Hell's Jaw Pass

by Max O'Hara

  The man stood gazing at the brown-and-white pinto and the girl lying belly down over the saddle. His face was stony but his eyes were wide. His feet didn’t move. They might have been mired to the ground.

  Lori stepped back and looked at both horses. When she saw the bodies, she raised a hand to her mouth, muffling a gasp.

  “I’m sorry, Russell,” Wolf said.

  The Wild Horse lawman shifted his gaze from the pinto to Stockburn, his eyes wrinkling at the corners, deep lines carving the ruddy skin of his broad forehead. “That’s her, ain’t it?”

  “I’m afraid it is, yes.”

  A shopkeeper who had been washing his front windows behind Russell and Lori had stopped to gaze silently toward the two horses carrying the bodies. More men on the boardwalks of other shops, or crossing the street on foot, turned to stare toward Stockburn, Lori, and Watt Russell, as well.

  With what seemed an effort, the old marshal pulled his feet free of the invisible bog they’d been mired in. He ambled slowly forward. His face grew pale, the skin hanging slack, as he approached the pinto’s left side.

  He stared down at Ivy’s blanket-wrapped body, at the long hair hanging straight down to the ground so that its very tips brushed the dirt of Wind River Avenue. Russell drew a deep breath, then with another brief struggle managed to drop to one knee.

  He reached out with his right hand, grabbed a handful of the blond hair, and ran his fingers through it.

  He gave a strangled sob and shook his head.

  Suddenly looking ten years older than he’d looked the other day, in his office, Russell turned to Stockburn and said, “Who?”

  Stockburn jerked his chin to the chestnut gelding standing off Smoke’s right flank, hanging its head as though in a nod to the solemnity of the occasion. “Him.”

  Russell grunted as he lifted his heavy bulk to his feet. He walked around behind Ivy’s horse and came up between the two horses. He crouched and parted the fold in the blanket covering the bastard with the large-caliber Sharps, stared down at the man’s face, then turned to Stockburn.

  He looked as though he’d just eaten something sour.

  “Slim Sherman. Sharp-shooting regulator. I seen him in town.” Russell shook his head distastefully then looked at Stockburn again. His eyes glistened. “Why’d he shoot Ivy?”

  “The bullet was intended for me,” Wolf said, his stony features belying the sickness he felt inside. “Do you know who hired him?”

  Russell nodded slowly, keeping his angry, bereaved gaze on Stockburn. “Yep.”

  Wolf reached back and pulled the flask out of his saddlebag pouch. He handed it down to Russell, who looked at it, then looked back up at Stockburn.

  “Is it the man who that flask belongs to?”

  “Yep.”

  Stockburn reached down and plucked the flask out of the marshal’s hands. “That’s all I need, then.”

  He dropped the reins to both packhorses and started to boot Smoke forward but stopped when Russell held up a hand and said, “Wait.”

  Russell stepped forward, looking up at Wolf. “A dozen riders rode into town last night. They’re all over at Hennessey’s place.”

  “A dozen, eh?”

  “Around that.”

  Stockburn thought about that, nodded. “So, he called his jackals in.”

  “I suspect he’ll sic them on you.”

  “I don’t doubt you’re right.”

  Lori walked up to the other side of Smoke from Russell, gazing worriedly up at the rail detective. “Wolf, if you go over there alone, you’ll be carried out.”

  He smiled, remembering that Ivy had warned him in similar words.

  “Ah, hell, I’m not stupid.” Stockburn gave the girl a reassuring smile and tossed the flask in the air and caught it. “I just aim to have a powwow with the man.” He glanced at Russell. “Keep her with you.”

  Russell drew a deep breath and nodded.

  Stockburn booted Smoke on up the street.

  Faces turned as he passed the now-closed shops. Small clumps of cowboys and drummers standing outside saloons and the Cosmopolitan Restaurant turned toward him, skeptically. They muttered darkly among themselves.

  Wolf put Smoke up to one of the several hitchracks fronting Hennessey’s Wind River Saloon & Gambling Parlor and swung down from the leather. He tied the horse to the rack and slid his rifle from its saddle sheath.

