Hired Guns Read online

  In a hurry to get his feet under him once more, Luke reached out in the darkness, hoping to grab something to help balance himself. His hand closed on the iron frame of a bed’s footboard.

  At the same time, the deep, gargling rumble of a snore came from just beyond the footboard, and with it was issued the unmistakable stink of exhaled breath that had been liberally soused in rotgut whiskey.

  So, in that moment, Luke knew two things: He hadn’t arrived in the room where the youngsters were being held captive, but he was in the presence of at least one of their captors, a varmint who was sprawled in an obligingly drunken slumber.

  What was more, judging by the boom of shotguns coming from outside the room and down in the direction of the barroom, along with the crackle of additional gunfire that had started up directly out in the hall, other pieces of his plan sounded like they were happening as intended.

  Now, if Eagle’s entry into the other middle room, the one directly across the hall, had succeeded in finding the kids, then everything would really be clicking into place.

  All of this flashed through Luke’s mind in a fraction of a second. And even as he thought it, he knew things might be going good for the moment, but there was a long way to go before this was over and all hides—the ones that mattered—were still intact.

  Luke’s attention swung to the snoring hombre on the bed. All he could make out in the lightning flashes that stabbed through the window was a lumpy shape, a long, large one. Whoever this drunken slob was, this human snake who hired out to cold-bloodedly kill and ravage for the likes of Hack Ferris and Parker Dixon, Luke didn’t have to contemplate long before making the icy decision that here was a hide that did not matter.

  He was in the act of rising to his feet, meaning to move around to the side of the bed, his right hand already drifting toward one of his Remingtons, when the door suddenly burst open.

  “Roust up! Roust up, blast it! We got a bad fire spreadin’ out here!” squawked the spindly, frog-faced figure who filled the doorway.

  The figure hollered this toward the lump on the bed. But even as the last words tumbled from his mouth, he noticed Luke straightening up at the foot of the bed.

  “Who in blazes are you?” the gunman demanded, starting to raise the rifle he was holding.

  “The last person you’re going to see this side of hell,” Luke answered. And then the hand that had been only drifting toward the Remington was suddenly filled with the big revolver and its muzzle was spitting flame and death.

  The two slugs that it hurled in rapid succession slammed into the man and jerked his body into a crazy spin even as it was flung back hard against the door on the opposite side of the hall. The frail, cheaply made slab of wood popped open with a crackling of splinters and the dead man dropped through the opening like a sack of mail tossed from a freight car.

  “Wha-what? Did somebody say fire?”

  The room was now filled with illumination from the hallway. Whipping his head around, Luke saw the big man on the bed rearing up, clawing to get untangled from his blankets. His hair was standing on end and his bloodshot eyes were wild, confused. But when those eyes landed on Luke, the confusion suddenly left them, replaced by a split second of suspicion giving way to instant, raw anger.

  There was a holstered gun on the nightstand. The big man made a grab for it. Turning only slightly from his stance in the doorway, Luke drew his left-hand Remington and reaching almost casually across his body triggered a single round that snapped the big man’s head back and caused his upper body to follow in a heavy flop that left him once more prone and motionless with outflung arms dangling limply over the sides of the mattress.

  Outside the room, in addition to the shots Luke had just added, the sound of gunfire was crashing and roaring from all directions, high and low. Acrid black smoke from the stairwell fire rolled forward, curling down from the hallway ceiling. Mingled in it were layers of powder smoke from the numerous blazing weapons.

  But through the noise and smoke, courtesy of his room’s door standing ajar and the one across the way likewise knocked open and blocked that way by the first gunman’s body, Luke saw a heartening sight: Tom Eagle, frantically cutting away ropes that had been binding his daughter and Heath Pettigrew. Not only were the youngsters there in the room, but they looked to be unharmed and in relatively good shape.

  Eagle’s eyes darted in Luke’s direction. Seeing the bounty hunter was okay and there was no immediate threat at hand, he quickly returned his focus to the task of pulling away the now-loosened ropes his knife had sliced through. Both Belinda and Heath were also helping, struggling and yanking to free themselves the rest of the way.

