Scalpers (17 page)

“Folks will do most anything these days, boss,” said Rayburn, he and Deloof giving each other a look.

At the gate, the senior French guard, Dillus Lobeau, saw the three guards coming and pointed out at a roiling cloud of trail dust on the trail leading straight to the gates.

“There's more of them now, Asp!” he shouted. He'd already walked over to the large iron wheel and started turning it, drawing the iron-barred gates shut. “Must be some kind of suicide riders, is the best I can make of it.”

“Suicide,
ha
!”
shouted Asp. “We'll show them
suicide
if that's what they're looking for!” He leaped up onto a stone column beside the left gate and climbed a ladder to the top, fifteen feet up.

“Jesus!”
said Rayburn, looking up at Asp. “What the hell's he doing?”

“Stop this at once!” Asp shouted at the riders thundering toward the gates of the mining facility. “This is the property of the sovereign nation of—” He stopped short as a volley of gunfire ripped through him and flung him backward off the column and onto the ground with a heavy thud.

“Oh yeah, we're in trouble,” Jep Rayburn said, grabbing his rifle from where it leaned against a low stone wall.

Stunned by seeing Asp fall dead on the ground, Lobeau froze with his mouth gaping. He stopped cranking the gates shut, crouched low and ran to the cover of a nearby freight wagon as more gunfire erupted from the riders.

“For God sakes, Lobeau!” Rayburn shouted at the fleeing guard, seeing the gates still open ten feet wide. “Henri! Close the damn gates!” He raised his rifle to his shoulder, returning fire.

Deloof made a stab at cranking the gates shut, but the riders had gained so much ground that he saw he would never get the task completed.

“These are Mexican bandits!” he shouted at Rayburn as bullets banged and thudded against the partially closed gates.

“I don't give a damn if they're Chinese laundrymen!” Rayburn shouted in reply. “Get the gates shut!” Even as he made his demand, he saw for himself that the riders had gotten too close too soon. As bullets sliced through the air, Deloof had to abandon his task and make a run for cover. The
riders were so close now that they were riding back and forth twenty feet from the gates, firing at will.

“Holy jumping cats!” shouted Rayburn, seeing two riders throw out lariats from their saddles and loop the gate handles and hold them open. “Get to the pay shack and hold them back from there!” he shouted, seeing the two riders loop the lariats around their saddle horns and begin to pull the big gates farther open.

In the yard miners ran wild, some taking cover, other racing to their shacks for guns and weapons. Shrieking whores took cover behind the bar. The payroll clerk had scooped up his paperwork and made a run for it.

“Jesus, we're dead, boys,” Rayburn murmured, firing as he moved backward toward the payroll shack, stunned by the relentless speed and fierceness of the outlaws.

As the two riders pulled the gates open wider with their lariats, Fox Pridemore led the Perros Locos inside, firing and trampling into the crowd of drinking miners and scantily clad women. Guards, joined by a few miners with guns, took positions in the payroll shack, ready to defend the large amount of cash on hand. But instead of attacking the shack straight-on, Fox led his bandits into the crowd and began herding them into a tight circle like cattle being prepared for slaughter.

“The hell are they doing now?” Jep Rayburn said to anyone listening inside the payroll shack. As soon as he asked he saw a miner fall from one of the guard's bullets that had sliced through a bandit's arm and hit the hapless miner in the chest.

“Got one!” shouted the guard, firing from an open window. He quickly levered a fresh round into his rifle chamber.

“You hit one of ours!” Rayburn shouted above the roar of gunfire. “Good God, men, stop shooting!” He waved a hand up and down in the looming gun smoke. Another miner fell on the street even as the shooting inside the shack halted.

As the firing from the shack stopped, so did the shooting from the bandits, except for Ozzie Cord,
who had dragged a half-naked woman up onto his lap while she screamed and kicked.

“Easy, woman, easy,” Ozzie said into her ear. “Don't make me start whittling on you.” He reached his free hand around and plopped his big scalping knife across her naked lap.

The woman settled, trembling but under control.

“That's good,” Ozzie said. He slipped a hand around, cupped her exposed breast. “Every time I shoot, you scream, else I'll clip the noses off your puppies and use them for earplugs.”

The woman gasped, believing he'd do what he said.

Holding her against his chest as a shield, Ozzie continued firing, spacing his shots to every fifteen or twenty seconds, his rifle resting on the woman's bare shoulder. Every time he fired the woman screamed as if being tortured.

“Hold your fire!” Rayburn shouted, jerking a white handkerchief from his lapel pocket. “We're not shooting back! See?” He stepped into full view in the open window and gestured the white handkerchief back and forth.

This is
how easy it is robbing a payroll,
Fox told himself. He gave a slight smile, his horse restless, stepping back and forth among the miners and the women. Every few seconds Ozzie fired another round into the closed door of the shack. With every shot the woman on his lap screamed loudly.

