Cutthroats

by William W. Johnstone

  Bledsoe laughed again, clapped his big hands together, and glanced over his shoulder at the three deputies concealed in the shadows behind him.

  To a man, they were as sober as judges. The one with the cheroot took another long pull on the cigar once more.

  Bledsoe looked up at Abigail Langdon, who only quirked her broad mouth a little, keeping her eyes on Penny.

  “You gotta love those two, don’t you?” said the chief marshal.

  “What two?” asked Penny, incredulous.

  “Slash Braddock an’ the Pecos River Kid. The woman, too—Jaycee Breckenridge. Hell, you gotta love all three.” Still chuckling with boyish delight, Bledsoe shook his head and wrung his hands together.

  Penny glowered at him, one nostril flaring. “If you love ’em so damn much, why’d you sic us on ’em?”

  Instantly, the smile left the chief marshal’s long, angular face with its deep-set, cobalt eyes. “I meant it figuratively.”

  “You meant it . . . what?” Antrim asked skeptically. He glanced at Penny, then back to Bledsoe. “What’d he say?”

  “I didn’t mean it literally,” Bledsoe said.

  “I don’t care how you meant it,” Antrim said, stepping forward, his face red, his little eyes pinched with anger. “And I don’t see why you can’t talk in a way that—”

  “Shut up, you little fool!” Bledsoe bellowed, lifting an arm to point his long, bony finger.

  Antrim stopped and hardened his jaws, his little, pinched-up eyes spitting fire. He made a deep, breathy chortling sound in his chest and his feet moved in place, as though he were grinding bugs into the floor. His chest rose and fell sharply. He flexed his gloved right hand over the handle of the .44 jutting from the holster on that thigh, under the pulled back flap of his rain slicker.

  “Go ahead,” Bledsoe said, leaning forward in his chair, his own face mottled with fury now. “Pull that smoke wagon, you little termite!”

  The sounds Antrim was making deep in his chest grew louder. He looked at the three deputies sitting behind the table on the far side of the room, their faces in shadow, smoke from the one deputy’s cigar webbing in the guttering lantern light. Antrim shuttled his gaze from the deputies to the three dead men before him.

  Penny smiled as he glanced over his shoulder at the smaller man. “Stand down, Bart.” His smile grew as he returned his gaze to the gray-haired cripple in the wheelchair. “Stand down, stand down,” he added drolly.

  Antrim relaxed his hand. The noises stopped issuing from his chest but he held his acrimonious stare on the wheelchair-bound chief marshal.

  Bledsoe sat back in his chair. To Penny he said, “You let two of the most elusive cutthroats on the western frontier get away from you, after you had ’em both and that outlaw woman, Breckenridge, corralled in their outlaw cabin. You know how long I’ve been after those two—Braddock and the Pecos River Kid?”

  “A long time, I’d imagine,” Penny said, playing along with the strange man’s game. “They been at it a long time.”

  “I’ve been after them for nigh on twenty years now. Ever since I was a deputy ridin’ for ole Cleve Butterworth, who held the position I hold now, in the Denver Federal Building. I almost had ’em once. We thought we had ’em corralled in Abilene, Kansas—eleven of us deputy U.S. marshals and three Pinkertons—when the Snake River Marauders were robbing the Stockman’s State Bank on Front Street.”

  Bledsoe grimaced, shook his head slowly, fatefully. “Somehow, they slipped away. Slick as dog dung on a doorknob on the Fourth of July!”

  He shook his head again and added in a low, throaty voice, “That was the day I got the bullet in my back. From Braddock himself when he was comin’ out of the bank, both pistols blazing, laying down cover for the Pecos Kid, whose hands were full of money. I caught a ricochet off the sandstone wall behind me.”

  Penny doffed his still-dripping hat and held it down before him in both hands, and dropped his chin gravely, looking at Bledsoe from beneath his shaggy brows. “I do apologize for your misfortune, Marshal Bledsoe. I didn’t know that bullet came from Braddock.”

  “No,” Bledsoe said. “You wouldn’t.”

  “Again,” Penny said. “I can’t imagine a worse thing than bein’ confined to a—”

  “Shut up!” the old marshal bellowed.

