Tom Shepherd stepped out of his office. He drew the LeMat from its holster, rechecked every load, and secreted the heavy-barreled pistol in the deep pocket of his overcoat. It was an uncommon habit that had stuck with him from his days as an outlaw, always keeping a hand on his weapon and his weapon inside his coat whilst out on the street. Indoors, it stayed in the holster on his belt, but even as he and his deputies made their morning rounds, the touch of the LeMat, for no special reason, was comforting.
He lingered on the front step until the last man out closed the door behind him. They talked for a bit—Shepherd, Dobie, Bauer, and Arballo—until the lazy morning conversation played out. Then, one by one, the deputies separated, meandering down certain paths until Shepherd was left alone outside the office. He decided to take a stroll up First, to the High Grade Hotel, where Stringer was. He meant to talk to him some more about the plans they had gone over yesterday.
The air was brisk, and it did more to wake Shepherd up than the two cups of coffee he’d just drunk. As gusts of warmth streamed from his lungs and licked up before his face, he felt strangely alive, his thoughts far from the impending firestorm. Even stranger, he thanked the Lord, as he did every morning, for his time inside Huntsville Unit, for the preacher who brought him to the beginning of wisdom, and, finally, for leading Shepherd to this place and this job.
On the opposite side of the street a black-bearded man trailed Shepherd by half a block, mingling with passersby on the boards. When Shepherd stopped to share pleasantries with a grocer, the man hid behind a signpost and waited until he continued on.
A few minutes later Shepherd approached the butcher shop, which was located beside the stage station. Directly across the street was the High Grade.
The sheriff paused to let a wagon roll by, his head turning to watch the wheels run southward. Instinct, perhaps guided by the hand of God, prodded him to keep turning.
The black-bearded man stopped suddenly on the boardwalk behind him. Their eyes met, held. Then the stranger tried to swing the double barrels of a sawed-off shotgun from under his long coat.
Shepherd pulled the LeMat.
Having covered the length of Fourth Street three abreast, the horsemen funneled single file down an alleyway between buildings, emerging unseen midway between Chivington and Martin Streets, with the rear of the bank directly across. Kings and Brownwell dismounted to approach on foot while Yeager, still in the saddle, stationed the animals within fifteen feet of the bank’s back door.
He turned their heads back toward Fourth, with himself positioned in the middle. When the last hoof had shifted, Yeager twisted in his seat and watched as Brownwell and Kings closed on the rear steps.
“Make one noise and I’ll blow your stalkin’ guts out your back.”
Shepherd had Osborn up against the doors of the butcher shop and was holding him in place with a forearm under the chin and the barrel of the LeMat against his belly. Osborn’s sawed-off was on the ground with both hammers uncocked and the muzzles still cold.
“I’m backin’ you into Mr. Henderson’s shop here,” Shepherd said. He released Osborn’s chin for a second to wrench the left-hand door open, then continued, “You’re gonna stay real quiet ’til I get you into the back room, and then you’re gonna tell me what your boss’s next move is. Do that and I might recommend you just get a stretch in the pen. Move!”
Osborn shuffled backward into the butcher’s, deliberately moving his heels at a snail’s pace. “You can take that offer with ya to hell, Sheriff,” he said, still backpedaling, then spat in Shepherd’s eye.
Shepherd flinched, and Osborn attempted to break loose, but the lawman was quick to recover. With an advantage in height and strength, he managed to wrestle the outlaw to the ground, left hand firmly gripping the collars of Osborn’s coat and shirt.
Shepherd addressed the proprietor, gaping down from behind his counter: “Mr. Henderson, open up your meat locker.”
The scene might have struck Henderson as comical if he’d had time to look at it that way—Tom Shepherd bodily dragging a strange man through his store—but the butcher, still holding his cleaver, leapt at the sheriff’s command.
Once inside the locker, Shepherd holstered his pistol and squatted to get both hands under Osborn’s armpits. He grunted as he hauled the prisoner to his feet, then grunted again as he ducked to evade a backhanded swing. Bobbing back up, Shepherd smashed a right at Osborn’s face and watched him fold to his knees. He moved quickly, clamping Osborn’s wrists in irons, then looped the chain securely around a meat hook hanging from the ceiling. “Now, then! Will you cooperate?”
