Jake grimaced with the ungodly pain as the man walked in a circle around him. He wore only his denim pants, and he knew the left leg of those pants was soaked with blood from his broken leg. He’d been stripped to the waist, and he knew what was coming. He refused to speak, and he refused to cry out. God, if this man is going to kill me, just let it happen quickly!
“I see that you have many scars on your back.” The don walked around to stand in front of him again. “Scarred tissue does not heal well when it is reopened.” He leaned closer. “And I am going to reopen your scars, Jake Harkner. And then I am going to feed you to the buzzards and let them finish you off. You will die feeling them pulling the meat off your back and your leg. You will die feeling them peck out your eyes.” He stepped back, turning to someone. “Open up every scar on his back!” he ordered.
Jake had no idea where he was. Still somewhere in Mexico. That’s all he knew. God willing, Cole had made off with Annie and was well on his way north. He knew the skin on his arms and chest and back was already torn from being dragged. He’d have been killed right then if Don de Leon hadn’t ordered it to stop. He wanted Jake still alive so he could make him suffer even more.
Somewhere in the swirl of black pain, Jake knew what was coming. He gritted his teeth. He’d never once cried out when his father used the buckle end of a belt on him, and he wasn’t going to cry out when de Leon’s whip lashed into him.
That promise proved hard to keep. He knew that when the first horrible sting came. He heard the loud snap of the whip, and he forced his mind to fall deep into the world of blackness where nothing hurt and nothing mattered. He’d learned to do that as a boy, and he could do it again.
Time and the number of lashes faded into a shroud of smoky clouds around him. Randy. He had to think of Randy…another lash.
And his beloved son, Lloyd. Another lash.
And his angel of a daughter, Evie. She seemed to be full of his own mother’s spirit. Another lash.
And his precious Little Jake keeping his guns. Another lash.
And the love in Ben’s eyes for finding a man who loved him like a real father should. Another lash.
The adoration in Stephen’s eyes. Another lash.
And little Tricia and Sadie Mae. Another lash. Sadie Mae. Another. Sadie Mae…her gorgeous, dimpled smile. Another. The chickens. Sadie Mae’s giggle. Her big eyes that held secrets. Another. Sadie Mae crying over broken eggs and then laughing over her grandpa’s wild cussing when he went into the chicken coop.
Another lash.
He heard a chicken cluck. Somehow in the hideous darkness and pain, he managed to open his eyes and see it. A chicken. While he was being whipped, a chicken strutted right in front of him. Another lash.
Clucking. Pecking at grass seed. Another lash.
He actually grinned through the awful pain. Somehow Sadie Mae was with him. That chicken was a sign. Another lash.
Sadie Mae’s little hands were folded, and her saint of a mother was praying for him. Another lash.
Of course she was. Whose prayers had more power than Evie’s? Maybe the Pope. Another lash.
Randy! Was that Randy walking toward him? Was she greeting him like she always had back in Guthrie? Yes! There she was! I’m back, Randy. I can’t wait to hold you again.
That was his last thought before he passed out, unaware that his abuser continued to wield the whip until his back was completely raw.
Don de Leon smiled. “Cut him down and take him into the desert. Let the buzzards finish him,” he ordered his men. “And before you leave him there, cut off his privates!”
The two men taking Jake away looked at each other with the same thought. How could they do such a thing to a man? De Leon had never requested such a dastardly punishment.
De Leon walked away. He would report to the authorities that the famous Jake Harkner was dead, at the hands of Don Jesus Ricardo de Leon. He’d dealt his own form of justice, and now he would be famous for killing an American legend. Mexican authorities would do nothing about it. He owned them all.
Fifty
Lloyd saw him first. On the horizon. A lone man on a horse, and pulling a packhorse along. Lloyd was familiar enough with every single horse and man on the J&L to know it wasn’t Jake, and it wasn’t Outlaw. His stomach tightened. It was a roan gelding. Cole. God, no!
It had been seven days since his mother nearly collapsed over thinking something had happened to Jake. Damn it, Cole, where’s Outlaw?
