by Logan, Jake
Driven to the Edge
The big man lunged at him again, and caught a handful of Slocum’s shirt. He felt it tighten and the shoulder seams pop from the grip of the big, work-hardened hand.
Try as he might, Slocum was growing weaker, scrabbling for his now-lost foothold . . . And he was two feet from falling off the cliff.
He had one chance. Now or never, Slocum, old boy, he told himself. He reached up at the growling, chuffing face, got a handful of jowly cheek meat, and pressed his thumb into the man’s eye socket.
“Gaaah!” the big brute wailed and lessened his grip on Slocum’s shirt enough that Slocum rolled out of the hold. He swung his body upward and drove his wounded leg right into the bent brute’s shoulder. The man grunted and Slocum did it again. The moaning man lashed out, trying to grab hold of him, groping blindly, wildly for Slocum. Then his hand found Slocum’s rifle and he snatched it up, still shaking his head from the eye gouging.
“Oh no, you don’t,” said Slocum through gritted teeth. He drove a fist straight at the man’s nose and felt something inside it snap twice under his knuckles, then smear sideways into pulp. An immediate gush of blood, warm and foul, burst from the screaming man’s face. Slocum followed it up with a boot heel to the middle of the man’s mouth, and still he didn’t let up. Slocum kept pushing, driving the big man backward. In his dazed condition, the man never noticed the cliff edge until it was far too late.
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SLOCUM AND THE HELLFIRE HAREM
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Jove edition / December 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
1
With a quick poke of a finger, John Slocum tipped his dusty, sweat-stained fawn hat back on his head and eyed the brimming glass of bourbon the barkeep was pouring him. It had been a long time, weeks, in fact, since he’d come to town, and just as long since he’d had a drink. Life on the Rocking D had kept him busy. Back in April, the ranch owner, Dez Monkton, had sent most of his cowboys and a thousand head north on a spring drive, which had left the ranch shorthanded for the summer season. And that was when Slocum had ridden in, ranging for work.
It was now July, and he’d been working at the Rocking D ever since. The pay was fair, the work was hard, most of the hands were decent to spend time with, and the food, cooked and served by Mrs. Monkton, was a cut above most grub shack fare. It was a good outfit, and part of him considered sticking there through the winter. But he was a far-ranging man, in part because he liked the freedom of traveling the wide-open spaces, stopping to gamble and drink, should his whim or his wallet allow. Yet overriding all that was the thought that he was a wanted man with the possibility of bounty hunters forever on his trail. And that was the thing that never allowed him to get too comfortable in any one place. He suspected that was the part that would win out in the end—it always did.
With a grim smile, Slocum raised the brimming glass to his mouth. He was looking forward to the drink about as much as he had been that bath, shave, and barberin
g he’d gotten when he rode into town a couple of hours before. Then he’d stopped off at Millie’s Café for a hot meal of pot roast, potatoes, stewed tomatoes, buttered biscuits . . . and dessert served up the way Millie knew best.
Slocum had still been eating when she hustled on out the front door the only other customer in the place, a broke-down old miner who, from the looks of him, hadn’t seen hide nor hair of a lode in a long time. But it hadn’t mattered to Millie. She’d propped the CLOSED placard in the window and breezed by Slocum toward the back room.
“Dessert, John?” she’d said, eyeing him over her shoulder.
He’d gulped the last bites of spuds, gravy, and biscuit, followed them with a swig of coffee, then trailed her to the kitchen. If this turned out to be anything like the last time she’d served him dessert . . . He found her where he guessed he would—in the storeroom, wearing a smile, an apron, and nothing else. Somehow, between his table and the storeroom, she’d managed to shuck her dress and slip her apron back on.
“Ahem, I was told I might find dessert here . . . maybe pie?”
“Right this way, sir,” she’d said with a smile and a beckoning finger.
As good as the pot roast and trimmings had been, that dessert proved to be the most memorable part of the meal, not in least part because of the tasty way Millie had served it up. Turned out that his sweet tooth had been mighty hard to satisfy, so he went ahead and had himself a second helping.