Osborn leered through the blood streaming from his nose. “Again, I must respectfully tell you to go to hell,” he said, then lunged to catch a heel around Shepherd’s leg. The lawman stepped away quickly and closed the door behind him, ordering Henderson to keep it locked until he returned.
Then, pistol once again in hand, Shepherd was out the door and sprinting across the street to the High Grade.
Brownwell’s boot thundered into the back door. As soon as it flew open, Kings surged into the bank and raised a gun on the cashier, who half-turned, then froze with fear. The metal deposit box in his hand slipped, clanked heavily against the walnut counter, and spilled a mess of coins all over the floor.
“Everything okay back here, Loyal?”
The teller appeared, unknowingly walking his chest into the hard, unyielding barrel of a Spencer rifle. His face went from a healthy winter pink to shirt-collar white.
Kings glanced briefly at the teller, saw that Brownwell had him covered, then returned his attention to the petrified cashier. “In spite of what you both may think,” he said, “neither of us wanna use these guns. And we won’t, so long as you help us do what we come here to do and refrain from foolishness. Sound fair?”
Before either could reply yea or nay, Kings asked his man, “You the cashier?”
The cashier’s eyes slid toward the teller, but Kings’s short bark retrieved his focus. “Do not look at him, Loyal! If you ain’t the cashier, I’ll ask him, but for now, I wanna know . . . are you the one can open that safe for me?”
“Best thing you can do for yourself at this moment is answer him, friend,” Brownwell said. The cashier nodded.
“That’s all I wanted to know, Loyal.”
Kings guided him by the shoulder into the vault. They came to the safe, and Kings dropped a cotton sack with shoulder straps at the cashier’s feet. He commanded, “Open her up.”
Behind them, Brownwell’s eyes snapped at the teller when the man asked, “Could you lower that gun, please? I am not armed and—”
“Shut up.”
“—I don’t mean to fight you.”
“You’re fightin’ me now, mister. Just shut up, and you won’t have to worry. We ain’t in the murderin’ business.”
The arrow point of the smaller hand had come to rest on the VIII on the watch face belonging to Bob Creasy, but the larger was stubbornly positioned three ticks away from the VI. Davis’s timepiece, on the other hand, had it at one minute to the appointed time.
Creasy shrugged. “Fireworks are goin’ off a little earlier’n expected,” he said and slipped a match from behind his ear. He struck a flame off the back wall and put it to the end of the fuse. It spat as the flame caught and began to hiss as the spark inched toward three red sticks bunched beneath the floorboards of the sheriff’s office.
Then they ran like hell.
Deputy Whitehead went stiff, trying to identify the noise. He was just fitting the key into the lock on the weapons cabinet, holding a broke-open shotgun between his body and left elbow and carrying a spare pistol in his belt in addition to the one on his hip. When the shooting started, he wanted to be ready.
The sound was faint, and Whitehead followed it as best he could, treading softly. It led him to the rear of the office, past the holding cell that Cutting was anxiously sweeping out.
Whitehead’s movement caught Cutting’s eye, so he paused in his diversion and leaned out of the cell to watch. Something unseen appeared to be leading Whitehead like a dog on a leash, and Cutting knew something was afoot when he saw the deputy set down the shotgun, go to one knee, and then to his elbows. All he could see of Whitehead were the soles of his boots and his rear in the air.
Dropping his broom, Cutting stepped out and asked what the hell was going on, but Whitehead waved him silent. Whitehead drew his hip gun and, with his left hand, fitted the head of his knife into the crack between the floorboards. He had located the source and found the noise to be a mysterious hissing, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense. It was far too cold for a snake to be . . .
The hissing faltered. A white light pushed its way up from beneath the floorboards, and Deputy Whitehead heard no more.
At the sound of the explosion, Deputy Arballo turned and started running, drawing his pistol as he hurled dumbfounded citizens out of the way. From behind a buggy parked across the street, H. E. Simmons tracked him, waiting until the Mexican was in the open. From thirty feet away he threw Brownwell’s shotgun to his shoulder and fired, the blast muffling the screams of a woman standing close by. The deputy staggered, his right side peppered and his upper thigh perforated. He collapsed in the middle of the road but managed to keep a hold on his six-shooter.
Simmons broke open the shotgun, fumbling a few shells from his pocket that fell through the spokes of the front buggy wheel. He knelt to retrieve them and heard the air above his head pop as a bullet from Arballo’s pistol just missed. The deputy was sitting up, yelling through the pain and steadily returning fire.
