Lassiter Tough Page 18

  The sun beat down through a rift in boiling clouds. A slight wind sent sand shushing against mesquite trunks.

  Lassiter knew he’d have to make do with the gun he’d snatched from Semple. That he had been able to pull it off was a miracle. He had simply caught everyone by surprise. He was nearing town now and left the road for a trail through the undergrowth.

  Finally, through towering brush and cottonwoods, Lassiter glimpsed the roof line of a two-story building where Doc Clayburn lived and had his office. He forced Sanlee to ride along the east side of the building, which was some distance from the main part of town. No one seemed to be around. Had all the pressure Sanlee had been putting on him caused the doctor to flee from Santos? But when they came around to the street side, Lassiter breathed easier. The door to the doctor’s office in the narrow building was wide open… .

  At Diamond Eight, Mrs. Elva Dowd stared at Millie Chandler, her wrists bound, who had been shoved through the doorway by two of the men. “The boss says for you to keep an eye on his sister an’ hold her here till he gets back,” one of the men said.

  “Where is he?”

  “In town by now, I reckon. He’s got Lassiter.” He didn’t add that if Sanlee had brought Lassiter to town, it was probably as a dead body.

  Elva Dowd grunted something and closed the door on the two men. “What do I do with you?” the woman asked heavily as she turned to Millie.

  “Untie me!” Millie twisted around and thrust her bound wrists at the austere housekeeper. The woman thought about it.

  “You gotta promise you won’t try an’ skeedaddle.”

  “These ropes are hurting me. Please, Mrs. Dowd. Please!”

  Mrs. Dowd studied the young widow’s stricken face, weighing it against her brother Brad’s displeasure if something went wrong. She reluctantly untied her wrists.

  Rubbing at indentations left in her flesh by the rope, Millie hurried to a front window. She could see the buckboard team tied to the corral fence in the distance. The men were too lazy to put it up, at least for now. They were in the bunkhouse, no doubt, having a pull at a bottle and talking over the experience of the day.

  But when she wheeled for the front door, Mrs. Dowd sprang forward and grabbed her by an arm. With her superior height and weight, the woman held Millie easily in her grasp.

  “You promised,” the woman reminded thinly.

  “Let me go!” Millie cried. In desperation, she swung a fist that landed solidly on the woman’s jaw. The eyes of Elva Dowd were suddenly crossed. She slumped to the floor in a tangle of skirts and petticoats.

  Then Millie ran as quietly as she could all the way to the corral, stepping in the thick dust so her footfalls would be minimized. She kept the buckboard team to a walk until clear of the house, then she slapped the reins along their backs and shouted at them. They lunged into a gallop, hauling the buckboard at a dangerous speed along the rough ranch road… .

  24

  *

  At the east side of Doc Clayburn’s building, Lassiter, still keeping a gun trained on Sanlee, ordered him to dismount.

  “Tie the horses,” Lassiter ordered brusquely.

  Sanlee scowled, but obeyed. Then Lassiter forced him to walk very slowly, his hands raised shoulder high, around to the street and the front entrance to the medical office.

  Aplump Mexican woman was sitting on a stool discussing some problem with the doctor. When Sanlee and Lassiter entered the office, a look of fear touched her plump dark face at sight of the drawn gun.

  “We’re not going to hurt you, señora,” Lassiter said softly in Spanish. “Leave now, if you will. You can see the doctor later.”

  She scurried out of the building, not looking back. Doc Clayburn, looking unutterably weary, sank to the stool so recently occupied by the woman. “What’s your next move, Lassiter? Kill us both?”

  “I want you to write out the truth, Doc. You didn’t see me murder Buck Rooney. You weren’t anywhere near the spot where he was killed that day.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  Sanlee, who had been glaring at the doctor, now relaxed and a faint smile appeared on his bearded lips. Sweat showed through the coarse, reddish hair where his hat was tipped back. He started to lower his hands, but Lassiter jabbed him in the back with the gun barrel. He lifted them again.

  “I think you’re a fair man, Doc,” Lassiter said. “An honest man. Sanlee has some hold over you. I don’t know what it is. You tell me.”

  Sanlee gave a short laugh. “I offered Lassiter $10,000 to clear out. Can you figure him turnin’ it down, Doc? An’ now he’s got you to point the finger at him for killin’ Rooney. Maybe Lassiter don’t know it, but he’s already got one foot on the gallows’ steps.”

