The Wicked Die Twice

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  “Inside,” Walsh said.

  He stepped aside as the big man, who Jay now saw wore a five-pointed deputy sheriff ’s star, carried Myra over to where Jay lay on her hip and elbow near the cabin’s back wall. The man stopped, smiled nastily down at Jay, then lowered his shoulder. Myra rolled down his arm and dropped to the hardpacked earthen floor with a thud.

  The girl gave a loud groan and a sharp curse. The tumble seemed to snap her back to consciousness.

  Jay reached for her, hardening her jaws and sharpening her eyes as she glared up at the hulking deputy with a round, fleshy face in which his small eyes were set too close together. “You damned brute!” She switched her gaze to Walsh, who was stepping into the cabin now, removing his hat and tossing it onto the table. “Damn you, Cisco! You killed Delbert Thayer!” She felt her voice breaking on the boy’s name. “How could you?”

  Myra turned to her, eyes widening with shock. “What . . . ?” the girl gasped.

  “I’m sorry,” Jay said. “He . . . Delbert . . .”

  Myra half sat and swung her head with her bloody mouth to Walsh. “Murderer!”

  “Shut up. You two are the ones who killed him. I might have pulled the trigger, but I wouldn’t have had to if . . . Well, what’s done is done.” Walsh stood by the table, reaching up to, with insolent casualness, rearrange his hair with one hand as he stared grimly down at Jay.

  By the light of two burning lamps, she saw the dark malevolence in the man’s eyes.

  Voices rose from outside the cabin. Quick footsteps sounded. The door was jerked open and another man walked in—a slender, mustached man in a crisp gray Stetson. Long sideburns peppered with gray framed his long, pale, angular face with cold gray eyes. The end of his long nose was touched with red from the cold and the wind. He wore two pistols on his hips, beneath a hip-length corduroy jacket. He had a bandanna wrapped around his right hand, and he was squeezing that hand painfully in his other hand against his belly.

  As he did, his teeth showed in a straight white line beneath his neatly trimmed mustache. He fairly seethed with rage.

  “What’d you bring them in here for?” Keldon Reed asked Walsh, switching his angry gaze from Jay to Myra and back again.

  Walsh stared grimly down at the two women. Myra sat on her butt beside Jay, sobbing into her hands for the murdered Delbert Thayer. “We’re gonna keep them in here till the job’s done,” the outlaw marshal said.

  “Like hell we are!” Reed strode forward and buried his right boot in Myra’s side. The girl screamed as she slammed back onto the floor and rolled onto her side, facing away from the man and drawing her knees up, gasping.

  Jay reached for Myra and cursed the man shrilly.

  “She killed one of my men, wounded another, and damn near blew my hand off!” Reed held up his bloody paw to show Walsh, then drew a revolver with his right hand. “I’m gonna kill them both!”

  “No, you’re not.” Walsh had already drawn his own revolver. He aimed it at Reed’s head and cocked it. “I told you not to kill them, and I meant it.”

  Reed wheeled toward Walsh, jaws hard with rage. “Hall wants them both dead!”

  “Hall doesn’t run this show!”

  “He sure as hell does! And don’t forget the dirt he has on you, Marshal!”

  “Dirt or no dirt, without me, he wouldn’t be able to pull this job. I’m the one who learned about the run. No one else knows about it except the company who mined the gold and the stagecoach company shipping it!”

  “You’re outgunned, Walsh.” Reed laughed caustically and glanced at the two deputies flanking him and at the half-open door beyond which three of his own men stood in the darkness, staring in. They had their hands draped over the butts of their holstered guns. “I mean, you’re badly outgunned!”

  “Maybe. But I could drill a bullet through your head right now.” Walsh narrowed an eye as he aimed down the barrel.

  That seemed to take the starch out of Reed’s drawers. He glared back at the Camp Collins marshal, flushing. He glanced at Jay kneeling beside Myra, caressing the injured girl’s back soothingly. Myra was sitting up now, her lower lip bleeding. Jay returned the man’s cold gaze before he turned his head back to the lawman. “They’ll talk, Walsh. You know they will.”

  “It’s my decision. Now get the hell out of here. We have a stage to rob in two hours. Your boss is likely waiting for you at the other cabin. It’s time to get into position.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll be right behind you.”

