To Hell and Back

by P. A. Bechko

  Eddie bolted around the counter, gun swinging brazenly into sight. The weapon roared and the tension splintered, everyone moving, triggering fear and anger, a mix of powerful emotion. The thinner, darker thief near the door fired. Eddie’s shot went wild. The bank robber’s didn’t. Eddie dropped like a felled log.

  Hollander, Amanda learned in the instant it took to draw a panicked gasp, was not a man slow on the uptake. He was out in the open with impossible odds, but there was no stopping it now. The weapon at his hip appeared to leap into his palm, spitting flame and lead in a brief instant.

  Blood bloomed on the darker man’s dingy shirt front, gun snapping from his hand and skittering across the floor. But he hung onto the bags of money and spun toward the door. The leader’s gun boomed.

  A streak of blood, crimson and wetly gleaming suddenly streaked Hollander’s head. He blinked folding to the floor, one hand clutching at the counter, the other refusing to relinquish his gun a that didn’t matter since he was already unconscious or dead.

  Stunned, Amanda gagged. Sweat plastered clothes to her body and time dragged out each second. She what was revealed of every face above each colorful neckerchief, clearly. She would have sworn she felt the hollow in time when Eddie’s soul left his body. But not Hollander’s. He was alive. Body and soul clung together still.

  Nothing in her Boston upbringing could have prepared her for this. Fear washed out through the soles of her feet and in its place fury raged, heating her blood and knotting her muscles. Suddenly, without thought, she moved.

  Ears ringing from the gunshots, she swung around the counter , sweat-slicked grip on the worn wood to propelled her forward as the outlaws made for the door. She swooped down, taffeta skirts rustling, and snatched up the gun which had been flung from the hand of Eddie’s murderer.

  Adrenaline, in a pulsating rush, had obliterated caution. She had not even realized what she had done until she glanced up, gun in hand, to find all three of the men already gone.

  Her eyes fell then on Eddie. He would never again give her one of his sly smiles or banter with her when things were slow. He would not tease her or ever again force her to realize her own strength and determination.

  She realized that she was breathing fast, like she had just run a mile. She turned to Jake Hollander and gently rolled him over.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered.

  He was breathing. A deep gouge along the side of his head, having taken out skin and hair in a long groove, was awash in blood staining the floorboards.

  During the chaos, John Berglund had completely escaped her thoughts. Now, he intruded upon them, solid footsteps leaden as he walked up behind her with a deliberate stride. Why hadn’t he done anything sooner? Why did he move so slow?

  “He needs a doctor,” Amanda blurted over her shoulder. “He’s bleeding! I don’t know what to do!” She grabbed the hem of her skirt and ripped a piece of fabric from her precious gown without a thought, using that to attempt to stem the flow.

  Amanda, on her knees, half turned, staring up at Berglund who stood before the teller’s cages, gun dangling casually in his hand one instant, abruptly jerked level and businesslike the next. His mocking brown eyes flicked past her to the open doorway which was now filled with Sheriff Carson, gun drawn, eyes darting suspiciously to every corner of the bank lobby. He edged inside, putting his back to the wall.

  “What happened?”

  “Bank robbers. Four of them—and her,” Berglund answered before Amanda could open her mouth to again ask for a doctor.

  “That fella she’s so het up over, bleeding on the floor is one of them too.” Berglund’s tone was convincing, his face honestly pained as he gestured with his gun toward Hollander.

  “I got him and winged another one.” He fixed His unwavering gaze on Amanda. “She killed Eddie.”

  “What? Don’t be an idiot! I didn’t kill anybody!” Amanda sprang to her feet, the gun she’d picked up from the floor still clenched in her hand.

  “He’s lying, Sheriff. There were only three of them, Eddie tried to stop it, and . . .”

  “There’s the gun that killed Eddie that she’s holding.” Berglund interrupted her outburst. “Smell it. It’s been fired. She’s doing the lying. She’s been lying to all of us since she arrived with her story about coming all the way out here from Boston. She was part of that gang all along. They bided their time and now poor Eddie’s dead.”

