by Mark Henry
Dear Reader,
I did a fair amount of my growing up on a small farm in Hamilton County, Texas. When I wasn’t hoeing squash or picking okra (my father and I have differing opinions as to how much of this I actually did) I was reading. Fred Gibson set his stories a couple of counties over from the very ground I worked, so Old Yeller and Savage Sam were some of the first books I read. I watched “Gunsmoke” and “The Rifleman” with my grandpa and listened to him talk about his boyhood trapping and hunting in central Texas. To me, the West was real and it was right outside my door. From my bedroom window, I could make out the ghost-white limestone markers on the neighboring ranch where a Comanche raiding party had massacred a young school teacher and her five students only a few generations before. My local librarian told me the Texas Rangers had played a large part in chasing down the renegades. So, I read everything I could get my hands on about Indians or Texas Rangers.
When it came time to choose a career, law enforcement seemed like the only choice—and early on, when I realized I wanted to write, Western stories came naturally to my pen.
When I was a young-pup detective, it was a savvy Texas Ranger who gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever heard—on police work and writing.
It was my first homicide investigation, and I was twenty-six years old. The victim was a pretty college coed. The poor thing’s body had been dumped in a weedy ditch along a lonely gravel road, where we found her three days later. Everything I knew to do, I did twice and had a good start on a stomach ulcer by the time the Ranger pulled up in his dark blue Crown Victoria and strode over to where I stood a couple of feet upwind from the corpse. Without speaking, he hunkered down on the heels of his lizard skin boots to take a closer look.
I squatted beside him. “Billy,” I pleaded. He’d have slapped me if I’d called him “Ranger” like they did in the movies. “I’m not sure what to do. You’ve investigated dozens of murders. Teach me.”
Billy nudged the straw hat back on his head a few inches and picked at his teeth with the flat wooden toothpick he never seemed to be without. “Well, Markus,” he said, fooling with the toothpick as he spoke. “Just write down everything you see . . .”
At that moment a tiny pupa, which had only recently been a wriggling critter feeding on the decaying body, hatched into a sticky, green-backed fly and flew straight into the Ranger’s mouth. I looked on in horror but he never missed a beat. He picked out the fly with a thumb and forefinger, returned the toothpick to the corner of his mouth and gave me a wry smile.
“Just write down everything you see . . . and watch out for the blow flies.”
Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with beat cops, detectives, Rangers, deputy marshals, and a whole alphabet soup of federal law enforcement agents who exemplify those standards set by the lawmen I read about as a boy. The spirit of the Old West lives in them—and most are far more interesting than any character I could ever dream up. We’ve had some hellacious adventures together, and through it all, I’ve tried to follow the Ranger’s advice and keep good notes.
I’ll apologize now if my comrades-at-arms find any piece of themselves reflected between these pages. You see, they may have different names, but I’ve had the privilege of riding with Trap, Clay, Hezekiah, and many of the others.
I only hope I can make their stories as gritty and real to you as they are to me . . . so enjoy the adventure—and watch out for the blow flies.
Respectfully,
Mark Henry
Anchorage, Alaska
May 2005
TO HELL AND BEYOND
MARK HENRY
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
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Hard Road to Heaven copyright © 2005 Mark Henry
The Hell Riders copyright © 2006 Mark Henry
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ISBN: 978-0-7860-4204-3
First electronic edition: June 2017
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4205-0
ISBN-10: 0-7860-4205-2
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
HARD ROAD TO HEAVEN
THE HELL RIDERS
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
PART TWO
HARD ROAD TO HEAVEN
For Ty, who provided the tinder,
And Victoria, who gave me the spark
PROLOGUE
Boston
August 1910
Angela Kenworth’s mother was dead-set against her having any adventure that required the wearing of britches.
“. . . a great Western adventure!” her father’s telegram had promised. “. . . suggest you bring at least two pair of canvas trousers.”
“Young lady, adventure is nothing more than the lie your memory tells you about hardship you’ve been forced to endure. I stand resolute on this matter.”
Mother fastened the buckle on Angela’s leather valise with an air of staunch finality, lest any britches find their way inside.
When Mother stood resolute on anything, it did no good to argue. “I will not permit a young woman associated with me or this family to be seen in Montana dressed like a rough boy. Pants have no place on a proper lady when it comes to adventuring.”
Mother swelled up like a deviled toad when Kitty, the Irish housekeeper, quietly agreed, observing that she herself had had many fine adventures without her pants. The woman was no smarter than a stick and if she hadn’t been such a gifted cook, Mother would have long since given her the sack.
“I shall always despise your father for dragging you out to that dreadful place,” Mother said, driving poor Kitty from the room with a withering stare. As if the fact that she chose to live two thousand miles from her husband wasn’t already enough to show how resolute she stood in her feelings for the man. “You long for adventure, Angela, but believe you me, all you will get is rough men and red savages.”
