Cutthroats

by William W. Johnstone

  He looked over his left shoulder at Jaycee standing over him, behind him, then turned forward to see the expressions on Slash’s and Pecos’s faces. Suddenly, he broke into hysterical laughter.

  Pecos was almost unable to get the words out. “J-Jay? Jay . . . wh-what the hell?”

  “Why, Jay?” Slash said, shaking his head with a keen incomprehension.

  Jay gazed back at them through tear-glazed eyes. Her upper lip quivered.

  Pecos stepped forward, thrusting his arm up and pointing an accusing finger at her. “You double-crossed us, Jay!” he bellowed. “Why?”

  Bledsoe slapped his thigh and rocked with laughter.

  Jay lowered her gaze to her tightly entwined fingers, tears streaming down her cheeks. She lifted her gaze again to Slash and Pecos.

  “I’m sorry, Slash,” she said, sobbing, her face a mask of grief and bitter regret. “Pecos, I’m sorry!”

  She wheeled, her hair and her long skirt flying, and ran back into the private car.

  Slash and Pecos shared another befuddled look.

  “I don’t get it,” Pecos said, shaking his head. “I just don’t get it.”

  “Me, neither,” Slash said, and turned his enraged gaze to Bledsoe, who sat laughing in his chair on the private car’s fancy vestibule.

  Through his laughter he managed to order his deputies to cuff and shackle their prisoners, adding to Slash and Pecos after he’d sobered somewhat, “We’ll be heading on down to Saguache, boys. Got a little party for you. One of the necktie variety. Oh, of course there’ll be a trial an’ all beforehand. A fair one, of course. A federal judge is on his way down here from Denver even as we speak.”

  The chief marshal widened his eyes demonically and jutted his chin like a cocked .45. “Then we’re gonna hang you on the main drag, in front of the whole town. In fact, the good citizens of Saguache are already preparing for the festivities!”

  That made him rock back in his chair and howl once more, slapping the arms of his chair.

  As two deputies dropped down out of the express car, each with a pair of handcuffs and spancels, the cigar-smoking deputy remained behind the Gatling gun, narrowing one eye as he aimed down the brass canister at the two cutthroats, grinning as though daring them to resist arrest.

  Slash returned his incredulous gaze to the broadly, victoriously grinning Bledsoe. He’d never seen a man look so pleased with himself. The crippled old marshal appeared about to leap up out of his chair, jump down from the train car, and hop around his two, long-sought prisoners, yowling like a crazed Injun on the night before a battle.

  “How’d you do it?” Slash spit out at the old lawman. “How’d you get her to double-cross us? How’d you do it, Bledsoe?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t so hard,” Bledsoe said, shrugging a shoulder. “She’s a woman, isn’t she?”

  “Not just any woman,” Pecos said as his arms were jerked around behind his back and cuffs were closed over his wrists. “What’d you do? How’d you threaten her?”

  Bledsoe merely sat back in his chair, smiling and taking the sun. “Load ’em up, boys,” he said, plucking a gold timepiece from a pocket of his brocade vest. “If we leave now we should be back to Saguache in time for a late lunch.” He returned the watch to its pocket and winked at Slash and Pecos. “The special over at the Colorado House is the prime rib sandwich and a boiler maker,” he said. “Not that that means anything to you two. You’ll be dinin’ on burned beans, moldy bread, and stale water till you’re dancin’ the midair two-step!”

  He closed a knobby hand around his neck and stuck out his tongue, feigning strangulation.

  Then he slapped his leg and howled again.

  “Hurry up, dammit, boys!” he urged the two deputies. “Get ’em aboard and let’s get this heap back to civilization. Success of this caliber makes the chief marshal hungry!”

  CHAPTER 14

  “Guilty!” the federal judge bellowed three days later, rapping his gavel atop the bar behind which he sat on a high wooden stool. “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” Even louder, he shouted for emphasis above the cheering court watchers in the Busted Bum Saloon and Parlor House on First Avenue in the little Colorado mountain town of Saguache: “GUILTY AS HELLLLL!”

  Sitting at a round saloon table with their “attorney,” flanked by all three of Bledsoe’s rifle-wielding deputies, Slash turned to Pecos. “Well, that was a real surprise.”

