The bullet hit Pip Ogden in his left temple. The man didn’t even have time to cry out as death took him, and he fell to the platform, a trickle of blood seeping from his terrible wound.
Then horror piled on horror . . .
As the music wailed to a discordant stop, Stella smiled and yelled, “Thank you, Colonel Anderson, for the grand adieu.” She shoved the muzzle of her revolver between her breasts and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
“She said, ‘I’ll never grow old,’ and then she died,” T. C. Lyons said. He sighed. “Well, Stella Morgan was right about that.”
“There was nothing I could do for her,” Dr. Tom Malone said. “The bullet burst her heart asunder.” He looked at Red Ryan with less than affection and said, “As for you, young man, you’ve been shot up and cut up, and it seems that patching you up has become my full-time job.”
“How is he, Doc?” T. C. Lyons said.
“He’ll live.”
“Maybe you could tell me how I am,” Red said, irritated and in some pain now as the ether the doctor had administered was wearing off.
“The shoulder wound was not as serious as it could have been because the bullet hit the bandage over one of your knife wounds,” Dr. Malone said. “Nevertheless, I had to extract the ball. It was in quite deep. As for the wound on your waist, well, you were shot through and through, but no vital organs were damaged. You were very fortunate, Mr. Ryan. However, you’re a strong young man, and you’ll soon recover, that is, if infection can be avoided. That’s why you’ll remain in my surgery for a week or so.” The doctor picked up Red’s bloodstained buckskin shirt and his plug hat with its bullet holes and said, “I suggest you buy yourself a new wardrobe as soon as you leave.”
“When will he be on his feet, Doc?” Buttons Muldoon asked.
“Hard to tell,” Dr. Malone said. “A few weeks, a month, maybe.” He saw the disappointment on Buttons’s face and said, “Why do you ask?”
“We got a coward to pick up in Fort Concho, Doc,” Buttons said.
“A coward?”
“Yeah, a Limey coward. We’ll carry him to New Orleans, where he’ll be taken into custody by a British ship.”
“Then he’ll just have to wait, won’t he?”
After Dr. Malone left to visit patients, Red raised himself in the cot and said, “What happened to the carpetbag, Lyons?”
“I gave it to the army,” the sheriff said. “Maybe Major Morgan has next of kin.” He smiled and said, “Ryan, that damned bag has caused enough death and suffering. I wanted to get rid of it as quickly as possible.”
Buttons whistled and said, “That was a lot of money to give away.”
“Yes, a small fortune,” Lyons said. “Was I tempted? The answer is, yes, I was, but only for the best part of a day. I was glad to hand it over to Colonel Anderson.”
“Now he’ll be the one tempted,” Buttons said.
“Well, that’s up to him,” Lyons said. “What do you think, Ryan? Did I do the right thing?”
“I’d have left it up to the county sheriff to make that decision,” Red said.
Lyons smiled. “I thought about that. But I’m glad I decided to let the army deal with it.”
“Where’s Stella Morgan being buried?” Red said, the thought coming to him.
“In Concordia, later today. And so will Carter and Roper and Deputy Hall. I’ll be in attendance in an official capacity,” Lyons said.
“What about Pip Ogden?” Red said.
“I wired San Antonio and asked what they wanted done with the body. I haven’t had an answer yet.”
“Will you tell them how he betrayed his badge?”
“I don’t think that will serve any useful purpose. As far as San Antonio is concerned Detective Ogden died in the line of duty.”
“I suppose that’s all for the best,” Red said.
“I think so. By the way, when I searched Stella’s trunk I discovered the cameo brooch taken from the old Rabinovich couple,” Lyons said. “I’d already found letters in their store between Raisa and a cousin in Boston. Since it’s a family heirloom, I’ll send the cameo to her.”
Red said, “Two people murdered for a bauble. It seems that Stella was born without a conscience.”
“I’d say that’s pretty common among the criminal class,” Lyons said. “Now, I got to leave for the cemetery.” He smiled. “I hope you recover real soon, Ryan, and then leave El Paso forever.”
“And ever,” Buttons said.
