The Wicked Die Twice

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  “Yeah, well, sounds to me like it’s time for you to start lookin’ around for another gal. Sounds to me like you an’ Annabelle Ludlow are kaput. Through. End-of-story.” Charley narrowed one eye in cold castigation at his younger friend. “And you got only one man to blame for that—yourself !”

  Gritting his teeth, Charley removed his dusty sombrero and smacked it several times across Hunter’s stout right shoulder. “Gall-blamed, lame-brained, cork-headed fool! How could you let her get away?”

  Hunter had asked himself that question many times over the past few months, but he didn’t want to think about it now. Thinking about Annabelle made him feel frustrated as all get-out, and he had to keep his head clear. You didn’t drive a six-horse hitch through rugged terrain haunted by desperadoes and Sioux warriors with a brain gummed up by lovelorn goo.

  He climbed down from the driver’s boot and saw that Miss Meyers was trying to open the Concord’s left-side door from inside. She was grunting with the effort, her fine jaws set hard beneath the brim of her stylish but somewhat outlandish eastern-style velvet picture hat trimmed with faux flowers and berries.

  “I’ll help you there, ma’am.”

  She looked at him through the window in the door—a despondent look if he had ever seen one. She was, however, a looker. He couldn’t deny that even if he had denied noticing to Charley. He felt a sharp pang of guilt every time he looked at this woman and felt . . . well, like a man shouldn’t feel when he was in love with another gal.

  “It’s stuck,” she said, her voice toneless with exhaustion.

  “I apologize.” Hunter plucked a small pine stick from the crack between the door and the stagecoach wall. “A twig got stuck in it somehow, fouled the latch. I do apologize, ma’am. How you doing? Not so well, I reckon . . .”

  As Hunter opened the door, she made a face and waved her gloved hand at the billowing dust and tobacco smoke. “The smoke and dust are absolutely atrocious. Not to mention the wretched smell of my unwashed fellow traveler and his who-hit-John, as he so colorfully calls the poison he consumes as though it were water!”

  Hunter helped the woman out. He glanced into the carriage to see the grinning countenance of his only other passenger—the Chicago farm implement drummer, Wilfred Farley. The diminutive, craggy-faced man with one broken front tooth and clad in a cheap checked suit—which seemed the requisite uniform of all raggedy-heeled traveling salesmen everywhere—raised an unlabeled, flat, clear bottle half-filled with a milky brown liquid in salute to his destaging fellow passenger’s derriere, and took a pull.

  Hunter gave the man a reproving look, then turned to the woman, removing his hat and holding it over his broad chest. “Ma’am, let me apolo—”

  “Will you please stop apologizing, Mister Buchanon? I’m sorry to say your apologies are beginning to ring a little hollow at this late date. My God, what a torturous contraption!” She looked at the coach’s rear wheel and for a second, Hunter thought she was going to give it a kick with one of her delicate, gold-buckled, high-heeled ankle boots.

  She thought about it for a couple of seconds, then satisfied herself with a chortling wail of raw anger and tipped her head back to stare up at the tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed jehu hulking before her. “And must you continue to call me ma’am?”

  “Uh . . . uh . . .”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven, ma’a . . . er, I mean, Miss Meyers.” At least, he hoped that was the moniker she’d been looking for. If not, he might end up with a swift kick to one of his shins, and in her state of mind, even being such a light albeit curvy little thing, he didn’t doubt she could do some damage.

  “Now, see—I’m younger than you are. Not by much, maybe, but I am young enough that you can feel free to call me Miss. Miss Meyers. Not ma’am. For God’s sake, don’t add insult to injury, Mister Buchanon!”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Meyers, it’s just that you seemed older . . . somehow.” Wrong thing to say, you cork-headed fool! Backing water frantically, Hunter said, “I just meant you acted older! You know—more mature! I didn’t mean you looked older!”

  He’d said those wheedling words to her slender back as, fists tightly balled at her sides, she went stomping off into the brush and rocks that littered the base of the ridge wall on the west side of the stage road.

  “Don’t wander too far, ma’am . . . I mean, Miss Meyers!” he called. “It’s easy to get turned around out here!”

  But she was already gone.

  CHAPTER 2

  Hunter stared after the pretty, angry woman.

  Something nudged his right arm. He looked down to see Wilfred Farley offering his bottle to him, and grinning, his thin, chapped upper lip peeled back from that crooked, broken tooth.

  “No, thanks. If that’s the stuff you bought at the Robbers’ Roost Station, it’ll blind both of us.”

  “Pshaw!” Farley took another deep pull. “Damn good stuff, and I see just fine.”

  “That’s how Hoyle Gullickson lost his top knot.” Charley Anders was climbing heavily down from the driver’s boot, his sawed-off, double-barrel shotgun hanging from a lanyard down his back.

  “What?” Farley asked. “Drinkin’ his own skull pop?”

