Hired Guns

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  “I know enough,” Dixon said tightly. “For a long time I believed all of the murderous vermin responsible for my brother’s death were dead themselves and my only regret was that I had no hand in bringing any of it about. But then, lo and behold, the name of Luke Jensen—one of the men under my brother’s command who for years had been hiding under the alias of Luke Smith—came to my attention. And that’s when I knew there was still one more piece of vermin to exterminate and it was my place, my calling, to see it got done and got done right.”

  “Why the elaborate setup? Why didn’t you just have me killed back in Helena and have it over with?” Luke wanted to know. “Or have Patton do it when we were together out on the trail? He’d won my trust, I let my guard down around him”—here Luke’s gaze shifted to the hired gun standing nearby, looking back with no expression on his face—“it would have been easy.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said in the beginning?” Dixon demanded, annoyance ringing in his tone. “To properly avenge Russell’s betrayal and death, you must be dispatched in a meaningful and special manner, not merely gunned down like a common villain.”

  Wheeling suddenly and flinging his arm in a wide flourish, Dixon announced, “And here is the means for doing exactly that!”

  What he was gesturing toward was a pair of massive, powerfully muscled dogs being led on chain leashes from their cages by the two black handlers assisting Ngamba. The beasts, each looking to weigh close to a hundred pounds and standing nearly three feet at the shoulders, were sleek and tan in color, with ugly, skull-like heads and a strange pattern to the hair on their backs that made it appear like perpetually raised hackles but angled sharply forward toward the shoulders. Even though they seemed fully under the control of their handlers at the moment, it was easy to imagine them as terrifying if encountered on the loose.

  Addressing Luke again, Dixon said, “It must be obvious by now that I sent you to this remote locale under false pretenses, for the purpose of exacting my revenge on you here. When you left Helena, I had not yet precisely decided how, other than it must be something extraordinary. And then, the very afternoon you left, these vicious beauties arrived. I had them shipped directly from South Africa, you see, after a visit from a friend who had gone on safari there and returned with tales and photographs of what he’d encountered. Among the exotic rarities he described and showed evidence of were these magnificent hunters. The Khoikhoi tribe there raises them for lion hunting. Lion hounds they are commonly called—or, more officially, Rhodesian Ridgebacks. I was moved to immediately arrange delivery of some for the purpose of breeding and raising and making them available as hunters and guard dogs here in America.

  “And when they arrived so closely in conjunction with you being sent off to Hard Rock Valley to unknowingly await what I had yet to formulate as a proper revenge . . . well, it was like a wondrously fitting omen.”

  A spike of raw fear, something he rarely ever experienced, lanced through Luke. And from the men looking on—the same men who’d been so quick to view Luke with loathing and to hang on Dixon’s every word as he spun his tale of betrayal and evil and his yearning for what sounded like justifiable payback—came a sudden gasp of alarm.

  Chapter 44

  “Father,” Roland said, his voice ragged with uneasiness, “you’re not saying your plan is to sic those savage beasts on these men, are you?”

  Dixon frowned, finding not the question but his son’s disapproving tone to be offensive. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. And why not? A savage act to atone for a savage act. What could be more appropriate than that? First, Jensen and his cohorts turned savagely on my brother. And then, in subsequent years, he’s claimed how many more lives as a bounty killer? Is that anything but a savage existence? And Eagle, he’s never been anything but a half-civilized savage from the beginning. His recent acts of harassment and thievery and wreckage all through the valley, the acts of a heathen renegade—do you need any more proof than that?”

  “But what you’re proposing—it’s madness!” said Mace Vernon.

  “It’s that and more,” said Carstairs. “It’s inhuman to even think such a thing. You’ll never get away with actually doing it.”

