The Wicked Die Twice

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  * * *

  Since there was no cover out here, and the quarter-moon was on the rise, Slash and Pecos decided to take every precaution to keep from being seen as they approached the killers’ camp. They rode northeast, in the opposite direction of the outlaw camp, for a good three-quarters of a mile. They swung east and rode roughly the same distance before swinging to the south for another mile, then west for another mile and a half.

  That put them nearly due south of the two bluffs they could see hulking up darkly against the northern sky, roughly a half mile away.

  “This is where it gets tough,” Slash said quietly, keeping his voice low.

  Pecos glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

  “We walk,” Slash said, swinging down from his saddle.

  “Ah, hell.”

  “Yep.”

  “You know I hate walkin’ worse than bathin’.”

  “I know, partner, but the hosses would make too much noise. Damn quiet night.” Slash dropped his Appaloosa’s reins, ground-reining the mount, and slid his Winchester from his scabbard.

  Pecos cursed and slid his own rifle from his saddle sheath. “You’d think we could at least get a breeze.”

  “Don’t count on it.” Slash removed his spurs, dropped them into a saddlebag pouch. He shouldered his rifle and began tramping north through the sage.

  Pecos removed his own spurs, then patted his buckskin’s neck, saying, “Stay now, Buck, and behave yourself,” and fell into stride beside Slash.

  They walked steadily through the scrub, keeping roughly eight feet apart.

  Pecos said quietly, “You got enough cartridges, partner?”

  “Oh, I ’spect so.”

  “You ready to do this?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah,” Pecos said. “Me neither.”

  As they walked almost due north, the two dark bluffs grew steadily before them. The outlaws were camped on the other side of those bluffs. Slash and Pecos were sure of it.

  “We climb to the top o’ them buttes?” Pecos asked, even more quietly than before as they walked. “That what you’re thinkin’?”

  “Yep, shoot ’em like ducks on a millrace.”

  “Sounds easy enough.”

  Slash stopped. “Wait.”

  Pecos stopped and looked at him. “What is it?”

  “Down.” Slash dropped to his knees.

  Pecos followed suit, lifting his chin and sniffing. He frowned as he turned to Slash again. “Is that smoke?”

  “I think so,” Slash whispered slowly.

  “They switch camps or what?”

  “Maybe they broke up, scattered. Could be they figured we might make the play we’re out here tryin’ to make.”

  “In that case . . .”

  “We been hornswoggled.”

  “How you wanna play it?”

  “Let’s check it out.”

  Slash dropped to his hands and, holding his rifle in his right hand, sort of dragging it along the ground, crabbed forward through the sage. Pecos did likewise, keeping well to Slash’s left. They split farther apart to avoid a nasty-looking patch of prickly pear, then came closer together again when they’d gotten beyond the low-growing cactus.

  Ahead, a dull light grew. It was almost the color of a sunset.

  It seemed to be radiating up out of the ground.

  Slash stopped. So did Pecos.

  Slash stared ahead. The light flickered dully, appearing to originate about fifty feet ahead. He glanced at Pecos, jerked his chin to indicate ahead, then, keeping very low to the ground, resumed crawling very slowly and quietly. Ahead the light grew until Slash could see that it was, indeed, radiating up out of the ground. From a wash cut into the prairie at the southern base of the two buttes.

  The cut of the wash broadened as Slash crawled up to its edge. He peered down into the cut. The wash was roughly fifty yards wide, maybe thirty feet deep. The fire lay just ahead, beyond a fringe of willows and stunted cottonwoods. The fire appeared small, maybe only a coffee fire, a small blaze to ward off the night’s growing chill.

  Two men sat around it. They were smoking—Slash could smell the peppery aroma of Durham tobacco—and talking in desultory tones. He couldn’t hear what they were saying. They were speaking too quietly. He couldn’t get a good look at them, either, through the screen of the growth between him and their fire. They were two blurred, partly lit, partly shadowed figures sitting Indian style on either side of the softly crackling fire.

  One of the pair spoke a little loudly to say, “And then she told Ronnie he couldn’t have any ’cause he smelled like a dead javelina.”