  “Yeah,” Pecos said grimly, beneath the cheering of the townsfolk who’d filled the saloon till the place was busting at its seams. “Pardon me while I pick myself up off the floor in shock.”

  “Sorry, fellas,” yelled one of the girls who’d been watching from the balcony over the saloon, above the mahogany bar where Judge Angus McClelland was gathering his papers. “If you’re allowed, me an’ Betsy’ll give ya both a free one before they drop ya!”

  The pretty blonde clad in colorful under frillies and with pink night ribbons in her hair elbowed the half-clad brunette beside her, who leaned forward over the porch rail to blow the two doomed cutthroats a kiss.

  “Thanks, girl!” Pecos yelled back as one of the deputies pulled him to his feet from behind. “We’ll put in a request with ole Bleed-’Em-So Bledsoe, but I got a suspicion he ain’t gonna allow us no slap’n’tickle before we saddle our golden clouds and float off to that great express car in the sky!”

  “We’ll be out in the street cheerin’ for your souls to make it to heaven!” yelled the blonde, leaning forward and kicking a slim, pale leg out behind her.

  Slash grinned back at the pretty doxie, who was young enough to be his granddaughter, but said to Pecos out the side of his mouth, “She’ll be out in the street, all right, but she won’t be cheerin’ for our souls so much as she’ll be tryin’ to drum up business. I bet that’ll be the biggest day for all the business folks in this part of the territory.”

  “Ah, don’t be so tough on the girl,” Pecos said as the three deputies conferred behind them, watching the milling crowd for a break through which they could haze their prisoners back out onto the street and over to the courthouse in which the jail was tucked. “She’s gotta make a livin’ like everyone else!”

  Slash turned to his and Pecos’s attorney sitting to Slash’s right. The young little lad, who wore a carnation in the lapel of his shabby brown suit coat, was sound asleep, his chin dipped toward his left shoulder. Slash could hear the young man snoring beneath the crowd’s din.

  He nudged the young man’s arm. “Hey, Lester, wake up!”

  Lester Hyman jerked his head up with a start, looking around wide-eyed, as though slow to remember where he was and what he was doing here—defending two of the West’s most notorious outlaws against a surefire hanging, which he’d lost. He wasn’t really an attorney, anyway, though Bledsoe and his close friend Judge McClelland had deemed him so. Lester was just reading for the law; he had no experience in the federal courts at all. His resume included a couple of divorces, a man charged with stealing hay from a neighbor, an elderly teetotaling lady accused of killing her husband by dumping strychnine in his home-brewed forty-rod, and a doxie accused of robbing her jake while he slept upstairs in this very saloon.

  “It’s all over, Lester,” Slash told the young man still blinking as he looked around the room, slowly coming out of his alcohol-induced stupor. He’d been so nervous through the entire trial that he’d drained his little pocket flask over the course of the three-hour proceeding, furtively adding the rye to his coffee beneath the table while the federal prosecutor was regaling the cutthroats and judge as well as the six-person jury with Slash and Pecos’s past exploits. “All over except the hangin’,” Slash added.

  “Ah,” Lester said, fighting a yawn and running a grimy sleeve across his mouth, over which he was trying to grow a mustache. “Ah . . . oh . . . golly, I’m really, really sorry, fellas. . . .”

  “Don’t worry about it, Lester,” Pecos said. “You didn’t have a chance.”

  “Bledsoe and McClelland had
decided they was gonna hang us long before we even arrived in town,” Slash said, remembering the large banner draped across the town’s main street, and which he’d first seen when he and Pecos had pulled into town on Bledsoe’s dime.

  In large, ornate red letters, it read:

  NECKTIE PARTY NECKS SATURDAY!

  He hadn’t been sure, and he still wasn’t, if the misspelling had been unintentional or a reflection of the banner maker’s wry humor.

  “They didn’t even allow me to provide any witnesses who might’ve testified in your defense!” Lester said, fumbling a second silver flask from his coat pocket.

  “That’s all right, too, Lester,” Slash said.

  “Yeah,” Pecos said, smiling grimly and adding, “You wouldn’t have found any even if you’d gone lookin’.”

  He and Slash snorted a bleak laugh.

  “All right, fellas, let’s go!” the perpetually cigar-smoking deputy ordered, ramming his rifle butt against Slash’s back. “Get movin’, an’ no lollygaggin’!”

