Quick Killer (A White Apache Western Book 4) Page 14

  “Go to hell!” Clay responded, tensed to move either way depending on how Quick Killer attacked.

  “Most men not so eager to die,” Tats-ah-das-ay-go noted. While he would never admit as much, secretly he admired Taggart’s fighting spirit. Not one of the many renegades he had tracked down over the years had proven half so difficult to subdue.

  “Most men don’t have bounty on their heads,” Clay snapped, surprised Quick Killer was content to talk instead of finishing him off. “You’ll have to earn your money the hard way, bounty hunter.

  “I no bounty hunter. I am scout.”

  “Scouts wear uniforms,” Clay pointed out, suspecting the man had lied.

  “All but Tats-ah-das-ay-go. I do as I please.”

  “Were you sent after Delgadito or me, or both?” Clay asked, his future hinging on the answer. He’d about had his fill of his own kind. They’d cheated him, stolen from him, tried to rub him out. The marshal of Tombstone had the long arm of civilian authority arrayed against him. And now the government itself must be intent on doing him wrong. It was the last straw, if true. “Which?” he prompted.

  Quick Killer wasn’t about to confess that he’d decided to hunt the band on his own, without official approval. He thought that if he lied, it would anger White Apache, perhaps even make Taggart mad enough to want to go back and confront those responsible, thereby rendering his job a lot easier. “They send me after you,” he said. “Tell me to bring you. Say take as many moons as I want.”

  “I figured as much,” Clay growled.

  “So you come back, eh?” Quick Killer prodded. “You have your say. Tell army what you think.”

  “Never.”

  “You fool, white man.”

  Clay bristled, clenching his fists so tight his knuckles paled. “Don’t call me that! No one is ever to call me that again. From here on out, for better or for worse, I’m the White Apache.”

  “You think you are Indian?” Quick Killer scoffed. “Take lifetime of living to be Apache.”

  “Just for the trimmings, I reckon.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “The trimmings,” Clay repeated, moving a few inches to the right. He wanted to keep the scout jawing a little while longer, long enough for him to reach a small mound of loose earth a yard away. “Speaking the tongue fluently and knowing all the customs and such are what I call the trimmings of being an Apache. But there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that.”

  “Oh?” Quick Killer grinned, amused by the notion of a white man claiming kinship with his father’s people.

  “Being an Apache has to do with what’s in here,” Clay said, thumping his chest over his heart and taking another short sideways step. “It has to do with craving freedom more than anything else, and not letting other folks tell you how you should live.”

  “You are wrong, white-eye,” Quick Killer said. “Being Apache is in blood, not in heart. And you have wrong kind of blood.”

  “Which one of us is the renegade and which one is working for the white sons of bitches who make a habit out of stealing other folks’ land?”

  “You dare say you are more Indian than me?” Quick Killer rejoined in disbelief. “My father and all his fathers were Indians. Yours were white.”

  “Maybe so, but I don’t want anything to do with the white part of me from now on. Like I told you, I’m Lickoyee-shis-inday.”

  “You are loco.”

  Clay had edged close enough to make his play, but there was one thing he needed to know beforehand. “Delgadito didn’t think so.” He paused. “Speaking of which, what did you do with him, you murdering bastard?”

  The fiery insult scorched Quick Killer’s pride but he controlled his temper. “Delgadito is alive,” he said, “until I am done with you. Then he dies.”

  “You’re counting your chickens before they’re hatched, hombre,” Clay taunted.

  “We will see,” Tats-ah-das-ay-go said, and lunged, extending his arm to its fullest in order to pierce the white man’s torso.

  Clay was in motion before the thrust commenced. He dipped, scooped up a handful of the dirt, and flung it squarely into the half-breed’s eyes.

  Quick Killer was a shade too slow in reacting. He saw the Americano bend but didn’t divine Taggart’s intent until the dirt was in flight. He shut his eyes, too late to keep some of the dirt from getting in and setting them to watering fiercely. Back-pedaling, he blinked over and over and wiped at them with his free hand, all the time swinging his knife in a random pattern to keep his quarry at bay.

