The Wicked Die Twice

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  Slash glanced at Pecos. “Didn’t I tell you this wasn’t gonna be no picnic?”

  “No.”

  Slash sighed as he turned back toward Carlisle’s. “Yeah . . . well.”

  “Let’s go,” Pecos said.

  Shouldering his Colt’s revolving rifle, he stepped down off the boardwalk. Slash matched his stride as the two angled across the main street, heading for Carlisle’s that stood, eerily silent and eye-achingly bright, in the midday sunshine.

  CHAPTER 12

  Slash looked up the street to the west, then down to the east, toward the burned church they’d passed. Nothing moved. Only smoke.

  He and Pecos took the broad, high porch steps side by side. They confronted the batwings side by side, as well. They slid cautious glances around the frame, squinting into the dark interior.

  They shared a questioning glance; then Slash pushed through the left door. Pecos followed through the right door. They each stepped to one side so the doorway wouldn’t backlight them.

  Slash scowled incredulously into the gloom, where a big man was dancing with a scantily clad young woman—a slender blonde with long, curly hair tumbling down her naked back. The man was even bigger than Pecos, and lantern-jawed. His hair was cropped close, and a two- or three-day growth of beard stubble darkened his broad face.

  Slash’s scowl deepened. He’d thought the two were dancing. He’d been wrong. The big man was the only one of the pair dancing. He was dragging the poor blonde around Carlisle’s floor—back in the shadows, where tables had been cleared away to form a dance floor fronting a stage where bands had likely played during happier times. The girl’s head was tipped forward against the big man’s stout left shoulder.

  Her bare, pale feet dragged across the floor puncheons.

  Asleep?

  There was another man in the room, Slash saw. A portly man lay dead in front of the bar. Judging by the blood matting his shirt and the apron tied around his bulging waist, he’d been shot a good half-dozen times. He’d overturned a table and one chair when he’d fallen, and now lay on his back, glaring up at the ceiling.

  The big, living man—the dancer—had his eyes closed as he moved slowly, sliding to and fro, his feet clad in high-topped, mule-eared boots. He hummed along with the waltz playing in his head. He wore only a bowie knife in a sheath strapped to his waist. A gun rig lay on a table nearby. The rig held three holstered pistols. A Springfield carbine lay on the table near the rig, as well as the man’s feathered black opera hat, which lay crown down near three bottles, one half-empty, and four shot glasses, all empty.

  The big man had his head down, a dreamy smile on his face as he danced. He and the girl could have been two lovers on their wedding night. Only, they weren’t. Suddenly, having sensed the two newcomers’ presence, the big man lifted his head and turned toward the batwings.

  “Hey!” he said in a deep voice that echoed briefly around the cave-like, all-but-empty room. He released the girl’s hands and pointed toward Slash and Pecos. “Who’re you?”

  The girl fell straight back away from the big man, her knees buckling. She dropped to the floor like a fifty-pound sack of potatoes and lay unmoving, crumpled, legs curled beneath her back. She stared toward the front of the room through wide-open, lake-blue eyes.

  Dead. Had to be. She hadn’t resisted the fall a bit.

  She didn’t appear to have been shot or stabbed. There was no blood.

  Heart attack, maybe . . . Death by terror.

  The big man stared down at her with mild surprise. He chuckled, then turned again, angrily, toward Slash and Pecos. He pointed again. “I said, who ’re you?”

  With a calm he did not feel, Slash said, “We’re the fellas that just killed you, friend.”

  The man’s eyes snapped wide. His lower jaw dropped, his big mouth opened. “Oh, you think so—do you?”

  He stepped forward, heading toward the gun-laden table before him.

  Slash raised the Winchester to his shoulder, peeled the hammer back, and blew a .44-caliber round into the big man’s chest. Dust puffed from the man’s wool shirt and brown leather vest.

  He grunted, flinched, but kept moving toward the table.

  Slash shot him again.

  The big man kept moving, albeit a little less steadily, toward the table.

  Slash glanced skeptically at Pecos, then ejected the smoking cartridge from his Winchester’s action, seated fresh, and shot the big man a third time. The man bellowed loudly, his voice thundering around the room. He reached forward and started to shuck a Remington revolver from one of the holsters before him.

