In the barrio, the chickens and stray dogs still ruled, and the smoky cooking smells had heightened. That made his belly rumble, but he ignored its demands — you don’t go into a gunfight on a full stomach. You might embarrass yourself puking at some point.
He positioned himself at the pueblo window.
Within minutes, the sun was spreading across the sky and illuminating a Main Street that might have belonged to a ghost town — not a soul in sight, no sign of waking businesses, only boarded-up windows and a street whose layer of river-sand was riffling in a too-cool breeze. No, not breeze.
Wind.
The kind that promises a storm.
And just about when he’d expected the Rhomers to ride in, black clouds rolled across the sky, churning, roiling, blotting out the sunrise, turning early morning into near midnight. Crackles of veiny lightning momentarily illuminated the sculpted, shifting forms of a burgeoning black thunderhead, billowing like smoke from some invisible conflagration.
Distant thunder shook the ceiling of the sky, and five men on horseback came riding in, harder than need be. They turned that corner past the livery, horses leaning; then their redheaded riders pulled back sharp on their reins and they assembled in front of the jail, one man on horseback moving out in front of the others.
These horses, York was pleased to see, were not the black mustangs he feared might show up under the Rhomer backsides — that type of well-trained steed of which three dead bank robbers had availed themselves. These were solid horses, all right, but as mixed a bunch as the redheaded brothers were similar. Two quarter horses, two paints, an Appaloosa.
It took the horses a while to settle, and the men on them seemed worked up, too. Grinning yellow teeth in scruffy red-bearded faces, butts moving up and down on saddles.
They weren’t interchangeable, though, these Rhomers. The one out front — positioning himself as the leader, as the men on horseback faced the adobe jailhouse — was older, and looked a lot like the late Vint Rhomer.
He’d likely be Lem.
One brother was skinny and tall, another was heavy and short, the other two medium-size, but of those two, one was obviously the youngest, just a kid in his early twenties, his beard barely filled in. All were dressed in Levi’s and shirts with sleeve garters and vests, of various colors — maybe this family shopped together. Only a variety of hats set them apart.
One thing they had in common: .45 Colts in tied-down holsters, kept in place by snap straps. They must have bought their guns together, too. They had rifles in scabbards, as well, riding with them.
The horses were settled. Each brother unsnapped his holster.
Quietly, Lem — York barely made it out, listening at his pueblo window — said to his brothers, “Second he shows, let rip.”
The sky grumbled and the horses shuffled a little.
When the animals had settled again, Lem called out, “Caleb York! Lem Rhomer. You killed my brother Vint. I mean to see you die for it.”
York wondered how many nights under the stars Lem Rhomer had spent, staring into the sky, composing those words.
Lem wasn’t through: “Come out and face me like a man, and we’ll have it out. My brothers been told, if the fight is fair, they is to ride off. Caleb York! You hear me?”
The sky alone answered with a faint, murmuring rumble. The horses danced a little. Settled again.
“York, come out here and meet me in the street. They say you’re fast! Well so am I. Let’s see who’s the better man!”
Tulley burst out the barnlike doors of the livery and fired both barrels of the scattergun into the sky. The thunder of it, here on the ground before God could have his say, spooked the horses bad. Every one of the animals got up on its hind legs and shrieked in terror and then bucked and circled and danced and kicked, and one by one, each redheaded Rhomer got tossed from his saddle onto the sandy street.
York came out of the pueblo hut as the two closest to him were trying to scramble to their feet, guns in hand but wholly flummoxed.
Somebody yelled, “He’s over there!”
The two — the medium-sized pair, one of whom was the youngest brother — wheeled toward York, but their guns weren’t even raised when a bullet blew through the eye of the older of the pair, and a second slug cracked the younger one’s head like an eggshell. They stood momentarily, staring with three blank eyes, then flopped back onto the street and leaked blood and brains.
Tulley scurried back inside the livery, while the other three Rhomers, Lem included, realized they’d been ambushed, and been abandoned by their spooked horses, who had gone off this way and that, and the remaining three brothers ran down deserted Main Street, looking for cover.
Like a delayed echo of Tulley’s scattergun blasts, the sky ruptured with thunder and rain sheeted down. York ran to the boardwalk opposite the jail and, with his back to the building facades, moved down slow. The rain came almost straight down, making a translucent curtain. York barely made out the heavyset Rhomer cut around the corner of First Street, down to the right, and the skinny one do the same, on the other side of the street.
Lem Rhomer, who York guessed was the most dangerous of this bunch, he’d lost track of. That probably meant the man had ducked into one of the few buildings whose doors weren’t locked — that would be the hotel or the Victory and maybe the café.
First things first.
The rain drummed incessantly on the roof over the boardwalk as York moved cautiously down. Whip cracks of lightning momentarily lit up the night this morning had become, but no Rhomers were in sight. Skinny was around one corner, Fatty the other, the one York was inching toward. At some point he might become a good target for the former, although either man, or both, might not be waiting — they may have splashed through back alleys to either flee or find a better position.
At least he knew neither man was tucked into a recession of the buildings he was edging past — although, come to think of it, Lem could be. At each one, York peeked around, ready to blast, finding nothing but closed doors. As the angry sky roared and the rain pelted the boardwalk awning, he slid along and, finally, made it to the corner.
Peeking around, he saw nothing but a street between buildings that was turning into a soup of sand and mud, as Main Street’s businesses trailed off into residences.
He stepped off the boardwalk onto ground already gone spongy and the rain pummeled and drenched him, gathering in his curl-brimmed hat and overflowing, as he moved toward the rear alley. Again, recessions of doorways presented danger, and he took care with the two doors between him and the alley.
When at last he rounded the corner into the alley — which bordered fenced-off residence yards at left — he saw nothing, though at right a rear exterior stairway to living quarters above a store had a landing that presented a platform for a shooter. But in the dense downpour, York couldn’t see anybody up there.
He decided to go up and make sure.
With the .44 in his right hand, York couldn’t make use of the wooden railing, so his left hand supported him against the side of the clapboard building. The rain was pounding into his face, but his hat brim was protecting his eyes somewhat, as he went up one step — one slow step — at a time.
He was halfway up when a roar came not from the sky but from a small bear of a man, a redheaded bearded bear, who had been prone on that landing and now lumbered to his feet and pointed down with his .45, though the dripping monstrosity was just a blur before York’s rain-streaked eyes.
York’s two .44 slugs made their own thunder, punching the fat Rhomer in the chest, shaking him, rocking him, making him stumble backward and he went over the far side of the landing, taking some crunching wood with him. He must already have been dead, because he didn’t scream on the trip down, though when he landed on the muddy-topped ground, he hit hard enough to send plenty of moisture momentarily back into the sky, the whump of it competing with a halfhearted growl of thunder.