  The dry, funeral sense of mourning in his voice was enough to make Amanda want to scream, that or puke on his shiny black leather boots.

  “For God’s sakes, will you please get this man a doctor?”

  The Sheriff tossed Hollander a sideways glance, then eyed Amanda with more than a little doubt. He’d never had reason to get to know her well. She had always been as elusive as a butterfly. A loner, not one to mix, getting to know no one.

  John Berglund, on the other hand, had long been a respected man in Phoenix. His words carried some weight.

  “Give the gun to me, Miss,” the sheriff said evenly, his voice soft, his hand reaching out to her, but he took no chances and kept his gun leveled steadily on Amanda.

  She handed him the gun. She didn’t want it, didn’t even know how to use it. Her green eyes clamped on Berglund in a questioning glare. Why? She kept asking herself the question over and over again. Why would he tell such lies?

  The banker smirked in the face of her questioning, no, it was more a demanding, gaze. “She must have been keeping the others apprised of our schedules and when we would have the most money in the bank. Maybe she even planned it.”

  The Sheriff put the gun barrel close to his nose and took a whiff.

  “Of course it was fired, Sheriff. It was fired by the man who shot Eddie.”

  “Or the woman,” Berglund murmured.

  “You’ll have to come with me, Miss,” Carson said, stiffly formal. “Mr. Berglund, will you keep an eye on the other one until I get a couple of men over to haul his carcass over to the jail?”

  “Glad to, Sheriff,” Berglund affirmed, voice solemn, playing the part of the injured banker.

  Stunned, Amanda didn’t resist. It was all a mistake. It would be straightened out soon. Her flesh recoiled at the touch of the Sheriff’s hand when he firmly gripped her elbow, guiding her swiftly toward the jail.

  After only a few steps she felt like a witless ninny.

  “This is all a mistake, sheriff,” Amanda said in breathless protest. “Eddie and I were getting ready to close. Mr. Hollander, the injured gentleman, had just asked me to make up bank draft when three masked bandits came in and robbed the bank!”

  “And how do you know this Hollander fella?”

  He never stopped hurrying her along.

  “I don’t know him!”

  “But you know his name.”

  “He introduced himself!”

  “John Berglund tells me you were involved I got no reason to doubt him.”

  Amanda lifted her feet briskly to keep pace. “But you doubt me. Why?”

  “Don’t have no reason not to.”

  She was dumbfounded into silence by the man’s logic.

  Chapter 2

  They stumbled up the jailhouse steps, Amanda tripping over her skirts. Beneath the brilliant orange and turquoise-streaked sky, they staggered through into the dim interior of the jail.

  Amanda glanced over her shoulder in time to see a couple of men carrying a third between them, under John Berglund’s supervision, heading their way. Plainly, he was seeing to it personally that Jake Hollander, was delivered to the jail cell with alacrity.

  Why? Amanda asked herself the same question again and again. Why this when the real bank robbers were getting away with the money? Only one answer came readily to mind and it was a frightening one. John Berglund himself could have been a part of that robbery which had cost Eddie his life at the same time casting a dark shadow on her reputation and that of a total stranger.

  Her thoughts scattered like dust befor
e the wind leaving her terrified, sweating and trembling. She reminded herself again the truth would prevail.

  The sheriff roughly pulled her across the room. He was muttering under his breath and paused only long enough at the hulking desk to pick up a ring of keys before ushering her to one of the two adjoining cells.

  “Why did you have to go and shoot poor Eddie?”

  He opened the cell door, pushed her inside and closed it with a decisive clang.

  “I didn’t shoot anyone, and neither did that man they’re bringing over here now. There were only three bank robbers and all of them got away. You’re wasting your time with us while they’re escaping!”

  The sheriff’s face was closed and cold. “I’ve know John Berglund a while,” he stepped back from the barred door. “Ain’t no reason for him to be lyin’ about something like this. You got yourself into a peck of trouble, Miss.”

