A Good Day for a Massacre

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  “A what?” both Slash and Pecos said at the same time, flabbergasted by the ever-growing complexity of these modern times.

  “I told you we should have buried those boys under rocks,” Slash told Pecos, when the coroner, unhappy at having been roused from his smoking parlor, had come to collect the dead men and the three deputies had returned to their courthouse office, smoking, shaking their heads, and casting suspicious glances over their shoulders at the two freighters. “Now we’re gonna have to have a talk with Decker and the coroner, and you know how that fat badge-toter is always givin’ us the woolly eyeball.”

  “What’s right is right, Slash. I mean Jimmy, damnit!”

  “Dammit, how are we gonna get out of the habit of usin’ the old handles?” Slash said, rocking back on the seat as Pecos pulled the mules up to the small compound of their freighting office, which was flanked by a stable and a barn. “Maybe we oughta get ourselves hypnotized.”

  “Ah, hell,” Pecos said, “we’ll remember when the chips are down. Besides, we don’t overly socialize in town all that much. Hell, this job has us toolin’ around the mountains most days of the week. Breaking our butts for pennies and pisswater,” he added with a surly grumble.

  “Yeah, well, I reckon it’s better than what most range hands make in a whole month.”

  “Yeah, but most range hands are young,” Pecos said. “We’re gettin’ old, Slash. We gotta start savin’ up for our retirement.”

  “Jesus,” Slash growled, leaping down off the wagon when Pecos had drawn it up in front of the main corral. “You are one dark and depressing cuss tonight, Pec—I mean, Melvin. Galldangit, anyway!”

  He kicked a front wheel.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t got a woman to go see. Nor one to marry, neither. Hell, you won’t need to work once you marry Jaycee.” Pecos looked around. “Now, where do you suppose Todd’s at? He’s supposed to be out here takin’ care of this team.”

  Todd Elwood was the young wrangler they’d hired about a month ago to help out around the barn. He had a history of drunkenness and general sloth, Elwood did, but he’d promised he’d lay off the Taos lightning if Slash and Pecos would give him the job. He’d been plumb tired of bouncing around from one ranch spread to another.

  Slash looked around, fists on his hips. He called for Elwood but was met with only silence from the darkest corners of the freight yard. No lamps appeared to be burning anywhere.

  “I’d say he’s on a tear,” Slash said with a sigh.

  “Damn his drunken hide!” Pecos cursed again. “That’s what we get for giving a firebrand a second chance.”

  “I had a bad feelin’ about him, and I told you so,” Slash said. “He had layabout written all over him. Your problem is you got too big a heart.”

  “Oh, shut up!”

  “Don’t tell me to shut up!”

  “Shut up!” Pecos walked around the front of the wagon to help Slash unhitch the team. He cast a glance back toward the giant, glittering jewel of the House of a Thousand Delights, from which they could still hear the fiddle music, albeit faintly. “As I was sayin’ about Jay . . . if she ain’t by now, she’s soon gonna be one of the most money-eyed women in the whole damn county if not all of eastern Colorado Territory!”

  That gave Slash pause. As he worked on snaps and buckles and removed hames and harnesses, he too glanced toward the Thousand Delights. He hadn’t thought of Jay’s money.

  Could he suck his pride down deep enough to marry a woman who would for all intents and purposes be supporting him?

  “Me?” Pecos said, taking a bridle strap in his teeth. “They’ll likely be digging a shallow grave for me out in potter’s field.”

  “Oh, shut up, will ya?”

  Pecos looked at him, his eyes sharply indignant even in the relative darkness of the unlit freight yard. “Now, what the hell’s got into you?”

  “Oh, just stitch your mouth closed, will you?”

  Slash cursed and began leading the team through the open corral gate.

  Pecos yelled behind him that he should do something physically impossible to himself.

  * * *

  Slash’s mood improved later, after he and Pecos had taken whores’ baths in their respective rooms in their cabin flanking the freight yard office.

  He and Pecos had silently agreed, as they always did after one of their frequent dustups, to bury the hatchet. They might argue bitterly from time to time but never for long. They brushed their clothes, rolled cigarettes, took a few pulls from a bottle, then tramped off side by side toward the Thousand Delights for drinks and supper—and, of course, so Slash could see Jaycee.

