The Brothers O'Brien

by J. A. Johnstone

  “Be quiet, you little bitch.” Aracela took the key from the pocket of her dress, clanked it in the lock, and swung the door open. She pushed the whimpering girl inside and closed the door behind her.

  Dusk had fallen and the inside of the tomb was dark. Aracela struck a match and lit the candle that stood beside her father’s coffin. In the shifting, yellow light she saw the maid had wedged herself into a corner, her eyes wide and terrified. That pleased Aracela greatly. She’d ravaged and whipped this girl before and it hadn’t brought her much pleasure. But the memory of the thrill she’d experienced when she killed Whitney still lingered, so tonight would be different. She’d kill the stupid peon with the whip and feel that thrill again. She must feel that thrill again.

  “Take off your clothes,” Aracela said.

  “No, Lady, please don’t whip me,” the girl said.

  “Take off your clothes,” Aracela said again.

  The frightened girl did as she was told and stood naked and shivering against the cold tomb wall.

  Aracela threw off her cloak and tossed it over her father’s coffin. She tapped a riding crop into the palm of her hand, then smiled. “Come to me, child.”

  “No.” The girl made a dive for the door.

  Aracela intercepted her and used the riding crop to lash her back to the wall again. A cut with the whip had opened up the girl’s left shoulder.

  “Child, you will die for my pleasure tonight,” Aracela said. “I can bestow on you no greater honor.”

  Tears ran down the girl’s cheeks. “Please, Lady, let me go. I’m a good girl.” Then she tried a threat. “I will tell the padre.”

  “You’ll be dead, so you’ll tell no one.” Aracela dug her fingers into the girl’s hair and raised the crop. “I am giving you an honorable death and yet all you do is defy me.”

  The crypt door creaked open.

  Aracela froze, her whip raised. She turned slowly, an unholy fire in her eyes. “What the hell do you want? Get out of here.”

  “My name is Juan Hernandez and I want you, Donna Aracela.” The young peasant stood in the doorway in his ragged serape and straw hat. In his right hand he held a knife.

  “Get out!” Aracela cried, feeling a start of fear. “I don’t know you.”

  “You knew Pilar, the girl I loved . . . and still love. You dishonored her, and then, unable to cope with her shame, she walked into the snow and cold, and died. Pilar was to be my wife, and I grieve for her. That is why I am here to kill you.”

  “Ha, you need a woman, that’s all.” Aracela grabbed the naked girl by the arm and pushed her toward the youth. “Here, Juan, take her, take her now.” She smiled. “And after her, you can have me. Tonight all your dreams will come true, Juan. I will deny you nothing.”

  “All I want is to send you to hell, Donna Aracela.” He took a step toward the woman, his knife up and ready.

  Thoroughly frightened now, Aracela backed to the tomb wall. She tore open the top of her dress, exposing her magnificent breasts. “Take me, Juan,” she said, panting. “Take me now.”

  The boy’s knife plunged into her chest, between the breasts she’d offered to him. She sank slowly to the floor, her back sliding down the cold marble of the crypt wall. The pain was great, the knowledge that she was dying an even greater pain.

  She looked up at Juan and struggled to find breath. “Goddamn you, you stinking peasant pig!”

  Her eyes were still open, filled with hate, as she died.

  The maid screamed and shrank away from Juan, her gaze on the haft of the knife protruding from Aracela’s chest. She tried to speak but couldn’t form the words. It was to be the peasant girl’s destiny that she would never be able to speak again.

  “The girl was struck dumb by the horror she’d witnessed,” Padre Diego said. “She may never regain her power of speech.”

  “How did it happen, Father?” Jacob spoke in the same hushed tones as the priest as they sat in the candle-lit chapel where Aracela’s body lay.

  “The vaqueros were all gone, so Donna Aracela was alone, but for a few servants,” Padre Diego said. “As far as we can piece the events together, the peasant boy Juan Hernandez had dragged Donna Aracela’s maid into the tomb to rape her. He’d raped and beaten a girl before, a beauty named Pilar. After she was dishonored, Pilar was so ashamed she walked into the snow and killed herself.”

  Jacob nodded. “Yeah, I remember that.”

  “What we think is that Donna Aracela, an exceedingly pious woman who was devoted to her father, went to the tomb to pray over his body. Unfortunately, she caught Juan Hernandez in the act and he killed her.”

  Padre Diego sighed. “Perhaps the girl in question will be able to talk again and we’ll have the full story. Until then all we can do is grieve for Donna Aracela and honor her memory.” He looked at Jacob with sad eyes. “She was a fine woman.”

  “And a beautiful one,” Jacob said.

  “Yes, we always seem to lose the ones we can least afford to lose, don’t we?” Padre Diego said.

  “And what of the murderer, Father?” Jacob said.