  Reed held his gaze for another fifteen seconds, then stepped quickly around him and stomped out the door in a huff. The two big deputies flanking Walsh turned to leave, as well, but they stopped when the lawman said, “Not you two. You’re going to stay here.” He glanced at Jay and Myra. “With them.”

  “What?” said the larger of the two beefy, cow-eyed men. “You’re going to stay here and keep an eye on them. Get rope. Tie them.”

  When the deputies had found rope hanging from the wall of the cabin cluttered with old airtight tins, tack, and odds and ends of mining paraphernalia, they each tied Jay’s and Myra’s hands behind the women’s backs, and then they tied their ankles.

  “Now, get out but stay close. You’ll stay in here with them until I return.”

  The deputies shared an oblique look, shrugged, and stepped outside. Walsh kicked the door closed behind them, then turned to the two women sitting with their backs to the soot and cobweb-covered rear wall from which rusty mining implements hung and on which a moldering old bobcat skin was stretched.

  He gestured toward the potbelly stove hunched before him, in the center of the shack. A table lay to the stove’s right, opposite the side of the cabin Jay and Myra were in. “Can I offer you ladies a cup of coffee?”

  “Go to hell, Cisco!” Jay shot back at him.

  “How are we supposed to drink coffee with our hands tied behind our backs, you murdering moron?” Myra fired at him, as well, her eyes narrowed furiously.

  Walsh drew a deep breath, nodded. “Good point.” He walked forward. “Look, Jay—I’m sorry.” Glancing at Myra, he said, “I’m sorry for that little tap, young lady.”

  “It was more than just a tap, and you had no right to kill Delbert, you low-down, dirty—”

  “All right—I’m sorry about Thayer! I’m sorry I struck you! I didn’t know who you were. I saw Jay, and I thought perhaps her cutthroat pal had thrown in with her out here, acting like heroes.” To Jay again, he said, “You could’ve just stayed out of it, you know. Young Thayer would still be alive if you had. It’s none of your damn business!”

  “When the law breaks the law and there’s no one else around to know or to try to stop it, it’s my business. It’s any citizen’s business. The law has to be on our side, the side of good. Otherwise . . .” Jay shook her head, glowering at the man who’d now dropped to his haunches before her and Myra. “What is it he has on you, Cisco? What’s the dirt?”

  Walsh drew a breath, lowered his head, and again ran a hand through his hair as though he couldn’t leave the barbered mop alone. “I knew Hall in Texas before I came here. He was a money man down there with an interest in ranching. He came up here about a year after I did. He knew a dirty little secret of mine. Only, well . . .” He looked down in chagrin. “It’s not so little.” He gave Jay a level look. “In Abilene, I got a woman . . . a young woman from a good family . . . in the family way. I was going to marry her. I really didn’t want her to give birth to an illegitimate child. I really didn’t. I didn’t want her to have to carry around that terrible reputation because of my own indiscretion, but . . .”

  He let his voice trail off and released another burdensome sigh as he looked around the room as though for the answer to his failings.

  “But . . .” Jay prodded him.

  “I left. There you have it. I left. After the baby was born, I pulled out. I’d been dragging my feet on getting hitched.” Walsh sighed. “She was a good woman, too. De
cent and caring. A good, simple, small-town girl. A churchgoer. Lived by the Golden Rule . . . till I came along and she fell for me. Couldn’t help herself, she said. And I took full advantage. But after all was said and done, I just couldn’t see myself married to her, raising a child in Abilene with a simple small-town gal when I had such higher aspirations. I didn’t want to be pinned down by a family. Not then. I was younger, you understand. This was twelve years ago. So I ran.”

  “It’s a terrible thing, but it happens, Cisco,” Jay said. “And it was a long time ago.”

  Walsh looked at her again directly. “She turned alcoholic. She hanged herself in her bedroom in her family’s house. But only . . .” He drew a breath and closed his eyes, steeling himself. “But only after she’d smothered the little boy, when he was five years old.”

  “Ohh,” Jay breathed out in shock.

  “I gambled with Hall back in those days, before I fled Abilene. He knew all about what I did. When he came here and couldn’t get his ranch off the ground . . . not where he wanted it to be ... he turned to robbing stagecoaches coming down out of the mountains, hauling bullion to the local banks and the railroad. He needed an inside man to help his operation run a little smoother. He had that dirt on me, and if I didn’t agree to throw in with him, he threatened to go to the newspapers with the story . . . to ruin my name. He even has an ambrotype of me an’ the girl, taken before we were to be married . . . with the baby. Could you see that splashed across the front pages of the local newspapers?”

