Last Stage to Hell Junction Read online

  “I saw you,” Willa said from her window.

  He seemed amused as he looked up at her, leaning a forearm against the coach. “What did you see, child?”

  “Your Hamlet—in Denver. Three years ago, I think.”

  “Did you like my performance?”

  “Then or today?” she asked.

  He laughed uproariously. She couldn’t tell if it was real or not. If he was acting, it was too much. If he wasn’t, he was crazier than that Dane he played.

  The Filley woman squeezed in nearer Willa to look out the window at the highwayman.

  The saloon woman snapped, “Why are you doing this? There’s no Wells Fargo strongbox on this stage. There’s nothing of value, unless you like to dress up in women’s clothing!”

  “Back in the Bard’s day, I might have. But not now.”

  Willa asked, “Are the driver and his guard all right?”

  “No. They were foolish, and now have breathed their last.”

  The two women drew back from the window.

  Hargrave peeked in. “As for what we’re doing, we are indeed robbing the stage. But the item of value onboard is that disheveled character seated across from you—Raymond L. Parker.”

  Parker, looking like an unmade bed, had said nothing since he’d been hauled back onto the stage. He was awake but still dazed.

  The saloon woman demanded, “And what of us?”

  “You continue breathing at my sufferance. And with my forbearance. It remains to see if you will annoy or amuse me. As Will Shakespeare says, ‘The quality of mercy is not strained’—nor is my patience, should you strain that.”

  He swept off his hat and bowed to them, an arch display of theatrics that did not amuse Willa.

  “Ladies,” he said, tugging his hat back on.

  Then he walked toward the front of the coach. “Reese! Get those carcasses down and dump them on the roadside. And clean that seat up, else you’ll get gore all over yourself.”

  “Them women—they’re witnesses, Blaine.”

  Hearing this, Rita clutched Willa’s arm, and Willa grasped the hand at her sleeve.

  Hargrave was saying, “You’d leave two dead females on the road, you blinking idiot, to bring out all the law in the Southwest? Now get about your business. Randy!”

  “Yessir?”

  “Tie your horses in the back and get in. Mind our guests.”

  The boy did that, then scrambled back into the coach and settled next to the unconscious Parker. He had a deadly revolver in his hand and a stupid grin on his face.

  Then the ride got even rougher, as the stagecoach was driven off the road toward the mountains and canyons of the Sangre de Cristo, dust boiling in its wake.

  CHAPTER THREE

  That the local undertaker, Casper P. Perkins, an appropriately cadaverous individual in constant black, had been the one to find the bodies in the road was both fitting and ironic.

  The man had been transporting the late Ben Lucas—the hand from the Cullen spread who’d been shot to death yesterday by Burrell Crawley, Caleb York’s current hoosegow guest—to be installed at Trinidad Cemetery.

  Lucas had no kin anyone knew of, and Willa Cullen had done the county a favor by volunteering to pay for the burial. There’d been no service, and the prompt disposal of the earthly remains of the cowboy who’d been sweet on a girl called Molly was a practical affair—undertaker Perkins (though a skilled cabinetmaker whose coffins were second to none) knew not of embalming, and even in a chilly month like this, the sooner a corpse got into the ground the better.

  So Perkins and his shroud-wrapped passenger had rattled back to Trinidad in a buckboard, the dead cowhand making an unexpected return trip, the undertaker stopping at the sheriff’s office to report the grim findings. This only seemed to support York’s notion that Perkins had a way of showing up instantly after any violent death.

  But for the time being the two dead bodies in the rutted road were the purview of York and Dr. Albert Miller, the lawman’s friend and Trinidad’s unofficial coroner, who had come immediately to the scene.

  Stage driver Norval Bratcher lay sprawled facedown on the side away from Boot Hill. Shotgun guard Gus Gullett was similarly a pile of dead on the side nearer the graveyard. When Doc Miller leaned over each of them, it wasn’t to check for a pulse—these two could not have been more obviously deceased if they had already been residents of the cemetery.

