.45-Caliber Cross Fire Read online

  He kicked the arrow out of his way and drew the door closed. Bullets plowed into it from the outside, making it shudder in its frame. When Sapp had his own door closed, he stumbled past Cuno, his sunburned face pink with fury above his muddy blond mustache, cursing shrilly.

  “Thanks a whole bunch, Beers!” he shouted as though the gang leader were here. “Easy money down in Mexico!” He laughed loudly, for a second nearly drowning out the thunder of the rifles slinging lead against the barn’s stout adobe walls. “Oh, it’s easy, all right—if you don’t get hit by the fucking Yaqui!”

  13

  SPURR REINED HIS big roan to a halt at the edge of the Mexican village from which heated gunfire crackled, adding a staccato undertone to the sporadic bursts of thunder that accompanied the steady rain falling from a sky the color of dirty rags. One hand on his holstered six-shooter, he led Cochise off the trail and into thick brush and strewn boulders.

  From a knoll, he’d watched through his field glasses as the Yaqui followed the three wagons and three outriders until both parties had disappeared amongst the adobes. Now he tied the horse to an old wagon grown up with weeds and cacti and slid his Winchester from its ancient leather saddle boot even more pliant now after the rain.

  “Stay here, Cochise.” Spurr ran a hand along the horse’s sleek, rain-soaked neck and made sure the knot he’d tied in the reins wasn’t too tight. “I’ll be back soon.”

  But he’d tied the horse loosely in case he didn’t return. He wanted Cochise to be able to hightail it from here in the event that Spurr saddled a cloud. He wouldn’t want the Yaqui to get their hands on the big, handsome roan. The Mexican Indians were notoriously cruel to their animals.

  Spurr moved through the brush, heading toward the steep ridge on the village’s north side. The guns were popping a good ways off to his right, on the far side of the village where the Indians had apparently pinned down their quarry.

  Spurr wasn’t sure of his plan here. Possibly mop-up duty after one side of the two factions had won the battle. He’d come down here looking for the daughter of an old friend of his, and she was his primary concern, but he had no idea if she’d ended up with this contingent or the one that entered the canyon before the mud walls had collapsed around it in the driving rain.

  If he could, he’d like to retrieve or destroy the stolen weapons and ammunition before either they got where they were going or the Yaqui got their hands on them. But his fight wasn’t with the Yaqui, only the men who’d sacked the fort and stolen the guns. Barring his ability—he was only one old lawman, after all—to do anything about the guns or the men who’d stolen them, however, he’d be satisfied with rescuing the girl and taking her home.

  Was that really the only reason he was down here?

  The question pricked at him like the cockleburs that clung to his wet trouser legs now as he left the brush and sidled up to a building that fronted on the pueblito’s main drag. The question was vague, like a ghostly whisper in his ear, and he was only half conscious of it, half nettled by it.

  Why were you really down here, Spurr? Do you really think you can do anything to save Abel Hammerlich’s daughter—one old man against a veritable army of cutthroats and a pack of rampaging Yaqui? Was there some other reason for this ride or had you gone crazier than a vampire bat on a moonlit Halloween?

  Spurr let the question evaporate as he edged a look around the front of the building to his right and stole a look down the pueblito’s deserted, waterlogged main drag. Smoke lifted from several chimneys, but all the doors and shutters that Spurr could see were boarded up. Not even a dog moved. The rain splashed puddles pocking the old, stone-paved street.

  The Indians and the Anglo cutthroats were exchanging gunfire farther up the street, around a slight northern bend. Spurr could hear occasional shouts amidst the shooting and see smoke puffing from the front of a big adobe structure on the road’s right side. Squinting, he could see the moccasin-clad feet and tan legs of a dead Yaqui lying facedown on the street’s opposite side, the rest of the body hidden by a rain barrel.

  Holding his rifle up high across his chest, Spurr ran, crouching, across the street. He continued limp-jogging northward for a hundred or so yards before swinging right, intending to give the shooters a broad berth until he could see who was winning the battle. Fifteen minutes later, he was crouched behind an abandoned stable flanking a large, pale church capped by a blocky bell tower rising from a red slate roof.

