Last Lawman (9781101611456) (30 page)

He would not bother with a silly attempt at best of trying to arrest the Vultures. Things had gone too far for that. He was a lawman, not a vigilante, but sometimes the law had to stop lawbreakers in the only way it could, lest more innocents should perish. There simply were not enough lawmen or judges to stop them without one man—the last lawman north of all-out hell—taking extreme measures.

He would kill Stanhope and the other Vultures for Erin and her murdered boy, if not for Mason and the other lawmen and all the others this bunch had killed in cold blood.

Spurr had little hope of taking them all down, of course. He himself was exhausted, feeling little more than a shell himself. And he would be alone in his stand against the savages. But he’d get Stanhope if none of the others. Maybe, with luck, his ghost would rise up out of South Pass City’s boothill and take down the others with their own guns as they slept. Before they could continue their reign of bloody murder and unbridled torment.

Spurr reached up and took the reins out of Erin’s hands. She did not look at him but only gazed at the hotel as if trying to figure out what it was, as though she’d never seen such a structure before. Spurr tied their reins around the hitchrack that bulged around the worn spots in its peeled pine crosspole, then helped the woman out of her saddle, setting her gently on the ground before taking her hand, sliding his rifle out of its saddle boot, and leading her up the porch steps. The second step from the top was rotted out, and Spurr stepped over it, then turned to help Erin over it, as well. He led her across the creaky porch littered with old newspapers and tumbleweeds and through the hotel’s batwing doors.

He kept the woman behind him as, while the doors slapped, he stopped a few feet from the entrance and looked
around, seeing only one customer in the place—the half-breed, sitting at a table on the room’s far left. The big, brown-skinned man sat casually, almost insolently kicked back in his chair, his saddle and rifle on the floor beside him, his saddlebags draped across his lap. He was sewing a patch into the back of one of the pouches, the contents of the pouch—an old coffeepot, a tin frying pan, a pouch of Arbuckles, some cartridge boxes—spilled around a mug of frothy beer on the table before him.

When he looked up, his green eyes glowed startlingly in the crisp, clear light from the doors and windows.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Spurr asked the man, annoyed. He was getting tired of the man’s unexpected appearances.

Henry looked up while continuing to sew the leather patch into his saddlebag pouch. “Me? Hell, I’m darnin’ this old saddlebag. Plum wore out, I reckon.”

Spurr snorted. He ran a hand across his mouth and walked over to the bar paneled in dull green wainscoting on the room’s right side. He stopped short when he saw a blond woman standing behind the counter, in front of a back bar painted the same dull green, with a cracked, warped, age-spotted mirror behind several green shelves stocked with dusty bottles and glasses.

Spurr felt his jaw hinges loosen as he stared at the woman, a slow smile crawling across his ragged, dusty face. “Well…Della Ramsay. You still here?”

“Where else would I go?” the woman said in her sexily raspy voice, leaning forward, hands spread atop the bar.

She held a cigarette in her right hand; the smoke curled up along the right side of her blue-eyed face that was still fine-lined and even-featured and pretty despite her years. She must have been pushing forty, with crow’s-feet around her eyes and mouth. But her long, straight hair was as blond as he remembered, with only a few streaks of gray. Her eyes were as clear and frank as those of a twenty-year-old.

Spurr had met Della Ramsay years ago in Leadville, when she had been plying the trade, and had last seen her here in South Pass City, working for percentages again but also dealing faro at the Wind River. He’d never known much about her—aside from that she knew her business right well—but he’d heard that she’d been married a few times, mostly to cardsharps and prospectors, though never for longer than a few months at a time.

She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, and a childish light danced in them. “Like the new digs?”

“You own this place now?”

“Why not? It was free. Old Handly pulled out last year. Tried to sell it for a dollar. I offered fifty cents, and he just threw up his hands including the deed to the place and rode away.” Della chuckled. “So I contracted with the Davis outfit to haul me in a few bottles of whiskey every spring and fall from Rawlins, and I got a business. Not gettin’ rich, but I wouldn’t know what to do with rich…”

She looked at Erin still standing just inside the doorway behind Spurr and frowned dubiously. “Who’s…your friend, Spurr?”

