The two cutthroats shared dark looks through their cell doors.
CHAPTER 15
“Why do you suppose we got us a coupla cell mates, Slash?” Pecos asked from the cell across the corridor.
Slash looked up from the big, bald-headed hombre sacked out belly down on the cot in Slash’s cell and said, “I don’t know. Maybe Gables figures they need father figures. You know—two good, upstandin’, older citizens to counsel them in the ways of the straight ’n’ narrow.”
Slash smiled.
Pecos chuckled and shook his head, staring down at his cell mate. “I got a feelin’ that ain’t so. Just a hunch, though. I might be wrong.” He wrinkled his nose and stepped back away from his loudly snoring cell mate. “Pee-you! This fella stinks like a whiskey barrel that done drowned a polecat!”
He ran a thick forearm across his nose.
“Yeah, this one, too.”
Slash stared down at his own cell mate. The man was maybe six feet, six inches tall, though it was hard to tell with him lying down. He was thick through the chest and neck. Very thick. Thick as a Brahma bull. On the side of his neck was the tattoo of a naked woman.
A gold stud pierced his left earlobe. Another tattoo marked his forehead. It was a circle with a figure eight inside it. Slash had seen such markings before and knew that these, like those, were probably the signature of some coastal city gang. This fella was likely from the Barbary Coast or New Orleans. He and his partner were likely hiding out in the Colorado mountains, on the dodge from a possible murder charge. Probably several murder charges. They had the look of freight-hauling mule skinners. This one’s ham-sized hands were badly scarred and thickly callused. Scars across his knuckles marked him as a bare-knuckle fighter. They told of smashed faces, broken jaws, and eyes swollen to the sizes of horseshoes.
He must have gotten into another fight last night, for some of those scars had opened up and shone brightly with fresh blood.
His face was broad and ugly. His thick nose had several knots. It had obviously been broken several times and not been set right. A dollop of blood was crusted beneath his left nostril.
The big man before Slash indeed looked like a merciless, tough nut, as someone here in Saguache had likely learned last night or early this morning the hard way.
The man sucked in a long, deep breath, roaring like a slumbering dragon. When he let out the breath, the snore rose a couple of octaves, and the man’s thick, chapped lips fluttered. They were also flecked with blood. He winced a little, shaking his head and frowning.
Likely suffering one hell of a hangover.
“All I got to say,” Pecos said, walking up to his cell door and leaning forward, squeezing the iron bands in his hands and regarding Slash gravely, “is when these fellas wake up, I doubt they’re gonna be feelin’ any too friendly.”
“Yeah,” Slash said, walking over to his own cell door, stepping lightly on the balls of his boots so as not to wake his big, mean-looking companion. “Let’s just hope they sleep good an’ sound till . . . well, till tomorrow, at least.”
He leaned forward against his own cell door, pressing his forehead to the iron bands.
“You gotta hand it to ole Bleed-’Em-So,” Pecos drawled. “He sure knows how to make a pair of old cutthroats suffer. He’s prob’ly hopin’ these two wake up an’ beat us to greasy pulps.”
“Yeah, well, he’s been after us for a long time. And I’m the one who put him in that wheelchair.” Slash sighed, lifted his head, and scratched the beard stubble on his neck. “I reckon he’s gonna wring every bit of pleasure he can out of us before we drop through that gallows floor tomorrow.” He glanced over his shoulder at the stout man still snoring behind him.
“I reckon,” Pecos said, toeing a crack in the stone floor.
He looked up at Slash suddenly, frowning. “Say, Slash . . .”
“Uh-huh?”
“You, uh . . . you afraid?”
“Of what? Dyin’?”
“Of course dyin’!”
Slash pondered the subject, frowning down at the cell block’s chipped and dusty stone floor. His frown deepened and then he lifted his gaze to his partner’s blue-eyed gaze holding steady on him from the opposite cell.
“Yeah,” Slash said, nodding slowly. “Yeah . . . I reckon I am. I reckon we both faced death so much—every time we went out on a job, as a matter of fact—that you’d think I’d have got used to the notion. But . . . now, havin’ that gallows staring me in the face . . .”
