Longarm 242: Red-light (22 page)

“It . . . it was Miss Sutton!” he said. “Her and some of her girls! They stole that silver—”

“Did they start the fire?” asked Longarm.

Jessup shook his head. “I did that. Knocked over a lamp. I was hoping somebody would see the fire and come a-runnin'. Thank God you did and got here in time.”

But not in time to save the building, thought Longarm as he glanced at the stage station. With luck, the bucket brigade would be able to keep the fire from spreading, though. They were already wetting down the surrounding structures, including the barn in the back.

Longarm lifted his wrists. “I've got to get these manacles off so that I can go after 'em,” he said.

“If you can't find the key, I reckon the blacksmith can bust 'em off of you,” said Dodson.

“And you'd better have that wound seen to, as well,” added Dupree.

Longarm was tempted to once again say that there was no time for that, but he knew Dupree was right. He couldn't afford to pass out from loss of blood. Nola and the other women had a head start, but not a huge one by any means. And they would have to be traveling fairly slowly, too, whether they were carrying the silver in a wagon or on horseback. Longarm thought a wagon was the most likely possibility.

Jessup confirmed that. “It sounded to me like they headed north out of town,” he went on. “That would be the easiest route, once they hit the Truckee River and could turn east or west.”

“I'll find 'em, you can count on that,” promised Longarm.

“Looks like you'll need a posse again,” commented Dodson.

Longarm shook his head. “Not this time. I can travel faster alone.” His voice grew more grim as he added, “And this time they sure as hell won't take me by surprise.”

 

Ben Mallory stood near the back of the cold, dank cellar as the trapdoor leading to the house above was opened. One of the guards tossed down a burlap sack. “There's some food in there,” the man called.

One of the other outlaws whined, “When are we goin' to get out of here? This cold and damp is makin' my rheumatiz act up somethin' terrible.”

“You should have thought of that before you took up the profession of banditry, my friend,” called the guard. He was the young shotgunner from the stagecoach, Mallory realized. He was the one who talked so fancy.

The trapdoor fell with a thump, and Mallory heard the bolts being shot to fasten it. He and the other five members of the gang who had survived had been dumped unceremoniously in here to wait until they could be taken to the jail in Virginia City.

Several of the buildings in Galena City had cellars. Mallory remembered hearing stories about how tunnels had connected some of the buildings back when the place was called Doldrums, so that a fella could disappear in one place and pop up in another across town without ever being seen. The Mormons who had founded the town had built the tunnels so that they could escape from the Gentile massacre they all feared. The massacre had never taken place, of course, and blasting at the mines in the surrounding hills had caused all those tunnels to collapse, but the cellars still remained. With their sturdy walls, hard-packed dirt floors, and no doors or windows, they were the closest thing Galena City had to a jail. This particular cellar was below the hardware store and the trapdoor opened into the store's back room.

The other outlaws started arguing over the hunks of bread and meat in the burlap sack. Mallory stepped forward and took it away from them, doling out the food as he saw fit. None of the others argued with his decisions, even though he kept the biggest share for himself.

While he was eating, somebody thumped on the trapdoor and called, “Hey, Mallory! You down there?”

That was the stagecoach driver, the one called George. He and the shotgunner had been taking turns standing guard over the prisoners. Mallory hated both of them already. He hated everybody in this stinking town. Especially that slut Nola and that rangy son of a bitch who had turned out to be a federal badge-toter...

“Yeah, I'm here,” Mallory replied to George's question. “Where the hell else would I be?”

“Just thought you might be interested to know that somebody else stole all that silver.”

“What!” Curses poured out of Mallory's mouth. “Who got it?” he finally managed to say, his snarling voice sounding more like an animal's than a man's.

“A woman named Nola Sutton, the one who owns that saloon up the street. Her and three of her girls drove off with a whole wagon full of silver earlier tonight.”

“Nola? Nola did that?” Mallory threw back his head and screeched in rage and frustration. “The bitch! I'll kill her! She double-crosses me, then steals the silver herself... Aaarrghhh!”

The other prisoners crowded into the far side of the cellar, none of them wanting to get anywhere near Mallory at this moment.

“Don't worry, she won't get away with it,” George called down through the heavy door. “Marshal Long's already gone after her, headed north toward the Truckee. I reckon he'll bring those women back, and the silver along with 'em. I surely hope so, anyway.”

Mallory drew deep breaths into his body and tried to calm the storm of hate and fury raging inside him. Long and Nola had thwarted him at every turn, and now Nola had betrayed the lawman, too.

Mallory had to get out of here so that he could take his revenge on Nola, and on that big galoot of a lawdog, too. That was all there was to it.

He looked around the cellar, eyes burning feverishly, searching for some way out. The cellar was lit by a single candle sitting on the stump of a tree that had been cut down when the townsite was originally cleared. The feeble glow didn't reach into the corners, but Mallory had already explored them by feel and found nothing that could help him. Now he turned toward the stump itself, which was cracked and split with age. Mallory's lips were drawn back from his teeth in a grimace as he reached down and wrenched a long, thick piece of wood off the stump. He had thought of doing that earlier, when he was toying with the idea of using a chunk of broken wood as a makeshift shovel to dig his way out of the cellar.

That would take days, long days that he didn't have. He had to escape now.

One of the other outlaws came closer to him. The man's name was Zeb; he had his bullet-broken arm hanging in front of him in a crude sling. He said, “Ben, what are you doin' there—”

Mallory whipped around and lashed out with the broken piece of stump, raking it across Zeb's throat. The wood wasn't very sharp, but the jagged end was sharp enough to rip through the soft flesh and tear veins. Blood gushed from Zeb's ruined throat as he gave a gurgling scream, staggered back, and collapsed. The blood looked black instead of red in the faint glow of the candle.