  The other man squealed a quiet laugh. “What’d Ronnie say to that?”

  “He said ‘damn girl’ . . .”

  The man must have realized he was speaking too loudly, for just then as he continued his bawdy yarn he lowered his voice considerably so that Pecos could no longer hear. That was all right. He wasn’t here to eavesdrop on the killer’s ribald tales.

  He was here for other matters entirely.

  He glanced at Pecos, who parted his lips slightly as though to say: “What’s the plan?”

  Slash patted the breech of his Winchester, then jerked his head to indicate the two men in the wash. Pecos nodded once, slowly. Slash rose to a crouch and dropped first one foot and then the other over the lip of the wash. He moved slowly down the shallow slope. At the bottom of the wash, he waited for Pecos to make his own way down and to stand to his left, holding his Colt’s revolving rifle down low, where the firelight wouldn’t reflect off its octagonal steel barrel.

  Slash canted his head to the left, then to his right.

  Pecos nodded, then moved slowly, quietly ahead and swinging left. Slash moved ahead and right, gently nudging the willows and cottonwoods aside. His feet moved quietly on the wash’s sandy bottom. Ahead of him, the firelight grew. The two men sat where they’d been seated before.

  What in hell were they doing out here? Were they on watch? If so, why the fire?

  Maybe just stupid. Maybe they didn’t think Slash and his partner would try to sneak up on a such a large and savage gang—two men going up against a good dozen. So they’d built a fire to ward off the chill and were just lounging around out here, against their leader’s wishes, chewing the fat until their watch time was up.

  Slash continued wending his way through the brush, nearly silently.

  The fire and the two men took clearer and clearer shape before him.

  CHAPTER 32

  Ten feet from the fire in the wash, Slash stopped. He saw Pecos, a large shadow against the moon, quarter toward him on his left.

  Slash looked toward the fire. The man on the left sat facing Slash’s direction, but he had his head turned toward his friend on the other side of the fire. A Winchester rested across his thighs. He appeared a stout man with an enormous, bearded head. He wore two pistols and at least one knife that Slash could see. The second man was facing away from Slash. Thinner and taller than the other man but just as well armed, he was smoking a cigarette. His own Winchester leaned against his right thigh. A spare cartridge belt lay coiled around the rifle’s stock.

  They were droning on about pleasure girls they’d known, poker games they’d played and whom they’d played them with, commenting that the reputations of some famous gamblers were overblown.

  “Now, you take Doc Holliday, for instance,” the man on the left was saying in his high, reedy voice. “I once sat in on a game with him and Wyatt in Dodge City, an’ Doc . . .”

  He let his voice trail off. Slash had just stepped forward, shoving a willow branch aside with his left hand and thrusting his rifle barrel forward with his right hand. To his left, Pecos stepped forward, as well.

  The man facing Slash looked from Slash to Pecos and then back again, tensing. He wrinkled his nose and said, “Holy shi—”

  “What is it?” the taller man said, lunging to his feet and whipping around.

  He already had the rifle in his
hands and was raising it.

  Slash pumped two rounds into him with his Winchester.

  “Whoa, now!” the other man said, tossing his own rifle aside and raising his hands, palms out. “Whoa, now! Whoa, now! Just whoa!”

  “Just this, you dog,” Pecos said, and fired two rounds with his Colt’s rifle.

  Both slugs plowed through the man’s dusty wool vest and shabby suit coat, and he went stumbling off into the brush beyond a trickle of stream water, howling. Pecos fired two more rounds, and the outlaw tumbled into the brush, quivering as he died.

  Slash glanced at Pecos through his own wafting powder smoke. “How dare you insult dogs that way, partner?”

  “Yeah,” Pecos said. He turned to Slash, frowning. “Hey, what if they weren’t part of the gang? What if they were just passin’ through or . . . maybe they was cowpunchers?”

  “You see any cows to punch around here?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “Well, I reckon we’ll know in about three shakes of a doxie’s bell if they’re part of our bunch or not.”

  “Maybe we oughta wager on it. You know—just to pass the time.”

  “Too late.”

