Read Payback at Big Silver Online

Authors: Ralph Cotton

Payback at Big Silver (6 page)

BOOK: Payback at Big Silver
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“Sheriff, I don't know what to make of you seeing her lying there dead,” said Sam. “I might be saying ‘coincidence' because I don't know what else to call it. All those other things you talked about seeing before, I believe the doctor might be right. The fact is I just don't know.”

Stone thought about it and nodded.

“Obliged that you're honest enough to admit you don't know,” he said. “I don't think the doctor knows either, but being a doctor he can't admit it like the rest of us can.” He sucked on the cough drop and readjusted it in his mouth. His fingertips went back to tapping his gun butt. “I need some coffee. What about you?”

The Ranger looked him up and down.

“Obliged, but I'm good,” he said. “Are you going to be all right here, with Centrila's men in town?”

“All right, how?” said Stone. “I'm getting over the whiskey shakes a little more every day. I'm drawn tighter than a fiddle, but I'm holding myself together.” He gave a stiff grin. “I'm not turning into a wolf—”

“I can stay a day or two longer,” Sam said, cutting him off, seeing how high-strung and shaky he'd become. “My prisoners wouldn't mind waiting a couple of days before I turn them in.”

“I'm obliged for your offer, but you take your prisoners on in, Ranger,” Stone said. “I'm all right here.” He gazed away, off across the evening shadows along the distant hill lines. “Nobody made me drink. I got into this shape on my own. I'll get through it on my own.”

Sam nodded.

“All right,” he said. “I needed to make the offer. That done, I'm turning in. I want to head out before daylight.”

“Obliged,” Stone said, still staring away across the late-evening sky. “You can have the cot in the back room. I'll be at my desk tonight.”

“Trouble sleeping?” Sam asked.

“No,” said Stone, “trouble dreaming, is all. I can get to sleep, but my dreams wake me up.” He gave a slight shrug. “I know it's just the whiskey trying to hang on. It'll pass.” He looked away again as if not wanting to talk about it. “Night, Ranger,” he said without looking around.

“Night, Sheriff,” Sam said, touching the brim of his sombrero.

Chapter 6

Before the first ray of dawn mantled the horizon, Sheriff Stone sat slumped in his chair, his head bowed over his desk like a man deep in prayer. A mug of cold coffee sat at his right hand; loose cough drops lay strewn atop a stack of wanted posters. He snored quietly, deeper in sleep than he had been for the past week. The Ranger had slept on a cot in the back room. When he awakened, he dressed and pulled on his boots and walked out the rear door, rifle and saddlebags in hand, careful not to disturb the sheriff's much-needed rest. He eased the rear door closed behind himself.

While he walked to the livery barn to ready his dun and the prisoners' horses for the trail, inside his cell Boomer Phipps stood up from his bunk and looked through the darkness at the sleeping sheriff as he stepped over to the back wall. In the cell next to him, Dobbs also stood up and watched the big outlaw. Sensing something afoot, Dobbs eased his arm out of the sling the doctor had placed around his neck and walked to the door of his cell. The two prisoners nodded at each other in the laddered moonlight lying slantwise through the rear barred windows.

Quietly Boomer reached up, gripped the window bars in his giant hands and walked three steps straight up the wall until he squatted across the window frame like some ape caged in a public zoo. Dobbs watched, barely daring to breathe, as the big man planted and pushed his feet against the wall with all his massive strength. The iron bars creaked in Boomer's viselike grip.

“Good God!”
Dobbs whispered, hearing a long muffled groan build and begin to erupt from Boomer's broad chest. At the same time he heard a cracking of rock and hard mortar where the window bars began giving way to the enormous pressure pulling against them.

Glancing toward the sleeping sheriff, Dobbs noted that the snoring had stopped suddenly. He started to whisper something to Boomer, caution him against the deep rumbling sound he was making. But before he could say a thing, he saw the barred window break free of its frame and launch the big outlaw across the cell as if he'd been fired from a circus cannon.

Dobbs ducked down as Boomer hit the front of his cell so hard the entire building shuddered with the impact. Boomer fell to the floor with the bent window bars atop him. At his desk, the terrible racket caused Sheriff Stone to jerk his bowed head up and leap to his feet. He grabbed his holstered Colt instinctively. As he hurried to the front of the two cells to see what had happened, he saw Boomer sling the window bars aside and rise to his feet.

“Hold it right there,
big man
,” Stone shouted. “I'll shoot.” He stuck his Colt out arm's length toward the huge outlaw.