  “Time for the Richards,” Slash told Pecos, stepping aside.

  “Be happy to.”

  Pecos stepped forward, raising the double-bore, sawed-off shotgun in both hands. As the big man, bellowing again, raised the pistol straight out from his right shoulder, the twelve-gauge thundered. It sounded like a keg of detonated dynamite. Rose-like flames and roiling smoke blossomed from both bores.

  The big man gave a shrill cry and triggered the Remington into the ceiling as he ran backward and then to one side and flew, howling, over a table. He rolled over the table and hit the floor with another thundering boom. He gave another grunt, one more, then groaned as his life bled out from the twin pumpkin-sized wounds in his chest.

  Slash spied movement at the rear of the room.

  Jerking his head that way, he saw a man run down to the second-story landing. The man’s gun rig was looped over his left arm. His shirt was unbuttoned, its tails out. He held a pistol in his right hand. Stopping on the landing and crouching to gaze down into the drinking hall, he raised the Colt and fired. The bullet sawed through the air between Slash and Pecos to slam into one of the batwings behind them, knocking it outward.

  Slash stepped forward, raised the Winchester again, and fired.

  The man on the landing cursed, wheeled, and ran back up the stairs. Slash wasn’t sure if he’d hit him or not.

  Slash hurried forward, pinching fresh cartridges from his shell belt and sliding them through his carbine’s loading gate. Pecos close on his heels, he hurried up the stairs. He could hear the man’s running foot thuds in the ceiling above his head.

  Slash crossed the second-floor landing, turned, and took the last set of steps two at a time. He paused at the top of the steps.

  “Get back!” he told Pecos, nudging his big partner back and to one side as their quarry, standing in the middle of the dim hall, triggered his revolver twice.

  Both shots flew over the staircase and thumped into a wall. The man turned and resumed running, taking long strides, scissoring his arms and legs. Slash raised the Winchester, but before he could plant the beads on the retreating man’s back, the man leaped straight through the window at the hall’s far end.

  Just like that—out of the darkness of the hall and into the sunlight, gone!

  Only, Slash could hear him whooping wildly as he flew through the air outside the saloon, beyond the raining glass.

  Slash lowered the Winchester and took off running. “I’m gonna get that son of a buck!” he shouted at Pecos running behind him, his big partner’s steps sounding twice as loud as Slash’s.

  Slash gained the end of the hall and kept running....

  Right through what remained of the window.

  A quarter second earlier, he’d seen the roof of the building next door to Carlisle’s. He’d also seen his quarry crawling up and over the peak of the roof, disappearing down the other side. If he could make it, so could Slash.

  Slash flew out of Carlisle’s third-floor window like mortar from a Napoleon cannon. But a mortar with not enough powder behind it. Slash flew a few feet out away from Carlisle’s—then down like a wounded duck. He’d forgotten until now that he was still clutching the Winchester. He dropped it, inwardly wincing at the gun’s mistreatment. He had a feeling his own mistreatment was going to be worse.

  A half second later, he was proven right.

  Ufffghhhrrrr
r! exploded out of him as he slammed onto the roof of the adobe brick building beside Carlisle’s. The roof was steeply pitched. Immediately, he began sliding down the rough wooden shakes. He tried to grab purchase, but there was nothing to grab on to.

  What in the hell had the man who’d come before him grabbed?

  A sickening feeling flooded his belly and loins when he felt his feet and then his legs drop over the edge of the roof. His head and shoulders slid down, down, down while he continued digging his gloved fingers into the shakes. Or trying to, but to no avail. His head and shoulders went over the edge, as well.

  At the last second, he managed to close his hands around the edge of the overhang.

  He hung there against the side of the brick shack, dangling, kicking his legs, trying desperately to swing them up and over the overhang. That wasn’t going to happen. Something like that kind of an athletic, acrobatic feat hadn’t happened in the past twenty years—not since he’d left his twenties, anyway, and probably a good bit longer ago than that. When he was a teenager growing up in Missouri, he’d once had to skin out of a parlor house in Blue Springs, when his pa had gotten word he’d become a regular patron of a pretty Mexican doxie. He’d made a mad, cat-like, successful dash across several rooftops, buck-naked, his clothes clutched in his arms. But that was years ago, and his father, armed with a solid oak pitchfork handle, had been hot on his heels.