  There had been a time when the tactic would have worked, a time before Clay Taggart came to live among the Chiricahua renegades, before he learned to wield a knife as expertly as he already did a six-shooter. He’d learned well, this White Apache, and he resorted to his knowledge now as he glided to the right, crouched low to the ground and sprang, tackling Quick Killer around the ankles.

  Quick Killer felt himself falling and stabbed at where he thought Taggart would be. But White Apache had let go and moved beyond reach. As the knife arm descended, White Apache pounced, gripping Quick Killer’s wrist even as he drove his shoulder up and under Quick Killer’s arm. Bending, White Apache heaved, throwing all his weight into the act.

  Quick Killer felt air brush his cheeks and braced for the impact sure to follow. A second went by. Two. Three. And still he had not hit the ground. Furiously brushing at his eyes, he wondered how high the white-eye had thrown him. Abruptly, his vision cleared, and he realized it wasn’t how high that mattered, it was how far.

  Stark fear such as Quick Killer had never known seized him as he gaped up at the receding rim of the cliff and the grim avenger staring down at him. “Noooooo!” he howled. “It cannot end like this!”

  White Apache’s lips formed a mocking smile.

  Thrashing and kicking, Quick Killer went into a frenzied panic. He twisted, saw the cliff face sweeping past him just feet away. Thoughtlessly, he reached out and tried grabbing hold to arrest his fall. His fingertips scraped solid rock, the rough surface shearing the skin from his fingers like a hot knife searing butter. He cried out, glanced down, and his stomach seemed to leap into his throat. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. This wasn’t supposed to happen, he told himself. He was Tats-ahnias-ay-go, the most feared of Army scouts, the man who had brought in more renegades than anyone else. His medicine was powerful, the most powerful of all. He couldn’t be beaten by a deluded white-eye who wasn’t half as skillful.

  The ground loomed steadily closer, steadily larger, becoming Quick Killer’s whole universe. The wind plucked at his buckskins, at his hair. He wanted to scream his defiance, to die as he had lived, but his insides had turned to water and were trickling down his leg.

  The White Apache stood gazing down at the crimson smear of pulped flesh and busted bones for some time. Then he reclaimed his Colts and the scout’s rifle and hastened to the base of the cliff. He was en route to the slope where Quick Killer had shot at him when a weaving figure stumbled into the open and called his name.

  White Apache reached Delgadito as the warrior’s legs buckled. He picked up the Chiricahua, carried him to the camp, and covered him with blankets. After building a fire, he went for water and permitted Delgadito to drink his fill. “How do you feel?” he asked in Apache.

  “Much better. The fever has left me.”

  A hand to the brow confirmed it. White Apache nodded and said in English, “I always knew you were a tough son of a gun, pard.”

  For the first time since Delgadito met Clay Taggart, he didn’t mind being called that. “I owe you my life. Again.”

  “I cannot claim all the credit. Cuchillo Negro and Fiero helped.”

  “What of Ponce?”

  White Apache started, then blurted, “I plumb forgot about him. You lie still while I have a look-see.” Since he hadn’t seen Quick Killer’s mount from the cliff, he figured it must be hidden among the trees. Twenty minutes of thorough searching brought him to a cl
earing in which two horses were ground hitched. On one, gagged and tied hand and foot with his legs lashed together under the animal’s belly, sat Ponce.

  “I thought you would be dead,” White Apache said as he tugged the gag out.

  “The breed was going to use me as a decoy,” Ponce said. “He bragged how he would slap my horse and send it running past all of you and counted on you shooting me by mistake.” The young warrior smoldered with wrath. “Where is the dog that I might kill him?”

  “Dead.”

  “Who? You?”

  “He tried to fly and forgot to coat himself with feathers first.”