  “Won’t I? Who’ll stop me?” hissed Dixon. “This is my valley now, can’t you fools get that through your heads? Once I’ve opened up the new vein of gold and I’ve run the last of the riffraff out—meaning that pitiful nest of refugees that Eagle has hidden up in the mountains somewhere, who’ll be the next targets for my new pets—then I’ll re-build it the way I want with the laws I want and only the people I want in it. If no one can stop me now, who’ll dare try to stand in my way then?”

  Roland looked like he was going to be sick. Vernon and Carstairs appeared numb, stunned by what they’d just heard, and the two engineers had long since fled away. Only Asa Patton’s expression remained stony, unaffected.

  “Turn me loose from this post!” howled Eagle, struggling wildly against his restraints. “Let me at those hellhounds of yours. I’ll rip their livers and guts out with my bare teeth and then I’ll come after you like I should have done at the very first!”

  Dixon’s only response was to smile a cold, tolerant smile, like he might upon watching a spoiled child throw a temper tantrum.

  And that was when Hack Ferris reappeared, leading a dozen of the heavily armed hardcases who had initially arrived as part of Dixon’s caravan.

  * * *

  Directing his question to Ferris, who was one of the men now standing close around him, Dixon said, “How much sunlight you figure is left?”

  Ferris glanced skyward. “This time of year with a clear sky? Three, four hours. Then some pretty good half light for a spell past that.”

  Dixon looked over at Ngamba. “Is that enough time for the dogs? If we allow their quarry a half-hour head start?”

  Like Patton, the gruesome business under discussion elicited no outward reaction out of the black man. He said, “Plenty time, Bwana. Dogs not need long.”

  Dixon smiled. “Excellent. Tell your men to keep the dogs easy for just a while longer.” Then he turned to Patton standing at his left elbow. “Go ahead and prepare the quarry as we discussed.”

  While Dixon’s orders were being carried out, Ferris edged away a few steps and went to stand next to Roland who had remained apart from the others. The younger Dixon’s face was still set in the sour, uncertain way of someone teetering on the verge of vomiting, and its color had a vaguely greenish tint. Ferris, for all his normal gruffness and tough outer demeanor, looked a bit queasy himself.

  They were now all assembled on the edge of the badlands, several miles from the Gold Button. Shortly after Ferris had returned, as assigned, with half of the newly arrived gun toughs, they had ridden hard from the mining operation to this spot. Neither Mace Vernon nor Dr. Carstairs nor any of Ferris’s own remaining gang members came with them. Having missed Dixon’s lengthy but no less startling revelation on what he planned for Luke and Eagle, Ferris had only heard it during the ride here and it wasn’t sitting entirely well with him, either.

  “I got to tell you, Boss,” he said now, speaking in a low voice to Roland, “this thing we’re about to do . . . it’s got a kinda raw edge to it that bites deeper than anything I ever been part of before. Deeper than anything I ever dreamed of gettin’ mixed up in.”

  “I know,” Roland whispered hoarsely. “I’ve long been aware that my father could be extremely ruthless. But this . . . I never imagined there was a part of him that was capable of something like this.”

  Ferris gazed out across the endless expanse of bare, ragged rocks and jagged cliffs falling away into twisting arroyos baking in the mid-afternoon rays of a white hot sun. Gradually, his gaze drifted back and came to rest, briefly, on the leashed lion hounds where they rested calmly on their haunches beside their handlers, loose-fitting black hoods covering their heads. An involuntary shudder passed through Ferris. Then his eyes shifted to where Luke and Eagle were being je
rked around and talked to by Patton.

  “Those two,” he said. “I had me a big hate built up for them and I was lookin’ forward to ’em gettin’ some real hard treatment before your old man let us finally set their suns. None of that’s necessarily changed. But, jeez, what’s about to happen to ’em instead of anything I ever pictured . . .”

  “Don’t say anything. Just hold your tongue,” Roland warned him. “There’s nothing we can do for them. Trying, even saying the slightest wrong thing, could only make grief for yourself.”