  Between him and the church, two Yaqui warriors with hideously painted faces were carrying a Gatling gun away from a mustang pony while the Yaqui queen whom Spurr had seen bathing in the creek watched with an imperious air, grunting orders and pointing at the church’s bell tower. When the two warriors, each carrying an end of the brass-cased Gatling, one with a long cartridge bandolier draped over a shoulder, swung toward a small wooden door in the church’s back wall, the queen reined her cream mustang around, slammed her moccasins against its flanks, and galloped off through a gap in the buildings.

  Spurr scratched his beard as he stared at the half-open door. A wistful expression pulled at his eye corners.

  He hunkered low, waiting, looking around to make sure he wasn’t being flanked by the wily Yaqui. Finally, he heard what he’d been waiting to hear—the rat-a-tat-tat of the Gatling gun in the bell tower. A man yelled sharply from the far side of the street. As the Gatling continued hammering away, sounding eerily loud in the still air with the steadily falling rain, Spurr moved out from behind the stable and jogged, skirting mud puddles, to the door at the back of the church.

  He stopped in front of the door, lowering his Winchester and raising his Starr, more effective in close quarters. Pushing the door open, he stepped inside quickly and to one side. The light from the open door cast the inside of the church in a dull, milky dusk. Candles were lit at the church’s front, to his right—two large standing racks of them. A young, round-faced priest in a brown robe and rope sandals knelt before the candles on the far side of the church. His hands were entwined before him, a rosary chain dangling, and his shaved head was bowed. His lips moved as he muttered prayers, squeezing his eyes closed.

  Spurr looked around at the crude wooden benches. There was no one else here.

  The Gatling gun sputtered, stopped, then resumed its caterwauling, the blasts muffled by the church’s stout ceiling. Spurr glanced at the priest once more—the man continued moving his lips desperately, head bowed—then headed toward a narrow stone stairway rising at the front of the church, left of the closed double doors.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Spurr looked up into the bell tower through an open cellar-like door. He couldn’t see much but wafting powder smoke and gray sky.

  “Forgive me, Father,” the old lawman muttered, clicking the Starr’s hammer back as he began climbing the steps, “for I am about to sin.”

  He climbed the steps quickly, or as quickly as his old heart would allow, hearing the Gatling gun’s ever-loudening belching. Above the opening and to his right, the gun was set up on its wooden tripod, the barrel blasting over the bell tower’s low wall. One of the Yaqui was crouched over it, cranking the wooden handle and whooping and yelling, the empty casings clinking onto the bell tower floor. The other warrior crouched over his Winchester, triggering lead toward the big building on the other side of the street.

  The old lawman stopped a few feet from the top of the stairs. The Gatling gun fell suddenly silent as the Indian who’d been cranking it froze and rolled a dark eye back. He turned his head toward Spurr. His paint-ringed eyes jerked wide with shock. With a yowl, he started to swing the Gatling’s muzzle toward the lawman.

  Spurr’s revolver roared twice. His .44 slugs blew both warriors against the bell tower’s far wall, at the base of which they piled up, limbs entangled, jerking and dying. Spurr climbed the last five steps into the bell tower. One of the braves was reaching for a saddle-ring Colt on the floor near his face.

  Spurr shot him again, then looked down into the
muddy street beneath the church.

  Five Yaqui braves were crabbing belly down across the muddy street toward the livery barn. One more was approaching the barn from Spurr’s left while another knelt by a trash pile and fired a Winchester at the barn’s wall, likely aiming at a window though Spurr couldn’t see that side of the barn clearly from his vantage. They’d been using the Gatling for covering fire while they’d stormed the barn, but a good half of the seven were craning their neck to peer incredulously up at the bell tower.

  Spurr was between a rock and a hard place, but he’d put himself there. The men in the barn and the Indians were his enemies, and he was tempted to let the battle play out.

  But what if the girl was in the barn with the Anglo cutthroats?

  And what if the Yaqui got a hold of the guns and ammo? There would likely be a blood bath in these parts like few had seen since Juarez and Prince Maximilian had locked horns in the late ’60s.

