CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Hans Kruger put both hands on the batwing doors at the miserable hovel in the middle of nowhere. Inside what billed itself as a way station but was nothing more than a hog ranch between the Pecos and the Rio Grande, it served the worst women and whiskey only slightly less deadly. The clinking of glasses and the giggling—more like wheezing—of a prostitute fell into complete silence. Slowly, tentatively, he pushed the doors open and stepped out of the night wind and into the dimly lit one-room stone shack that smelled of Taos Lightning, smoke, and filth.
The prostitutes had moved away from one of the two tables in the place. The bartender twirled his mustache.
Uncle Zach Lovely trained both barrels of a sawed-off double-barrel at the door. Bob Benteen, each hand holding a Smith & Wesson .44, grinned and eared back both hammers. Hank Benteen removed the cigar from his mouth with his left hand, his right tucked inside the lever of a sawed-off Winchester repeater, hammer cocked, finger on the trigger. At least that weapon was pointed at what passed for a ceiling.
For now.
“Evening.” Hank Benteen nodded at the bartender. “Carlos is still serving. As long as you got coin.”
“Obliged.” Hans stepped through the doorway and let the doors bang their way shut behind him.
“He say that funny, don’t he?” Bob Benteen said.
“Like a Hun,” Uncle Zach said.
When Hans Kruger reached the bar, he placed his right hand away from the Colt and onto the bar. He used his left to fish out a dollar, which he flipped to the barman.
“The best you got.”
The Mexican shrugged. “Best is worst. Worst is best.” He ducked and rose quickly, filled a dirty glass with filthy liquor, and put the jug back where he had stashed it. By then Uncle Zach had risen from his chair, and still holding the shotgun, moved through the batwing doors, which again banged.
Kruger shot down the kerosene the Mexican called liquor, eased the glass back onto the bar, and nodded. “Another.”
“For a Hun,” Uncle Zach said as he stepped back inside, “He can handle his liquor.” The old man looked at Hank. “Nobody’s with him.”
Kruger made himself turn around to the Benteen Gang, holding the glass at the brutal men and nodding his blessings. Bob had holstered his .44s, Uncle Zach had returned the shotgun, now uncocked, to his lap, and Hank had laid the Winchester on the table, but the barrel pointed in Kruger’s general direction, and the fingers on his right hand beat out a horse trot next to the lever.
“Late to be riding,” Hank said. “Especially in this country.”
“I look for someone.” The German accent caused Bob Benteen to snigger.
“Maybe I know him.” Hank Benteen smiled.
“Ja, you do,” Kruger said. “For it is you, Hank Benteen.”
The fingers stopped their trot and inched inside the lever.
Kruger hurriedly explained, “I am Hans Kruger.”
“Is that ’posed to mean something to me, Hun?”
He felt the wind leave his sails. It was a discouraging fact to learn that despite robberies, murders, and the occasional swindles in Arizona, New Mexico, one town in California, and five places in Texas, Hans and Otto Kruger didn’t rank with the Benteens.
“Dere are vanted posters on me and Otto, my brother.”
“Congratulations.”
He smiled. “Danke.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Uncle Zach growled.
“It is German. For tank you.”
“You ain’t in Rome no more, you damned Hun,” Uncle Zach said.
Hans Kruger blinked.
Hank Benteen shook his head and spit on the floor. “Rome’s in Italy, you idiot.” Then he nodded again at Kruger. “So you’re Hans Kruger and you’re wanted. Why are you looking for me?”
“I need to join you.”
The outlaw leader shook his head. “We’re full up.”
“But Tom is—” Kruger realized his mistake and gulped down the liquor. The guns were trained on him again. He dropped the glass, only after he had emptied it, on the bar, and quickly removed his hat out of respect for the dead. “Bitte. Let me explain.”
“Make it good, Hun. You got ten seconds.”
He’d never been able to do it in such short time, but Hans Kruger tried. “The man you—” He didn’t finish, but only because two rifle barrels pointed through the doorway just above the batwing doors.
The twin barrels of a big shotgun came up at the bottom of the doors, and a Texas voice boomed,
“Don’t try it, you damned Benteens. If just a-one of ya blinks, you all buy a ticket straight to Hell.”
Hank Benteen was halfway out of his seat, knocking over the chair, but he could not get the rifle up in time, and he knew that. He looked with malevolent eyes at Hans Kruger, who was stunned by this turn of events. The leader of the cutthroat killers snarled, “You traitor, you Judas, you miserable son of a—”
The batwing doors opened, and the two men with rifles went in, two graybeards wearing dusters and big Texas hats.
As the shotgun barrel rose, the third, a smaller man, snickered. He had more wrinkles in his face than on the prostitute who had moved away from the Benteens.