“Erin Wilde, meet Della Ramsay.” Spurr glanced back at Erin, who stood staring uncertainly into the shadows at the rear of the wooden-floored, low-ceiling room. Seeing that she was not going to offer a response, he turned back to Della and said softly, “Vultures.”

Della’s reaction to the name of the notorious gang, much feared in these parts, was not oblique. She set a hand on her chest, worrying the brooch pinned to a black choker at her throat. “Don’t tell me…”

“They’re behind me, Della.”

She cast a nervous glance out the window on both sides of the swinging doors. “I hope you’ve got someone to back you, Spurr.”

“Did have. They’re dead. It’s just me, Della. I’ll be back
down for a drink, but I’d like to get Mrs. Wilde situated in a room.”

“No charge, Spurr.” Della offered a weak smile. “I figure you’ll drink plenty. You always did.”

Spurr tossed several gold coins onto the bar. “Not this time. Gotta keep my head about me. Oh, I’ll wet my whistle but I don’t reckon I’ll be fillin’ any trash barrels.” He plopped one more coin onto the bar. “But I’d admire to have a cork pulled for me when I get back.”

Della winked. “Take whichever room…or rooms…you want. I ain’t exactly overburdened just now. Waitin’ on the fall roundup, which usually brings a few punchers in. Doors are open.”

Spurr glanced again at Henry, who sipped his beer, set his mug back down on the table, then resumed stitching his saddlebag pouch. It was hard to tell if he’d been paying attention to the conversation. His broad, cherry face was as stony as a veteran gambler’s. But he likely didn’t miss much.

The old lawman walked over and took Erin’s hand and led her to the back of the room and up the narrow stairs. He opened the first door he came to on the second floor, led her inside, and opened the curtains over the room’s sole window.

“Please, don’t,” she said.

Spurr glanced back at her. She sat down on the edge of the bed, her hands on her knees. “I’d like it as dark as possible.”

Spurr closed the curtains with a sigh and turned to her. “I’ll fetch up some food.”

She merely looked at him, downturning her mouth in a remonstration.

“You gotta eat something.”

“Is my son eating something?”

Even with the casual, gentle way she’d said it, the retort was like a hard slap across his face. What did you say to something like that? Spurr merely walked to her, placed a
hand on her shoulder, squeezed it gently, then walked out of the room, closing the door behind him. Behind the door, he heard the bedsprings sigh.

Spurr walked downstairs to see that the half-breed had gone, taking his gear with him, leaving his empty glass on the table. The lawman bellied up to the bar on which Della was laying out a game of solitaire. She’d popped the cork on a fresh bottle and set a glass beside it. Spurr splashed whiskey into it and threw it back.

“You got a safe place you can go? A cellar or somethin’?”

She looked up at him from her game, a sad, fearful cast to her gaze. “They won’t bother me. They know I’m the only watering hole around.”

Spurr refilled his glass. “They got their tails in knots, Della. More so than usual.” He threw back the shot, set the glass back down on the bar, and grabbed his rifle. “Best find a place to take cover. I’ll be atop the Wind River, should have a good vantage from up there.”

“Spurr, are you
tryin’
to get yourself killed?” Della straightened and crossed her arms on her breasts. “Ain’t no one here to mourn a fool.”

He racked a shell into his Winchester’s chamber, off cocked the hammer, and glanced at Yakima Henry’s beer glass. “Where’d the half-breed go?”

Della hiked a shoulder. “Who knows where they go? Just a drifter. Been through here before; he’ll likely ride through again.” A strange, pensive, faintly longing expression shaped itself around her blue eyes and her red mouth as she stared at the half-breed’s table. “A tumbleweed, that one.”

Spurr gave a wry snort and went out.