  He wasn’t planning on asking the woman to marry him tonight. In fact, he still hadn’t decided whether he ever would pop the Big Question. While the whiskey had sanded the rough edges off the day, he was still wrestling with the idea of marriage. He shoved his hand in his coat pocket just to make sure the ring was still there, on the off chance his heart would overrule his mind and his pride and he’d blurt out a proposal.

  It was still there, inside the small maple ring box, the box’s top adorned with an antique gold metal flower with a rose crystal in the center. The inside of the box was lined with white burlap. Slash had to chuckle, thinking of his crusty old man, dead now these thirty years, buying such a feminine bauble for his mother, oh so many years ago.

  But, then, the boy his father had been must have been as gone for Slash’s mother as Slash now found himself gone for Jaycee Breckenridge . . .

  “Stop thinkin’.”

  Slash glanced at Pecos as they both walked up the broad wooden steps fronting the Thousand Delights. “What?”

  “Stop thinkin’ about it.”

  “Stop thinkin’ about what?”

  “You know what. Just follow your heart, or you’ll work yourself up so bad you’ll turn tail and run all the way back to Missouri, yippin’ like a butt-shot coyote.” Pecos chuckled as he paused to toss his quirley into the dirt of the street behind them.

  “Oh, shut up!” Slash snarled, and pushed through the batwings.

  The main saloon hall was filled to near bursting. Slash and Pecos had to sidestep their way through the men as well as Jay’s painted, scantily clad girls. The potpourri of male and female aromas was nearly overwhelming after several days of sniffing only the pure, high-country air.

  Tobacco smoke hovered in a thick fog, skeining like ghostly snakes in the lights of the crystal chandeliers and gas lamps that lit up the well-appointed saloon, which resembled the tony set of some stage play or a mine magnate’s ballroom.

  Varnished oak, velvet draperies, expensive wall hangings, shining brass spittoons, and glistening leaded-glass mirrors shone every which way. Some of the floor was carpeted. Some was hard maple. The fiddle music, now accompanied by a horn or two as well as a guitar, was issuing from a side room given over to dancing. Slash could hear the cowboys letting their hair down, yipping and laughing and stomping their boots.

  When Slash and Pecos finally made it to the bar, squeezing in between two drummers who didn’t look happy about being crowded, one of the barmen, Vance Taylor, saw them and said, “Hey, Slash!”

  “Set us up—will you, Vance? And, uh . . . where’s Jay?” He’d been looking around but so far hadn’t spotted her.

  Taylor, flushed and harried, glanced at the ceiling. “She asked me to have you two head on up to her suite.”

  Slash and Pecos cut befuddled looks at each other. “Her suite?” Pecos said. “Both of us?”

  Taylor just shrugged and then waltzed off to fill shouted drink orders with the two other aprons, all dolled up in pinstriped shirts, celluloid collars, foulard ties, and sleeve garters, working behind the broad, horseshoe bar.

  Slash and Pecos again worked their way through the crowd and up the broad, carpeted stairs. As they headed down the third-floor hall toward Jay’s suite of rooms, Pecos said, “What do you suppose she wants to see both of us about?”

  “Your guess is as g
ood as mine.”

  “That kind of cramps your style a little, don’t it, partner?” Again, Pecos gave a mocking grin. “I mean, you probably don’t want me around when you drop to a knee.”

  “If you don’t shut up, you’re gonna find out it’s true that the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

  Pecos snorted a devious laugh.

  They stopped at Jay’s door.

  Slash tapped lightly three times. “Jay? It’s Slash an’—I mean, it’s Jimmy and Melvin!”

  He cursed under his breath. Their given names sounded so foreign as to be comical.

  He frowned at the door. Behind it was only silence.

  He was about to tap again when a strangling, gagging sound rose from inside.

  “Slash! Pecos!” Jay screamed. “Hit the deck—it’s a trap!”

  CHAPTER 5

  You didn’t have to tell the former Slash Braddock and the former Pecos River Kid more than once that they’d walked into a trap. They’d moseyed into several over their long and storied outlaw careers, barely escaping with their lives at times.