Rattled, Simmons finally succeeded in securing one shell. He jammed it in, snapped the breech, and edged out from behind the buggy. Arballo, finally given a clear shot, raised his gun again.
The two men fired at nearly the exact same moment. Though none of the eyewitnesses would ever agree on who the honor went to, it was Arballo who fired first, but he himself couldn’t know it because the bullet had scarcely left his gun when Simmons’s double-ought spray knocked him back.
An instant later, Simmons lurched into the open, limply dragging his double barrels along the ground. The severity of Arballo’s last shot was still uncertain to the dazed and huddled townsfolk, who continued to watch as Simmons tottered four more eerie steps. Finally, he pitched onto his face, never to move again. When the coroner finally turned Simmons’s body over, he and every citizen that dared to gather around found a neat blue hole, dead center between the eyes.
A cloud of gun smoke hung in the air, then dissolved against a sudden breeze. The street was still only for a moment before one man stood up and took a look around, then another. But the day seemed reserved for gunfire, for only a few seconds went by before another volley sounded from uptown.
Too late, Dobie came around the corner, breathing hard, his face twisted in exertion. He paused, ignoring the questions of the crowd, checked on Arballo, then started running again, swearing aloud to himself that he wouldn’t be late a second time.
“Ain’t gon’ be late, ain’t gon’ be late, ain’t gon’ be late . . .”
A voice from outside clapped like thunder: “Gabr’el Kings!”
Brownwell, who was nearest the entrance, approached the bank’s narrow, windowed doors with caution. Flattening himself against the wall, he peered through the glass, searched, and finally pinpointed a figure behind a stack of crates. Slid across the top of one was the barrel of a rifle. Behind the figure, a thick column of gray smoke roiled above the rooftops, staining the clear morning sky. There was shouting from upstreet, and, here and there, clots of people were forming, their collective attention drawn to the site. Men spilling water over the edges of buckets and pails hurried to the burning wreckage.
Brownwell heard footsteps, and then his periphery was muddled by Kings’s black form crouching on the other side of the entryway, both pistols in his hands, a white strap of the cotton sack over his shoulder. He rose up on his toes to examine the shape the entire situation seemed to be taking.
Caleb Stringer stayed where he was—not letting them see him, waiting for backup. How many men were there likely to be inside? Two or three at the most, with perhaps one more in the alleyway, holding the horses. He scanned the windows of the dry-goods store to the right, then the vacant structure to the left.
He called out again, “Gabr’el Kings, I’m a captain in the Texas Rangers, appointed to bring you before a justice of the peace to answer for your crimes, and I have the men to back me! Will you come peaceably?”
Nothing from the bank. A flicker of side movement caught Stringer’s eye. He looked and, to his relief, saw that it was Shepherd, who had appeared out of nowhere and was crouched behind a similar form of cover to Stringer’s immediate left, the big LeMat pistol extended in both hands. Several yards behind the sheriff, that colored deputy of his was standing flat against a false-fronted building, rifle raised. Whether there were any more close by, Stringer did not know, but he felt the very human clutch in his stomach loosen a degree.
Shepherd risked a peek. “Kings! I’ve already got one of your men in custody. He put up a scuffle and got clobbered. No reason for you to do the same. Now for the last time”—he raised his voice then, grating over the words—“will you come along peaceably?”
Within the bank, Kings’s mind was swimming. He could feel the steady rhythm of his pulse accelerate. Under ideal circumstances, two-on-two, Kings would have met these men in the street, but now there appeared to be another piece in position, tipping the odds, however slightly, against him. His option, and there was only one, was clear—get out and get to the horses.
“Hell with ’em,” he spat. “Let’s ease outta here.”
Brownwell crept away from the window, staying out of the light. When he felt he had withdrawn a safe enough distance to be out of eyeshot, he swung around—too fast, and the barrel of Simmons’s brand-new Spencer shattered the globe of a lamp he didn’t know was there.
The front of the bank disintegrated under the sudden fusillade. Windows imploded, doors were blown to flinders, red dust kicked up in puffs as lead thudded into brick. Blinded by muzzle flashes but otherwise unharmed, Brownwell threw himself down and scrambled for the back door.
Yeager had his hands full, trying to maintain control of the animals. He was only too eager to throw the reins in Kings’s and Brownwell’s faces, shouting, “Reckon it’s time to go!”