“No, you won't, law dog,” Boomer shouted in reply. “Nobody's going to shoot me.” He started to turn toward the torn-open window. Stone cocked the outstretched Colt and hurried closer, aiming carefully between the bars. But before he pulled the trigger, Dobbs sprang upright, reached through and grabbed the sheriff by his forearm and yanked him forward. Stone's forehead struck the iron bars with the muffled sound of a church bell. He crumbled down onto his knees. His gun flew from his hand and skidded away across the floor.

“Boomer, wait, I got him!” Dobbs shouted.

Boomer jerked to a halt and looked at the sheriff wobbling unsteadily on his knees, his gun gone.

“So you did, Freddie boy,” the big outlaw said. He hurried forward as Dobbs grappled through the bars with the knocked-out sheriff, searching him for the cell key.

“Here,” Boomer said. He jerked Stone forward against the bars, turned him around and yanked the long key from his rear trouser pocket. When Stone moaned and tried to stop him, Boomer yanked his head against the bars again and let out a laugh at the muffled ring of iron against skull bone. “Told you, you won't shoot me,” he said to the limp sheriff lying on the floor.

Huddled at the front of their cells where a partition of bars separated the two, Dobbs stood and hurried to his cell door as Boomer stood up with the key, unlocked his own cell door and stepped out.

“Jesus, hurry, Boomer!” Dobbs said, even as the big outlaw stuck the key in and turned it. On the floor, Stone groaned and tried to settle the spinning world around him. As the door swung open, Dobbs said, “What the hell? Were you going to leave me behind?” He stepped out of the cell and clasped his wounded shoulder.

“I didn't, though, did I?” said Boomer firmly. He grabbed Dobbs and pulled him toward the cell with the missing window instead of letting him go for the front door. “This way, Freddie. Nobody will see us.”

The two hurried inside Boomer's open cell, across chunks of broken rock, over to the open window frame. Boomer picked Dobbs up by the scruff of his neck and hoisted him out of the window. Dobbs hit the ground and looked up, seeing Boomer's big hands reach through and grab the frame edges and pull himself up and out.

“Hurry, Boomer!” he said.

Boomer's big arms and the upper half of his torso squeezed out of the window frame as if the building were struggling to give him birth. But then he stopped and wiggled back and forth vigorously.

“I'm stuck, Freddie,” he said, trying to keep his big voice lowered, knowing that behind him the sheriff would come to any minute.

“Push, push hard, Boomer!” Dobbs said. “I can't reach you from down here. You've got to push yourself through!”

“I'm trying, Freddie,” Boomer said. He put his hands back flat against the wall on either side and pushed hard. He strained and grunted and twisted back and forth, gaining freedom an inch at a time.

Behind him, Stone shook his head and batted his bleary eyes. He saw the back half of Boomer Phipps struggling in the window. Looking all around for his Colt, he saw it lying on the floor under the edge of his desk and scrambled over and grabbed it.

Pulling himself up the side of his desk, the awakening sheriff saw Boomer give a final push and fall out of sight into the alley behind the building. Colt in hand, Stone collected himself quickly. He ran out the front door and around the corner of the alley beside his office. He arrived at the rear of the building in time to see Boomer push himself up from the ground, Dobbs pulling him by his arm.

“Hold it, both of you!” Stone shouted. He fired a warning shot over their heads, hoping it would hold them in place. But it didn't.

“Run, Freddie!” Boomer shouted, giving the smaller outlaw a shove to get him going. Yet, as Dobbs turned and ran, instead of running himself, Boomer started stalking toward the sheriff with his big arms spread like a standing grizzly.

“You can't shoot me, Sheriff! I'm unarmed,” he shouted. He started coming forward quicker, forcing his huge body into a powerful run.

You're wrong, Boomer,
Stone said to himself, standing his ground, his smoking Colt cocked out at arm's length toward the large charging man.

The sheriff's first shot hit Boomer in his broad chest, yet the impact only staggered him. Boomer kept coming. Stone fired again; this time the shot hit Boomer in his right shoulder, and again Boomer staggered. But he still wouldn't be stopped. He roared in pain and rage and kept coming.

Stone stood firm, but he knew if Boomer didn't fall soon the big man would be upon him. He fired again—
fourth shot,
he reminded himself as the Colt bucked and belched fire into the grainy darkness. The bullet only grazed Boomer on the inside of his upper arm. But the sting of the four bullets was catching up to the big man. He stopped and swayed in place, feeling warm blood spread down his chest, his arm. He bellowed like an enraged bull; he lowered his head and lurched forward again. There was now no more than fifteen feet between them. Stone stood firm, cocked the pistol and fired.

Shot five,
he told himself. He saw Boomer's lowered head lift up with a jolt as the bullet struck it dead center. In the moonlight he caught a glimpse of Dobbs on his knees farther along the alley.