  The white-haired, paunchy physician rose, smoothing a rumpled brown suit that had been that way before he knelt over the corpses. “No rigor yet, Caleb. Blood still wet.”

  York, looking like a circuit preacher in his usual black apparel, came over from the roadside where he’d been examining the place where the stagecoach had left the road. “Not long ago, then.”

  The doc took off his wire-framed glasses and polished them on his shirt while he pondered. “Within the hour, I would say. Single gunshots to the head. From an angle slightly below where they’d have been, seated up in the stagecoach box.”

  “Someone on horseback?”

  Miller shrugged. “A defensible assumption. That’s a diagnosis you can make better than I.”

  York gestured toward the yellow-brown road. “Even in hard dirt like this, it doesn’t take an Indian scout to read the signs—a group of at least four men on horses did this.”

  “Is that them, you think?”

  The physician was pointing off past Boot Hill, where a distant cloud of dust could be discerned between here and where the mountains took the horizon. Above was that clear blue sky New Mexico seemed almost to own, but a coolness and slight breeze whispered rain.

  “Must be,” York said, as he moved toward his black-maned, dappled-gray gelding, the animal waiting patiently along the roadside. “Again, no great tracking skills needed to see where the coach was driven off the road and headed that way, with men on horseback accompanying.”

  Mindful of the precious cargo on that stagecoach, York was moving fast. He was stepping boot into stirrup when the doc called, “Caleb!”

  York swung up into his saddle as the doctor approached.

  Miller’s expression was tight with confusion and concern. “What in tarnation is this about? Why steal a whole damn stagecoach? Why murder both driver and guard?”

  “Norve and Gus likely tried to stop the holdup, and got tickets to eternity for their trouble.”

  Miller was shaking his head. “But there was no Wells Fargo strongbox on that stage, no payroll of any kind. Nothing of value!”

  York did not answer that directly, instead saying, “I have a bad feeling I caused this.”

  “Caused it?”

  “Someone sitting in my jailhouse was supposed to be on that stage, keeping the people in line. Knowing Raymond Parker like I do, I will lay good odds he fought back. He carries a hideaway pistol.”

  The doctor’s gray eyes were wide behind the glasses. “Raymond Parker was on that stage?”

  York nodded, once. “And he is certainly ‘something of value.’”

  Miller frowned. “A kidnapping you mean? A ransom scheme?”

  “So it would appear. And two other passengers are of value, to me anyway—Willa Cullen and Rita Filley.”

  Miller, who did not shock easily, clearly was. He had ridden out here in his buckboard, drawn by a Missouri Fox Trotter, who also was patiently waiting on the roadside opposite Caleb’s steed.

  The doctor said, “I don’t believe I can load those two up by myself, Caleb.”

  York, up on the gelding, said, “I can’t take the time. Head back to town and have the undertaker do it for you. He’ll be happy to. He always welcomes new customers.”

  Miller sighed deep and nodded as York headed out at a good clip, heading toward that distant boil of dust.

  He rode hard, but not so hard as to lose the trail the stagecoach and the multiple horses of the riders had left him, staying to one side. Much as he believed it to be the case, York could not be certain the dirty cloud he was chasing b
elonged to the stage. It could be something else.

  So his eyes followed the coach’s path through the scruffy, dusty landscape, an oddly beautiful barrenness adorned with occasional low-slung sand dunes. Way up ahead, where the hills became mountains, some occasional green showed itself, pines and such.

  Caleb York had killed more than his share of men. The number, which he knew but mostly kept to himself (past thirty souls now), did not bother him. He had never put a man down needlessly and had worked to avoid doing so, in damn near every case. Yet the men whose lives he’d ended all earned the honor, and as he rode through this near desert he knew already that more killing awaited him.

  That whoever had done this would also die.

  Perhaps not an ideal way of thinking for a lawman, and these days an outmoded one. For a long time civilization had crawled like some poor sod caught out here with a dry canteen and no road in sight. Now civilization was racing, its thirst for change unslaked.

