She raised Slash’s bottle in salute and took another pull.
“Hmmm,” Slash said, pondering. “How much you think they’re carryin’?”
“With the money they make in cattle and horse sales—not to mention bullion sales—and with the amount of men they probably need to pay, I’d say they’re carrying anywhere from five to ten thousand dollars on any given run. Probably paper money and coins. I can’t guarantee that, of course, since I know so little about their operation. But if they were carrying less, they’d probably just send a couple of riders with saddlebags.”
Pecos dropped his fork onto his empty plate and looked at Slash. “Damn, it’s so close, it’d be a shame not to try for it.”
Slash set down his own empty plate. “We’d need to know more about it,” he said. “We’d need to make sure it’d be worth the risk, and we’d need to know when their next run is scheduled.”
“Why don’t I look into it?” Jay said, and forked more beans into her mouth.
Slash glanced at her skeptically. “What’re you talkin’ about?”
Jay swallowed and said, “We women are better equipped to plumb for sensitive information than men are.” She reached for the bottle. “I’ll dig up the stake Pete left me, head on down to Saguache, which is where the deliveries originate. Under the guise of a poor, grieving rancher’s widow, I’ll rent a room in a rooming house down there and indulge myself with a fancy set of duds. I’ve been right curious for years about the latest female fashions. Then I’ll moon around town, maybe join a church, and quite possibly befriend some important male amongst the citizenry. An important businessman, say. Maybe even a banker. Some man who might know more than a little about the Crosshatch’s money runs.”
“Why, she’s a devil!” Pecos said, his eager, wide-open blue eyes glistening in the leaping firelight. “I like that plan, sure enough!”
Slash let his gaze roam across Jay’s succulent frame. She wore a wool-lined, doeskin jacket against the cold, but it did little to conceal her feminine wares. He shook his head slowly in amazement at the redhead’s hazel-eyed, buxom beauty. “If anyone could pull it off, you could, Jay.”
She returned his admiring gaze with a warm smile, her cheeks turning a little pink at their nubs. “Thanks, Slash.”
“Could be dangerous,” he warned her.
“No more dangerous than what we went through today.”
“Fair point.”
She stared at him, her own eyes deep and soft and also bright with reflected firelight. He found himself holding her gaze, not turning away like he usually did when her eyes found his. It was as though she were mesmerizing him. Slash felt warm and . . . well . . . odd.
He wasn’t sure how to describe it. He’d be damned if he didn’t want to look away from the redheaded beauty before him—the widow of one of his two very best friends in all the world. They shared way too much complicated history for him to be feeling this way, gazing back at her like this.
But he couldn’t turn away.
He barely heard Pecos clear his throat and say, rising from his seat on the cave’s floor, “I, uh . . . I’m gonna check on the horses. With all this weather, they might’ve pulled free of their picket line.”
When Pecos was gone, Slash and Jay stared at each other for another three or four heartbeats, then each blinked, as though waking from the same dream, and turned away.
Slash rested back against his saddle. Jay rested back against hers. She crossed her legs Indian style, lowered her head, ran her hands through her thick red hair as though in frustration.
“Men,” she said distastefully. Slash knew she was referring to Ed Ritter.
“Yeah,” Slash said. “Tell me about ’em.”
He held the bottle out to her, around the side of the fire. “Drink?”
Jay looked at him. She smiled then, too, her lips drawing gradually farther back from her perfect white teeth.
“Thanks.”
They both laughed.
Jay lifted the bottle to her lips and drank. Pulling it back down, she studied him gravely, almost sadly, then asked, “How come you’ve never fallen in love, Slash?”
The old outlaw shrugged and looked down at his hands. “Oh . . . I don’t know. I reckon the right woman just never came along,” he lied.
CHAPTER 10
A fork of blue-white lightning streaked out of the murky black sky from which rain fell nearly sideways, tossed by a wicked wind, and struck a tree just right of the muddy trail. The tree fairly exploded, making a loud pop!
The cottonwood broke in two, the top jackknifing and crashing to the ground and again exploding with the impact, branches flying in all directions.
