JOSÉ LUÍS DEL Toro quietly levered a shell into the breech of his rifle and waited for a rift in the wind. If there was such a thing up here. With snow on the ground, there was practically what the gringos called a whiteout every time the wind blew—which was nearly all the fucking time.
It was blowing now, and even though the sky was clear as crystal, each gust caused a whiteout. There was no snow falling, only blowing, and during a gust you could hardly see your fucking hand before your face. A ground blizzard. That’s another word the gunman hadn’t heard before coming north.
No wonder gringos were such a chilly race of people.
Del Toro’s rifle was a Sharps .50-caliber, factory engraved with a horseback rider shooting buffalo, and inlaid with gold. It had a silver finish and butt plate, and its smooth black walnut stock felt firm and familiar against the gunman’s cheek.
The Big Fifty fired a two-and-a-half-inch-long case loaded with ninety grains of black powder that could blow a dollar-sized hole in a man at six hundred yards. That kind of distance didn’t come into play here, however. If all went as planned, the first man on Magnusson’s list would pass within seventy-five feet below him, on the meandering cow path at the bottom of the draw.
If it hadn’t been for all the snowy brush covering the hillside
on which Del Toro sat, rifle on his knees, it would have been a chip shot. But with the winter dead foliage limned with hoarfrost between him and the trail below, he’d need a steady hand not to clip a dump of frozen berries or a hawthorn twig, and nudge the slug wild.
The swirling snow wasn’t helping any, either. Visibility was only about thirty yards. About twenty yards beyond that now, the man was coming on a brown horse—just as he came every night from town, lit up with cheap liquor and singing like a stud lobo at the end of March.
Del Toro could hear the man’s voice, make out the words of the song he was singing—attempting to sing.
“Oh, Su-zanny, don’t you cry for me, I’ve gone from Ala-ba-my … with a banjo on my kneeeee.”
The voice was so high and ludicrous and off pitch and gringo cocky that it made Del Toro grate his teeth together. But his face remained expressionless, his jaw set in a hard line. He closed his left eye, stared through the sliding leaf sight, through the tunnel of motionless foliage.
It was about four-thirty, a still, cold night this far north in December. The sun had fallen into the prairie, but the sky remained blue. Amid the blowing snow, which swirled down the draw like some living thing, the brush was dark, a solid black shape against the opposite, boulder-strewn ridge.
Horse and rider were approaching now. When the wind died and the snow settled, Del Toro could see the horse and the dark shape of the man.
He lifted his head from the rifle stock, gave a high, short whistle, then returned his eye to the sight. The rider stopped suddenly, drawing back on the reins.
“Whoooa. What was that?” he said. His voice was thin and barely audible above the wind.
The horse had stopped, jerking its head against the bit pulled taut against its jaw.
The man opened his mouth, lifted his upper lip like a curious horse. He looked around, listening. “Who’s there?” he said after several seconds.
Del Toro was counting his heartbeats and staring through the sight at the vague shape in the snow. He waited for the present gust to break so he’d have a clear shot. The last thing he wanted was to wing the bastard and see him flee on his horse. That would be messy. Del Toro did not like messes.
The snow swirled like silk flags waving this way and that, catching and tearing on boulders and tree limbs. Gauzy forms assembled and scattered. The man waited, looking around. He did not have the animal’s keen nose, but he sensed the hunter’s presence just the same.
He was frozen there in his tracks, sensing death there on the hillside just a few yards away. “Who’s there?” he said again, quieter this time, voice thin with fear and suspicion.
A gust died for half a second; the snow thinned.
Del Toro cursed in Spanish. He should have taken the shot. It might have been the only one he’d have.
But just as the thought vanished, the wind settled again, and the man sat there clearly, both hands holding his reins, looking up the hill.
Del Toro squeezed off the shot just as the man turned up the trail and started to flick the reins. Fire spit from the end of the barrel and the report echoed like an immense drumbeat, circling before it died.
Del Toro lowered the smoking gun and stared down the hill, frowning. The wind and snow had closed in, thick as ever. He could see nothing but the irregular, free-forming shapes of the ground blizzard, but he heard the horse whinny loudly, heard the hooves stomping and the bridle chains jangling.
The man yelled out, cursed.
The horse pounded off. A pistol cracked once, twice, three
times. Del Toro ducked low behind a tree and listened to the slugs thudding into the ground around him—the closest about ten feet away.
The reports echoed. When they died, Del Toro tipped his head to listen. Below rose the soft crunching of boots in the snow, nearly indiscernible above the wind.
The man was off his horse and was running away!
Cursing himself, the gunman stood, reloaded the single-shot rifle, and started down the hill. Gravity pushed him down the snowy slope at a breakneck pace. Sliding and stumbling, he broke the speed of his descent by grabbing branches and careening off boulders, holding the rifle out for balance.
Hurdling a deadfall, he came to the foot of the hill and stood in the horse’s tracks, looking around and catching his breath. His lungs were not used to air this cold. It was like breathing sand.
