A Good Day for a Massacre

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  The little man climbed out of his chair. He snapped his brocade vest down at the bottom, flattening out the wrinkles, and turned his chin to a chalkboard on which his prices were printed. “Twenty cents per bucket for a bath.” He regarded each of the two dusty newcomers critically, adding, “Are you sure you both couldn’t do with a hair trim and a shave in addition to a bath?”

  Pecos ran his hand along his jaw. “I think we just been insulted, pard.”

  “Maybe later,” Slash said. “Me, I just wanna a good long soak in a hot bath. But . . . twenty cents a bucket?” He scowled at the little man incredulously.

  “Boomtown prices,” the little man said, lifting his chin imperiously and pooching out his lips, which were mantled by a little, carefully trimmed pewter mustache.

  “Look around you, pard,” Pecos told him, glancing out the window to his right. “I do believe you’re livin’ in the past.”

  The little man glanced out the window at the deserted street, then drew his mouth corners down in defeat. He drew a deep, fateful breath, stared at the floor, and said, “All right—ten cents a bucket.”

  “A nickel,” Slash said. “Or we’ll go wallow in the stream yonder.”

  “Oh, for cryin’ in the—” The little barber cut himself off sharply. He swung around and disappeared through a rear door. “Right this way!”

  He led Slash and Pecos out the rear of the barbershop building, across a ten-foot strip of hardpan, then up four steps and into the bathhouse beyond it. The bathhouse resembled a small, wooden-floored dancehall outfitted with six copper tubs. Pegs and benches lined the walls, as did shelves housing towels. A big range abutted the front wall, and two boilers steamed on the burners. A wooden bucket hung from the mouth of a pump poking up out of the floor near the range.

  While the little barber stoked the stove, Slash and Pecos walked over to one of the benches, took off their coats and hats, pegged them, and sat down. Slash kicked out of a boot, glanced at the tubs lined out before him, and said, “Looks like you got a tub for every man remaining in the town, amigo.”

  He gave a wry chuff.

  “Go ahead an’ laugh. You’re obviously not from around here or you’d feel the sting, as well.”

  “Nah, just passin’ through,” Pecos said, pulling off one of his boots with a grunt.

  “Trail up here had plenty of traffic on it,” Pecos said, trying to make the comment sound offhand as he kicked off his second boot. “I mean, judgin’ by the tracks. A fairly good-sized bunch must have passed through here yesterday. Must have been a small rush on your place, eh, Mister, uh . . . ?”

  The little man whipped around from the range, his pasty cheeks reddening. “Let me give you two strangers a bit of advice.”

  “Please do,” Slash said. “We could use it.”

  “Leave here. Soon. Tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest. Or . . . if you decide to stay, which I wholeheartedly discourage, keep your mouths shut. In other words, don’t go around asking questions. Even innocent questions up here in Honeysuckle will get a man killed!”

  CHAPTER 27

  “Well, that went well,” Slash said as he and Pecos filed out of the barbershop after a good long soak in their respective tubs.

  “No, it didn’t,” Pecos said, running a hand through his still-wet hair, then setting his hat on his head. “Didn’t go well at all. We didn’t learn a damn thing about them gold robbers.”

  Slash gave him a rueful smile. “I was being ironic.”

  “You were being what?”

  “Iron . . . oh, Jesus, never mind. I sure wish one of these women you’re always throwin’ in with would teach you how to read.”

  “Hell, I haven’t had me a steady woman, book-learned or not, in a month of . . .”

  Slash cut him off with a nudge. “Look there.”

  “Where?”

  “There.” Slash jerked his chin toward where the man wearing the town marshal’s star sat directly across the street on a loafer’s bench fronting the butcher shop and grocery store. As he’d been doing the first time Slash and Pecos had spied the man, he was fanning his face with his hat, though it was getting on in the afternoon and the air was noticeably cooler than before.

  Slash had a feeling the movement was a nervous tic.

  The town marshal didn’t look away when Slash and Pecos stared back at him. He kept his eyes on them, grinning cryptically, as though he knew a deep secret about them but he’d be damned if he was going to share what it was.

  “Afternoon,” Slash said with a nod, holding up one hand in a genial wave.