  As Slash and Pecos were hazed toward the batwing doors through the rapidly thinning crowd, Lester hurried to keep up with them, saying, “If they would only wait until I could file an appeal with the appellate courts, I’m sure I could at least get you a stay and a new trial!”

  Lester tipped the flask back once more as he and Slash and Pecos stepped out onto Saguache’s broad, dusty main street, flanked by the three, grim-faced, Winchester-wielding deputies donning mustaches on their severely chiseled faces, and low-crowned, black brimmed hats.

  “Don’t waste your ink,” Slash said. “You’d only be prolonging the inevitable.”

  “Ah, Jesus,” Lester said, jogging to keep up with the taller men. “I just feel . . . well, I just feel . . .”

  “Forget it, Lester,” Slash said. “Go home and sleep it off, son.”

  The young man slowed his pace until he’d fallen well behind Slash and Pecos and their three flanking guards. Slash glanced over his shoulder to see Lester stopping, throwing his arms out in defeat, and taking another deep pull from his flask.

  “Poor fella,” Slash said to Pecos, striding beside him with his hands cuffed behind his back. “He tried his best.”

  “Yeah, it ain’t his fault we’ll be the guests of honor at the necktie party tomorrow.” Pecos cast a grim glance at the gallows, still under construction a block ahead. Two men were putting the finishing touches on it, one oiling the trapdoor hinges while the other adjusted the two ropes atop the platform and to which two sandbags had been tied to gauge the drop. He toiled under the tutelage of a tall, gray-haired man in a stovepipe hat and long black, claw hammer coat and whom Slash knew was the hangman, Adolph Grimes.

  “No, it wasn’t Lester’s fault,” Slash agreed, adding, through gritted teeth, spitting out her name like a bitter pill he just couldn’t swallow: “Jay! That’s whose fault it is. Jaycee Breckenridge!”

  “Why do you think she did it, anyways?” Pecos asked, both men ignoring the three sun-darkened little boys who’d just run out of the gap between a barbershop and a millinery, firing their tree branch rifles at the two doomed men and yelling, “Bang-bang—you two cutthroats is wolf bait!”

  “Bang-bang-bang!” yelled another—the smallest of the bunch, hopping around as though he were galloping hell for leather on a wild stallion. “Consider yourselves planted!”

  “Go away, you boys,” reprimanded one of the marshals. “You get too close to these polecats, they’re liable to jump you and bite your ears off. Now, git!”

  Chuckling, Slash turned to Pecos in answer to his partner’s question about Jay. “Maybe it’s like ole Bleed-’Em-So said. Maybe the marshal plied her with nice dresses and fine jewelry. Most women will do a lot for that sorta thing. I never would have figured Jay for one o’ them, but I reckon I had her wrong.”

  “I reckon we both had her wrong.”

  “Well, she’s a woman. You gotta figure you’ve figured ’em wrong just when you start to believe you’ve finally figured ’em out!”

  Pecos stared at his partner in wide-eyed admiration. “I’ll be hanged, Slash, if you ain’t the wisest man I ever known!”

  “I’ve been tryin’ to tell you that for years now.”

  “Maybe it finally done sunk in.”

  “Here on the eve of our necktie party.”

  “Life is odd, ain’t it, Slash?”

  “That it is, partner,” Slash lamented, slowly wagging his head as he drew up to the side of the courthouse, near the two barred cellar doors leading to the basement cell block. “That it sure as hell is.”

  “You two are real philosophers,” said the deputy, Vern Gables, who had the perpetual Mexican cheroot in his hand. They’d all stopped in front of the cellar doors, and the deputy named Vince Tabor crouched to poke a key in the lock.

  “You know what my philosophy about you is, Gables?” asked Pecos, staring belligerently down at the slightly shorter, dark-haired deputy U.S. marshal.

  “No, what’s that?”

  “You smoke too much an’ you smell bad!”

  Gables grinned darkly as he took one step back. He’d just started to raise his rifle to tattoo Pecos’s forehead with the brass butt plate when Slash sidled between the two men. “Now, now, now,” Slash said, facing Gables. “If that’s all it takes to get your dander up, then I, sir, am sorry to inform you that you are sorely lacking in maturity.”