  “Gone. We sent men out looking for Hernandez, but they came back empty-handed.” The priest glanced at Aracela’s body, then brought his black eyes back to Jacob. “The peons are a simple, ignorant people and they don’t believe, or don’t want to believe, that the boy murdered Donna Aracela.” He shook his head. “I don’t think they searched too hard.”

  Padre Diego laid a hand on Jacob’s forearm. “They say they did find a body, though. But it was not that of Juan Hernandez.”

  Jacob’s interest quickened. “Did they describe it?”

  “There wasn’t much to describe. The poor soul was much torn about by coyotes. He was a small man and there was not enough of him left to bury, they said.”

  “Anything else?”

  “The peons think the man had been killed by Apaches. There are still a few around, doing mischief.” Padre Diego thought for a moment. “A fur coat. Yes, they said the dead man had worn a fur coat, but it too was much torn and tattered.”

  Jacob knew with certainty that his hunt for Joel Whitney was over and it left him feeling empty and unfulfilled. It had to be the little man’s bones that were scattered over the prairie like so much garbage. The Apaches had done Jacob’s job for him, but they’d robbed him of his revenge, and that hurt like the devil.

  Padre Diego faced the altar, his thin fingers on his rosary beads. His lips moved for a while as his eyes roved around the empty chapel. “Where is my flock?” he said finally.

  “I was wondering that myself. Maybe the snow is keeping them indoors.” Jacob rued Whitney’s demise and was only half listening to the priest.

  “Failing to attend a wake for a holy and devout woman could be an occasion of sin. I will say masses for Donna Aracela, and that will bring them out.”

  “I am sure it will, Father.” Jacob rose to his feet. “I got to be riding.”

  “God bless you, my son,” the priest said, making a cross in the air. He smiled. “Yet one thing more that reveals Donna Aracela’s great piety. I went through her papers and found her will. She said that in the event of her death, everything she owned should be bequeathed to Holy Mother Church.”

  “Did that include her claim to the Estancia Valley?” Jacob said.

  “Everything.”

  Jacob was sure that Whitney had relatives back East who would dispute that. But it shaped up to be a court battle, not a range war, and it could drag on for years. Best of all, the sheepherders would stay where they were and end any threat to Dromore.

  Candlelight slanted the chapel with dark, shifting shadows as Jacob stepped beside Aracela’s bier. Even in death she was beautiful, as serene as a sleeping nun.

  Suddenly Padre Diego was at Jacob’s side. “Before you take your leave of her, there was another item in her will. She asked that the lid of her coffin not be nailed down.” The priest smiled. “She said that come her resurrection, she did not wish to waste time
breaking free from a nailed casket.” His smile saddened, then faded. “Ah, indeed, Donna Aracela was as devout a Christian woman who ever lived.”

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Dromore, February 1887

  The clouds had parted three days before, and the sun shone from a blue sky, adding a sparkle to the streaks of snow that surrounded Dromore. The wind was cool, but soft and smelled of high peaks and tall timber; of cattle and horses and the musky scent of smoke from the log fires inside the big house.

  Shamus O’Brien and Luther Ironside, his wounded leg sticking straight out in front of him, were in wheelchairs that had been pushed outside the front door so their occupants could catch the sun.

  Patrick had sat down beside them for a while, but since the colonel and Luther were trying their hardest to outdo each other in crankiness, he’d closed his book and left them to it.

  Samuel was spending time with his wife and son, and Shawn was off somewhere to meet with a girl he was sparking, so Patrick had the library to himself.

  He sat in a chair by the fire, and renewed his acquaintance with Mr. Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake. After thirty minutes, Patrick became aware of the icy draft that was chilling his neck and shoulders. The library window was at the back of the house and faced north in the direction of the prevailing wind. Reluctantly putting his book aside, he rose, stepped to the window, and slammed it shut.

  He glanced outside . . . and saw Jacob.

  His brother sat his horse on a rise about fifty yards from the house. As always, he sat his saddle like a sack of grain. Even at a distance, Patrick made out his shabby, ragged clothes and the great beak of a nose that overhung a cavalry mustache he seldom trimmed.

  Jacob watched the house intently, as though he was trying to make up his mind about something. Patrick stood motionless at the window, afraid he’d be seen.

  After a few minutes, Jacob swung his horse away and vanished into the pines.

  “Good luck, brother,” Patrick said aloud. He stood watching the trees for a long time, then went back to his chair and picked up his book.

  J. A. Johnstone on William W. Johnstone

  “When the Truth Becomes Legend”

  William W. Johnstone was born in southern Missouri, the youngest of four children. He was raised with strong moral and family values by his minister father, and tutored by his schoolteacher mother. Despite this, he quit school at age fifteen.

  “I have the highest respect for education,” he says, “but such is the folly of youth, and wanting to see the world beyond the four walls and the blackboard.”