The smell of brimstone and charred wood peppered Jack Penny’s nose as his horse lurched away from the burning tree, giving a shrill whinny. Penny, wearing a long yellow slicker against the downpour, rain funneling off the brim of his tan hat, yelled, “Christ Almighty! I don’t think the gods is lookin’ at us too favorably today!”
“I think they’re tryin’ to do us in!” yelled Bart Antrim, trying to settle down his own frightened mount beside Penny. “That’s what I think!”
“Let’s get in out of the storm!”
Penny touched spurs to his mount’s flanks and galloped on down the trail, the horse’s hooves splashing in the veritable muddy stream the trail had become between two high, rocky escarpments. Another lightning flash revealed the old cottonwood ranch portal he was looking for, dead ahead along the twisting trail. Penny galloped under the portal and reined up in the yard of what had once been a prosperous ranch but was now a remote, San Juan Mountain Valley watering hole that catered mostly to the outlaw breed of clientele.
Ahead and on the bounty hunter’s right was the sprawling former ranch house, built of native timber and sporting a wide, wraparound veranda. Under a low-hanging, gently pitched roof, the saloon’s windows shone red with lamplight burning within the place. Another flash of lightning briefly silhouetted a man-shaped figure sitting on the veranda, looking toward Penny and Bart Antrim, who just now galloped under the portal and into the yard.
At least, Penny thought he’d seen someone sitting out there, staring in his and Antrim’s direction from beneath a bullet-crowned, broad-brimmed hat. After the brief lightning flash, the stormy night seemed even darker than before. The big, bearded bounty hunter brushed mud from the corner of his lazy left eye, gigged the buckskin over to a barn on his left, and dismounted. Two young Mexican hostlers in long canvas coats ran out from the barn’s open doors, where they’d been smoking, perfuming the air with the peppery smell of Mexican tobacco.
The hostlers grabbed the reins of Penny’s and Antrim’s horses and led the storm-fidgety mounts into the barn.
Penny raised the collar of his rain slicker and, bowing his head against the stormy onslaught, began running toward the ranch house-turned-saloon but stopped when Antrim tapped his shoulder.
A small man with a hawkish face and thick mustache and goatee, Bart Antrim nodded toward the open barn doors. Another lightning flash briefly illuminated a fancy, enclosed buggy—a custom-built affair resembling a cross between a chaise and a hansom cab—sitting just inside the barn, its tongue drooping toward the hay- and straw-strewn floor.
Penny cursed.
“Out of the fryin’ pan and into the fire!” Antrim yelled above the storm.
“We’ll see about that!” Penny yelled back, wheeling and stretching out his long, thin legs in a goosey, awkward jog, breathing hard after only three or four strides, his years of hard-drinking and smoking catching up to him yet again.
By the time he’d gained the top of the veranda, Penny’s lungs felt no larger than raisins. Raisins filled with sand. He stopped, leaned forward, hands on knees, then hacked a large gob of phlegm from his chest and spat it over the porch rail.
Antrim chuckled. “You feeble old devil!”
The younger bounty hunter ran across the porch and pushed through the storm door, laughing.
He followed Antrim inside and closed the storm door behind him, having to kick it closed at the bottom to get the swollen wood to latch. He turned to look around the low-ceilinged room filled with as much shadow as light. Sooty gas lamps smoked from low rafters, where they hung by rusty chains.
The bar ran along part of the back wall. Mercantile supplies were haphazardly arranged on shelves and bins to the left. There were tables straight ahead, fronting the bar and across the rest of the broad room.
Only one of the dozen or so tables was occupied—one against the far wall to the bounty hunter’s right. Penny couldn’t see the faces of the three men sitting over there, on the table’s far side, their backs to that wall as they faced the room. A lamp hung between him and the three men, lighting mainly their table on which three shot glasses and one whiskey bottle stood. A long, black cheroot smoldered in a stone ashtray.
The wan lamplight glinted dully off the moon-and-star badges pinned to the three men’s dark wool coats. All three wore high-crowned black Stetsons.
That was about all Penny could see of them.