  “That a fact?” Gables said. “Well, let me tell you something, Slash Braddock, that might make you feel just a tad immature.”

  Slash grinned defiantly. “Fish or cut bait!”

  Gables took a deep drag off his cigar, blew the smoke at Slash, then, leaning forward and grinning like the cat that ate the canary, said, “Guess who I seen comin’ out of ole Bleed-’Em-So’s room over at the Colorado House this morning, lookin’ a little, uh, disheveled, shall we say?”

  The grin left Slash’s face. His eyes grew flat and dark. “Who?”

  “That whore who double-crossed you two old mossyhorns—Miss Jaycee Breckenridge!”

  Slash glared at him, his face swelling and flushing. “You’re lyin’!”

  “You’ll never know.” Gables grinned more broadly, then poked the cheroot into his mouth once more.

  Slash slammed his forehead against the man’s mouth, smashing the cigar against his lips and throwing Gables straight backward with an indignant scream. Gables nearly went down and would have if the deputy behind him hadn’t grabbed him and propped him back up.

  “You win,” Slash said, his grin in place once more. “That does make me feel a tad immature.”

  Pecos chuckled.

  Gables brushed hot ashes from his mouth. His lower lip was split. “Why, you son of a bitch!”

  He rushed at Slash but the deputy behind him grabbed him.

  “Hold on, Vern, hold on! Don’t mess ’im up—you know . . . before . . . ?” The third deputy, whose name was Tyson Waite, spread a shrewd grin of his own.

  That seemed to take some of the hump out of Gables’s neck. He lowered his clenched fist, then smiled and released his held breath. Waite released him.

  “Oh, yeah.” Gables smiled mockingly at Slash and Pecos, smoothing his rumpled jacket. “Right, right.”

  “I don’t get it,” Pecos said. “Before what?”

  “You’ll see,” Gables said, raising his rifle and using its butt to nudge Slash toward the open cellar doors. “Get back in your hidy-hole. We’ll drag you back out . . . and ‘drag’ is likely the word for it, too . . . when it’s time to stretch some hemp.”

  “I don’t get it,” Pecos said to Slash as the two outlaws walked down the steps and into the cool, dark cell block. “Why are they gonna have to drag us out?”

  “Here you go,” Gables said when they were roughly halfway down the cell block. “Home sweet home, fellas!”

  Pecos and Slash glanced into their respective cells. Pecos’s cell was on the left side of the stone-floored corridor between the two walls of strap-
iron cages. Slash’s was on the right side. Each cell had a prisoner in it.

  Before the trial, Slash and Pecos and one other man had been the only prisoners in the cell block. The third prisoner, hauled in last night for getting drunk and tearing up a hurdy-gurdy house, was gone—likely freed after his fine had been paid.

  Now there were two other prisoners. One was in Pecos’s cell, lying sacked out on one of the two cell cots that folded down from the barred walls on stout chains. The other was in Slash’s cell, also sacked out on a thinly padded, iron-framed cot.

  Both were big men. Bigger than Pecos, even. They were both snoring loudly.

  “I don’t get it,” Slash said, glancing around the otherwise empty cell block. “Why are they in our cells? Hell, there’s plenty of other cells for ’em.”

  “We were afraid you boys might get lonely,” Gables said.

  Slash shrugged and said, “I got an idea. Why don’t you stick us into another pair of cages?” He smiled mockingly at Gables. “If we get lonely, we’ll call for you to read us a good-night story, Vern.”

  “Nah, nah,” Gables said, giving Slash a hard shove into his old, newly occupied cell, through the door that deputy Tabor had opened with a key from his ring of cell block keys. “This is home sweet-home-home for you, my friend, Slash. Till Adolph Grimes plays cat’s cradle with your head, anyways.”

  He laughed.

  Tabor shoved Pecos through his own cell’s open door and into his own, freshly occupied cell.

  When the deputies had removed Slash’s and Pecos’s handcuffs, closed and locked their cell doors, and clacked off down the cell block, chuckling, Slash massaged his chafed wrists and stared down at the big man sprawled belly up across the cell’s second cot.

  “Good Lord—this here is one big SOB!” he told Pecos.

  “Yeah,” Pecos said, staring down at his own bulky cell mate. “This one, too.”