Sweeping his gaze along the ground, he saw the man’s horse had thrown him—there was a splash of blood in a broad, scuffed area where he’d fallen—then bolted up the trail. Boot prints showed the man running back the other way, in the direction from which he’d come.
Del Toro sighed, clutched his rifle in both hands, and followed the man’s tracks, walking. There was no reason to hurry. From the amount of spilled blood, the gunman knew the man wouldn’t get far without a horse. Also, the man could be lying in wait for him, pistol drawn. There was no reason to add injury to insult by getting bushwacked.
As he walked, he considered letting the man go. He’d either die from the wound or freeze to death. But there was always the possibility of his finding help from a fellow traveler or of retrieving his horse.
No, Del Toro needed to finish the job. There was nothing he hated more than a mess.
He wrinkled his nose to loosen the frozen nasal hairs and
began moving forward, following the erratic tracks of his wounded quarry. There were occasional splotches of blood next to the boot prints, and they looked brown in the fading light. Del Toro stopped every few steps and listened before moving on.
He knew the man would stop sooner or later, since he was losing blood fast and he had a gun; he would hunker down in the brush along the trail and wait. Like a cornered lynx.
A fine goddamn mess, Del Toro thought. Shoot a man with the biggest rifle on the market and miss! Like something a damn gringo would do.
It was this hellish weather—all this snow and cold fucking wind. The conditions for killing were horrible.
Del Toro stopped. About fifteen feet away, the tracks began bearing off to the left, toward the shrubs and brush. A small wedge of red-orange flame poked through the blowing snow. A crack followed and a bullet whistled, thunking into a tree somewhere behind the gunman.
Del Toro dropped facedown in the snow and cursed. He rolled to the right and heard the pistol fire twice more. The lead thumped the snow. He unholstered one of his two pistols and fired at the place in the snow he had seen the pistol flash. The lead twanged off stone.
The man was behind a rock. Shit.
Del Toro angrily fired off four more rounds, then rolled again to his right. The pistol barked and flashed again. Two more quick bursts, then one more about five seconds later.
That was six shots. The man’s gun was out of bullets.
Quickly, Del Toro climbed to his feet and ran slipping through the snow, peering through the whiteout, trying to brush it away with his hands. Suddenly the wind settled to reveal the big stone—a flat-topped slab of granite grown up with dead weeds and moss. A stunted cedar grew out from under it at an impossible angle.
The gunman grabbed a cleft in the stone for leverage and peered around the rock, lifting his rifle to his chest with one hand.
“No!” the man screamed. “Leave me be!”
He lay on his back, chin to chest. His pistol was in his right hand, shielding his head. The pistol’s cylinder hung out, and empty cartridges lay scattered on the ground.
“Please don’t shoot me,” the man pleaded, kicking his feet and cowering like a whipped dog. Blood oozed from a hole in his dirty blanket coat. The air around had the rotten-egg odor of gunsmoke.
Del Toro said matter-of-factly, enjoying the man’s misery, “I have to shoot you, senor.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re filthy gringo scum. Because you butcher cattle that do not belong to you. Because you occupy land you do not deserve, and because you multiply like brush wolves and fill the land with more mangy scum like yourself.”
“King!” the wounded man cried. “King Magnusson! He’s the one who hired ya.”
“That is right. Allow me to introduce myself, senor.” The gunman took his rifle in his left hand and held out his right. “José Luis del Toro.”
The man stared at the hand, lips quivering, eyes bright with fear. Tears rolled down his heavy, leathery cheeks. “Please …”
When he saw that the man was not going to shake his hand, Del Toro shrugged and lifted his rifle to his shoulder, aimed at the man’s forehead. “No, I am sorry, senor. I have a job to do.”
“What about my wife? What about my kids?”
Del Toro did not reply, and there was no indication on his taut face that he’d even heard what the man had said.
The man saw this, and his breathing slowed. The fear in
his eyes gave way to resignation, though a good dose of the fear remained. He dropped the empty pistol in his lap.
His head tilted to the side and his chin came up. The eyes rose to the gunman’s, sighting down the octagonal barrel.
“No,” he begged one last time.
Fire and smoke geysered from the barrel, and the big gun bucked. The man’s head snapped back from the impact of the slug destroying his forehead. The head bounced off the ground with such force that the man’s back rose nearly perpendicular to the ground. Blood and brain matter sprayed. Then the man fell back again. The man’s head turned to the side, and he lay still.
The air left his lungs with a sigh and a groan.
Del Toro stood the rifle against the rock and rummaged inside his coat, producing a pencil stub and a small leather-bound notebook. He licked the stub and scrawled something on one page of the notebook. He tore the page from the book, folded it, and stuffed it in the pocket of the man’s coat. Then he licked the stub again and scratched out the first name on his list. With a slow, satisfied nod, he replaced the pencil in the book and returned the book to his coat.
He snugged his collar against his neck, retrieved his rifle, and headed back toward the hill and the tree to which he’d tied his horse.
“This goddamn gringo weather,” he grumbled.