  Penny felt his gut tighten under the crazy old lawman’s onslaught. He slid his eyes to one side, glancing at Antrim behind him. Bart slid his own tense, angry gaze to Penny, then to the fiery chief marshal before them, flanked by the severely beautiful blonde in the spruce-green cape, who might have been carved out of alabaster, complete with her coolly mysterious smile.

  “The only thing you two corkheads need to be sorry for is letting yourselves get outsmarted by those two cutthroats and that outlaw woman, Breckenridge. You got that close”—Bledsoe raised his hand, holding his thumb and index finger an inch apart—“and let ’em get away. Get outta here! You’re fired!”

  “You can’t fire us!” Antrim shot back, raising his arm and pointing an angry finger.

  “You gave us contracts!” Penny added, also pointing an accusing finger at the old marshal. “You agreed to pay us like deputy marshals as long as we tracked Slash ’n’ Pecos and only Slash ’n’ Pecos till we ran ’em down and killed ’em an’ brought you back their heads! Then we’d both get the reward money on their heads—doubled!—and the rest of our men would get a thousand dollars from Uncle Sam. That was the deal!”

  “It ain’t our fault they had an escape tunnel,” Antrim argued, leaning forward at the waist, glaring at Bledsoe. “So, they pulled one over on us? They pulled one over on you in Abilene!”

  He straightened, beaming victoriously.

  Bledsoe glared back at the shorter bounty hunter. His eyes were bright with fury though the rest of his face appeared passive except for a nerve that was twitching in his left cheek, just beneath that deep-set, cobalt eye.

  The room was silent. The only sounds were the din kicked up by the storm outside. Lightning sparked in the windows, at times filling the entire room with those eerie, blue-white flashes.

  Finally, Penny gave a nervous chuckle and, grinning at the ominously silent Bledsoe, holding out his right hand to calm his enraged partner, he said, “Now, now, now. Pshaw! No point in callin’ out everbody’s mistakes. So, we let them two owlhoots slip out on us here today, just like you did way back in Abilene.”

  He threw out his arms, shrugging. “None o’ that means a damn thing right here an’ now, does it? Me an’ Bart here will go after them two as soon as the storm clears out. We’ll track ’em from the cabin an’ finish ’em right an’ proper. We’ll cut their heads off, cart ’em back to your office in Denver, and collect the money we’ll have comin’ to us.”

  He added with a wry chuckle, “Of course we’ll forget the money you owe the rest of the bunch, since they’re dead an’ all. You just keep that money in ole Uncle Sam’s bank. That’s a savings for you. As soon as Bart and me have collected the reward money . . . along with our retainer fees . . . you and us will fork trails, Chief Marshal Bledsoe. You’ll never have to lay your eyes on our ugly faces again.”

  Penny chuckled again nervously, shifting his eyes from the three deputies sitting silently in the shadows to the right of the chief marshal sitting in his wheelchair, his eyes still blazing at Bart Antrim.

  For nearly another full minute, Bledsoe remained silent.

  Then he lifted his big, horny hands, opened his coat, and reached into a pocket. He pulled out two sheets of cream paper, which were folded lengthwise. He opened both pages, turned them so that they faced the room, and ripped them along the crease.

  Bledsoe’s face suddenly brightened in a mocking grin.

  “Here are your contracts!” He placed his hands on the arms of his chair and leaned forward over his knees, pointing his chin like a pistol barrel at the two men before him. “Now get your cowardly asses the hell out of my sight!”

  Antrim gave a mewling cry o
f outrage. He bounded forward, reaching for the pistol thonged on his right thigh. “Why, you crippled old son of—”

  He didn’t get the rest out.

  Or if he did, it was drowned by the sudden concussion of Bledsoe’s sawed-off shotgun, which the old marshal had drawn with lightning speed from its greased scabbard and held straight out before him in both hands, thumbing the left hammer back and squeezing the trigger.

  Antrim was picked up and flung straight back, triggering his Colt into the ceiling just before he hit the floor on his back and lay writhing like a bug on a pin.

  Penny stared down at his partner in shock. Antrim stared up at him, the light quickly leaving his eyes as he held both his gloved hands to what remained of his belly. Bart tried to speak but he managed only a few strangled gurgling sounds. His eyes rolled back in their sockets, his bloody hands dropped to the floor, and he lay still.