  He cocked the Yellowboy one-handed, off-cocked the hammer, and rested the rifle on his shoulder. He paused to dig a three-penny Indian Kid cheroot from a pocket inside his coat. He stuck the cheroot in his mouth and scratched a match to life on the hitchrack.

  He lit the cigar.

  Through the smoke billowing from his lips, he saw three men in shabby business suits standing at the base of the three steps rising to the saloon’s front door. They were small, prim men in well-trimmed beards and mustaches. Attorneys or accountants, maybe. They each held a frothy beer mug.

  They’d turned to study the tall, gray-haired, gray-mustached man in the buckskin coat and black slouch hat, the Yellowboy resting on his shoulder.

  “Evenin’,” Stockburn said, blowing out another long smoke plume.

  The men scowled at him. They shared dubious looks. One looked at Stockburn again, looked at the rifle on the big man’s shoulder, looked at the Peacemaker that had been exposed when Stockburn had unbuttoned his coat and pulled the left flap back behind the ivory-gripped revolver.

  The prim man flushed and said, “I, uh . . . I reckon I’d better get on home.”

  He turned, started to walk away with his beer, then, remembering the beer, turned back to the other two men. He took a big drink from his glass then shoved the glass at one of the others, who accepted it incredulously.

  The now-beerless man ran the back of his hand across his bearded face, glanced at Stockburn once more, then hurried off down the boardwalk to the south.

  The other two men looked at Stockburn again. They looked at each other, flushed, then set their own beer glasses and the extra glass down on the boardwalk at the base of the saloon. They hurried off in separate directions, one twirling a walking stick, both casting skeptical glances back over their shoulders at the big rail detective behind them.

  Stockburn stepped up onto the boardwalk. He took one more drag off the Indian Kid then dropped it and mashed it out with the heel of his boot. He mounted the saloon’s front steps and went on inside through the heavy oak door.

  He stood looking around the smoky sunken saloon hall.

  The place was hopping. There were three bartenders, clad in white silk shirts and red silk waistcoats, scurrying around behind the horse-shoe-shaped bar. All of the gambling layouts looked like small anthills.

  There were a good fifteen or so men bellied up to the bar, turned toward each other, talking. Another twenty or so sat at tables, drinking, playing cards, conversing, or flirting with the several painted ladies making the rounds.

  The smell of tobacco smoke, beer, liquor, man sweat, and cheap perfume wafted against Stockburn still standing at the door.

  He didn’t see Hennessey so he walked down the steps to the drinking hall floor and wended his way through the tables to the bar. As he did, he noticed quite a few faces turn toward him, hard eyes staring. He’d already picked most of Hennessey’s killers out of the crowd here in the drinking and gambling hall. They hadn’t been hard to spot.

  They might have gotten shaves and haircuts and maybe even baths since they’d hit town last night, and they might have had a good romp or two upstairs on the second floor. But they still had the gimlet-eyed look of soulless killers.

  They all wore well-used and just-as-well-cared-for hoglegs on their hips or thonged down low on their thighs. Two, in some cases three apiece.

  They were not similarly attired. But they had the same hard, quick eyes and bony faces and panther-like movements of practiced killers. Of men who could ride into a camp where hard-working men were dead asleep and kill those hard-working men wi
thout warning and with a savagery unknown to even the most savage of wild animals.

  Wolf waved to catch the attention of one of the beefy bartenders and called, “Where’s Hennessey?”

  The barman scowled at him.

  The men near Stockburn and the barman fell silent and turned toward Wolf.

  “Who wants to know?” asked the barman. He had closed-cropped brown hair and a shaggy beard.

  “Where’s Hennessey?” Stockburn asked again, putting some steel in his voice.

  More conversations stopped.

  The silence stretched away from Stockburn like ripples from where a rock had been tossed into a lake.

  Suddenly, the saloon was only half as loud as it had been when Stockburn had first walked into it. It grew quickly quieter as more men nudged each other to silence.

  More and more faces turned toward him, eyes flat with menace. One of those pairs of eyes belonged to an amber-eyed man standing five feet away from Stockburn, against the bar on Wolf’s right.