Terrel happened to ride past, and he shouted to Terrel to get down off his horse. “Go tell Peter to keep my mother in the house,” he told Terrel.
“Yes, sir.” Terrel looked toward where Cole was coming in. “Shit,” he mumbled, hurrying to the house.
Lloyd mounted Terrel’s horse and charged up the hill before Cole could come any closer. He rode in a circle around the man. “Where’s my father?” he shouted.
Cole reined his horse to a halt, devastation written all over his haggard face. He just closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Goddamn it, Cole, where’s my father!”
Cole removed his hat and rubbed his shirtsleeve across his forehead. “He ain’t comin’.”
“That’s it?” Lloyd practically screamed. “He ain’t comin’? That’s all you have to say?”
Cole whirled his horse. “Yeah, Lloyd, that’s it! He’s as much as dead, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it! Shoot me if you want. I’d be glad if you did, because right now I’d just as soon be dead myself except for the fact I don’t have the guts to put my own gun to my head and pull the trigger! Jake chose what happened, Lloyd! He did it to give me and Annie time to get away, and now he’s dead!”
“You’re lying!” Lloyd leapt right off his horse and into Cole, knocking him off his mount and to the ground. Cole covered his face as the much bigger Lloyd began pummeling him, calling him a fucking liar and a coward. “You left him!” he roared. “You left him behind, didn’t you?”
In moments, several of the ranch hands surrounded them. It took six of them to get Lloyd off Cole, who got to his knees, then managed to stand up, his face cut and bleeding. Lloyd went for his gun, but Terrel grabbed it, and with the help of three other men, they managed to get it away from Lloyd.
“Jesus, Lloyd, that’s Cole!” Terrel told him. “He’d never abandon Jake of his own accord, and you know it! And he ain’t gonna fight you back. He knows you still ain’t healed on the inside.”
Lloyd glared at Cole as he jerked away from the men who held him. He grasped his middle and turned away. “Where’s my father?” he groaned.
“I did every goddamn thing I could do, Lloyd. You gotta know that! It came down to a choice of me and him both dyin’ and a Mexican don getting his hands on Annie…which would have defeated the entire purpose of Jake riskin’ his life like that. Jake even gave me his guns to keep for Little Jake. I tried my best to save him, but I couldn’t! Do you understand? I couldn’t! If I could go back there and trade my life for your father’s, I would, because my life ain’t worth a shit. I’d die for any member of this family, and you goddamn well know it. You know there wasn’t one damn thing I could do, or I would have done it!”
Lloyd stumbled away from them, then went to his knees. Pa! He heard his mother then, screaming for him. “Oh, my God,” he moaned. After a moment, he managed to get to his feet and turned to see the men standing in a group, surrounding Cole as though they feared Lloyd would charge into him again. Blood streamed from a cut on Cole’s cheek, mixed with silent tears that came from Cole’s eyes. Cole, a man seemingly immune to softer feelings—a crusty cowboy as tough as nails, crying. Cole, a hardened ex-outlaw, much like Jake…the kind of man Jake would be if not for—
“Lloyd, where is Jake?”
Randy screamed the words as she headed up the hill. Lloyd hurried down to intercept her. A moment later, she screamed Jake�
��s name loud enough for everyone around the homestead to hear.
“No! No! It’s not true!”
Lloyd had to keep an arm around her to keep her from collapsing as he helped her back to the house.
Evie came running, then folded to her knees. Katie came out of her and Lloyd’s house and ran to Lloyd. He put his other arm around his wife and herded her and his mother inside. Peter came out to help with Randy, and Brian ran to Evie, helping her up. She turned and collapsed against her husband, weeping.
Cole looked away and walked to his horse . He studied the vast expanse of the J&L spread out in all its glory beyond the hillside. “This place ain’t never gonna be the same,” he told the other men. “Not ever.”
“What happened down there in Mexico, Cole?” Terrel asked.
