The girl stared at Slash from across the bar. Her mussed hair hung in tangles around her face. Her right cheek was welting up from the force of her suitor’s blow. Her dark eyes were round and fearful. She’d been through such a dustup with this firebrand before. She knew how it went. She knew Tio’s black heart. She was scared.
Slash cursed under his breath and heeled his wolf. He wasn’t going to do the girl any good deed. Despite the fury raging behind his breastbone, he raised his hands, palms out, and turned his head to one side in resignation.
Tio grinned at him mockingly. He depressed his Remington’s hammer, but before he could pull the gun back, Slash’s left arm shot out across the bar. That hand closed around the kid’s gun. As Slash ripped the gun back toward him, out of Tio’s grip, Slash grabbed the kid’s head by his hair and slammed his face down atop the bar.
Tio screamed. There was a wet crunching sound as his nose broke against the bar’s surface. Blood sprayed, staining the scarred wood.
As Slash flipped the Remington around, grabbing its handle, he saw in the corner of his left eye the shorter kid claw one of his Colts out of its holster. As he cocked the gun, aiming it straight out toward Slash’s head, Pecos bellowed, “Hold on, sonny! I got a twelve-gauge cannon ready to blast a tunnel in your belly big enough to drive a freight train through!”
That was enough to make the kid hesitate, jerking his pistol toward Pecos.
“No, no, lo hace!” shouted the older man, tossing the mandolin onto his table and reaching for the Colt Navy. “No, he doesn’t!”
The kid to Slash’s left cursed loudly in Spanish as he triggered a round toward Pecos, who threw his big bulk out of his chair and hit the floor with a heavy thud. The kid’s bullet slammed into the back of the chair in which the big outlaw had been sitting. As he swung the pistol toward Slash, the Remy in Slash’s left hand bucked and roared.
The kid stumbled backward, screaming and triggering his Colt into the ceiling.
Slash wheeled toward Tio behind the bar. The kid was bellowing Spanish curses at Slash, spewing blood out his smashed nose and cut lips as he raised his second Remington.
Again, Slash’s newly acquired hogleg spoke once, twice, three times, flames stabbing across the bar.
Tio triggered his second Remy into the top of the bar as he flew back against the shelves behind him, wailing and dislodging several bottles. Dying fast, he fell to the floor, his long, dark-brown hair buffeting like a muddy tumbleweed around his long face and startled eyes.
As the older Mexican bolted up out of his chair, Pecos threw a chair at him with a bellowing wail. The chair smashed into the older man’s right shoulder, nudging wide the bullet he’d just hurled toward Slash. Slash whipped around, crouching and firing, punching two bullets into the man’s chest and belly and throwing him backward across his table.
The older Mexican threw his pistol wide as he rolled off the table’s far side and piled up on the floor near the batwings before which Slash just now saw a man sitting . . . in a wheelchair.
A tall blond woman, a Nordic statue in a dark wool cape, stood behind the man in the wheelchair.
Three tall, ramrod-straight younger men stood side by side on the other side of the batwings, looking into the saloon, their faces expressionless. One just then drew a long, slim, black cheroot to his mustached mouth, drew on it, then blew the smoke over the louvred doors, making the tip glow orange.
Chief Marshal Luther T. “Bleed-’Em-So” Bledsoe looked up from the man who’d just died on the floor before his chair, and smiled broadly, showing all those oversized false teeth as he grinned. He clapped his gloved hands together and roared, “By God, you two old cutthroats still got it. I won’t give ya much but I’ll give ya that!”
Bleed-’Em-So threw his head back, gazing up at Abigail Langdon, and roared.
CHAPTER 20
Slash stared in hang-jawed shock at the crippled old roarer sitting there with his shotgun resting across his knees.
So did Pecos.
The two cutthroats exchanged disbelieving glances, and then Slash sidestepped cautiously to where the young Mexican lay sprawled at the base of the bar. Quickly, Slash crouched, scooped up one of the kid’s Colts from off the floor near the growing blood pool. He tossed the pistol across the room to Pecos, who caught it one handed, cocked it, and leveled it at Bledsoe.
Slash plucked the second Colt from the kid’s holster and snapped it up quickly to hold it straight out at the chief marshal and his three-man and one-woman armada. Bledsoe was still smiling delightedly.
