.45-Caliber Deathtrap Read online

  Cuno said nothing. He stared at the hole in Wade’s forehead.

  “My nerves,” said Serenity, “they been all shot to hell ever since that dynamite blast in the mine.”

  “Where’d they go?” Cuno asked.

  Serenity shuffled around to peer up from Cuno’s left shoulder. “Those three inside are part of the same bunch. They’re stayin’ with the injured hombre while the rest—ten men if there was one—rode up trail. They’re headed to pull a robbery on the western slopes, I heard tell. Probably in Sundance. They’re on the dodge. One of the girls from the pleasure house said they robbed a bank out Nebraska way!”

  Cuno turned.

  “What’re you gonna do?” Serenity asked as Cuno left the stable.

  “You stay here,” the freighter said. “I’ll be back to bury my partner.”

  He crossed the alley and pushed through the Hog’s Head’s rear door, swinging his gaze around. The three hard cases were no longer in the building. Their voices rose from outside. They were moving around on the street in front of the dusty window.

  “Damn, looky here!” one bellowed. “Chewin’ tobacco!”

  Cuno moved to the front door. Staring out, he removed the keeper thong from over the hammer of his .45.

  The three hard cases had the tarp half off the big Murphy, and one was prying the lid off a crate.

  3

  CUNO SLID THE Colt from its holster, crouched, and triggered three quick shots. One after another, the hard cases’ hats were ripped from their heads to sail around on the breeze before bouncing off along the street.

  Each man jerked with alarm, turned enraged looks at the brawny freighter, who held his smoking .45 on the saloon’s front boardwalk. He regarded each man mildly.

  “I don’t know what you’re lookin’ for, but that’s my freight. Less’n you don’t stand clear, my next shot’s gonna be a mite lower.”

  They stared at him hard, their hands slowly moving toward the six-shooters holstered low on their thighs.

  Cuno’s Colt roared again. The man standing at the wagon’s tailgate, a wad of fresh chew balling his cheek, crumpled, screaming and clutching his knee. “I apologize,” said Cuno. “I must not have made myself clear.”

  While the wounded man dropped lower into the dusty street, groaning and spitting curses, the others raised their hands high above their pistol butts.

  “Hold on, hold on,” said the hard case standing atop a crate of winter mackinaws, his long, stringy black hair blowing in the breeze. “We heard you. We just thought this stuff was for sale is all.”

  “Yeah, don’t get your back up,” said the other man, kneeling atop flour sacks stacked as high as the Murphy’s yellow-painted driver’s seat. “We were fixin’ to pay.”

  He wore a denim jacket over a torn underwear shirt and an Abe Lincoln stovepipe hat, a deck of cards wedged behind its braided leather band. The breeze buffeted the fringes of his deerskin leggings.

  Cuno gritted his teeth and jerked his .45’s hammer back with an angry rasp. “Ain’t for sale. Get down.”

  “All right,” said the man with the stringy black hair, glancing at the man in the stovepipe hat.

  He shrugged, crouched, planted both hands on the side of the wagon box, and hoisted himself over. He dropped with a thud, dust puffing around his worn boots. A second later, the other man joined him, catching his hat as it tumbled off his shoulder.

  The other man lay at the back of the wagon, both legs curled beneath his body. He clutched his bloody knee with his right hand. His face, framed by two dusty wings of sandy-blond hair, was nearly as red as the blood streaming between his fingers.

  “You son of a bitch,” he spat at Cuno. “You ruined my goddamn knee!”

  “Shut up,” Cuno said, “or I’ll ruin the other one.”

  He stared at the other two, who’d stepped out of the wagon’s purple shade, casually putting a good six feet between them. They kept their hands well above their pistol butts, but sneers flashed in their eyes and pulled at their lips.

  “You sure are proddy,” said Stovepipe, grinning.

  “We told ya we was fixin’ to pay,” said the man beside him. “Just wanted to see if ya had anything worth payin’ for.” He shrugged and canted his head to one side, flashed a toothy smile.

  “That what you told Wade Scanlon?”

  The two men looked at each other.

  “Now, who’s that?” Stovepipe asked.

