Микки Спиллейн - Last Stage to Hell Junction

“Yessir?”

“Tie your horses in the back and get in. Mind our guests.”

The boy did that, then scrambled back into the coach and settled next to the unconscious Parker. He had a deadly revolver in his hand and a stupid grin on his face.

Then the ride got even rougher, as the stagecoach was driven off the road toward the mountains and canyons of the Sangre de Cristo, dust boiling in its wake.

That the local undertaker, Casper P. Perkins, an appropriately cadaverous individual in constant black, had been the one to find the bodies in the road was both fitting and ironic.

The man had been transporting the late Ben Lucas — the hand from the Cullen spread who’d been shot to death yesterday by Burrell Crawley, Caleb York’s current hoosegow guest — to be installed at Trinidad Cemetery.

Lucas had no kin anyone knew of, and Willa Cullen had done the county a favor by volunteering to pay for the burial. There’d been no service, and the prompt disposal of the earthly remains of the cowboy who’d been sweet on a girl called Molly was a practical affair — undertaker Perkins (though a skilled cabinetmaker whose coffins were second to none) knew not of embalming, and even in a chilly month like this, the sooner a corpse got into the ground the better.

So Perkins and his shroud-wrapped passenger had rattled back to Trinidad in a buckboard, the dead cowhand making an unexpected return trip, the undertaker stopping at the sheriff’s office to report the grim findings. This only seemed to support York’s notion that Perkins had a way of showing up instantly after any violent death.

But for the time being the two dead bodies in the rutted road were the purview of York and Dr. Albert Miller, the lawman’s friend and Trinidad’s unofficial coroner, who had come immediately to the scene.

Stage driver Norval Bratcher lay sprawled facedown on the side away from Boot Hill. Shotgun guard Gus Gullett was similarly a pile of dead on the side nearer the graveyard. When Doc Miller leaned over each of them, it wasn’t to check for a pulse — these two could not have been more obviously deceased if they had already been residents of the cemetery.

The white-haired, paunchy physician rose, smoothing a rumpled brown suit that had been that way before he knelt over the corpses. “No rigor yet, Caleb. Blood still wet.”

York, looking like a circuit preacher in his usual black apparel, came over from the roadside where he’d been examining the place where the stagecoach had left the road. “Not long ago, then.”

The doc took off his wire-framed glasses and polished them on his shirt while he pondered. “Within the hour, I would say. Single gunshots to the head. From an angle slightly below where they’d have been, seated up in the stagecoach box.”

“Someone on horseback?”

Miller shrugged. “A defensible assumption. That’s a diagnosis you can make better than I.”

York gestured toward the yellow-brown road. “Even in hard dirt like this, it doesn’t take an Indian scout to read the signs — a group of at least four men on horses did this.”

“Is that them, you think?”

The physician was pointing off past Boot Hill, where a distant cloud of dust could be discerned between here and where the mountains took the horizon. Above was that clear blue sky New Mexico seemed almost to own, but a coolness and slight breeze whispered rain.

“Must be,” York said, as he moved toward his black-maned, dappled-gray gelding, the animal waiting patiently along the roadside. “Again, no great tracking skills needed to see where the coach was driven off the road and headed that way, with men on horseback accompanying.”

Mindful of the precious cargo on that stagecoach, York was moving fast. He was stepping boot into stirrup when the doc called, “Caleb!”

York swung up into his saddle as the doctor approached.

Miller’s expression was tight with confusion and concern. “What in tarnation is this about? Why steal a whole damn stagecoach? Why murder both driver and guard?”

“Norve and Gus likely tried to stop the holdup, and got tickets to eternity for their trouble.”

Miller was shaking his head. “But there was no Wells Fargo strongbox on that stage, no payroll of any kind. Nothing of value!”

York did not answer that directly, instead saying, “I have a bad feeling I caused this.”

“Caused it?”

“Someone sitting in my jailhouse was supposed to be on that stage, keeping the people in line. Knowing Raymond Parker like I do, I will lay good odds he fought back. He carries a hideaway pistol.”

The doctor’s gray eyes were wide behind the glasses. “Raymond Parker was on that stage?”

York nodded, once. “And he is certainly ‘something of value.’”

Miller frowned. “A kidnapping you mean? A ransom scheme?”

“So it would appear. And two other passengers are of value, to me anyway — Willa Cullen and Rita Filley.”

Miller, who did not shock easily, clearly was. He had ridden out here in his buckboard, drawn by a Missouri Fox Trotter, who also was patiently waiting on the roadside opposite Caleb’s steed.

The doctor said, “I don’t believe I can load those two up by myself, Caleb.”

York, up on the gelding, said, “I can’t take the time. Head back to town and have the undertaker do it for you. He’ll be happy to. He always welcomes new customers.”

Miller sighed deep and nodded as York headed out at a good clip, heading toward that distant boil of dust.

He rode hard, but not so hard as to lose the trail the stagecoach and the multiple horses of the riders had left him, staying to one side. Much as he believed it to be the case, York could not be certain the dirty cloud he was chasing belonged to the stage. It could be something else.

So his eyes followed the coach’s path through the scruffy, dusty landscape, an oddly beautiful barrenness adorned with occasional low-slung sand dunes. Way up ahead, where the hills became mountains, some occasional green showed itself, pines and such.

Caleb York had killed more than his share of men. The number, which he knew but mostly kept to himself (past thirty souls now), did not bother him. He had never put a man down needlessly and had worked to avoid doing so, in damn near every case. Yet the men whose lives he’d ended all earned the honor, and as he rode through this near desert he knew already that more killing awaited him.

That whoever had done this would also die.

Perhaps not an ideal way of thinking for a lawman, and these days an outmoded one. For a long time civilization had crawled like some poor sod caught out here with a dry canteen and no road in sight. Now civilization was racing, its thirst for change unslaked.

This stagecoach someone had snatched was a little dinosaur with wheels, jostling along on its way to extinction. The iron horse was coming. It was damn near here.

Still, York didn’t imagine men would ever be so civilized that crime would go away, that greed would wither, that wanting and wanted men would be history. He had never been a gunny drifting and looking for trouble. He’d been a manhunter who sought bounty for bringing in badmen, and a detective for Wells Fargo, and now, finally, if kind of accidentally, a lawman in New Mexico.

But whichever side of a badge you were on, if you were good with a gun, you were part and parcel. You became a target yourself. For every Billy the Kid, there was a Pat Garrett; for every Clanton, there was an Earp and the occasional Doc Holliday.

The men who had done this thing were killers. The ruined bodies of Bratcher and Gullett proved that. What these killers hadn’t banked on was having another killer on their trail, and Caleb York had no hesitation about adding them to his list of the dead. He didn’t know who they were yet. But he knew they would deserve what he had in mind.