  “You might have just pulled out,” Jay remarked. “God knows you’re accustomed to moving around the West, Cisco.”

  “I wanted to stay here. I’m tired of running, sinking taproot after taproot. Besides . . .” Walsh wrung his hands together. “I didn’t want you to know, Jay. I would have been so ashamed. And I am so ashamed. I love you, and I honestly thought you would marry me.”

  Jay glanced at Myra, who returned her hopeful gaze. Turning back to the marshal, who appeared near tears, Jay said, “If you love me, Cisco, let me go. Untie us.”

  He looked back at her, expressionless at first. Then he offered a grim smile and a single shake of his head. “Can’t, Jay. I’m sorry.”

  “We won’t tell,” Jay lied.

  He laughed at that. “Of course, you will. I can’t have anyone finding out. I need time to get to Mexico, and I don’t want bounty hunters trailing me for the rest of my life. They’ll look for me even south of the border. I’m gonna live high on the hog down there in my old age. You could have, too, Jay. It didn’t have to come to this. I can’t risk going to jail. You know what happens to lawmen in jail.”

  “So you’re just gonna kill us?” Myra said, her voice taut with anger. “Just like Delbert . . . ?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. Don’t worry. Not yet. Not here. You deserve better. I’ll take you off alone, into a ravine, and give you each your sendoff. Just me. No one else around to see. That’s how I did Thayer. It’ll just be the three of us. I owe you that, Jay. A respectful killing.”

  “You’re mad,” Jay said, narrowing her eyes, studying him closely. “You’ve been driven mad by greed. You’ve been driven to murder by greed!”

  “Maybe,” Walsh allowed, nodding, tucking down his mouth corners. He reached out and gently placed his hand on Jay’s left cheek. “And by love.”

  She shook her head, recoiling at the killer’s touch.

  “Love will do it, too, Jay. Unrequited love. You see, I just can’t see allowing you to marry that . . .” His mouth twisted into a bitter expression. “That old scalawag and outlaw, Slash Braddock.”

  “Scalawag? Outlaw?” Jay gave a shrill, ironic laugh. “Slash is three times the man you could ever be! You’re nothing but an expensive haircut and an empty suit! A cold-blooded, murdering snake!”

  Walsh’s face turned red. He snapped his right hand back behind his shoulder and had just started to swing it forward, toward Jay’s face, when a grunt sounded from outside the cabin. There was a heavy thud as though of a body hitting the ground.

  A voice said, “What the . . .” Another thud followed by a sharp, “Oh, ah!”

  A heavier thud as a body hit the ground.

  “What the . . . ?” Walsh rose, wheeled, and strode toward the door. He closed his hands over the grip of the Colt in the holster on his right hip.

  Before he could pull the gun, the door burst inward with a thundering boom!

  Walsh froze as a frightening visage stepped through the door—a specter in the night.

  CHAPTER 35

  The crouched figure, appearing half-man, half-beast—a giant coyote, maybe—stepped quietly into the cabin, both arms raised to the right, holding something in the thing’s hands over its right shoulder, just off that ear.

  The figure was like a coyote ghost belched out of the night—wiry, filthy, sweating, seething with anger. The ghost was badly disheveled, wearing a soiled pin-striped shirt and suspenders and baggy broadcloth trousers, both knees torn, stuffed into the high tops of mule-eared boots. A bloody bandage encircled the top of the specter’s coyote-like head with a long, thin nose and pinched up eyes. Thin sandy, sweaty hair trailed down over the bloody cloth.

  Jay blinked as she more closely scrutinized the newcomer, felt her lower jaw drop.

  She turned to Myra. The girl’s own jaw was sagging, and both eyes were growing wider. She and Jay yelled at the same time, “Delbert!”

  “Thayer!” Walsh said in horror. “What in God’s name . . . ?”

  “God didn’t have nothin’ to do with it, you fork-tailed demon. You ugly, dry-gulchin’ sidewinder!”

  Delbert stood six feet from Walsh. Jay now saw that what the young man held in his hands, cocked and ready to fly, was a slingshot. Young Thayer canted his head to his right, aiming the rock-loaded scrap of rawhide, attached with cow gut to the forked wooden handle, at Walsh’s head.

