GUN TROUBLE AT DIAMONDBACK (Bear Haskell, U.S. Marshal Book 1) Read online

  The urine glinted in the sunshine filtering through the leaf canopy above him.

  He lifted his head and yelled, “Hey, Bean—don’t use her all up, now. Save some for me an’ the others!” He laughed.

  “Fuck you, A.J.!” shouted the man in the lean-to, grunting.

  A.J.’s streamed dwindled, stopped. When he’d tucked himself back into his pants and buttoned up, he headed back inside the shack. Haskell had been hunkered none too patiently behind the stump, squeezing his Henry in both hands. Now he rose, strode out from behind the stump and walked through the brush to the corral.

  Now three horses were watching him.

  Haskell gritted his teeth, silently beseeching the mounts not to give him away.

  He stopped at the lean-to’s corner and peered over the top corral rail into the shelter’s murky shadows. He could see two dusky figures moving around in there, amidst what appeared stacked firewood, but he could see neither figure clearly.

  “How do you like it, huh?” Bean asked. “Tell me how you like it, bitch! Tell me how you like it, bitch!”

  “Oh, you’re awful,” the girl cried, grunting. “A wicked, wicked man. Look what you’re doing to me! I’m ruined!”

  “I think you like it, bitch! I really think you like it!”

  “You’ll burn in hell for this!”

  “I think you like it!”

  “Oh, god! Oh, god—you’re a savage!”

  Bean howled.

  “What will Father say when he finds out about this! Oh, my poor dear mother!”

  Bean howled louder.

  Haskell crouched under the corral’s top slat. He glanced at the horses, all of which were looking at him now with typical horse-like incredulity. He held up a placating hand to them and then stole forward into the lean-to, which was half-filled with stacked firewood. He stepped around one stack to the stack behind it.

  Bean’s back was facing Haskell. The girl lay back against a saddle blanket spread out atop the firewood. Her bare legs were spread wide. Bean was pumping his hips against her. His faded denim trousers and long-handles were bunched around his boots. His gun belt and two pistols lay on a stump near the ground to his right. Near the stump lay a white dress, pantaloons, and pink bloomers.

  Bean had long, tangled brown hair—thick like a girl’s and spotted with dust and seeds. Bean’s skinny ass was pale and dimpled and peppered with thin little tufts of light brown hair.

  The girl’s bare legs flopped against his sides as he rammed himself savagely against her, pushing in, pulling out ... pushing in ... sliding out ... He had a hand wrapped around each of the girl’s slender knees.

  Haskell gritted his teeth as he stepped up behind the man. He had to take him down quietly so as not to alert the men in the cabin. He glanced over the man’s left shoulder. The girl spotted him. She stared at Bear, wide-eyed, mouth open, as Bean continued to rape her. Haskell placed two fingers on his lips and then rammed the butt of his Henry against the side of Bean’s head.

  The outlaw gave a yelp and staggered to his right, dazed.

  Haskell tapped him again.

  Bean twisted around to face Haskell as he fell back against the woodpile, blood from the two Henry kisses trickling down the side of his head, over his left ear. Bean’s head wobbled. He slitted his lids, trying to focus his gaze on Haskell, who raised the Henry club-like behind his right shoulder, and swung it forward.

  It smashed against Bean’s right temple with a cracking thud.

  The girl cried, “Oh, my—!”

  “Shhh!” Again, Haskell pressed two fingers to his lips. The girl’s eyes flicked to the deputy U.S. marshal’s moon-and-star badge pinned to his calico shirt, just inside his left suspender.

  Bean dropped to his knees. His busted head wobbled heavily on his broken neck. Liver-colored blood from the grisly wound in his right temple gushed heavily down his cheek. Haskell stepped back as Bean tumbled forward and hit the lean-to floor on his face.

  “Get dressed!” Haskell ordered the girl, keeping his voice low.

  “Oh, my god!” she said in a voice hushed with awe, staring down at her attacker.