“Gotch ye boys.” He slapped his side with his left hand, keeping the right on the scattergun. “Gotch ye good.”
“Shut up,” said the taller of the graybeards. Then back to the Benteens, “Reach.”
Slowly, Hank Benteen’s right hand left the table and joined the left hand high over his head. Uncle Zach pitched the shotgun on the table and followed his nephew’s movements. Bob Benteen wet his lips, but leaped up, trying for his holstered .44s.
It was the wrinkled man who cut Bob Benteen down, blasting his chest open with both barrels of the shotgun and riddling the prostitute behind him. The impact of the buckshot drove him back, knocking over the prostitute as she screamed and died. He slammed into the wall and sat on the floor, both eyes seemed fixed on the trail of blood he left as he slid across the hellhole. The woman lay facedown in a lake of crimson.
“I gotch him,” the wrinkled man said. “I—”
The bartender turned around and cried out, “You murdered my wife.”
The thinner of the graybeards shot the Mexican between the eyes, and he crashed beside wherever he kept the jugs of his awful brew.
For a moment, Hans Kruger wondered if these men would kill him, but once the ringing died down and the smoke drifted through the opening above the batwing doors, or holes in the ceiling, the taller of the graybeards looked at Kruger and said, “Who the hell are you?”
“Ich bin—” Quickly he stopped, thought, decided these men were bounty hunters, and said, “John Smith.”
The thinner graybeard laughed, and to Hans Kruger’s surprise, so did Hank Benteen, which did not seem logical considering that of the three people cut down so violently and so unexpectedly in this place in the middle of nowhere, one happened to be Hank Benteen’s brother.
“All right, John Smith,” the tall graybeard said, “If you want to live, this is how you’ll play this hand. You’ll sign a statement that the bartender was killed by Tom Benteen and—”
“That’s Bob,” Uncle Zach corrected.
“All right. The bartender was shot dead by Bob Benteen. That’s what started the row. Zach killed the woman. Claude, Zeb, and me each killed the Benteens.”
Hank laughed. “You’re not taking us in?”
“Corpses are less trouble. And dead men don’t talk.”
They were looking at the Benteens, the tall man, the thin man, and the cackling man with whiskers, so Hans Kruger drew the Colt from his holster and cracked three shots, downing the thin man with a ball through the temple, the cackling idiot with one that shattered his spine, and would have hit the tall graybeard in the heart but that man was fast and moving around. The slug just spun him around and dropped him to his knees, his left hand clutching his right shoulder.
He was still game, though, trying to raise the rifle, but Hank Benteen kicked it out of his hands and drew a .45 from his holster. When the tall man said, “Please,” Hank shoved the barrel into the man’s mouth, breaking off a couple of teeth.
“Unh-unh,” Hank Benteen told the wild-eyed man. “Corpses aren’t no trouble. Dead men don’t talk.” He pulled the trigger.
* * *
Hank Benteen stepped around the dead Mexican, found the jug, and filled glasses for himself, Uncle Zach, and Hans Kruger. He raised his own toward his dead brother.
“You were a good brother, Bob.”
“For a damned simpleton,” Uncle Zach said.
All drank—Kruger, too—and then Hank Benteen pointed the Colt at Hans’s head. “Now talk,” he said, and thumbed back the hammer. “But because you saved our hides, I’ll give you thirty seconds. Starting now.”
It was quite simple, Hans Kruger managed to say. Hank and Uncle Zach had to be chasing the man who had killed Tom Benteen, hanging him in Purgatory City, then burning the body with the gallows. Kruger could not remember the name of this evil person, but he did know that he rode with the man who had taken his own brother prisoner. Some nefarious scoundrel named Jed Breen.
“Breen?” Uncle Zach said. “The bounty hunter?”
“Ja.”
That had taken longer than thirty seconds, but Hank Benteen lowered the Colt’s hammer, then dropped the revolver into his holster.
“Go on,” he ordered.
“Otto Kruger is being taken to Precious Metal,” Hans said. From what he had managed to hear, the man who had murdered Tom Benteen and the bounty hunter who was taking in his brother for blood money were—this confused him until his head ached—driving ponies to sell in Arizona. “With some other . . . what is the word . . . ? Jackal?”
Hank Benteen killed his liquor. “McCulloch.” He nodded at his uncle. “The Ranger.”
“The trifecta,” Uncle Zach said. “Always wanted to kill McCulloch. And Breen, too. Now we got to add this Sean Keegan to our list.” But he looked at the dead nephew still staring at nothing and still sitting against the stone wall. “But we is getting short on Benteens and Lovelies now.”
“Yeah, but this Hun’s faster than greased lightning with a six-gun.” Hank nodded at Hans, held out his hand. “You just become a Benteen, Otto.”
“I am Hans,” Kruger corrected.