Noose Page 11

“I have not forgot, sir. Yes, the man that killed my father is a dog, that is a fact.”

  “Yes, ma’am, he is.”

  Bess regarded Butler a long moment. He held her gaze, watching her back with something in his eyes she didn’t like—something she couldn’t put her finger on. Finally, she said, “Well, you know what they say.”

  “No, what do they say?”

  Bess stood, scraped her plate into the fire. She fixed Butler in a direct stare down where he sat below her and said, “It ain’t the size of the dog in the fight. It’s the size of the fight in the dog. I’d say that, fight-wise, this dog you’re after, he’s got some size on him. Hope yours is as big.”

  With that, she turned and headed toward her tent, disappearing behind the flap.

  Frank Butler didn’t watch her go. He just stared into the fire, the light gone from his ugly eyes. He spat the rest of his mouthful of food into the flames, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and took a sip of coffee.

  “Bitch,” he muttered.

  CHAPTER 23

  Being swept down the rough, rock-strewn flow of the Snake River was dangerous enough during the day but it was suicide at night.

  The current was deep, icy, and powerful. The swift surging breakwaters coursed and smashed against large rocks all the way through this stretch. And Noose couldn’t see the river, only hear it—all his eyes could make out was a deeper black in the already pitch black of the rural countryside. In the sunlight, a man might be able to swim or at least reach out and push away from the big wet boulders if he was lucky. Not so in the dark when you couldn’t see what you were heading into. But the cowboy could smell the river a few yards away and feel the cool coming off the water, sense the huge unseen force of weight and gravity of the Snake River barreling past.

  The moon was faint behind murky clouds in the gloomy sky tonight and while there were stars aplenty, little light shone down on the Snake. The river, that of it that could be discerned, resembled a big black void. It was a jagged dark ribbon like a yawning crevice in the valley floor.

  But Noose knew this river afforded him an opportunity to slip past the eight armed and trigger-happy men now positioned between him and Jackson Hole—a town where he might find sanctuary if he could make it the twenty miles to get there. First, Joe Noose had to duck past the bounty killers and get ahead of them if he was going to survive. He didn’t dare try it on dry land. During the day, they’d spot him for sure and pick him off quickly and easily. His only chance was to try and make it past them at night, when the gang was unawares, camped and resting. Even so, they might hear him. Could have a guard posted he didn’t see. These professional killers were bloodthirsty and ruthless but they weren’t stupid and were full of animal cunning. Noose could count on them setting alarms with empty cans and chains on wires near camp to make sufficient racket to wake the whole bunch if he tried to sneak past. His only way to get past them was to go down the river, and he was going to have to float so they didn’t see him.

  A canoe or a raft wouldn’t do, even if he had one, and he wouldn’t risk using it if he did. A watercraft they could spot from shore. A man alone up to his neck in the water in the black of night, maybe, hopefully, not.

  That plan at least he felt confident of and had made up his mind to try.

  The bounty killers were camped on the shoreline but would not see a man in the river getting washed by. It was just too damn dark. Noose himself couldn’t see the rocks and boulders glistening shiny and black ten feet ahead as he took his first steps into the freezing Snake River. This might work if he didn’t get his skull cracked open and his brains splattered on a rock, or knocked out and drowned in the rapids. It was easily possible. Or he could crack his ribs open again and if he made one noise, let alone let out a cry of pain or a scream, those shootists would hear him and start blasting.

  There had been no easy ways the last twenty-four hours and his options were no less difficult now.

  From where he hunkered by the eddies knee-deep in dank fragrant river mud, Noose could make out the distant fire of the bounty killers’ camp a quarter mile ahead down the river on the shore past the flowing water. He could vaguely smell burning wood and smoke and a faint whiff of coffee. A few tents and eight tethered horses were visible. The gunmen were mostly out of sight, probably in the tents. A couple of men hunkered by the campfire and smoke rose off it into the air to be swallowed in the darkness. There wasn’t much going on. A lot of the men might be asleep.

