“What?” Pecos said.
“Look at him. He’s sweating.”
This nudged Miss Langdon’s mind out of the paperwork before her. She turned her head to frown over her shoulder toward Slash sitting on the other side of Pecos from her.
“I am not!” Slash said. He brushed his hand across his left cheek and looked at it. He’d be damned if he wasn’t sweating, after all. “Well, if I am, it’s because you got a fire goin’ on a warm night. Good Lord, man, who lights a fire out here in August?”
“This is a chilly night for August,” Miss Langdon said in her quiet, sonorous voice.
Bledsoe narrowed his eyes at Pecos. “You are, too.”
“I’m what?”
“Sweatin’!” Bledsoe pounded his fist on his desk. “Look at ya, both of ya sittin’ there sweatin’, fairly salivating at the thought of hightailing it all the way to Mexico with a hundred thousand dollars in high-grade gold!”
“Oh, hell!” Pecos said, quickly turning his head to Bledsoe’s pretty assistant and saying, “Uh . . . pardon my farm talk, Miss Langdon.”
She lowered her eyes and half-smiled, flushing in the flickering lamplight.
Turning to Bledsoe again, Pecos said, “You can’t make a dog not lick his chops at the smell of fresh beef. That don’t mean he’s gonna rise up on his hind feet and snag a T-bone off the cookin’ range.”
“My partner’s right for once in his life,” Slash said. “You can’t keep us from droolin’ over the thought of that much gold. Lord knows we tried for that much a time or two, but never even got close. But we’re not stupid enough to actually run off with the Cloud Tickler’s ingots. Of course, you’d run us down before we even got to Denver, and we’d be hangin’ from the gallows outside the Federal Building faster’n a judge could hammer his gavel. We know that. We’re not stupid despite how Pecos might look.”
Pecos gave him a frosty smile. “Thank you for so nobly rushing to my defense, partner.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Miss Langdon snorted, then turned around quickly and dug back into her paperwork, scribbling away with her ink pen.
“Rest assured you’d be run down, all right,” Bledsoe assured the cutthroats. “You wouldn’t get far. And, believe me, the deputy marshals who ran you down would have marching orders not to waste time taking you back to Denver, where you’d only waste more taxpayers’ dollars on a worthless court trial. They’d be under orders to hang you from the nearest tree and to leave you there, a feast for the buzzards and crows!”
Bledsoe pounded his desk once more. “Now get out of here. Miss Langdon and I still got a pile of work to plow through before we head back to the oversized stockyard perdition of Denver.”
“When are we due in Tin Cup?” Slash asked.
“As soon as you get there. The Pinkertons are en route even as we palaver. Here—take this.” Bledsoe tossed the manila folder over to Slash’s side of the desk. “That’s the file on the operation. The name of your contact in Tin Cup is in there. It’s a Pink—you know, one of Pinkerton’s female operatives. Make sure—let me repeat—make damn good and sure that file doesn’t leave your side. Once you know everything that’s in there, burn it.” He frowned suddenly, cutting his gaze between the two men. “Say . . . you two can read, can’t you?”
“Of course, we can read!” Slash said, chuckling his exasperation at the question as he flipped open the file. “Leastways, I can. I don’t know about—”
“I can read just fine!” Pecos growled, rising from his chair.
“Say, Chief?” Slash said, also gaining his feet. “You said we was supposed to haul a load of freight up to Tin Cup. To make us look genuine, I assume. What freight did you have in mind?”
Bledsoe shrugged and looked up impatiently. “I don’t know. Why don’t you just fill the back of your freight wagon with firewood or something like that? Tie a tarp over it so no one’s the wiser. Unload it once you get up there. And make sure no one sees what it really is, or your goose is cooked!”
Slash and Pecos shared a glance, shrugged.
“Nice palaverin’ with ya, Chief,” Slash said, donning his hat as he headed for the door.
Bledsoe only grumbled and muttered something incoherent as he picked up his own ink pen and began scribbling, holding his spectacles on his nose with one hand.
Pecos headed for the door behind Slash, turning toward Bledsoe’s pretty assistant and saying, “Just wanted to mention you look especially fine this evening, Miss Langdon.”