  Spurr holstered his pistol, crouched behind the Gatling gun, dropped the muzzle a few inches, and turned the crank.

  Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!

  The five Indians directly beneath the church screamed and tried climbing to their feet as the .45-caliber rounds hammered through them, spraying red onto the muddy street. They hadn’t had a chance in their positions. Neither did the other two left of the barn.

  Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!

  One managed to squeeze off two rifle rounds, the slugs hammering the wall in front of Spurr, but then three bullets shredded the brave’s deerskin vest and black calico shirt as they lifted him straight up off his feet and threw him several yards back, where he tumbled into a trash pile with a rattle of rusty airtight tins. The other Yaqui had been trying to run away when Spurr’s burst drilled through his back and butt and threw him into a goat pen behind the livery barn.

  Silence.

  Spurr kept the Gatling’s muzzle down. He looked at the bandolier feeding its breech. There were only eight or nine bullets left. But he had the Starr and his rifle, and he had the rifles and pistol of the two Yaqui lying dead around him, if he needed them.

  A face appeared in the small window left of the livery barn’s closed, bullet-shredded double doors. The head wore a tan cavalry kepi. “Who’s out there?” the man shouted.

  Spurr bit his lip. Then he grinned and chuckled, hoping he’d sound like at least one man in the cutthroat party. “Ha-ha! Miss me, boys?”

  He kept his head low, so that just the feathered crown of his hat shown above the tower’s lower wall.

  “Hardwood—that you?” said the man with his head in the open window.

  Spurr chuckled again and patted the Gatling’s smoking muzzle. “This belly buster cleans up right well. Wouldn’t mind havin’ one o’ my own.”

  The man in the window continued to stare toward the bell tower. Spurr couldn’t make out any details of his features except a shaggy blond mustache. That meant he couldn’t make out Spurr’s features, either, and the men in the barn may or may not fall for the bluff.

  There was only one window at the front of the barn, and behind it Spurr spied movement in the barn’s heavy shadows. The old lawman waited, lifting his head and removing his hand from the Gatling’s crank but not wanting to show too much of himself until everyone in the barn was outside.

  The left side door swung open, its hinges whining in the rainy silence. A man lay slumped and bloody just inside the barn, and the blond-mustached gent in the tan kepi stepped over him and outside, carrying a rifle in his right hand. Several pistols showed behind the swinging flaps of his yellow rain slicker.

  Spurr was happy to see that he and the three other men who followed him out, one with a bandanna wrapped around the top of his left arm, were more interested in the Yaqui strewn in the street before them than their savior in the bell tower. They looked around cautiously, the rain dripping off their hat brims, as they held their rifles on the dead braves, as though expecting one or two to come to life and resume triggering lead.

  The street was as vacant as before. Smoke curled from a couple of shacks lining the main drag, but none of the pueblito’s citizens had ventured outside. They’d likely seen the Yaqui, and there was nothing a Mexican feared more.

  Spurr was about to crouch over the Gatling gun and wrap his hand around the handle when he hesitated. Another man just now stepped out of the barn—a stocky young man with longish blond hair falling over the collar of his faded blue chambray shirt. He was a little under six feet, but broad-shouldered, with heavy arms and big hands, and he wore a tan slouch hat. A green neckerchief was knotted around his neck.

  His sun-reddened face, covered with several days’ growth of blond beard, was broad and handsome, his blue eyes alert and without the cunning and meanness of the others who’d ventured out ahead of him.

  Deep lines spoked the old lawman’s eyes. He mouthed the name. Massey?

  When the others had spread out, the stocky blond standing more cautiously back near the barn than his trail brothers, holding his rifle up high across his broad chest, Spurr crouched over the Gatling gun once more and wrapped his hand around the wooden handle. The pivot pin squealed as he aimed the maw at the men in the street. They all stopped in their tracks and jerked anxious looks toward the bell tower.

  Spurr didn’t have to raise his voice very loudly to be heard in the dense, damp silence. “Names’s Spurr Morgan, deputy U.S. marshal, and you fellas best throw down your guns unless you want me and my six-barreled friend here to blow you to kingdom come!”