  Chapter 38

  Bullets continued to sizzle back and forth the length of the hall and the intermittent roar of shotguns exchanging fire with pistols and rifles downstairs assailed Luke’s ears as well.

  Luke dropped to one knee, placing his head at an unexpected level, and made some quick peeks around the door frame on either side, assessing the situation out in the hall. It wasn’t particularly good, but it could have been worse. Barlow and MacGregor were in doorways toward the rear, leaning out at intervals to trade lead with three owlhoots at the front of the hall.

  One of the latter was also in a doorway, a second was firing from back around the corner of the small landing at the mouth of the hall, the third was sprawled on the steps of the open stairway that led down to the barroom, popping up periodically to trigger a long-barreled Colt over the body of a fallen comrade that he was using for cover. Farther back toward the rear of the hall, lay another dead man and beyond him the flames from the back stairs were leaping and crackling higher as they licked hungrily up and forward.

  Luke straightened up and called out, “Barlow! MacGregor! Are you okay?”

  “We won’t be for much longer, not with that fire closing in on us so fast—and MacGregor has been hit in the leg!” came the response from Barlow.

  “How bad is it?”

  “I’ll be okay,” MacGregor answered for himself.

  “But he ain’t gonna stay that way—not with all the blood he’s losing,” amended Barlow.

  Luke’s gaze returned to the room across the way. The youngsters were completely free of their ropes now and Eagle had them crowded over to the window. Heath was already out over the sill, hanging on the rope with one hand while reaching to assist Belinda with the other.

  A pair of bullets skimmed across the frame of Luke’s doorway, digging furrows in the wood and throwing a spray of splinters. Luke was far enough back so that it had no effect except to annoy him.

  Calling once more to Barlow and MacGregor, the bounty hunter said, “Hang on just a minute longer, but get set. Eagle and I will give you cover to move forward. Can you double-time as far as the next room, MacGregor—the one across from me?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “I’ll drag him if I have to,” said Barlow.

  “Good. If you make it that far,” Luke said, “then you can help him out the window and down the rope too! You two get on across the street, to the horses—then get out of here. Back to the camp where that leg can be taken care of!”

  “What about you and Eagle?”

  “Don’t worry about us,” Luke told him. “We’ve still got Turley and Baker covering us from the front and we’ve still got some rats to finish exterminating down in that barroom!”

  In the room opposite his, Luke could see that Belinda and Heath were both out the window and had dropped from sight. Eagle leaned out, gazing down on their descent for a moment, then he spun and came rushing up to the doorway.

  Luke called over to him. “You hear what I just said?”

  Eagle nodded. “Enough.”

  Luke’s eyes bored into him. “You with me?”

  Eagle’s gaze came back, just as intense. “All the way.”

  At that exact moment the flaming back stairwell gave way, collapsing in a prolonged rumble that shook the whole building as it belch
ed a spark-infused cloud of boiling, choking black smoke. The cloud billowed upward and forward, rolling the length of the hallway and creating a smoke screen that couldn’t have been better timed.

  “Now!” Luke hollered to Barlow and MacGregor.

  Without taking time to see if his command was obeyed, Luke leaned out of his doorway with both arms extended and a .44 fisted at the end of each. As fast as he could cock and squeeze the triggers, he began pouring lead toward the three hombres at the front of the hall. The swirling, choking smoke made clear vision next to impossible but accuracy, in this case, was secondary to keeping the varmints pinned down and not throwing lead at Barlow and MacGregor as they made their move. In his doorway, Eagle was doing the same, though with a single pistol.

  As his Remington hammers began clicking on empty chambers, from the corner of his eye Luke saw Barlow and MacGregor lurch and stumble through Eagle’s doorway. They nearly fell over the prone form of the dead man but managed to maintain their footing. And then, with Barlow half supporting, half dragging his companion, they stumbled toward the window. The smoke hadn’t poured as thickly into the room as it was out in the hall, so Luke could follow their progress fairly well.