  “You don’t have to be afraid of Sanlee,” Lassiter said patiently to Doc Clayburn. “Because after you tell the truth about Rooney, I figure to blow him outta his boots.”

  “Back in New York a man was seeing my wife. I caught him. We shot it out. I was the lucky one and he was dead. But the man had powerful friends. I had to run.”

  “Pick up a pen and write what you just told me—and the rest of it,” Lassiter said over Sanlee’s shoulder.

  “Maybe I should go back to New York and face up to it after all these years.” Doc Clayburn gave Sanlee a tired smile. “What do you think, Brad?”

  “Doc, you better not even think about it,” Sanlee said coldly. But there was an edge of worry in the voice. Lassiter carefully stepped around Sanlee so he could see the man’s eyes. There was a definite wariness in the gray depths. Lassiter smiled.

  “Doc, will you tell the truth about Rooney?” Lassiter asked the man slumped on the stool. “If you shot that man in a fair fight …”

  “I did.”

  “Then your conscience is clear.”

  “But there are others to consider—my daughter, my grandchildren.” Clayburn looked up. There were hollows under his eyes and his mouth sagged. “I can’t do it, Lassiter.”

  “Don’t tell me I figured you wrong, Doc,” Lassiter said quietly.

  “Lassiter, you’ve got a chance. Take it and get out.” Clayburn’s voice shook. “You can’t stand up against Diamond Eight. Nobody can. Brad Sanlee has got this county sewed up in his own private bag. Go ahead. You’ve got a weapon. Sanlee is unarmed. It’s your one chance.”

  “You heard him, Lassiter,” Sanlee said with a laugh.

  Lassiter said, “All right, if Doc won’t help me, then I’ve only got you. I can start on you, Sanlee, and work my way up till you shout the truth about Buck Rooney. Shout it loud enough so they can hear you all the way uptown!”

  “What’d you mean when you said work your way up?” Sanlee demanded suspiciously, his tongue tip snaking through the beard to lick his lower lip.

  “It means I’ll start at the kneecap. If a bullet there doesn’t loosen your tongue, then I’ll bust a hip bone. Next a couple of ribs. I think about then you’ll scream to high heaven that I didn’t have one damn thing to do with killin’ Buck Rooney.”

  “You ain’t the kind to do that to a man,” Sanlee sneered. But it failed to carry to the gray eyes.

  Lassiter stared hard at his captive, then finally gave a short laugh. “I reckon maybe you’re right, Sanlee. Doc, have you got a spare gun?”

  Clayburn looked up with a frown. “I have, but …”

  “Give it to Sanlee,” he said in a hard voice. “Then the two of us will step into the street. And only one of us will walk away.”

  Clayburn thought about it for a moment, then got up from the stool and stumbled over to a desk. He reached for a drawer, which drew a warning from Lassiter. “Careful, Doc. Just open it real easy. No tricks.”

  Clayburn nodded. His hand shook so that the drawer rattled when he opened it. Reaching in, he withdrew a .45-caliber gun with black grips, holding it by the barrel so the tall man with the cold blue eyes wouldn’t misjudge his intent. The weapon thumped against the desk top as he laid it down.

  At that m
oment, riders suddenly appeared in the street in front of the building, the brown dust from their horses billowing against the clearing sky. Lassiter looked out to see Luis Herrera and his vaqueros dismounting. Herrera bounded into the doctor’s office, his white teeth gleaming under his mustache.

  “Señora Aguilar, she tell me where you are, Lassiter!” Herrera said, referring to Doc Clayburn’s recent patient. Then Herrera looked at Sanlee, white-faced and standing with his hands lifted. “Ah, you have defanged the snake,” Herrera said in Spanish.

  Five vaqueros, all the crew Box C had left, were staring at the tableau.

  “My wife, she fetch us,” Herrera was explaining to Lassiter as he brandished a carbine.

  A few minutes earlier, five Diamond Eight men had come boiling into town by the back way and flung themselves from their horses and charged into the store.

  Isobel Hartney, who had been cold with worry over Lassiter’s fate, but knowing she was helpless to do anything about it, looked up to see Pinto George, Jeddy Quine, Pete Barkley, Joe Tige and Jake Semple come rushing through the store. Isobel had been showing new corsets to some of the ladies.