It took Cole a moment to answer. “I think he just gave up.” Cole swallowed and sniffed. “Jake Harkner has been fightin’ his own demons his whole life, and he finally stopped tryin’. That’s the only way I see it.”
A couple of the other men turned away with tears in their eyes.
Terrel spoke up. “This will kill his wife. She won’t survive this. Last winter was bad enough, but she only got through that because of Jake. She ain’t gonna get through this.”
Fifty-one
After everything had calmed down some, Lloyd had someone get Cole and bring him to the house. The whole family sat in stunned silence as Cole explained exactly what happened, fighting his tears as he did so.
“Poor little Annie is so devastated. She can’t get over what he did for her. He was so nice to me, she kept sayin’. He spent the whole night with me, and all he did was put his arm around me and tell me not to be scared. She feels horrible about having to leave him behind.”
Brian spoke up. “Then we need to have her come out here to the J&L. She needs to know none of this is her fault, and I think the family will feel better if they can meet her.”
Cole nodded. “She’s a beautiful, beautiful girl. Incredibly innocent for what she went through.” He glanced at Randy. “She said as how Jake said how much he loved his wife. She couldn’t get over the fact that he paid three thousand dollars for a night with her and then sat there and talked about his wife and grandchildren.”
That brought a few smiles, a welcome break from the heartache they were suffering.
“Gretta’s in a bad way too,” Cole told them. “She’s just flat-out destroyed. She said she’s closin’ up her place and turnin’ it into a legitimate roomin’ house, but right now I’m worried about her state of mind. She’s so happy Annie is back. She just wants her daughter to have a normal life and fall in love and marry like a natural woman ought to do, but she’s sick about Jake. She’s so damn sorry to all of you, and she feels so guilty. I promised her nobody would blame her, but she’s a mess.”
“Then you need to go back to Denver, Cole,” Evie told him. “We’ll give you a letter to take to her.”
Cole sighed, nodding toward the cloth bag he’d laid on the table. “There’s Jake’s guns,” he told them. “He half threw them at me and said as how he’d promised them to Little Jake. I think he just didn’t want them men who was after him to get hold of them, ’cuz they’re famous and all. He wanted them to stay in the family.”
Little Jake got up from his chair and stormed over to Cole and started hitting him with his fists. “I don’t want ’em!” he cried. “I don’t want Grandpa’s guns! I want Grandpa! You let him die! You let him die!”
Brian pulled the boy off Cole and hung on to him as he kept kicking and flailing his fists. “Stop it, Jake!” he demanded.
“Jake, this is not Cole’s fault,” Evie told him as she joined Brian in trying to calm the boy down. “Your grandfather is probably with God now. He’s in the best place he’s ever been.” She broke down herself, and turned away.
“Apologize to Cole!” Brian ordered his son. “He risked his life trying to get Jake out of there. You know Cole. He wouldn’t leave your grandfather to die unless he had absolutely no other choice!”
Little Jake jerked in a sob, hanging his head. “I’m…sorry.”
Cole grabbed one of his arms and squeezed. “Little Jake, as much pain as he was in, your grandfather thought to give me them guns. Just think what that means. He was thinkin’ about you. You can honor him by taking damn good care of them guns and growin’ up to be a strong, good man like your grandpa was. And don’t use them guns for nothin’ bad. Your grandpa wants you to learn the new ways and be a law-abidin’ man. You’ve seen how your grandpa suffered because of his own past. He doesn’t want that for any of you.”
Little Jake straightened, wiping at his tears. He looked around the table. “Don’t anybody call me Little Jake again,” he told them. “You call me Jake! Just Jake!” He ran out the door, and they could hear his sobs as he kept running. Ben laid his head in his arms on the table and wept, and Stephen got up and walked into the great room to curl up in his grandfather’s chair.
Lloyd stood near Katie, and she reached out to grasp his hand. “Lloyd, I don’t know what to say to you. I’m so sorry for you,” she wept.
Brian sighed and rubbed at his eyes. Evie sank back into her chair and covered her face, breaking into more tears. “Daddy,” she cried.