A half hour later, Millie had buttoned herself back into her dress and, with a last squeeze, had ushered Slocum to the back door. “I have to get busy prepping for the supper crowd,” she said.
“But I’m hungry again,” he’d said with what he hoped had been a suitably gaunt face.
She’d pushed him out the door. “You think you’re hungry now, you come back later.”
Now standing at the bar down the street, he recalled with a smile what might well have been the best midday dessert ever offered to him—and he had every intention of dropping by the café near closing time. But first, he was about to follow up that fine dessert with a smooth bit of bourbon.
The amber-colored nectar had just touched his lips when a groan and a crash sounded from the doorway to his left. He shifted his gaze, along with everyone else in the place, in time to see the Rocking D foreman, Randolph “Hap” Roderick, crash through the batwing doors and drop in a heap to the barroom floor.
The thin older gent was called “Hap” because he always seemed to be smiling, no matter the difficulty or level of danger of the chore he’d been asked to perform, nor the foulness of the weather in which he had to do it. Yes sir, Hap was known as a happy man. It was a trait that Slocum envied and, in his own way, had tried to emulate as he worked alongside Hap at the Rocking D these past few months.
But Hap wasn’t smiling today. Slocum slammed the untouched glass of whiskey on the bartop, spilling it. He dropped to the old cowboy’s side, eased him onto his back as the saloon’s occupants crowded around. Hap’s vest flopped open; his blue-checked go-to-town dress shirt was a mess at the gut, clotted with blood and scorched fabric. It had been a close-in shot.
“Hap!” Slocum leaned close to the man’s ashen face. “Hap! What happened? Who did this?”
“Oh, Slocum, good.” The man smiled, though his eyes teared from the pain. “I was hoping to find you.” Then his smile faded. “Tunk . . . Tunk Mueller . . .”
“What about him, Hap?” He looked up at the gawking onlookers. “Somebody get a doctor, for Pete’s sake! And the sheriff!”
He heard footsteps and the batwing doors slap open. Slocum turned back to Hap. “What about Tunk, Hap? Did he do this to you?” Slocum already knew the answer. Of course it was Tunk.
Slocum didn’t have much say in who Dez had hired, being a new hand himself, but he wished Monkton had not brought on Mueller. The man was a walking sack of trouble from the get-go, shirking his workload onto others, starting arguments and fistfights. But Hap, being the foreman and a decent man, was always trying to find the good in others. He urged Slocum to give Mueller the benefit of the doubt, and since the D had still been shorthanded, Slocum had gone along with it. Now he knew it had been a mistake. He should have trusted his own gut.
“Mueller . . . never thought he’d be a bad seed, John.” Hap licked his lips and Slocum said, “Get him a beer, whiskey, something.”
Hap smiled again, coughed. “I never touch the stuff, John. Water, though, I’d like a drink of cool water, if you could.” The barkeep tended to the request.
Slocum worked to keep the man awake and coherent. “Are the Monktons all right?” Slocum knew the ranch was all but emptied out, being as it was the first proper day off the crew had had in weeks. “Hap, were the Monktons hurt, too?” The wounded man’s eyelids flickered wide again.
“Getting myself duded up to come to town, I heard shots . . .” His lip quivered and he swallowed. “Seen Tunk coming out of the house carrying some of Mrs. Monkton’s fancy flatware . . . Didn’t make any sense.” His eyes turned glassy and he gritted his teeth as some unseen pain wracked him deep inside.
Slocum touched Hap’s forehead. “Hap? Stay with me here. Come on, Hap.”
The wounded man’s eyes focused again on Slocum. “Tried to stop him, tried to talk sense into him. I told him he wasn’t a bad man, but he . . . just laughed at me, John. Told me I was a fool. Can you believe it? Man just gave up on himself. Then he shot me, John. He shot me and rode north. I have never been shot before, John.”
The bartender returned with a short glass of water, but Slocum shook his head. Hap was beyond needing it.