“Honestly, Mother,” Angela said, running an ebony brush through thick auburn hair. “It’s the twentieth century. Everyone west of the Mississippi River isn’t still mired in the 1800s battling Indians and dueling in the streets at high noon.”
Mother waved her off with an exasperated gasp and went in search of Kitty to check on breakfast. Angela picked up her father’s telegram. She had it memorized, but read it again anyway. “Mother, you’ll get the vapors if you don’t calm down,” she sighed softly to herself. “Red savages in this day and age?”
Mother’s resolution on the matter not withstanding, civilization had even come to places like Montana.
CHAPTER 1
Montana
August 18, 1910
Six days after the train groaned away from Boston’s North Station, seventeen-year-old Angela Kenworth showed some resolution of her own and tossed two gray linen traveling skirts out the window of a swaying, horse-drawn coach.
Evidently, her father’s idea of adventure had little to do with comfort. It was miserably hot inside the jigging vehicle that seemed to spend
more time on two wheels than four. Angela leaned her head back against the smooth, maroon leather upholstery and tugged at the knees of her new canvas britches, regretting the loss of the airy skirts. The snug pants caused her to sweat profusely, confining and pinching in countless unmentionable places. Unable to do anything about it, she consoled herself with the fact that she was no longer confined to the elegant prison of her home in Boston.
Outside, what her father had described as rolling green hills of pine and hemlock had been reduced to charred rock and ruined black snags. Every few minutes the coach rolled over a scab of burned ground, some hundreds of feet across. Mountains of the Bitterroot range peeked up through a brown haze all around her, emerald isles above a sea of greasy smoke.
Her father hadn’t mentioned the fires, and she had yet to see him so she could ask about them. A tall, strapping German fellow with soap-scrubbed skin had met them at the station in Saltese and introduced himself as Fritz Mueller, her father’s representative. He had white-blond hair, sun-bronzed skin, and chiseled features that made Mother’s representative, Betty Donahue, trip on her skirts to fawn over him.
Betty drooped beside Angela, fanning her face with a lace handkerchief. She was a fleshy woman, prone to copious sweating even in cooler weather. Beads of perspiration pasted blond curls to her high forehead and glistened over a moist upper lip. She had a dark, if somewhat alluring, smile of a stain at the scooping neckline of her robin’s-egg dress. Mother considered Betty her spy, but at twenty-four the flighty woman was only a few years older than her charge and not much more mature than her five-year-old son, Shad, who sat at her knee playing with a toy wooden horse. Betty did a marvelously irreverent impersonation of Mother by plugging one nostril while she spoke.
“I despise the fact that you’ve dragged me out to this godforsaken wilderness.” Betty’s put-on whine harmonized perfectly with the chattering coach wheels. She used the hankie to dab at the sweat that sparkled like a beaded necklace and pooled into a clear jewel at the center of her abundant bosom.
“What does despise mean?” Shad said, wiping his forehead, without looking up from the toy horse. He had blond hair like Betty, and shared her tendency to wilt in the heat. Mother had thrown her weight in on the matter of his traveling clothes as well, and he wore an absurdly frilly white shirt with ruffled cuffs, brown knickers, and white knee socks that made him look like a sweaty little George Washington out for a visit to Montana.
Betty let her own brogue slip back while she continued to press the lace against her cleavage, though all the sweat had long since been dabbed away.
“Despise describes the way you feel about turnips, dear.” She spoke to her son, but kept a hungry gaze on the handsome young German across from Angela. Betty’s late husband had been a fisherman out of Gloucester who was lost at sea. She was heavily in the market for another, and the bosom dabbing was her not-so-subtle method of advertisement.
Shad curled his freckled nose and rolled his toy horse across the leather seat between him and the gentleman. “I despise turnips,” he said.
“Mr. Mueller, how much further to my father’s mining operation?” Angela asked, as much to rescue the poor man from Betty’s heaving flirtations as for any desire to have a short journey.
“One half of one hour,” the young man said in a clipped accent. “Please to call me . . .”
A sharp crack outside the coach cut him off, and he cocked his head to one side, listening. Panic seized his blue eyes, and he tore his gaze away from Betty to stare down at his chest. A crimson bloom spread rapidly across the pressed fabric of his shirt.
He blinked, opened and closed his mouth like a fish out of water, gasping for air. “I am shot.” A thin sheen of blood covered his perfect teeth.
Angela heard the driver’s shrill whistle, and fell back against her seat as the horses leaped forward into a frantic gallop along the tilted, hillside road.
“Oh, Dear Lord!” Betty put the hankie to her open mouth and gaped, wide-eyed, at the bleeding man. Angela turned to look out her window, and got a glimpse of approaching riders emerging from a cloud of dust behind them. She heard the German groan. His cool hand yanked back surprisingly hard on her shoulder. If not for the blood and the dazed look in Mueller’s pale eyes, she would have thought this was all part of her father’s idea of an adventure.