“Yep,” the chief marshal said, nodding slowly, approvingly. “You might be a little long in the tooth . . . and you might get careless from time to time . . . overconfident, probably after all these years of unfettered success . . . but you still got some bottom left—don’t ya, boys?”
Slash didn’t say anything. He just stared at the five unlikely newcomers in total disbelief, his mind reeling. He could tell from his partner’s silence that Pecos was in the same immensely puzzled condition.
“You don’t get it?” Bledsoe shook his head wonderingly. “It ain’t clear to you by now?”
“Is what clear?” Pecos said tightly, keeping the Colt’s sights on the old man’s spindly chest behind a fancy, flowered, pink and gold brocade vest and white silk shirt with ruffled cuffs poking out of the sleeves of a black frock coat that owned a layer of beaded moisture from the rain.
“He sprung us,” Slash said, glancing at Vern Gables smoking his ubiquitous cigar behind the batwings, his eyes smugly condescending. “I thought somethin’ looked off, him layin’ in the street without any blood showin’. He wasn’t shot. He was only fakin’ it.” He glanced at the other two deputies, Waite and Tabor. “You were all fakin’ it.”
He frowned at Bledsoe, who sat in his chair, thoroughly enjoying himself, like a wizened old man watching half-naked girls dance in some remote mining camp opera house. “You were fakin’ it, too, when you fired your greener over the rail. I noticed you didn’t seem to hit any of those angels ridin’ in to save our hides. You fired wide.”
Deep lines of incredulity cutting across his forehead, still staring over the Colt at the chief marshal, Slash shook his head slowly. “Why?”
“Wait,” Pecos said. “I don’t understand.”
“A setup,” Slash told him.
Pecos glanced at him skeptically, then returned his befuddled gaze to Bledsoe. “No. The train. That was the setup. The train . . . with Jay . . .”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Bledsoe said, raising a gloved hand from his shotgun as though he were blessing the room. “It’s been a long pull down from Saguache and the weather is horrid. What do you say we stoke the stove”—he gave a little shudder in his chair, as though demonstrating the chill the storm had pushed into the near-dark watering hole—“and have a few drinks? Then I shall explain everything.”
Gables and the other two deputies pushed through the batwings, stepped around Bledsoe and Abigail Langdon, and stood facing Slash and Pecos, thrusting their chests out bullishly but keeping their revolvers in their holsters. The three lawmen wore rain slickers beaded with moisture. Rain was pooled on their hat brims, dribbling onto the floor in front of their boots.
“Lower the hoglegs, fellas,” Gables said commandingly. “Put ’em away. You’ve got no more use for ’em here.”
“That’s yet to be proven,” Slash said.
“It’ll be proven soon enough.”
Pecos and Slash shared another conferring glance.
Pecos lowered his Colt, depressing the hammer, and shoved it down behind the waistband of his pants. “I’ll be holdin’ on to mine. I been unarmed long enough.”
Slash did the same with his own weapon. “Me, too.”
He glimpsed the girl, Justianna, standing behind the bar, looking around bewilderedly. “You all right, darlin’?”
She slid her gaze from Slash to the floor behind the bar, where Tio lay sprawled in death. She didn’t say anyth
ing but only stared down at the dead Mexican. Her cheeks were flushed with terror, damp with tears.
As Abigail Langdon wheeled Bledsoe over to the table at which the older Mex had been sitting, near the potbelly stove, the chief marshal glanced at Waite and Tabor, and said, “Drag the bodies out of here for that poor child. Good grief!”
He shoved his shotgun into the leather scabbard strapped to the right arm of his chair. He glanced with mock reproof at Slash and Pecos still standing where they’d been standing when they’d first spied Bledsoe’s party. “Such a mess you cutthroats have made!”
The chief marshal turned to the girl behind the bar and said in fluent Spanish with a distinctly Sonoran inflection, “Senorita, I’ve often discovered the best medicine for anxiety is good, old-fashioned work. So, if you will, roll up your shirtsleeves, in a manner of speaking. We’ll have drinks all around!”
“Sí,” Justianna said quietly, then brushed the tears from her cheeks and sprang into action. As she carried a tray with a bottle and several glasses on it out from behind the bar, Slash touched her arm and said, “I apologize for the trouble, senorita.”
