Page 91 of Ransom
I looked at him too long.
"Go," he said again, with a pronounced drawl this time.
I turned away from him and climbed.
I came up over the arroyo lip and ran the wash line toward the corral. Coyote ghosted past me into the scrub, knife already in his teeth. I flattened against the rail and listened. There were two voices on the other side, the shotgun pumping, one of them saying something low and the other laughing shortly. Rex's boyswere having a good time on Rafe's land. I pulled the knife out of my boot.
The first stood at the rail with his back to me, rifle up. I put my hand over his mouth and jammed the knife between his ribs into the heart. He went rigid against me and dropped quietly. I lowered him so he wouldn't make a sound on the way down, his blood running up over my hand into the cuff of my shirt before I'd let him go all the way. The second turned, and I shot him in the face from four feet off, the round through the cheekbone and out the back of his head, the spray hitting the corral rail behind him in a dark line.
That was two. Welcome to Pae Saco, motherfuckers.
I came around the corner with the pistol up, and the yard opened in front of me. Mateo was behind the water trough working the bolt of a .30-06, blood drying brown down the side of his face from his hairline. The Cruz kid was at the bunkhouse corner with a bandana tied tight around his upper left arm, blood coming through the cloth in a steady seep and running down to drip off his elbow. He had a pistol in his right hand, and he was leaning his shoulder into the wall to keep his feet under him. His face was the color of dry chalk. He saw me, nodded once, and pivoted back to the tree line.
That's a lot of blood, I thought, and didn't have time to think anything else.
I cut along the corral and took a man at the hay barn corner from fifteen yards. The shot caught him in the chest as he turned. He fell across the threshold, and the fire took him. A round came past my ear from the tree line, and I dropped behind the corral. The hay barn had gone over and was throwing chunks of itself across the yard in burning lengths, and the horse barn was past anything anybody could do for it. The screaming from inside it had stopped.
Across the yard, Winston came up beside Mateo at the trough and started firing at the tree line. Two shooters dropped fire on them. The Cruz kid pivoted and put rounds into the trees with his good arm, leaning hard into the bunkhouse wall. Coyote came out of the scrub on the south end at a dead run, and one of Rex's men broke from the trees trying for a truck I hadn't seen. Coyote took him down between the second and third strides: clean tackle, one short knife motion. Nimue stayed across his shoulders the whole time, head up.
I came around the corral corner to get a sightline on the wash, and the man came out of nowhere on Winston's blind side.
Winston, no!
He was tracking the tree line through his sights with Mateo working beside him, and he didn't see the man. The rifle butt came down across the back of his head, and Winston dropped sideways off the trough into the dirt like somebody had pulled the bones out of him.
Son of a bitch, I thought, and broke into a run. I'll fucking rip your throat out with my teeth for that.
Forty yards stretched between us. Forty fucking yards and a corral rail and two of Rex's men. I knew before three steps I wasn't going to make it, but I ran anyway. Get up, I told him in my head. Get up, get up, you stupid, stubborn Ranger, get up.
Rex's man got him by the collar and started dragging. Winston's bad arm trailed behind him in the dirt. Another one came up to help the first, and I shot him through the back at thirty yards. Old habit. The round took him cleanly, and he dropped on top of Winston.
The second man was already moving faster. He'd seen me coming. I shot again and missed. When I drew up to shoot a third round, the revolver clicked. Empty. Dammit.
A round went past my head near enough to move the air. A third man came up out of the wash to cover the drag. I ducked behind the rail and shouted, "Winston!"
He didn't answer.
I tried to peek around the fence post, but bullets flew too close to my head, and I didn't have any spare ammo for my revolver. God dammit, Ransom. The one time you weren't prepared…
The truck started.
I came over the fence with the pistol up. The truck was already rolling, the second man swinging up into the bed, getting an arm under Winston's head, and for one stupid second I thought, Thank God, somebody's holding his head, and then I remembered who they were.
Some animal part of me wanted to chase the truck down, run after him. I wanted to get on Galahad and ride them down, jump into the bed. Maybe I could take a few of them before they shot me dead. Maybe not, but wasn't Winston worth trying for?
Wasn't he worth dying for?
By the time the thought came and went, the truck was a mile down the road, throwing up a long tail of dust behind it.
They were gone, and so was Winston.
Fuck. God dammit.
Rex was going to die slowly.
I turned back toward the yard.
The horse barn was still standing. Most of it. The roof was gone in a hole at the east end and the south wall had fallen in, the smoke thinning, the fire eating what was inside it. Two of Rex's men's bodies lay in the dirt by the threshold, and the one I'd shot at fifteen yards had burned where he fell. The smell was bad and getting worse.