  “You speak in riddles. Men are not birds.”

  “So he found out.”

  ~*~

  Two days later Cuchillo Negro and Fiero arrived at Sweet Grass. They were delighted to find Delgadito recovering, indignant to hear of Tats-ah-das-ay-go’s attempt to destroy their band, and upset to learn that Lickoyee-shis-inday had left the day before on a special errand. To all their questions, Delgadito would only say that, “He took a gift to the Americanos.”

  At Fort Bowie, life went on as usual. Captain Vincent Parmalee, Chief of Scouts, stood in front of his commanding officers desk. “You sent for me, sir?”

  Colonel Reynolds looked up from the report he was filling out. Sometimes it seemed to him that he spent half his military career doing forms and the other half riding roughshod over incompetents like the captain. “Yes, I did. At ease.”

  Parmalee relaxed, but not much.

  “If you’ll recall, I sent word to you yesterday that I wanted your best scout, that fellow Quick Killer, sent out with Captain Derrick’s next patrol. Derrick is going after Delgadito and will need all the help he can get.” Reynolds leaned back. “Did you receive the message?”

  “Yes, sir. The orderly delivered it promptly.”

  “Then why the hell isn’t Quick Killer here? Derrick is out there with all his men, saddled and waiting.

  Captain Parmalee shriveled inside. “I know, sir. But there’s a slight problem.”

  “How can that be? Not two weeks ago Quick Killer was standing in the very spot you are, practically demanding that I send him after Delgadito. Has he changed his mind?”

  “No, sir. It’s not that.”

  “Damn it. Then what is the problem?”

  “I don’t know where Quick Killer is,” Parmalee admitted, trying to shrink within his uniform. “He disappeared from the fort shortly after his little talk with you and no one has seen him since.”

  Colonel Reynolds began drumming his fingers on the desk. “Why wasn’t I informed?”

  “I was hoping I would find him before this, sir,” Parmalee whined. “I didn’t want to bother you over a trifle.”

  “A trifle!” the colonel exploded, coming out of his chair. “Our best scout up and vanishes and you don’t rate it news worthy of my attention?” Reynolds swept around the desk and reared over the junior officer. “I’ve tolerated about as much of your bungling as I’m going to. I know you have a drinking problem. Hell, half the men stationed here do. But that’s no excuse for gross misconduct. Didn’t it occur to you that he might have gone off on his own after Delgadito?”

  “Yes it did, sir,” Parmalee answered, flushing with anger at the aggravation the damned breed had caused him. If and when Quick Killer did return, Parmalee was going to find a way to repay the scout in spades.

  Reynolds lifted a hand as if to poke his subordinate in the chest, but then simply sighed and sat back down. “Captain, I want him found. Take as many men as you need. Scour the reservation from one end to the other if need be. But find him and bring him here before the end of the week, or so help me God I’ll have you sent to a post that will make this one seem like the Ritz in New York City. Do you understand, mister?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Get the hell out of my sight.”

  Grateful for the reprieve, Parmalee scurried outdoors and hurried across the compound to his small, dingy office. He paused to glance back, and when assured no one was looking, he pulled out his flask. His hands shook as he shoved the door wide, stepped inside, and tipped the bottle to his lips. The whiskey seared his mouth, his throat, warming them and his belly as he gulped greedily. It used to be that he couldn’t get through the day without a glass or two. Now he couldn’t get through an hour without draining half the flask. But how dare the colonel accuse him of not being able to hold his liquor! he fumed. He did as good a job as—

  Suddenly an awful stench assailed Captain Parmalee’s nose. He jerked the flask down, almost gagging when he inhaled. Bewildered, he looked around, then felt his whiskey making the return trip.

  A ghastly object rested on top of the captain’s desk, positioned in the center where it leaked ooze and pus and gore. The flesh was discolored, the tongue protruded, the jaw split wide, but there was no mistaking those cruel facial features.

  It was Quick Killer’s head.

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