The Graves at Seven Devils (5 page)

He rose slowly, again gripping the shotgun in both hands. Taking a deep breath, quickly brushing sweat from his face, he began moving toward the end of the hall, where the stairs dropped to the saloon's main room from which voices rose, including the screechy, contentious voice of the girl.

He stopped well back from the top of the stairs, so he wouldn't be seen from below, and peered down into the main saloon hall. No one on the stairs. He could see shadows moving ahead and left, sensed the tension of Norman Carstairs, who was probably still behind the bar, wondering if Fletcher had lit out for good like a donkey with its tail on fire.

Fletcher took another deep breath and, holding the shotgun low and angled about forty-five degrees away from his body, started down the stairs.

“Hey, Captain Sykes, why didn't you tell me you had the jack?” the girl yelled, her shrill voice echoing around the room's adobe-brick, mud-chinked walls. “
Damn
you anyways!”

Someone laughed. “Well, now, Miss Cora—that ain't exactly the way the game is played, is it?”

“Careful, Captain,” said a deep voice rumbling up like an earthquake through a privy hole. “You wouldn't go sassin' Miss Cora if you was to see her doin's upstairs!” There was the slap of cards on a table. “No, suh. I think I'm gonna have nightmares tonight jus' thinkin' about it!”

As Fletcher dropped midway down the stairs, moving slowly on the balls of his boots but still making the rotten steps squawk and creak, the outlaws' table slid into view before him, about fifteen feet from the staircase. They were all gathered around it now, the girl, the black man, and the man in the cavalry blues having joined the three of a kind.

The girl was straddling the knee of one of the triplets—the one wearing the stovepipe hat—and she leaned back to kiss his cheek now as Fletcher gained the bottom of the stairs and began bringing the shotgun up, swinging it out from his belly.

The black man was expertly dealing the cards while the others snapped them up, smoking or throwing back shots or, in one case, farting. The black man wore a large diamond ring on the outside of his right glove, on his middle finger. The girl caressed the bearded cheek of the man in the stovepipe hat, then leaned forward to pick up her cards and cast a glance toward the bar.

“Hey, barkeep!” she called. “Bring us another bottle of that panther piss, will ya? It's so bad it makes me wanna blow both your eyes out the back of your head, but if it's all you got, I reckon . . .”

Her eyes found Fletcher standing and aiming the shotgun from the bottom of the stairs. She smiled brightly, weird green eyes—eyes like a cat's—flashing under the green war paint, two locks of copper-red, green-streaked hair falling down her shoulders to frame her breasts. “Hey, look who's here! It's the lawdog!”

She lowered her cards and continued to regard Fletcher as though he were the parson and she were a sweet little bride preparing for her wedding ceremony. “Come on over here and have a drink, lawdog. It's the worst hooch I've ever tasted in my nineteen-goin'-on-twenty years, and I'll prob'ly be blind by sundown, but I reckon if you live around here, you're used to it.”

The others had shifted their gazes to Fletcher now, too. They looked at him with sneering amusement, like schoolboys who'd turned a turtle onto its back to see what it would do or how long it would take to die.

The look-alike in the brown-checked suit said, “Yeah, he was in here before, his panties all in a twist on account what you and Captain Sykes and Heinz were doin' upstairs.”

“Oh,
really
?” the girl said, her tone and her stare hardening as she leaned back against the shoulder of the gent in the stovepipe hat. “And why shouldn't I kill my brother's killer, pray tell?”

Fletcher raised the shotgun's butt to his shoulder and aimed at the middle of the table, keeping all six faces within his field of vision. The black man had frozen in the act of dealing, looking up at Fletcher from beneath his thick brows, the whites around his dark eyes glowing in the shadows.

“Keep your hands above the table,” Fletcher ordered. “You're all under arrest.”

They all looked at Fletcher with indifferent expressions, as though he were only a momentary interruption in their card game—like a swamper wanting to scrub the floor beneath their table or a house girl clearing their empty glasses.

The redhead leaned back against the shoulder of the stovepipe-hatted gent once more and sneered, her smooth cheeks dimpling. “You're being silly, lawdog. Downright foolhardy. You know who we are?”