  They both hit the deck so fast that any onlooker would have thought their old legs had suddenly turned to wet mud. No sooner had their chests hit the nicely carpeted hall floor than an explosion sounded from behind Jay’s door. A round of what could only have been double-ought buckshot blew a pumpkin-sized hole through the door’s top panel.

  Chunks of wood peppered both Slash and Pecos, lying prone in the hall. Chunks and slivers flew against the opposite wall.

  “Die, you cutthroat bastards—die!” bellowed a man on the heels of the first blast and on the nose end of the next.

  Ka-boom!

  The second blast was every bit as loud as the first, if not louder. It seemed to make the hall floor buck up hard beneath Slash and Pecos.

  A second hole joined the first hole, slightly lower down than the first one and connecting the two, so that now there was a single, hourglass-shaped hole in the middle of the door roughly the size of a rain barrel’s mouth. More wood chunks littered the two prone cutthroats and the floor around them.

  Silence.

  Slash lifted his head and turned to Pecos. Pecos looked back at him. Wood slivers peppered his hair, his beard, and his clothes. His blue eyes were bright with apprehension as, gritting his teeth, he reached down for the big Russian holstered on his right thigh.

  As Slash reached for one of his Colts, a man inside the room said in a low, tense voice, “You think we got ’em?”

  “Let’s make sure,” said another voice.

  “No!” Jay screamed.

  “You shut up, woman!” bellowed the last man who’d spoken.

  As Slash and Pecos scrambled to their feet, what sounded like six-shooters began popping inside the room. The bullets screeched through the hole the two-bore had punched through the door and made new, smaller holes of their own. A couple even punched through the wall.

  Slash rose to a crouch and pressed his left shoulder against the wall to the left of the door. Pecos rose and pressed his thick right shoulder against the wall to the door’s right, wincing as the bullets continued to punch through the door and through the walls to either side of him and Pecos, a couple coming within a cat’s whisker of hitting pay dirt.

  They didn’t have time to wait around and keep hoping the men inside the room would continue to miss their marks until they emptied their pistols.

  Slash turned to Pecos and yelled above the din, “Whatever you do—don’t hit Jay!”

  He and Pecos glanced around the sides of the door to peer through the large hole the two-bore had carved. They swung their pistols up and shoved them through the hole and went to work, hurling lead at their targets inside the room, evoking indignant wails and curses and silencing the guns of the three men who were standing about seven feet back from the door, hurling lead through it.

  Or had been hurling lead through it, blindly. Like fools.

  Until Slash and Pecos had taken steady aim at their targets and sent the three gutless bushwhackers breaking into bizarre death dances and wailing and shooting their pistols into the floor and ceiling. When Slash, peering through the hole and into the smoky room beyond, saw that all three men were down, he pushed through the door, breaking out a remaining chunk of it and stepping into the room, keeping his six-gun aimed straight out in front of him.

  Pecos followed him in, breaking out what was left of the door.

  The two cutthroats stood side by side, peering through the smoke at the two shooters lying twisted on the carpeted floor before them. The third man was crawling away toward their right, toward an open window above Jay’s pink brocade fainting couch. Trying to gain his feet, holding a smoking six-shooter in one hand and clamping his other hand over his chest, the man glanced over his shoulder at Slash and Pecos.

  “Don’t shoot me! Oh, God—please don’t shoot me!”

  At the same time, Slash and Pecos’s pistols roared.

  The man dropped to the floor near the fainting couch and lay quivering as he died.

  Slash turned to his left, toward Jay’s large, canopied, four-poster bed. Through the thick, wafting smoke he saw Jay lying on her side, hog-tied, bound wrists tied to her bound ankles behind her back. She lay diagonally across the bed with its thick red silk, down-filled comforter, and she was staring in wide-eyed terror toward Slash and Pecos.

  “Oh, God!” Jay cried, her thick copper tresses lying in tangles across her shoulders and down her back, the top of which was exposed by her low-cut velveteen gown. “Oh, God—I thought for sure they were gonna kill my boys. I just knew they were gonna kill you!”

  She lifted her chin, sobbing.

  “Oh, fer chrissakes!”