Slash nodded again, chuckled. “Yeah . . . I reckon I am feelin’ a might squishy in the belly about it.”
“Me, too,” Pecos admitted. Suddenly, he grinned, blue eyes glowing as they caught the light angling through the high, barred window flanking Slash. “But we had us a good run, didn’t we, partner?”
Slash returned the smile. “We did at that, partner.”
“Not too many men can say they got through this life without callin’ no other men their boss.”
“They sure can’t!”
“You an’ me was never no other man’s hammer an’ that’s a fact. Leastways, not since we was seventeen, eighteen years old. After that, we went into business for ourselves, stealin’ other men’s money!”
“That’s what we did, all right. And we did it in about as honest and upright a way as two cutthroats could do it, too!”
“We sure as hell did!” Pecos agreed, lifting his head suddenly and loosing a victorious, coyote-like whoop.
“Oh-oh,” Slash said, stretching his gaze beyond Pecos.
The big man on the cot behind Pecos had stirred, snorting and grumbling. He lifted his big, flat face suddenly, framed by greasy, brown, gray-flecked hair, and glowered toward Slash and Pecos, wrinkling up his broad, doughy nose from which sprouted a wart the size of the tip of Slash’s little finger. “Will you two peckerwoods shut the hell up? Can’t you see a man’s tryin’ to get some shut-eye over here?”
His voice was deep and grumbling, like the voice of a grizzly bear—a severely piss-burned one—if a grizzly bear could talk, that was.
Half turned to his cell mate, Pecos said, “Uh . . . yes, sir. Sorry, sir!”
He glanced at Slash, wincing.
“There,” grumbled the big man, dropping his head back down to the thinly padded cot, making the chains squawk and groan. “Tha’s more . . . like . . . it. . . .”
He was sawing logs once more.
Slash pressed his lips together, biting back a laugh.
Pecos glanced behind him again, then turned to Slash in relief. “Whew! Did you see the size of his head?”
“Looks solid, too.”
“And I doubt there’s a thing in it,” Pecos said, lifting a big forearm to muffle his snorting laughter.
“Shhh!” Slash said from across the stone corridor. “We wake him again, I got a feelin’ you’re gonna suffer somethin’ awful.” He fought back his own snorts and yowls, tears of laughter running down his cheeks. “No, I don’t think it’ll go well for you at all, Pecos! Why, he’ll pull you inside out an’ stomp on your stuffin’ till there won’t be nothin’ left for ole Bleed-’Em-So to hang but a bag of broken bones!”
Both men slid down the bars of their respective cell doors, howling into their shirtsleeves. They sat on their butts, shouldered up to their cell doors, snorting and grunting for nearly two entire minutes. Glancing at each other through the bars and at the big snoring brutes flanking each of them only made them howl harder.
“Ah, crap,” Pecos said finally, when their laughter was dwindling and they were both wrung out, tears bathing their rugged faces.
They let a few minutes pass, just sitting there. They listened to the occasional hammering from outside, which they knew belonged to the final adjustments being made to the instrument of their annihilation—the gallows. There was also the barking of a distant dog, the chirping of birds, and the clomping and clattering of occasional horseback riders and wagons passing the jailhouse.
Men shouted,
laughed.
A baby cried.
“Hey, Slash?”
“Yep?”
“What’re you gonna miss the most? You know—about livin’?”
“What am I gonna miss the most? Hmmm.” Slash looked up at the cobwebbed wooden rafters, pondering. “You know what I’m gonna miss?” he said finally. “I’m gonna miss good bourbon whiskey, that first smoke of the day . . . along with a cup of good, hot mud, of course . . . and the expertise of a good workin’ girl. That’s what I’m gonna miss. In that order. In my younger days, that order woulda been a whole lot different.”
He chuckled as he pressed the back of his head against the cell door. “But now in my later years—there ya have it. Good whiskey, the first smoke, and a talented whore that knows when to get up and haul her freight.”
Pecos pursed his lips, nodding. “All right, all right,” he said. “That’s a good list, I reckon.”
Slash glanced through the bars at him. “What’re you gonna miss?”
