Collection 1983 - The Hills Of Homicide (v5.0) by Louis L’Amour Read Free Book Online Page B

know I wouldn’t be letting anyone else drive for fun, not with Nick Ries in the back seat, whom he had seen me bash the night before.
    Something made me glance around then, and I saw two things. I saw a gray convertible, the one I had seen standing back of Castro’s tent, turning into Caronna’s drive, and I saw Nick Ries leaning over on his right elbow, fishing in his left-hand pants pocket for matches.
    My own right hand held the gun, and when I saw Ries way over on his elbow, I shoved down with my elbow on the door handle. The door swung open, and at the same instant I grabbed at the wheel with my left.
    The car swung and smashed into the curb and then over it. We weren’t rolling fast, but I hit the pavement gun in hand and backing up, and saw Loftus coming toward us as Peppy rolled down the hill in the following car. “Get that guy!” I yelled.
    Nick was screaming mad. “It’s a double cross! It’s a—” His gun swung up, and I let him have it right through the chest, squeezing the two shots off as fast as I could pull the trigger of my gun.
    Nick screamed again and his mouth dropped open, and then he spilled out of the car and landed on his face in the dust and dirt of the gutter.
    Another shot boomed behind the car, and I knew it was Loftus cutting loose with his six-shooter. He only shot once.
    For once Toni had been caught flat-footed. My twist of the wheel and leap from the car had caught her unawares, and now she stared, for one fatal instant, as though struck dumb. Then her face twisted into a grimace of hate and female fury, and she grabbed at her purse. Knowing where her gun was, I went into action a split second sooner and knocked it from her hand. She sprang at me, screaming and clawing, but Loftus and a couple of passing miners pulled her off me.
    “Hold her,” I said. “She’s in it, too.”
    “Karen Bitner’s disappeared,” Loftus told me. “Have you seen her?”
    “Caronna’s got her.”
    Diving around the sheriff’s car, I sprang for the seat of Peppy’s convertible, which had been stopped alongside the street. I kicked her wide open and went up the winding road to Caronna’s house with all the stops out. Skidding to a halt in front of the gate, I hit the ground on both feet, and this time I wasn’t caring if there was a warning signal on the gate or not. I jerked it open, heard the bell clang somewhere in the interior, and then I was inside the gate and running for the steps.
    As I went through the gate I heard something crash, and then a scream as of an animal in pain—a hoarse, gasping cry that died away in a sobbing gasp. I took the steps in a bound and went through the door.
    Caronna, his eyes blazing, his shirt ripped half off, was standing in the middle of the room, his powerful, trunklike legs wide spread, his big hands knotted into fists.
    In the corner of the room Castro was lying, and I needed only a glance to see that Richard Henry Castro had tackled a different kind of jungle beast, and had come out on the short end. I could surmise what had happened. Castro must have jumped him, and Caronna had torn the man loose and hurled him into that corner and then jumped right in the middle of him with both feet. If Castro wasn’t ready for the hospital I never saw a man who was, and unless I was mistaken, he was a candidate for the morgue.
    One chair was knocked over, and the broken body of Castro lay on the floor, blood trickling from a corner of his mouth, blood staining the front of his white shirt and slowly turning it to a wide crimson blotch. Yet his eyes were alive as they had never been, and they blazed up to us like those of a trapped and desperate animal brought to its last moment and backing away from the trapper with bared teeth.
    Caronna was the thing that centered on my mind and gripped every sense in my being. Somehow, from the first I had known I would fight that man. Perhaps it began when Shanks had told me I wasn’t man enough for him. That had rankled.
    I