  “But he is lying,” Amanda persisted desperately . “And you should be looking for the reason!”

  Carson turned his back on her, cutting off further protests as the men toting Hollander entered, Berglund on their heels. Dutifully, the sheriff opened the door to the second cell and they carried him inside, tossing him, on the narrow cot against the back wall.

  Amanda rushed to the side of her cell closest to that of the injured man.

  “Aren’t you going to get him a doctor?”

  The men left without a word. The sheriff hooked the keys on his belt with a commanding snap and joined Phoenix’s most respected banker at the door.

  “It’s not much more than a scratch,” Berglund said from the doorway without concern. “He’ll be all right in time for the trial later.”

  “Trial!” Amanda exploded as Carson and Berglund filed out the door. “Wait! You can’t . . .” she objected, but as the heavy wooden door closed with a solid thump, she was filled with a sick certainty that they most certainly could—and would.

  What if John Berglund, whatever his reasons, convinced them that she really had murdered Eddie? She shuddered. That was impossible. There couldn’t be a trial. She hadn’t done anything!

  Silence settled over the jail with the thickness of sea fog. The only sounds to break it was that of her own breathing, and that of Hollander, his definitely more ragged.

  Glancing sideways at him she saw blood seeping from the scalp wound. How much blood could a man lose before he was in danger of slipping away? She worried her lip between her teeth in concern. The bunk he lay on was positioned so he was sprawled parallel with the back wall, head near the bars separating their two cells.

  Amanda found a pitcher full of water and a basin. Hastily slopping the tepid water into the bowl, she carried it over to Hollander, and knelt on the floor beside the bars nearest him. She stuck a hand through the bars, tugged his neckerchief from around his neck, and dipped it into the water, and began dabbing gently at the raw, angry looking wound.

  “You’re going to have an awful headache,” she murmured to the unconscious man.

  Finally the flow of blood slowed. A few moments more and Hollander stirred. He made a sound low in his throat that would have passed completely unnoticed had he been laying even a foot further from her.

  Then, suddenly, he bit off a curse and rolled into a sitting position on the cot. He cradled his head in both hands and blinked as if even the dim light the setting sun cast across the jail’s gloom was too bright.

  Amanda first stared at the dingy, blood-splattered pillow where his head had lain, then watched as he took in his surroundings in weighted silence. The curse he’d swallowed passed softly from his lips.

  “They say I killed Eddie, and you and I were in on the robbery.” Amanda decided he’d better know the facts, and quickly. “The banker, John Berglund, claims he shot you and winged the other man.”

  “Great,” Jake grumbled climbing to his feet, swaying a bit. “They get around to talking about a trial yet?”

  Amanda blinked in surprise. “Why yes, yes they did. I think they intend to have one tonight. But we didn’t do anything,” she added quickly. “Surely you don’t believe they’ll . . . .”

  The trail-rider gave her a twisted grin.

  “Lady, how long you been in these parts?”

  “Three months,” she answered with injured dignity. “Now sit down and let me finish cleaning that wound. It doesn’t look good.”

  Hollander glanced heavenward as if he might expect some help from that quarter, then winced at the pain the sudden movement brought to his throbbing head. He gingerly touched the fresh gouge where the skin was peeled back nearly all the way from bone. He’d seen it coming when he had first seen the banker’s face.

  The banker had been a part of it just as sure as the sun would rise in the morning. Hollander had seen it first in his eyes, then in the nod he had given to the leader of the trio to take along the dirty, trail-worn canvas bag containing the twenty thousand dollars. Until then the outlaws had taken no real notice of it. The little lady had almost saved it for him. She had been scared, but she had played it right, neither completely ignoring the sack, nor trying to hide it. But, as he suspected, Lord what a tenderfoot she was. Three months! And, she had learned nothing during those months, spending the entire time working in the sheltered safety of a bank. It was that way with the few women, town women anyway, who did not end up working in saloons or worse, but it left Jake with a hell of a problem.

