Seven Days to Hell

by William W. Johnstone

  “He can look all he likes but no touching. The hospitality of the house only extends so far. After that the proceedings are conducted on a pay as you go basis, strictly for cash,” Mrs. Frye said.

  “That let’s Bill out. In all the time I’ve known him he’s never had much more than a couple of copper coins to knock together,” said Johnny.

  “He does now,” Damon Bolt said. “Vard’s gang rode, not walked. They left behind eight very good horses. Sam Heller decided to split the windfall with young Longley. Heller left the horses with Hobson at the livery stables to sell on a consignment basis.

  “There were two horses Hobson wanted for himself so he bought them paying cash on the barrelhead. Sam Heller left Longley’s share of the money with us. It’s in a sealed envelope in the safe. And Longley’s due for more when the other horses are sold.”

  “Best you hold on to that money for a bit,” Johnny suggested. “Bill’s laid up in the Golden Spur with a bunch of money and nothing to spend it on but whiskey and women. I’ve got a hunch that it won’t be too very long before Bill’s back to going without a dime in his pockets—but he’ll have a hell of a lot of fun getting there!”

  Mrs. Frye stood to escort Johnny Cross upstairs. The girls had their rooms on the second floor and there were private rooms there, too.

  The head of the staircase opened on the center of the second floor landing at the rear, north wall. A balcony with gallery extended along three walls: the rear wall and two long walls. The house girls’ rooms lay mostly along the rear wall, with private quarters for Damon Bolt and Mrs. Frye in separate unconnected rooms along the west wall.

  Bill Longley’s recovery room lay along the east wall.

  Johnny Cross and Mrs. Frye exited the ground floor office and went to the foot of the staircase.

  “No need for you to bother, Miz Frye, I can find the way to Bill’s room,” Johnny said. Lord knows I know my way around the girls’ rooms upstairs, I’ve been there enough times. He smiled to himself.

  “It’s dangerous for a man to be upstairs alone and unescorted,” Mrs. Frye said coolly.

  “Your girls are safe from me,” Johnny said.

  “Ah, but are you safe from them? The girls corner a handsome man like you alone and we might not see you for a few days and then in heaven knows what condition.”

  “You’re joshing, Miz Frye,” Johnny Cross said, “aren’t you?”

  “Um,” she said, shrugging. She smiled, showing lots of white-glowing teeth in the mid-afternoon shadows.

  Mrs. Frye started up the stairs, Johnny Cross following. He couldn’t help watching her high, firm heart-shaped bottom outlined against her long straight skirt. There was something hypnotic in the way her buttocks rolled beneath the taut fabric, slim hips swaying. Nothing vulgar or exaggerated about her movements, just the enticing rhythm of a fine healthy adult female body in motion.

  Mrs. Frye paused at the top of the stairs, a hand resting on top of the corner post of the staircase’s handrail. Glancing over her shoulder down at him through heavy-lidded green eyes she said huskily, “See anything you like, John?”

  He swallowed hard. “Now, Miz Frye, you know it’s not nice to tease the animals.” It would have sounded better had his voice not cracked in midsentence.

  She laughed throatily. “Is that what I’m doing, John?”

  “One thing I’m sure of, Miz Frye—you always know what you’re doing.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said. “Rest easy. I’ll be good, I promise.” She drew an invisible X over her left breast. “Cross my heart.”

  Mrs. Frye waited on the landing for him to join her. When he stood alongside her she started forward, Johnny falling into step beside her. They turned right at the end of the landing, moving along the eastern gallery past a wall lined with closed doors.

  It was quiet, almost hushed in the upstairs area. The house was open for business should a customer appear, but prospects were slim at the hour of three o’clock on a weekday afternoon.

  A man sat slumped in an armless wooden chair parked outside a room door in mid-gallery. Presumably the guard posted to protect Bill Longley, Johnny thought.

  The guard had managed the seemingly impossible feat of sleeping in a chair designed for discomfort, a straight-backed wooden chair with no arms, and no seat cushion. The man who had met and mastered the challenge was Earl “Cousin” Cozzens, an unlovely specimen of masculine squalor and incompetence.

  Cookie, the Golden Spur’s able cook was indeed Earl Cozzens’s cousin and had gotten him a job at the Golden Spur doing mostly maintenance and donkey work, for which he had a modest ability.

  Cousin Cozzens enjoyed a kind of minor celebrity due to his role in a messy drunken shoot-out some weeks earlier at the Doghouse Bar, a low dive on the dirty side of town, south of Trail Street—way south . . .