Kings hugged the cotton sack close to his chest. Fingers flying, he managed to button the top half of his buffalo coat around it, adding a good eight inches to his girth and sufficient padding should he find himself on the wrong end of a stray bullet. “Time to go!” he echoed.
Brownwell reached a hand into his pack and came out with a stick of dynamite. Putting the reins between his teeth, he lit the fuse, and, as they booted their horses into motion, he chucked the explosive over the bank roof. If Brownwell had gauged the distance correctly, he imagined it would land right about where those lawmen would be organizing . . .
As it happened, Brownwell’s aim was off by only a few feet, though it was considerably closer than Stringer might have felt comfortable with. He, Shepherd, Dobie, and another man had rushed the bank after the initial volley, only to find the two employees crouched under counters with their hands over their heads. Back in the street, confusion was being shouted down as other gun-wielding townsfolk joined them. When the dynamite landed, its hissing was scarcely audible over the warring voices.
When the sound finally reached Stringer’s hearing, the spark was too close to stamp out, and the only measure left—to run, push against the crowd of bodies, and hit the dirt—seemed futile.
Stringer was knocked off his feet by the blast, and it was only by pure luck that he wasn’t killed. Brownwell had grabbed the one stick whose fuse had been ruinously cracked by the day’s cold, which greatly diminished the force of the explosion. It did little damage other than raise pulses and set ears to ringing.
Tom Shepherd thought the ranger had been killed, or at least severely maimed. Wispy smoke was licking up from his boots and trousers, but when the sheriff opened Stringer’s shirt, Shepherd was surprised to find only bruising.
“My Lord, but if that ain’t a miracle,” he muttered. Stringer sat up, forcing out tubercular coughs, but Shepherd told him to stay down a minute.
The older man waved him away, gasping, “I never had a fight I didn’t finish standin’ up.”
“Captain—”
“Sheriff, I once fought two days with a Quahada arrow in my hip on the Brazos River. Jesus ain’t callin’ my name over no kiddy’s firecracker.”
Creasy and Davis reached the horses, held by Foss in an alley a block away. In the cramped space Creasy mounted first, then kneed his horse into the clear, allowing Davis enough room to swing a leg up. Reassembling then, the three drew their pistols and spurred back toward the chaos, firing overhead.
Their appearance galvanized the townsfolk who had rushed to put out the flames. The outlaws screamed and whooped, jostling pedestrians, spurring their horses after any that broke off, and shouting things like, “Bring that stray back here!” and “Don’t that fire look pretty!”
In all this confusion, they had blinded themselves to the fact that civilians directed by Walt Mincey were pushing wagons into the street, cutting off their nearest exit, and possemen rallied from the boarding house had skirted the buildings to their rear. Patrick Delaney, who led the charge, stepped out with a borrowed .50-caliber Sharps rifle. He centered on the meaty part between the closest robber’s shoulders and squeezed.
His precision had devastating results for Charley Davis. The buffalo gun was designed specifically for long-distance shooting, and at a distance of forty yards, it may as well have been a cannon, because it blew a hole in Davis as wide as a fist. He dropped from the saddle and landed on his back.
Creasy fired wildly at Delaney, missed, then leaned down and eyed the gaping exit wound in his friend’s chest. He knew the answer but asked nonetheless, “Charley, can you ride?”
“I’m through, Bob,” were Davis’s last words. He coughed blood, and his eyes rolled back, as though watching his soul escape and ascend to be judged.
Creasy twisted his rearing paint horse away, shouting at Foss, “Let’s get outta here!” He felt a sudden pain in his thigh, and about that same time a bullet punched through Foss’s right shoulder. Hearing a clatter and turning his head south, Creasy saw the fortifications and a half-dozen rifles gleaming hotly in the early morning light.
Knowing there was no other option—knowing there were trees on the other side of those rifles—Creasy aimed his horse directly at the barricade. Gritting his teeth against the imminent barrage, he rammed hard with his spurs. He heard a voice that sounded miles away yell, “Fire!” just as the paint went airborne. Bullets struck Creasy, threatened to knock his body out of the saddle, but somehow he kept his seat. The paint came back down to earth, stumbled, and managed to resume its gallop. Shots sounded after them, but the gap had widened, and for the moment Creasy had avoided the inevitable.