“Don't
shoot
!” Dobbs shouted in a shaky voice
,
seeing Boomer fall at Stone's feet like a downed buffalo. “I give up! It wasn't me. It was all his idea!”

One bullet left. . . .

Stone glanced down at Boomer, then back at Dobbs. Smoke curled and rose from the barrel of his Colt. He noted the steadiness of his hand as he raised the big warm gun and cocked it in Dobbs' direction. The Colt in his hand felt
right
—he felt
right
, he told himself. Balanced, steady, everything aligned. . . . He eyed down the barrel sights at Freddie Dobbs, who held his hands over his head in surrender.
There it is,
Stone told himself, his aim locked in, his finger tightened on the trigger.

“Don't shoot, Sheriff,” the Ranger said, sliding to a halt behind him, his Colt out and cocked, as it had been since he heard the first shot resound along the alleyway to the livery barn. “Ease it down,” he added, realizing he'd found Stone on that last split second before bullet hit bone. “You can do it.”

Stone waited a second longer; then he lowered the Colt until it was pointed straight down before laying his thumb over the hammer and uncocking it.

“That was close, Ranger,” he said in a quiet, steady tone. Along the alley they both saw townsmen appear out of the darkness. Lowering his voice, he said, “He wouldn't stop. He just kept coming at me. I couldn't turn and run.”

“I know, Sheriff,” the Ranger replied quietly. “A man that size, you did the only thing you could. Reload your Colt and holster it. I'll get Dobbs and put him back in his cell.” He looked up at the ripped-out window frame, then down at Boomer's body. He shook his head in regret.

“Boomer Phipps got too big for everything around him,” he said.

•   •   •

It was midmorning when the Ranger stepped atop his dun, a lead rope to Dobbs and Boomer Phipps' horses in hand. Boomer's big body lay wrapped in canvas, tied down over his horse's bare back; Dobbs sat slumped, his arm back in the sling, his free hand cuffed to his saddle horn. Sheriff Stone stood on the boardwalk out in front of his office, a warm coffee mug in his left hand, a cigarette pressed between his lips. The bowed misshapen window bars leaned against the building awaiting the town blacksmith. On the boardwalk lay a short pile of broken rock and mortar cement from around the window frame.

Stone parked a cough drop in his cheek and took the cigarette from his mouth.

“Hard to believe any one man could rip out a cell window that way,” he said, toeing the rubble as he spoke. He looked out at the huge body of the outlaw, and the horse standing beneath it.

“You had to see it,” Sam agreed, also looking at the broken rock and bent window bars. Freddie Dobbs sat listening with a sore smirk on his face.

“Sure you don't want to bury that big rascal here?” Stone nodded toward Boomer's horse. “I bet his cayuse would be well obliged to you. I'll give you an affidavit that he died here, attempted jailbreak.”

“I'd sooner turn him in at Fort Hamlin, let them do all the paperwork,” Sam replied. “Like you said, it's
hard to believe
it happened, let alone trying to put it all down in writing.”

Stone nodded and sucked on the cough drop as if considering the matter.

“Yeah,” he said, “that's true. I best let everybody get used to me not being a wolf awhile longer, before I go making any wild-sounding statements.”

“You shot him down in cold blood, is what I plan on telling anybody who'll listen,” Dobbs said, straightening in his saddle. He looked back and forth between the two lawmen as they just stared at him. “That's right, I will,” he continued. “I saw the whole damn thing. I'll tell them he was unarmed, hands in the air, trying to surrender—”

“That's enough out of you, Freddie Dobbs,” Sam warned. “We've already talked about this. Anything else you've
got
to say, tell it to the judge in court. Anything else you
feel
like saying, you stop first and ask yourself how you'd enjoy a pistol barrel across your jaw.”

“You better think about this, Sheriff,” Dobbs warned, undaunted, ignoring the Ranger. “Tell this Ranger to let me go. Once we ride away, it'll be too late. Anybody wants to hear what happened to Boomer Phipps, I'll give them a whole earful. You all but emptied your gun in him—him only trying to give himself up. Lie about it all you want, Sheriff, I'll set things straight, is what I'll do!”

Sam and Stone looked at each other.

“Every word I said is true, Ranger,” Stone said. “He come at me and kept coming—”

Sam raised a gloved hand, stopping him.

“You needn't explain yourself again, Sheriff,” he said in a quiet tone. “Boomer tried buffaloing me the same way when I arrested him. Luckily he went down before he got close enough to do any damage.”

“That's it, stick together,” Dobbs said. “That's what you law dogs always do.”

BOOK: Payback at Big Silver
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