The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists Page 5

  Claire fired at the birds. Feathers flew and stray bullets whipped through the corn as the gun bucked in her hand.

  She pulled the trigger again and again and again.

  Until the gun was empty, and the only sound that remained was her scream.

  A tumult of screams and gunfire and black wings erupted from the corn.

  “Jesus!” Hank said. “It’s the law!”

  Arson didn’t say a word. He grabbed the Thompson machine-gun and tossed the Browning Automatic to his brother, and together they started into the corn.

  Arson’s heart pounded like a goddamn drum. If some cracker cop had shot up his Claire while he wasn’t watching…

  If the bastards had stolen her from him…

  If that had happened there was only one thing Arson Pike wanted.

  Blood.

  Pearl ran for all she was worth. Oh, lordy, but she hurt. A bullet had knocked her down and another had clipped her when she struggled to her knees, but she had known that she had to get up, even when a third bullet nearly blew her left hand clean off.

  Two fingers were gone from that hand, along with her wedding ring. Pearl was hit in the side. And there was something wrong with her neck, which was gushing blood like a garden hose. She didn’t even remember getting hit in the neck.

  The woman’s scream chased her through the corn. The gunfire stopped for a moment, but the scream didn’t. It was everywhere, all around her, like the corn and the sky and the clouds and the air that seemed as heavy and hot as blood.

  God. Pearl knew they’d done desperate things. They’d killed honest folks. She knew the law hated them. But what the bastards must have done to Claire to make her scream like that…

  Pearl didn’t want to know what that was. But she knew one thing — she had to keep moving or she’d end up screaming too. She didn’t know which way to go, but she had to go somewheres. She couldn’t slow down for a second. Else the law would get her is sure as sunshine.

  Behind her, the gunfire started up again.

  The screaming hadn’t ended.

  Pearl ran.

  Now she was screaming, too.

  By the sound of it, all hell had broken loose.

  There was no use waiting. Imogene kick-started the motorcycle. It was a heavier brute than the one she’d learned to ride, the one that belonged to that wildcat of a boy she’d met at the county fair. But then again, the cop outweighed that boy by a good bit, so it was only right that he’d ride a bigger machine.

  None of the cop’s weight was what you’d call misplaced, though. Imogene sure hoped that he’d stay in one piece.

  Fiddler was ten miles away.

  Somehow, Imogene knew they’d be the longest ten miles she ever traveled.

  She put the bike in gear and didn’t spare the horses.

  Tate moved along the edge of the cornfield, heading toward the road where Imogene had spotted the stolen Ford.

  The screams and gunfire had set him on edge. Who knew what the hell was going on in the cornfield. It could be almost anything — a police ambush set up by the local sheriff that no one had bothered to tell him about, or a crazy-brave farmer gunning for reward money, or a thieves’ quarrel turned deadly.

  Whatever it was, Tate knew he had to be ready for it. His gun was drawn and he was sweating bricks, trying to fix the newspaper photographs of Arson and Claire in his mind’s eye as he hurried along, trying to remember the descriptions of their accomplices and at the same time get a handle on the situation —

  And then the scream came right at him, slicing through the cornstalks a second before a woman emerged from the field. Tate whirled to meet her with his finger tight on the trigger, but he saw right off that the woman was both unarmed and injured.

  Which was another way of saying that someone had already shot her and done a damn thorough job of it. Still, her wounds didn’t seem to slow her down any. She charged right into Tate, and it was all he could do to keep from going down.

  Panic flared in her eyes as soon as she saw his pistol, and she took hold of the barrel with one hand and begged him, “Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot.”

  Her blood was on his gun, and on his shirt. Already, it had soaked through to his skin. Tate tried to keep his wits about him. He knew he had to size her up and do it quickly, because whoever had pumped her full of lead had to be close by.

  She had platinum blond hair and bee-stung lips. She wasn’t a farmer’s wife. That was for sure. She didn’t belong in a cornfield.

