Last Lawman (9781101611456) (32 page)

The lawman could detect no sound save for the infrequent peeping of morning birds.

His heart hammered, hiccupped. He swallowed, licked his lips, drew a breath. Quietly clicking back the Starr’s hammer, he stepped around the corner of the building, extending the cocked pistol before him, and slightly eased the tension in his trigger finger.

Nothing but sage and old trash, a few rotten boards left over from construction. No sign of Magpie.

Spurr heard a faint
ching
. He looked toward the privy. A board was missing in its front wall. Through the gap, he saw a shadow move between several boards in the rear wall, over the bench. Spurr fired four times quickly. The bullets careened through the front gap, punched through the rear wall in a straight line, blowing quarter-sized holes in the gray wood.

A man screamed hoarsely.

Spurr ran around the side of the privy in time to see Magpie staggering, limbs akimbo, in the brush behind the outhouse. The outlaw dropped to a knee, and raised his big Buntline Special again, black eyes wide, blood pumping from several wounds and grazes and from a ragged scrap of flesh where his right ear had been.

Spurr’s Starr leapt two more times, blasting.

Magpie triggered his Buntline as he flew back over a boulder and into a gnarled cedar. His bullet had screeched past Spurr to bark into the rear of the privy. Spurr stumbled forward, clamping his left hand to the hole in his left thigh. Weakness and nausea washed over him in acrid waves.

He looked down at Magpie. The big, dark outlaw stared up at him, flared his nostrils, and moved his lips as though trying to mutter something. Then his eyes became two large, cloudy black marbles, and a last sigh gurgled involuntarily from his throat.

Guns popped in the distance behind Spurr. He found a branch and used it to support his left leg as he hobbled back the way he’d come and out into the main street littered with fallen Vultures and growing blood pools. A gun roared again, echoing off near walls. Spurr felt his old ticker race painfully as he hobbled at an angle westward down the street, in the direction of the two hotels.

A man stepped out of a break between the Overland Hotel and the hardware store. Black hair blew around a
red-brown, green-eyed face. The half-breed limped tenderly into the street, holding his pistol down low in his right hand. Both his legs were bloody, and more blood oozed from his broad torso. He showed his teeth between dark lips.

“Stanhope?” Spurr called, pain making his voice tight.

Henry stopped, threw his hair back from his broad forehead with his left hand. “Dead!”

Another figure appeared in the street behind him, moving out away from the break on the hotel’s far side. Clell Stanhope staggered forward and extended his sawed-off shotgun toward the half-breed.

“I don’t think so!” Spurr shouted, triggering his pistol.

The hammer made a sickening ping as it fell on an empty chamber.

A blast sounded. Spurr frowned. There was another blast as Stanhope jerked forward and triggered his shotgun into the ground at his feet, blowing up a shovelful of old shit and ground dirt. He dropped to his knees near the crater the shotgun had dug. How he was still alive, with so many holes in his red carcass, Spurr couldn’t figure.

His head wobbled on his shoulders. His tongue hung out one corner of his mouth. The vultures on his cheeks drooped into his blood-matted beard.

Yakima had spun around, pistol extended, but he held fire as Erin Wilde strode out from the same gap Stanhope had surfaced from. Her chin was up, shoulders back, spine straight. She held a cocked pistol in both her hands in front of her, pointed at the ground. Now she stopped beside Stanhope, extended the gun at him, and fired from six inches away from his left ear.

The man’s head muffled the shot. Blood from the killer’s ruined skull flew up to baste Erin’s hands, arms, and cheeks. What remained of Stanhope’s head jerked madly. Then he sagged straight down to his left shoulder and quivered, kicking his legs and ringing his spurs, before gradually falling still.

Spurr and Yakima stared silently toward Erin and the outlaw. She stood over the dead Vulture for a time, quietly sobbing. Then she turned her head slowly toward the lawman and the half-breed. Her sobs dwindled. A glimmer of life returned to her eyes, deep lines cut across her forehead, and she dropped the gun in the dirt.

Dust wafted around the hot steel.

“Oh my god,” she whispered, regarding the bloody men slouched before her, blood dribbling into the street around their boots.

Footsteps thudded, and Spurr saw Della Ramsay moving down the hotel’s porch steps quickly, holding her skirts above her ankles. She stopped in the street beside Erin, her eyes widening in shock and horror at the survivors of the set-to. Then, sucking a deep breath, she moved over to gingerly take Yakima’s right arm and begin leading the wounded half-breed toward the hotel.

Erin hurried into the street and stopped before Spurr. She looked him up and down, eyes stricken.

“It ain’t as bad as it looks,” he quipped.

With the woman’s help, he hobbled up beside Yakima, who moved with Della’s assistance up the hotel steps.

“Come on,” Spurr said to the half-breed, climbing one heavy step at a time, Erin’s arm wrapped firmly around his waist. “I’ll buy ya a drink.”

“I don’t need your charity, old man.”

“All right, you can buy me one.”