  This stagecoach someone had snatched was a little dinosaur with wheels, jostling along on its way to extinction. The iron horse was coming. It was damn near here.

  Still, York didn’t imagine men would ever be so civilized that crime would go away, that greed would wither, that wanting and wanted men would be history. He had never been a gunny drifting and looking for trouble. He’d been a manhunter who sought bounty for bringing in badmen, and a detective for Wells Fargo, and now, finally, if kind of accidentally, a lawman in New Mexico.

  But whichever side of a badge you were on, if you were good with a gun, you were part and parcel. You became a target yourself. For every Billy the Kid, there was a Pat Garrett; for every Clanton, there was an Earp and the occasional Doc Holliday.

  The men who had done this thing were killers. The ruined bodies of Bratcher and Gullett proved that. What these killers hadn’t banked on was having another killer on their trail, and Caleb York had no hesitation about adding them to his list of the dead. He didn’t know who they were yet. But he knew they would deserve what he had in mind.

  Yet he had not yet admitted to himself that this was personal. He made himself think objectively about the people taken on that stage. He told himself the missing passengers were still alive. Had to be, because they were the stolen cargo.

  Raymond Parker was the obvious target. He was among the most successful businessmen in the Southwest—someone powerful, who could authorize ransom money being spent. Whether Parker would do that or not remained to be seen; he was not the kind of man to be cowed, nor to give money to men who would likely kill him anyway. So the eventual outcome there was uncertain.

  And then there were the women.

  What a terrible twist of fate that on that stage were the two females who meant the most to him in this life (his mother being long dead).

  Willa Cullen, if he would have been capable of admitting it to himself, was the girl he loved. He did not allow himself to imagine what trouble she might be facing; this would have overridden his common sense and he’d indeed have just followed that dust cloud at the fastest possible clip.

  And as the dust cloud dissipated ahead, real clouds, dark ones, began rolling in, small at first, like smoke signals, then more like smoke from an unseen fire, as if a conflagration behind the mountain range was feeding the sky, billowing charcoal clusters.

  If a storm was coming, he needed to outrace it, to beat it to the men making that smaller cloud below.

  He could not stop his mind from wishing he had treated Willa better. That he’d have been the kind to courtly woo her and talk her into accompanying him to San Diego and that handsome Pinkerton post. But even on horseback, following a deadly trail threatened by a dark sky, he could see the foolishness of thinking that for one moment.

  Willa had been her late father’s only child, the daughter who wasn’t a son, and for her the Bar-O was everything. She had made it plain to York that she would hand him that spread on a platter, that he could run the ranch with her and enjoy a prosperity few in the West would ever know.

  But Caleb York was no glorified cowboy. He was a detective and that meant San Diego and the Pinks. And wasn’t it the woman’s role to do things the way her man told her to?

  He damn near smiled at that. Truth was, if Willa had been that sort, she wouldn’t have attracted him in the first place. And yet how she’d schemed to keep him in Trinidad, in his sheriff’s post, and not have him leave for California as he’d promised. Only now that he was where she wanted him—staying on as sheriff, increasingly a part of the fabric of the town—they’d been driven apart by other forces.

  The thing was, things had not been the same since York killed Willa’s fiancé.

  Yes, the man into whose arms Willa had gone when she and York went bust was now one of those on his list of the deservedly dead. Wasn’t York’s fault that the son of a bitch had been after her money and land and likely plotted her very death.

  But it had caused a rift, nonetheless. Even a strong girl like Willa didn’t like having a wedding yanked from out under her.

  Those dark clouds were stampeding into one great black herd now, and lightning was dancing in them, God growling a rumbling approval. York’s coat and vest did not keep out the sudden cold, including chilling thoughts.

  The other woman on that stage was Rita Filley.

  The notion that he loved the saloon owner, too, had never crossed his mind, though he knew her in a way—the biblical one—that he did not yet know Willa. Somehow, though, York and Rita seemed more friendship than romance. She was a practical woman, Rita, and she did not seem to be pursuing him with matrimonial intent.