  “We need guns!” Pinto George shouted at her.

  “Just a minute, can’t you see I’m busy?” A faint hope for Lassiter’s safety flared in her. All along, she had told herself that Brad wouldn’t dare hang him. You didn’t arrest a man, then kill him as you were taking him to jail.

  “We need guns now!” George yelled and moved toward a large glass showcase with a display of revolvers and rifles.

  Isobel frowned but managed a show of indignation. The ladies looked frightened, suspecting the men were drunk.

  “I refuse to be shouted at,” Isobel said firmly.

  Pinto George screamed, “Goddamn Lassiter took our guns and dragged ’em in sand. They ain’t worth a damn till they’re cleaned. We ain’t got time for that. He’s down at Doc’s place. We seen him go in!”

  He got behind the showcase and tried to slide open the wooden doors, but they were locked. “Gimme the key!”

  “Get out of here!” Isobel cried. Her two white-faced clerks were huddled in fear and confusion.

  Lassiter had outwitted the bunch of them. And as Isobel stood with Lassiter’s roguish image flashing through her consciousness, Pinto George seized some tinned tomatoes and used the heavy can to start smashing in the top of her showcase. Glass shattered and shards tinkled to the floor. The ladies at the corset counter were terrified.

  Pinto George and the others reached into the maw at the top of the showcase, snatching up revolvers and rifles. On a shelf in back of the gun case were boxes of cartridges, which they feverishly tore open, loading the weapons, stuffing spare shells into their pockets.

  “Let’s go get that son of a bitch!” Joe Tige yelled. He shuffled toward the door, bent over because of a bulky bandage that covered his chest.

  Isobel Hartney emerged from her visions of Lassiter and rushed to the door ahead of Tige. She tried to block him. “Leave Lassiter alone!”

  “He killed Rooney!”

  “He didn’t!” she screamed.

  Joe Tige laughed in her face. By then, Pinto George, Barkley, Quine and Semple had swarmed up. They shoved her out of the way and streamed into the middle of the dusty street. Frightened faces peered at them from windows up and down the block. Far down the street, four vaqueros from Box C were standing rigidly in front of Doc Clayburn’s building, which sat alone at the edge of Santos.

  25

  *

  Since the moment the plump Señora Aguilar had fled the doctor’s office, Lassiter had been aware that the ancient timbers of the former whorehouse were coming to life under the heat of a climbing sun. But now, suddenly, there was another creak, a deeper one as if a great weight crossed the floor in the rear part of the structure. Lassiter suddenly felt as if the door to an ice house had opened at his back. His head came up. It was at that moment that he first heard a great smashing of glass coming from farther uptown.

  “What in the hell was that!” Herrera cried.

  But Lassiter was looking over his shoulder at Shorty Doane. The big man stood in a doorway leading to a long, dim hallway with closed doors on either side, the former working and sleeping quarters of the givers of pleasure to range-land males. Because of his height, Doane had to stoop. He wore a broad grin on his scarred face. Some of the scars were old and others, more recent, resulted from the slashing fists of the man who stood half-turned, a gun in hand. The weapon was trained on a grim Brad Sanlee.

  With Shorty Doane’s sudden appearance in a rear doorway, hope flashed in Sanlee’s gray eyes like a blinding beacon. For Shorty Doane was lifting the first weapon he had been able to get his hands on after he had deserted his companions to go it alone. No longer was there any possible execution of Doane’s plan to make Lassiter’s death as ugly as possible at the point of a knife. Now he wanted to get it over with!

  In the space of seconds it had taken for Lassiter to realize the giant’s ominous presence, Doane yelled, “Brad … jump!”

  And Brad Sanlee did just that, hurling himself headfirst to an open window. As he was clearing it, Lassiter dropped hard to the floor, all thoughts of trying to bring Sanlee down erased from his mind. It was now self-preservation.

  A roar rattled through the windows and shook the office. Smoke belched as buckshot screamed and dug splinters from walls and demolished a front window, the sheet of lead directed solely at the spot where Lassiter had been standing only a heartbeat before.