Foss had been on his heels from the moment of his wounding to the moment of flight, but on the cusp of jumping himself, Foss’s last nerve dissolved. Too late, he heaved back on the reins with a roar, meaning to wheel around and try another route, but his roan screamed and went to ground ten yards shy of the barricade. It scrambled to its feet and walked toward Davis’s horse, dragging its unconscious rider through the dirt by his left foot.
Walt Mincey ordered a ceasefire, stepped over a wagon tongue, and jogged toward the animal with his rifle trained on the slackened body of Hardyman Foss. He slapped the man’s boot free of the stirrup and stooped to check the wound. “He’ll live,” he said to no one in particular, then straightened to watch the wall of a frame building next door to the wreckage cave in.
Sam Woods stumbled out of the hardware store on legs that felt as sturdy as water. He looked like a man half out of his mind, wild-eyed and breathing hard, his ruined left arm swinging with every turn of his body as he searched for an enemy, an ally—anyone that might be moving toward him and not ducking away from the swinging barrel of his gun.
Standing in the middle of Second Street, blood coursing down his arm and off his fingertips, he bellowed, “Kings!”, but the echo faded without a response. He tried again, going on to the next name that leapt to his mind, “Brownwell! Somebody! Dammit, I’m shot up . . .”
And then . . . salvation.
Bob Creasy was riding hard in his direction, torso reddened with blood. Grunting as more pain swept down his arm, Woods stepped farther into the road to wave him down. Creasy reached out to pull the wounded man up behind him.
Deputy Bauer burst out of the very store Woods had emerged from only seconds before, his side aflame with a breathless cramp. He’d cut across two blocks at a sprinter’s pace in the hopes of running down the man who had ambushed him all the way over on the south end. They had traded lead for two whole minutes back there before a townsman stepped out of his home to put a rifle slug in Woods’s elbow. Bauer himself suffered only a scratch, but Woods, wrecked wing and all, had managed to outdistance the deputy.
Suddenly, Bauer heard the heavy sounds of a horse being slowed from a run to a stop, and then he spotted Creasy picking Woods up. Bauer levered a fresh round into the chamber and took careful aim. His shot smacked into Woods’s lower back. Creasy returned fire, but Bauer dove for cover.
“Go!” Woods gasped, and they were off, having been flushed east on Independence Street. Hot blood coursed down the animal’s withers and flanks from the six wounds Creasy and Woods had between them.
The three-man group of Gabriel Kings, Leroy Brownwell, and Andy Yeager moved south on Fourth at a trot, holding their horses for the race that surely lay ahead. So far, they had fared much better than their fellows, two of whom were in custody, two dead, and two more gravely wounded.
The street was quiet, almost as if they were riding through a dreamscape, another world. The west end had been alive with gunfire for the last nine minutes, but that was not the case from this side of the scene. Faces turned away from windows as they passed, but it wasn’t an easy feeling that rode with the men—the contrasting calm only wound them tighter, made them expect a shot in the back at any second.
Out of nowhere, Kings heard his name on the wind. Slowing to a walk so he could better place the location of whoever had done the calling, he thought it might have been Woods. He hadn’t sounded too far off, maybe a few blocks, but Kings didn’t raise his voice in reply for fear of marking their position.
“Sounded hurt,” Yeager whispered. “Think we oughta ride to him?”
Again they heard a shout for help.
“I wouldn’t,” Brownwell advised. “Look, there’s trees yonder! Not two hundred yards. Sad to say, but it’s ever’ man for himself now.”
At that moment a rifle cracked, and all three flinched at the sound. Like the call for help, it hadn’t been far away, but it wasn’t aimed at them. There was a reply from a pistol, and then, on its heels, a second-story window went up, and the snout of a shotgun angled down at them. Yeager fired across his body, the round shattering glass above the shooter’s head, then shouted over his shoulder, “That’s it, then!”
They kicked their horses into a gallop, but the getaway was stalled at the intersection of Fourth and Independence when Creasy’s horse, laboring under its double load, nearly collided with Brownwell’s. Woods, slumped to one side behind Creasy like a sack of potatoes, smiled with delirium and said, “Hot damn, it’s the boys!”
“You all that’s left?” Kings asked but went unheard above the commotion. When the teetering Creasy came alongside, Brown-well leaned over and snatched the frantic animal’s bridle.