He also saw that there were four other men in the room. These men were dead. Two lay on the floor about ten feet from the badge-toting men sitting in silhouette against the far wall. One dead man slumped belly down across a chair, a gun in his hand.
Another dead man lay belly up on the table, atop playing cards and scattered shot glasses and an overturned bottle and ashtray. He stared up at the ceiling, the nearby lamp revealing him in garish brilliance, reflecting off his wide-open, sightlessly staring eyes. Blood trickled from a corner of his mustache-mantled mouth.
Penny gave a caustic chuff, then cursed as he brushed his fist across his nose. He glanced once more at the three badge-toting silhouettes, then squawked in his wet boots to the bar at the room’s rear.
Rain drummed on the roof.
It plop-plop-plopped from a hole in the roof into a tin bucket to the left of the bar. Thunder rumbled, making the floor quiver beneath the bounty hunter’s boots.
Lightning flashed in the windows, intermittently filling the room with a spectral blue light that touched the hard-planed, ghoulish faces of the badge-toting men sitting against the far wall. They sat so still, they might have been mere suit-wearing skeletons over there.
Penny bellied up to the bar beside Antrim. A little old lady behind the bar had just set a shot glass before Antrim and was filling it from an unlabeled bottle. She plucked a glass off a shelf beneath the bar, set it down in front of Penny, and slopped the unlabeled whiskey into it.
She didn’t say anything. She merely stared up at the two bounty hunters blandly through her coal-black eyes beneath which dark pockets of flesh sagged against her wizened, coffee-brown face. She was so small that only her head shone above the bar, her coal-black hair pulled severely back against her egg-shaped head.
“Thanks, Ma,” Penny said, tossing a couple of coins onto the scarred, varnished pine planks. “Leave the bottle, will ya?”
The little woman, Ma Rondo, owned the place. Or, at least, she tended it. That’s all Penny and anyone else knew about her. She seemed to have been here forever, as fixed as the place itself, and would be here forevermore. It was just her and the two Mexicans who lived in the barn.
Ma lifted a rusty, dented coffee tin from under the bar and swept Penny’s coins into it with a jangling clatter, then, leaving the bottle on the bar, returned the tin to its shelf, swung around, and disappeared through a curtained doorway.
Penny sagged tiredly forward over the bar and threw back his entire whiskey shot, as did Antrim. Penny picked up the bottle and was refilling Antrim’s glass when lightning flashed, and for a second the bounty hunter thought it had struck the building itself, lancing through the roof and into the drinking hall.
A bright, blue-white light lit up the entire room. It flickered, brightened, then dissolved, and again the room was all dull spheres of lantern light and thick, hard-edged shadows. Thunder wailed like a tormented dragon.
“Christ!” the bounty hunter exclaimed, jerking with a start and splashing whiskey onto the bar around Antrim’s glass.
Antrim also leaped with a start and looked around, as though he, too, thought the lightning had penetrated the building. He turned to Penny, laughed edgily, then leaned forward and sucked the spilled tangleleg from the bar around his overfilled glass. He lapped at it like a dog.
He laughed. “Good stuff. Can’t waste a drop. Ma brews it herself, ya know!”
Just then there was the scrap e-bark -squawk of a door opening.
It was followed by another squeaking sound, almost like the faint chirp of distant birds. That sound was accompanied by the dull zing of rolling wheels.
“Here we go,” Penny said through a fateful sigh, and turned to where two figures moved out of the shadows on the far side of the room, to the left of the three specter-like deputy U.S. marshals.
The two figures moved into a broad, dim sphere of flickering lantern light and stopped about fifteen feet from Penny and Antrim, both of whom had turned to face the newcomers. One of the figures was a tall, severely featured blond woman wearing a spruce-green cape over a blood-red, velveteen gown, the hood of the cape drawn up over her thick, golden curls. The other figure was a man in a stylish, tailor-made, three-piece suit sitting in a wooden wheelchair, which the young woman had pushed into the room.
