CHAPTER 2
Pecos turned to Slash and made a face. “Ah, hell. How much we got, Slash?”
Slash sighed as he reached inside his black wool suit coat, which he wore over a pinto vest and suspenders.
“Slow, now,” the limey warned, steadying the aimed Spencer in his hand.
Slowly, Slash reached into the breast pocket of his chambray shirt and withdrew the manila envelope in which he’d collected his and Pecos’s pay after delivering an organ to a canvas dance hall up in Boulder and sundry dry goods and whiskey to a mercantile in Estes Park.
He ran a thumb over the slender stack of bills, making soft, clicking sounds. “One hundred and fifty dollars.”
“What?” the kid said, shocked.
“You heard me.”
“You mean you two old cutthroats ran a load of freight all the way up there into them mountains and are only bringin’ down one hundred and fifty dollars for your trouble?”
Slash felt the flush of embarrassment rise in his leathery but clean-shaven cheeks. Pecos glanced at him. He, too, looked sheepish. It used to be they’d done jobs for thousands of dollars. They never would have done a job—taken down a train or a stagecoach—unless they were sure they’d take home at least three times what they were carrying today for a whole lot more work.
Now, here they were busting their backs several days on the trail for a measly one hundred and fifty.
“That ain’t so bad,” Slash said, indignant.
“And it’s honest,” Pecos added, defensively.
“Jesus Christ!” said the limey, glancing at the kid. “From now on, I reckon we’d best keep our sights on whole freight trains instead of single wagons.”
“And on younger men,” said the redheaded mongrel, Cord, mockery flashing in his eyes.
Slash said, “You could try makin’ an honest livin’ your ownselves.”
“We tried that,” Donny said. “We been bustin’ rocks for two summers. The winters damn near killed us. We found a little color, all right, but not enough for a stake. Hell, this is easier.” He moved toward Slash’s side of the wagon, keeping his rifle aimed straight out from his hip. “Throw it down.”
“We need that money more than you do,” Pecos said.
“You don’t need it.” The kid stopped and looked up darkly at the two former cutthroats, his mouth lengthening, though the corners did not rise. “You ain’t gonna need a dime from here on in.”
“What’re you talkin’ about?” Pecos said.
Quietly, the kid said, “Throw the money down, Slash Braddock. Just toss it down here by my right boot.” The kid tapped the toe of his boot against the ground.
Slash glanced at Pecos. Pecos looked back at him, expressionless.
Slash glanced at the limey, then turned to the kid. “If you’re gonna kill us anyway, why should I turn over the money we worked so hard for?”
“You never know,” the kid said with quiet menace, dark amusement glinting in his cold eyes, “I might change my mind . . . once I see the money. It’s enough to buy us all whiskey and girls for a coupla nights, anyway. We haven’t had neither in several days now.
“Throw it down, Slash,” the limey ordered.
Pecos turned to his partner, his eyes wide with fear. “Oh, hell—throw it down, Slash. Don’t give ’em a reason to kill us.” He glanced at Donny. “You wouldn’t kill two old codgers in cold blood, would you, boy? Throw it down, Slash. Throw it down, an’ let’s go home!”
“Yeah,” Cord said, moving slowly toward the wagon, stepping around the mules and striding toward Slash’s side of the driver’s box. The Mexican was sidling around toward Pecos. “Throw the money down, Slash . . . so you old cutthroats can go on home. Looks like one of you has lost his nerve in his old age.”
He stopped and blinked once, smiling.
“Oh, lordy,” Pecos said, throatily.
Slash glanced at him. “What is it, Pecos?”
“My ticker.”
“What?”
“My ticker. It’s . . . it’s actin’ up again.” Sweat dribbled down the middle-aged cutthroat’s cheeks.
“Ah, Jesus, Pecos—not now!”
“What the hell’s happening?” Donny said.
“Ah, hell,” Pecos said, leaning forward, dropping a knee onto the driver’s boot’s splintered wooden floor. “I can’t . . . I can’t breathe, Slash!”
“What the hell is going on?” asked the limey, striding down the slope, letting his rifle hang nearly straight down along his right leg.