Out the corner of his left eye, Fletcher saw the bartender, Carstairs, standing tensely behind the mahogany, staring toward Fletcher and the table.

“Norman, you still have the sawed-off under the bar?”

“Reckon.”

“Pull it out, make sure it's loaded.”

Carstairs stepped to one side, bent down, and came up holding the short-barreled ten-gauge with a braided rawhide cord. He breeched it, peered down the tubes, then snapped it back together.

“What do you want me to do with it?”

“Aim it. Any of these folks so much as twitches a gun toward me, cut loose with one of your wads. Consider yourself deputized.”

Fletcher kept his gaze on the table, opening and closing his right hand around his own shotgun's fore stock. The outlaws continued to stare back at him with that infuriating condescension.

“Very slowly, one at a time,” Fletcher said, “I want each of you to reach down beneath the table and, one at a time, bring your weapons up and set them on top of the table. Pistols, knives, swords—whatever you're carryin'.” He glanced at the man nearest him, the triplet in the checked suit and sombrero. “Sir, we'll start with you. Nice and slow or I'll blow a hole through your back wide enough to drive a wagon through.”

The girl shot a wide-eyed mocking look at the man in the green-checked suit. “Ouch! You better do as he says, Rafe.”

“I reckon I'd better.”

Rafe glanced back at Fletcher, deviously arching a brow as he lowered his left hand beneath the table. Fletcher watched the man unsnap the keeper thong over the hammer of the .45 holstered low on his left thigh, then with two fingers slowly lift the gun from its holster.

Fletcher held the heavy shotgun steady as he raked his gaze around the table while at the same time watching Rafe's left thumb and index finger slowly . . . ever so slowly . . . raise the .45, barrel down.

Rafe kept his gaze locked on Fletcher's eyes, a queer sort of half smile turning up the corners of his thin mouth inside the shaggy black beard. He was the most hawkish-looking of the three brothers, with an especially sharp, upturned nose and cheeks so hollow that shadows lurked within them. His eyes were small, black, and set deep within cavernous sockets. His evil leer made Fletcher's insides quiver like a nest of young rattlers, and he had to fight back the nearly overwhelming urge to drop both hammers on the hard case and watch his face disappear in a spray of blood against the far wall.

“That's high enough,” Fletcher said, when Rafe had raised the gun a little above his shoulder, his evil, mocking smile still twisting his lips.

The hard case stopped raising the gun and broadened his grin.

The girl laughed suddenly, causing Fletcher to jerk the shotgun slightly.

“Lawdog's nervous!” The girl laughed harder. “Look at how his hands are shakin'.”

Fletcher returned his gaze to Rafe. He hated the quake he heard in his voice as he barked, “Set the gun on the table, goddamnit! Set it down
now
!”

Running footsteps rose in the street outside the saloon, growing louder as someone approached.

“Colter, no!” Marie Antoinette called.

Boots thumped on the gallery. Fletcher felt as though his chest had been struck by a war hatchet as, in the corner of his left eye, he saw a face slide over the tops of the batwing doors and two small hands grip the door's scrolled edges.

“Don't do it, Pa! You won't make it!” Colter shouted, his voice cracking with terror. “I just seen their pictures in your off—!”

“Colter, goddamnit, I told . . . !”

Fletcher had jerked his head toward the batwings when he spied a sudden flicker of movement near the table. By the time his eyes darted back to the hard cases, Rafe's revolver was turning over in the air. The butt dropped into the hard case's hand with a soft smacking sound, and the barrel jerked toward Fletcher so quickly that the sheriff's brain was slow to comprehend what was happening until the black maw sprouted flames.

The gun's roar filled the saloon, echoing sharply off the walls. The slug careened through Fletcher's left shoulder—a little puff of dust from his shirt and then he felt as though he'd been slammed in the chest with a bung starter.

He groaned and staggered backward, trying to steady the shotgun on the table. But as if of its own volition, the fore stock swung toward the rafters at the same time that Fletcher drew back on the twin triggers.

Both shells exploded into the ceiling before and above the table, carving two pumpkin-sized gouges in the heavy rafters and throwing slivers in every direction.