  Penny turned to the chief marshal. Bledsoe gazed back at him, eyes bright with anticipation. Smoke curled from the maw of the shotgun’s right barrel. Both barrels were aimed at the bounty hunter’s chest.

  Bledsoe curled his upper lip. “Want some?”

  Penny raised his hands, palms out, and shook his head. He glanced at the three deputies. They hadn’t moved. They sat as before, the one with the cheroot just now stubbing out the cigar in the ashtray and exhaling smoke through his nostrils.

  Abigail Langdon stood behind and above the little, crippled chief marshal, gazing coolly at Penny. She might have been watching some mildly entertaining theatrical play in a frontier opera house.

  Penny’s heart thudded heavily, painfully.

  “I reckon I’ll, uh . . . I reckon I’ll just take a bottle and go to bed.” He began backing toward the bar where he intended to secure a room for the night.

  “The place is done filled up,” Bledsoe growled, sliding his shotgun toward the door. “Take the barn.”

  Penny compressed his lips. Fury was a living thing inside him, trying to claw its way out. He looked at the smoking shotgun before him, then at the three deputies and the cool eyes of Bledsoe’s ethereally beautiful assistant gazing at him blandly.

  There would be another time, another place for Bledsoe.

  Just as there would be another opportunity for the bounty hunter to take down Slash Braddock and the Pecos River Kid.

  Penny sidled over to the door, shrugged deeper into his rain slicker, and left.

  Bledsoe sheathed his shotgun and sat staring at the closed door, slowly shaking his head and chuckling.

  “What’s funny, Chief?” asked Abigail Langdon, gazing down at him. Her voice sounded like the keys of the most finely tuned piano in the world.

  “Braddock and Pecos,” Bledsoe said, shaking his head as he stared at the door. “Those two old cutthroats got no quit in ’em—I’ll give ’em that.”

  He threw his head back, laughing.

  “But I got one more big surprise for ’em!”

  The old chief marshal laughed harder.

  Outside thunder roared.

  Lightning lit up the entire room.

  CHAPTER 12

  Three weeks later, Slash leaned his Winchester against his knee and plucked his old, dented and tarnished railroad watch from a pocket of his black leather vest. He checked the time, snapped the lid closed, returned the timepiece to its pocket, then pulled his field glasses from their leather, baize-lined case.

  As he squatted in the rocks of an aspen-stippled mountainside high in the southern Rockies, he raised the binoculars to his eyes and aimed them along the twin rails of a narrow-gauge spur line snaking down a steep mountain grade to his left.

  He adjusted the focus.

  Soon, telltale puffs of black smoke appeared down that narrow chasm between towering aspen- and pine-studded cliffs.

  “Right on time,” the outlaw muttered to himself as he stared through the single sphere of magnified vision.

  A few seconds later, as Slash began to hear the chuffah-chuffah-chuffah of the locomotive laboring toward him up the mountain, he saw the coal-black stack. A couple of seconds after that, the locomotive itself, its bullet-shaped, black snout fronted by the copper-plated number 31, lurched into view.

  Slash’s heart quickened anxiously, thrillingly. Maybe that sense of excitement and that alone was what had kept him riding the long coulees all these years since the war. It was nearly as fine a feeling as that of a rip-roaring bender in some wild frontier city—Dodge City, say, or New Orleans.

  No, it was better than being drunk, for it didn’t dull the experience of living the way spirits did. It washed the mind as clear as a window scoured on a spring morning after a rain, giving it a diamond-edged lucidity as it erased all the demons otherwise on the lurk in a man’s consciousness. It expunged all the tedious sundry cares, desires, needling responsibilities, mild annoyances, and lingering angers.

  This was life or death, freedom or jail. This was living in its purest, rawest form.

  Soon, if the information Jay had gathered over the past three weeks in Saguache was correct—and there was no reason for Slash to think it wasn’t—he and Pecos would be nearly ten thousand dollars richer and well on their way to owning their own freighting company in Camp Collins, a quiet little town nestled on the eastern edge of the Front Range between Denver and Cheyenne.

  Soon, they’d retire from the long coulees and begin the second half of their lives as respectable businessmen.

  Soon.

  Chuffah-chuffah-chuffah . . .