“Can’t you see the poor man’s havin’ ticker trouble?” Slash said, dropping to a knee beside his partner.
“He’s fakin’ it,” said the kid. “He ain’t havin’ ticker trouble.”
Slash shot an angry look at him. “Yes, he is. It started a couple months back. We were hefting heavy freight down from the wagon box, and his chest tightened up on him and his arm went numb. He said he felt like a mule kicked him.” He turned back to Pecos, who was really sweating now, face mottled both red and gray. “Fight it, Pecos. Fight it off . . . just like last time!”
“I’ll be damned,” said the limey, leaning forward over the wagon’s left front wheel and tipping his head to one side to stare up into Pecos’s face. “I think he really is having ticker complaints.” He chuckled and glanced at the kid. “I think we done made the Pecos River Kid so nervous, his heart is givin’ out on him!”
They all had a good laugh at that.
Meanwhile, Slash patted his partner’s back and said, “We need to get him down from here. We need to get him off the wagon and into some shade. Anybody got any whiskey? The sawbones told him he should have a few swigs of who-hit-John when he feels a spell comin’ on.”
“Yeah, I got whiskey,” the limey said. “But I sure as hell ain’t sharin’ it with him.”
They all had another good round of laughs.
“Just hand the money down, you old mossyhorn,” the kid said, extending his hand up toward Slash, who’d stuffed the envelope into his coat pocket. “Then you can be on your way and get that poor old broken-down excuse for the Pecos River Kid to a pill roller . . . if he lives that long.” He snapped his fingers impatiently. “Come on, hand it down, Slash. I ain’t gonna ask you again!”
“Oh, hell!” Slash said, drawing the envelope out of his coat pocket. “Here, take the blasted money!” He threw the envelope down. In doing so, he revealed the small, silver-chased, pearl-gripped over-and-under derringer he’d also pulled out of his pocket and that was residing in the palm of his right hand.
He flipped the gun upright. He closed his right index finger over one of the two eyelash triggers housed inside the brass guard. He shoved the pretty little popper down toward the kid, who blinked up at him, slow to comprehend what he’d just spied in Slash’s hand, his mind still on the money beside his right boot.
There was a pop like a stout branch snapping under a heavy foot.
The kid flinched as though he’d been pestered by a fly. His eyes snapped wide. Instantly, the rifle tumbled from his hands as he lifted them toward the ragged hole in the right side of his slender, lightly freckled neck.
A half an eye wink after the derringer spoke, Pecos, recovering miraculously from his near-death experience, shoved his right hand beneath the driver’s seat just off his right shoulder. He closed his hand around the neck of the twelve-gauge sawed-off shotgun housed there in the strap-iron cage he’d rigged for it, constructed to resemble part of the seat’s spring frame.
He pulled the short, savage-looking gut-shredder out from beneath the seat and swung it in a broad arc toward the limey, who’d just turned to stare in shock toward where the kid’s precious bodily fluids were geysering out of the hole in his neck. As the Brit’s eyes flicked toward Pecos, dropping his lower jaw in sudden exasperation as he began raising his rifle once more, Pecos tripped one of the double-bore’s two triggers.
The limey’s head turned tomato-red and bounded backward off the man’s shoulders. Even as
the limey was still raising the Spencer in his hands, his head bounced into the brush and rocks beside the trail.
As the head continued rolling and bouncing, like a child’s bright-red rubber ball, Slash slid the smoking derringer toward Cord, who shouted, “Hey!” and lunged forward, raising his Henry repeater. The gray-eyed Cord didn’t quite get the butt plate snugged against his shoulder before Slash squeezed the pretty little popper’s second eyelash trigger.
Having only one more round with which to save himself from St. Pete’s bitter judgment, Slash decided to play the odds. He aimed for the redheaded mongrel’s broad chest and curled his upper lip in satisfaction as the bullet nipped the end off the man’s string tie as it plowed through his shirt into his breastbone and then probably into his heart.
“Oh!” the redhead said through a grunt, looking down at his chest in shock as he staggered backward, the Henry wilting in his arms.
