Howard Hopkins - The Lone Ranger - Vendetta

The morning sun was already high overhead and the day was getting gawdamn hot. Heat waves rippled off the hardpacked wide main street. Cooperville was a sprawling town built akin to a horseshoe with false fronted buildings and homesteads at the south end of clapboard, brick and adobe. A gunshop, mercantile, bank, cafe and sundry businesses lined either side of the street.

She had just exited the cafe after a breakfast of beefsteak, eggs and Arbuckle’s. Awake most of the night ridin’ Matthews had left her famished and him sawing wood loud enough to wake the dead. She’d made her other men find their own sleeping arrangements for the night.

She stepped off the boardwalk, eyed the bank, which was open for business. For now she’d let it be, despite objections from a couple of her men. But once her business with the Ranger was concluded she’d be payin’ it a visit.

What once would have been a bustling cow town was more akin to a ghost town. Folks were plumb scared and she liked it that way. Made them less prone to stupidity, such as tryin’ to bring in the county law. She killed one of them a day at random to make certain they got the message. She reckoned the wife of the bank man would be next, that prissy little bitch. She hadn’t liked the woman on first look, and that never boded well for a long life.

She sauntered across the street, in no particular hurry, to the opposite boardwalk. The air smelled of horse piss and dust and the heat made it worse. Her nerves started to crawl. She was tired of stayin’ in that room but she reckoned this would be the last time she could move freely about with the Ranger nearby. She wasn’t ready to engage him just yet, no, not until she had that Injun and what she wanted from Cooper.

Cooper was a tough sonofabitch, she had to give him that. He hadn’t talked, and by Christ she had tried to make him. She’d already pulled off a couple of his finger nails and beat him half to death. She might respect that in another life.

Stepping onto the opposite boardwalk, a passerby, a man, gave her wide berth, keeping his gaze pinned to the boards as he passed. A low laugh came from her lips.

“Don’t worry, ain’t your day,” she yelled after him, but he didn’t look back, only hurried his pace.

It was funny… she couldn’t recollect what fear felt like. She’d known loneliness since she lost Butch, known it intimately. She knew hate and anger and disgust. She knew wrath and the craving for vengeance. But not fear. She had not known fear since the day her pa had lost her virginity to one of his drunken friends in a poker game. That was the first time she had felt fear… and the last. She had sworn the moment she ran away from that no-good bastard no one would take anything from her or make her afraid again. Never. In her years before Butch, as a bar whore, she had been the one to take—money from men who were too drunk to know their peckers were locked between her thighs and not where they intended them to be, and lives from those who got on her bad side, which were many and often. No man controlled her nor owned her. She controlled them and she reckoned that might be the one good thing she could thank her pa for. Fact, she had thanked him… right before put a bullet in him one night when he passed out upstairs in a whore’s cubicle. He’d not even had the decency to recognize the woman he was trying to bed was his own daughter.

Then she’d met Butch. And everything had changed. She still took what she wanted—gold, jewels, sex, but she took it together with him. He was the cruelest sonofabitch she’d ever met up with, and she the meanest thing a man like Butch Cavendish ever had the good sense to keep around.

Gawdammit, she missed that peckerwood.

She shook off the memory as she reached the marshal’s office. As she flung open the door, two of her men, one wearing a marshal’s tin star and the other a deputy’s badge, nearly came off their chairs. They would have had it not been for the whores sitting on their laps.

“You,” she said to the blonde bar dove straddling Parker, the fake marshal. “Get out.”

The girl quickly extricated herself from the man and, brushing blonde ringlets from her face, ran out the door.

“What about me?” the brunette woman wearing a peek-a-boo blouse asked, slipping off the deputy. She had a horse face that was entirely ugly.

“You… I don’t like. Sorry.” She pulled her Smith & Wesson and shot the woman in the head. The woman folded without uttering a sound, thudded hard on the floor.

“Jesus, what’d you go and do that for?” the fake deputy said, staring at the body of the dove. “I liked that one.”

She holstered her gun. “Such is life. Both of you stop the whores and be on the alert. He’s here.”

“Who’s here?” asked the marshal.

She smiled a vicious smile. “Reckon it’s time I told you what we’re doin’ here and who we’re doin’ it to. I aim to kill the Lone Ranger…”

12

The afternoon sun was just starting to dip towards the western hills when the Lone Ranger and Tonto rode into Coopersville. Since he still had little idea what exactly he was facing, the Masked Man had decided to ride directly into town, throw down the gauntlet and try to force a move on the part of the gang. The notion was not as reckless as it first appeared. Whoever led the gang had struck all around the Ranger, at folks he had come in contact with and cared about in his former life. That meant for the moment the gang leader only desired to lure him close before putting into motion the final part of his plan. Otherwise the gang would have tried to ambush him on the trail.

No, this smacked of more than just the simple killing of a man who delivered justice to owlhoots. It smacked of something personal, a vendetta. Which meant the person tasking him would need him to know why he was being killed before actually doing the deed.

But that didn’t apply to the man riding beside him. The Ranger saw only two choices to continue the pattern: killing Dan Reid and Tonto. Dan was safe as long as Cooper didn’t talk, but the Ranger had no way of knowing whether the gang had forced the information from the rancher by now. Even if they had, he judged Dan would be secure for the time being. The gang was here in Coopersville, while Dan was at least a two-day’s ride from here.

The bigger danger was to Tonto, though the Ranger wasn’t certain whether they would want to kill him outright or use him as a wedge somehow. They might try to take him. But Tonto would not be easy to take. Outlaws had tried, only to find themselves in the hands of the law, facing a necktie party.

The Ranger searched his memory, but pinpointing an enemy who might have a notion to get even for something personal and have the brains to employ it was problematic. Most owlhoots were cowards at heart, notoriously cocky. Big with words, they seldom had the balls to back up something as rash as trying to lure the Ranger into an obvious snare. They were ambushers, impulsive, reckless. Not planners…

This gang leader was cut from different cloth. He had a reason behind his actions and a method to his madness. Again the word “personal” struck him. He had too many enemies to count, virtually every killer, robber and rustler west of the Mississippi, but how many of those were on a personal level? Very few, he thought. Most who would have reason to make a close kill were dead or in jail. Of those who weren’t or had escaped, the percentage of them would not operate in such a progressive method. They were far more like to try a surprise attack, assassinate him out on the open trail.

Cavendish. The name rose in his mind again. He was such a man. An outlaw smart enough to plan in detail, resort to whatever means suited the situation, whether ambush or stealth. And he would have reason for a personal vendetta. Yet, Butch Cavendish was dead. The Ranger had watched him die.