  “Huh?”

  Slash lifted his chin and pricked his ears, listening. He turned to Pecos, scowling. “I swear, you got the hearing of a deaf old woman!”

  “I hear it!” Pecos said, indignant.

  Slash heard it, too—men shouting. The shouts echoed in the quiet night.

  A horse whinnied.

  “I think they’ll be along in a couple minutes.” Slash peered up the steep, pine-peppered slope on the other side of the wash. “What say you and I climb up yonder and make ourselves comfortable?”

  “Yeah, I could use a little rest from all this bustling activity!” Both men ran wide around the fire and the two dead men. Slash stopped, turned back, and tossed a couple of driftwood chunks onto the fire. Instantly, it flamed higher, bolder. Breathing hard, he and Pecos scrambled up out of the wash and then started climbing the ridge at angles, easing the wear and tear on their old ankles, knees, and hips. It was a steep climb. Slash started cussing after three long strides, and he could hear his partner doing the same.

  “Shut up over there, dammit!” he scolded Pecos.

  “I will if you will!”

  After ten strides, Slash thought he was high enough on the ridge for a good view of the wash below. He stopped and dropped to a knee behind a rock. Pecos stopped on his right now as Slash looked down into the wash. Pecos spat. He was breathing raggedly.

  “Christ, you sound like a smithy’s bellows!” Slash said, hearing hoof thuds now. The outlaws were coming along the wash below and on his right, following the curve of the bluff that Slash and Pecos were on.

  “Yeah?” Pecos snapped back at him. “You sound like a gassy horse breaking wind!”

  “All right,” Slash said. “You got me beat there.” He chuckled to himself as he pumped a cartridge into the Winchester’s breech, settled his weight mostly on his left knee, rested the barrel on the top of the rock before him, and waited.

  He glanced to his right. Pecos knelt behind a ponderosa pine about twenty feet away. The big man had his Colt’s rifle raised to his right shoulder and was aiming down the barrel around the ponderosa’s right side, also waiting.

  The hoof thuds grew louder and louder until . . .

  “Here we go,” Slash said mostly to himself.

  Two figures rode into the edge of the firelight, on the right. Another rider appeared, then another, and another. They rode wide around the backside of the fire, looking around. One man, whom Slash recognized as Dawg by the snow-white hair flowing down from his black opera hat, said, “Why in the hell’s there a fire out here . . . ?”

  “Hey, look here!” One of the other riders had ridden around the fire and over to the man Slash had shot and who now lay belly down in the brush. He pointed out the dead man and turned to Dawg, who was now flanked by the bulk of the twelve-man pack.

  Two other riders had ridden over to the man Pecos had shot. “Another one’s here, Dawg,” said a man in a low, dull voice, and spat chaw into the high, crackling flames that cast a good bit of orange light over the killers.

  It was as though they all just then and at the same time realized they’d ridden into a trap.

  “Clear out!” bellowed the white-haired Dawg.

  He ground his heels and neck-reined his horse sharply left, but the horse didn’t take a single step before Slash’s well-placed .44 round blew him out of his saddle. Then all the killers shouted in recognition of the whipsaw they’d ridden into and started yelling and desperately reining and spurring their mounts wide of the fire, but not before both Slash and Pecos hurled a veritable rain of lead down upon them. Slash yelled like a wild lobo as he aimed and fired and pumped the Winchester’s cocking lever, ejecting the last spent rounds, seating fresh and blowing yet another killer out of his saddle.

  When Slash’s Winchester clicked empty, he set the rifle aside, rose from his knee, and ran down the slope, palming both of his stag-butted Colts. He continued his fusillade with the two .44s, which leaped and roared in his hands, flames lapping from the barrels.

  Whooping and howling like a moon-crazed coyote, he saw in the right periphery of his vision that Pecos also stride quickly downslope, tossing away his rifle and lowering his right shoulder to swing the Richards around in front of him. Most of the riders were already on the ground, either dead or wounded and trying to scramble toward the cover of darkness beyond the fire. Trouble was, the blaze was so large that its sphere of flickering light was broad—so broad that the few who did make it to the edge of it did so with lead inside them, and sliding down the sides of their screaming, buck-kicking horses.