  As he nimbly reloaded the Remingtons, he called over to Eagle. “Help them get started down. I’ll pour another round at our friends up front while you’re taking care of that, then it will be our turn to take advantage of this smoke screen.”

  “Just don’t kill ’em all until I get the chance to join in,” Eagle said before turning to go assist the men at the window.

  Just as Luke finished reloading his guns, one of the varmints at the end of the hall—evidently having heard his remark about using the smoke screen—shouted out, “You come right ahead and see what it gets you! Smoke don’t stop bullets!”

  Keying on the man’s voice and simultaneously catching sight of a blurred shape through a sliver of separation in the churning black clouds, Luke fired his right-hand Remington and was rewarded by hearing a sharp yelp of pain and seeing the blurred shape jerk away. “Nope, it sure don’t,” Luke drawled.

  By the time Luke had emptied his wheels again and was once more reloading, Eagle reappeared in the opposite doorway. “You ready?” he wanted to know.

  The fire at the rear of the hall was crackling higher and louder and the smoke rolling ahead of it was still plenty thick, but not as much so as a couple minutes earlier. Luke gritted his teeth and said, “Ain’t going to be no better time. Let’s go!”

  Together the two men surged from their respective doorways and started down the hall, bent forward in low crouches, guns blazing, throwing a wall of lead ahead of themselves. Opposing lead was sent to greet them, bullets ripping the air high and low, sometimes missing by mere inches, other times gouging the walls a foot off target. The distance to cover was only a few yards, though in the roiling, blinding smoke it seemed more.

  Rushing headlong through the poor visibility, Luke ended up inadvertently running straight into one of the owlhoots—the man who’d been firing from the front doorway on the bounty hunter’s side of the hall. Their bodies collided hard, making a meaty thud. Luke’s momentum drove the other man back against the door frame, a loud grunt of pain and a mouthful of sour breath exploding out of him.

  But that didn’t mean the fight was out of him. Gasping a curse, he swung up one arm and tried to club the gun he was holding against the side of Luke’s head. Luke jerked back in time to take only a glancing blow from the attempt, and then responded with his left-hand Remington in the true manner a gun was made for—at point-blank range, the muzzle of the big revolver roared and the slug it discharged blew apart the would-be clubber’s heart.

  The suddenly limp body of the now dead cuss was unable to slide to the floor right away because Luke was, for the moment, still jammed against him, holding him pinned upright against the door frame. Out of the corner of his eye, Luke saw the remaining second floor gang member, the one who’d been shooting from behind the corner of the landing, suddenly fly backward, throwing his arms wide, as he took a bullet from Eagle. The man staggered a half step and then pitched into a lifeless heap practically on top of the body that already lay just above the lip of the open stairway—the body the shooter previously firing from the steps had been using for cover.

  This gave Luke an idea. Momentarily holstering his Remingtons, he grabbed the man he’d just killed by a double handful of shirtfront, then jerked him from the doorway and dragged him forward until he was close enough to give his limp form a hard shove to send it flopping down onto the dead sprawls of the other two men.

  Drawing his Remys again, Luke gave Eagle a sidelong glance and said somewhat breathily out the corner of his mouth, “Now we’ve got us a barricade to shoot from behind.” Then he moved forward and dropped in behind the low wall of carcasses.

  “I’ll be damned,” Eagle muttered. A moment later, wearing a rake-hell grin, he fell in beside Luke.

  Their hard-won vantage point gave them their first look at what the situation was down in the barroom below. The smoke rolling out from the hallway was drifting down, mingling with a haze of powder smoke already present in the air down there, but the larger, higher-ceilinged room was able to absorb much of it and leave details only slightly murky, at least for the moment.