  “No—brewin’ it.” Anders stepped off the front wheel and turned to face Hunter and the pie-eyed Chicago drummer. “He sold it to the Sioux. Several went blind, and the others came back and scalped him.”

  Farley looked at the bottle in his hand as though it had suddenly transformed into a rattlesnake. “You don’t say . . . ?”

  Hunter snorted softly. He knew the story wasn’t true. Hoyle Gullickson had lost his top knot when he’d been out cutting wood one winter and was set upon by four braves who’d wanted whiskey.

  Gullickson had refused to sell to them because he’d already done time in the federal pen for selling his rotgut to Indians, and he wasn’t about to risk returning to that wretched place. Incensed, the braves scalped him, so now he wore the awful knotted scars in a broad, grisly swath over the top of his head, making any and all around him wince whenever he removed his hat, which he loved to do just to gauge the reactions and turn stomachs.

  Charley Anders, however, preferred his tall-tale version, which he related often and usually at night around some stage station’s potbellied stove to wide-eyed pilgrims in his and Hunter’s charge.

  Hunter glared at the drummer. “I thought I told you not to smoke around that woman, Farley. And to stay halfways sober.”

  “Kills the time,” Farley said with a shrug, raising a loosely rolled, wheat-paper quirley to his mouth and leveling a defiant stare at Buchanon. “I offered to share my panther juice with her, but she turned her nose up. That offended me. So I got the makings out and rolled a smoke.”

  He pointed his bottle toward where the woman had disappeared in the rocks and brush. “That pretty little bitch can go straight to hell.”

  “He’s got a point, pard,” Charley said, reaching through the stage window. “Give me a pull off that, Farley. I could use a little somethin’ to cut the dust.”

  “I thought you said it’d blind a fella!” Farley objected sarcastically.

  Anders jerked the bottle out of the drummer’s hand and swiped the lip across his grimy hickory shirt. “I been drinkin’ the rotgut so long I’m immune to blindness by now.” He stepped back and started to take a pull from the bottle. As he did, a rabbit poked its head out from between two shrubs roughly ten feet off the trail.

  Hunter, who’d been looking around cautiously, wary of a holdup and also starting to get a little worried about the woman, had just seen the gray cottontail pull its head back into the shrubs. Bobby Lee gave a mewling yip of coyote excitement, leaped from the roof of the coach onto Charley Anders’s right shoulder to the ground.

  Charley jerked back with a startled grunt, dropping the bottle.

  Bobby Lee plunged into the shrubs between two boulders, then shot up the ridge, hot on the heels of the streaking rabbit, the
rabbit and the coyote darting around the columnar pines.

  “Damn that vermin!” Charley wailed, clutching his right shoulder with his left hand. “He like to have dislocated my arm! What gall—using me as his damn stepping stool! Has he no respect?”

  Hunter snorted a laugh. “That’s what you get for being so tight with your jerky, Charley.”

  “The bottle! The bottle!” wailed Wilfred Farley, pointing at the bottle lying on the ground between Anders and Buchanon. “Good Lord, you’re spillin’ good whiskey!”

  Hunter crouched to pick up the bottle. There was still an inch or two of rotgut remaining. Not for long.

  Grinning at Farley, Hunter turned the bottle upside down. The whiskey dribbled out of the mouth to which dirt and pine needles clung. The liquid plopped hollowly onto the ground.

  Farley was flabbergasted. “Good lord, man! Are you mad ?”

  “Jehu’s rules, Farley.” Hunter tossed the bottle high over the coach and into the trees and rocks on the other side. “No drinkin’ aboard the coach.”

  “You’re sweet on that gal!” Farley shook his head in disbelief. “You must like a gal who runs you into the ground with every look and word. Me—I got some self-respect. No purty skirt’s gonna push Wilfred Farley around!”

  “Speakin’ of purty skirts,” Anders said, staring off toward where the woman had disappeared. “What in the hell’s she doin’ out there—knittin’ an afghan?”

  Hunter glanced around, making sure no would-be highwaymen were near. He didn’t like standing still here on the trail like this, making easy targets. It was always best to keep moving between relay stations, as a moving target was always harder to attack than one standing still in the middle of the trail with good cover all around for would-be attackers.

  Hunter stepped forward and called, “Miss Meyers? You all right?”

  No response.

  “We’d best get movin’, Miss Meyers!”

  Hunter took another couple of steps forward, then stopped again, concern growing in him. “Miss Meyers?”

  He didn’t want to call too loudly and risk alerting anyone in the area to their position. He and Anders were carrying only two passengers, but aboard the stage they had ten thousand dollars in payroll money, which they were hauling to one of the many mines above Tigerville.

  Hunter glanced back at Anders, scowling his frustration. Anders shrugged and shook his head.

  “I best look for her,” Hunter said. “Charley, stay with the stage. Keep a sharp eye out. I don’t like sitting out here like a Thanksgiving turkey on the dining room table.”

  “You an’ me both, pard,” Charley said behind Buchanon, as Hunter stepped off the trail and walked into the rocks and brush littering the base of the western ridge.

