Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek (A Caleb York Western Book 6) - Mickey Spillane (classic novels .TXT) 📗

Harvest.

How many men had he put here? He knew. He knew. And he wasn’t proud of it, either, yet there wasn’t one he wouldn’t send here again.

The absence of the woman who’d summoned him began to worry him. He moved slowly through the boneyard, stepping around graves, including the fresh one that housed William Hammond, glancing from side to side.

Where was she?

This began to feel wrong. At the far east side of the cemetery was the handful of headstones of various respectable citizens, relatively new residents of this city of the dead, fieldstone and granite, shipped in from Denver.

Towering over them—well, towering was an exaggeration, he supposed—was a modest mausoleum, as mausoleums went, with the word CULLEN carved in marble above its wrought-iron door. Willa had sprung for this, and had moved her mother inside to be with her father, who had inspired in his daughter this tribute.

No one considered this inappropriate, not that York knew, at least. After all, George Cullen had made the existence of Trinidad possible. He had brought in tradesmen to occupy land he gave them to have the convenience of a town near his ranch. The man had been, in his way, in his day, the kind of cattle baron that the would-be cattle baroness could never rival.

“You won’t rate anything so fine, York,” a male voice said.

York looked toward the sound as Clay Colman, his Peacemaker drawn and ready, came around from behind the structure, his smile curling up into a smirk. The gun-fighting Cowboy had worn black to better blend in with the night, but the brown of his hat made the rattlesnake band stand out, and his pale, clean-shaven complexion and blue-eyed blond looks were whitish smears in the near night.

Colman’s tone struck York as a little too self-satisfied: “Did you think I forgot?”

“Forgot what, Colman?”

Now an edge came in, and the blue eyes narrowed in the white blur of face. “Not what. Who. Do you remember, York? Owen Burge.”

“Bit familiar.”

“Burrell Eyler.”

“Might I do.”

Colman thrust the gun forward, his barrel accusatory. “Do you need remindin’?”

A dry wind was blowing, gentle, but enough to stir hat brims and rustle sagebrush.

“No,” York said. “They were in on that stagecoach holdup. You slipped away. Well, I never had enough to really go after you.”

“But you got them, didn’t you?”

“I did. I recovered the ten thousand for Wells Fargo, too. At my five percent reward, that’s five hundred more than you made.”

The almost too handsome face scowled. “Shot down like dogs in the street.”

“No. Like fools. They pulled on me, Colman—two men on one. Damn near as bad as back-shooting.”

“You’ve shot men in the back.”

“I have,” York admitted. “When they were fleeing and I didn’t feel like running after them.”

The sounds were simultaneous—somebody coming up behind him at the far left, somebody else behind him at the far right. Slow, trying not to be heard, but coming. Whoever they were, they’d either tucked themselves behind the mesquite or found one of the larger grave markers to skulk behind.

But that didn’t matter.

What mattered was this had just turned into three to one, and even Caleb York didn’t relish those odds.

He said to Colman, “But I feel like it now.”

“Feel like what?”

Running.

York turned tail and ran back into the cemetery, and as the shots flew, he dove and tumbled and got himself behind a gravestone, a real one, not a wood marker and certainly not a damn cross. He got the .44 out and Colman was yelling, but not at him—at his confederates, telling them to spread out. Probably literal Confederates, considering.

Because his glimpse of the other two had identified these accomplices as part of the Arizona Cowboy crowd, no one he knew by name, but wearers of the telltale rattlesnake hatband, whether genuine article or silversmith copy.

Crouching, York started moving to his right, staying low, the darkness covering him well enough that he didn’t draw any fire. As he got close to the south edge of the cemetery, he planted himself behind another sturdy marker and listened.

One of the bastards was moving, too fast, stirring up dust and pebbles enough to be heard.

York popped up, not all the way, just about as high as the stone he was behind, and demonstrated his willingness to shoot a man in the back, or rather in the back of the head, because that was what he did to a Cowboy who was a mere six or seven feet away, close enough for the man’s skull to crack and bleed bloody brains like a jam jar burst in a pantry.

Immediately York scrambled toward the west of the cemetery and found cover behind another marker. He huddled there, listening. Whispers and shouts told the story—they were spooked. Spooked in a spooky damn place like this—that was a good one.

He waited.

But after thirty seconds or so had passed, he was afraid they’d be coming around in a pincher move, so he got up and ran. Ran like hell between rows of graves, giving them just enough time to shoot at him and reveal their position, and him enough time to dive for the dirt and let their slugs fly overhead.

One was just behind him, on the same row, and York swivelled onto his back and let fly with three rounds that peppered a Cowboy’s midsection and turned him into an awkward floundering thing that seemed to be going in every direction at once, as if chasing the spurts of scarlet in the night that blew out of him like streamers on the Fourth of July.

Scrambling again, on his hands and knees, York got into the next row west and found cover again.

“York!”

York didn’t respond. The voice was coming from several rows to the east, fairly close to the Cullen mausoleum.

“Caleb York, you son of a bitch! . . . I will holster my weapon if you pledge to holster yours. We will face each other like men!”

York peeked around the gravestone. He could see Colman clearly—the man had his six-gun poised