  * * *

  “It’s real simple,” Patton was explaining. “You’ll be stripped of everything but your britches. No shirts, no boots, no weapons. Your wrists will stay bound but the shackles will be removed from your ankles. That’s the good news—you’ll be able to stretch your legs and have a fair shot at outrunning the pretty puppies with the half-hour head start you’re going to be given.”

  “Oh, hell, I was afraid you were gonna make it hard on us,” remarked Eagle.

  “If you want to take the time,” Patton continued, ignoring him, “you can stop and possibly find a jagged edge on some rock that you could use to saw through the ropes on your wrists. I’m not recommending that, mind you, I’m just sayin’. I wouldn’t want to be accused of leading you astray because I personally don’t see where it would gain you that much, especially considering the time you’d lose.”

  “Your sense of fair play is inspiring,” Luke told him, all the while glaring at the hired gun with hate-filled eyes. Both he and Eagle were on their feet now and Patton had come up to stand carelessly close as he talked. Three of Dixon’s gun toughs were standing in a triangle formation only a few feet away, the muzzles of their rifles at all times aimed loosely at the two captives.

  Even with his wrists bound, Luke could have reached out and snapped Patton’s neck before anybody could stop him. Plus, he couldn’t help thinking, maybe the bullets that would then find him would be preferable to the dogs. But the never-give-up survivor ingrained in his core held him in check, reminding him that maybe the dogs weren’t necessarily the sure thing everybody was counting on.

  “One final thing,” Patton said, holding up a set of handcuffs with a four-foot chain between them, “is this little item, the ends of which will be clasped to one wrist on each of you. It’s to keep you rascals from trying to split up and force the dogs to do likewise, thinking you might have a better chance with one dog at a time rather than both at once. Frankly, I don’t think it would make hardly a lick of difference, but nobody wants to waste time prolonging the inevitable.”

  As he’d spoken, Patton had studiously avoided meeting Luke’s eyes. Now he suddenly lifted his gaze and smiled crookedly.

  “I know exactly what’s going through your mind, Jensen. You’re thinking you could grab me and rip out my throat before any of these fine fellows with rifles had the chance to cut you down. Am I right?”

  “Those ain’t his thoughts alone,” injected Eagle.

  Patton didn’t break eye contact with Luke. “So why don’t you? Ever since you figured out Dixon—and me, by association—had played you for a sucker, you’ve been beating yourself up for not spotting it sooner and killing me when you had the chance. So why not try it now, why not go for that one small piece of satisfaction?”

  “Because you’re not worth it,” Luke said through gritted teeth.

  “Oh? Really?”

  “If it was Dixon standing there, it might be different. He’d be dead in a heartbeat. His last.”

  “And yours.”

  “Like I said, if it was him it might be different. The certainty of getting rid of Dixon might be worth it. You, you’re just a cog in the wheel.”

  “But an important enough one to have successfully played you and helped get you here. It’s too bad,” Patton said, his crooked smile widening, “because I kinda liked you. And I sensed the feeling was somewhat mutual. At a different time and place, we might even have been friends. Or, if we’d still faced off as enemies, at least it would have been under more straight-up circumstances.”

  “Like you care.”

  Patton blinked. “Actually, I kinda do. Can’t say I favor going about things the way we are . . . but it’s part of the job I’m getting paid to do.”

  “Keep that in mind,” Luke said, his voice now a barely audible rasp. “You might still get your chance to try and earn it straight up.”

  Chapter 45

  The hunt was on!

  Luke and Eagle were off and running, beginning their half-hour head start across the barren, blistering sea of jagged, punishing terrain—chained together and barefoot—in advance of the relentless hounds soon to be sent in pursuit.

  They set a steady, controlled pace, one they could maintain for a long time as far as their wind and physical stamina went. The real decider on how fast the dogs would catch up would be how much the two men’s exposed feet could endure from the slashing, burning landscape.

  Barely had they gotten out of sight from Dixon and the rest who were counting down the time before loosing the ridgebacks and joining in the chase, before Luke signaled a halt.