  He showed his buck teeth as he seethed out, “You left me in that canyon to die, didn’t ya? Or maybe you figured I was dead! Well, I wasn’t dead. I was playin’ possum, ’cause while folks might like to laugh and make light of me, like you and them two deputies out there nursin’ split skulls, I’m smarter than I damn look!”

  “Oh, Delbert!” Myra sobbed into the hands she was clamping over her mouth, tears of joy runnin’ down her cheeks and over her hand.

  “Hah!” Delbert laughed bitterly, his eyes spitting bayonets of raw fury at Walsh. “I’m back from the dead, all right. Delbert lives! Ya see, ya stupid fool, Marshal Walsh, any kind of a head wound bleeds profusely. Even a small nick like the one you gave me. It threw me from my saddle, all right, but I lay there playin’ possum till I heard you chuckle and ride away. Yaring-tailed polecat! Copper-riveted dunderhead!”

  Delbert shifted his boots on the earthen floor as he glared with challenge at Walsh. The marshal still had his hand wrapped around the grips of his holstered Colt. The two men faced each other, crouching like pugilists frozen in midmotion.

  “Go ahead and de-leather that smoke wagon, Walsh! Go ahead! You don’t think my aim is true? Or maybe you think bringin’ a slingshot to a gun battle gives me the short end of the stick!”

  That was what Walsh must have thought, all right.

  In the next second, the marshal whipped the gun out of its holster. There was a creak of rawhide and gut as Delbert loosed the rock. It thumped against Walsh’s forehead just as the man’s hogleg cleared leather.

  Walsh wailed and dropped the pistol. He clamped both hands to his forehead, stumbling backward. Dropping the slingshot, Delbert stayed on the man, pulling his own six-shooter from the soft leather holster on his belly, clicking the hammer back and thrusting it hard against Walsh’s chest. Walsh stumbled over his own feet and dropped to the floor, falling hard. Dust and grit rose around him. He landed in front of the wide-eyed women.

  Delbert dropped to a knee and pressed the barrel of his cocked old Remington against the outlaw marshal’s forehead. Walsh raised his hands in supplication. Delber
t’s sharp-featured face with its long nose and blue eyes was still flushed deep red with rage as he glared at Walsh’s, whose own face was now twisted in pain and terror.

  “How dare you dry-gulch me, you criminal! How dare you hurt my girl an’ Miss—”

  Young Thayer stopped himself and turned a shade even redder as he glanced sheepishly at Myra and said, “I mean . . . Miss Myra an’ Miss Breckenridge.”

  Jay glanced at Myra, who smiled, then tucked her bottomlip under her upper one, suddenly wistful.

  Delbert cleared his throat self-consciously, then switched his narrowed, enraged eyes back to Walsh. “I oughta feed you a pill you can’t digest right here an’ now for doin’ something that low-down an’ poison mean. I heard how you was gonna kill these ladies. I had my ear pressed against the back wall there. I heard the whole thing . . . before I stole around an’ beaned both of those post-stupid deputies with my old slingshot. Yessir, Walsh, I oughta turn you toe down an’ kick you out with a cold shovel. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t!”

  Jay cleared her throat, hesitant to intervene in the young man’s castigation of the outlaw marshal, since he seemed to be airing his spleen over a good many injuries even above and beyond Walsh. “Uh . . . Delbert?”

  “Yes, Miss Jay?”

  “The others left to meet Jason Hall and hold up the bullion run. Don’t you think we should tie him up and . . .”

  “Don’t you worry yourself, Miss Jay. Nor you, hon . . . I mean, Miss Myra.” Again, Delbert’s flush deepened. “I got it all taken care of.”

  “What?” Walsh blinked up at the enraged young deputy, suddenly curious.

  Keeping his eyes on Walsh, Thayer said, “Before I rode out here the other day to hunt me some outlaws and warn the Horsetooth Station about an imminent holdup, Uncle—er, I mean the sheriff—wired me from Santa Fe an’ said he was headed back on the next flyer. Well, after you dry-gulched me, you low-down dirty dog—with my apologies to dogs—and I spent two days tryin’ to clear my head and track down my horse and then heard shootin’ that drew me over here, I ran into the sheriff his ownself. He’s leadin’ a posse out from Camp Collins—a good twenty men. They’ll be layin’ for you and Hall at Horsetooth Station, armed for bear!”