Читать книгу A Good Day for a Massacre - William W. Johnstone - Страница 12

CHAPTER 7

Chief Marshal Bledsoe thought it prudent that he and the two former cutthroats keep their arrangement as secret as possible. The marshal didn’t think it would reflect well on the federal government if folks knew it had amnestied two career criminals in return for their service, that is, running down owlhoots every bit as bad as Slash and Pecos once were—and worse—and killing them.

The eastern newspapers would have an ink-fest if they found out that Uncle Sam had amnestied two career criminals and turned them into paid assassins.

Apparently, Bledsoe and even the president of the United States thought it made sense, though, given the nasty cut of the outlaws who currently ran off their leashes on the still relatively lawless western frontier. Who but two cutthroats would be better qualified for running down and bringing to justice—or flat-out killing—their own?

Bledsoe’s sending Jack Penny and a whole pack of nasty bounty hunters to kill them, and then Slash and Pecos in turn killing the bounty hunters, with Penny now included, had been a pretty good test of their abilities. Even at their advanced ages, though neither Slash nor Pecos saw their mid-fifties as being all that advanced. Of course, Bledsoe hadn’t intended Penny’s ambush to be a test. He’d genuinely wanted Slash and Pecos dead.

Who could blame the man?

Slash himself had crippled Bledsoe many years ago. He hadn’t intended to, but the lawman—a deputy U.S. marshal at the time—had caught one of Slash’s ricochets. It had shattered Bledsoe’s spine, confining him to a pushchair.

Slash knew that, given their history, Bledsoe wasn’t going to pull any punches when handing out job assignments to the two former cutthroats. Slash and Pecos were always going to be going after the worst of the worst.

Until their tickets were punched.

Luther T. “Bleed-Em-So” Bledsoe would not shed any tears at their funerals. If they received funerals. Which they almost certainly wouldn’t.

Bledsoe kept an office of sorts in the little near-ghost town of Cedar City, which sat amongst rocks and cedars in a broad horseshoe of the Cache la Poudre River. The town had never been a city, despite its obvious aspirations, and had ceased even to be a town when the army pulled out of Camp Collins, which was the original name for Fort Collins. Now it wasn’t even a fort anymore, and all that remained of Cedar City were a few abandoned mud-brick dwellings, an abandoned livery barn and stock corral, and a single saloon, the Cormorant, which mostly served the rare drifter and local cowpuncher and acted as a home to the old gentleman who owned the place—a stove-up former Texas Ranger, Tex Willey.

Tex and the chief marshal had been friends for a couple of generations, having worked together in chasing curly wolves in their heydays.

These days, Bledsoe came out here to get work done when he found himself drowning in red tape in his bona fide digs in the Federal Building in Denver. It was a handy location, given its close proximity to the railroad line. An old freighting trail, still in good repair, offered access from the rail line to Cedar City.

Now as Slash and Pecos rode into the ghost town from the west, they saw the old Concord mud wagon that Bledsoe had customized for himself, nattied up a bit with brass fittings and gas lamps, softer seats and velvet drapes offering privacy, and brackets on the side for housing his pushchair. The horses milling in the corral flanking the mud wagon were likely the two that had pulled Bledsoe out here from the train.

The other two would be those of the two deputies who always escorted and ran interference against possible assassins. The wily old reprobate had locked up his share of owlhoots over his long years of service to Uncle Sam, and he had a poisonous personality, to boot. There were likely plenty of gunslingers who would love to add the crippled old devil’s notch to their pistol grips.

The two deputies sat on the corral’s top slat, to the right of the gate, smoking. Slash could see only their silhouettes in the darkness, but he could clearly see the badges pinned to their coats and the coals of their cigarettes, when they took drags, the gray smoke wafting around their high-crowned, broad-brimmed Stetsons.

Slash and Pecos didn’t say anything to the two federals. The two federals said nothing to them. They just sat there atop the corral, smoking and staring dubiously toward the newcomers in the night, the darkness relieved by a low half-moon, stars, and the lamplight ebbing from the saloon’s front windows.

Two saddle horses were tied to the hitchrack fronting the low, mud-brick, brush-roofed saloon. The cutthroats and old Bledsoe likely wouldn’t have total privacy, but out here, men knew not to shoot their mouths off without getting something else shot off for their indiscretion. Also, very few who visited the saloon these days were from around here. Most were just passing through, keeping to the back roads and shaggy ravine trails. As travelers, they knew to keep their noses out of other men’s business.