  “The one you shot in the knee and right here.” Cuno put a finger to his forehead. His cheeks were taut, forked veins swelling just above the bridge of his nose. “Before you looted his wagon, set it on fire, and hoorawed his team into the ravine back yonder.”

  “Oh, kangaroo-man!” said the man with the stringy black hair. “Jeez, I plum forgot about him.”

  “How could you forgit him?” said Stovepipe, laughing. “Don’t you remember, Walt shot him in the knee just like this bastard shot Cotton over yonder. Only, that was the only knee kangaroo-man had!”

  They laughed.

  “And Cannady shot Wade between his eyes!” Stovepipe added.

  They laughed again.

  “Where might I find this Cannady?” Cuno asked.

  “Oh,” Stringy Hair said, “you don’t wanna find Cannady. He’s off his feed. He done had to leave his injured brother with the whores. Besides, he’s faster’n downwind spit, an’ mean as a rattlesnake in a fryin’ pan.”

  Stovepipe’s eyes flicked toward the wounded man behind the wagon. Cuno swung left. His Colt barked at the same time the S&W of the knee-shot man burned a round through Cuno’s left calf. Cuno’s slug smashed the wounded man’s head straight back in the street, its quarter-sized hole leaking blood.

  In the corner of his right eye, Cuno saw the other two hard cases reach for their guns. He dove forward as the pistols popped, drilling the air where he’d been standing, the slugs plunking into the saloon and the awning posts behind him.

  He hit the dirt behind the wagon and scrambled to a crouch as two more shots plunked into the wagon box, spraying his face with wood slivers. He snaked his Colt around the wagon’s right rear corner. The two hard cases were sidestepping toward the saloon but facing the wagon, crouched, pistols extended, trying to get a bead on their quarry.

  Cuno triggered one shot, then another, watched as both men fired their own revolvers into the dirt and went down, screaming. Raging, bleeding from his lower left shoulder, Stovepipe swung his revolver toward the wagon and sparked a round off a small iron tie ring right of Cuno’s face.

  Gritting his teeth, Cuno drilled two rounds into the man’s chest.

  As Stovepipe wailed, kicking around in the dust like an overheated horse, Stringy Hair ran heavy-footed, right hand held tight to his wounded hip, around the far side of the saloon. Cuno stood and opened his Colt’s loading gate. As he shook out the spent shells and replaced them with fresh ones, the saloon’s single door squawked.

  Serenity Parker stepped out, looking around warily.

  “Stay inside, Serenity.” Cuno flipped the loading gate closed. “Got a little moppin’ up to do.”

  Parker made a hasty retreat, the door swinging shut behind him.

  As Cuno moved to the saloon’s corner, following Stringy Hair’s scuffling tracks, he saw that several scantily clad women had moved out of the whorehouse and into the street, looking around wide-eyed. Several others remained on the unpainted house’s sagging front porch.

  “Lara, get back here!” one called to a girl moving toward the wagon. “You wanna get shot?”

  Cuno waved the women back and tramped along the saloon’s west wall, following blood splashed in the gravel and rabbitbrush around the saloon’s rear corner to the backyard.

  Ca-pop! Zing!

  As the slug sliced off a rock near Cuno’s left boot, the shooter ran out from behind an old beer barrel, heading for the barn. Crouching, Cuno fired two quick shots. The man screamed and fell inside the barn, scrambled back behind the door.

 
His Colt appeared around the door, just below the hide-loop handle. It barked twice, the barrel belching smoke and stabbing flames.

  The man pulled the gun back.

  Cuno aimed his .45 at the door and emptied it, the four slugs tracing a circle the size of a coffee lid.

  There was a wooden thud. The door jerked. Stringy Hair’s head appeared, sagging slowly down to the hay-flecked ground beside the door. The open eyes did not blink. Blood washed over his lips and down his chin, dribbled into the dust.

  The saloon’s back door scraped open. In the crack, the old bartender’s face appeared, owl-eyed. When soft footfalls sounded behind Cuno, he spun, extending his empty gun. A girl. She flinched, took one step back.

  “There’s another one in the house,” she said.

  It was Lara, with soft yellow hair and sandstone-colored eyes, a mole on her right cheekbone, another just above her nose. The blemishes did nothing to mar her beauty. Cuno had wondered what had turned such a sweet, pretty girl to whoring until she’d told him, the last time he was through Columbine, that her parents had broken up and simply abandoned her on the streets of Denver.