She smiled up at him sweetly, then rose onto her toes and planted a tender kiss on his cheek. “Gracias, amigo, uh . . .”
The old cutthroat returned her smile. “Slash.”
She drew a deep breath. “My father is out hunting. I fear that if it hadn’t been for you, Papa would have returned tomorrow to find me lying where Tio lies now, with my throat cut.”
“Let me give you a word of advice I feel uniquely qualified to make.”
The girl arched a brow over a lustrous brown eye.
Slash crouched to whisper into her ear. “Stay away from cutthroats. Purty we may be, but looks ain’t everything.” He squeezed her arm and winked.
She gave a knowing smile, glancing at the cuffs on his wrists, then carried the tray over to the table at which Bledsoe sat with Abigail Langdon, who had set a leather valise on the table before her. She’d also stoked the potbelly stove, which pushed an inviting warmth into the room. Pecos stood where he’d been standing before, the Colt shoved down in his pants. He was staring skeptically at Slash, still unable to wrap his mind around the confusion of recent events.
He had that in common with his partner.
Gables stood near the batwings, smoking, one hand on one of his Colts, his wet yellow slicker folded back behind the walnut handle. He seemed to be on guard duty. Meanwhile, Waite and Tabor had dragged the older Mexican out onto the boardwalk fronting the place and were on their way back into the saloon, heading to where Tio’s amigo lay on his back near the bar, one leg curled beneath the other one.
As Tabor grabbed the dead Mex’s arms and Waite grabbed his ankles, dragging him toward the batwings, Justianna moved around the table at which Bledsoe was sitting, pouring tequila into the glasses. Abigail Langdon slid the filled glasses to various points around the table while old Bleed-’Em-So toyed with the older Mexican’s mandolin, holding it high, strumming it softly, shifting his gaze between Slash and Pecos, still grinning that annoying, ever-present grin, as though he was always on the verge of telling a joke he thought was hilarious—a joke about the person he was telling it to.
An annoying habit.
Maddening.
Slash had a feeling the next joke Bledsoe would tell was going to be a doozey. And that he and Pecos would be the butt of it. Even though they’d escaped the gallows and so far remained upright, Slash had a feeling that they’d already been the butt of some supreme joke of the old marshal’s. Slash was waiting to learn what it was.
And Jay’s part in it. That part was of particular interest to him for some reason he couldn’t explain to himself.
“Please, gentlemen, come,” Bledsoe said, beckoning. “Sit down with me and my lovely assistant. Have a drink. I will explain everything. Soon, it will all be as clear as that lovely rain falling out there. Isn’t it lovely? I do so love a summer storm!”
Again, Slash and Pecos shared a skeptical glance.
Remaining defiantly in place, Slash said, “Where’s Jay?”
Bledsoe stared at him. He seemed to be studying him, a shrewd cast gradually entering his gaze. It was as though he were deciphering letters from far away. The longer he stared, the clearer the letters became.
Slash felt uncomfortable under the old man’s perceptive, penetrating gaze.
“Ah, yes,” Bledsoe said at last. “Of course, you mean Jaycee Breckenridge.”
Slash moved slowly to the table. He felt like a wild dog being baited into a trap, but he walked to the table anyway. So did Pecos.
Both men pulled out chairs across from the chief marshal and the strikingly beautiful Abigail Langdon. Slash had heard of the woman’s beauty, as well as the mystery surrounding her and Bledsoe’s relationship—was it strictly professional?—but he’d never seen her until the other day in Saguache, and he’d never seen her up close until now.
With thick, rich, red-gold hair coiled stylishly atop her head, her wide cheekbones that tapered severely down to a fine chin and regal jaw, and her crystalline, lake-green eyes, long and slanted, like a cat’s eyes, she looked like some long-dead Viking warrior’s lurid dream. Big, too, but as stalwart as a warrior queen. Slash thought she was maybe in her late twenties, early thirties but, despite a raw carnality about her, there remained an innocence, a purity about the woman you normally only found in young virgins or nuns.
However, as though to contradict the cutthroat’s estimation of her saintliness, she just then plucked her tequila shot off the table before her, between her thumb and index finger, and, sticking out her little finger, tossed the entire shot straight back and swallowed it as though it were no stronger than tea.