  The gang clearly figured they could take a load off because there was no way a wounded man like himself would try to travel this country in the dark. Under normal circumstances, his enemies would have figured that correctly, but these circumstances were anything but normal and improvisation was required.

  Noose couldn’t hear anything from here because this close the sound of the loud river surging by shattered the stillness and drowned out most other sounds.

  It was as good a time as any.

  The cowboy waded into the Snake. Cold shot up his legs and he instantly felt them go numb. The rocks were slimy with moss and algae, and his footing was slippery. The ground dropped away below the surface quickly, so it hardly mattered that he lost his footing because within a few seconds, Noose was up to his waist then his chest in the river. The strong surge of the swift current exerted its quick firm pull and he was off his feet, up to his neck in the river and being swept downstream. The bracing cold was like being dropped in a box of ice, but it felt good once he got used to it, refreshing against his aching wounds. The sense of deep power of the great river filled him with awe as he was carried downriver with the sweep of the current. Noose kept his body below the surface, paddling with his hands and feeling ahead of him for any surprise rocks that might crash against him. His nose and eyes were above the rapids, and remained unblinking and fixed on the fire and tents of the camp that were coming up quick on his right side as he sped past the shore.

  The figures of the bounty killers, three, then four, were visible now, sitting around the fire, carrying their rifles and tossing their coffee dregs into the flames.

  The tableau of the camp, like a chiaroscuro oil painting of golds and browns against a black canvas, grew closer and closer as the submerged man came up on it. There were silhouettes of people inside the tents, elongated shapes against the glowing amber canvas lit from the inside by kerosene lamps. Joe Noose was floating in the middle of the river, steering a straight trajectory as he was carried downstream, and he kept a sharp eye on the shoreline of the camp he was about to pass. None of the men were looking in his direction. Sparks floated bewitchingly up into the darkness above the dwindling fire, and the cowboy smelled burning wood clearly now.

  Noose switched his gaze to the river ahead. A twenty-foot-wide stretch of firelight fell from the camp onto the river like an illuminated band directly ahead about a hundred yards. The men cleaning their rifles by the tents could see if and when he was washed downstream through the light. After that, the Snake flowed past the camp and all was darkness again.

  Taking a deep breath, Joe Noose ducked his head below the surface of the water and tried to swim deeper. He kept his eyes open, but all he could see was pitch-black murk. Then gradually a dim illumination came and went as he traveled through it, and Noose knew he was past the light and the camp itself so he came up for air.

  No bullets hit him in the head as his mouth and jaw burst through the surface and he gulped down oxygen. Swinging his gaze behind him as he was washed downriver, Noose saw the tents of the camp shrinking behind him upstream, a few of the horses tethered to a tree on the outskirts giving him the side-eye as they somehow noticed him in the river, but none of the horses sounded an alarm and they, too, soon were lost from view.

  The last thing Noose was looking at that caught his attention as he floated past the camp was the silhouette in the last tent, which he assumed was a trick of the light, since otherwise one of the bounty killers had grown a nice set of tits.

  Br
eathing a sigh of relief that he was safely past the gang’s camp, Noose turned his face forward into the river a split second too late.

  The wet rock sledgehammered his skull and he passed out.

  CHAPTER 24

  Bess didn’t go back to her tent like she planned. She had been walking that way but was jumpy. Her whole body ached but her heart hurt worse than anything physical. Tiredness hung like a lead blanket over her shoulders and limbs and she wanted nothing more than to lie down and get some sleep but her guess was she wasn’t to get a wink tonight because she wasn’t going to risk closing her eyes for a second on these men.

  Her being a U.S. Marshal kept these rabid dogs on a leash only as far as it went.

  A marshal’s badge was just a piece of metal.

  She had one, but bullets were pieces of metal, too, and they had a lot of those, these men did.

  The female lawman walked alone through the darkness away from the glow of the fire where she had left that man with the killer’s eyes, Frank Butler, sitting alone. She didn’t know anything about him but that he was a very bad man. Bess had heard people talk about evil . . . preachers in church, her father when he read her the Bible before bed, but that was just a word for bad. She had never seen evil up close until now. Butler was evil in the flesh. You felt he was capable of anything. Even though each step took Bess farther from the comforting glow of the fire into the deepening darkness of the camp perimeter, it also took her a step farther away from Butler, and that made her feel safer.