Only two of the other men were relatively able-bodied; the remaining outlaws had been wounded in the battles in which they had been captured. Mallory went for the two who were still on their feet, taking them by surprise. He rammed the makeshift stake into the throat of one man and grabbed the other one, strangling him and slamming his head against one of the thick beams supporting the building's floor, which formed the ceiling of the cellar. The other two men, one of whom was shot through the leg and the other who had been caught in the dynamite blast at the hideout cabin, started screaming in horror.

“Help!” bleated the man with the wounded leg as he tried to scramble away from Mallory and fell. “Mallory's gone crazy! He's gonna kill us all!”

Mallory was screaming, too, howling in insane rage. He drove the head of the man he was struggling with against the support beam until the outlaw's skull was grotesquely misshapen and his eyes had rolled up in his head. Mallory let go of the man and let him fall, then whirled around toward the others. The second man he had stabbed with the jagged piece of wood had managed to pull the crude weapon free, but that might have been a mistake, because it allowed the blood to flow that much faster from his throat. The front of his shirt was a gruesome mess as Mallory slammed into him and knocked him backward. The two wounded men screamed louder.

With all the yelling going on, Mallory didn't hear the bolts being pulled back on the trapdoor, but he knew it when strong arms grabbed him from behind. “Damn it, get away from those men!” yelled George.

Mallory drove an elbow backward into George's midsection, knocking the breath out of the guard. He twisted like an eel and got his hands on the rifle that George was carrying. George tried to pull it away, but Mallory's berserk strength was too much. Mallory twisted the rifle loose and brought it up sharply, cracking the butt against George's jaw. George went over backward, the knowledge of his own imminent death in his eyes.

Mallory shot him twice in the face, firing as quickly as he could pull the trigger and work the Winchester's lever.

He left the other two outlaws cringing in the cellar, not wanting to waste the bullets it would require to kill them.

Well, that plan, crude and impulsive though it had been, had worked out about as well as he could have hoped, thought Mallory as he kicked open the front door of the hardware store and raced out into the night. The store was closed at this hour, of course, as were most of the businesses in Galena City. Several horses were tied up at a hitch rack less than a block away, though. Mallory ran toward them.

The shots had been muffled by the thick walls of the cellar, but a few men were stepping out onto the boardwalks to investigate what they thought they had heard. One of them called to Mallory, “Hey! What are you—”

Mallory snapped a shot at the man, making him dive back into the building from which he had emerged.

Then Mallory was at the hitch rack, jerking loose the reins of the nearest horse and swinging up into its saddle. He slammed his heels into the horse's flanks and hauled its head around almost before he hit the leather. The horse lunged into a gallop.

Mallory raced out of Galena City, and as he rode, three thoughts filled his mind: Nola, that damned lawman ... and all that silver.
His
silver...

Dawn found Longarm on the southern bank of the Truckee River. He had stopped there to rest his horse—and his own aching body—and to ponder the question of which way Nola, Angie, Rafaela, and Mickey might have gone from here.

To the north, across the river, was rugged, mostly unsettled country. That Paiute burial ground Mallory had been using as a hideout was up there, along with Virginia Peak and Pyramid Lake, but there wasn't much to attract four women, even four women on the run from the law.

To the west was Reno, a good-sized settlement. That was a definite possibility, thought Longarm. Reno was big enough so that four strangers wouldn't stand out too much, and Nola and her friends could catch a train there and head for San Francisco.

But trains ran east as well as west, and Longarm recalled that about fifteen miles east of his current location; the Truckee Valley also intersected the railroad, at a place called Two Mile Station. Longarm wasn't sure how the place had gotten its name, but it wasn't much of a settlement, little more than a flag stop depot, a water tank, a trading post, and a few cabins.

If Nola and her companions went there and caught an eastbound train, they would be beyond Longarm's reach in a matter of hours. In a few days, they could be in Chicago; a few days after that, New York or Lord only knew where else. The law would never find them, and that stolen silver would allow them to establish themselves in any kind of life they might choose.

For a lengthy moment, Longarm stood there on the bank of the river and thought about saying the hell with it. They hadn't really hurt anybody or anything—except his pride—and considering the lives they had led so far, maybe they deserved something better.

On the other hand, they didn't have any right to get that something better with somebody else's money, and if they used that stolen silver to finance their getaway, that was exactly what it would be. The law was still the law, after all.

“Damn,” said Longarm. The word was quiet but heartfelt.

Then he swung up into his horse's saddle and turned the animal east, following the hunch his lawman's instincts had given him.

The old granny who was the closest thing Galena City had to a doctor had been roused from sleep and brought to the Silver Slipper to tend to his wounds. She had cleaned and rebandaged the bullet holes, then advised him, “Was I you, I'd go to bed for three or four days, sonny. You've bled too much here lately.”

Longarm had shaken his head regretfully. “Afraid there's no time for that. I've got to get on the trail, or I won't catch up to the folks I'm after.”

The old woman had just shaken her head. “It's your funeral, I reckon.”

Longarm wasn't convinced that he was in that bad a shape, but he had to admit now as he rode alongside the river that he was mighty tired and even a little light-headed. He was confident he would be a match for the women when he caught up to them, though.

Unless he had gone in the wrong direction and never found them. He wasn't going to think about that...

Ben Mallory reined in when he reached the river. The sun was up now, making glints of light sparkle and dance on the swiftly flowing water. Before the winter was over, a sheet of ice might form over the river, but now, despite the cold air that made Mallory's breath fog in front of his face, the Truckee was still clear. Another man might have found the scenery to be downright beautiful.

Mallory paid no attention to anything except the hoofprints he spotted on the bank. Someone had ridden up here, paused, and then turned east, following the river upstream.