“Please, don’t, Miss Kenworth,” Mueller said through clenched teeth. Pink spittle foamed at the corner of his tight lips.
An arrow whistled through the same window and lodged in the wall directly above Mueller with a reverberating thud. Shrieking whoops echoed amid rifle shots and the thwack of more arrows outside the coach. A shadow flew past Angela’s window as the burly man riding shotgun tumbled from his perch.
The coach careened wildly as it picked up speed, bouncing over rocks and ruts. Shad clutched his toy horse, his eyes locked on the German’s glistening red shirt. A crackling wheeze racked the poor man’s body at each ragged breath.
Mueller pressed a hand over his wound. It seemed to help some—just enough for him to speak.
“Not much time,” he groaned, risking a weary glance out his window. “These highwaymen . . . seek money . . . still dangerous. I promise . . . keep you safe. Please . . .” He held a hand out to a cowering Betty to pull her and her son across the coach, leaving the seat next to Angela vacant. Mueller’s wheezing grew worse by the moment, his voice little more than a whispered croak. “Behind you . . . in seat . . . is knob. Push . . .” Mueller’s eyes clouded, fluttering in a vain effort to remain conscious.
He was drowning in his own blood.
Angela’s mind raced while she groped in the crease of smooth leather where the bench met the backrest. It was a tight fit, even for her small hand, and made more difficult by the jigging coach.
This was all impossible. A bone-numbing scream pierced the window as surely as any arrow and made her blood go cold.
Indians.
“I can’t find anything.” Angela’s voice rattled with the coach. She was almost in tears. Searching frantically, her hand finally closed around a cool metal knob. She gave it a push and the leather padding next to her tilted up and forward toward Betty to reveal a hidden compartment the size of a small coffin.
Another bullet smashed into the paneling next to Mueller. Splinters of yellow wood shot across the crimson mess that covered the front of his shirt and oozed between his fingers. He didn’t have enough energy to flinch.
“Your father uses . . . to hide precious cargo.” Mueller rasped. “Today, you are such cargo.”
Angela looked at the dark box and then up at Betty’s pleading eyes. “But there’s only room for one. I can’t . . .”
“No time . . . to argue . . .” The German pulled a black pistol from his waistband and stared resolutely out the window. His breath was shallow, his face sickeningly pale. It seemed a struggle for the once-powerful man to hold the heavy weapon.
“They are upon us.” His voice was no more than a whisper now—hardly audible above the melee. “It is your father’s place . . . to decide . . .”
A volley of gunfire shattered the air. Betty flinched at each report, and Shad pressed his hands against his ears. Above them, the driver gave a muffled yelp and the coach began to slow.
A chorus of hoofbeats grew louder and drowned out the coach wheels amid the yelping shouts of approaching riders. Angela looked again at Betty’s panic-stricken face.
She refused to believe this was happening. “I don’t care what my fa . . .”
Mueller’s head lolled forward: chin on bloody chest. He was beyond arguing.
The shooting stopped.
“Shad, honey,” Angela whispered. She turned the trembling boy’s face away from the gore-covered German. “I need you to lie down in here and be very quiet.” Her voice was higher than normal, tight and overflowing with urgency.
Shad looked up at his mother and sucked his bottom lip. The tips of his small fingers pressed white as he clutched his toy
horse.
“Hurry, sweetie,” Betty said. Her eyes were awash, and her tremulous chest now heaved with terror and grief.
Harsh voices milled outside the slowing coach, mingling with the protestations and snorts of horses jerked to a stop.
Angela looked down at Shad in the compartment. “Quiet now. No matter what you hear.”
The shadow of men on horseback flashed past the window. Moments later, heavy footfalls approached.
The seat snapped shut over little Shad Donahue with a resounding click at the same instant the doors flew open. Rough hands dragged the women from their seats on opposite sides of the coach. After the dimly lit interior, the blazing daylight combined with the shock of their circumstances proved blinding and Angela saw only a dark silhouette. Brutish men with stinking breath pawed at her body and threatened to yank her arms from their sockets.
She struggled against her captors, but bit her lip to keep from screaming.
Betty had no such compunction, and her mournful wails rocked the carriage between them.
CHAPTER 2
Montana
August 19
Except for the spot where the blue-eyed mare kicked him above the left knee, Trap O’Shannon woke feeling reasonably pain-free for someone who’d spent most of his forty-eight years sleeping on the ground. He pulled a thin cotton sheet up around his bare shoulders to ward off the morning chill, and tried to nestle deeper into the feather mattress. A twenty-year-old knife wound, puckered and white, decorated the tan flesh over his left shoulder. The injury had gone all the way to the bone, and it troubled him from time to time, particularly if the weather turned cold. Trap was getting to the age where he babied it a little.