Miss Langdon set the glass down and looked across the table at Slash, as though letting him know she’d been reading his mind, and then resumed writing in the cloth-covered notebook she’d been writing in for the past several minutes, her head canted to one side, tongue pressed against the inside of her left cheek. She seemed somehow removed from the proceedings while being very much integral to them, a shadowy figure even when she was present.
Slash kicked his chair around and sat with his arms crossed on its back.
“Where is she?” he prodded Bledsoe.
Again, that shrewd look, the old marshal’s eyes squinting just a little, then his lips spreading slightly with a self-satisfied smile of understanding. Slash’s cheeks warmed.
“Oh, that whole thing,” said Bledsoe, kneading his chin between thumb and index finger.
“Yeah, that whole thing.”
“It’s a tad on the cheap side, I’ll admit.”
“What happened?”
“What can I tell you?” Bledsoe said, hiking his shoulder. “She’s a woman.” He glanced at Miss Langdon, still scribbling in her book to his left. “Uh . . . no offense, dear Abigail.”
“None taken.” Idling her pen, Abigail Langdon looked across the table at Slash. Her green, gold-flecked eyes were ever so vaguely crossed, which added to her aura of mystery and forbidden charm. “Yes, she’s a woman, some of whom are easily swayed, Mr. Braddock.” Slash wasn’t surprised that she spoke with a lilting Irish burr. “Some, but not all, I assure you,” she added, punctuating the statement with a raised brow before returning to her writing in a large, flowing, feminine hand.
“I don’t think you’ve ever been properly introduced,” Bledsoe said, glancing from Miss Langdon to the two outlaws. “This is my assistant, Miss Abigail Langdon. Miss Langdon, Slash Braddock and the Pecos River Kid.”
Miss Langdon set down her pen to shake Slash’s hand, a cordial nod included. She slid her hand over to where Pecos had extended his. When her gaze met that of the blond-haired, blue-eyed cutthroat, Slash couldn’t help noticing the slight flush that rose in the woman’s fair, beautifully if severely sculpted cheeks.
Glancing at Pecos, Slash noticed the same thing—a brief but definite flush of emotion in his partner’s face. These t
wo were like a boy and a girl exchanging honey eyes across a schoolhouse floor!
When Pecos glanced at his partner, Slash raised a brow. Pecos’s face tightened with embarrassment. He looked away quickly, scowling.
“Let’s get on with this thing about Jay,” the blond cutthroat said after clearing his throat, fidgeting uncomfortably around in his chair. “You expect us to believe you merely paid her off to double-cross us like that? I don’t believe it!”
CHAPTER 21
“Come now, fellas,” Bledsoe said. “Don’t be too hard on the poor woman. Imagine what it was like—all those years in that mountain hideout, for the most part alone. With very little in the way of creature comforts.” He glanced pointedly at Slash. “Without a man . . .”
Old Bleed-’Em-So looked at Abigail Langdon, who’d finished writing to lean forward, elbows on the table, her chin in her hands, a thoughtful expression pooching her lips out slightly. The pen dangled from between the first two fingers of her right hand.
“Could you endure that kind of loneliness, Miss Langdon?”
She glanced at Pecos, then quickly flicked her eyes to the table. There was that flush again. Slash knew that if he looked at his partner, he’d see a similar pinkening of the big devil’s cheeks, a tense tightening of his mouth. He chuckled ironically to himself.
“Just like every man,” said the jade-eyed Nordic queen in her lilting accent, “there is only so much every woman is willing to endure. When a better offer comes along . . .” She looked at Slash now, keeping her eyes away from Pecos, and shrugged.
“Tell me she didn’t go to you, at least,” Slash said to Bledsoe.
“No, no.” The chief marshal shook his head. “The sheriff down there thought he recognized her. He wired me, informing me of the beautiful redhead who’d just come to town, claiming to be a rancher’s widow. He’d seen her dining out a few times with the owner of the Saguache Bank and Trust, the man who handles the Crosshatch accounts and arranges the cash shipments to the Crosshatch headquarters via the ranch’s own private spur line. I sent a Pinkerton down there to investigate. When her story about being a widow of some rancher didn’t check out, and the operative suspected she was, indeed, Jaycee Breckenridge, Miss Langdon and I called on her one night in her hotel room. That was when I made my offer.”
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