Rage Under the Red Sky Read online

  I sprinted in a straight line to the tree. Theories differ, but it seems to me that if you’re being shot at from the side there’s no point in zig zagging because you’re just moving toward and away from the same bullet path, and you’re going to get hit whether you’ve zigged or zagged. It’s all about speed; It takes an experienced marksman a couple seconds to draw a bead on a running target, and judging from the fact that they’d missed a few shots already I didn’t think the ambushers were expert shots.

  Several bullets, I perceived with the ear that Carmody hadn’t deafened, buzzed behind me and I heard one slap into the dirt. I couldn’t tell how far in back of me it hit and I wasn’t about to stop and look, but for the time being I’d moved faster than they’d expected.

  I’d actually moved faster than I’d expected. Being shot at is a terrific motivator. I reached the tree and stood sideways behind it for a split second, knowing Carmody would pick up the cue and provide me some cover.

  I heard three shots from Carmody’s buffalo gun and I lit out for some real protection, a stand of pines at the base of a hill.

  As I ran, I fired my rifle one-handed in the general direction of the shots, trying to draw the attention of the gunmen as they turned their sights back on Carmody. I needed three seconds or so to make it to the stand, a long time being exposed, but I risked a look toward the ambushers anyway. Looking anywhere but where you’re going subtly slows you down, maybe not by much but by enough that it might count seriously against you.

  The wind had abated and the rain was pouring straight down, in sheets so thick I saw nothing.

  And then I realized I saw everything I needed to see.

  Chapter 5

  We had them. If you do what Carmody and I do for long enough it becomes like a chess match. You know it’s over four or five moves before the end because of the inevitability of your closing moves and your opponent’s inescapable lack of alternatives.

  They were halfway up a hill with about a twenty-degree slope and were crouched about ten feet apart behind the thick trunk of a fallen tree. The vertical rain had tamped down the smoke from their weapons and it hung above them in two cottony, three-dimensional billows. For all intents and purposes, there may as well have been a sign proclaiming, “ambushers hiding here.”

  I didn’t even bother running the rest of the way to the stand. I stopped and put four rounds into the top of the log, two beneath each smoke-cloud. The log was probably four feet thick and a cannonball couldn’t penetrate it at the center, but whoever was hiding behind it would certainly see and hear the splintering of the wood and unless their motive was suicide they’d keep a low profile until they figured out what to do next.

  I ran to the stand and began working my way uphill, tree by tree. I needed time to reload my rifle but hadn’t yet fired my sidearm or the five-shot Cooper I kept in my pocket so I was in no particular hurry, though I admit that I view a revolver primarily as something that’s nice to have when your long-gun isn’t handy, so I wanted to assure that the rifle was at the ready.

  Meanwhile, Carmody started his ascent. He crouched and ran a Z-pattern like a rabbit, exactly what you want to do when charging head-on.

  For somebody six-five and probably 220 the man certainly could move. Even with his rabbit-run he’d covered half the distance in about five seconds, closing in on the twin clouds.

  A head popped up from behind the log. I was looking through the rain and sparse pine branches but I could still see the eyes – as wide as half dollars, puzzled and uncomprehending, as they tracked Carmody charging them.

  It was plain that the sight of a snarling gorilla who moved like a deer and wielded a rifle the size of the mast of a boat was the last thing our attackers expected. That was a good sign in itself. It betrayed their lack of experience.

  In an ambush, charging the attacker is usually the best strategy because running away is exactly what the ambushers expect and are prepared for. And if there was convenient cover nearby they wouldn’t have chosen that spot for an ambush in the first place.

  The ambusher I could see panicked, dipped down, and then the vertical barrel of a rifle rose over the log. He brought his head up sort of sideways, in a tentative way, like he only wanted to expose one eye, and in a flash of realization and trepidation and uncertainty he remembered that there was another man somewhere to his left and he looked in my direction.

  He saw me an instant before I shot him in the forehead.

  Chapter 6

  The dead man’s compatriot was flanked, and he realized it, and then he panicked.

  For a man in his position, there were two smart alternatives, neither of which he chose.

  He could have thrown out his gun and surrendered. While there’s no guarantee we wouldn’t have killed him anyway, at least he stood a chance of surviving. As it happens, he would have. As a lawman, I’m not supposed to summarily dispatch people even if they do try to murder me. At least not before I find out why they tried.

  Alternatively, he could have backpedaled uphill and sideways into the woods behind him. A man with even an elementary grasp of tactics would realize that if there’s an advancing enemy to the front and one to the side you retreat at a diagonal, putting maximum distance between you and both attackers as quickly as possible and moving sideways to their respective lines of fire. It’s possible he might have escaped, for a while, anyway, until we tracked him down.

  But one of the cruel ironies of life is that if you don’t know much, you don’t know what you don’t know. Even as we closed in on him, the second shooter didn’t realize that he was playing our game and he wasn’t really equipped to ante up at the same table.

  Despite his murderous nature, he was an amateur at the process.