  Slash hurried over to her. He saw a thick, wadded stocking on the bed near her head. They must have gagged her with the sock, but she’d managed to spit it out when Slash had knocked on the door. If she hadn’t warned them, “her boys,” as she called Slash and Pecos in her typically endearing way, would indeed be wolf bait.

  “Jay, are you all right?” Slash asked, sliding a lock of copper hair back from her left cheek with his hand, raking his gaze up and down her body, looking for injuries. “Did they hurt you?”

  Jay stifled another sob and shook her head, tears rolling down her lovely, finely sculpted cheeks. “I’m all right, Slash!”

  Slash dropped to a knee beside the bed and slid his face up close to hers, keeping his hand on her cheek. “What the hell happened? Who were they?”

  Pecos answered for her. “Jack Penny.”

  Slash turned to him. “What?”

  Pecos stood over one of the men sprawled in death on the floor several feet from the foot of Jay’s bed. He glanced over his shoulder at Slash. “Our old friend Jack Penny. Remember him?”

  “How could I forget?” Slash straightened and walked over to stare down at the bounty hunter, who lay on his back, slack in death. Jack Penny was a tall, long-limbed, bearded man with one unmoored blue eye, which had rolled to the outside of its socket while the other one stared straight up as though back at the two living men staring down. Penny wore a mismatched suit, badly worn, and his long, brown-gray hair stood out in patches around his hatless head. His brown Stetson lay on the floor beside him.

  He stank of stale whiskey and tobacco smoke.

  Blood oozed from two bullet holes in his chest.

  Slash said, “How do you suppose he found us here? And . . . why? Since he was in cahoots with ole Bleed-Em-So, he must’ve known those bounties on our heads aren’t good anymore.”

  “Uh, fellas?”

  Slash and Pecos turned to Jay, who still lay hog-tied on the bed. “I hate to interrupt your serious discussion, but do you suppose . . . ?” With a taut smile, she jerked her eyes to indicate the ropes binding her wrists and ankles behind her.

  “Ah, Jesus—sorry about that, darlin’!” Slash hurried over to the bed.

  By now, thunder rose from the hall as men ran up from downstairs to see what a
ll the shooting had been about. As Slash pulled his bowie knife from his sheath and cut the ropes binding Jay, a big, mustached gent poked his head through the ruined door, looking around.

  This was Charlie Lattimore, one of the three bouncers, all the size of small mountains, Jay had hired to keep peace about the Thousand Delights. The beefy gent with thick, curly, dark-brown hair beneath his crisp bowler was holding a sawed-off, double-barrel shotgun in both his ham-sized hands.

  Lattimore was a street tough from back east. He spoke with a thick Boston brogue. He wasn’t very smart, nor much to look at—his face was badly scarred, and one ear was cauliflowered almost beyond recognition—but his very presence alone usually served to keep the clientele on their best behavior.

  Usually.

  “Bloody hell!” he cried, hardening his jaws as he looked at the dead men, at Slash and Pecos, and then at Jay on the bed. He glanced at the loud, milling crowd that had gathered behind him, said, “Stay back, you men!” then pushed through the door and into the room. “What in the name of Jesus, Joseph, an’ me dear sweet Mary happened here, Miss Breck—”

  “Long story,” Jay said, sitting up now and rubbing the circulation back into her hands. “All is well now, Charlie. Just please send someone for the marshal, will you?”

  “Will do, ma’am!” Lattimore retreated through the door, admonished the crowd once more, and then stomped off to fetch the local law.

  Slash sat on the edge of the bed beside Jay. “You sure you’re all right? They didn’t hit you or anything?” He looked her over carefully, again finding no obvious sign of injury. Her body was just how Slash remembered—splendid in every curve and plane. Even in her forties, Jaycee Breckenridge was still a heartbreaker.

  “I’m all right, Slash,” Jay said, smiling sweetly up at him, her jade eyes glowing in the light of a nearby lamp. “Really.” The smile disappeared, replaced by a deep frown as she glanced from Slash to Pecos and back again. “It’s you boys I was worried about. I thought for sure he was going to make good on his promise and turn you under with that ugly shotgun of his.”