  “Get dressed and wait out here!” Haskell grabbed her arm and squeezed. “All right? Can you do that? You’re gonna hear some shooting, and when the smoke clears, if it’s not me you see heading back this way, you light out, okay? Just start running straight back through the brush. I’ll try to get as many of them as I can, but there’s no such thing as a sure bet!”

  She was staring down at Bean. Her eyes glittered with shock. A pretty girl, not much over sixteen, with a slender, buxom body and heart-shaped face with a little mole on her chin, another on her neck. Haskell squeezed her arm again, shook her gently. “Do you understand?”

  The girl looked at Haskell. She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Okay. Okay. I’ll get dressed.”

  Haskell walked to a corner of the lean-to and cast his cautious gaze at the shack. Leaf shadows darted across the old cabin. A couple of blackbirds were perched on yellow weeds growing up from the sod roof.

  Haskell heard a click behind him.

  He turned to see the preacher’s daughter aiming a pistol at him. She had both hands wrapped around the gun. “Bastard!” Gritting her teeth, she turned her head to one side, closed her eyes, and squeezed the trigger.

  The gun thundered.

  The bullet plunked into a lean-to post just over Haskell’s left shoulder.

  Haskell staggered backward in shock, dropping his Henry as he reached for the lean-to wall.

  The girl looked at him again, saw she’d missed her mark, and tried again. She turned her head away again as she fired, and the second bullet also sailed wild, thudding into the ground beyond Haskell, between the lean-to and the cabin.

  “Hold on!” Haskell barked in confusion, sliding his big Schofield from its holster.

  The girl clicked her gun’s hammer back again, aimed again.

  Haskell’s Schofield roared. The girl’s gun also roared. Her bullet thudded into the underside of the lean-to roof as she staggered backward. Haskell’s bullet carved a neat round hole between her cherry-nippled breasts.

  She screamed as she smacked her head against the woodpile then dropped to the ground where she lay staring up at Haskell, her soft brown eyes quickly turning opaque as blood formed a river between her breasts.

  “What the hell?” Haskell said, staring down in shock at the girl.

  “What the hell?” echoed a man’s shout behind him.

  Haskell picked up his rifle and whipped around, casting a look around the corner of the lean-to. Two men in various stages of dress had just run out of the cabin, wielding rifles. The cabin door barked sharply as it slammed against the shack’s rear wall. One man stuffed a hat down on his head as he and the other man looked around wildly, whipping their rifles around, looking for a target.

  Shouts rose inside the cabin behind them.

  Haskell aimed, fired.

  One of the outlaws screamed and flew back against the cabin wall. The other cursed and jerked his rifle toward Haskell, who dispatched the man before he could get his own shot off.

  Before the second outlaw had piled up in the depression fronting the door, Haskell was running through the waving grass toward the cabin, ejecting the last spent cartridge from the Henry’s breech, sending it tumbling, smoking, over his right shoulder then jacking a fresh round into the action.

  “What the fuck—who’s out there?” another voice shouted from inside the shack.

  A rifle cracked. Haskell could see the flash inside the shack’s shadows. The shooter was standing about four feet back from the door, shooting blindly. Haskell dropped to a knee and fired three quick rounds, pumping and firing.

  There was a loud wooden thud.

  The shooting inside the cabin stopped but the shouts from the other men did not.

  Haskell ran past the cabin door, pressed his back against the rear wall. The open door was to his right. He snaked his Henry around the do
orframe, poked the barrel inside, and hurled three more rounds into the darkness, evoking more shouted curses, more stumbling around and yelling. Haskell bolted through the open doorway and dropped to a knee.

  A man lay writhing on the floor before him, groaning, spitting blood. Haskell finished him with a bullet to the head then cast his gaze into the shadows.

  The shack was only one room, crudely outfitted, cobwebs and filth everywhere. A small sheet-iron stove hunkered in the middle of the room near the front door. One man was crouched behind the stove while another just now peered over the top of an overturned table around which playing cards, coins, paper money, and whiskey bottles were scattered.