At least, it appeared to Slash that “Oh!” is what the man said as the bullet shredded his ticker. He didn’t know for sure, for the man’s exclamation, whatever it was, was resolutely drowned out by the second, dynamite-like blast of Pecos’s twelve-gauge on the other side of the wagon.
That fist-sized round of double-ought buck punched through the chest of the Mexican, who, just like his cohort on the other side of the mules from him, was bounding forward as he realized he and his brethren had just found themselves in dire straits. He didn’t get his rifle raised even halfway before the buckshot picked him two feet off the ground and hurled him straight back into the brush already bloodied by the limey’s disembodied head.
Meanwhile, Slash looked at the redheaded mongrel who’d stumbled backward to sit down against a boulder a few feet off the trail. He sat there against the rock, his chest rising and falling sharply as blood continued to well out of his chest and turn his shirt dark red.
He stared at Slash in slack-jawed, wide-eyed shock and said, “I’ll be damned if you didn’t kill me.”
“If I hit your ticker, then you’d be correct,” Slash said. “Do you think I hit your ticker? There’s a chance it might have ricocheted off your brisket and missed your heart. If so, I’d better reload.”
Cord shook his head once, his gray eyes glazed with deepening shock and exasperation. “No, no. You got my ticker, all right.” He paused, staring at Slash, then added simply, “Hell,” because in his shock and mind-numbing realization that he was teetering on the lip of the cosmos, he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Slash couldn’t blame him. He didn’t know from personal experience, of course, but he was sure that the place where Cord was just now entering was hard for a mere mortal to wrap his mind around. Slash would know soon enough. Every day, he was a little closer and more and more aware of that bitter fact . . .
Slash looked at the kid, who was rolling around on the ground, squealing like a stuck pig and cursing like a gandy dancer, clamping his hands over his neck, for all the good it did him. He was losing blood fast.
Slash looked across the wagon to see the carnage Pecos’s shotgun had left in the brush over there. He glanced at his partner, who was just then breaking open his twelve-gauge and plucking out the smoking, spent wads.
“How’s your ticker?” Slashed asked him.
Pecos grinned. “Better.”
Slash chuckled as he climbed down off the side of the high, stout wagon, a Pittsburgh freighter he and Pecos had bought along with the business. He walked over to the brush where he’d tossed his weapons and picked up one of his .45s.
“I need help,” the kid croaked out, sitting up against a rock, holding his hands over his neck.
“You’re askin’ the wrong jake, kid.”
“Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!”
“Kid, even if you weren’t already a goner, I’d still kill you. Think I’d leave a little demon like you alive to sow your demon seed? What this world does not need is more of you.”
The kid’s eyes appeared ready to pop out of their sockets. “Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!”
Slash killed him with a neat, round hole through the middle of the kid’s forehead.
The demon spawn fell back against the ground and lay quivering.
“Kid,” Slash said, flicking open his Colt’s loading gate and shaking out the spent round, “I’ve come to know that what we want in this life and what we get are very rarely the same damn thing.” He glanced at Pecos, who was staring down at him from the driver’s boot. “Ain’t that right, partner?”
Pecos laughed and shook his head as he shoved his shotgun back into its cage beneath the seat. “Partner, sometimes your wisdom astounds me. Purely, it does!”
CHAPTER 3
Slash and Pecos chinned for a time about what to do with the dead men.
Slash wanted to drag them off the trail and bury them under a few rocks. They weren’t worth burying, but since they were men, albeit no-accounts to a man-jack of them, he supposed someone should make at least a little effort by way of laying them to rest.
Pecos, more tenderhearted than his lean, dark, and moody partner, wanted to deliver the dead men to the town marshal in Fort Collins. “I mean, they might have family in the area, Slash. Or family somewhere. If one of your kin met his demise, you’d want to know about it. You wouldn’t just want to have to think about it all the rest of your life, would you? To be left to imagine all the various nasty ways they might have met their ends? I mean, even if said kin had gotten exactly what they deserved . . .”