  Stockburn recognized him as the hired killer Tom Cole from the Montana Territory. He was tall and wiry, with a flat face and a nose like an eagle’s beak. He was recently shaved, and his close-cropped brown hair glistened with barber’s pomade that smelled like mint.

  He was turned toward Stockburn, his wool coat pulled back, one long-fingered hand—an oddly feminine-looking hand—draped over the grips of the .44 holstered high on his left hip. He blinked owlishly and studied Stockburn with his amber owl’s eyes. The man was like a raptor or a snake; he didn’t so much think as react to his instincts, and his instincts right now were telling him to do the job he’d been brought here to do.

  Kill Wolf Stockburn.

  A rumbling voice cut through the room’s sudden silence. “Up here, detective!”

  CHAPTER 33

  Stockburn kept his eyes on the weirdly flat, soulless eyes of Tom Cole.

  Cole glanced up and beyond Stockburn. The killer removed his hand from the grips of his .44, let his wool coat drop down over the holster.

  Stockburn glanced over his right shoulder. Kreg Hennessey stood on the balcony overlooking the saloon, in front of his open office door. The tall man with the Burnside beard and badly swollen lips held a drink in one hand, a cigar in the other hand.

  His eyes bored into Stockburn’s, and without expression he beckoned with his hand holding the burning cigar. He turned and walked back into his office, leaving the door open.

  Stockburn looked around. Everyone in the room—at least, everyone Wolf could see from this side of the bar—was turned toward him.

  Stockburn glanced at Tom Cole again. Cole picked up his shot glass and raised it in dark salute to the rail detective, his face and eyes as flat and as expressionless as before.

  Stockburn swung around, shouldered the Yellowboy again, and crossed the room to the stairs. He climbed the broad staircase, occasionally glancing over his shoulder into the room behind him. All eyes were still on him.

  At least, most were. Several men—likely townsmen with a keen and sudden sense of their own mortalities—were moving quietly toward the door.

  Stockburn gained the top of the stairs. Approaching the open door, he stopped, briefly pondered the Yellowboy on his shoulder, then lowered the rifle to the floor, leaning it against the wall, left of Hennessey’s open office door.

  He strode inside, reaching into his left coat pocket.

  “Hold on!” The admonition had come from his left, where Stanley Cove sat in a deep leather chair near a liquor cabinet, his broken wrist in a white sling across his chest. Cove had his left hand on the revolver resting on the right arm of his chair. He was looking warningly at the hand Stockburn had shoved into his coat pocket.

  “Don’t soil your drawers, Stanley.” Wolf pulled the flask out of his pocket and showed it to the broken-limbed toughnut.

  Cove flared a nostril.

  Kreg Hennessey sat behind his desk, straight ahead of Stockburn. There was a third man in the room, sitting in a short brocade-upholstered sofa to Wolf’s right. Russell’s former deputy, the stocky, square-headed, thick-necked Sonny sat on one end of the sofa, in what appeared a second-hand three-piece suit that was barely containing his lumpy body. Sonny held a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun across his thick thighs.

  He had a smug smile on his doughy face.

  “How’s your head, Stockburn?” Sonny asked.

  “How’s your head, Sonny?”

  Sonny smiled more brightly. “Just fine.”

  “You’re moving up in the world. A real upstart.” Wolf flashed a crooked smile at the moon-faced lad. “I’m gonna kill you. You know that—don’t you?”

  Sonny scowled and flushed as his indignant eyes flicked toward Hennessey slumped down in his chair behind the desk so large that he nearly resembled a child behind it. Stockburn tossed the flask over the desk.

  Hennessey jerked both hands up and caught the flask just before it would have struck his tender lips.

  “What the hell . . . ?” Hennessey glowered at Stockburn.

  “Recognize it?”

  Flushed with anger, Hennessey inspected the flask. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he said, looking over his desk in wide-eyed surprise. “Where did you find it?”

  “At the scene of the massacre.”

  Hennessey let out a large breath of air and slumped back in his chair again, arms draped over the chair arms. He rolled his head from side to side, chuckling whimsically. “I’ve looked all over for that damn thing!”