  The lawman said nothing in response. He made no gesture. He just kept sitting there, smiling behind his rectangular, gold-framed spectacles, using his hat to fan his angular face, framed by thick red muttonchops.

  Pecos glanced curiously at Slash. Both men grabbed their reins off the hitchrack fronting the barbershop and swung up into the leather. Slash could see, out of the corner of his eye that the lawman continued to stare at them, that seedy, puzzling grin remaining on his lips.

  “What do you suppose he wants?” Pecos said under his breath.

  “Hard to know if he don’t say.”

  “Maybe he’s mute.” Slash glanced over his shoulder at the man, then turned back to Pecos. “Or maybe he’s tryin’ to spook us.”

  “He’s done that,” Pecos said, also glancing over his shoulder at the man.

  Trying to ignore the lawman, Slash peered up the street toward the Honeysuckle Saloon and Dance Hall. “What do you say we tend these cayuses, then see how Hattie’s getting along?”

  “You’re worried about her, aren’t you?” Pecos asked, grinning.

  Slash frowned as though deeply offended. “I ain’t one bit worried! Slash . . . er, uh, Jimmy Braddock. Don’t get worried!” He shifted his gaze back in the direction of the Honeysuckle. “I’m just wonderin’ if she’s made any more progress in the investigation than we have.”

  “Well, that wouldn’t take much,” Pecos said as they booted their horses up toward the livery barn sitting just beyond the barbershop.

  As they approached the barn, a tall, stoop-shouldered man with a sunken-jawed, hawklike face stepped out of the inside shadows, holding a steaming tin cup in one gloved hand. Long, grizzled gray hair hung down from his leather-billed immigrant cap. A tightly rolled quirley drooped from one side of his mouth. He blinked against the sunshine as he stopped between the double open doors to size up his visitors.

  He glanced beyond them toward the obliquely grinning lawman, then, returning his gaze to Slash and Pecos, said, “You two ain’t from around here.”

  “Nah, just passin’ through,” Slash said, swinging down from the leather.

  “Nobody just passes through Honeysuckle,” the liveryman said, not so vaguely suspicious. “This is the end of the trail.” He glanced again, tentatively, maybe a little anxiously, toward the lawman. “A man comes here, he comes here for a reason.”

  “You want to know ours?” Pecos asked him, looping his shotgun’s lanyard over his head and right shoulder, letting the double-gauge dangle down his back. He walked almost confrontationally up to the liveryman, letting his height go to work for him, but smiling affably down at the man, who stood nearly a whole head shorter.

  The liveryman, in his sixties, stared at the double-bore cannon poking up from behind Pecos’s right shoulder. He scrutinized Pecos himself then, cutting his eyes to Slash, standing to Pecos’s right, he shook his head and said, “Nope. No, I don’t.”

  “For some reason, I had a feelin’ that’s what you was gonna say,” Pecos said. “Here, take our hosses.” He handed the man his reins. “They don’t need a stall. Your corral will be fine. They’ll likely want to stretch and roll and maybe tussle for a while.”

  Slash handed the hawk-faced man his own reins. “Treat ’em right. An’ you can stow our gear in a corner till we come back for it.”

  The hawk-faced man glanced at the lawman once more, then turned his begrudging look back to S
lash and Pecos. “How long you stayin’?”

  “Don’t know yet,” Pecos said.

  Slash frowned at the man. “If you suggest we move along, just like the barber over there done, we’re gonna start to get our feelin’s hurt.”

  Holding both sets of reins in one hand, his coffee in his other hand, the liveryman said, “It’s seventy-three cents a night for the whole nine yards. That includes a rubdown and a bait of oats or parched corn, whichever I got more of.” He paused then added commandingly, “I will take your compensation up front.”

  Slash and Pecos glanced at each other, skeptically.

  Slash dug into his pocket for some coins, saying, “What’s the matter, mister? You thinkin’ we’re not gonna be around to pay later?”

  “I’m just sayin’, I will be compensated now.”

  Slash and Pecos each stuffed their coins into a pocket of the man’s overalls, then pinched their hat brims to him. “Nice talkin’ to ya,” Pecos said.

