Bullet for a Half-Breed

Yakima triggered a shot where he’d seen the red flash, then lurched off his moccasined heels and dove behind a nest of rocks and driftwood humped in the middle of the wash.

As he rolled once more, a veritable fusillade opened up on the wash’s opposite bank, about thirty yards down from Yakima’s position. Two guns, possibly three, ripped the night open as they flashed in the darkness and hammered the nest of rocks mercilessly, spraying shards and wood slivers in all directions.

As the gunmen continued to pepper the backside of his cover with lead, Yakima crawled belly-down to the right corner of the rock mound and inched a look around the side. There were two shooters, he decided. Two sets of flashes from the scrub on the far side of the wash, positioned about ten feet apart.

A slug thudded into the sand and gravel about a foot in front of him, spraying grit. He jerked his head back behind his cover and furiously ground his teeth. Sitting up a little, pressing his back against the rocks, he waited for the bushwhackers to run out of lead. When their fire dwindled, Yakima jerked his head and arm around the side of the rocks, aimed at where he’d seen the two flashes, and squeezed the trigger.

The Colt roared and danced in his hands, flames stabbing from the maw. He fired three shots at each spot he’d seen the gun flashes; then, listening to his own echoes dwindle over the wash, he pulled back behind the rocks and flicked his loading gate open. He could hear the rustle and crackle of brush as the two shooters scurried around.

Yakima had shaken all six of his spent cartridges from the Colt’s wheel and replaced them with fresh in less than twenty seconds. Now, as the bushwhackers ran off, he rose to his knees and emptied the gun once more, aiming farther up the wash, his gray powder smoke wafting around him.

When he’d squeezed off the last shot, silence closed down over the wash once more. He smelled burned cordite and hot brass. The stars twinkled brightly. Somewhere behind him, in the main part of town, a dog barked wildly.

Fury boiled in the half-breed’s veins. He squeezed the pistol in one hand and clenched his other fist as he shouted, “Come on back here, you yellow-livered sons o’ bitches. Face me like men!”

Standing there, eyes burning, he reloaded. Faintly, he heard the thuds of two galloping horses, the rattle of bridle chains. Soon there was only the echoing din of the dog again.

Determining that he was alone out here now but keeping his ears pricked, he holstered the .44 and climbed up out of the wash via the well-worn path. He followed the path for another fifty yards, gravel crunching softly beneath his moccasins. The motley buildings of this leg of Red Hill rose before him—four tall wooden structures and a few adobe brick dwellings with attached stock pens.

He made his way around a goat pen, the goats’ eyes following him warily, and crossed the rutted, red dirt trace to the shabby three-story house whose shingle announced MA PRATE’S ROOMS—$1 INCLUDING BREAKFAST. Beneath the larger sign was a smaller one: CLEAN AND BEDBUG FREE! There was more: TAROT READINGS—PREPARE FOR YOUR FUTURE!

The place had started out as a simple frame shack, but it had been added onto so many times it looked like a train that had tumbled down a steep cliff. He walked up to the small porch. A shadow filled the window in the door’s curtained upper panel. As Yakima reached for the knob, the shadow turned away and he saw the bulky figure of Ma Prate ambling back toward a couple of oil lamps bracketed on the walls around her small desk beneath the stairs.

Yakima went in and, obeying the admonishing sign tacked to the foyer wall, wiped his boots off on the rope rug in front of the door. He could smell Ma’s sickly sweet perfume. She said as she turned toward her desk, “What was all that shootin’ about, Yakima Henry?”

Ma hailed from Springfield, Missouri, and had the slow, rolling accent of that woodsy, humid country with a still in every boggy hollow. Every shelf and piece of furniture in the small lobby beneath the stairs was adorned with one of Ma’s homemade, elaborately costumed dolls. She seemed to be working on one constantly; she had the outfit of one spread out across her puncheon-topped, red-curtained desk now, with a small sewing kit spilling needles and thread nearby.

Yakima doffed his hat, ran his hands through his hair. “Someone musta thought I needed a lead bath. I reckon they didn’t know I’d taken a real one just a few hours ago.”

“Shoulda known that clatter involved you,” Ma said with mild reproof. She dropped her hefty, gingham-dressed bulk into her swivel chair behind the desk, the top of her piled red hair brushing the wainscoted staircase angling just above her head. “You’re a troublecourtin’ man, just like my late husband, Devlin. Follows you around like a hungry cur.”

“Better that cur followed me and Devlin, ’stead of the other way around.” Yakima set his fists on the edge of her desk, leaning toward her and grinning.