“Jesus, I can't stand much more of this,” Rayburn said to the men nearest him.

“Then lucky for you I'm here,” said the gruff
voice of the head mine engineer, Harvey Gatts. He stood up from behind an overturned desk in front of a large safe that he had closed and locked as soon as the shooting started. “I'll get this nonsense organized.” He walked to where Rayburn stood in full view. He jerked the handkerchief from his hand and shoved him aside.

“See here, you rapscallions,” he shouted out at Fox. “Have your man stop that infernal shooting this instant! I won't even speak to ill-mannered saddle tramps.”

Ill-mannered saddle tramps?

Fox grinned. He still sat alone atop his horse while the rest of the bandits had grabbed miners and women for shields.

“I can't stop him. He likes shooting at you,” he called out to the engineer. Around him the Perros Locos gave a laugh as Fox continued. “You know what we're after. Give it up. Else we start killing everybody out here.”

Fear stirred among the crowd. The miners and the women surged, but the riders held them herded in.

“I'm afraid you're in for a disappointment,” Gatts said confidently. “You have killed the only man who knows the combination to this safe.” As he spoke he looked shrewdly at Rayburn.

“Don't fool with these men, sir,” Rayburn warned. “He looks like one of them scalpers—”

“Oh, shut up, Rayburn,” said Gatts, cutting the Texan off. “Had you and the guards done your job, we wouldn't be in this pickle.”

Rayburn just stared at him.
All right, son of a bitch. . . .

“You're the one in for a disappointment,” Fox called out to the shack window. A shot resounded; the woman screamed. “Give over the money or we will blow the shack up . . . all of you with it.”

“All right, I've got him talking,” Gatts said under his breath to Rayburn. He kept the white handkerchief waving in his hand. “Stop the shooting, put the woman down and let's talk,” he called out to Fox.

Instead of answering Gatts, Fox called out over his shoulder to Silvar Stampeto, “Hey,
segundo
, get over to the dynamite shack. Bring us back, say . . . five or six sticks—some fusing too.” He turned and grinned at the engineer waving the handkerchief in the window. “We'll blow up the shack, then the safe.”

“That will do you no good,” Gatts called out. “You'll blow up the money when you blow up the safe. You still won't leave here with any money.”

“So?” Fox shrugged. “We didn't come here with any.” He gave Ozzie a look as Ozzie sat with his rifle cocked and ready on the woman's bare shoulder.

“That would be the most idiotic, mindless, irresponsible thing you could possibly—” Gatts' words stopped as a shot exploded from Ozzie's rifle, followed by the woman's scream.

Gatts' blood splattered all over Rayburn as the shot flung the engineer backward, leaving the handkerchief hanging suspended in the air for a
second. Rayburn grabbed the handkerchief in reflex as Gatts flew backward across the shack, across the overturned desk and slammed against the big locked safe door. A misty streak of blood trailed in the air behind him.

“Anybody here feels like getting blown up today, raise your hands,” Rayburn said democratically, wiping Gatts' blood from his eyes with the handkerchief he'd retrieved on the fly.

The miners and guards looked at each other and shook their heads.

“That's what I thought,” said Rayburn. He waved the blood-smeared handkerchief in the window and called out to Fox, “You've got it all, mister! We're giving it up.”

“Throw out your guns,” Ozzie called out. He whispered into the woman's ear, “See . . . ? You get to keep those puppies, nose and all.”

Fox smiled and looked around at Stampeto and the Perros Locos. He motioned for Terese to move her horse over beside him. She had ridden in wearing a large sombrero like one of the bandits. Joining Fox, they watched rifles, shotguns and revolvers fall out of the window onto the rocky ground. A small Uhlinger pocket pistol slid over by her foot. She stepped down from her horse and stretched her back and stood watching for a moment. Before stepping back into the saddle, she managed to pick
the small pistol up and hide it in her clothing without being seen. A moment later the shack door opened and Jep Rayburn stepped out, the men filing behind him, all of their hands raised chest high.

“You'll have to blow open the safe door,” Rayburn said. “The engineer was right about none of us knowing the combination. He knew it. So there's that, unless you can raise the dead.” He gave a shrug.

Fox cocked his head slightly.

“Are you sure you don't know the numbers?” he asked.

“If I did, it's possible I would have robbed it myself,” he said. “I once went so far as to figure the miles between here and every water stop on the way to the Guatemalan border.” He stared at Fox. The bandits gave a hearty laugh.

“You seem like a cool hombre,” Fox said. “Play your cards right, you won't have to die here before we leave.”

“You get the money you come for,” said Rayburn, “why does anybody have to die?”