Miss Langdon looked up quickly, arching her brows over her lovely eyes in surprise. “Oh . . . well, uh . . . thank you, Mister Bak—”
Backing toward the door and holding his hat over his heart, Pecos said, “No, no—please, call me Melvin.”
“Oh . . . well, then, uh . . . thank you for that nice compliment, Melvin.”
“Be seein’ you now,” Pecos said.
“Good-bye,” Abigail Langdon said, giving a little wave.
Pecos backed out the door. Slash grabbed a chair and thrust it behind him, turning it sideways. Pecos backed into it, ramming it over on its side, then giving an indignant cry as he twisted around, tripping over it and falling to the floor with a booming thud.
Chuckling, Slash ran to the batwings.
Pecos rolled up on his side. He saw Miss Langdon standing in the open door to Bledsoe’s office, holding a hand over her mouth in deep dismay.
Pecos’s cheeks turned as hot as a branding iron. He swung his head toward where Slash was just then running through the batwings, and yelled, “Come back fer your whippin’, you black-hearted son of Satan!”
CHAPTER 9
“Slash, you know what I think?” Pecos said later that night as the two former cutthroats lay in their respective cots, on opposite ends of their small, crude cabin behind their just-as-small and crude freighting office.
“Forget it.”
“Huh?”
“If you’re thinkin’ I should help you use the privy after all that steak an’ beans you had for supper—not to mention beer and whiskey—forget it. You’re too damn big an’ drunk, and I drank too much whiskey my ownself to stay on my own two feet. You’d fall and kill us both.”
It was true. After they’d gotten back to Fort Collins, they’d headed for the Bon-Ton Café on Larimer Avenue, where they’d proceeded to pad out their empty bellies with liberal portions of red meat, beans, and sourdough bread. They followed that up with whiskey in a little cantina on the other side of the street. They’d decided that after the dustup earlier in Jay’s room, they’d probably best not show their faces in the Thousand Delights for a while. Someone might recognize them for who they really were and complicate their lives.
Pecos’s wrath over Slash’s high jinks out at the Cormorant had dissipated quickly. The big cutthroat could blaze as hot as a pistol in mid-fire, but the smoke and flames usually cleared just as quickly as they had erupted. Especially when his ire was directed at Slash. They could get into all-out brawls, the cutthroats could, but they were the brawls of brothers, not true-blue enemies.
Pecos’s wrath would burn down quickly, even when Slash did something as boyishly devilish as what he’d done to his partner out in Cedar City, in front of the gal for whom he had developed an animal-like attraction. Pecos knew Slash had merely been out to amuse himself as well as to distract himself from one Miss Jaycee Breckenridge. Pecos knew Jay was on Slash’s mind. Her and the fancy-Dan town marshal, that was. Pecos always knew what Slash was thinking, just as Slash could read his partner’s mind as well.
“That ain’t what I’m thinkin’ about,” Pecos said. “I’m too drunk to even think about usin’ the privy even with help. I was layin’ here thinkin’, waiting for this cabin to stop turnin’ circles around me, that one reason Bledsoe selected us for that job up in Tin Cup is because he’s wanting to get our goats.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Ain’t I right?”
“You’re right, all right. One of the rare
times.”
“He’s probably just chucklin’ to himself right now, as he’s rollin’ back toward Denver, about how that gold is going to affect us. And there’s not gonna be a damn thing we can do about it, ’cause we both know we’d never make a clean break with it.”
“Oh, yeah,” Slash said, keeping one bare foot on the floor as he tried to steady the cabin that was swirling around him, as well. “He’s a devil, all right.” He chuckled. “He’ll ram the knife into each of us whenever he can, gettin’ us back for past history. He can’t jail us or hang us anymore, but he can do what he can to ride roughshod on us. Give us all the toughest, most dangerous jobs, likely half-hopin’ in the back of his mind that we’ll eventually get fed a pill we can’t digest.”
“He’s takin’ his revenge on us, ain’t he?”
“Oh, yeah.” Slash chuckled again as he stared up at the ceiling. Or tried to. It was hard to stare straight at something that was moving. “He knows us too well, don’t he?”