  He never stopped to think that the rain and humidity would tamp down the smoke and give away his position, and he was clearly too dense to deduce that two men who’d immediately divided his field of fire and alternately covered each other while flanking him knew too much to succumb to his next moronic move.

  Which was to stand bolt upright and attempt to fire at the man advancing in front and then, I assume, pivot and fire at the man to the left.

  Maybe he was envisioning the stories he’d tell at the bar or the campfire about his eagle-eyed aim, how he stood tall as the bullets whizzed by him. Maybe he’d heard stories like that and believed them and believed he could do the same.

  In any event, he never got the stock of the gun to his shoulder before we cut him down.

  Chapter 7

  Setting the wagon back on its wheels wasn’t hard. After I retrieved my soaked and newly re-ventilated hat, I rocked the rig a few times and it tipped back. The horses were in a state of shock; they had abandoned their reproachful glare and now their pool-ball eyes bugged out at me with pure bewilderment.

  They didn’t know it but it could have been a lot worse for them. Their traces were long enough so they weren’t twisted to the ground when the wagon was tipped over, and most importantly, they hadn’t been shot. An ambusher who knew what he was doing would have shot the horses immediately in order to immobilize the wagon and eliminate the possibility of Carmody and I seeking momentary cover behind a standing horse.

  The rain had tapered off but the trail was muddy and I couldn’t maneuver any closer to the hill without getting stuck. I got as close as I could. If Carmody could find their horses – which seemed likely, because it didn’t seem reasonable that the ambushers had walked a long way to find a position in the middle of nowhere – we’d hoist the bodies on their mounts and hitch the horses to the wagon.

  And we still had to pick up Hollis Carpenter’s body.

  I heard the horses coming down just as I began retracing the same route I’d taken up the hill. When they emerged from the stand of pines, I saw that Carmody was riding the smaller horse, and he’d lashed both of the ambushers’ bodies onto the second. It was slow going. As a rule, horses don’t like going downhill, but Carmody knew how to nudge them along and help th
em pick their footfalls.

  I was tempted to let on that I was amazed that a mere mortal could round up two horses and heave two full-grown men up top in the same amount of time it took me to right the wagon and dry off my hat, but I’d seen Carmody accomplish quite a few things out of the ordinary and I was alive today because of his particular abilities.

  So I let it pass.

  “What do you want to do now?” he asked, casually, as though we’d just finished lunch and were deciding whether to whittle or play horseshoes.

  “That looks like a pretty good horse,” I said, and Carmody nodded.

  “We have to pick up Carpenter’s body at some point,” I said. “I know we’re taking a chance, but I don’t see any point in turning around now and coming back because I think we’re less than a mile away.”

  Carmody nodded.

  “So I’ll ride ahead,” he said, “and scout the trail to see if anybody else has a mind to kill us. We’ll load these bodies on the wagon now. Then you drive the wagon to Carpenter’s and pick up his body. We’ll hitch the other horse to the wagon and if there’s trouble and you need to maneuver and you do your best to get on the free horse before you get your farmer hat shot off again.”

  I nodded. The sudden influx of dead bodies had complicated the logistics, but Carmody had it all figured out.

  “Now, all that is based on several assumptions,” Carmody said. “Number one being you ain’t planning on killing nobody else, because if you is, maybe we should just go back now and fetch a bigger wagon.”

  I didn’t want to encourage him so I just nodded as we unhitched the bodies from the horse and arranged them on the bed of the wagon.

  “Or,” he said, “maybe a wagon train. With a few spare horses. Mules, maybe; they can pull big loads even through soggy ground.”

  I shoved one body close to an edge of the bed and surveyed the amount of room left in the middle.

  “We can comfortably fit one more corpse in the wagon,” I said. “Appears we could accommodate somebody about six-five.”

  And I looked him up and down for a second.

  Carmody put a foot in the stirrup swung a long leg over his saddle.

  “Before I make my final mistake by riding our front and exposing my back to you,” he said, “you got any thoughts on the obvious question? Why these two tried to kill us?”

  “All I can think of is that somebody saw me shoot Carpenter, or heard about it, and figured I’d be back to get the body, and lay in wait to take revenge. They had a couple hours to plan.”

  “I never seen them before, either,” Carmody said, skipping over some needless conversation. It reminded me why I liked working with him so much. He didn’t ask me if I knew who they were, which I obviously would have mentioned if I had.

  “Maybe they’re relatives,” I said. “Lot of Carpenters crawling about in these hills.”

  He shook his head.

  “Maybe, but not with the same last name. The head-shot one’s initials is B.I. The gut-shot is A.S.”

  “You found wallets?”

  “Nope.”

  “Identification in the saddle bags?”

  “Not there, neither.”

  There’s no point in rushing Carmody when he’s building up to a dramatic moment, so I just let it play out.

  I didn’t mind. We both needed a breather, the rain had stopped, and there was even a jagged reddish break in the clouds allowing a pale band of sunlight to sweep along the hillside.

  He fished in his right-hand pocket.

  “Found the initials on the back of these,” he said, as two brass pocket watches, identical to the one that sent Hollis Carpenter into the rage that sent him into his death, dangled from tangled chains, twisting and glinting in the sun.