  * * *

  During the course of a chair leg-swinging, ear-biting, crotch-kicking exhibition of impressively dirty fighting, Cousin had been lucky enough to lock up with his opponent just as the latter managed to haul a horse pistol out from behind the bib front of a pair of filthy denim overalls.

  Clutching the thick wrist of the other’s gun hand in his pawlike mitts, Cousin wrestled his foe to the sawdust-covered floor, the two of them rolling around underfoot of the dive’s bloodthirsty patrons screaming and shouting their excitement.

  Suddenly the gun fired once in a roaring blast of noise that was followed almost immediately by a howling scream of pain.

  The frantic crowd fell dead silent. In the absence of sound the lone screamer’s sobbing shrieks produced a blood-chilling effect.

  The next instant, the crowd erupted in helter-skelter flight to escape the scene of the shooting. They poured out the doors, front, side, and back. They jumped out the windows. The Doghouse Bar being a one-story ground-floor structure, none of the jumpers was too badly hurt.

  In less time than it takes to tell it, the dive was emptied out of all but the two combatants, Cousin and his opponent; the bar’s owner and his helper, jealously watchful of the liquor supply to make sure it remained intact; and a handful of drunks too stupefied, bemused, or uncaring to disappear with the rest of the gunfire-shy crowd.

  The screaming was getting on Cousin’s nerves. He looked around in search of its source.

  It came from his former foreman, who now stood on his knees holding his maimed hand upright, blood jetting from a hole that had been formerly occupied by his thumb. He had been grievously disabled by accidentally shooting off his own left thumb during the fight for the gun.

  Candlelight glinted off the horse pistol where it stuck out of a sawdust mound on the floor.

  Cousin scuttled to it on hands and knees, scooping it up and fisting it to triumphantly stick it in the face of the foe. The now one-thumbed man recoiled with a yelp, falling over on his side.

  Cousin was on his feet, stalking the other, a triumphant leer on his face.

  The Man with One Thumb bumped into a wall, having run out of crawling space. He was cornered. “Don’t kill me please please don’t do it please—”

  Cousin thumbed the hammer back, cocking it with a loud click.

  “No. D-don’t!—”

  Seated alone at a small round-topped to one side of Cousin and his imminent victim was a small, slight old man with shoulder-length snowy white hair and matching billy goat beard.

  He made eye contact with Cousin as the latter’s finger tightened on the trigger. He shook his head no.

  “Why not?” Cousin asked.

  “They’ll hang ye,” the Ancient said reasonably. “You don’t want to dance on air swinging on a rope under the Hanging Tree.”

  “You’ve got something there,” Cousin said, easing off the trigger and lowering the hammer into place.

  Town marshal Mack Barton arrested both men. For some reason he didn’t like the looks of the one-thumbed man. Digging through an old pile of Wanted circulars, he discovered One-Thumb was an axe murderer
from Pingry, an agricultural settlement some twenty miles distant from Hangtree.

  He’d been working as a handyman on a farm owned by a widow with two children. One night he killed them all with an axe and stole $7.97, all the money he could find on the premises. He took a broken cuckoo clock, too.

  One-Thumb was hanged not in Pingry but Hangtree, the event drawing a big turnout.

  * * *

  Cousin Cozzens’s supposed ability with a gun had led to his being posted as one of the guards assigned to protect Bill Longley.

  Now, Cousin dozed on a chair outside Bill Longley’s room, his tailbone perched on the chair’s unpadded wooden seat. Spindly legs stretched straight out in front of him, blocking the aisle. Cousin’s head lolled, mouth hanging slackly open. He snored lightly.

  More sounds came from within Bill’s room, muffled by the closed door. A man and woman were talking low voiced, the woman occasionally giggling.

  Mrs. Frye’s eyes glinted with green sparks. She held a forefinger upright in front of her lips, signaling Johnny to silence.

  Advancing on noiseless feet, she closed on Cousin. He was right-handed, his pistol stuck in the top of his pants on the left-hand side, worn butt-forward for a cross-belly draw.

  Standing to one side of Cousin, Mrs. Frye leaned over him. Her left hand was held poised palm-down above his face while her right hand hovered scant inches from the gun butt.

  All at once she snaked the gun out of his waistband and clamped her other hand over his mouth, muffling the startled outcry caused by his rude awakening.

  “Don’t speak,” she said in a husky stage whisper. “Don’t make a sound.”

