Look for CUTTHROATS.
Coming in July, wherever books are sold.
CHAPTER 1
In the early morning hours, the bounty hunters gathered around the remote mountain cabin, crouched in a shadowy clearing. They were thirteen in number—a dozen-plus wolves on the blood scent.
Ray Laskey walked up to where Jack Penny crouched in the pines roughly fifty yards from the cabin, running an oily rag down the barrel of his Henry repeating rifle.
“All the boys are in position, boss,” Laskey said, slicing a hunk of wedding cake tobacco onto his tongue and chewing.
Penny turned to Laskey and winked in acknowledgment with the rheumy blue eye that always seemed to roll to the outside corner of its socket and that always made Laskey feel vaguely uneasy, for some reason. That wandering eye seemed like some separate living thing, rolling and bobbing around in Penny’s ugly, bearded head . . . like some ghastly thing that lived inside a log at the bottom of a murky lake and only came out to rend and kill....
Both men crouched lower behind their covering pine when the cabin’s front door latch clicked. Laskey drew a sharp breath as he turned to see the door open. He squeezed his Spencer tightly but then eased his grip when he saw that the person stepping out onto the cabin’s small stoop was a woman with long, thick, copper-red hair.
The woman, nicely put together and clad in a man’s wool shirt and tight denim trousers, turned toward the split firewood stacked against the cabin’s front wall. When she had an armload, she straightened, turned back to the door, and stopped abruptly.
No, Laskey thought. Don’t do that. Keep goin’. Get back inside the cabin, dearie....
The woman turned ever so slowly to stand staring straight off into the trees, directly toward where Laskey and Penny crouched behind a stout ponderosa.
Laskey’s gut tightened.
Had she heard or in some other way sensed the killers crouched in the forest around the cabin? Had she smelled their unwashed bodies made even whiffier from their long, hard ride over the course of the long night lit only by a small and fleeting powder-horn moon?
Penny glanced at Laskey. The bearded bounty hunter smiled darkly, then raised his Henry to his shoulder. He slid the barrel up over a feathery branch and leveled his sights on the woman. He crouched low over the long gun, resting his bearded cheek up snug against the stock.
Slowly, almost soundlessly, he ratcheted back the hammer with his thumb.
Laskey looked at the woman. His heart thudded. She appeared to be staring straight at him. Straight at Penny steadying his sights on her chest.
No, no, no, dearie. You didn’t hear nothin’. You didn’t smell nothin’. No one’s out here. A coyote, maybe. A rabbit, maybe—up and out too early for its own damn good . . .
That’s all.
Go on inside, stoke your stove, start cookin’ breakfast for them two cutthroats in there. It’s them we want. Not you, purty lady.
We got other plans for you . . . dearie....
As though obeying Ray Laskey’s silent plea, the woman turned slowly, stepped back toward the door, nudged it open, and stepped inside. She turned to look outside once more, then closed the door and latched it with a soft click.
Penny eased his Winchester’s hammer down against the firing pin.
Laskey released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
Penny turned to him, spreading his ragged beard as he grinned. “She almost joined the angels.”
“When, uh . . .” Laskey said, pressing the wedding cake up tautly against his gum, “when do you want to . . . ?”
“Start the dance?”
“Yeah, yeah. Start the dance.”
“As soon as they show themselves. Best odds, that way. Won’t be too long now, most like. We got time.”
“What, uh . . . what about the woman?” Laskey said.
“What about her?” Penny asked him.
Laskey shrugged, toed a pine cone. “She’s too purty to kill. Outright, I mean . . .”
Laskey grinned, juice from the wedding cake bleeding out from between his thin lips.
Penny scowled down at the shorter man. “We came here to kill, an’ that’s what we’re gonna do, Ray, my boy. She’s with them cutthroats, so she dies with them cutthroats. Hell, there’s a reward on her head, too. Dead or alive. Same as them.”
“Oh, boy,” Laskey said. “The woman, too, huh? Seems a shame’s all.”
Penny placed a big, strong, gloved hand on Laskey’s shoulder and squeezed. “The woman, too, Ray. We ain’t here for none o’ that nonsense you’re thinkin’ about, you randy scoundrel.”
Penny brushed his gloved fist across Laskey’s pointed chin.
He winked his weird fish eye again, and it rolled like that living thing in the dark lake, fleeing back to its log after feeding.
CHAPTER 2
“What you two old cutthroats need is a job,” said Jaycee Breckenridge.
James “Slash” Braddock lifted his head from his pillow, frowning at the pretty woman forking bacon around in the cast-iron skillet sputtering atop her coal-black range. “Jay, honey, please don’t use such nasty language so early in the morning. Pecos an’ me got sensitive ears!”
“What’d she say?” asked Melvin Baker, better known for the past thirty years of his outlaw career as the Pecos River Kid.
He lay belly down on the cot on the far side of the small cabin from Slash Braddock. His blue eyes were open, regarding his longtime outlaw partner in shock and disbelief. “I didn’t just hear her use the bad word again—did I, Slash?” He closed his hands over his ears. “Oh, please, tell me I didn’t!”
“Now, look what you done, Jay! Poor ole Pecos is beside himself over here! He’s likely ruined for the whole dang day! I might have to hide his guns from him, so he don’t blow his brains out!”
Pecos buried his face in his pillow and pretend bawled.
At the range, one hand on her hip as she continued to flip and shuttle the bacon around in the same pan in which potatoes and onions fried, Jay shook her long, copper-red hair back from her hazel-eyed face and laughed. “Look what time it is, you old mossyhorns!”
