When All Hell Broke Loose
Page 28
The banker’s son, no less.
“Hah!” Mary Kate laughed caustically. “Everbody knows prissy Richard leaves her alone at home every night, to tend those three screaming brats, while he—”
“That’s enough, Mary Kate! I told you I never wanted to hear those nasty rumors again. And what did I just tell you? Get some shoes on!”
Mary Kate stopped at the second step up from the bottom, thrusting the broom back and forth across the first one and shaking her head slowly, hardening her jaws. “Boy, when I’m old enough and have made enough money to flee this back-water cesspool, I’m gonna—”
She looked up when boots thumped on the stoop fronting the Copper Nickel and three men filed into the saloon—two tall men, one blond and quite colorful in his Spanish-style dress. Mary Kate’s father, Rivers, had just seen the trio in the backbar mirror and jerked with such a start that the bottle he’d nearly placed, finally, on the high shelf, tilted forward, slammed into his head—the opposite temple from before—and shattered on the floor at his feet.
Mary Kate looked at her father, who held his head, cursing. Then she turned to the tall, red-blond drink of water standing just inside the batwings. The blond man grinned and winked at her.
Mary Kate brought a hand to her mouth and laughed.
Rivers glared at her, then turned his head slowly to regard the three newcomers. He felt a tightness in his chest, as though someone had punched a fist through his ribs and was squeezing all the blood out of his heart. All three men had their heads turned toward Mary Kate. The blond man was smiling at her. She was smiling back at him, still covering her mouth with her hand.
Rivers did not like the expression on the blond man’s face. Nor on Mary Kate’s. At the moment, however, he felt powerless to speak, let alone do anything to break the trance the blond man—Ned Calico?!—seemed to be holding his daughter in.
Finally, the shortest of the three, but also the heaviest and all of that weight appearing to be muscle, which the man’s gaudy checked brown suit could barely contain, removed his bowler hat from his head and tossed it onto a table. “I don’t know about you fellas,” he said in a heavy Scottish accent, “but this feller could use somethin’ to cut the trail dust!”
He kicked out a chair and glanced at Rivers, who still held a hand to his freshly injured temple. “Barkeep, we’ll take a bottle of the good stuff.”
That made Mary Kate snicker through her nose.
The tall, blond man in the Spanish-style duds broadened his smile, slitting his flat blue eyes and curling his upper lip, revealing a chipped, crooked front tooth that took nothing away from his gambler-like handsomeness. He switched his gaze to Rivers and said, “What’s the matter, apron? Did you hear my friend here? A bottle of the good stuff!”
He stepped forward and kicked out a chair from the table the big man—what was his name? Wheeler? Yeah, that was it. Kinch Wheeler. The third man was Stockton, a laconic, cold-blooded, gimlet-eyed, dark-haired Texan. Rivers hadn’t thought of them, he suddenly realized, in a good many years. But for several years after “the Old Trouble,” as everyone in town back then had called it, he hadn’t been able to get their names . . . as well as their faces . . . out of his head. For years, he’d slept with a loaded shotgun under his bed. Now, just when he’d forgotten them—or hadn’t been remembering them, anyway, and having nightmares about them, and when his shotgun was clear over at the other end of the bar—here they were.
One of them, Ned Calico, making eyes at his daughter the same way he’d made eyes at another girl so long ago . . .
And there wasn’t a damn thing Rivers could do about it.
“The good stuff—pronto!” barked Stockton, as he stepped up to the table and plopped his crisp black bowler down beside Ned Calico’s and Kinch Wheeler’s. He scowled across the room at Rivers. His face was broad, dark, and savage, his hair long and oily. Time had passed. Twelve years. There was some gray in the Texan’s hair, and his face, just like the faces of the other two men, wore the dissolution of age and prison time. But here they were, looking really no worse for the wear.
For the prison wear.
And now, sure as rats around a privy, all hell was about to break loose.
“That man there,” said Ned Calico, leaning against his elbow and pointing an accusing finger at the barman, “is either deaf as a post or dumber’n a boot!”
“I got it, I got it,” Mary Kate said, walking toward the bar with her broom and scowling bewilderedly at her father, who was just staring in slack-jawed shock at his customers.
“No,” Rivers said, finally finding his tongue. “No, I, uh . . . I got it.”
Mary Kate stopped near the bar, scowling at him, baffled by his demeanor.
“No,” said Ned Calico. “Let her do it.” He looked at Mary Kate again and smiled his devil’s smile. “I like her. She’s got a way about her, I can tell. Besides that, she’s barefoot an’ she’s pretty.”
Mary Kate blushed. She turned to the bar, casting her father a mocking, insouciant smile, and stretched her open hand across the mahogany. “You heard the gentlemen, Pa. A bottle of the good stuff.”
Rivers stared at the three spectre-like men lounging in their chairs, smiling at him coldly, savagely, three wolves glowering through the wavering, murky mists of time.
“Mister Rivers, I remember you,” Ned Calico said, throwing his head back and laughing. “Did you miss us, you old devil? Wasn’t you one o’ the townsmen that old lawman roped into helpin’ him take us down when we was drunk as Irish gandy dancers on a Saturday night in Wichita? Why, sure it was!”
He laughed and shook his head, though his eyes had now grown cold with admonishing.
“I hope you got a few more bottles of the good stuff ’cause we’re gonna be here awhile and it’s gonna be a party!”
He looked at Mary Kate. He looked her over really well and blinked those devil’s eyes slowly. Again, the girl flushed.
Calico returned his gaze to the barman and said, “Don’t that make you happy?”
The three wolves watched Rivers’s pale jowls mottle red, and laughed.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of over 300 books, including the bestselling series Smoke Jensen, the Mountain Man, Preacher, the First Mountain Man, MacCallister, Flintlock, and Will Tanner, Deputy U.S. Marshal, and the stand-alone thrillers The Doomsday Bunker, Tyranny, and Black Friday.
Being the all-around assistant, typist, researcher, and fact-checker to one of the most popular western authors of all time, J. A. JOHNSTONE learned from the master, Uncle William W. Johnstone.
The elder Johnstone began tutoring J.A. at an early age. After-school hours were often spent retyping manuscripts or researching his massive American Western History library as well as the more modern wars and conflicts. J.A. worked hard—and learned.
“Every day with Bill was an adventure story in itself. Bill taught me all he could about the art of storytelling. ‘Keep the historical facts accurate,’ he would say. ‘Remember the readers—and as your grandfather once told me, I am telling you now: Be the best J. A. Johnstone you can be.’”
Visit the website at www.williamjohnstone.net.