  He felt a numbing along his back, a wetness. But in desperation he twisted to a supine position on the freshly scrubbed floor. He saw Doane still in the hall doorway. A row of yellow teeth were revealed as he lifted the shotgun to discharge the second barrel. But before the barrel settled on the intended target, Lassiter shot him. Doane’s head snapped back and the shotgun roared again, this time sending that scythe of shot into the ceiling. Powdered plaster fell like a sheet of snow. Doane collapsed, still holding the shotgun, now empty.

  Lassiter picked himself up, aware of a groaning sound, wondering dully if he was the source. Painfully he made his way to Doane. He was aware of shouting from farther uptown.

  “Kill you,” Doane breathed, staring up out of shocked eyes. “It’s all I wanted… .” Then, as if punctured, the great bleeding chest collapsed and his head rolled to one side.

  Lassiter turned around. The pain burned like the heated blades of a dozen knives. He saw Doc Clayburn lying on his back. Blood from several wounds formed a puddle. Breathing hard, Lassiter forced himself to walk over to where Herrera was crumpled in the doorway. The whole purpose of Lassiter’s extensive maneuvering had been to save lives. And now it looked as if Hell’s double doors had burst open to incinereate anyone within reach.

  In front of the building, the vaqueros were firing at something down the street. Bullets slammed into the side of the building as they began to give ground. Rudy Ruiz made what appeared to be a grand bow, then he toppled and fell across his rifle in the rutted street.

  “Lassiter’s inside!” It was Sanlee’s screech. “Get him!”

  Jamming the .45 into his belt, Lassiter snatched up the carbine Herrera had dropped. At a crouching run, despite pain, he hopped over the crumpled segundo and reached the street. Those advancing from the Hartney Store missed a beat in surprise at Lassiter’s boldness. His first shot doubled up Pinto George. His second knocked Jeddy Quine into a twisting gargoyle, blood streaming down his face. Semple, the left-handed one, whirled like a dervish as a bullet crashed into his shoulder.

  Shocked by Lassiter’s sudden and devastating marksmanship, Joe Tige fired in haste, the bullet ricocheting off Doc Clayburn’s metal sign above the door. By then the shot from Luis Herrera’s carbine, now in the capable hands of a frenzied Lassiter, dug deep through the packed bandage on Tige’s chest and out of his body.

  Pete Barkley started to lift his rifle, then wheeled in panic. He threw away his weapon and started back up the street at
a limping run, past spectators frozen along the walks or taking refuge in buildings. The blacksmith was crouched behind his cooling tank.

  Black specks were whirling in front of Lassiter’s eyes and his knees felt wobbly. He let Barkley go and started to turn. From a corner of his eye he saw Brad Sanlee snatch the gun from Pinto George’s dead hand. For a big man, Sanlee seemed to have the speed of a gazelle as he sprinted for the safety of a building wall. In the next instant a bullet fired from Sanlee’s weapon ripped the rifle out of Lassiter’s hands. Lassiter felt a numbness to the tips of his fingers. The shock of the blow sent him stumbling to his knees. A second bullet whipped past the tip of his nose.

  Far up the street he saw Isobel Hartney at a run from her store, her blond hair tumbling, skirts and apron flying. “Get back!” he yelled, gesturing with a numbed hand.

  Added to that awful moment was the sudden appearance of Rep Chandler’s widow. For some seconds, Lassiter had been aware of the growing sounds made by a fast-moving team and wagon. He watched in horror as Millie Chandler came whipping out of a side street in a buckboard. She was standing up, lashing a lathered team that ran as if their hindquarters were licked by flame, eyes wild, manes streaming. Millie’s hair was a dark banner caught by the wind.

  Her eyes were on Lassiter, on his knees, some distance down the street, as if in an attitude of prayer. Around him, three vaqueros were dragging themselves away. A fourth lay unmoving. Herrera was crumpled in the doorway. She came pounding past Isobel Hartney and on down the street, her buckboard skidding dangerously. Then she spotted Sanlee and made a slight shift with the reins. Sanlee saw her coming and turned his big body.

  “Millie!” he screamed. In his eyes was a mixture of hatred and adoration.

  As the speeding team and buckboard bore down, he leaped aside, for it was obvious that her intention was to run him down. But the left rear hub of the speeding wheel caught an awning post and ripped it out. The rear wheel went flying as did Millie, like a black-haired rag doll flung by an angry child.