  That was often all it took.

  Cuno swung past her, looked at the house. In the second story, a lace curtain swung down across a window.

  “Wounded?”

  “Yeah, but he’s getting better,” Lara said. “He’s also got one of them big, long pistols. Near as long as a rifle.”

  “A Buntline Special,” Cuno said, thumbing fresh cartridges through his loading gate.

  “He’s got a taste for strange pleasures too.”

  “Not much longer.”

  Cuno tramped with her toward the house, behind which the sun was setting, casting shadows into the yard around half a dozen half-dressed girls.

  “Sorry about what happened to Scanlon,” Lara said gently behind him.

  “Stay here.”

  Holding his .45 down low at his right thigh, Cuno passed the girls standing silent amidst the buckbrush and sage of the pleasure house’s front yard. As he climbed the porch and started through the open front door, a plump, middle-aged woman with bottle-blond hair piled loosely atop her head grabbed his left arm.

  “He was upstairs beatin’ hell outta one of my girls a while ago. Haven’t heard a peep out of him since the shootin’ started.” Her breath smelled like candy and tobacco, Miss Mundy’s two worst vices. She read the Bible aloud to her girls every Sunday, however, and did not personally imbibe.

  Cuno nodded and moved slowly through the door. He crossed the shabby parlor to the stairs and the room’s rear, took the carpeted stairs two steps at a time, walking softly on the balls of his boots, the .45 aimed straight out from his right side.

  He gained the top step and stopped.

  The air was rife with the smell of whiskey, tobacco, perfume, and sex. A window at the far end of the hall offered the only light.

  Cuno took one step forward. A latch clicked. A door on his right and ten yards ahead swung inward. Soft, natural light spread across the hall’s musty runner and opposite wall. A bulky shadow grew on the wallpaper.

  A skinny, naked man stepped into the hall and turned to face Cuno. He held a naked girl before him, one hand clutching her arm, the other holding a long-barreled pistol to her head.

  The man wasn’t much taller than the girl, and he wasn’t much broader. His blond hair was longer than hers, reaching nearly to his waist. His left side was covered with a heavy, white bandage crisscrossed with cotton straps. His face was long and narrow, his eyes blinking rapidly.

  Cuno heard his short, shallow breaths. The girl groaned softly, her body rigid with fear. The fetor of the ground roots, mud, horse shit, and whiskey packing the man’s gunshot wound instantly overcame all the other smells in the hall.

  The hard case gave the girl’s hair a vicious yank. “Throw the gun down, you murderin’ bastard! I’ll kill the whore!”

  Cuno stopped and lowered the gun to his side. “What do I care about a whore?” he asked quietly.

  “I’ll kill her!” the hard case shrieked. “I swear I will. You’ll have this whore’s death on your conscience for the rest of your life.” He jerked the girl’s head sharply; she screamed.

  “No,” she whimpered, grabbing at the man’s skinny arm wrapped around her neck. “Please…”

  Cuno blinked. “What’s your name, friend?”

  The hard case stared at him dully, the bridge of his nose wrinkling. “Huh?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sylvester. Sylvester Cannady. Why you askin’?”

  “Just wanna know what name to carve on your headstone.”

  As the hard case’s mouth snapped wide with exasperation, Cuno raised his pistol and fired. In the close quarters, the report sounded like a shotgun’s boom. Smoke wafted as the hard case flew straight back, hitting the floor with an ear-ringing roar. The entire floor jumped and, farther down the hall, a glass chimney shattered as it fell from a bracket lamp.

  The girl screamed and bolted to the wall to Cuno’s right. She dropped to her butt, brought her knees to her chest, her hands to her face.

  “He’s crazy!” she shrieked. “He’s just plumb crazy!”

  Cuno walked past her, stared down at the hard case. The man’s mouth was still open, flooded with blood from the bullet Cuno had fired between his open jaws. His eyes flickered at the ceiling before a gray veil closed down.

  “Not anymore he ain’t,” Cuno said.

  Hurried footsteps rose behind him. Cuno turned to see Lara running up the stairs, holding her skirts above her ankles. She flashed Cuno a worried look as she went to the whore in the hall.