  The glass of the front windows bordering the batwing doors had long since been blasted into nonexistence and Turley and Baker were still at work on the outside, throwing intermittent shotgun blasts through each gaping opening. At least four lifeless, badly shredded recipients of those blasts decorated the floor of the barroom. Five other gang members appeared still alive—two returning fire from behind the bar, one from behind the pool table, and two others from behind overturned round-topped card tables whose splintered, pellet-pocked surfaces indicated they were barely providing adequate cover.

  None of these five men seemed as yet to have realized that their upstairs cohorts had just been wiped out. Even worse for them would be when they realized that their current positions, which provided cover against the shotgunners outside the windows, gave them virtually no protection from the two men now poised above them at the top of the stairway.

  “This is gonna be like shootin’ fish in a barrel,” Eagle growled in a low whisper. “And the first bloated carp I mean to bag is Hack Ferris squattin’ there behind the bar.”

  “There’s only one problem with that,” Luke said.

  Eagle scowled. “What do you mean? You’re not gettin’ cold feet on me, are you? We’re sittin’ on the brink of exterminatin’ this whole nest of rats—the very words I heard you use just a few minutes ago.”

  “Yeah, and that would be a huge step toward solving your trouble. I understand that and I’ll go along if it’s the only way,” Luke allowed. “But, if there’s any chance, I’d sure like to take Ferris alive, at least long enough to try and find out what’s behind this whole business about Dixon setting me up the way he did.”

  Eagle opened his mouth to respond but what he meant to say never got the chance to be spoken. Because it was stopped by an enraged roar and the slap of heavy boots pounding the floor directly behind him and Luke. Both men whirled around to see what was happening.

  What met their startled eyes was the sight of a huge, wild-eyed man appearing as if born from the tumbling smoke. He was rushing toward them in lumbering strides, arms outstretched, fingers curled into claws, lips bared in an animal snarl. Blood poured from a gash high on his head, above his right eye. Only Luke, in the fraction of a second he had before the giant left his feet and threw all of his momentum and crushing weight into a pulverizing tackle, recognized who he was—the man from the bed in the room where Luke had first entered. The man Luke had thrown a quick shot at as the hombre was reaching for a gun on the nightstand. The way the skunk’s head had snapped back and he’d flopped down so motionless, Luke thought he was dead . . . but he’d failed to make sure.

  And now, the bounty hunter told himself with a curse, both he and Eag
le were going to pay the price for that oversight.

  The giant barreled into them like a locomotive. The impact slammed them through the barricade of dead bodies and the whole grisly entanglement—the dead, the living, and the should-have-been-dead—all went rolling and tumbling down the stairs. A boot heel at the end of a loosely whipping leg crashed across Luke’s teeth and the breath was driven out of him by the edge of a step sinking deep into his gut. Even though he felt he deserved the punishment, he fought fiercely to stay conscious and keep hold of his guns. If he could do those two things he still had a chance to make amends, he told himself.

  But then another boot heel, even heavier this time, came out of nowhere and clubbed savagely across his temple. He instantly lost his fight to stay conscious and, though he had no awareness of it, so did his numbed fingers lose their grip on the Remingtons . . .

  Chapter 39

  “When we saw the sheriff and that Jensen fella come a-rumblin’ tumblin’ down those stairs and they ended up conked out cold,” Red Baker was explaining, his weathered old face wearing a long, sad expression, “that’s when Turley went a little crazy. Instead of hangin’ back and firin’ in through his window like he’d been doin’, he went a-chargin’ straight through those batwings, cussin’ a blue streak and blastin’ away with his shotgun like he meant to wipe out all the rest of Ferris’s varmints in one big charge . . . but he didn’t make it. Barely took two or three steps afore he got riddled to pieces. One of the rounds split his stubborn old head like an ax blade goin’ through a gourd. He hit the floor and I knew he wasn’t never gettin’ back up again, so I . . . so I turned and lit out.”

  The old man’s voice broke a little on the final words and his shoulders trembled, trying to hold back a sob.

  Dinah Mercer reached out and placed a comforting hand on his arm. “It would have been senseless to do anything else,” she said gently. “You only would have gotten yourself killed, too.”