  True to this vow, Bill attempted to enlist in the French Foreign Legion (“I saw Gary Cooper in Beau Geste when I was a kid and I thought the French Foreign Legion would be fun”) but was rejected, thankfully, for being underage. Instead, he joined a traveling carnival and did all kinds of odd jobs. It was listening to the veteran carny folk, some of whom had been on the circuit since the late 1800s, telling amazing tales about their experiences, which planted the storytelling seed in Bill’s imagination.

  “They were mostly honest people, despite the bad reputation traveling carny shows had back then,” Bill remembers. “Of course, there were exceptions. There was one guy named Picky, who got that name because he was a master pickpocket. He could steal a man’s socks right off his feet without him knowing. Believe me, Picky got us chased out of more than a few towns.”

  After a few months of this grueling existence, Bill returned home and finished high school. Next came stints as a deputy sheriff in the Tallulah, Louisiana, Sheriff’s Department, followed by a hitch in the U.S. Army. Then he began a career in radio broadcasting at KTLD in Tallulah, Louisiana, which would last sixteen years. It was there that he fine-tuned his storytelling skills. He turned to writing in 1970, but it wouldn’t be until 1979 that his first novel, The Devil’s Kiss, was published. Thus began the full-time writing career of William W. Johnstone. He wrote horror (The Uninvited), thrillers (The Last of the Dog Team), even a romance novel or two. Then, in February 1983, Out of the Ashes was published. Searching for his missing family in the aftermath of a post-apocalyptic America, rebel mercenary and patriot Ben Raines is united with the civilians of the Resistance forces and moves to the forefront of a revolution for the nation’s future.

  Out of the Ashes was a smash. The series would continue for the next twenty years, winning Bill three generations of fans all over the world. The series was often imitated but never duplicated. “We all tried to copy The Ashes series,” said one publishing executive, “but Bill’s uncanny ability, both then and now, to predict in which direction the political winds were blowing brought a certain immediacy to the table no one else could capture.” The Ashes series would end its run with more than thirty-four books and twenty million copies in print, making it one of the most successful men’s action series in American book publishing. (The Ashes series also, Bill notes with a touch of pride, got him on the FBI’s Watch List for its less than flattering portrayal of spineless politicians and the growing power of big government over our lives, among other things. “In that respect,” says collaborator J. A. Johnstone, “Bill was years ahead of his time.”)

  Always steps ahead of the political curve, Bill’s recent thrillers, written with J. A. Johnstone, include Vengeance Is Mine, Invasion USA, Border War, Jackknife, Remember the Alamo, Home Invasion, Phoenix Rising, The Blood of Patriots, The Bleeding Edge, and the upcoming Suicide Mission.

  It is with the western, though, that Bill found his greatest success and propelled him onto both the USA Today and the New York Times bestseller lists.

  Bill’s western series, co-authored by J. A. Johnstone, include The Mountain Man, Matt Jensen the Last Mountain Man, Preacher, The Family Jensen, Luke Jensen Bounty Hunter, Eagles, MacCallister (an Eagles spin-off), Sidewinders, The Brothers O’Brien, Sixkiller, Blood Bond, The Last Gunfighter, and the upcoming new series Flintlock and The Trail West. Coming in May 2013 is the hardcover western Butch Cassidy, The Lost Years.

  “The Western,” Bill says, “is one of the few true art forms that is one hundred percent American. I liken the Western as America’s version of England’s Arthurian legends, like the Knights of the Round Table, or Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Starting with the 1902 publication of The Virginian by Owen Wister, and followed by the greats like Zane Grey, Max Brand, Ernest Haycox, and of course Louis L’Amour, the Western has helped to shape the cultural landscape of America.

  “I’m no goggle-eyed college academic, so when my fans ask me why the Western is as popular now as it was a century ago, I don’t offer a 200-page thesis. Instead, I can only offer this: The Western is honest. In this great country, which is suffering under the yoke of political correctness, the Western harks back to an era when justice was sure and swift. Steal a man’s horse, rustle his cattle, rob a bank, a stagecoach, or a train, you were hunted down and fitted with a hangman’s noose. One size fit all.

  “Sure, we westerners are prone to a little embellishment and exaggeration and, I admit it, occasionally play a little fast and loose with the facts. But we do so for a very good reason—to enhance the enjoyment of readers.

  “It was Owen Wister, in The Virginian who first coined the phrase ‘When you call me that, smile.’ Legend has it that Wister actually heard those words spoken by a deputy sheriff in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, when another poker player called him a son-of-a-bitch.

  “Did it really happen, or is it one of those myths that have passed down from one generation to the next? I honestly don’t know. But there’s a line in one of my favorite Westerns of all time, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where the newspaper editor tells the young reporter, ‘When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.’

  “These are the words I live by.”

  PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2012 William W. Johnstone

  All rights reser
ved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

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  ISBN: 978-0-7860-3301-0

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4

  First electronic edition: September 2013

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3417-8

  ISBN-10: 0-7860-3417-3