The man’s long black hair tossed across his bearded face and he was grinning.
“Pierce, you bastard!” Stryker screamed, all his pent-up fury turning his voice into a rabid shriek of rage. He raised his gun and fired at Pierce, who was starkly outlined by a shimmering lightning flash.
Pierce fired back, then ducked behind a low wall.
Stryker followed, his boots splashing through mud, mouth open in a soundless roar. He reached the wall, the downpour hissing around him. But Pierce was nowhere in sight.
Then, from somewhere ahead of him, unseen behind the spinning maelstrom of wind and rain, came the man’s roaring voice. “I’m gonna kill you, Lieutenant Stryker. Goddamn you, we’ll end it here today.”
Chapter 39
Boots pounded behind Stryker and he turned quickly, his gun coming up fast.
“Don’t shoot, Cap’n!” Trimble yelled. “It’s us!”
The three men ducked behind the wall and Birchwood said, “We tried to head him off, came round behind the adobe, but he was gone.”
“He fired at me, then ran away, damn him,” Stryker said.
Trimble nodded. “Ol’ Rake likes an edge, Cap’n. Standin’ out in the open that way, he figgered he didn’t have one.”
“Was that the man Pierce shouting, Lieutenant?” Cantrell asked.
“Yes, that was him.”
“He’s trying to get you good an’ mad, Cap’n,” Trimble said. “In a gunfight, an angry man is a dead man.”
“He’s succeeding,” Stryker said.
His mind was working. As Trimble said, Pierce would look for an edge. But what kind of an edge? His eyes moved across the plaza to the three ruined stores. Each had an open front where goods had been displayed, leaving a wall about four foot high under them. Unlike the windowless adobes, a man could shoot from concealment there.
Was that where Pierce and Dugan were holed up? The range was too great for his Colt. He turned to Birchwood who was white-knuckling his Winchester in both hands.
“Lieutenant, dust along the store fronts over yonder and we’ll see what happens. You too, Clem.”
Both men rose and fired at the stores, working their way along the open fronts. Bullets thudded into adobe or rattled through the stores, followed by sounds of shattering pottery and glass.
“Cease fire!” Stryker yelled.
He did not have long to wait for a reaction.
Both Pierce and Dugan rose from behind the low wall of the middle store, working their rifles. Bullets chipped Vs of adobe along the top of the wall, and Birchwood, a split second too late in getting to cover, was hit, a round opening up his left cheekbone.
Stryker turned to him. “You all right, Lieutenant?”
The young man looked at the fingers he’d touched to his cheek, now streaming with rain and blood. “I believe so, sir,” he said.
“A battle scar to show your betrothed,” Stryker grinned.
Birchwood nodded. “I sincerely hope it’s the only one.”
Cantrell stuck his gun over the adobe wall and shot at the store. But return fire drove him behind the wall again.
“Lieutenant,” he said, “we know where they are and they know where we are, so how do we get to them?”
“The short answer is ‘not easily,’” Stryker said. He looked at Birchwood. “I guess you know you’re bleeding like a stuck pig.”
The lieutenant nodded, the blood running down his cheek intermingled with rain so it had taken on a pink cast. “I’ve always been a bleeder, sir, ever since I was a boy. One time I remember—”
“Stryker!”
The voice from the store front was not Pierce’s. It was Silas Dugan’s harsh rasp.
Stryker turned to Trimble. “Clem, see if you can do something for Mr. Birchwood’s wound.” He got closer to the wall and yelled, “Dugan, you sorry piece of shit, what do you want?”
“Harsh words, Lieutenant. A thing I’ll keep in mind. It could make the difference atween you getting it in the belly or the head.”
“I asked you, Dugan, what the hell do you want?”
Thunder shook the village and lightning scratched across the black sky. The wind had turned ferocious, baring its teeth, ratcheting up the rage of the raking rain.
“Stryker!” Dugan yelled. “Are you still there?” The lieutenant glanced at Birchwood. Trimble had torn a strip off the white cotton shirt he was wearing and had wound it under the young man’s chin and tied it at the top of his head. It seemed to have stopped the bleeding, at least for now.
“I’m here! What do you want?”
“See, me and ol’ Rake are getting soaking wet and we got the coffee hunger. So what do you say we have it out, us against you four? Step into the plaza and so will we, and then we can go to our work and end this thing.”
“Clem,” Stryker asked, “can we take them?”
The old man shook his head. “Not a chance in hell, Cap’n.”
Stryker bit his lip, thinking. Rain dripped from his hat in strings that got caught up in the wind and scattered into the roaring day.
“Clem, give me your rifle,” he said.
Doubt in his eyes, Trimble handed over the Winchester. Stryker stood and fired at the store where Pierce and Dugan were holed up.
After he ducked back again, grinning, Trimble asked, “Hit anything, Cap’n?”
Stryker shook his head. “No, that was just my answer to Dugan’s proposal.”
A moment later, his voice angry, the gunman yelled, “Now you get it in the belly, Stryker.”
Long minutes ticked past and the rain and wind grew in intensity, driving mud and stinging pine needles into the four men crouched behind the wall.
“Anybody hear that?” Birchwood asked, his face stiff with unease.
Trimble nodded. “Yeah, Lieutenant, I’ve been hearing it for quite a spell.”
And so had Stryker. A thin, eerie wailing rose and fell in the wind; a lost, lonely sound, as poignant as a widow’s tears.
Cantrell crossed himself hurriedly. “It is the cries of the dead,” he whispered. “They walk abroad in the storm.”
Trimble looked hard at the young Mexican. “Don Carlos, I don’t know what’s scarin’ me more, Rake an’ ol’ Silas, or you!”
“Be very afraid, old man,” Cantrell said. “Many people have come to this village seeking plunder, and few have ever returned.”
The wailing carried in the wind like smoke, shredding into what sounded like long, drawn-out sobs.
Stryker prided himself in being a practical man, but he felt shivers finger up and down his spine. He had been taught many things at West Point, but dealing with the supernatural had not been one of them.
Then it seemed that Pierce and Dugan had missed that particular lesson themselves.
“Stryker!” Dugan yelled. “Who’s doing all that damned screaming?”
“It’s all the people you’ve murdered, Dugan,” Stryker called out. “Those are dead Apache women and children coming back for your dirty scalp.”
He waited a moment and hollered. “Surrender now, Dugan, and we’ll protect you.”
“You go to hell!”
Bullets chipped along the top of the wall and whined into the gloom.
Trimble shook his head. “I never took ol’ Silas for a scaredy-cat when it comes to ha’ants an’ sich.”
“He has a right to be afraid,” Cantrell said.
Stryker latched onto that. Had the wailing unnerved the superstitious Dugan so much that he might have grown careless?
Now was the time to do something, a course of action better than waiting for night, when he and the others could slink away like whipped dogs.
“Mr. Birchwood,” he said, his mind made up, “I’m going for my horse. You and the others will lay down a covering fire.”
The lieutenant had been trained not to question orders, and said simply, “Yes, sir.”