  Now he watched in horror as his old fingers slipped off the edge of the overhang. His heart slid up into his throat as his body plunged down the side of the adobe brick shack. Fortunately, a pile of shipping crates lay beneath him. He struck the crates with a grunt and a curse, fell, and rolled, the crates tumbling around him as he slid down the stack to the trash-littered ground.

  “You crazy bedbug!” Pecos shouted at him, as the bigger ex-cutthroat ran past on the street, having taken the easy way out of Carlisle’s. “If you’ve broken anything, I’m gonna shoot you!”

  Groaning at the ache in his right ankle, Slash cursed his partner and said, “Thanks for your sympathy!”

  But by then Pecos was gone, having dashed out of sight around the front of the brick shack, in hard pursuit of their quarry.

  Slash rolled onto his hands and knees. His right ankle felt as though a railroad spike had been driven through it. But he didn’t think it was broken. Just twisted. He heaved himself to his feet, glanced at his poor Winchester lying at the base of Carlisle’s, near his hat. Not wanting to take the time to retrieve the abused rifle, he shucked one of his stag-gripped .44s and took off running painfully around behind the shack he’d so recently fallen from.

  He stopped so suddenly that his bad ankle gave, and he dropped to a knee, falling forward. The move saved his life, for the gunman had just lifted his head above a stack of firewood abutting the back wall of the next low adobe brick building, twenty feet beyond the one Slash had fallen from. The man triggered a round, the revolver popping hollowly. The bullet whistled two feet above Slash’s head. Slash raised his .44 as the gunman gritted his teeth and cocked his own Colt, then narrowed one anxious bright eye as he drew another bead on Slash.

  Slash squeezed his .44’s trigger. The bullet plowed into a log just beneath his assailant’s head, blowing slivers in the man’s face. Cursing, the man triggered his own Colt wide, the bullet screeching off a rock behind Slash. The gunman drew his head back, squeezing his eyes closed. He rose and ran, crouching—limping, too, it appeared—around the adobe building’s far corner, disappearing down the side.

  “Pecos!” Slash shouted. “He’s over here!”

  Slash grimaced as he heaved himself to his feet and ran to the adobe shack’s rear corner, on the far side of the wood pile. He glanced around the corner and into the break between the adobe building and the burned-out hulk of a livery barn. He pulled his head back as the gunman triggered another round at him, the bullet screeching off the adobe inches from where Slash’s face had just been.

  “Hold it, you polecat!” Slash heard his partner yell.

  Slash looked into the break again.

  The gunman stood halfway between the rear of the adobe shack and the front, and about ten feet out away from it. He was turned to face the adobe shack, his gun rig still looped over his right arm, his Colt in his right hand. He whipped his gaze toward where Pecos was poking his head out from around the adobe building’s front corner.

  Slash stepped out from the corner. His .44 leaped and roared.

  The gunman screamed and jerked backward, turning toward Slash as Slash’s bullet plowed into his right arm. Blood instantly stained the upper arm of his unbuttoned cream shirt. Pecos extended his Russian and fired.

  The gunman screamed again and whipped to his left as Pecos’s bullet tore into his left arm.

  “Dirty dogs!” The gunman gritted his teeth as he raised his pistol toward Pecos. He didn’t get it level before Slash and Pecos each fired two more rounds, all four rounds cutting into the gunman’s torso and sending him tumbling backward to lay in a writhing pile near the still-smoldering ruins of the livery barn.

  He’d dropped his Colt and his gun rig on which two more Colts were holstered.

  He lay on his back, grinding one boot heel into the turf. He pressed his shaking fingers into the ground to each side of him.