A shot rang out, whining nastily as it ricocheted off a metal street sign, and then another, this one of a higher caliber. That shot missed, too, but came significantly closer as Brownwell jerked, deaf in his right ear. Boardwalks rumbled as marksmen scrambled for position, spilling into the street from half a block away. It was Caleb Stringer, standing in the middle of the road, who fired the shot that nearly downed Brownwell.
One man moved away from the pack and to the right to try for a clearer shot. Kings caught sight of the buffalo gun in his hands, with its unmistakable length, and a thought turned his stomach. If that fellow could fire and reload quickly enough, he could plink away at their backsides at his leisure . . .
As the remnant of his shattered gang hurried away, the Virginian held his stallion steady, squeezing with his knees, and threw out his gun arm. Sighting down the barrel, he did not hear the report of a dozen rifles, nor did he flinch as a dozen bullets whapped wide, high or low. His mind shut down, and, in that moment, nothing else mattered but his pistol and the target.
He feathered the trigger. The gun kicked, and the man with the Sharps jerked and fell into the man behind him. Kings waited long enough to see the results of his marksmanship, then turned John Reb and rammed with his spurs.
The others were two lengths ahead. The stallion surged, closing the distance impossibly fast. At the head of the charge was Yeager on his smoke-gray mare, swinging his quirt and yowling like a banshee. Brownwell on his stocky chestnut was stirrup-tostirrup with Creasy and Woods, stiffening an arm against Woods’s shoulder to keep him from slipping.
John Reb’s neck stretched, and his powerful haunches carried his rider past them with ease. Had Kings been of a mind to slow up and send Brownwell on, he wouldn’t have been able to. The black was soon gaining on the smoke-gray, and Kings felt the horrible sensation of riding down a giant funnel, as though the buildings on either side were closing in like double doors. The space through which their exit must be made was getting tighter and tighter.
It was an all-out run for freedom, and, as the horsemen exceeded rifle range, with the edge of town and outlying wilderness well in sight and welcoming, it seemed apparent that the Avenging Angels—or what was left of them—had made it through. They had only to pass the livery barn, maybe pause to open the corral gate and scatter horses, effectively covering their tracks and eliminating almost all hope of a lawman’s chase . . .
And then, from the semi-darkness of the livery, streaks of flame shot from the muzzle of a Gatling gun, sweeping across the street in a staccato roar. A heretofore inactive Paul Leduc cranked the lever with unrushed calm and watched the carnage, the effects of his accuracy, with a flinty look of satisfaction.
Brownwell’s horse screamed and went down as .45-70-caliber rounds pocked its side and flanks in a red spray. Brownwell landed on his knees and came up clawing for his pistols, but he never cleared leather for the volley that riddled his groin, chest, shoulders, and neck. When the barrel of the Gatling slid away, the damage done, Leroy lunged at the carcass of his horse, wanting the rifle he had sheathed to help Woods. He toppled face-forward onto the bulk only to realize that the scabbard was trapped underneath. Life left him with a grunt of frustration.
In all of Creasy’s years as a fugitive, he had never known such resistance, such mayhem. Always their robberies had been fast, hit-and-run operations. There had been some shooting from time to time, but never like this. He had never known this. Desperately, he wheeled his horse around, and, in the process, Sam Woods lost his seat.
As he fell, Sam knew he was finished. He landed in agony on his wounded arm and rolled in the dirt, as if to outdistance the gunfire. All around him slugs whacked into the walls of buildings and exploded a trough in a shower of splinters and water. Woods got up, reeled blindly for some shred of cover, and then went down as he was jolted from behind, again and again, by fire.
Creasy didn’t get much farther. Swinging the Gatling hard to his right, Leduc turned the lever and the barrels barked one last time. Spent and smoking brass dropped in the livery dirt, and Bob Creasy threw his hands into the air, falling headlong into the street.
A haze of gun smoke blanketed fifty feet of road, and stillness descended like a giant bird as the Texas Ranger stepped out to survey his handiwork. He was sorry about the horse but felt nothing for the men who lay where they had fallen.
A few brave townspeople emerged from cover. While there was still plenty of fear and shock to go around, more than one raised their voices to shout their thanks and admiration for the ranger who had finished the fight. But as he went from man to man, boot-rolling them onto their backs, Leduc’s grim and somewhat sickened expression hinted that it wasn’t finished after all.
Gabriel Kings had gotten away.