by Jake Logan
Slocum wasn’t desperate for money, but he knew all too well that the winds of fortune could blow him off course at any given moment. It was never wise to turn down money when it was handed over unless there were too many strings attached. Unfortunately, there were always strings. When the stack of money was placed in front of him, Slocum asked, “What’s that for?”
“The bounty on Rob Bensonn’s hide. You delivered him to me wrapped up nice and neat, so it’s all yours.”
“I’m not a bounty hunter.”
“Then perhaps you should consider it as a profession because you did a hell of a job.”
Slocum picked up the money and counted it. There were three hundred and fifty dollars in the stack. “So you know who Rob Bensonn is?”
“Sure I do. He can’t go five damn minutes without reminding everyone about it.”
“And you knew he was in town?”
“It’s my town,” the lawman replied. “I know most everything that goes on here.”
“If it’s your town, then why the hell weren’t you protecting it?”
Sheriff Cass placed both hands flat upon his desk and rose up from his chair. It took quite a bit of effort and he wheezed slightly when he said, “Pardon me?”
“I think you heard me just fine, Sheriff. This is your town and there’s a killer walking your streets, bragging about all the blood he’s spilled to anyone who’ll listen.”
“Most of that kind of talk is just that. Talk. The men who do the talking ain’t usually nothing more than liars or drunks.”
Slocum felt his fists start to clench. “Maybe you should ask the woman who was nearly raped . . . or worse . . . how that animal was full of nothing but talk.”
“That animal is in a cage where he belongs. Thanks to you. If you want to insult me, I’ll ask you kindly to leave my office before I toss you out on your ear. If you want to take your money, you can do it and enjoy the rest of your stay in Tarnish Mills. I’d suggest you do the latter, sir.”
“Could you answer me two questions?”
“What are your questions?”
“How long has Rob Bensonn been in town?”
The sheriff shrugged. “Couldn’t say for certain. A few days, maybe.”
“And how much is your salary for a few days?”
“Why do you need to know that?”
“The way I see it,” Slocum replied, “that’s all money I should get since it was me doing your damn job for you in that stretch of time.”
As the lawman’s eyes narrowed into angry slits, he leaned forward with enough force to make his desk creak beneath his hands. “Take your money and get the hell out of my office.”
“Gladly,” Slocum grunted. He stuffed the cash into his pocket and left.
5
A few hours later, Slocum had had a big breakfast, drunk his fill of some freshly brewed coffee, and was lying on his bed with Tess riding him like he was a bucking bronco. The window was still broken, but the curtains were drawn and billowing with a warm breeze that came in from the west. Tess was naked as a jaybird, pressing her hands flat against his chest and bouncing on his rigid cock in a way that made her breasts move with a rhythm of their own. They were still locked in a battle of wills to see who could go the longest without making a noise, so she chewed on the inside of one cheek as she took every inch of Slocum’s erection deep inside her.
He let out a breath and reached up with both hands to cup her tits. Slocum never tired of how they felt in his grasp. When he teased her nipples the way she liked so much, Tess sucked in a sharp breath and let it out in a wavering sigh. That sound was music to his ears. Before she was finished, her sigh was lost amid the cracking of gunfire.
“What was that?” she asked as she came to a sudden stop.
“Who cares? Just keep going.”
Tess shifted her weight, which didn’t feel bad from Slocum’s angle. Rather than pick up where she’d left off, she strained to lean toward the window. “I think those were gunshots.”
He knew they were shots, but Slocum would be damned if he was going to be the one to push her away so he could walk toward that window. “Could’ve been anything. Don’t worry about it.” When Tess didn’t resume her rocking motions, Slocum grabbed her hips and started pumping up into her.
She shook her head at first while squirming in his grasp. After a few powerful thrusts, she clenched her eyes shut and stayed put. “Right there,” she whispered while doing her best to maintain the strange posture she’d taken to get a better look at the window.
Slocum smiled, knowing he was back in business. Keeping one hand on her hip, he slid the other one up over her stomach and to the narrow valley between her swaying breasts. He pumped into her again. Moaning, Tess ground her hips in a way that made him feel—
“Good Lord!” she said as another volley of shots rolled through the air.
Before Slocum could set her mind at ease again, people outside started yelling back and forth about a gunfight in the street.
When he looked up at Tess, she was too distracted by the window to notice much of anything else. Every part of her body that could lean toward that side of the room was doing so. He could even feel the muscles in her legs and thighs tensing to carry her up and off the bed. “God damn it,” he growled. “Go on and have a look!”
She climbed down and grabbed the first thing she could use to cover herself before pulling the curtains aside. Holding a blanket against the front of her body, she looked down and mused, “There’s a whole lot of riled-up folks down there.”
“I think I’m going to take my horse out for a ride.”
“What?” she asked while reeling around to face him.
Slocum shrugged his shoulders and scooped up his clothes. “I’m sure he’d like a chance to stretch his legs. So would I.”
“John! It sounds like someone was hurt.”
“Then maybe someone should fetch the sheriff.”