  Haskell dropped to a knee as a man’s head and a rifle rose up from behind the overturned table. Haskell hammered several rounds at the table, the bullets plunking into the table as well as into the head of the man behind it, punching him back against the front wall, screaming and dying.

  A deafening blast assaulted Haskell’s ears.

  He heard the screaming rip of a large caliber round hurling over his left shoulder, feeling the warm air curling near his earlobe. There was a loud smacking sound behind him. He glanced back to see that the rear door had blown partway closed. Something had smacked it open again, then bounced it off the rear wall.

  It was starting to close again, wobbling on its hinges. There was a hole the size of a man’s fist in the middle of it.

  Shit!

  A buffalo rifle. Had to be ...

  The man behind the stove rose screaming, raising two pistols. He was shirtless and he had a tattoo on his right cheek and long, stringy blond hair. A name matching the man’s likeness on a Wanted circular flashed across the lawman’s brain: “Curly” Ray Buford. Before Curly could level either of his revolvers on Haskell, the deputy U.S. marshal emptied his sixteen-shooter into the man’s bony torso, punching him back into the front door.

  The man knocked the door off its hinges, and he and the door landed in the front yard.

  Curly triggered both his pistols wild as he screamed, dying hard.

  The screams died in mid-scream. Curly moved his arms and legs, like a bug on its back trying to right itself. Then the body relaxed atop the blood-washed door.

  Haskell lowered the smoking Henry. He looked around.

  There were two dead outlaws in front of him. He turned around to stare toward the back door. Another man lay dead just inside the rear door. Two dead outside. Another one dead in the lean-to with the girl.

  He stepped through the ruined back door and counted the horses in the corral.

  Seven.

  Had the girl, who had apparently thrown in with the rawhiders, had her own separate horse?

  Or had there been another outlaw in the cabin?

  Chapter Three

  Haskell ran through the shack and out the front door.

  He looked around. Movement ahead and to his left. One of the outlaws was running through a heavy stand of trees and brush that trailed off toward the wash. He was about fifty yards away from Haskell, running hard, leaping deadfalls and swerving around shrubs.

  When the shooting had started, the seventh man must have skinned out a window or through the front door. Haskell started after him then stopped and stared straight off toward where he’d left Emma Kramer.

  His heart thudded.

  Emma hadn’t headed back toward her ranch headquarters. She wasn’t keeping her head or anything else down, either. She was standing on the ridge on the far side of the wash, roughly three hundred yards away. Her horse stood beside her, switching its tail. Emma was staring toward the cabin.

  “Goddamnit,” Haskell bit out, lunging forward as though to run to her, then stopping and angrily waving his arm.

  She’d heard the shooting and she was wondering if he was still alive. He wanted to yell at her to get the hell away from there, but if he did, he might only be pointing her out to the outlaw. If the outlaw hadn’t already spotted her. She and the horse were clearly outlined against the sky. The outlaw would want that horse. Maybe Emma, too.

  Haskell remembered what she looked like.

  Hell, yeah—the outlaw would want Emma, too!

  Haskell waved again, leaping up in the air and throwing his arm forward, trying to indicate that she should get the hell back away from the wash. She returned his wave with an uncertain one of her own. She’d didn’t understand his meaning. Maybe she thought he was only trying to tell her that he was all right but that she should wait there.

  “Goddamnit!” Haskell said.

  He looked at the outlaw still running through the trees. Suddenly, the man dropped down out of sight. He was in the wash. By now he’d certainly seen Emma and the horse and he was going to try to sneak up on her.

  Haskell remembered the Sharps.

  He swung around and ran back into the cabin. The Sharps, a 45-70, lay by the dead outlaw who’d almost blown Haskell’s head off with it. It was an 1874 model with a Vernier rear sliding site. Cartridges spilled from a box that lay on the floor nearby. Haskell picked up the big buffalo gun, grabbed a cartridge nearly as long as his index finger, and hurried to the small window left of the door. The window was partly concealed by a drooping branch of a cottonwood.

  Haskell had fired such a buffalo gun before. But not this one. And it had been a while.

  And he didn’t have time to adjust for the wind ...