“Me?” Pecos frowned as he stared into space, reflecting. “I’m gonna miss the smell of desert sage and burning piñon pine, an’ spring wildflowers. Especially them purty bright yellow and red and purple flowers that paint spring meadows up high in the Rockies. I’m gonna miss the taste of a trout caught fresh in one o’ them Rocky Mountain lakes—like that lake where we camped on the shore of a couple summers back with that old rascal Brent Huntley. Remember him?”
“Hell, how could I forget that old scalawag? The stories he told!”
“Remember how he always called Kansas City by its original name—Westport Landing? That old coot!” Pecos shook his head, smiling. Gradually, his expression grew serious once more. “You know what I’m gonna miss more than anything, Slash?”
“What?”
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“All right, I won’t laugh.”
“Forget it. You’re gonna laugh.”
Slash scowled through the bars at his partner, who sat on his butt on the other side of the corridor, his long, thin, blond hair flowing down over his shoulders. Pecos was frowning and pulling at his blond chin whiskers.
“I ain’t gonna laugh. I promise.”
Pecos considered Slash through the bars, then slowly shaped a dreamy, faintly sheepish smile. “I’m gonna miss fallin’ in love.” He draped an arm over an upraised knee. “Yessir. That’s what I’m gonna miss the most. That kind of achy feelin’ you get in your chest and belly when you’re tumblin’ for a woman.”
Slash glanced at him skeptically. “No kiddin’?”
“Damn straight.” Pecos glared at him, accusing. “You said you wouldn’t laugh!”
Slash threw up a hand. “I ain’t laughin’!” He paused. When Jay crept into his mind, he quickly shoved her away, turning to Pecos and saying, “I don’t reckon it’s any wonder you’d miss that, since you’ve always tumbled for one woman or another so damn often!”
He chuckled, and Pecos did, as well, likely remembering with no little fondness all of the pretty women he’d been attached to over the years. Most for only a few weeks or months at a time. The briefness of said unions hadn’t made them any less poignant for the big, romantic galoot. And it hadn’t made the tenderhearted Pecos River Kid hurt any less when those unions had run their courses and he and the ladies had forked trails.
As far as Slash was concerned, women always made him feel fidgety when they were around too long. For more than a few hours, even. They made him feel tight and hemmed in. Downright owly.
Most had, anyway . . .
Thinking of feeling hemmed in, he glanced around the cell block, feeling as hemmed in as he’d ever felt in his life. He and Pecos had been riding roughshod and tail-up around the frontier for a long time, but neither one had spent more than a night or two at any one time in a jail, and those jailings had been merely for getting into drunken dustups in saloons or sporting houses. They’d been here in this county lockup for nigh on a week, and Slash was starting to feel as though he’d been buried alive.
“You don’t suppose there’s any way out of here—do you, Pecos?” he said, studying the bars of his cell’s small window through which bright midday light angled onto the high, lace-up boots of his slumbering cell mate.
“Do you know how many times you’ve asked me that since we been in here?”
“Twenty, at least.” Slash pressed his back against the cell door and rose to his feet, rising from his heels.
“Yeah, I’d say around twenty.”
Slash winced as he walked on the balls of his boots past his loudly snoring cell mate and over to the window mounted in the cell block wall. Roughly two feet by three feet, with four bars embedded deeply in the stone casing, the window was about six and a half feet off the floor.
“I just keep wondering if I couldn’t loosen up one or two of these bars.” Slash leaped up off his heels and grabbed two of the bars in his hands, sort of chinning himself to see out.
As he grunted and groaned, squeezing the bars, testing their strength, he saw none other than Luther T. “Bleed-’Em-So” Bledsoe being wheeled past the jailhouse, not twenty feet beyond Slash, by none other than Slash and Pecos’s young, so-called attorney, Lester Hyman. Judge Angus McClelland strolled along behind Bledsoe and Hyman. Included in the four-man group was the prosecuting attorney, George Hill, a sour-looking little man in an opera hat and with thick, curly, red muttonchops.
“Well, well, well—what do we have here? Y’all headin’ off to the Colorado House for a prime rib sandwich and a boiler maker to start the celebration? You, too, Lester—our own loyal attorney? Shame on you, son!”
