The Old Wolves Read Free Page B

“Where’s Brine?”
    â€œDead.”
    â€œDead?” LaMona’s fleshy lower jaw sagged, making a small round hole of her thin-lipped, little mouth. “I . . . I thought he musta got bored last night and went over to see that Beamer girl in Sandy Flat.”
    â€œNope. He bushwhacked me last night. You’d have been proud of him. Only, he took about four rounds for his efforts. Nope, he’s dead, all right. Now, I ain’t gonna ask you people again. Throw down them irons or you’re gonna be meetin’ ole Frog and ole Brine in hell in about two jerks of a whore’s bell!”
    â€œMy cousin, Jesse James, will hunt you down and kill you for this!” LaMona said, extending her arm and a pudgy index finger at Spurr.
    Just then Missy May started issuing a strange sound. The girl stood stiffly, glaring up the slope at Spurr, her mouth opening wider and wider and the sound growing louder and louder until she was bouncing on the balls of her gum boots and fairly screaming.
    She looked like a diamondback coiled to strike. Her eyes flashed fire. The others looked at her as though she’d suddenly been possessed by a demon. But they must have heard the sound before, and taken it as a signal, because they all whipped their heads back toward Spurr, eyes as wide and bright as Missy May’s.
    Spurr had never heard a sound so haunting in all his days. It rocked him almost literally back on his heels. “You just simmer down, now, young lady!”
    The last two words hadn’t left his lips before Missy May dragged the popper out of her coverall pocket, and Spurr shot her.

THREE

    Missy May dropped the gun as Spurr’s .44 round punched her two steps back, snapping her head back sharply.
    LaMona and the rest of Missy May’s gang jerked shocked gazes at the girl, who looked down at the blood spurting out the hole in her baggy shirt, between the small pert lumps of her breasts, and then at Spurr. The light was already dying in her blue eyes as she lifted her right arm and pointed a finger at the old lawdog, as though to indicate the man who’d shot her. She moved her lips but no words came out.
    She fell hard on her back, hair fanning out behind her on the grassy ground.
    Spurr ejected the spent cartridge casing from the Winchester’s breech, seated a fresh one, and pressed the stock against his shoulder once more. At the same time, LaMona reached under her shirttails, squalling,
“You’ll pay for killin’ my baby, you old bastard!”
    But James was already jerking up his own two pistols, so Spurr shot him next. He slid his rifle back to the left and punched a hole in LaMona’s fat hide just as the woman triggered one of her two Smith & Wessons at Spurr though both slugs screeched wild into the ground about three feet in front of the oak. As James went down, howling like a coyote, Preston and fat Darrold jerked up their own weapons and, crouching, cut loose at Spurr.
    The old lawman was fleet of foot when he had to be, and as bullets wheezed and buzzed around him, punching into the ground before and behind him, he ran to the next tree to his right, and pressed his back against the trunk. When there was a relative lull in the shooting, he snaked his Winchester around the oak’s right side and triggered three quick rounds at Preston, who’d hunkered down behind a pitted gravestone, and Darrold, who was using his father’s casket for a shield, triggering his old Spencer repeater over the top.
    Two of Spurr’s slugs hammered the side of Frog’s casket, but the third one drilled Preston a new eye—this one about two inches above the bridge of his nose. It punched him straight back until he was sitting upright against a gravestone directly behind the one he’d been using for cover. As Preston kicked his boots as though trying to dislodge fire ants crawling up his pants, Darrold punched a round into the tree about