Longarm’s heart beat slowly, calmly, his hands steady. This wasn’t his first rodeo. He knew exactly how to play it.
He’d just raised his rifle and started to plant his Winchester’s sights on the left cheek of Jack Leyton, just beneath the upcurved brim of his hat, when a rifle barked below him and to his right. A rider who’d been trotting his horse up on Longarm’s side of the wagon—it was Mercado—flew down the far side of his horse with a shrill yell. His head slammed against the top of the wagon’s side panel with a cracking, smacking noise, and then he sagged down beneath his horse, his foot apparently hung up in his right stirrup.
Jack Leyton’s voice bellowed, “Amm-buuush!”
But by then all the riders were sitting straight in the saddles and raising their rifles. At the same time Vonda shook the reins over the mules’ backs, screaming, “Giddyup, you sons o’ bitches!”
Deciding his next target had to be the wagon driver, so she couldn’t get away with the gold, Longarm planted a bead on Vonda and fired. He watched her buck sideways with a shrill yelp as his slug punched through her upper left arm.
Longarm rose to his feet and continued firing, levering his Winchester as fast as he could, spraying the wagon box with .44-caliber lead. He couldn’t see Leyton now because the wagon had passed Longarm’s position, rattling off down the crease, but he thought he heard the turncoat ranger bellow as the other member of Longarm’s party opened up with their rifles.
“Goddamnit, Dobson!” Longarm couldn’t help taking the time to shout. “I told you to wait for my signal!”
“Mercado seen me!” Dobson bellowed in reply as smoke from his Yellow Boy wafted up from his niche in the rocks.
He was a good shot, because three riders trying to check down their prancing horses were thrown out of their saddles. Longarm resumed firing, as well, drilling one rider through his knee and hammering a round through the ear of another man taking aim at Haven on the other side of the canyon.
Return fire barked and screeched off the rocks around Longarm and Dobson.
As Longarm paused and dropped to a knee to punch fresh shells through his rifle’s loading gate, he saw three of the gold thieves wheel their frightened horses and gallop back the way they’d come. At the same time, Vonda was whipping the mule team off to the west, the wagon bouncing and fishtailing and kicking up a thick, billowing dust cloud.
Longarm pumped a fresh shell into the Winchester’s breech and cast a quick glance toward the opposite slope. Haven and Cocheta were both hunkered atop boulders and firing at the handful of remaining riders in the crease, a few still on horseback, a few hunkered behind rocks and returning fire at their ambushers.
The killers were bellowing at each other as they returned fire, thoroughly shocked to find themselves in such a predicament, the tables turned, their brethren dying bloody around them.
Longarm’s sundry physical grievances had died down considerably under the hot coursing of his blood through his veins. He couldn’t help grinning wickedly now as he descended the bluff, leaping from rock to rock and firing his Winchester from his hip.
Another killer—this one the cadaverous Jake Wade, Stretch Azrael’s so-called segundo—went down hard, turning and triggering his own rifle into the air above his head.
Haven and Cocheta each accounted for two more outlaws, the murderous bandits blown out, screaming or cursing, from behind their covering boulders, blood splashing their shirt and leather vests.
By the time Longarm had leaped to the bottom of the canyon, automatically punching fresh shells through his loading gate, all the outlaws were down and either lying still in death or writhing as they died. One man was crawling back in the direction from which the caravan had come.
It was Mercado.
Cocheta was just then leaping from a boulder to the canyon bottom. She walked coolly over to Mercado, stepped around in front of him, blocking his progress. The Mexican bandito leader looked up at her, his shaggy hair hanging down over his blood-streaked face.
He screamed in Spanish for the girl to spare him.
She punctuated the plea with a bullet from her Spencer carbine.
Longarm looked around, saw that the other outlaws were no longer a threat, the last living one expiring quickly, quivering in a pool of his own blood near his dead horse. Haven leaped to the floor of the canyon, looking around as she reloaded one of her LeMats.
“The gold,” she said.
Longarm was staring to the west. The wagon was dwindling into the distance.
“She won’t get far.”
He’d wounded Vonda and probably Jack Leyton, as well. Leyton must have stayed on the wagon, because Longarm didn’t see the turncoat ranger anywhere around the canyon. The lawman took long strides westward and reached for the reins of one of the riderless horses standing around, wide-eyed and jittery from the fusillade.
Haven ran up behind him, ran down a horse of her own, and swung into the saddle. Together, they galloped up the trail, following the twin wagon furrows, both hunched low in their saddles.
Longarm could feel the malicious little man with the hammer in his head again, but only dimly, beneath the more violently pounding desire to run Jack Leyton down and either kill him or throw him into a federal prison where he’d have a good, long time to reflect on his transgressions. There was nothing more cowardly than a lawman gone bad…
His adopted horse tore up the trail, head down. He and Haven ripped through the chaparral, following the wagon furrows as they rose and fell over the low, sandy swells, creosote shrubs and mesquites occasionally scraping against Longarm’s legs. They came around a jutting thumb of rock, and the wagon was just ahead, thundering westward.
“Look out!” Longarm yelled as Jack Leyton, lying atop the canvas stretched over the top of the wagon box, triggered a Winchester.
Amidst the wagon’s banging and clattering, the rifle’s crack sounded little louder than a branch snapping. Dust puffed from the maw once, twice, three, four times. Haven yelped and jerked sideways in her saddle. Longarm turned to her just as she twisted around and fell down her saddle’s far side, hit the ground, and rolled.
Longarm raised his Winchester as Leyton fired at him once more, and cut loose with his own rifle, taking his reins in his teeth and triggering and levering as he rode. When he’d fired his ninth round and the rifle’s hammer had pinged on an empty chamber, he tossed the gun away and watched Leyton’s slack body bounce over the side of the wagon.
The ex-ranger struck the ground and rolled.
Longarm could hear the man groaning as he continued to roll madly, limbs akimbo, out away from the hammering wagon before piling up against a rock and a spindly desert shrub. At the same time, the mules pulling the wagon turned sharply to avoid a jumble of boulders ahead.
The wagon fishtailed abruptly, slammed nearly sideways into the mound of rock. Vonda gave a high-pitched, agonized scream as she flew up and over the rock mound while the wagon disintegrated behind her.
She rolled as the mules tore loose of the hitch and continued galloping, still strapped together, to the south.
Longarm jerked back on his horse’s reins, leaped out of the saddle, and ran back along the trail toward where he’d seen Haven fall. He came upon her just as she was climbing to her knees, clamping one hand over her arm. Her hat was gone and her hair was a mess, but her eyes were all business.
“Don’t worry about me, Custis. What about Vonda and the gold?”
Longarm shook his head as he reached her. “I don’t take orders from you, Agent Delacroix. How bad you hit?”