  She had to be part of the gang.

  The woman coughed and a stream of blood made a mess of the little Cupid’s bow painted on her lips. “I don’t want to scream no more,” she said, her fingers trembling around the barrel of Tate’s gun. “Don’t do nothing to make me scream.”

  Before Tate could say a word, the woman let go of the gun and slumped. Instinctively, Tate caught her before she fell.

  Another second and she was dead.

  Tate looked over her shoulder just in time to see the man with the Browning Automatic.

  One look at the corpse cradled in Tate Winters’ arms and the man’s eyes went wild.

  Then he started shooting.

  Fat droplets of blood rolled down Claire’s face. Four vultures lay at her feet, scarlet caverns burrowed in nests of black feathers courtesy of several .45 slugs.

  The birds that only ate dead things were quiet now. Not one of them managed a scream. They had tried to make a meal of Claire Ives. They might have done it if Claire hadn’t had a killer instinct that would shame Jack Dempsey.

  She had a gun, too. And a handful of bullets, cupped in her right palm. The bullets were slick with her blood. She could hardly feed them into the clip.

  Claire almost laughed. She was covered in blood, her body painted red as a five-alarm fire, and here she’d been worried about a little cut on her hand.

  Gunfire raked the cornfield. Claire slammed the clip home and started toward the ruckus. It sounded like Hank’s Browning, and maybe a pistol. Arson always used the Thompson, so the pistol probably belonged to a lawman. But if Arson was out there, Claire expected she’d hear him open up soon enough if the law was around.

  Claire hoped she’d hear that sound, and soon.

  If she didn’t hear it… If the cops had chopped Arson down before he fired a shot… If they’d shot her man in the back… if they’d done that…

  Claire refused to think about it. She moved down a corn row, her pistol ready. It was quiet now. She listened for a familiar voice, or an unfamiliar one… but there was nothing. She tried to remember where the car was, but she was all turned around. The sun was gone from the sky so she couldn’t gauge direction at all. Besides that, blood flowed into her eyes from the cuts the vultures had inflicted on her forehead, nearly blinding her.

  Wiping her eyes, she took a chance and stepped into the next row.

  She gasped and opened fire on the man she saw there. Her bullets tore through him, but he didn’t so much as flinch.

  And then Claire saw why.

  The man wasn’t a man at all.

  He wore a skeleton’s face.

  And he was grinning.

  Gunfire rocked the woman’s corpse, and she danced in Tate Winters’ arms as only the dead can dance.

  Tate shielded his body with the corpse. Still, he felt the lead pound into him. Once… twice… three times. Hard punches that stole his wind while stray bullets sang in the dead corn.

  The moist air ripened with the smell of gunpowder. Tate held the woman with one arm, her skin still warm to the touch, his blood pumping between them. He held her close, the way the man with the Browning must have held her on cool moonlit nights.

  But the woman was dead now. She belonged only to Tate, and he wasn’t going to —

  “Let her go!” yelled the man with the Browning. “Fight like a man, goddammit! Let my Pearl go!”

  Anger and horror flared in the man’s eyes. The barrel of the Browning jerked in Tate’s direction again, bu
t this time Tate’s pistol traveled a determined arc that mirrored it.

  Both men opened fire, and the man with the Browning bucked in his boots as Tate’s bullets sank red wells in his chest. The rifle fell silent and tumbled from the man’s grasp and he dropped to his knees just as Tate’s last bullet trenched the top of his skull.

  The man didn’t say another word.

  Tate released the woman’s corpse and reloaded quickly, staring into the bandit’s clear blue irises. A wave of blood spilled from the trench in the man’s head and washed his face. He blinked, watching as a scarlet puddle spread across Tate’s left shoulder, and then he smiled, wet red breaths whistling through holes in his chest that pumped dark blood like gushers in a Texas oil field.

  Tate kicked the Browning into the road and moved on, never taking his eyes off the fallen bandit.

  The man took the longest time to topple.