  The liveryman didn’t respond to that. He just stood there, holding both horses’ reins in one hand, his coffee in his other hand, staring after Slash and Pecos walking along the street toward the Honeysuckle. Slash glanced back over his shoulder. Just as he’d suspected, the town badge-toter was still giving him and Pecos the woolly eyeball, though that silly grin had faded from his mouth.

  “He’s still there,” Slash said.

  “He makes me nervous.”

  “Everybody I’ve met so far in this high-up ass-end of nowhere makes me as fidgety as a virgin bride.”

  Looking around, Slash saw a silhouette in a dusty window on the opposite side of the street. The silhouette quickly jerked away, out of sight. Slash gave a wry chuff. Then he and Pecos mounted the Honeysuckle’s front steps, crossed the veranda, and pushed through the batwings.

  Like they always did without thinking, Slash stepped to the left, Pecos to the right, blinking as they scanned the shadowy room. One of the few men inside the place, just then sinking into a chair at a table to the right of the horseshoe-shaped bar, said, “Say, Clifford, what happened to that new window you said you had shipped in from Denver?”

  A gray-haired man who had been nailing a plank over a window on the bar’s far side, stopped pounding and turned, scowling, toward the bar. “The new serving girl.”

  “The new serving girl broke your window?” came the skeptical reply.

  Still scowling toward the bar, the man—who’d been hammering the nail into the plank (one of several planks he’d nailed over the window frame before him, Slash saw)—said, “In a manner of speakin’, she bloody well did, all right.” He spoke with a heavy Irish brogue.

  Just then Slash saw what the Irish barman, Clifford, had been talking about. He’d been referring to the scantily clad young woman turning away from the bar, holding a tray bearing two beers. Slash blinked as though to clear his vision.

  No, his eyesight was fine.

  The gorgeous brunette, outfitted in a corset and bustier, with red and black feathers dancing in her piled-up hair, was none other than the pretty Pinkerton her ownself—Operative Number One, or, as she’d been more recently known, Hattie Friendly.

  Pecos saw her at the same time. “Holy cow,” he grunted, then chuckled. “We came to the right place, after all.”

  Slash looked up at his partner standing to his right. Pecos was grinning lewdly, his blue eyes flinging bayonets of bawdy passion. Slash elbowed him sharply in the ribs. “Stop ogling her, you reprobate. That’s Hattie!”

  Pecos jerked a disbelieving look at him. “Huh?”

  Slash jerked his head. Pecos turned back to the girl, who was setting a beer down on the table of the man who’d asked Clifford about the window. The man was grinning up at the pretty new serving girl, his pasty cheeks becoming two bright red apples. “Holy cow!” Pecos repeated.

  “Yeah.”

  Slash glanced around the room once more. Only a half-dozen men occupied the place—three at the bar and three at two tables. All six were so distracted by the new serving girl that they hadn’t even noticed the two strangers still standing by the batwings.

  “Let’s have us a seat,” Slash said, brushing past Pecos and heading for a table against the front wall to his right.

  Hattie had just delivered the other beer to the table at which two men in shabby business suits sat on the bar’s other side, under a gigantic snarling grizzly head. As she turned back toward the bar, her eyes found Slash and Pecos, and she grinned.

  Slash blushed. He could feel Pecos blush, as well. The heat of embarrassment fairly radiated off the man, as though off a fully stoked woodstove.

  Their embarrassment must have infected Hattie, for her cheeks suddenly blossomed like a rose after a silky spring rain. She glanced down at her attire, so meager that Slash silently opined he could have stuffed the whole ensemble into one boot and still have had room for his foot. She swung around and headed back to the bar with her tray.

  A small man who appeared to be a half-breed drew a couple of beers from a tap, and when Slash and Pecos had sat down at their table, Hattie brought the beers over atop the tray.

  “Since you’re both on duty,” Hattie said, softly enough for only Slash and Pecos to hear, “I knew you wouldn’t want anything stronger than beer.”

  “Thanks, thanks,” Slash said, as she set a beer down in front of him.

  “Yeah, uh . . . thanks, darlin’,” Pecos said.

  “You can look at me, you know.”

  “What’s that?” Slash was running his thumb over a pair of initials carved into the top of the table.