* * *
“Buttons, I want you to do a couple of things for me,” Red Ryan said after Lyons left.
“Name it,” Buttons said.
“Bring me a bacon sandwich from Ma’s Kitchen. No, make it two.”
“The doc not feeding you?”
“He fed me oatmeal for breakfast. Does that answer your question?”
“And what else?”
“Do we have money?”
“Some.”
“Buy me a shirt and new hat.”
“I can do that. But the shirt won’t be buckskin.”
“Maybe I can pick one up later from the tame Apaches at Fort Concho.”
“Is that it?” Buttons said.
“No. Get the stage and the team ready. We’re out of here tomorrow morning at first light.”
Buttons was shocked. “But Red, you heard Doc Malone, you’re all cut up and shot through and through. “
“And I’m much more likely to die of an infection in this place than I am on the stage,” Red said.
“But Red—”
“I’ll survive, Buttons. Just do as I say.”
“I don’t like this, Red. I don’t like this one bit.”
“Well, it has to be done, that’s all. Now go, and don’t forget . . . it’s two bacon sandwiches, and the greasier the better.”
EPILOGUE
The Franklin Mountains lay behind them, almost lost in the ribboning dust kicked up by the stage wheels. Before they reached Fort Bliss, Red Ryan and Buttons Muldoon had four hundred miles of prairie to cross, a vast wilderness of grass under the arching blue bowl of the Texas sky.
“How are you holding up, Red?” Buttons said, slowing the team to a distance-eating trot.
“I feel like hell,” Red said.
“Where?”
“All over.”
“I don’t like this, Red. I don’t like this one bit, you being cut up and shot through and through an’ all,” Buttons said.
“You already told me that back in El Paso.”
“Doc Malone was real angry when you left, mad enough to chew a chunk out of the head of a double-bit axe, I’d say.”
“Buttons, one of the times when I was snowed up I read Doctor Darby’s Maladies and Ailments of Women from cover to cover. Now I know enough about doctoring to take care of myself.”
“Red, I don’t know if you’ve looked in a mirror recently, but you’re a man,” Buttons said.
“Man, woman, it doesn’t make any difference,” Red said. “A misery is a misery.”
“Well, I hope you know what you’re doing,” Buttons said.
“If I’m still alive by the time we reach Fort Concho, I reckon you’ll know I knew what I was doing,” Red said.
Buttons drove in silence for a while, the team fresh and going well, and then he said, “Red, you ever met a real live coward afore?”
“Can’t say as I have,” Red said.
“What makes a man that way?” Buttons said. “Why does he become a yellowbelly?”
Red said, “Well, now I study on it, a coward gets scared and quits and a brave man gets scared and still does what has to be done. At least, that’s how I see it.”
“What are we?”
“I don’t think we’re cowards, Buttons.”
“Me neither,” Buttons said.
CUTTHROATS
A SLASH AND PECOS WESTERN
JOHNSTONE. KEEPING THE WEST WILD.
Not every Western hero wears a white hat
or a tin star. Most of them are just fighting to survive. Some of them can be liars, cheaters, and thieves. And then there’s a couple of old-time robbers named Slash and Pecos . . .
Two wanted outlaws. One hell of a story.
After a lifetime of robbing banks and holding up trains, Jimmy “Slash” Braddock and Melvin “Pecos Kid” Baker are ready to call it quits—though not completely by choice.
Sold out by their old gang, Slash and Pecos have to bust out of jail and pull one last job to finance their early retirement . . .
The target is a rancher’s payroll train. Catch is: the train is carrying a Gatling gun and twenty deputy US marshals who know Slash and Pecos are coming.
Caught and quickly sentenced to hang, their old enemy—the wheelchair-bound bucket of mean, Marshal L. C. Bledsoe—shows up at the last minute to spare their lives. For a price. He’ll let them live if they hunt down their old gang, the Snake River Marauders. And kill those prairie rats—with extreme prejudice . . .
Look for Cutthroats. Coming in July,
wherever books are sold.
CHAPTER ONE
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 pinecone. “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 TWO
“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 t
hrow 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-worn 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!”
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