He liked the woman’s earthy honesty. There was warmth in her character that was rare in most of the people he’d known. She’d been giving him seven kinds of hell since he’d started renting a room from her, and yet he felt she liked him, maybe even felt an affinity with him.

“You be careful around here.” Ma sat sideways to the desk, keeping her eyes on the corncob pipe she was filling from a rawhide tobacco pouch. “Men like you don’t last long. I heard from the undertaker’s hired man you came in with five dead men riding the top of the stage this afternoon.”

“Makes no never mind.” She tossed a blue handkerchief across the desk and indicated the bullet burns on his cheek and ear.

Ma had stuck the pipe into her mouth, but now she removed it and looked up at him. “Your stars are different from most folks’. Trouble follows you the way bad luck follows an owl. Have you seen a large gathering of raptors lately?”

Ma shook her head darkly, holding the pipe in front of her mouth. “That’s the worst kind of luck. When death birds shadow a man, he’s in for a long, hard run.”

“What was I supposed to do—hand over the strongbox to Gries and his boys and wish him luck spending it down in Monterrey?”

“I’m just telling you that your stars are lined up wrong, and this ain’t a good place for a man with bad stars showing. I’ll read your palm if you want me to.”

“No, thanks.” Yakima saw one of Ma’s dolls staring down at him from a shelf on his right—a pointed-nosed little man in a court jester’s costume, with bells adorning the long tows of his green felt shoes. The beady black eyes seemed to bore through Yakima, flashing red as pistol shots in the lantern light.

“Reckon I’ll head up to bed.” He dropped the blood-spotted handkerchief down on the desk and started turning toward the stairs.

Ma sat back in her squawky chair and lit her pipe. Between smoke puffs, she said, “Where’d you have your bath, Yakima?”

Yakima stopped at the bottom of the stairs, his hand atop the carved wolf’s head newel post. “Why? You’ll just read something dark into it.”

Ma Prate hiked a shoulder, a look of bemused contentment on her face as she continued to puff her pipe to life. “An old woman gets curious, that’s all. Call it snoopy. Can’t do much more than snoop anymore,” she added with a plaintive sigh.

“I don’t know,” Ma said, sitting back in her chair, puffing her pipe and staring up at him, her eyes faintly devilish. “I used to be partial to men with the wild savage in ’em, I reckon. My Devlin was Choctaw. Full-blood. If’n I was about thirty years younger, Yakima Henry ...”

“We’d be keeping your other boarders up nights.” Yakima winked at the woman, then turned and started up the stairs.

“You got a weakness for women. I ain’t sayin’ that’s bad or good. I’m just sayin’ you got it. You know that, but mind it. Don’t let your guard down.” Ma removed the pipe from her mouth and stared up at Yakima darkly. “I was tossing my cards around today, and some came up with the face of a half-breed Indian from the northern plains on ’em. The snake woman, a wretched fornicator and devil worshipper, turned up just behind it. For this man, the cards told of death birds, deceitful women, and hard luck here in Red Hill.”

The second-story hall smelled of sweat and tobacco. Snores resounded in rooms off both sides of the hall. Ma catered mostly to retired men with nowhere to go, and traveling stockmen and drummers.

Derks had left the door of his and Yakima’s room unlocked. Yakima turned the knob, stepped into the small, cramped room furnished with two beds rammed against opposite walls, and a few other sticks of badly worn furniture. The oil lamp on the upended apple crate beside the jehu’s bed was lit. Derks was awake, propped on one arm and looking toward the door. The light shone in his milky brown eyes.

Derks yawned. He punched his pillow, laid his head back on it, and turned toward the wall. “Well, good night.”

Yakima went over to the washstand, filled the pitcher from a bucket on the floor, intending to clean the bullet burns on his cheek and ear. “Don’t you lose any sleep worrying about me.”

Deputies Cordovan Stall and Lonnie Silver trotted their horses up to the hitch rack of the Red Hill Sheriff’s Office, and checked their mounts down in front of the stoop on which Sheriff Frank Rathbone stood smoking a black cheroot.

The deputies glanced at each other. Both wore high-crowned hats and dusters. Van Stall was a big, bearded man who wore his hair in a ponytail down his back. Silver was a half-Mex from Silver City—a short, wiry man, all muscle and sinew, with a killer’s dark eyes and a straggly mustache and goatee. His right arm hung taut against his side. Rathbone now saw a stain on the upper half of that arm.

Rathbone curled his upper lip. “What the hell does that mean—bad case of misfortune? Christ, I’m gonna hear bad news, ain’t I?”