  The longest time to die.

  Claire emptied her pistol.

  Red tears burned her eyes. The skull swam before her in a scarlet sea of blood. She wiped her eyes clear, wiped again at the cuts on her forehead. She blinked, and stared, and the skull stared back, hollow eyes over a leering grin.

  Claire lowered her gun. It was only a scarecrow. She realized that now. Just a straw-stuffed suit and a rusty white bucket of a head with a skullface scratched on the dented side.

  She’d shot it full of holes, but there was no blood at all. That was the funniest thing. No blood, only straw and cloth and rust. Rust around the slashing hole that formed the laughing leer, and flaking orange teeth that had powdered to nothing when her bullets ripped through the bucket.

  But still the scarecrow smiled, despite its wounds.

  Claire smiled too. The scarecrow would grin long after she was gone. Under the hot summer sun and the freezing winter moon, the gentle rains of April and the angry sleet of October. The scarecrow would grin through all of it, and it wouldn’t bleed a drop. It would just hang on its cross laughing at the funniest joke of all, laughing until its brittle leer rusted clean away.

  Nothing could hurt it.

  It couldn’t bleed.

  It couldn’t die.

  But it couldn’t live, either.

  Claire didn’t know if she could live anymore. She didn’t know if she could die, either. But she knew that she could bleed. And as long as she could do that — alive or dead or consigned to some hell in between — why then, that was something, anyway.

  Even with all the blood, that was something.

  Claire jammed the last of her bullets into the .45 clip. Arson was out there somewhere. All she wanted was to find him.

  She’d do it.

  Even if it took her last drop of blood.

  A scarlet woman hurried through the corn.

  Tate glimpsed her between the rows. There and gone, cutting her own path, never pausing. Tate tracked her from the road, sometimes ahead and sometimes behind.

  He couldn’t see her face at all, only a mask of red, but he knew he was shadowing Miss Claire Ives, a cold-blooded killer wanted by every lawman from J. Edgar Hoover on down.

  Covered in blood, she sure as hell looked the part to Tate. Like some kind of nightmare. But Tate was bleeding, too. God knew he was leaking bad enough to start seeing things. Angels or devils, as the case might be. But somehow he knew that this vision was real, just as he knew that he had to confront it before he could worry about his own wounds.

  He was hurt, sure. Tore up in the shoulder, missing most of one ear, blood from some other wound making a sticky mess of his left boot. But the woman was bleeding too, and the blood didn’t seem to slow her down none.

  It was crazy, that’s what it was. Crazy for the both of them. Why, if they had any sense they’d both sit down and hope to hell that a certain young lady in a black slip was on her way back from Fiddler with an ambulance.

  Hell, two ambulances.

  But neither one of them sat down at all. Claire Ives rushed on, and Tate Winters followed.

  The Ives woman neared the road where the stolen Ford was parked. Tate glanced ahead, at the spot where the field ended and the two roads met.

  That was where he’d make his stand.

  At the crossroads.

  The gunfire had stopped.

  Arson heard movement in the field.

  Pale cornstalks parted like a wound.

  Claire came to him.

  Christ, she was all torn up. But Arson didn’t care. He swept her into his arms. He couldn’t get the words out fast enough.

  “It’ll be okay, baby,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”

  “Always?” she asked, looking at him hard.

  “Yeah. Until they put one of us in the — ”

  She pressed her fingers to his lips and stopped his words. “No,” she said. “Always.”

  Arson nodded, and Claire smiled under all that blood. He helped her into the Ford and climbed behind the wheel. It was still dead quiet — no sound but the wind combing through the corn.

  Dead quiet. Yeah. That’s what it was.

  Hank’s screams echoed in Arson’s memory. Pearl’s, too. But they were only echoes. Arson knew that his brother and sister-in-law were dead.

  He wasn’t, and he was damn glad of it.

  And he had his Claire.

  That was all that mattered.

  That, and getting the hell out of here before the law finished them, too.

