York went down the steps much quicker than he’d come up, and he slogged toward the street, knowing he had to risk crossing Main to seek the skinny brother. He would stay low and he would move as quickly as this molasses underfoot would allow. But he had barely begun the journey when he realized someone was running at him, shooting.
The skinny Rhomer!
45 slugs flying overhead, York flopped to the ground and was aiming up at the screaming, approaching scarecrow when a boom came that wasn’t from the sky. The skinny guy suddenly was a teetering headless thing with a jagged neck geysering red and getting it spewed right back.
Grinning, a thoroughly sopped Tulley came into view, his scattergun barrels smoking despite the rain.
The skinny brother wobbled, then fell headfirst onto the ground. Well, not exactly headfirst...
Tulley scurried over and helped York up.
“That stopped him,” Tulley said.
“Seemed to,” York said.
Pieces of what had once ridden the skinny one’s shoulders were scattered in the rain-swept street, looking like nothing remotely human, except for a staring eyeball, floating in a puddle.
“That leaves one,” Tulley said, over the downpour. “That Lem feller.”
“See where he went?”
The deputy pointed. “Down the block from the Victory. Think he ducked in that there doorway. Barbershop.”
They moved to the edge of the building. Behind them was the dead fat Rhomer, on his back, his mouth open and overflowing with rain. In front of them, in the street, the headless skinny Rhomer lay on his belly.
As if a switch had been thrown, the rain slowed and then stopped. Dark clouds still filled the sky, but they were moving fast, racing, a stampede headed elsewhere.
Within a minute, the only raindrops were those falling from awnings, and the sky turned a tentative blue, damn near cloudless. The soggy aftermath was everywhere, pooled in the street, dripping off storefronts.
But the storm had passed. The one in the sky, at least.
York quickly crossed the side street to take a position alongside the opposite building, the mercantile. Tulley came along, and fell in, in back of him. The old boy was reloading. So was York.
“Lem Rhomer!” the sheriff called around the corner. “Give yourself up! Your brothers are dead. You don’t have to be!”
The street was silent but for drip-drip-drips.
Then: “Why not decide this, York!”
Yes — the recession of the barbershop doorway. Just across the way and down. Well within range...
“What is there to decide, Rhomer?”
More silence punctuated by the aftermath of the deluge.
Then: “What do you think, you bastard? Who’s fastest!”
“That’s what you want, Rhomer?”
“That’s what I want! Face-to-face. I’m holstering my gun, right now. You holster yours.”
“And if I do?”
“I step out and we finish this! See just how fast Caleb York really is!”
“All right!”
Several long seconds dragged by.
Rhomer stepped out.
York stepped out.
Turned sideways, presenting smaller targets, they faced each other in, and across, the saturated street.
But Rhomer’s holster was empty, his gun already drawn and at his side, held rib-cage-high, the turn of his body meant to conceal the trick.
Then one last thunder crack came: a .44 slug from York’s gun — he’d done the same as Rhomer, been ready with holster empty and gun in hand and rib-cage-high.
The bullet punched the last redheaded brother in the belly, 45 tumbling out of his fingers, Lem Rhomer himself tumbling into the street, facedown, exposing the cavernous red-bubbling exit wound the .44 round left behind.
As York hurried to the man, Tulley tagging after, Rhomer crawled over onto his back, filling his red-bearded face with morning sun, though his clothes were filthy from the muddy street, the brown covering him leavened only by the scarlet, spreading patch over his belly where the bullet had gone in.
Rhomer looked up at York; gut-shot like that, the man was suffering, the pain excruciating. But he still said, “Damn... damn liar...”
“You know the saying,” York said blandly, looking down at the dying man. “‘Takes one to know one.’”
Tulley was at York’s side. “Put him out of his misery, Sheriff. It’ll take him a long damn time to die iffen you don’t... He be way past doctorin’.”
“No.”
Tulley took York’s sleeve. Whispering, the coot said, “Do it, Caleb. You’d shoot a dog in the head, sufferin’ like that.”
The sheriff responded to his deputy, but he was staring at the grimacing Rhomer, who glared back in pain and rage.
York said, “Dogs don’t need to think about what they done.”
Tulley scuttled off. Couldn’t stand the sight.
But Caleb York stayed and watched the man die.
Chapter Fifteen
The sun was out and so were the citizens of Trinidad. They hugged the rails of the boardwalks, men and women, some of them fathers and mothers with their children along for the view of the aftermath of a shoot-out that for all its gory glory would grow into epic proportions as the story was passed from this one to that, as eyewitnesses (who had seen nothing, cowering under tables or hugging floors) described in vivid detail the day Sheriff Caleb York gunned down the five Rhomer brothers.
Or was that seven Rhomer brothers? Or had there been a dozen of the redheaded villains who had gone down under the relentless fire of Caleb York’s blazing six-shooters (like the brothers, the number of York’s guns would increase over the years).
Today, however, eyes were wide and at a distance as the doctor and undertaker approached the sheriff, who was standing over the body of Lem Rhomer, a big ugly man, who had died wearing a big ugly grimace. The sand on the street had returned to its damp riverbank roots, a wealth of puddles and pools resisting the sun’s rays.
But there was no question: the sky was bright and blue and the violence was over.
As they regarded a corpse that still seemed in pain, Caleb York said to Doc Miller, “You have four more dead patients scattered here and there. My deputy will show you to them.”
“Perkins has already spotted one of ’em,” Doc Miller said, nodding toward where the dour-faced undertaker, as always in black frock coat and beaver high hat, looked down regretfully at a headless skinny Rhomer brother sprawled in the moist sand.
“Looks disappointed,” York said, “for a man about to make ten dollars.”
The doc smirked. “It’s a bitter pill, knowing he dasn’t display a corpse like that in his window.” Miller gave York a look. “You know, I haven’t had a live patient in two days. If I have to write out one more death certificate, I’ll be riding over to Ellis and have that print shop make me some forms.”
“Well,” York said, with a sigh and a glance around, “things should be quieter now. Can you and Perkins handle these dead ones?” He gestured to his soaked, mud-splotched attire. “I need to clean up some.”