She glanced at the windows behind her through which slanted the crisp, high-altitude sunlight of the Juan Valley of southern Colorado Territory. “It’s nigh on midmorning and you two are still lounging around like a pair of eastern railroad magnates on New Year’s Day!”
“Lounging around—nothin’!” Pecos lifted his head from his pillow and looked over his shoulder at Jay. “I was dead asleep not more’n two minutes ago. You done woke me up with your foul language. You oughta be ashamed of yourself, woman. What would Pistol Pete think of such talk?”
“Ha!” Jay threw her head back, laughing. “Whenever I mentioned the word ‘job’ to that old rascal—as in he might want to quit ridin’ the long coulees and try an honest job for a change—he’d howl like a gut-shot cur an’ skin out of here like a preacher caught in a parlor house. He’d run clear across the yard and throw himself in the creek. Didn’t matter what time of year it was. Spring, summer, winter, or fall—that’s just what he’d do, Pete would.”
Jay threw her head back again, laughing.
But then she turned a thoughtful look over her shoulder, gazing out the window toward the lone grave standing on a knoll about sixty yards out from the cabin, in a little pocket of ponderosas and cedars. Jay’s shoulders, clad in a plaid work shirt tucked into tight denims, rose and fell slowly, heavily. Her lower lip trembled. She stifled a sob, clamping her hand over her mouth, then wheeled from the range and hurried to the cabin’s front door.
“Excuse me, boys!” she said in an emotion-strangled voice as she opened the door and stepped out onto the small front stoop. She slammed the door behind her.
Through the door, Slash heard her sobbing.
He turned to his partner, scowling, and said, “Pecos, what’d you have to go and do that for?”
“Ah, hell!” Sitting up now, clad in his wash-w
orn longhandles that clung to his big, rawboned frame, Pecos slapped the cot beside him and hung his gray-blond, blue-eyed head like a young man fresh from the woodshed. “I reckon Pete’s name just slipped out. I mean, hell, he was her man. And, hell, we rode with him for nigh on thirty years before he . . . well, you know . . . before he got himself planted over there in them trees.”
Pecos turned a disgruntled look at Slash. He kept his voice down so he wouldn’t be heard on the stoop from where Jay’s sobs pushed softly through the door. “Come on, pardner, Pete’s been dead almost five years now. We should be able to mention his name from time to time.”
“Dammit, Pecos.” Slash tossed his animal skin covers aside and dropped his bare feet to the timbered floor still owning the chill of the crisp mountain morning. “You an’ I both know Pete didn’t get himself planted in them trees over there. I did!” Slash jabbed his thumb against his chest that bore the hooked knife scar that gave him his nickname. “I’m the one that got him planted. My own damn carelessness did.”
“It was a bullet from the gun of one of Luther Bledsoe’s deputies that killed Pete, Slash, you stupid devil. Don’t you start in with all this old Pete stuff now, too!”
“I didn’t,” Slash said, rising in disgust and grabbing his brown whipcord trousers off a chair. “You did!”
“Ah, hell!” Pecos twisted around and flopped belly down on his cot, burying his head in his pillow. His big Russian .44, snugged inside its brown, hand-tooled leather holster, hung by its shell belt hooked over elk horns mounted on the wall above his head, within an easy grab if needed. Such a move had been needed more than a few times in his and Slash’s long careers as riders of the long coulees, or the owlhoot trail, as some called the life of a professional western outlaw.
Slash quickly stepped into his pants. Then his boots. He left his blue chambray shirt on the chair but he strapped his twin, stag-butted Colt .44s around his waist, which was solid as oak at his ripe age of fifty-seven, which he was not above crowing about to Pecos, who’d grown a little fleshy above the buckle of his own cartridge belt.
Slash rarely walked more than five steps without either the revolver or his Winchester Yellowboy repeater. As he grabbed his hat off the kitchen table his bone-handled bowie knife, also strapped to his shell belt, rode high on his left hip, behind the .44 positioned for the cross-draw on that side. He swept a hand through his dark brown hair, still thick, he was proud to know, but well streaked with gray—especially up around the temples and in his long sideburns that sandwiched a broad, strong-jawed, brown-eyed face—the face of a handsome albeit middle-aged schoolboy.
One who’d spent the bulk of his life out in the blazing western sun.
That he was no longer a schoolboy, however, made itself obvious once again as it always tended to do upon his first rising. As he tramped across the kitchen, his hips and knees and ankles popped and cracked, stiff from too long in the mattress sack after too many years forking a saddle and sleeping on the hard, cold ground of one remote outlaw camp or another. An old back injury, the result of being thrown from a horse during a run from a catch party nearly twenty years ago, made Slash curse under his breath as he lifted the popping skillet off the range and slid it onto the warming rack, so the vittles wouldn’t burn.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of over 300 books, including the bestselling series Smoke Jensen, the Mountain Man, Preacher, the First Mountain Man, MacCallister, Flintlock, and Will Tanner, Deputy U.S. Marshal, and the stand-alone thrillers The Doomsday Bunker, Tyranny, and Black Friday.
Being the all-around assistant, typist, researcher, and fact-checker to one of the most popular western authors of all time, J. A. JOHNSTONE learned from the master, Uncle William W. Johnstone.
The elder Johnstone began tutoring J.A. at an early age. After-school hours were often spent retyping manuscripts or researching his massive American Western History library as well as the more modern wars and conflicts. J.A. worked hard—and learned.
“Every day with Bill was an adventure story in itself. Bill taught me all he could about the art of storytelling. ‘Keep the historical facts accurate, ’ he would say. ‘Remember the readers—and as your grandfather once told me, I am telling you now: Be the best J. A. Johnstone you can be.’”
Visit the website at www.williamjohnstone.net.
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