  Claire reached out and took his right hand. Their fingers knotted around her blood. He raised her hand and kissed it, her fingers still locked in his.

  “Always,” he said.

  His lips shone like rubies.

  Wet with her blood.

  The engine roared to life, and the Ford started coming.

  Tate stood at the crossroads and raised his pistol. Straight on, the Ford came at him. Faster now. Black as a hearse, it came, its engine geared high, bearing killers who paid their way in blood.

  Their own, and the blood of many others.

  Tate aimed his gun and waited. He was bleeding bad. The car was thirty feet away, and in a couple of seconds it would be on him.

  It wasn’t going to slow down. It wasn’t going to stop.

  Neither was he. Blood leaked from his head and shoulder. Blood filled his boot. But he could bleed for at least another thirty seconds or so.

  He could stand his ground.

  He could pay his way in blood, the same way these two had. Hell, he had already done that.

  He’d already paid the price.

  And now he’d pull the trigger.

  Claire opened fire.

  The lawman stood his ground and did the same. His bullets tore through the windshield like angry hornets, and Claire closed her eyes in spite of herself, but it didn’t do any good because windshield shards sliced through her eyelids and stung her eyes. Still, she fired blindly as the car raced forward, fired until her gun was empty, and then another staccato blast exploded from the cop’s pistol and Arson grunted hard.

  The Ford bucked and rolled on one side. Arson lurched against her and her door came open as the car kept rolling. The gun flew from her grasp and then she felt it, hot on her face, a spray as warm as summer sunshine and she knew it was her lover’s blood and Arson’s scarred fingers brushed her breast so lightly so tenderly as they tumbled from the car.

  Together they hit the hard dirt road.

  They rolled in a red tangle.

  And when they came to a stop they didn’t move at all.

  But the blood did. Arson Pike’s blood washed Claire Ives, filling her wounds, and what she felt was the warmth of it, and the life in it.

  The busted windshield had blinded her, but it seemed she could see clearer than ever now.

  As her heart beat its last, and Arson’s did the same, everything Claire Ives saw was red.

  Tate’s feet were cold.

  He opened his eyes. Raindrops splashed his face. The gray sky had opened up, and thunder boomed, and lightni
ng flashed.

  Tate saw a vision. At least he thought it was a vision. An angel reaching down for him from above.

  And then the angel tugged at Tate’s belt, and the lawman noticed that the angel didn’t have any trousers.

  “Steal my pants and I’ll shoot you dead,” Tate said.

  “Sweet Jesus!” John Wallace Johnson gasped. “You’re alive!”

  “Yeah.” Tate sat up. “Now give me my belt.”

  John Wallace Johnson turned sheepish, handing the belt to Tate. “I was going to use it for a tourniquet,” the kid explained. “You’re hit in the leg, you know.”

  “How about my goddamn boots? What were you gonna use them for?”

  John Wallace didn’t answer. Tate got to his feet and grabbed his boots. He looked up into the sky, and raindrops pelted his face, and he took a step and nearly toppled over.

  “You ought to sit down, you know,” John Wallace Johnson said.

  “Shut up,” Tate said. He took a couple more steps, and then a couple more, and pretty soon he was where he wanted to be.

  The battered Ford lay on its side in the cornfield.

  Arson Pike and Claire Ives lay in the road at Tate’s feet.

  “They got what they deserved,” John Wallace Johnson said. He snatched a handkerchief from Arson Pike’s pocket and brushed Claire Ives’s bloody cheek with it.

  “Souvenir,” he explained.

  Tate glared at the young man, but the sound of sirens rose in the distance before he could tell John Wallace Johnson exactly what he thought of his souvenir.

  Tate heard those sirens and thought of one thing and one tiling only.

  Imogene. Damn. The little flapper had gone and done it. She really could ride a Harley.

  A woman like that… well, she just had to be a real sweet slice of something. Tate closed his eyes and thought about it while warm summer rain washed his face.