  Pecos entered the Richards into the melee.

  KA-BOOM! thundered the wicked twelve-gauge, evoking at least one shrill, girlish scream as the double-ought buck tore into a man trying to gain his knees near the base of the slope. The buckshot chewed into his chest and flipped him over backward and straight into the fire.

  Screaming with maniacal agony, he bounded back to his feet inside the fire and ran out of it and across the wash, in the opposite direction of Slash and Pecos. He was a literal human torch rocketing across the wash and lighting up the darkness back there to reveal several wounded riders who’d made it into the cottonwoods and willows before their wounds had taken them down.

  KA-BOOM! spoke the sawed-off again.

  KA-BOOM! KABOOM!

  Slash emptied both pistols quickly, then dropped to a knee to reload. When he’d ejected all the empty casings and replaced them with fresh cartridges from his shell belt, he rose again to his feet, thrust both revolvers straight out before him, and clicked the hammers back.

  He couldn’t find a target. A half-dozen men lay within ten feet of the fire, which had spread due to the human torch’s having run to the south, setting dead brush aflame. More men lay beyond that ten feet, and they were more in shadow than light, but none seemed to be moving.

  Scratch that. One was moving straight down and out from Slash’s position, and slightly right. The man cursed as he pushed himself to his hands and knees. As the man turned his head toward the slope, his eyes glowing demonically in the orange light of the fire, Slash aimed his right-hand Colt and drilled a bullet through the man’s forehead.

  The man flopped straight back against the ground and jerked his boots a little as his ghost abandoned him in favor of loftier lodgings.

  “You see any more?” Pecos was on one knee to Slash’s right, aiming his own big Russian down the slope and sliding it back and forth and up and down, looking for a target.

  “No,” Slash said. “Let’s head down and take a look.”

  Slash started moving carefully down the steep slope, edging sideways, sort of half facing Pecos, for better balance on the sharply dropping terrain.

  Pecos yelled, “Dammit, Slash—behind you!”

  Slash wheeled so suddenly that both boots sl
ipped out from beneath him. As he dropped butt-first toward the slope at an odd angle, a gun flashed to his left. As he hit the ground on his ass, he saw the bullet that had been meant for him tear Pecos’s hat off his partner’s head.

  Pecos jerked the Russian around and fired two times quickly, both bullets plowing into the hatless man in the red-and-white checked shirt and brown vest who’d been hiding behind a ponderosa. Now the man stumbled straight back against the tree with two startled grunts, one for each chunk of lead that shredded his heart.

  Back pressed against the tree, he looked down at the twin holes in his chest, side by side, and said in a breathy, bewildered voice, “Well . . . I’ll . . . be . . . damned . . . !”

  He dropped to his knees and fell forward on his face.

  “Dammit, Slash!” Pecos glared at his partner.

  “Ah, don’t get your drawers in a bunch!” Slash sat up, wincing at the pain in his tailbone. “I think I just broke my—!”

  “Look at that!” Pecos reached for his hat and held it up, poking a finger through the hole in the crown. “That bullet was meant for you, dammit!”

  “Better your hat than my ticker!”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Pecos said, stuffing the topper back on his head. “I bought this hat new last Easter!”

  “I’ll buy ya a new one!”

  “Yes, you will!”

  Slash gained his feet again and made his way even more gently down the slope, wincing at the pain in his posterior. Cursing about his hat, Pecos walked down the slope, as well. He’d reloaded his shotgun and was aiming the Richards with his left hand while aiming the Russian with his right hand, looking cautiously around for a still-kicking desperado to shoot.

  The fire had died down to half its previous size. The flames that had been spread by the burning killer were mainly just smoke and cinders now, for there wasn’t enough dead brush on the other side of the wash to fuel much of a blaze. Slash couldn’t see the human torch himself, but he was mostly likely one hell of a crispy critter by now, lying against the wash’s far bank.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Pecos said after a minute had passed and neither he nor Slash had spied any movement around them. Only dead men’s eyes staring glassily in death.