  “I said you can look at me. That carving don’t look all that interesting, if you ask me, Uncle Jim,” she added a little more loudly and fashioning a warm smile, glancing around the room, not wanting to seem overly secretive.

  Slash looked up at her. So did Pecos.

  “Well?” Hattie said.

  “Well, what?” asked Slash.

  Hattie held her arms out to each side, the tray in one hand.

  “How do I look, Uncle Jim and Uncle Melvin?”

  “Oh!” Slash said, feigning surprise. “Lookee there . . . you’re all gussied up in a serving girl’s costume! Lookee there, Uncle Melvin—did you notice that?” He elbowed his partner.

  “No,” Pecos muttered tensely, trying very hard to keep his eyes on the girl’s face, though other revealed parts of her attracted his gaze like magnets attracted steel. “I didn’t notice that until just now when you mentioned it, Uncle Jim. Lookee, there—why, you’re right purty, Miss Hat . . . er, I mean, our precious niece Hattie.”

  Hattie lowered her arms and sucked in a cheek. “You two are embarrassed.”

  “No, no, we’re not,” Slash protested.

  “Surely you’ve seen serving girls before . . . in their uniforms, as Mister Hicks calls this getup.”

  “We sure have, darlin’,” Pecos said. “But I don’t recollect we ever seen one as . . . as . . . as . . .”

  “Careful, Uncle Melvin, you nasty scalawag!” Slash raked out at him. “That’s our niece you’re talkin’ to.” Looking up at Hattie, trying very hard to keep his eyes on only her eyes, Slash said, “What he means is, uh, we sorta understand now how the window got broke.”

  He grinned.

  Hattie snorted a laugh, tucking her upper lip under her bottom teeth.

  She glanced self-consciously around the room. So did Slash and Pecos. They, as did Hattie, noticed that several glances were being cast their way.

  Slash had a feeling that he and Pecos were no longer nearly as interesting as they had been before word of the new serving girl had started spreading around town. More men were coming in, their eyes moving right to Hattie. As soon as they saw her, crimson flushes crept onto their unshaven faces, and they elbowed each other and muttered under their breaths, like schoolboys taking notice of the pretty new girl in the class.

  “Tread easy, girl,” Slash warned her as three men sat down at a nearby table, giving her the brashly roving eye
ball. “That uniform there is beginnin’ to attract a crowd.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hattie said. “I can handle myself quite well. I have my derringer tucked under my garter belt.”

  Inwardly, Slash groaned at the imagined image of the little popper snugged up tight against her pretty leg.

  “Hope you don’t have to use it,” Pecos said, glancing around the room as two more men entered the saloon. “Since you only got two bullets, an’ this place is fillin’ up fast.”

  “I have to get back to work now, Uncle Jim and Uncle Melvin,” Hattie said loudly enough for those near their table to hear. “I just wanted to make sure you’re behaving yourselves, is all.” Lowering her voice again quickly and leaning down toward them, she said, “I’ve already learned something important. Remember that word that Jupiter Dodge mentioned overhearing when he was in the barn loft and the gold thieves were bedding down in the barn beneath him?”

  “Yeah,” Slash said, keeping his own voice low, but smiling up at the girl as though they were having a frivolous conversation. “ ‘Spanish’ was the word.”

  Hattie cast her own somewhat strained smile around the room, then turned back to Slash and Pecos. “Mister Hicks said that weeknights around here were pretty slow. They could get downright tedious, in fact. But on the weekends—Friday an’ Saturday nights—the boys from the Spanish Bit converged on the town and gave him a walloping business.”

  “What’s the Spanish Bit?” Pecos asked.

  “According to Mister Hicks, it’s a ranch and gold mine up in the mountains. That’s all he said, and I didn’t prod him. Didn’t want him to get suspicious. Anyway, Friday is three days away. Maybe we’ll learn more then. I have to get back to work. You two be careful!”

  She hurried back to the bar. All heads in the room swiveled to follow her.

  “We ain’t the ones who need to be careful,” Slash said.

  “Yeah,” Pecos said. “We wouldn’t look near so good in that uniform.”

  Slash cursed, brushed his fist across his nose, and tipped back his beer, sucking down half in three big swallows.