Then Hap’s eyes closed and his smile came back. Slocum bent low, and in a whisper, the older man said, “Don’t you ever give up on yourself, John Slocum. You’re a good man.” Hap’s head slumped to the side, and he knew no more. One of the hostesses inhaled in shock and turned away, sobbing. The big bartender stood holding the glass of water, sadness pulling at his thick features. Until the doctor and the sheriff pushed their way in to Hap’s side, no one said anything.
And then all hell broke loose.
2
Slocum bolted from the Lucky Stiff Saloon. As he mounted his Appaloosa, standing hipshot at the rail out front, he saw Hap Roderick’s old buckskin, Sammy, head drooped as if he knew what had happened. Blood smeared Hap’s saddle.
As Slocum booted his horse into a hard gallop out of town, he tried not to think of his friend as a dead man. Surely Tunk hadn’t hurt the Monktons, too? Maybe the shots Hap had heard were just harmless warning rounds intended to scare them. But Slocum knew that the warning bells pealing in his head weren’t lying to him. For once, though, he was desperate to prove his instincts wrong. Maybe it had all been a mistake—maybe the doc could revive Hap.
Stop it, you damn fool, he told himself. Hap’s dead and you’ll be the first back to the ranch and you’ll find the Monktons dead, too. And for what? He was sure Tunk Mueller had hoped to find a safe filled with bank notes, gold coins, and all manner of valuable jewelry. But the truth was that most ranchers lived from the proceeds of one drive to the next, and limped along as best they could, scratching out a living.
Didn’t Tunk know that the Monktons barely had two pennies to rub together? At least, not until the drive’s boss, one of Monkton’s friends from a neighboring ranch, returned with whatever the Rocking D’s earnings would be after they sold the cattle in Ogallala. And even then, they would be lucky if they came out with enough to scrape through another year, and then they’d do it all over again.
It made it even worse that they were good people, kindhearted folks who had been on their place since they’d been a young couple. Raised and lost three children there, all to childhood diseases, and all buried in a plot on a knoll behind the house, one tall pine shading the three white wooden crosses.
Slocum made it back to the Rocking D in half a
n hour. The little ranch house’s front door was open, not a good sign. He rode right up to the front steps, shouting even before he dismounted. “Mrs. Monkton? Dez? You home? Anybody here?”
He dashed up the steps and pushed the door wide, stopping in his tracks, his gut tightening and a feeling of cold overcoming him. Laid out on the bare wood floor before him was Dez Monkton, belly down and bleeding, arms outstretched and facing the kitchen at the rear of the house, as if he were crawling toward it. And facing him, as if crawling forward from the kitchen, lay Mrs. Monkton, also amid a spreading pool of her own blood. Their outstretched hands still groped a foot apart by the time they’d succumbed. He gritted his teeth and checked each of them on the neck for any sign of a pulse, but found none, their warmth already fading.
Slocum stood still, his hands clenched into fists at his side, his breath hitched in his throat. He’d taken lives when given no other option; he’d seen many people die, on the battlefield, in accidents on cattle drives, and in fair fights when both sides were on equal footing. But it was the murders, brutal, senseless murders, most always committed for greed, for want of what someone else had—even if they didn’t really have it—that gnawed the harshest at Slocum. Murderers were the lowest of the low, a step below men who abused women and children. And Slocum had no tolerance for any of them.
He turned from the grisly scene, and walked onto the porch. Soon he heard hooves pounding and looked up to see a dozen riders headed toward the ranch, dust clouding about them. They were led by Sheriff Brolinski.
“Slocum!” he reined up and dismounted. “Are they . . .”
Slocum slowly shook his head, and that one gesture told them all just what they didn’t want to hear.
The sheriff stepped into the front room and took off his hat. He looked on the scene for himself, then stepped back out onto the porch. “Rollie,” he said, working his hat brim with fingers unaccustomed to helplessness. “Ride on back to town, fetch Delbert and his wagon, tell his son to make a couple of coffins. And send some women out here. You know which ones, Mrs. Monkton’s friends.”