Slash and Pecos put their own mounts up to the hitchrack. The strains of a fiddle pushed through the batwings atop the narrow, rickety-looking front stoop. In one of the dimly lit windows fronting the place, two shadows moved close together, as though a couple were dancing.

Slash glanced at Pecos. Pecos shrugged.

The two cutthroats tossed their reins over the rail, worn down to a mere stick in places by the reins of many a soldier’s horse, then negotiated the untrustworthy three steps to the porch and pushed through the batwings. Slash and Pecos stood side by side just inside the doors, hearing the batwings clatter back into place behind them.

The saloon was twice as wide as it was deep. The bar, comprised of pine boards stretched over three stout beer kegs and flanked by dusty shelves housing maybe a dozen or so dusty bottles, occupied the rear of the place directly beyond the batwings. An old man with snow-white hair hanging down his back in a tight braid and a crow’s dark-eyed face with a sun-seasoned, liver-spotted beak of a nose sat in a chair in front of the bar, sawing away on an old fiddle. Tex Willey wore old denims held up on his skinny frame by snakeskin galluses, a grimy calico shirt, and a badly sun-faded red bandanna knotted around his red turkey neck.

To the right of the old man, in a place clear of tables in which soldiers used to dance with the parlor girls who’d worked here at one time, two middle-aged men in dusty trail garb were now dancing just like a young man and a young woman would have danced back in the day. Only, these two were men. One tall, one short. Both outfitted like cowpunchers. Unshaven. Battered hats on their heads. Old pistols in cracked leather holsters sagged on their thighs, above their mule-eared boots.

Just then the taller gent raised his hand and gave the short man a twirl, and the short man’s batwing chaps buffeted out around his legs, whang strings flying. He closed his eyes, smiling dreamily as the old man continued to saw away on his scarred, ancient fiddle. Slash thought he recognized the song, even so poorly played, as “The Gal I Left Behind.”

Slash and Pecos shared another look and a shrug.

By now, Tex Willey had spied the newcomers.

The old man paused in his fiddling—though the dancers did not stop dancing—to look at Slash and Pecos and nod toward the door at the back of the room, to the right of the bar.

“Thanks, Tex,” Slash said as he began wending his way through the dozen or so dusty tables and around the two dancers, who appeared so absorbed in their two-step that they did not take note of the newcomers, even as they did a swing and an almost-graceful pirouette that nearly rammed the short one into Pecos as he stepped around them.

Slash rapped his knuckles on the door of the old storeroom that Bledsoe now used as a part-time office.

The knock was answered by a raspy man’s voice saying, “If you’re anyone but my two raggedy-heeled, over-the-hill cutthroats, stay out. I got work to do!”

Slash glanced at Pecos and gave a crooked smile.

Pecos shrugged.

Slash tripped the latch and stepped into the roomy office that owned the molasses aroma of liquor and malty ale. “Your cutthroats?”

“Oh, you’re mine, all right.” Luther T. Bledsoe was sitting at a big walnut desk he must have had hauled all the way out here from Denver. The chief marshal looked especially small and insignificant, sitting with his pushchair drawn up to the giant, cluttered desk on which a Tiffany lamp burned.

“Bought and paid for!” added the chief marshal with a delighted, mocking flourish, dropping the pen he’d been scribbling on a legal pad with to lean back in his chair. He ran his two bone-white, long-fingered hands through the cottony down of his unkempt, silver hair after thumbing his little, round, steel-framed spectacles up his long nose.

As Pecos closed the office door and stepped up beside Slash, Slash saw his tall partner’s head swing toward where Bledsoe’s comely female assistant, Miss Abigail Langdon, sat at another desk abutting the wall to the right of the chief marshal. Her desk was every bit as large as Bledsoe’s, and just as cluttered. A pink lamp burned on her desk, illuminating her cool, remote, severely Nordic beauty in the flickering light’s shifting planes and shadows.

Miss Langdon flipped a heavy curling lock of her red-gold hair back behind her shoulder, revealing wide cheekbones that tapered severely down to a fine chin and regal jaw. Her crystalline, lake-green eyes, long and slanted like a cat’s eyes, lingered on Pecos’s tall, broad-shouldered frame, raking him up and down. A dark cloak was pulled around her shoulders, over the purple velvet gown she wore so well. She reached for a shot glass on the desk before her, amidst the clutter of open files and dossiers and bound books on federal law, and took a sip.

Her eyes stayed on Pecos as she said, almost too quietly to be heard above the small fire crackling in the small sheet-iron stove flanking her boss, “Hello.”