Pecos usually won such arguments. He won this one, as well. As hard and cynical as Slash was, he knew his partner was the better man. Besides, he always felt guiltily wicked when he found himself trying to argue with Pecos’s moral authority. He might have been a wicked man in other folks’ eyes, but he didn’t like feeling that way himself.
Also, he had an ulterior motive in caving in to his partner’s wishes so easily. There was a chance there was a bounty on the heads of one or all of these men. Slash figured this wasn’t their first holdup. If so, and if someone had put a reward on their heads—well, in this humbler life the two former cutthroats were now living on the right side of the law—he and Pecos could use all the extra cash they could get.
They loaded the dead men into the wagon, covered them with the canvas tarpaulin they’d used to cover their freight on the way into the mountains a couple of days ago, and vamoosed on up the trail. When they came to a broad, grassy area in some trees along Marmot Creek, they pulled off the trail and into the shade of the breeze-ruffled aspens and pines. They fed and watered the mules and built a fire over which they boiled coffee.
It was midday, after all. They had only a few hours of travel before they’d be home, and besides, they weren’t as young as they used to be—a fact so wickedly emphasized by the men now lying belly-up in the wagon.
Slash Braddock and the Pecos River Kid needed a break.
“How in the hell did you do that, Pecos?” Slash asked after he’d taken a sip of his piping-hot, oily black mud.
Pecos glanced at him from where he sprawled against a grain sack on the other side of the fire. “How did I do what?”
“You know—make your face go so pale and cause that sweat to pop out on your forehead. For a few seconds there, you had me goin’. I was afraid you really were having a heart stroke!”
“Truth be told,” Pecos said, taking a sip from his own, steaming cup, “for a few seconds there, I was worried I was, too!” He gave a sheepish chuckle, then took another sip of his coffee.
“What?”
“I wasn’t fakin’ it, Slash.” Pecos looked at him directly over the low, crackling flames. “At least, not at first. For some reason, when I tossed away my weapons and it was just you and me sittin’ up there, facin’ them four cutthroats who looked so damn eager to snuff our wicks, a strange feelin’ came over me. It was like I was suddenly runnin’ a powerful fever. My heart started poundin’ and bangin’ against my ribs. I felt like someone had
shoved a dull, rusty knife in my guts. My back got so damn stiff, I felt I couldn’t move!”
He shook his head and stared off into space. “I can’t figure it, partner. You an’ me rode roughshod over thirty years. We faced lawmen an’ bounty hunters—some o’ the best on the whole damn frontier—an’ nothin’ like that ever happened to me before. Seems like . . . seems like lately . . . I been more aware of . . .”
He let his voice trail off, as though he were having trouble finding the right words. He turned to Slash and continued with, “I don’t know . . . I guess lately I just been more aware of the sand in the ole hourglass. You know? Been . . . well, I been thinkin’ about . . . you know . . . the end. Kinda scares me a little. You know?”
“Yeah.” Slash nodded as he stared into the dancing flames. “I know.”
“You, too?”
Slash looked at Pecos. “Yeah. Me, too.” He sipped his coffee, sighed, and thumbed his hat back off his forehead. “That young juniper’s crazy eyes sort o’ got to me, as well. It was like death starin’ right at me, an’ I realized then and there that I wasn’t ready for it.”
“Hell’s bells.” Pecos raked a thumb down his bearded cheek and shook his head fatefully.
“You know what I think’s causin’ us both to get gloomy?”
“What’s that?”
“Boredom.”
Pecos scowled. “Huh?”
“You heard me. Neither of us had jobs like this—haulin’ freight. Aside from what happened earlier, these long hauls have been nothin’ but back-busting on each end and boring in between. Hell, sometimes I imagine we got a posse on our tails just to keep from falling asleep . . . or just to entertain myself, to keep my heart pumpin’!”
Pecos shrugged and recrossed his ankles, stretched out before him. “Oh, I don’t know about that, Slash. I don’t think I’m bored.”
“You’re bored, Pecos. You just don’t wanna admit it.”
“Okay, so say we are bored. Say we do have too much time to think about things. What’re we gonna do about it?”
A Good Day for a Massacre Page 2