  They all stared, dumbfounded. Even the kid who looked like the fugitive Cuno Massey, whom Spurr and Sheriff Dusty Mason had chased from Colorado into Arizona.

  The man with the blond mustache broke into sudden motion, shouting, “Goddamnit!” He jerked his Winchester to his shoulder.

  The others brought up their own weapons, and Spurr began cranking the Gatling gun once more. First the blond-mustached gent went down, screaming, and then the three beside him, none of the four having time to trigger a single shot before the Gatling gun’s eight of nine remaining bullets cut them apart and piled them up not far from the Yaqui.

  Spurr held the Gatling gun’s maw on the stocky blond, who hadn’t moved but stood as before, near the barn and with his Winchester on his right shoulder. His chest and face had tensed, and he seemed to stand there, shoulders back, waiting.

  Spurr studied him, one eye narrowed.

  “Well?” the stocky younker said. “What’re you waiting for?”

  “I’ll be damned,” Spurr said. “Throw that gun down, Massey.”

  The young man’s eyes widened beneath the brim of his slouch hat, and he jerked his head up. “Look out!”

  Spurr had felt the presence of someone else in the bell tower about a second before. Now he reached for his pistol as he swung around to see the dark figure with long wet hair pasted against slender, bare shoulders dive toward him, shrieking and thrusting a large bowie-like knife down toward Spurr’s chest.

  Spurr knocked the girl’s knife hand away with his left forearm and smashed his pistol against her temple. As the girl flew over to where the other two Yaqui lay dead, Spurr fell back against the tower’s front wall, cracking the back of his head against the wall so hard stars blossomed in his eyes.

  He tried to draw a breath but could get no wind in his lungs. As he noted a searing pain in his chest, as though he’d been kicked by a stout cow pony, his eyelids drooped, and the world went black.

  “Ah, shit,” he heard himself mutter, faintly. “Here’s that cloud.”

  14

  CUNO STARED IN shock at what suddenly appeared, aside from the Gatling gun resting with its barrel angled up, an empty bell tower over the church. He’d seen the girl leap at the old lawman, and he’d seen them both go down. Now, neither of them moved.

  Cuno looked around at the dead Yaqui and the dead cutthroats, trying to wrap his mind around all that had happened. Of the wagon crew, he was the sole survivor.

  No. Not the only
survivor, he remembered now as he heard the thunder of horse hooves behind him.

  “H-yahh!” Flora shouted as she slapped her rein ends against her calico’s withers and exploded out of the barn, nearly plowing into Cuno as she swung right to head west along the main street. Cuno got his feet back under him and watched as horse and rider bounded up a muddy hill, gobbets of wet sand thrown up by the horse’s hooves, and disappeared down the other side. She reappeared a few seconds later, dwindling quickly into the western distance.

  What the hell—she wasn’t Cuno’s concern. She hadn’t spoken more than five words to him since their wild tussle atop the escarpment.

  He racked a shell into his Winchester’s breech as he stepped over the bodies littering the street, pulled one of the church’s double doors open, and stepped inside. Voices sounded above him, and he lifted his head to see a hole in the ceiling, at the top of a stone stairs to his right. He climbed the stairs, clicking his Winchester’s hammer back and holding the rifle up and out from his hip.

  In the bell tower, he found Spurr on the floor, resting back against the tower’s front wall. A young priest in a brown wool robe knelt beside him, digging a flask out of his robe pocket and handing it over to Spurr with a sheepish expression on his broad face. Spurr’s own face was pale and gaunt, and his chest rose and fell heavily.

  “Much obliged, Padre,” said Spurr, lifting the small flask to his lips.

  To his left, the girl sprawled across the two Yaqui braves who’d been manning the Gatling gun. She had a wicked-looking cut in her right temple, and she wasn’t moving, but her chest rose and fell slowly, regularly, her gaping, tight-fitting deerskin vest revealing the deep, alluring brown valley between her breasts.

  “Rest easy, senor,” the padre told Spurr, “and it will pass.”