  Hunter pushed through the brush, wended his way around rocks. “Miss Meyers? Time to hit the road, Miss Meyers!”

  He saw a deer path carved through the brush. It rose up a low shoulder of the ridge. Hunter followed it, frowning down at the ground, noting the sharp indentations of the heels of a lady’s ankle boots.

  As the path turned around a large fir tree, the indentations of the lady’s heels became scuffed and scraped. Amidst the scuff marks was a faint print of a man’s boot.

  Instantly, Buchanon’s hand closed around the pearl grips of the silver-chased LeMat secured high on his right hip in a gray buckskin holster worn to the texture of doeskin. He clicked the hammer of the main .44-caliber barrel back and, his heartbeat increasing, the skin under his shirt collar prickling, he continued following the scuffed trail.

  The prints led up and over the rise then down the other side, through tree shadows and sunlight. Somewhere ahead and to Hunter’s right, a squirrel was chittering angrily. That was the only sound.

  Hunter continued forward for another fifty feet before he stopped suddenly.

  Ahead, a man crouched between two aspens. He seemed to be moving in place, making jerking movements. He was also talking in a heated but hushed tone.

  Hunter could see a second man—or part of a second man—on his knees on the other side of one of the aspens. Hunter could see only the man’s boot soles and the thick forward curve of his back clad in a blue wool shirt. This man, too, was making quick jerking movements.

  He seemed to be holding something down.

  Hunter stepped to his right, putting the left-most aspen between himself and the crouching man. He moved slowly forward, both aspens concealing his approach from both men before him. As he moved closer to their position, muffled cries blazed into the air around him.

  Muffled female cries.

  Hunter stepped behind a tree. He peered around its left side. From here, he had a clearer view of the two men and of Miss Meyers on the ground between them, partly obscured by tree roots humping up out of the forest duff.

  The man on the right knelt by the woman’s head, leaning down, holding her head against the ground with both of his hands pressed across her mouth. Miss Meyers was kicking her legs out wildly and flailing helplessly with her arms, making her skirts flop and exposing her pantaloon-and stocking-clad legs.

  Thumping sounds rose as did the crackle of pine needles and dead leaves as she thrashed so desperately, her cries muffled by one of her assailant’s hands. The kneeling man laughed through his teeth as he held the woman down, his brown-mustached face swollen and red.

  The other man, tall and skinny with long black sideburns and a bushy black mustache, had pulled his pants down around his boots and was opening the fly of his longhandles, grinning down at the struggling woman.

  “Hold her still, Bill. Hold her still. I’ll be hanged if she ain’t as fine a piece o’ female flesh as I—”

  Leaning forward, exposing the evidence of his craven lust, he grabbed Miss Meyers’s ankles and thrust them down against the ground. Leaning farther forward, he slid his hands up her legs from inside her dress, a lusty grin blooming broadly across his long, ugly face with close-set, dark eyes set deep beneath shaggy, black brows.

  The man clamped her legs down with his own and reached for her swinging arms, grabbing them, stopping them as he lowered his hips toward the woman’s. He stopped abruptly, turning his head sharply to see Buchanon striding toward him.

  The man’s eyes widened in shock. “What the . . . hey!”

  Hunter had returned the big LeMat to its holster and picked up a stout aspen branch roughly five feet long and about as big around as one of his muscular forearms—as broad as a cedar fencepost.

  It made a solid thumping, cracking sound as he smashed it with all the force in his big hands and arms against the black-haired man’s forehead. The branch broke roughly a foot and a half from the end. As the would-be rapist’s head snapped sharply back, his eyes rolling up in their sockets, the end of the branch dropped with the man into the deep, narrow ravine behind him.

  The other man cursed and leaped to his feet, his amber eyes as round as saucers and bright with fear.

  “No!” he cried as he saw the stout branch swing toward him.

  He tipped his head to one side, raising his arms as if to shield his face. Buchanon grunted as he thrust the branch down through the man’s open hands to slam it against the man’s left ear, blood instantly spewing from the smashed appendage.

  “Ohhh!” the man cried as he hit the ground.

  Buchanon stepped forward, raising the club again, rage a wild stallion inside him. Only the lowest of the lowest gut wagon dog did such a thing to a woman. This man would pay dearly—and he did as Hunter, straddling the man’s flailing legs, smashed the club again and again against the man’s head. After the third or fourth blow from the powerful arms and shoulders of the big, blond, blue-eyed man standing over him, the man’s cries faded and his flailing arms and legs lay still upon the ground.

  Hunter raised the club for one more blow but stopped when the crackle of guns rose from the direction of the stagecoach. His heart shuddered. He hammered the second rapist’s head once more, then kicked the still body, the de
ad eyes staring up at Hunter in silent castigation, into the ravine.

  It landed with a thump near the other carcass.

  Hunter whipped around, crouching and drawing the LeMat from its holster, facing in the direction from which guns blasted angrily and men shouted.