“All too well.” Slash turned his head to stare at his partner, whose lumpy silhouette was all he could see over there on the other end of the cabin. “You know what I was layin’ here thinkin’ about?”
“Jay.”
“No.” Slash drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I was thinkin’ about that damn gold just the way I know Bleed-Em-So wants us thinkin’ about it. Dreamin’ about it.”
“I know. I was, too.”
Slash chuckled, shook his head, and resumed staring up at the ceiling. “That old catamount!”
“One hundred thousand dollars.” Pecos whistled. “That’d take us a long way, Slash. We could go down to Mexico, all the way down to South America. Buy us a big ranch down there. Or our own mine. Oh, how the busthead would flow!”
“Not busthead,” Slash corrected his partner. “Nothin’ but the good stuff. The best tequila and pulque south of the border!”
“And the women . . .”
“Oh, lordy—the women.” Slash had said that last sentence with little of the delight he’d intended. His own words had sounded flat to him. That’s because he hadn’t quite gotten the word “women” out of his mouth before Jay’s face had floated up in his mind’s eye. No sooner had he seen her face than he saw the face of Cisco Walsh, as well.
Walsh—that handsome face of his, and the fancy cut of his clothes.
Walsh with that smile on his face as he gazed appreciatively—all too appreciatively—at Jaycee Breckenridge. . .
“You could bring Jay,” Pecos said. He had his head turned toward Slash, staring through the darkness at him. “She’d come along down to Mexico, if we were toting that much gold. She’d meet us down there . . . and you two . . . well, you could . . .”
“Forget it.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t want to talk about her tonight. I just want to lay here and torture myself with ideas about all the ways we could spend that gold down in Mexico, where we’d live like two Jay Goulds in golden castles.”
“Best not do that no more.”
“Why the hell not? We can at least dream about it, can’t we?”
“Dreamin’s one thing. Actin’ on them dreams is another. I’m afraid if we keep layin’ here thinkin’ up all the ways we could spend that treasure we’re gonna have in our possession for four or five nights—just you, me, an’ a hundred thousand dollars in high-grade gold—we might start venturin’ into dangerous territory. We might start plannin’ on how we could really get away with it!”
Slash rolled onto a shoulder, facing Pecos. “Well, you know what, partner? I was just thinkin’ . . .”
Slash let his voice trail off. Even in the darkness, he could see Pecos’s two scolding eyes staring back at him.
Slash sighed and rolled back against his pillow. “All right, all right. Bad idea.”
“Go to sleep, Slash.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Slash said, sheepish. “All right.”
It took a while, but he finally did. But he dreamed of dusky-eyed Spanish queens and golden castles.
* * *
Slash woke earlier than he’d expected. Pecos was still asleep, and rather than wake him, Slash took a whore’s bath, dressed, and headed out to fill his belly. He’d had a big steak and a platter of beans only a few hours ago, but the whiskey must have dissolved it and left a gaping hole in his innards.
He felt as hollow as a dead man’s boot.
Since the dining room at the Thousand Delights boasted the best breakfast in town, maybe on the entire Front Range north of Denver, he headed that way. He wasn’t much in the mood for seeing Jay, but he doubted he’d run into her at this early hour. Jay usually stayed up late, keeping an eye on the saloon and gambling parlor as well as overseeing the working girls on the third floor—she was as protective as an old mother hen to her doxies—and usually didn’t roll out of her big, four-posted bed till mid-morning.
Not that Slash knew that from personal observation. He had not yet known the charms of the woman’s boudoir. He was not a fast mover in that regard. Nor in matters of the heart. Sometimes he dragged his feet too long in the dust, and that’s where he’d often gotten left. He feared he might be there right now, in fact.
Old Cisco Walsh was likely up there, sawing logs at this very moment, with a big, dung-eating grin on his handsome jaws, Jay curled up beside him.
The idea made Slash feel as though he’d just chugged a quart of sour milk. He almost decided against breakfast, but if he and Pecos were heading back into the mountains this morning, he’d need to fill his trough, so to speak. Neither he nor his partner were very handy with camp cooking, though they’d had plenty of opportunity. Usually, they just ate beans and jerky and baking powder biscuits, if they remembered to buy flour before leaving town. Occasionally they’d shoot or snare a rabbit and cook the meat on a makeshift spit, usually charring it beyond recognition.