  Bess wandered across the campsite toward the river.

  She didn’t feel safe around any of these men.

  It was good to be alone.

  There would be no sleep tonight, this was a certainty.

  It was a clear night. She looked up. The vast canopy of Wyoming sky loomed above her, black as pitch but beaming with millions of blinding stars. Bess smiled. That’s where her dad was now. Up in heaven. Because if ever a man deserved . . .

  Bess’s throat suddenly constricted with choked grief and sorrow, eyes burning with stinging tears as she felt a racking sob wrench up out of her guts. Quickly, the young woman wiped her tears away and forced composure on herself—she better not cry in this bad company. But she wanted to weep. It had all happened so fast today, from her father’s murder to her riding with the bounty killer gang to her being here. Bess realized she hadn’t had time to cry at all for her father. She had gotten into action right away, grabbed a gun, saddled up, joined this motley crew to go after the man responsible and get justice for her father—she hadn’t had time to think, and now Bess realized she hadn’t wanted to think, because if she did she would have to think about the lost parent she loved so much . . . and she would cry.

  Maybe if she hadn’t been so quick on the trigger to bury her grief beneath ill-considered action she would have done a little thinking, thought things through a bit, not gone off half-cocked. Because now that Bess had a few minutes of reflection in all the peace and quiet, she saw clearly how unwise her decision that brought her here to the remote wilderness, one woman alone with this gang of mongrel killers who would shoot her, or worse, the minute she got in their way or they had a mind to. Her marshal’s badge wouldn’t protect her any more than it did her dad.

  She should never have ridden with these men.

  Hadn’t Nate Sugarland always told his hyperactive tomboy daughter to think things through, to measure twice and cut once, to look before you leap? He had been full of dozens of such homilies.

  Don’t just do something, stand there was her dad’s favorite.

  By God, Bess was going to miss him.

  Might see you sooner rather than later if I spend any more time with Frank Butler, Dad, she thought, smiling up at the stars. That at least was a comforting thought.

  Until a voice suggested now might be the perfect time for the reunion.

  The marshal swung her head from the riverbank into the camp and saw two men standing in the dark by a tent talking . . . about her. She couldn’t see their eyes but felt their rodent gaze on her. The young woman’s ears were keen and damn sure heard what one of them said loud enough that he wanted her to hear it.

  “Excuse me, boys. I heard that,” Bess said sharply, turning in their direction.

  Yellow-toothed grins flashed like knives in the dark.

  She took a step toward them. “You want to say it again?”

  “Nobody was talking to you . . . Marshal.” She knew the voice. Culhane. One of the surlier of the shootists.

  “No, you were talking about me. I heard what you said.”

  “What was it you heard?” Lawson. The other dirtbag. She was keeping track of names.

  Bess felt herself experience an adrenaline dump. Her body tingled and her heart pounded as her pulse raced. She was sick of feeling scared around these men and needed to show them she was not to be messed with. Only way to do that was kick some ass so they respected the badge and the woman behind it. Looked like now was that moment.

  The marshal walked up to the two bounty killers and stood toe-to-toe. “What I heard one of you say was, ‘That bitch lawdog gets a bullet in the skull way out here, nobody would . . .’ Didn’t catch the last part but caught the first and can guess the rest.” Both gunmen held her gaze defiantly. She held theirs right back. “You just threatened a U.S. Marshal.”

  “You ain’t no real marshal, you just some little lawdog’s bitch—” Culhane didn’t finish his sentence. Pulling back her arm, her fist closed, Bess Sugarland punched him in the jaw, putting her whole shoulder into it. With a cry of surprise and pain, the bounty killer was knocked to the ground. His head shot up in fury as he spat a tooth. “You’re dead.”

