Carrie and the shepherds slipped out the back door and down the back steps, putting as much of the stone foundation between them and the nutcase out front as they could. I went sideways along the back porch until I could signal the deputies, who backed away from their positions at the porch corners. I was really glad they were along for this little adventure, both as witnesses and shooters. We gathered at the back steps, staying down at the level of the foundation, trying to keep the stone steps between us and the hillside where Mingo had put shooters earlier.
Using the rifle scope, I began to scan the tree lines behind us, looking for his backup, although I didn’t think he’d brought any this time. His little posse of assassins might still be waiting down on the dirt road for the gunfight at the OK Corral to be done with. We could hear Mingo still ranting away on the loudspeaker, but nothing from Sheriff Hayes. I told the Bigs that Hayes had gone down a hole into the crawl space.
“What’s the plan, Stan?” Carrie asked me, taking her own nervous look around at the surrounding hills. This cabin had not exactly been situated in a defensive position. The woods came down to within a hundred feet of the steps, directly behind us, and that was the obvious way out.
“I’ve got the rifle,” I said. “You guys and the dogs make a run for that tree line. If there’s a black hat up there, I’ll deal with him. Keep the cabin between you and Mingo’s sight line.”
Then we heard the cruiser’s engine crank up. It sounded like he was backing up. “Change one,” I said, and the four of us bolted around to the left side of the cabin as we heard Mingo put it in drive and gun the cruiser around to the right side of the cabin, where he proceeded to let go a blast of enfilading automatic weapons fire through the side windows this time. We gathered at the left front corner of the cabin, still trying to keep as much of the structure as possible between us and that Bushmaster. Then he gunned the cruiser again, swerving it around to the back of the cabin.
“The dam!” I yelled, and we took off on a dead run down the front yard, tripping over all the tire ruts in the lawn, until we made it to the dam and slid down the grassy face. We could hear Mingo yelling over that damned loudspeaker and then firing some more into the house as he drove around it like an enraged Apache. I felt naked out there on that exposed face of the dam, especially if Mingo’s guys were down there in the trees below us, but at the moment there was nowhere else to hide. As long as Mingo stayed focused on the cabin, we’d be relatively safe. I glanced at the deputies, who were calmly reloading their clips. Big Luke saw me looking and grinned; the big galoot was enjoying all this. Then we finally heard Hayes yell something from inside the cabin. I crawled back up to the top edge of the embankment.
Mingo had somehow managed to turn the cruiser around so that it was facing the backyard on what from our current position was the right side of the cabin. He had the Bushmaster stuck out the window, and I could hear him slam another magazine into it as I watched. He yelled back at Hayes, and then I saw, down low on the ground and behind some shrubbery, the double barrels of Hayes’s shotgun sliding slowly out a hole in the foundation, pointing up at about a ten-degree angle. Mingo couldn’t see it because he was busy leaning out the driver’s window and firing another burst into the side windows of the cabin. Those black barrels kept emerging, now pushing through the bush itself. Mingo stopped firing and was reaching for the speaker mike when the shotgun let go.
At a range of no more than twenty feet, I could see the loads punch two big, dimpled, dinner-plate-sized holes in the door. Mingo was knocked sideways back into the car, taking the carbine with him. The shotgun barrels tipped momentarily, leveled, and then Hayes fired again, lower this time, punching two more lethal-looking, multiple-holed indentations into the door panel. I actually saw upholstery explode inside the cruiser. Something dark sprayed all over the inside of the windshield.
The other three had poked their heads up when they heard the shotgun. Hayes pulled the shotgun back into the crawl space, and the sudden silence made me nervous. We could smell the gunsmoke drifting down across the front lawn. Mingo still had that Bushmaster in there, even if he was probably wounded. I became aware that we were clustered very close together. The last light of evening was dwindling fast, but our little band made much too good a target.
“Spread out,” I said. “In fact, why don’t you guys move across the dam and into those trees in case he’s got a rifleman down there behind us.” The deputies moved immediately, probably glad to head for some cover.
Carrie stayed put. “What are you going to do?” she asked. Damned woman just couldn’t take orders.
“I’m going to keep this rifle on the car until Hayes shows himself,” I said. “Mingo may be playing possum.”
“Why?” she asked. “A little while ago you were ready to help Hayes kill himself.”
“Still am,” I said, watching carefully for any signs of Hayes. It was getting hard to see anything up by the cabin. “But I think he wants to take his ex-partner there with him, and I’m in favor of that.”
“Cam,” she began, but I cut her off.
“Hey, Carrie: What we need now is not to get surprised from behind-that’s where Mingo’s people went, remember? Let me work this situation, and you make sure no one is setting up on us.”
“You shoot either one of those duly elected sheriffs, it’ll be a whole new ball game,” she warned.
“I know that,” I said. “Now, please-get back under cover. Look: Hayes is coming out.”
She peeped over the rim of the dam and saw the sheriff crouching by the corner nearest the back porch, which put him in front of the cruiser. I couldn’t see anyone in the cruiser, and obviously neither could he. He carried the shotgun low and pointed at the car. Carrie slid back down to make sure she was out of the possible line of fire and duckwalked across the face of the dam to join the deputies. I moved left to the swale where the dam intersected the front lawn and then set myself down into the prone position. I made sure my rifle barrel went up into the air before settling in on the cruiser, so that Hayes would know I was out there. He stopped for a moment when I made the move, but then continued his creep toward Mingo’s cruiser. There was a long cone of shadow in front of the cabin.
I scanned the vehicle through my rifle scope. It was getting dark fast, but that definitely looked like blood on the windshield. There was no visible sign of Mingo. I assumed he was either down in the front seat or perhaps in the space between the seat and the dashboard.
You’d think I’d learn something about making assumptions, because what occurred next happened in a blur. Somehow Mingo had managed to get into the backseat of the cruiser. The moment Hayes arrived at the driver’s-side window, stood up, and looked in, Mingo rose up in the backseat and shot him three times in the chest with a black handgun that produced quite a muzzle flash. Hayes sat down on the ground with a painful grunt and a stunned expression on his face. Mingo popped the left rear door open and started out to finish the job. I settled my rifle on him, but that was when Hayes let go both barrels of the shotgun through said door and blew Mingo ten feet backward into the grass. Based on the angle of his neck as he lay motionless on the ground, he’d been dead before he landed. All my efforts to keep the fight even had been overtaken in about three seconds of gunfire.
I got up and trotted over to the cruiser, rifle at the ready, pausing only momentarily next to Mingo’s body to make sure he wasn’t acting like far too many snakes I thought I’d killed. When I saw the bloody crater in his lower abdomen, I stopped worrying about M. C. Mingo. Sheriff Hayes, on the other hand, was not dead when I got to him, but he was definitely preparing to depart this vale of tears. I knelt down beside him, trying not to put my knees in all the blood literally pouring out of him. He focused his eyes on me and blinked several times.