Through the smoke and the dust raining from the rafters, and as he continued staggering backward, grunting and cursing, Fletcher saw the vague shapes of the killers bolt out of their chairs, moving as though they were made of little more than sinew and oil.

They reached for guns and, as chairs flew back behind them and sideways and as the girl and the two brothers on the table's left side dropped to a knee, revolvers flashed and barked, lifting an ear-numbing din.

As he spun around, dropping the shotgun, Fletcher felt two more hot chunks of lead slice through him—one through the back of his right forearm, another through his side—and then he was on the floor, screaming and rolling, his own cries rising and falling around him beneath the gun reports, as though it were someone else being shot to ribbons nearby.

Above the din of .44s and .45s triggered so quickly that the individual shots combined in one great burst of shuddering, echoing thunder, Carstairs's sawed-off boomed. There was a cow-like bellow of anguish, and as Fletcher settled on the floor on his back, he lifted his head slightly to see the barman falling against the back bar, chunks of flesh torn out of him by the outlaws' cracking revolvers, blood painting the mirror and breaking bottles behind him.

Carstairs's sawed-off bounced off the top of the front bar, in the very crater it had torn out of the mahogany when the barman had tripped both triggers. It hit the floor with a thud that was drowned by the gunfire.

Fletcher looked toward the front of the saloon just in time to see a hail of lead pepper the front of the batwings. Colter had been standing there, eyes and mouth wide as he screamed. The bullets punched him straight back, his head dropping beneath the tops of the doors, hat sailing, his boot heels rising from the porch and the soles showing as he hit the floor with a dull thud and giant dust puff.

“
Colter
!” Fletcher screamed.

No. Fletcher hadn't screamed. He'd tried, but it was Marie Antoinette's voice, growing louder as she approached the saloon.

“Colter! Oh, God—
Colter
!”

The shooting had stopped, Fletcher realized as he lay on his back staring up at the ceiling, feeling the blood leaking out of his pain-racked body. Glancing down, he saw that he'd been hit two or three more times than he'd thought. Blood poured from a wound in his lower chest as well as from his side, and there was a hole in his left thigh.

As if from far away, behind the ringing in his ears, he could hear Marie Antoinette sobbing and calling Colter's name outside on the stoop before the saloon.

“Hey,” one of the renegades said. “I think we got us another female in the vicinity.”

Fletcher dropped his chin to stare across the saloon. A couple of the renegades stood at the table where they'd been playing cards, thumbing fresh shells into their revolvers. Empty casings clattered around them. Three of the others—one of the triplets, the black man, and the cavalry man called Sykes—sauntered toward the batwings. Their boots thumped and their spurs chinged.

“A lawman's wife,” said Sykes. “Now, there'd be a first!”

The black man laughed.

Fletcher gritted his teeth and slid his hand toward the holster on his right hip. The movement was almost unbearable, kicking up the pain in the rest of his body and nearly making him vomit.

Fletcher was dying. There was no doubt about that. But maybe he could take one or two of the crazy savages with him.

He had little feeling in his right hand, just enough to detect the walnut grip of his .44. He gritted his teeth once more and began to slide the revolver from its holster.

A boot suddenly pinned his hand to the floor. He looked up with a pained groan. The crazy redhead stared down at him with her green cat eyes, green-streaked hair wisping about her face in a breeze from the door.

“Tch, tch, tch,” she clucked, shaking her head slowly.

Then she angled a bone-gripped Remington toward Fletcher's head and ratcheted back the hammer. She grinned, showing her perfect white teeth, and narrowed an eye.

Fletcher heard Marie Antoinette screaming her son's name as he watched the Remington's hammer fall.

“GO AHEAD,” REPEATED the raspy, pinched voice behind Lou Prophet. “What name you want on your tombstone? Best tell me now . . . or drop that long gun and turn around ni-i-ice and slow. . . .”

Prophet's pulse hammered. He could hear the breeze and the stream gurgling over rocks and the voices of the Emmitt Sanderson gang rising from the other side of the hill. Turning his head to peer over his left shoulder, he saw one of the ugliest creatures he'd ever seen—human or beast—aiming a sawed-off shotgun at him, a corncob pipe dangling from a corner of the creature's mouth.