“I had him dead to rights,” Silver said, swinging smoothly down from his ornate Spanish saddle in spite of his wounded wing. “But he pulled back suddenly, and my shot went wide. It was pretty much over after that. That son of a bitch is harder to kill than the bobcats I used to hunt in the Coronados.”

Rathbone cut him off, removing his cheroot to study the burning coal. “Get this inept bastard over to Doc Mangan’s, have him sewed up good. We’re gonna have us a busy week. Busier now that you went and made a mess of things tonight. I’d hate to know how you’d make out facing this man straight-on if you can’t even kill him from bushwhack.”

“When you’re done at the doc’s, you both have night duty. I’m right tired tonight. I think I’ll go on over to my digs and get me a long night’s sleep.” The sheriff grinned with mockery, then stepped down off the stoop, turned, and walked around the side of the building.

His smile dwindled. He’d assured Rae that the savage would be taken care of tonight. She’d find out soon that the job had been botched. Rathbone ground his teeth together as he moved out past the rear of the jailhouse, angling left toward the Stockmen’s House Hotel and Saloon, where he kept a set of rooms.

If Stall and Silver had been his last pair of deputies, he’d have no trouble getting shed of them. But these two were good. Damn good. Better than any other men he’d worked with here in Red Hill, and if he put a bullet through each of their heads while they slept—or hired someone to do it—he’d likely never find their equal. True, they’d botched this job, but they’d done well on the holdups, keeping their faces covered so no one could identify them and also making sure that Rathbone got a half cut of the loot they and the other men were able to haul down.

He hadn’t sent them out on the last job because he’d owed Gries a favor, and the desperado from Texas hadn’t wanted any men he didn’t know riding along with him. Even Rathbone’s men. He had, however, assured the Red Hill sheriff that he’d get his cut—a cut that Rathbone was obligated to split, of course, with Rae Roman. Rathbone had trusted Gries to not only take the strongbox but to follow through with the agreed upon split.

As Rathbone walked up the steps of the Stockmen’s House, he ground his cigar out angrily on a white porch post. The half-breed needed a bullet in the worst way. Somehow, he was going to get it. Likely not before the next stage run, however.

One more holdup, one more amply filled strongbox, and he could pull his picket pin, fog the stage the hell out of Red Hill. Only this time, Rae wasn’t getting her cut. He’d be damned if he’d give that uppity bitch more money for doing nothing but letting him know which stages would be running “heavy” as opposed to “light.”

He walked through the hotel’s carpeted, dimly lit lobby and glanced into the saloon opening off the left. Only a few horse buyers in there, gambling and smoking and enjoying their time away from wives and children. There was an old ranch couple in the dining room on the other side of the lobby—a hardy-looking though gray-headed man and wife, two of the county’s first settlers behind the Apaches. He’d heard the Chiricahuas had burned them out twice, killed all their children and stock, and still they survived and would probably live another ten, twenty years.

Christ, how did they do it? Rathbone couldn’t wait to head for San Francisco and run wild and fuck to his heart’s content. If he had any money left over after the high-priced whores, he might invest in a saloon or maybe one of those fine coastal ranches around San Diego. He’d work up no more of a sweat than he would riding around the place on a Sunday afternoon, admiring his holdings.

Rathbone pinched his hat brim to the pair chowing down on T-bones, which they were washing down with nothing stronger than coffee, then headed on up the broad, carpeted stairs, his silver spurs chinging softly. His room was on the third floor. It was a three-room suite with a bed the size of two prairie schooners parked side by side. He couldn’t wait to get a drink in him, count the money he’d saved from the holdups, and drift off into a deep, well-deserved sleep.

The woman had the most incredible, voluptuous body, but her demeanor was gravestone cold, with eyes like granite. He enjoyed taking his pleasure from her, but afterward he always felt as though he’d been the one who’d been mauled but never quite measured up to what she needed.

Rathbone chuckled as he closed the door and lit the lamp atop his large oak bureau. He poured a cognac, then doffed his hat, hung his gun and shell belt on a brass hook by the door. He stripped down to his long-handles, then pulled a chair over to the safe, twisted the knob, and opened the heavy iron door.

There it was—the two pearl-gripped Colts that he himself had taken from one holdup, and four even stacks of greenbacks and a pale white burlap sack filled with gold coins. He reached for the money, stopped suddenly.

Heart thudding, he half turned to glance over his shoulder. He only caught a brief glimpse of the heavy, hide-wrapped bung starter swooping toward him before it crashed into his temple, and everything went black.