  Chapter 8

  Carmody had set all three watches in a perfectly straight line on the table and studied them intently as he drank what might have been his third, fifth, or twentieth shot of the evening. He had a superhuman tolerance for liquor so it was difficult to estimate his progress.

  He moved the thick brass candlestick closer to the middle watch and the reflection of the flame danced on the metal of the cases. I assume the watches were made of brass, too.

  The candlesticks were Elmira’s idea. She insisted that the bar needed to be cozied up, whatever that might mean, and last month she bought five of them.

  I protested vigorously but in vain, which is pretty much the way our relationship works day-in and day-out. From my standpoint, putting ten-inch metal clubs on tables frequented by drunks – and then sticking a burning candle in each – was an invitation to disaster.

  To my mind it made as much sense as handing out extra ammunition at the door.

  I was playing the piano, an old but serviceable upright Elmira had placed against the wall, and I was in a bad mood. No one had yet come to claim the bodies, and policy was that they would be kept wrapped in blankets in the jail for one day and then buried if no one spoke for them. I’d thought up that particular policy somewhere after my fourth whiskey; I figured that if I had to take care of the bodies, I could make up any damn policy I wanted.

  “Keep playing that funeral music,” Carmody said as he set his glass down directly in back of the middle watch, “and people is going to start slitting their wrists.”

  And of course I responded by playing more loudly and slowing down the tempo a bit. The increase in volume was serving a dual purpose: In addition to drowning Carmody out, and, I hoped, annoying him, it was thundering again and the rain was roaring against the roof so I had to play louder to be heard.

  “Or maybe slit your wrists,” Carmody said, turning all three watches over in sequence. “Just so you know the popular sentiment. In show business they call it ‘reading the room.’”

  He continued communing with the timepieces and in a minute cleared his throat.

  “I’m guessing you can’t play nothing much friskier anyway,” he said, “since your hands is all swole up but banging off them thick skulls the other night.”

  He never missed anything.

  “I’m fine,” I lied.

  “I don’t want your head to get as swole up as your hands, but I do have to admit you are among the finest prizefighters I’ve ever met and among the finest piano players I’ve ever heard.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and pounded a little harder on the keys, and it hurt. I suspected my middle knuckle on the right hand had been broken, and pain shot all the way to my elbow when I moved my hand the wrong way. And as far as I could tell, for the time being, there was no right way to move it.

  “And as far as piano-playing prizefighters, you are alone on top of that particular and unique mountain. Same for fighting piano-players. Damn strange career path, though.”

  He was right about the career part.

  I started out my profession as a college professor, teaching in a small academy near where I grew up in southern Illinois. I was from a farming family and was never particularly erudite but I was a fast study and picked up philosophy, languages, music, and the like pretty quickly. But things changed for me and a few million others in ’61, and over the next four years or so I trained with some special units and picked up the equivalent of a master’s degree in mayhem.

  After the war, I returned to teaching and lasted exactly one month. A pug and strongman in a traveling show called me out in front of a group of students and friends, betting me long odds that I couldn’t last two rounds with him.

  I wasn’t particularly bothered by his goading but the possibility of impending violence, well, somehow got my blood circulating again. I’m not saying I enjoyed the war – no one with even near-normal sanity could ever say that after seeing what I saw. But it was like a part of me woke up from hibernation when I took him up on it.

  He never expected me to beat him to death.

  I never expected to kill him, either, but as I’d spent several years learning to fight with guns, fists, knives, rocks, or basically anything that could somehow
inflict injury, he wasn’t much of a challenge despite his bulk.

  The pug took exception to me knocking him down at will and tried to gouge my eye out and I took strong exception to that and put some real steam in the next combination and he was dead before he hit the ground.

  Prizefighting was technically illegal in that county but everybody always looked the other way until, I discovered, somebody wound up dead, and then the locals got pretty damned excited. I got out a few steps ahead of the local law and found it easier and more profitable to ply my new trade than my old one, and after a few years I’d put together a respectable record on various bareknuckle circuits.

  But prizefighting is a young man’s game, and as I entered my 40s I gravitated toward gunwork, generally on the right side of the law and more often than not behind a badge, and that – along with the murder of Billy Gannon – is what led me to my present employment as town marshal in this odd little half-heaven-half-hell I call home.

  I flexed my aching fingers and started a new number. Carmody continued to glare at the array of watches, as though waiting for them to confess something to him.

  He wiped his mouth carefully with the back of his hand, keeping the watches fixed in his gaze in a predatory manner, like he expected them to bolt and wanted to be poised to chase after them.

  As was his routine, he’d given up on the repetitious and comparatively inefficient practice of pouring himself shots and started drinking directly from the bottle, from time to time offering me a pull which I politely declined, suspecting that he may have recently indulged in his favorite delicacy, an acquired taste from his mountain roots, squirrel.

  As I fought back a wave of queasiness at the thought of what those lips might have recently feasted upon, he held up the empty bottle and called for Nonie to bring him another.