Pecos seemed to be breathing hard. He cleared his throat thickly and said, “H-hello, there, Miss . . .” He remembered his hat, quickly doffed it, and held it before him. “Hello, there, Miss Langdon.”

Slash squelched a chuckle. Pecos had reacted to the remote beauty—whom Slash judged to be in her middle twenties, though with a decidedly more mature air about herself—the first time they’d met. Abigail Langdon had reacted similarly to Pecos. It was almost as though the two were giving off invisible sparks of attraction—a primitive reach for each other.

Bledsoe seemed to sense it now, too. Sitting back in his chair, hands behind his head, he studied the two with an amused half-smile, his eyes dubious.

He slid his gaze to Slash, his eyes vaguely curious. Bledsoe gave a dry chuckle, then leaned forward slightly and beckoned to the two cutthroats impatiently. “Come in, come in. We’re burnin’ moonlight. I have to get back to that consarned, infernal hellhole, Denver, for a meeting at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. I came out here to try to get a little work done in the peace and quiet of the bucolic countryside, and because I got a fresh job for my two over-the-hill cutthroats.”

He smiled at that, again mockingly. He enjoyed ringing men’s bells and watching for a reaction that might amuse him. Slash and Pecos had learned that the first time they’d met the man.

“If you really thought we was over the hill,” Pecos pointed out, indignantly, his voice rising angrily, “we wouldn’t have turned Jack Penny into a human sieve tonight, just like we done to the rest of his gang last year. And you wouldn’t have called us here, Chief Marshal. So why don’t you stop tryin’ to rub our fur in the wrong direction just ’cause you’re hip deep in bureaucratic sheep dip, and bored, and get down to brass tacks.”

Slash turned to his partner, brows arched in surprise. Even Miss Langdon turned to look over her shoulder in shock at the tall, silver-blond cutthroat who had just shoveled it right back to old Bleed-Em-So. Pecos rarely got riled or spoke out even when he was. It took a lot to get his dander up. It appeared, however, that the chief marshal’s riding him and Slash about their ages—in front of Miss Langdon, especially—had done just that.

Slash covered a chuckle by brushing his fist across his nose and clearing his throat.

Bledsoe stared across his cluttered desk at Pecos, tapping his fingers on his blotter. “Well, well, it is possible to get his neck in a hump, after all.”

“Oh, you can do it, all right,” Slash said. “Always best not to, though. It takes some doin’, indeed, but once Pecos has got a mad on, it takes a good long time to cool him off. Sometimes several days, and only after he’s turned a whole row of saloons to little more than matchsticks and jackstraws.” Slash chuckled dryly, switched positions in his chair. “That’s a bonded fact. I’m an eyewitness!”

He chuckled again.

“Duly noted,” Bledsoe said, impressed. He sipped from the shot glass on his desk. A tequila bottle stood near his right elbow, uncorked. He did not, however, invite the two cutthroats to imbibe with him and his assistant. It was one thing to employ two men he’d been, for most of his career, trying to run down and jail or execute, one of whom had crippled him, however inadvertently. But old Bleed-Em-So was not going to sink so low as to invite them to drink with him.

That would be like telling them he didn’t hold a grudge, which of course he did. Anyone would.

Smacking his lips, he set the glass back down on his desk and brushed two fingers across his lips. “All right, all right. What’s this about Jack Penny?”

“Gone to his reward,” Pecos said. “Which means he’s likely wielding a coal shovel about now.”

“Hmmm.” Bledsoe tapped his fingers on the blotter again. “Self-defense, I’m sure . . .”

“He bushwhacked us in the Thousand Delights. Baited us in with Jay.”

“I do hope the lovely Miss Breckenridge is unharmed,” Bledsoe said, sounding as though he meant it, though he was well aware that she’d once run with Pistol Pete and that Slash and Pecos had often holed up in her San Juan Mountain cabin between outlaw jobs. Still, it was hard for anyone to dislike Jay. Even old Bleed-Em-So.

“Fit as a fiddle,” Slash said. “A little shaken up is all.”

Bledsoe looked pointedly across his desk at “his” two cutthroats. “I hope I’m not going to read about this in the newspapers, gentlemen.”

Slash and Pecos shared another look.

“Jay’ll keep it out of the papers,” Slash said, adding with a definite edge in his voice and a burn in his belly, “She an’ the new marshal at Fort Collins are old pals, don’t ya know.”

Pecos glanced at him. Slash did not meet his gaze.

“Good, good,” Bledsoe said, leaning forward and entwining his hands on his desk. “All right, then, let us get down to pay dirt.”