Spurr discovered three other businesses still in operation in South Pass City—the Grover H. M. Henry Hardware and Dry Goods, a harness shop, and the livery barn once owned by Wild Bill Harriman but now operated by an old cowboy named Melvin Lilly, who lived in a cabin behind the place with his consumptive wife, Rose.

Spurr stabled his horses with Lilly, whom he informed of the Vultures’ threat and suggested the man spread the word to Henry and Harriman, adding that they all should consider staying low until the storm had passed. Spurr didn’t appreciate the dark, worried look the old cowboy gave him after the lawman left the livery barn with his Winchester, but he could understand the man’s skepticism.

He wouldn’t want him protecting his town from the Vultures, either.

He limped up the street to the tallest building in town—the Wind River Hotel and Saloon. The windows were boarded up, but it wasn’t hard to pry off one of the boards and step through the gap. As he moved through the dark,
musty bowels of the place, he felt ghosts staring out at him from every dark nook and cranny, remembering all the revelry that had once taken place here, all the chips and gold dust won and lost at the roulette wheels and poker tables.

He continued up to the broad, creaky stairs, rats squawking indignantly, bats mewling and flapping somewhere unseen, to the fourth story and strode through one of the east-facing rooms. After kicking out another couple of planks from over the door to the balcony, he stepped out and looked around at the sprawling, dilapidated collection of buildings appearing forlorn under the lens-clear, high-country sun.

There was little movement except what the light wind blew. Peering off to the east, Spurr saw little movement out there, either. And, when he’d peered off another balcony on the building’s opposite side, he spied nothing in the other directions. The Wind Rivers were like giant anvils, tall and sprawling and snow-capped to the northeast, their slopes and foothills sliced with canyons through which the Vultures might ride toward the town, staying out of sight to within a mile or so.

But Spurr didn’t think so. They knew he was only one man alone. Even if he’d equaled their number, it was their custom to ride in roughshod and to squeeze as much terror out of their victims as possible before they started blasting away with their guns.

He dragged a chair out onto the balcony that faced east and sagged wearily into it, his bones creaking almost as loudly as the chair’s dry wood. He leaned his gun against the wall behind him, sat back in the chair, and keeping an eye skinned to the east, slowly built a quirley.

He’d built and smoked the quirley and was wanting another one, and still nothing moved in the east. There were only the rolling hills of sage, juniper, and cedar, with occasional bluffs and escarpments jutting against the horizon.

Spurr leaned forward, elbows on his knees, blue eyes
carefully scanning each fold, every tree and rock and shallow gulley—anywhere a man might hide. “Where the hell are you?” he heard himself growl, not liking the fatigue he heard in his voice.

The sun arced slowly across the sky and dropped quickly in the west. Shadows turned, lengthened, thinned. A gray veil dropped over South Pass City. Footsteps sounded in the street, and he stood and looked down to see Della Ramsay moving toward him holding a round wooden tray and a plate covered with a red towel. When she saw Spurr, she stopped, her blond hair and the shawl she’d drawn over her shoulders buffeting in the chill breeze whispering over the mountains.

“Spurr, you gotta eat,” she said.

It wasn’t like him, but he wasn’t hungry. Or maybe he just hadn’t realized he was.

“Don’t come in here, Della,” he said, not wanting her to negotiate the hazards of the dark, dilapidated building. “I’ll come down.”

Inside, darkness had settled thickly over the hotel’s ruined husk. He found a candle, lit it, and used it to light his way down to the broad front porch. Della stood just outside the boarded-up doors, holding the tray from which the rich, succulent smell of a hot steak emanated. Spurr’s gut gurgled, twisted. He was hungry, after all.

“Just fried one for myself and Mrs. Wilde and remembered that hollow leg of yours.” Della smiled. Two bottles stood on the tray—one with amber liquid, one with clear. “Whiskey and water,” she explained.

“Don’t know how to thank you, Della.”

She narrowed one eye as the breeze rustled her freshly brushed hair, bangs hanging over her brows. “How ’bout keepin’ yourself alive? I could use someone to share a drink and a game of cards with. Gets quiet around here between roundups.”