“I should have gone with him,” Lloyd lamented again. He squeezed Katie’s hand, then let go and turned away. “Ever since the Outlaw Trail, we’ve been together through everything. We’ve had each other’s backs for years, all those times in No Man’s Land back in Oklahoma, going up against the worst of them, we always looked out for each other. And last summer, when I was shot, he stayed right there with me day and night for weeks and took care of me, and he almost got hanged for avenging what happened to me.” His voice broke, and he wiped at his eyes. “Damn it! He can be such a stubborn…sonofabitch! I never should have let him talk me into staying. I should have been with him!”
“You probably would have died with him, Lloyd,” Cole told him. “He didn’t want you to take that risk. Look at that beautiful wife of yours, carryin’ another one of your young ’uns. You couldn’t risk leaving her to raise all them kids alone. And you have a big ranch to run. The welfare of the whole family depends on this place and on you. You gotta know this is what your father wanted…for you to be right here where you belong. He damn well knew you’d have risked your life for him in a second, but he didn’t want that.”
They remained silent for a few minutes, every one of them trying to get control of themselves. Peter took hold of Randy’s hand and squeezed.
“Some of you…uh…aren’t my biggest fans,” he told them, “but”—his voice broke a little—“you have to know I liked the hell out of Jake…and I respected the man for the way he could…keep going in spite of the hard life he led. I saw his goodness, in spite of that gruff facade he had. Surely you know how much I cared about him, or I wouldn’t have done so much for him. Yes, it was for your mother too, but I was proud to call Jake a friend. I wish I knew what to tell you now…how to find comforting words.”
“You’ve been a good, good friend, Peter,” Evie told him. She broke into tears again and couldn’t finish.
“Did he find anything about his past in Brownsville?” Randy asked. She sat rigid, clinging to Peter’s hand, but after her initial screams of devastation and nearly collapsing, strangely, she wasn’t crying now.
“Yes, ma’am,” Cole told her. “He…he found the house where he grew up.”
Nearly all of them gasped.
“What did he do?” Evie asked.
Cole shook his head. “It was pretty bad. He took a sledgehammer to it. It was just stone walls…no roof and nothin’ inside. He battered them walls till they was knocked into rubble. Then he showed me where his ma and brother was buried. He’d already gone to a mortician and ordered a headstone for it. He told me that if he didn’t make it back, I should make sure the headston
e was taken care of. I did.”
“Jake…oh, Jake, I should have been with you for that,” Randy said, closing her eyes.
“He did say…more than once, ma’am…I need Randy. But he got through it, and if it’s any comfort…I think it gave him some peace, bein’ able to put a headstone on his ma’s burial place.”
“Oh, my God, that must have been awful for him,” Lloyd groaned, finally sitting down beside Katie. Katie rubbed a hand across his back, and Lloyd put his head in his hands.
“I just sat and waited for him to do what he had to do,” Cole told them. “He sat there by his ma’s grave most of the day, not sayin’ nothin’.”
“Jesus, Cole, I’m sorry for attacking you,” Lloyd told him. “You’ve been a damn good friend to me and Jake both. I just didn’t want to believe…” He couldn’t finish.
“I half expected it,” Cole told him. “And you don’t know how bad I wish it had been me them men made off with and not your father.” He looked at Randy. “Randy, Jake’s last words was to tell you…uh…tell you he loves you,” Cole told her.
Randy looked around the table, then let go of Peter’s hand and rose. “All of you listen to me.”
They looked at her in surprise. Lloyd got up again and moved to stand behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders. “Mom—”
“It’s okay, Lloyd.” She thought a moment before speaking. “Lloyd called Jake a stubborn sonofabitch, and he damn well is. He’s the toughest man I’ve ever known. And any boy who can survive what he survived can handle a lot more as a man. We already know what a fighter he is.” She looked at Evie. “Jake is not dead, Evie. Your prayers are too strong for God to have let him die. And he said he’d come back to me.”
The Last Outlaw Page 36