Chief Marshal Luther “Bleed-’Em-So” Bledsoe was in his mid-sixties, distinctly skeletal in appearance, long and lanky, with very pale skin, cobalt-blue eyes residing in deep sockets, and a tumbleweed of coarse silver hair poking out around his head. Some of the man’s hair stood straight up from the roots, as thin as cotton.
A walnut shotgun stock poked up from a leather scabbard strapped to the chair’s right side, over the chief marshal’s scrawny right thigh.
Bledsoe grinned, showing a set of very large false teeth— teeth that would have looked more at home in a horse’s mouth. “There’s nothing like a lightning storm! God, how I love to watch mother nature wreak her wrath. Look at this.” He pointed at his head. “My hair’s sticking straight up from that last charge. I can feel the electricity hopscotching around in my bones, in my nerves.” He hopped around in his chair to regard the specter-like deputies. “You feel it, boys?”
None of the deputies said a word.
The one who was smoking lifted his cheroot to his lips and took a deep drag, exhaling the smoke toward the ceiling through his nostrils.
“Ah, hell,” said the chief marshal, turning back to Penny, “they don’t feel nothin’. Even a lightnin’ storm can’t impress them. The wonders of mother nature. You feel it, Miss Langdon?”
“I do feel it,” the statuesque blonde said coolly, standing behind the old man, keeping her flat green eyes on the men at the bar. In her early to mid-twenties, she stood a good six feet tall, and she was pretty in a severe Nordic way, as though she’d been chiseled out of ice.
“See?” Bledsoe said, turning to Penny and Antrim again. “My assistant, Miss Abigail Langdon, feels it.”
The tall young woman slowly dipped her deeply clefted chin as though in acknowledgment of her introduction to Penny and Antrim.
Thunder clapped again over the roadhouse, causing the whole room to shudder. Lightning flashed brightly in the windows, eerily illuminating the dead men on the floor and on the table.
When the din had shaken down to only the rain beating on the saloon’s roof, the old man’s face as well as his tone hardened, and he said, “I’m going to assume the rest of your men are taking their time in the barn, and that they have the heads of Slash Braddock and the Pecos River Kid out there in croaker sacks.”
Penny and Antrim shared a dark glance.
Penny picked up his refilled shot glass and strode toward Bledsoe, stepping around the dead men lying on and around the table. He glanced at the dead man on the table, then frowned
and gestured at the body with his hand holding the drink, and said, “Say, ain’t that Melvin Soledad?”
“Yeah,” the chief marshal said. “Imagine runnin’ into him way out here. Him and Henry Searls and Scratch Underhill.” He smiled, blue eyes glittering delightedly. “They resisted arrest.”
CHAPTER 11
Penny walked up to within seven feet of Bledsoe and stopped, looking down at the wheelchair-bound lawman. “We ran into unexpected trouble.”
“I paid you to expect anything.”
“You didn’t pay us to expect an escape tunnel.”
Bledsoe scowled. “An escape tunnel?”
“That’s right,” Antrim said from the bar. “That cabin was outfitted with an escape tunnel. When we set the place on fire, they musta crawled out through the tunnel and snuck around us.”
“They cut us down like ducks on a millpond,” said Penny, and sipped his whiskey.
“Us?” Bledsoe grunted. He smiled. “I see that you and your little friend managed to get away unscathed.”
Antrim bristled at being called little. Penny sensed the smaller man seething behind him. As Antrim lurched away from the bar, setting down his drink, Penny stopped him with an upraised arm.
“We both dropped into some brush when the shootin’ started,” he said tightly, defensively. “Otherwise, they woulda cut us down with the others. The odds were against us, so we lit out of there. Live to fight another day, is what I say. We’ll have another chance at ’em. One with the odds in our favor. I got no doubt about that. None whatsoever.”
Bledsoe was grinning so broadly that anyone watching might have thought he was in danger of losing his teeth. “An escape tunnel?” He chuckled. “Of course. Why not? Pistol Pete probably thought of that, the old devil!” He chuckled some more. “And them two cutthroats an’ Pete’s woman took full advantage. Circled behind thirteen of supposedly the nastiest bounty hunters on the frontier, and laid waste to all but two!”
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