  “Must’ve lost it in all the commotion. You know—horses galloping, guns popping, innocent men screaming as you and your hired killers triggered bullets into them as they leaped from their cots.”

  “You can imagine!” Hennessey looked down at the flask in his right hand, chuckled again, then leaned forward to set it on his desk. “Thanks for retrieving it. I hope you didn’t come for a finder’s fee.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  Hennessey shrugged. “Business opportunity.”

  “Not making enough money here in town?”

  Again, Hennessey shrugged. “You can never make too much money, Stockburn. When I was offered the opportunity to establish my own line . . . across Stoleberg land . . . for a pittance compared to that which the Stewarts paid Norman McCrae . . . well, hell, not taking such an offer and further diversifying my business interests would have been like leaving money on a table. I’m not a man who can leave money on any table.”

  “Did Daniel McCrae make you the offer?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why?”

  “You’d have to ask him. I don’t ordinarily discuss personal matters with my business associates. That said”—he tipped his head back to gaze at the ceiling with an air of vague speculation—“I think it might have something to do with one young lady named McCrae, who turned her back on young Stoleberg in his hour of need. Hours of need, I should say, pity the poor, one-armed cripple. To be promised such a bride and then having her family turn her against you. And, then, having the fruit of such a promising union reminding you every day of what you’d lost . . .”

  “The boy.”

  “Is it a boy? I wasn’t aware of the sex.”

  Still standing in the middle of the large office, between Stanley Cove on his left and Sonny on his right, Stockburn said, “I still don’t understand. Why the rail line, for chrissakes?”

  “Like I said, he and I never discussed it. Our relationship is purely business. If I were to continue to speculate, however, and to reflect on the wisps of gossip flying here and there around town, I would say that he was so fed up with both families that he wanted to ruin them both. Let the war that had been brewing for years finally erupt and take them all down. Fitting punishment for what they’d done to him—one side taking the girl away, his own father insisting on raising the child to replace the one McCrae had murdered so many years ago.”

  Hennessey stared with satisfaction across the desk at Stockburn, sipped his drink, and set it bac
k down on his desk.

  Slowly, softly, he continued: “Take them all down except him. When the smoke cleared, he could leave that damnable ranch where he’d known such heartache, and move to town, where he and I would oversee the spur line, which, of course, would run through Tin Cup graze. That’s where it should have run in the first place. Less rugged terrain and a more direct route to Hell’s Jaw Pass. The only reason it did not was because Norman McCrae had more sway with the Stewarts.”

  “Sweetening the pot for you was the fact that moving the rail line gave you the opportunity to exact revenge on McCrae for several years ago backing the opera house you tried to pass the ordinance against. Because you wanted the largest, most lucrative business in Wild Horse, and you chafed at the idea of competition—fair or otherwise.”

  “Ah, revenge,” Hennessey said, smiling his death’s head smile, slumped back in the chair, head canted to one side. His eyes were still red from grief. His smashed lips resembled ground beef. “Surprising how that age-old notion propelled so much of this, isn’t it?”

  The smile faded suddenly, the saloon owner’s face becoming a mask of animal hatred. “Thank you for making my own matter of revenge so sweet and easy, Stockburn!”

  He placed both hands on his chair arms, leaned forward across his desk, and shouted, “Kill him!”

  Stockburn palmed both Colts, clicking the hammers back at the same time. He extended the right-hand one toward Sonny, who was just then leaping from his seat and angling the double-barreled shotgun toward Stockburn.

  Wolf shot him twice in the chest, punching the fat kid back into the sofa, triggering both barrels of the shotgun into the ceiling.

  In the periphery of his vision, Wolf saw Stanley Cove leaping from his chair, raising his revolver in his left hand. Thank God he wasn’t a lefty or Stockburn would have been sporting a third eye.

  Instead, the bullet that would have cored him raked across his left cheek as he turned to face Stanley, who screamed shrilly when he saw his mistake—and Stockburn’s bigger, silver-chased Peacemaker bearing down on him like the jaws of hell opening, spitting smoke and fire.