  “Already?” Eagle protested. “This is prime time for us to be makin’ distance.”

  “I know, but this is going to help,” Luke assured him. “Reach in the hip pocket of my pants, pull out what you find there. Careful, it’s sharp.”

  Looking somewhat doubtful, Eagle did as instructed. When he withdrew the shard of pottery from Ying-Su’s broken pitcher, his expression failed to brighten very much.

  “This? This is the weapon you were braggin’ about back before Dixon showed up?”

  “It took me more than an hour to work that up under the back of my leg and into my pocket without being spotted. Test the edges and tell me if it doesn’t beat a jagged rock for cutting these ropes on our wrists.”

  Eagle lightly touched the ball of his thumb to an edge of the shard, which was basically a curved wedge about two inches long, a little over half that at its widest, and a half inch thick. “Yeah, almost as good as a razor.”

  Luke held out his bound wrists. “Okay, get to shaving with it then.”

  In little more than a minute, both men were free of their bonds. Briskly rubbing his chafed wrists, Eagle said, “Man, that feels good. I don’t know how much it’ll help us in the long run, but it definitely feels better.” He held up his left wrist with the handcuff and chain dangling from it. “Now if we could do the same with this blasted thing!”

  “Can’t have everything,” Luke told him. “But there’s one more improvement we can make, an even bigger one, if you follow my lead.”

  As he spoke, Luke had been unbuckling his belt and pulling it out of the waist loops in his pants. When it was free, he held it up before Eagle. “Do the same with yours. Next we’re each going to cut two-foot-long strips out of our belts and then use the ropes we just took off our wrists and tie the strips of belt leather to the bottoms of our feet. It will give us a good, tough layer of protection. It might slow our speed some, but it will more than make up for it by how much farther it takes us without our feet getting shredded. It’s an old Indian trick I learned.”

  Eagle’s eyebrows lifted. “An old Injun trick? But I’m the half-breed here!”

  A corner of Luke’s mouth quirked up as he began cutting the first strip from his belt. “Must be from the wrong tribe.”

  * * *

  They were on the move again.

  With their wrists unbound, they could pump their arms as they ran and it made the whole physical act smoother, more natural, less exerting. The chain linking them between handcuffs continued to be mostly a minor annoyance. The slap of their makeshift leather soles was gratifying and although—as Luke had predicted—the feel of them had been rather awkward at first, the protection they provided from the punishing floor of the badlands far outweighed that period of adjustment.

  Luke had lost any sense of how much time had passed since they’d started out. He tried not to dw
ell on it. All they could do was keep going, keep increasing the distance, keep hoping for . . . something. Some break. They’d each kept the buckles from their belts and held them now clenched in their fists, prongs jutted out between fingers, for the sake of adding a little something to any punches they might get close enough to throw, against man or dog.

  This time it was Eagle who abruptly signaled a halt. He paused and immediately poised in a half crouch, his eyes locked on a low rock formation just a few yards ahead. Over his shoulder, he whispered to Luke, “Stay with me but stay back. Move slow, keep the slack out of the chain so it don’t clink.”

  So saying, Eagle crept slowly, cautiously forward. The rock formation he was advancing on consisted of some rounded, pumpkin-sized stones partly embedded into the ground with a flattish slab of rock balanced across the tops of part of them.

  Because he was ambidextrous, Luke had accepted his end of the chain being handcuffed to his right wrist, leaving his left hand free, so that Eagle could have his dominant right hand free. It was this hand that the former sheriff held extended out ahead of himself now, thumb and fingers curled loosely, clawlike. The belt buckle he’d been clenching there earlier, he’d temporarily transferred to his left hand.

  Luke hung back, watching closely, curiously, keeping the handcuff chain taut. He couldn’t figure out what Eagle was up to, but he trusted the man well enough to count on it being something meaningful, something worth taking this amount of time for.