  Mostly she was just a woman who did not have a man, and since of late he didn’t have a woman either, they got together and pooled their needs, time to time. Man did not live by bread alone, even if the Victory did serve a free lunch.

  Superficially, Rita looked nothing like Willa, being nearly as dark as the former’s Mexican mother must have been, with eyes so brown they might have been black, with that nice flashing quality the prettier señoritas had.

  Of course, Willa’s nordic blue eyes could flash, too, like that lightning up ahead. And the women’s bodies were similar. Willa was a mite taller, but God had blessed both gals with that nice hourglass shape so many females these days tried to produce with straps and lacing and such, corsets they called these instruments of torture. Neither Willa nor Rita needed such help. Both had pretty features in heart-shaped faces, too.

  For some reason, he began to ride faster. Perhaps it was the threat of storm as daylight gave over to premature night.

  Yes, men were going to die for what they’d done. While stray thoughts about both women floated through his mind, he rode through rough country for over an hour, until he was under a black sky pregnant with rain, that single thought always returning, drumming like the gelding’s hoofbeats: men were going to die for this.

  The storm within him seemed to feed the threatened storm above.

  He threaded through slopes until the earth turned rocky, and at the bottom of a hill that was damn near a mountain, led by the tracks of his prey, York came to a sloping road where rocks had been ground to pebbles by horses over time, a road that split off into two more only slightly narrower roads that led in various directions of high country, around the near mountain here on its either side, and another up into and disappearing among the various peaks. Beyond those were ever higher peaks, snow-capped.

  Climbing off the gelding, walking the animal past a rocky outcropping, he doubted he was tracker enough to make anything out of the combination of sand, dirt, and small pebbles of these trails.

  But he looked anyway.

  And before he could tell a damn thing, the sky let him have it. The rain came shooting down, the thunder full-throated now, and as he settled and soothed the gelding under a rocky shelf, any trace of which trail the stagecoach might have taken was wiped out as weather became the accomplice of murderers.

  In half an hour the sky got the storm out of its
system. The only indication of the deluge was a remaining coolness and puddles that were sometimes almost pools.

  Nothing to do now but head back to town; what he’d put the gelding through required him to take it at an even slower, steadier pace, easier on the horse but agony on York, whose mostly pleasant memories of the two women were blotted out by fears of what they were going through.

  * * *

  Burrell Crawley, sleeping on the chain-slung cot in his cell at the rear of the sheriff’s office, got woken up sharp.

  The doc had given him laudanum again and that helped him sleep, and also took the edge off his aching foot. He even had his brown britches back on and the matching silk shirt. His boots remained off, however, and his foot had swollen some and the whole front part was bandaged.

  His cell was not adjacent to the office, rather around the corner and down, the second of four, with only the first one looking onto the office itself. But Crawley could hear just fine from his cell, next to that one.

  “Sheriff,” that fool Tulley was all but yelling, “I’m right good and dadblamed tired of sleepin’ behind bars at night, like I’m some kinder jailbird!”

  Caleb York’s voice came loud and steady. “A jailbird is somebody who has already flown the coop, Deputy. That isn’t you.”

  “You don’t have to tell me!”

  “But you’re no prisoner. It’s not like you’re locked in at night.”

  “Them city fathers, they put you in a room at the hotel! And I git a cell? T’ain’t right. T’ain’t right nohow. And you make more’n twict what I does! And who is it has the harder job? Do you ever do night rounds? No! Ye leave that to Jonathan R. Tulley.”

  “You knew what the post entailed when you signed on, Mr. Tulley. I had to do some fancy talking even to get the Citizens Committee to authorize your pay.”

  “Well, talk to ’em again! You’re the great Caleb York, ain’t ye? Threaten to quit iffen they don’t give your loyal right-hand man his fit due and proper!”

  The sound of a fist slamming down on wood—the sheriff’s desk out there, no doubt—made Crawley jump.