Tess didn’t say anything to that. She didn’t need to do much more than glare sternly at him for some of the quietest moments they’d shared since their paths had crossed. Unable and unwilling to weather much more of that storm, Slocum grabbed his gun belt and cinched it around his waist. “Fine. If that’s what you want, I’ll go marching out in the middle of all that confusion and see about creating some more. Happy?”
Her sternness melted away to be replaced by a warm smile. “You’re a good man, John Slocum.”
“And why do good men always get the short end of the stick?”
“I treat good men pretty well. When you come back,” she added while sidling up to him and allowing the blanket to fall away from her body, “I’ll show you firsthand.”
Then Tess planted a kiss on Slocum that would linger with him for years to come. In quiet moments when he had nothing to do besides reflect on some of his finer days, in difficult moments when he needed something good to cling to, in moments when his mind was blank and ready for a surprise memory to sneak up on him, he would feel that kiss once again.
Her tongue eased across his lips, and her mouth pressed long and hard against his. Their hands wandered, and when she finally stepped back, Slocum wasn’t able to catch his breath right away. Not that he was about to let her know all that. Slocum nodded and turned as if he was simply leaving one room and heading into another.
If he was forced to place a wager at that moment, Slocum would have bet every dollar he’d been given that she was staring at him with a wide, pretty, and exceedingly victorious smile on her face.
The saloon had been so quiet that his footsteps echoed through the place. The large window bearing the Split Log’s name was alive with a performance of shadows racing across the other side of the glass. Voices, although muffled, were loud enough for him to make out panicked words and shouts.
Pausing a
t the front door, he turned toward the bartender and asked, “What the hell is going on?”
“Sounds like someone’s shooting.”
Instead of staying put to get more useless answers from the barkeep, Slocum went outside and allowed himself to be swept into the flow of people moving down the street. It wasn’t exactly a stampede, but there were enough people to form a current that brought Slocum to a spot in the street within spitting distance of the sheriff’s office.
The front door of the office was wide open. Since no fewer than ten locals were clustered around the entrance, Slocum couldn’t see much. When a strong breeze got the door to swing, it knocked against something and came to an abrupt stop.
“Will everyone please stand back?” The man who’d just spoken rose up from the crowd with his arms held high above his head. He was the doctor who’d tended to Tess’s cuts. Although he wasn’t a particularly tall man, he seemed like a giant since everyone around him was hunched over to look at whatever had kept the door from shutting.
Slocum shoved through the crowd all the way to the front to find Sheriff Cass lying flat on his back with his legs splayed out in front of him. Before his door could knock him in the shoulder again, the doctor braced his foot against it. “What happened here?” Slocum asked.
The doctor didn’t look up from his patient. The sheriff’s shirt was soaked through with blood. He pulled it open to reveal a large, sucking chest wound. “Step back and give me room to work!” the doctor commanded.
Like all the others who’d been standing there, Slocum couldn’t take his eyes off the chest wound. It was a small pool that looked too dark to be blood. Small bubbles rose every now and then as the lawman’s life drained out for anyone to see. Slocum averted his eyes while thinking about the last time he’d spoken with Sheriff Cass. The pangs of guilt he felt became worse when he saw the thick peg of chipped wood where the sheriff’s left leg beneath the knee should have been. So that’s why he hadn’t strayed from his desk when Slocum had been there before.
“Jesus Christ,” Slocum sighed, feeling like the biggest ass in the territory.
“If you’re going to blaspheme, do it somewhere else,” the doctor said. “This man needs all the help he can get no matter where it comes from.”
“Tell me what happened,” Slocum demanded.
“I just got here and this is how I found him. Now step aside!”
Slocum put his back to the lawman and reflexively struck a defensive posture when he saw how many other people were trying to get a closer look. Lowering his head like a dog with its hackles raised, he snarled, “Someone tell me what happened!”
“The sheriff was stepping outside when somebody called him out.”
Having narrowed the location of the speaker down to one section of the crowd, Slocum shifted his eyes in that direction and asked, “Who called him out?”
A young man still in his late teens stared at him with wide eyes. “He was some old-timer. He told the sheriff to cut Rob Bensonn loose or else he’d send him straight to hell. Send the sheriff, I mean.”
“Was the old man a friend of Bensonn’s?”
“I don’t know that, but I guess the old man is a killer. I heard Rob Bensonn is—”
“Yeah,” Slocum snapped. “I’ve already heard plenty about Bensonn. I want to hear about the old man.”
Since the doctor had recruited one other man to drag the sheriff inside and close the door, the rest of the crowd was left without a show to watch. One of the others who spoke up looked to be older than the kid in his teens, but not by much. “That old man was a damned killer if I ever saw one. Looked tougher than leather and drew his gun faster than I ever seen.”
“He told the sheriff to cut Rob loose,” Slocum recited. “And when he didn’t, the old man gunned him down?”
Almost everyone in the crowd nodded. “I swear I ain’t never seen someone shoot that fast before,” the older teen said. “The sheriff didn’t even get a chance to touch his pistol.”
“That’s not speed,” Slocum said. “That’s firing when the man in front of you isn’t looking or wasn’t ready.”