  Feeling sudden movement to her right, Bess ducked a roundhouse swing by Lawson, and as his balance wavered when his fist went over her head, she straightened and kicked her left leg up into his groin as hard as she possibly could. Her boot slammed into his crotch with crunching force and Lawson screamed in a high-pitched porcine squeal, clutching his pants and dropping to his knees, face contorted in agony as he started to puke. Bess, untouched, stood over the man and stared down at him in pure disgust and disregard.

  “Looks like you need a new set of balls. Want to borrow a pair of mine?” she said.

  “Bitch!” Culhane drove himself off the ground, going for her throat with both outstretched hands, spittle frothing from his lips. Bess dropped to a fighting stance and brought up her fists, but Culhane didn’t get another step before four of the other bounty killers leapt out of the dark onto their fellow shootist and held him back, restraining him by the arms and in a choke hold from attacking Bess. It was Sharpless, Trumbull, and she thought the others were named Wingo and Garrity.

  “What are you doing, you stupid fool, you don’t hit a marshal!” Sharpless yelled, his arm wrapped around Culhane’s neck as he throttled him and dragged him to the ground with the others, Culhane kicking and thrashing the whole time. In moments, he was subdued by the other bounty killers.

  “You okay, Marshal?” Sharpless asked, worried, coming up to Bess and touching her arm, his eyes filled with worry and concern—about me screwing up your reward for you with the U.S. Marshal’s office, Bess thought cynically as she lowered her fists.

  “I’m fine,” she retorted. “They were the ones got hurt, not me.”

  “That’s a fact.” Sharpless grinned appreciatively. “Where you learn to handle yourself like that?”

  “My father.”

  “I’m sorry for the actions of my men, Marshal.” Bess swung her gaze to Frank Butler standing by the campfire, his eyes reflected in the dancing flames. “I take full responsibility. You have my word it will not happen again.”

  With a dismissive wave of her hand, Bess let Butler know with that gesture it was no big thing. “Been a long day for everybody.” She took a deep breath and started walking back toward the river, a good fight being just the thing she needed to get her blood flowing, because now she had landed a few punches she felt l
ess afraid of these men.

  The marshal looked back over her shoulder to see Lawson and Culhane were now on their feet but Butler hadn’t moved. The rest of the bounty killers had gathered around and trouble was stirring . . . but not for her.

  * * *

  “I want a word you with you boys in private.” Butler stood tall and formidable in the gloom, backlit by the campfire that carved his jagged shadow in a jigsaw of darkness on the ground.

  “Yes, Mr. Butler.” Culhane and Lawson exchanged nervous glances. They had a good idea of what lay in store.

  Butler nudged his jaw for the two men to follow him across camp into the darkness. Then he turned his back and walked grimly in that direction. The bounty killers followed their leader, jumpy in stride. The three walked about thirty paces until they were out of eyeshot and earshot of the rest of the gang and the marshal, then Frank Butler stopped and turned to face his two men, his eyes glittering blackly above his thick mustache. His voice was low. “I told you boys not to make trouble with that marshal, didn’t I?”

  “But she had it coming, Mr. Butler, I—we—”

  “I run this gang and I gave you an order,” Butler snapped, cutting off Culhane.

  “Yes, sir, you did.”

  “Did you follow it?”

  “Nossir, we didn’t.” Lawson looked at his boots, fingers worrying the brim on his hat.

  “Damn right you didn’t.”

  “We’re sorry, Mr. Butler,” they both said.

  The leader adopted a reasonable tone. “I can’t have any trouble with the U.S. Marshal’s office in Jackson Hole when we deliver Joe Noose slung over his saddle, and this woman can make some. I don’t like having some nosy uppity lady marshal riding with us and getting in our business any more than any of the rest of you do. But those is the cards we been dealt. The reward hangs in the balance. We need her on our side or, failing that, we need her not to screw things up for us, which she can do because of that badge. If she gets wind of what really happened back at the bar, or if the U.S. Marshal’s office thinks this ain’t anything but a legal bounty, we don’t get that money. That means we play it smart and we play it cool and what I don’t need are any of my men acting like fools and blowing this reward and taking money out of my pocket.”