Lester stopped pushing Bledsoe’s chair. He and the rest of the men all swung around to regard Slash staring at them through the barred, ground-level window.
“Ah, hell, Slash!” Lester said, tossing his head miserably. “I said I was sorry. Now, I don’t know what more I can do!”
“Well, you could run off an’ have a good cry instead of rushing off to stomp with these corrupt politicians!”
“Cry? Over you two scalawags?” intoned Judge Angus McClelland, standing beside the short, fat prosecutor, who wore a rust-red clawhammer coat inside the lapel of which he’d thrust his black-gloved right hand, as though he were waiting to have his picture taken.
The judge pointed his own black-gloved finger at Slash. “Believe you me, no one’s gonna cry over the hanging of Slash Braddock and the Pecos River Kid—and that’s includin’ the poor man who was given the cruel, inhuman, as well as impossible task of trying to defend your depredations against humanity!”
“Don’t worry, Slash,” said Bledsoe, squinting and wincing against the bright, high-country sunshine, “we’ll all be there tomorrow, enjoying the festivities. And you’re right—we are about to start the celebration.”
“You know, Bleed-’Em-So, the only thing I regret about my ricochet finding its way into your back is it didn’t have a twin.”
“That so?”
“That’s so, sir!”
“Well, under the circumstances, seein’ as how I’m gonna watch you two dribble down your legs tomorrow,” Bledsoe said, “no hard feelin’s! In fact, why don’t I have the barman over at the Colorado House deliver you and Pecos your favorite skull pop, just to ease your misery a little in this great time of sorrow for you both, seein’ as how you’re about to have your necks stretched. Okay? Can I do that for you?”
Slash turned his head partly to one side, frowning skeptically yet hopefully, imagining bathing his tonsils in one more bottle of his favorite Kentucky bourbon.
“Really?” he said, pulse quickening in anticipation of such a treat. “You’d do that?”
Bledsoe grinned and shook his head. “No,” he said dryly. “I wouldn’t do that!” He threw his head back, laughing. “Did you hear that, fellas? He really thought I was gonna send a bottle of his favorite forty-rod over to the jail? Hah! Hah! Hah!”
“Yeah,” laughed the prosecutor, Hill, “as if a U.S. marshal know
n as ‘Bleed-’Em-So’ would ever do such a thing!”
Hill’s jowls shook as he roared, leaning over to slap his thigh.
The judge and even Lester Hyman laughed.
Slash released the bars and dropped back down to the stone floor of his cell. “Crap!”
He leaned forward against the wall.
“Hey, Slash!” Pecos called.
“What?”
“Turn around.”
Slash turned. “What fo—”
He cut himself off. Directly in front of him was the broad chest of his cell mate, clad in sweat-stained wool spotted with blood from last night’s fight. The man smelled like a bear fresh from hibernation. One who’d gone to sleep drunk.
“You really Slash Braddock?” the big man said, painfully poking Slash’s chest with his banana-sized index finger.
“Uh,” Slash said, tentatively. “What if I was?”
“Why, you don’t look like so doggone much!” The big man poked his big finger into Slash’s chest once more, shoving Slash back up against the cell’s stone wall. “Why, I bet I could break you over my knee like kindlin’!”
CHAPTER 16
“I bet you could,” Slash told his tattooed, muscle-bound cell mate towering over him. “But why on earth would you want to do such a thing, pray tell?”
“Marshal Bleed-’Em-So done told us what you two said about us. How you two was laughin’ at us!”
Slash glanced around the big man before him at Pecos, who was facing down his own cell mate. The big brute had also risen from his bunk and was backing Pecos, who at six-foot-four stood a good four inches shorter than his cell mate, with long dark-brown hair, against the back wall of their cell.
“Bleed-’Em-So said we said what about you?” Pecos asked, staring warily up at his own opponent.
“That crippled-up old fox was on the street last night when the town marshal’s deputies was haulin’ us over here. He told us we might like to know that you two seen us out on the street the other day and you called us a couple of overgrown bunghole pirates.”
“We’re mighty tired o’ them rumors bein’ spread about us!” said Pecos’s cell mate, shoving Pecos back hard against the cell’s rear wall. “Mighty tired!”
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