“See what I mean?” Fox said, wagging a finger at Rayburn. “That sounds like a man who's looked down a gun barrel from both ends.”

“I'm not admitting nothing,” Rayburn said calmly to Fox, noting the eyes of the miners on him.

“Why don't I shoot him, Zorro?” Ozzie blurted out for no reason, butting his horse through the crowd over beside Fox.

Fox looked at him curiously.

“Easy, Oz,” he said, surprised by Ozzie's sudden outburst. “The man and I are speaking civilly here.”

“Zorro . . . ?”
Rayburn ventured to ask.

“It's a long story,” said Fox, brushing it off.

Ozzie settled but stared coldly at Rayburn. Fox noted that instead of cowering under Ozzie's stare, Rayburn gave it right back to him.

Nodding at the bar, the crates of whiskey and the kegs of beer, much of which had been overturned in the melee, Fox said to Rayburn, “I don't suppose you'd object to my men having a drink?”

Coolly, Rayburn looked back and forth at all the Perros Locos staring at him from among the women and the miners.

“Not at all,” he said. “In fact, have one yourself while the miners blow open the safe.” He offered a thin, wry smile. “I'll even have one with you.”

*   *   *

Silvar Stampeto and the Perros Locos looked on while two Cornish miners prepared an adequate proportion of dynamite to take the heavy door off the safe. Out in front of the shack, Fox, Ozzie and Jep Rayburn sat atop a freight wagon load of desks, chairs and other burnable wooden items. Terese Montoya sat at Fox's side. As they waited for the safe to blow, they passed a bottle of mescal back and forth between them. Ozzie sat brooding silently while Fox and Rayburn talked.

“Sure, I remember Pridemore's trading post,” Rayburn said, having heard about how the Apache had burned the trading post to the ground. “Been a
while since I was by there.” He raised a drink from the mescal bottle and wiped a hand across his lips. “I recall Bigfoot had two sons. . . .”

Fox looked around at the miners and women who sat cross-legged on the ground in the mine yard. One of the Perros Locos stood guarding them with his rifle.

“Yeah,” Fox said. “But the heathen Apache killed my brother, Lucas.”

“Damn heathen Apache,” said Rayburn, passing the mescal bottle to Fox.

“And I was there when it happened, so don't tell me,” Ozzie put in quickly, pounding himself on his chest as if proving something. He fell silent again when Fox and Rayburn both looked at him curiously.

“Here she blows, Zorro!” shouted Stampeto, he and the others running out of the shack, the two Cornish miners right behind them.

Fox only hunkered down a little and put a hand atop his battered hat. As did Rayburn and Ozzie. The people seated in the yard hugged the ground. When the dynamite exploded, the earth beneath the freight wagon shook violently. The remaining shards of glass in the shack windows blew out. A black plume of smoke erupted from the windows and doors, even through cracks in the plank walls.

Fox stood up on the freight wagon and fanned the smoke and dust. Rayburn and Ozzie stood up beside him. Fox reached down and pulled Terese to her feet. She rose reluctantly.

“When you leave here, what say you take me
with you as hostage in lieu of killing everybody?” Rayburn asked, just between him and Fox.

Fox appeared to consider it as he stepped down from the freight wagon and lifted Terese down beside him.

“All depends,” he said to Rayburn.

“On what?” Rayburn asked.

“On whether or not I see a ton of money in that big ol' safe,” Fox said.

Rayburn nodded to himself, having seen all the payroll money stacked inside the safe right before Gatts shut the door and twisted the dial.

“Sounds fair to me,” he said to Fox.

“Are you wanting to join us?” Fox asked on their way to the shack thirty feet away. He kept his voice low and guarded, against any of the miners hearing him.

“I'd join you, sure enough,” Rayburn said. “Soon as this is over, it's a sure thing my job here is over.”

Fox just looked at him, knowing there was more.

“All right, the fact is I'm through going straight,” Rayburn said. “I need to get on the other side of the law . . . where the money is.” He gestured Fox inside the shack where the Perros Locos stood staring through the smoke at the payroll money.

“Now, right there is some serious money,” Fox said, staring as if in awe for a moment.

“Holy Moses!” said Ozzie, staring wide-eyed at the stacks of cash. “We could buy us a whole string of Chinamen and use them for target practice. Drink whiskey . . . shoot Chinamen, all day long,” he added as he visualized it.

“Huh-uh. This is just the start, Oz,” said Fox. “We're going to be doing a lot of this from here on out.”

“Whoo-ee! I'm good with that too,” Ozzie said, barely containing himself.

Jep Rayburn stood watching, listening, figuring his best chances at staying alive.

“Well, the money's all there,” he said to Fox. “Where does that put us?”

“You really want to ride with us?” Fox said, studying his eyes closely.

“I don't say things I don't mean,” Rayburn replied. He held Fox's without wavering.