  He raised the rifle, peered through the sites. The outlaw was climbing the bank on the opposite side of the wash. He was a good thirty yards to Emma’s right, and he was closing on her but she couldn’t see him from her position. It was the girl and the horse he was heading for, all right.

  The outlaw slipped up and over the lip of the wash, crouching and looking toward the girl and the horse, and dashed out of sight into the brush beyond. Haskell drew the rifle’s heavy hammer back to half cock and pulled down the trigger guard cocking lever, opening the block.

  He knew he’d see the outlaw again in a few seconds.

  Haskell drew a deep, calming breath as he slid the long cartridge into the rifle’s action and closed the block. He drew the hammer back to full cock, set the rear trigger with the front one, pressed his cheek up to the neck of the stock, and gazed down the barrel through the sites.

  His heart thudded heavily, anxiously.

  Emma continued to stare toward the cabin. She had the horse’s reins in one hand. That hand rested on her hip. Her other boot was cocked forward. Her head was canted at a quizzical angle.

  The horse switched its tail.

  The outlaw was nowhere in sight. Nothing but sky beyond the horse and the girl.

  “Come on, you son of a bitch,” Haskell said, drawing another breath to calm himself.

  The horse turned its head to peer behind.

  Haskell’s pulse quickened.

  The outlaw came into view, moving slowly toward the horse and the girl, coming up behind them and to one side. He was going to steal around behind the horse and come up on Emma, surprising her. He was a hatted silhouette from Haskell’s vantage.

  The outlaw was within ten feet of the girl and walking slowly, lightly, on the balls of his boots, holding up one placating hand toward the horse.

  Haskell lined up the sites on the man’s chest. He drew a breath, let out half. He lined up the sites just left of the girl and the horse, anticipating where the outlaw would be in two seconds. He slowly tightened the first joint of his index finger on the trigger.

  The outlaw’s silhouette slid into the sites.

  Haskell’s gloved finger took up its slack.

  The Sharps thundered, punched back against his shoulder. The echo of the shot was swallowed by the huge sky. The acrid smell of burned powder blew back against Haskell’s face and was swept away on the wind.

  The outlaw turned toward the girl, jerking his left hand toward her right arm. Emma whipped around to face him. The outlaw jerked away from her, stumbled backward, throwing his right hand up high above his head. He twisted around to
his right and fell in a heap, legs bouncing off the ground.

  Emma stood frozen, staring at the outlaw lying before her.

  The horse lifted its head sharply. Haskell heard the distance-muffled whinny a second later. The horse jerked its reins out of Emma’s hands and ran away. Emma stood staring at the outlaw on the ground.

  Then she dropped to her hands and knees.

  She was throwing up.

  ~*~

  “Now, that was some fine eatin’!” Haskell said, swabbing the last of the gravy from his plate with a baking powder biscuit and sticking the biscuit into his mouth.

  He chewed, swallowed, washed the biscuit and gravy down with the last of his coffee. He looked across the table at Emma Kramer. “Yes, ma’am—you’re one heckuva cook, Miss Emma.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No—thank you.” Haskell grinned at her.

  Emma didn’t look at him. She was finishing her own stew, fork in one hand, piece of torn biscuit in the other.

  She hadn’t said more than five words to him since they’d ridden to her ranch headquarters toting the loot the outlaws had stolen from the stage. Haskell had hauled the body of the girl whom he assumed was the preacher’s daughter to the ranch, as well. He’d wrapped her in blankets and tied her belly down over a horse. He’d merely dragged the outlaws into the dry wash and left them to the predators. He didn’t believe in wasting time burying badmen. Badmen didn’t deserve the extra work. Life was too short and there were too many other badmen he could spend that time chasing.

  The West was full of thieves and killers just like those he’d left in the wash.

  Haskell wasn’t looking forward to hauling the girl back to her family in Socorro and telling them he’d been the one to shoot her and why. But that was part of the job. He assumed she’d taken up with one of the outlaws, somehow, and had must have helped subdue the other stage passengers from inside the coach.