“He was ready,” the younger of the two spokesmen replied. “Sheriff Cass said he aimed to kill anyone who took another step toward that smokehouse. The old man shouted for him to toss his keys and the sheriff told him to go to hell. Next thing I know, the old man put a bullet into the sheriff!”
“That’s right,” a grizzled man with a head of gray hair said through a mouthful of tobacco. “Quicker than a hiccup.”
“It sure was that fast!” the younger man said. After that, lots of others from the crowd chimed in with their accounts of just how quickly the killer had moved when he’d put the sheriff down. Some of the eyewitnesses claimed they hadn’t even seen the old man’s arm move at all apart from a blur of motion one woman likened to hummingbird’s wings.
“Enough!” Slocum said. “At least keep your goddamn voices down so the man that was shot doesn’t have to hear about what a thrilling spectacle it was.”
The crowd bowed their heads at the same time as if they’d just received a command from their preacher during Sunday mass. When the door to the office was opened, the air was still enough for the creak of the hinges to be clearly heard.
Slocum turned to find the doctor stepping outside, using a bloody rag to clean off his hands. “How’s he doing, Doc?” Slocum asked.
“He’s dying, that’s how he’s doing.”
“Then shouldn’t you be in there with him?”
“There’s nothing left for me to do,” the doctor replied. “Besides, he asked to see you.”
“Me?”
“You’re John Slocum?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s you. I’d suggest you step lively.”
Slocum walked past the doctor and into the grimy little office. Seeing the lawman lying there with his wooden leg on prominent display put a lot of things into perspective. It also cast the man in a whole new light. What made Slocum feel even worse was the fact that he truly hadn’t gotten to know Sheriff Cass before writing him off as a lazy waste of a badge.
Not wanting to be disrespectful by towering over the wounded man, Slocum got down on one knee and said, “The doctor told me you wanted to speak to me, but I don’t think . . .”
“Don’t think . . . what?” Cass asked. “Don’t think . . . I got enough sense. . . . to remember your name?”
“No. I was just going to say I thought you’d want to speak to someone else. Maybe your wife or family?”
“Ain’t got none of . . . either.”
Cass was dying. Of that, there was no doubt. Slocum could see as much in the lawman’s chalky face or in Cass’s eyes, which were hazy and wandering as if he was seeing things that no living man could see. By Slocum’s reckoning, the lawman could pass at any moment.
“Find them, Slocum,” Cass said.
“The old man who shot you?”
The lawman nodded although it obviously hurt like hell for him to do so. “Him and Bensonn. After I was shot, my jail keys were taken from me like I was some kinda damn baby. Ain’t felt so helpless . . . since I got my leg blown off. And you’re right . . . about me not doin’ my job.”
“No,” Slocum said quickly. “I spoke out of turn with that. I was just . . .” He stopped when he felt a firm grip around one wrist.
The sheriff grabbed hold of Slocum’s arm as if it was the only thing preventing him from falling into the abyss. “You were speakin’ yer mind, and it was the truth. If I couldn’t carry out my duties . . . I should have . . . turned in my badge. I asked you here so I could keep doin’ my job. The man that killed me . . . his name is Far Eye.”
“Is that an Indian name?” Slocum asked.
“No . . . that’s just what folks call him. He freed Bensonn and will
probably be. . . . movin’ on to Spencer Flats.”
“They told you all that before shooting you?”
“No, Rob was talking . . . talking up a storm when he was . . . in the cell. Heard something . . . about Spencer Flats. He was my responsibility. Goin’ after them both should’a been my job, but I . . . probably would’ve let it slide. That’s why . . . I’m deputizing you.”
Slocum pulled his arm away from the dying man’s reach. “Oh, no. I’m no bounty hunter and I’m no lawman.”
“You . . . could’ve fooled me.” Until Cass allowed his head to fall down and thump against the floor, Slocum hadn’t realized he’d been holding it up. In fact, when he lay back, Cass relaxed most of his muscles to the point that his body looked like a water skin with its contents leaking out through a small hole. His eyes were open and fixed on a point directly above him. When he spoke, it was with a voice that seemed to be a hundred miles away. “I wanted to do one last thing . . . one part of my duty that could make up for . . . all I let slide. You don’t know me well . . . enough to avenge me and you ain’t kin. I thought . . . maybe . . . you could clean up the mess I’m about to leave behind.”
Slocum pulled in a deep breath and let it out. “You say the name of the town is Spencer Flats?”
Cass nodded weakly. “Stars . . .”
“Are you seeing the stars?” Slocum asked quietly.
Suddenly, Cass snapped his eyes open and stared directly at him. “The star’s in my top drawer you . . . damn fool! Take . . .”
And then he was gone.
Slocum stood up, walked over to the sheriff’s desk, and opened the top drawer. Among other things such as papers, some pencils, and a few mismatched pistol rounds was a small deputy’s badge in desperate need of polishing. He took the little star and placed it in his pocket. All that remained was for him to tell the doctor what had happened.
There was no need to rush.
6
When Slocum returned to his room at the Split Log, he immediately gathered up his things and stuffed them into his saddlebags. Tess showed up before he was through, breathlessly storming through the door. “Didn’t you see me downstairs?” she asked.