Now, he needed some ham and eggs, a big helping of fried potatoes, and a half-dozen buttermilk pancakes with a big scoop of butter and a hearty helping of the real maple syrup they served in the Thousand Delights dining room.
The three steaming platters were set out before him in all their succulent glory, the scent of the warm maple syrup adding a pleasant sweetness to the smoky aroma of the slab of ham that resided half under four big, golden-yolked fried eggs fresh from the chickens of an old Norwegian woman who owned a little shotgun ranch at the edge of town, near Horsetooth Rock.
Slash was one of only four men in the dining room, which sat adjacent to a small, carpeted entrance hall from the saloon, and which was outfitted with a dozen round oak tables clad in fine white cloths and silverware wrapped in cloth napkins. Nothing but the best for Jaycee Breckenridge. Slash knew that she’d put down the stake Pistol Pete had left her as a down payment and taken out a bank loan for the rest, and already, only a year into the business, she’d paid the note down by half.
She was too good a woman for him. She had too much business savvy and plain old horse sense. She was a respected businesswoman in Fort Collins, and that reputation would do nothing but grow. It was just as well she’d taken up with the stylish town marshal, Cisco Walsh. They’d make a handsome couple. A pair of eights. A jack and a queen.
Slash Braddock had been a damn joker all his life, and he’d be buried in a potter’s field, a joker in death. It was what he deserved.
The livery-garbed waiter had just cleared Slash’s table of everything except his coffee cup and the steaming silver server, when a familiar voice startled him from behind: “Good morning, Sla . . . I mean, Mister Braddock.”
Slash looked up to see none other than Jaycee herself smiling down at him, one hand on the back of his chair. She was dressed in a beguiling gown, her hair was half up and half down, sprayed across her half-bare and beautifully freckled shoulders, and she looked ravishing already—here with the sun barely up.
“Jay!” Slash said, immediately chastising himself for sounding like an overeager schoolboy. “What’re you . . . what’re
you . . . ?”
He’d started to rise, but Jay placed a hand on his shoulder and shoved him back down in his chair. “Please, sit. I know, I know—it’s early for me. Believe me, I’d still be sawing logs, but I have a wedding reception at noon to prepare for. No rest for the wicked.”
“Time for a cup of coffee?” Slash asked, nodding at the steaming server.
Jay glanced at a clock on the wall, then folded her long, well-formed body into the chair across from Slash. “Indeed, I can. I’m my own boss, aren’t I?”
“There you go.”
Slash glanced at the waiter, “Phil, a cup for the boss, will you?”
The waiter glanced at Jay, smiled, winked, then disappeared into the kitchen.
Slash sat back in his chair, holding his coffee cup, which he’d just refilled, in both hands. “Did you, uh . . . did you sleep well, Jay?” He felt a vein in his neck flutter.
She glanced across the table at him, then leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table before her and setting her chin atop the shelf of her entwined fingers. “I did. I was exhausted. Long day . . . as you well know.”
“Yeah, sure was.”
Jay smiled her sweet smile. “I took care of everything with Cisco. I mean, Marshal Walsh.”
“Well, if you know him so well . . .”
Jay nodded. “I knew he wouldn’t be a problem. He may, in fact, be a valuable friend to you two here in Fort Collins. I know I’ve found him a valuable friend over the years.”
“You have, have you?”
“Indeed.”
“Well, then . . .”
“He’s agreed to make sure your real names stay out of the papers. I wrote out and signed an affidavit for him last night. Cisco . . . Marshal Walsh”—Jay amended with a coy smile—“thinks that’s probably all we’ll need. He’ll let me know if you need to speak to a coroner’s jury, but he’s going to try and have my statement be the end of it. Jack Penny and the other two men were known outlaws with nasty reputations, so . . .”
“I didn’t recognize the other two, but I know Penny had some money ridin’ in his hat.”
“Cisco said the other two were out-of-work, raggedy-heeled former railroad workers who’d been in and out of trouble along the Front Range for the past couple of years. One was wanted for cutting a doxy in Denver, and the other shot a gambler to death up in Leadville.”
A Good Day for a Massacre Page 7