  Christ what a fix. Already the scanty facts, as Jake knew them, were falling into place. Long years of living, filled with bitter experience had exposed him to almost everything, and there was nothing new in a banker having a hand in robbing his own bank. The twist this time though was the position he found himself in because of it, and the woman right along with him.

  He looked at her again. She was a beauty. Son-of-a-bitch if she wasn’t. That thick wavy black hair tumbling over her shoulders and those mysterious green eyes. Despite the character he saw in the firm set of her jaw, she was the greenest of greenhorns. And that dazzling beauty of hers would be nothing now but a burden. Worse, he feared it was going to be his to bear.

  “Well?” Amanda asked, an impatient note in her voice as a trickle of blood oozed from the wound running slowly over his temple and down his cheek to drip with a barely audible splat just outside the edge of his boot toe.

  “You think there’s something wrong, that the trial they’re going to give us won’t be fair, don’t you?”

  She was sober and downcast when he settled himself back on the cot near the bars, but that didn’t stop her from reaching through the bars to finish cleaning the bullet graze.

  “If that banker has anything to say about it, they’ll probably string us both up,” Jake winced as she continued her further clumsy attempts at nursing.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” Amanda said with a sigh, while her hands kept busy tending the raw, ugly rip in his scalp.

  “Your good friend, the banker, just robbed his own establishment is what I’m saying. With some help of course. I had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with a sack full of money that wasn’t mine.”

  “Of course. I think I had that part figured out. What I don’t understand is how he hopes to gain by making it appear we did it.”

  “You don’t?”

  Amanda shook her head.

  “We’re probably the best scapegoats he could have hoped for. If I hadn’t turned up, he would have had to let the sheriff go charging off after the real outlaws and hope the man didn’t catch up with them. Instead, with us in hand, by his account part of the gang, and you being the one who actually killed that boy.” Jake gave a shrug. “Things slow down a bit. Somebody’s dead. They have to take time out for a trial, and probably a hanging before they can get down to the serious tracking of the other three who have no doubt met with the banker, split my twenty thousand dollars as well as the bank money between them and are now riding hell for leather out of the territory.”

  He eyed Amanda as
she ripped a length of petticoat for a bandage.

  “Me I can understand, but the man has to have a grudge against you, honey, and it must be a beaut. What in blazes did you do to get that fella out for your blood?”

  Amanda’s hands froze at their task of rolling the bandage, and she stared at Jake in open disbelief.

  “Don’t be ridiculous! I didn’t do anything worthy of the kind of anger needed to justify this!”

  “But you did do something.”

  Amanda reddened. “It was nothing. It’s the sort of thing that happens all the time.”

  “And that was?”

  She didn’t respond, just returned to furiously readying the bandage.

  “Come on, lady, we’re hip deep in prairie fuel here. I need to know what we’re talking about.”

  “Well, I—it’s just that I didn’t respond to Mr. Berglund’s advances.”

  “He wants to spark you and you refused?”

  A short nod from Amanda was his answer.

  Jake grunted when the door swung open with a bang. Amanda jerked toward the door and the sheriff lit one of the oil lamps hanging overhead as John Berglund followed him inside.

  “Told you we’d probably find them like that,” the banker said with a leer, the chill in his deep-set brown eyes enough to chill the dead.

  “That pair is thick, Matt. I saw him in the bank a time or two before. Said he was just passing through. Must have been when she told him when there would be the most cash on hand and when it would be easiest to hit my bank. When poor Eddie tried to stop them, she pulled that gun from her drawer and shot him. Who would have figured it?”

  “That’s not true!” Amanda jumped to her feet. “Can’t you see he’s lying, sheriff?”

  “You said that before,” Carson said calmly, his hazel eyes indifferent. “You can say it again at the trial soon as they have things set up over at the saloon.”

  “What?”

  “You’re gonna get a fair trial. The both of you.”

  “Fair! No trial could be fair. I didn’t do anything. Neither did he,” she finished pointing a finger in Hollander’s direction.