  Cuno holstered his pistol, grabbed the naked hard case’s ankles, and pulled him down the stairs, the man’s bloody head bouncing with dull thuds.

  4

  BLACKY GILMAN, OWNER and operator of Blacky’s Place in Spinoff Creek, twenty miles west of Columbine, looked around his dingy saloon, where four bearded men sat drinking and playing cards, and cursed. He rubbed his hands on his beer-spattered apron and walked out from behind his plank bar to the saloon’s back door.

  He poked his head out.

  “Goddamnit, Chinaman, get in here and put some food on. I’m gonna have miners in here in a half hour, and if they don’t get vittles from me, they’re gonna head on up the road and get ’em from Gault. Goddamn your lazy, yella hide!”

  Gilman cursed again, smoothed a stray lock of frizzy, colorless hair over his bald, bullet-shaped head, and let the door slap shut. His enormous gut bouncing and straining his leather galluses, he ambled back behind the bar and continued stocking his shelves with whiskey bottles from a wooden crate.

  He’d arranged two more bottles when the back door creaked open and a slightly built Chinaman in overlarge denim trousers and a gray wool shirt shuffled into the long, narrow room with an armload of stove wood. Rawhide galluses held his pants on his skinny hips. His thinning, black hair was combed straight back from his domed forehead, and a thin growth of beard hung from his chin, something between a goatee and a beard. His feet were clad in beaded Indian moccasins.

  “I must split wood, Mr. Geelman. The kid, he no split wood this morning. I must split for myself. That is why I slow with supper vittles. I hurry now, though.”

  The barman snorted caustically. “The kid took sick. So you have to split wood as well as cook. My heart bleeds for you.” Gilman turned his sweaty face to the Chinaman, who was piling wood in the box beside the big brick fireplace along the far wall. “Where’s your girl?”

  “She clean fish—Li Mei. Clean fish for constable. You know how he like his trout for supper!”

  “Forget the fish. Fetch her in here to start servin’ drinks. If she’s too slow again tonight, I’m gonna hang a price around her neck and let the boys take her into the back room for a little slap ’n’ tickle.”

  Several chuckles rang out from the table near the room’s front. The Chinaman, Kong Zhao, dropped a log in the wood box and
turned his glance toward the bar, scowling at his boss’s back. He clenched his fists, then planted a hand on his right thigh, pushed himself to his feet, and shuffled over to the door.

  “I get her now, Boss,” he said in his practiced, kowtowing English, bobbing his head. “I get Li Mei right ’way!”

  He pushed the back door open, swung his gaze around the saloon’s small backyard to the diminutive Chinese girl cleaning fish at a low work bench. Gutted brook trout lay in a slimy pile to one side of the bench, glistening in the early evening light angling over the canyon’s tall ridges. Beside the girl’s split-log chair was a wooden bucket partly filled with livery-colored fish guts.

  Kong Zhao spoke several commanding words of Chinese. The girl set her knife down beside the fish she’d been cleaning, dipped her hands in a pan of water, and shuffled toward the saloon. She gazed fearfully up at her father, who stepped aside to let her pass through the door.

  As she stepped over the threshold, he grabbed her slender arm. She swung toward him, her delicate face turned up toward his, her brown eyes questioning.

  He muttered a question.

  She nodded and, glancing warily about the saloon, turned back to her father. She pinched up the left leg of her baggy denim trousers. In a soft leather sheath strapped about her ankle lay a thin, silver-trimmed, ivory-handled stiletto.

  Kong Zhao nodded and released the girl’s arm. She walked past her father, tense as always when entering the saloon, and headed for the bar where Gilman was setting freshly filled beer mugs on a wooden tray.

  At the same time, the gang of riders led by Clayton Cannady, who’d dubbed themselves “The Committee” during a night of heavy drinking, galloped along the narrow wagon road twisting along the south bank of Chicken Hawk Creek. They were eleven riders—hard, dusty men in various style of ratty dress, with six-guns on their hips, knives in their boots or sheathed between their shoulder blades, rifles in their saddle boots.

  As distinctly as each was dressed and armed, there was one thing they all had in common—each had the reputation for being “touched.”