  Slowly, Slash and Pecos moved toward him, Slash still limping on his bad ankle. He stared down at the dying killer. He was a small man—probably not much over five-anda-half feet. Reed thin. No wonder he’d been able to make that jump. He was long-faced, ugly as a snake. Long, thin, sandy-brown hair slithered around his shoulders. He was pale and thin-lipped, and his eyes were a washed-out green.

  “You de-devils kilt me,” he grunted.

  “Where’s the rest of ’em?” Pecos asked.

  “Go to hell!” the killer spat.

  Guns popped to the west, a good distance away. A man hooted loudly, jubilantly. More guns popped.

  Slash and Pecos shared a conferring glance.

  Slash blew a hole through the killer’s pale forehead; then he and Pecos hurried back toward the main street.

  CHAPTER 13

  Slash and Pecos stepped out of the break between the adobe building and the burned livery barn. They turned toward the sounds of sporadic shooting. It seemed to be coming from the church on the other end of town. From their position on the main street, they could see the church sitting alone on its own lot and up a slight rise to the north. A small cemetery fronted the church, on its right side.

  Men were milling around the place, firing rifles into it. Smoke slithered up from around the building’s stone foundation. Apparently, the men now firing rifles at the church had piled brush up around it and set it on fire.

  “You suppose that’s our curly wolves, do you?” Pecos asked, shouldering his Colt’s revolving rifle, his sawed-off twelve-gauge hanging barrel down behind his back.

  “There does appear to be three of ’em an’ they do appear to be curly wolves, up to no good as they appear to be.”

  “Why do you suppose they’re torchin’ that church?” Pecos gave Slash a dark look. “You suppose there’s more innocent folks holed up in there, like there was the other one?”

  Slash’s heart thumped. “Why else would they burn it?”

  “Yeah,” Slash said, raising his voice. “Why else?” He swung around and started limping back in the direction of the marshal’s office. “Let’s get the jail wagon!”

  Pecos jogged past him, glancing over his shoulder at him. “How’s your ankle?”

  “It hurts.”

  “Serves you right.”

  “Go to hell!”

  They untied their saddle mounts from the jail wagon, then climbed up onto the driver’s seat. As Slash untied the reins from around the brake handle, the marshal’s office door opened. Stanley Donovan peered out, squinting one eye. He looked to the east, then to the west, then at Slash and Pecos. “You get them two no-accounts over at Carlisle’s?”

  “They’ve done given up their
ghosts, Mr. Carlisle,” Slash said, clucking the two geldings into the street. “But there’s more trouble over at the Lutheran church, looks like.”

  “You don’t say?” Donovan said. “I bet that’s the first time them words have been spoken. I’ll just stay out of it!” The shopkeeper’s eyes glinted fearfully as he quickly slammed the door.

  Pecos gave a wry chuckle, then held tight to the seat as Slash hoorawed the team on up the street to the west. As he held the ribbons, he pulled his right-hand Colt from its holster and shoved it at Pecos.

  “Reload that for me–will you, partner? I’m gonna need both my hoglegs, as I left my rifle back yonder.”

  “You’re a damn lot of work!” Pecos grimaced as he lay his rifle down beneath the seat. “I’m using your shells, dammit.” He reached over and thumbed six cartridges from Slash’s shell belt. He flicked open the loading gate on Slash’s Colt, clicked out the empty shells, and replaced them with the fresh ones. He slid the loading gate closed, spun the wheel, then returned the revolver to Slash’s holster.

  “Don’t you think you better slow down?” he said as they came up on the church and the cemetery fronting it, off the trail’s right side. They could more clearly see the three shooters sauntering around outside the place, laughing, passing a bottle, and firing their rifles through the flames lifting around the outside of the building.

  Slash could also hear the muffled cries of what could only be people trapped inside.

  “Hell, no,” Slash said. “Them folks inside must feel like roasts inside a Dutch oven!”

  “Ah, hell!” Pecos said, bending down to pull his rifle up off the floor.

  As Slash turned the wagon off the main trail and onto the trace that climbed the hill to the church, Pecos checked to make sure his rifle was loaded, then raised it high against his chest. “You’re a crazy son of Satan,” he yelled above the thunder of the gelding’s hooves and the roar of the iron-shod wheels. “Always have been, always will be!”