  Slash lowered the glasses and turned to where Pecos was just then kicking rocks over the dynamite he’d arranged with caps and fuses between the ties at the base of the slope, fifty yards to Slash’s right, where the grade leveled out and a sparkling, gurgling creek swung toward the rails from a ravine on the other side of the tracks.

  “It’s comin’, partner,” Slash called, keeping his voice down though no one on the train could have heard above the continuing chuffah-chuffah-chuffah, which grew steadily louder as the narrow-gauge locomotive kept climbing the hill.

  Pecos kicked a few more rocks over his buried dynamite, making sure it was well concealed but careful to make sure it was subtly concealed, and that he left no tracks.

  He and Slash had acquired the explosive sticks from a long-trusted source in Durango who sold arms, ammo, and remounts to the army. The two cutthroats had been using dynamite to blow train rails for nearly as long as they’d been in the West. Pecos reflected that he’d miss the danger of the dynamite, of its smell that lingered on a man’s hands—the mixed tang of pepper and kerosene—and he’d miss the sudden roar of the tracks being blown, the screech of the locomotive’s brakes applied in panic by the engineer.

  He’d miss the huffing and puffing of the dragon-like locomotives, and maybe even the quick thudding of his heart, the slick sweat popping out on his hands, as it did now, beneath his gloves, as either freedom or jail, riches or poverty, life or death approached along a steep mountain incline, under a faultless bowl of blue western sky.

  Slash might miss all of those things and more about the outlaw life, he reflected. But the years were growing long. Trails had dimmed. Gray streaked his hair. He and Pecos weren’t getting any younger. Staying in the business any longer, with their skills on the wane, would be suicide. And neither Slash nor Pecos was suicidal.

  Glancing down the grade toward the approaching train, Pecos tipped his hat down low over his eyes and wheeled, the flaps of his long, black duster winging out around his high-topped, stovepipe boots as he mounted the rocky slope. He traced a meandering course through the aspens, pines, rocks, and boulders, sometimes scrambling on his hands and knees.

  Slash could hear his partner’s labored breathing. By the time Pecos reached Slash’s position, the bigger of the two cutthroats was wheezing like an overburdened bellows, his fair-skinned, sun-mottled face flushed and sweating.

  “Oh, Lordy,” Pecos said, dropping to a knee in the rock nest beside Slash. “I think I’m gonna have a heart str
oke!” He rammed a gloved fist against his chest as he sagged back against a tree bole and doffed his hat. He chuckled dryly as he raked air in and out of his tired lungs.

  “Age is a terrible thing—ain’t it, partner?” Slash plucked his small, flat, hide-wrapped traveling flask from inside his broadcloth suit coat and held it out. “Have you a shot o’ that. Best heart tonic known to medicine.”

  “What is it?”

  “Tequila.”

  Pecos gave an ironic chuff. He uncapped the flask, tipped it back, and took a long pull. As he returned the “medicine” to Slash, smacking his lips, he shook his head in relief. “Gracias, amigo. Think you mighta just saved my life.”

  Slash sipped from the flask, then returned the cap to its mouth. He glanced down the grade, toward where the train was approaching. As a fading memory slithered back into his brain—more and more were doing that lately, filling him with a bittersweet feel—he turned to Pecos and said with a grin, “Wouldn’t be the first time one of us saved the other’s life—would it, partner?”

  Pecos’s gaze deepened as he, too, remembered their shared history, over thirty years’ worth. He gave a dry chuckle and shook his head. “No, it sure wouldn’t. . . .”

  “You ready?”

  Pecos glanced at the plunger to which he’d already connected the dynamite’s fuse. He grinned at Pecos as he leaned forward to place his right hand on the plunger handle. “Partner, I was born ready!”

  “Wait for my signal,” Slash said, taking his rifle in his right hand and holding up his left hand, palm out, casting a cautious gaze through the rocks.

  The train approached, huffing and puffing along the narrow-gauge rails. The locomotive slid up into full view now, about forty feet to the left of Slash’s and Pecos’s positions. Slash could see the engineer poking his head out the near side window, gazing ahead along the rails. He wore a red wool cap, and a corncob pipe drooped from between his mustached lips. Behind him, the fireman had the firebox door open, and he was busily shoving wood from the tender car into the raging furnace, trying to keep the boiler’s temperature up.