  The awakening grew ruder still as Mrs. Frye pressed the gun muzzle against the underside of Cousin’s chin, tilting his head back, his eyes bulging.

  Mrs. Frye held Cousin there for a good half-minute, which must have seemed infinitely more prolonged to him.

  “Bang! You’re dead,” she whispered. “That’s what happens to those who sleep on guard duty. If I were a real killer, your brains—what there is of them—would be splattered all over the wall.

  “I’m going to take the gun away now and I don’t want a sound out of you. Not a peep, understand? Otherwise I’m going to be very angry. Very very angry. Nod yes if you take my meaning.”

  Cousin bobbed his head. Mrs. Frye straightened, removing the gun muzzle from under his chin. Cousin slumped in his chair like a leaky wineskin.

  “Sit in your place and don’t get in the way,” she told Cousin.

  Mrs. Frye turned toward Johnny, so Cousin couldn’t see her face. She winked broadly at Johnny.

  Johnny Cross was vastly relieved, having been unsure of just how far Mrs. Frye would go.

  Mrs. Frye reversed the gun in her hand, proffering it to him butt-first. “You friend Bill might not take it so well if he saw me enter with gun in hand,” she said.

  Johnny nodded, taking the gun and sticking it under his belt, under his jacket flap, out of sight but certainly not out of mind. Safely put away where it couldn’t get into mischief.

  Mrs. Frye knocked smartly on the door, turning the doorknob and opening the door at the same time.

  “Coming in, dear, it’s Mrs. Frye with a visitor,” she called out cheerily, bustling into Bill Longley’s room.

  Johnny Cross hung back, letting Mrs. Frye take the play.

  Bill Longley was sitting up in bed, reaching for a young woman in a state of partial undress who stood by the side of the bed, playfully fending him off.

  Mrs. Frye came breezing in, and Bill and the girl froze in place. Mrs. Frye closed the door.

  Outside in the gallery, Cousin Cozzens looked at Johnny Cross. Johnny shrugged.

  “I guess I overplayed my hand, sleeping on the job,” Cousin said unhappily.

  “I reckon maybe you did,” Johnny agreed.

  “Kin I have my gun back?”

  “When Mrs. Frye says so.”

  Cousin nodded.

  * * *

  The bed in Bill Longley’s room was big enough for two, or even three or more. It had an ornate shiny brass headstand and footstand, looking for all the world like sections of a big birdcage.

  Hanging from one of the headstand’s knobbed bedposts was a twin-holstered gunbelt with a gun in each holster. It was Bill Longley’s own gunbelt and guns, the ones Sam Heller had returned to him.

  Bill had vowed to himself that any who tried for him, badman or lawman, would be greeted with hot lead burning through their vitals. No recovery room for them! When Bill Longley opened fire he shot to kill and rarely missed his mark.

  This part of Texas was new to Bill Longley, yet he had already made his mark on it. From what he’d managed to pick up from Sam Heller and others, Loman Vard was a pretty big noise in this part of the state.

  He was, Bill thought to himself. Now Vard was no more and his gang had gone down that same long road to nowhere with him and it was Bill Longley who had sent them there. Yes, he’d had some help from Sam Heller . . . honesty compelled him to admit that, if only to himself.

  Heller was the damnedest Yankee he’d ever seen, no doubt about that. Try though he might, Bill could not get a handle on him. Sometimes Heller made noises like a lawman but no lawman could kill like that. He went about killing with cool competence and deadly efficiency. A true Northerner in that!

  Yet what strange whim or impulse had motivated Heller to cut Bill in for half of the plunder in the form of the Vard gang’s horses? Sharing out half of such a rich prize when he didn’t have to? Was he loco? Bill could have seen the sentiment in it if not the logic if Bill had saved Sam’s life, but that’s not the way the deal went down. The reverse was true: Sam had saved Bill’s life when Vard had him nailed six ways to sundown.

  The gang’s horses hadn’t even all been sold off yet, according to Damon Bolt, who had told Bill the news of this unexpected windfall. Hobson, the livery stable owner, had agreed to sell the majority of the animals on consignment, meaning that it could be weeks if not months before Bill saw his share of the money.

  Luckily Hobson had wanted two of the horses for himself, Vard’s horse and Big Taw’s quarter horse. The two best horses in the lot, Bill had to agree. Vard’s mount was a superb Thoroughbred with Arabian and Spanish blood, while the quarter horse was an outstanding example of the breed, strong and fit with classic lines.

  This outbreak of honesty and, yes, even honor must be contagious. Bill Longley found himself actually consenting to Damon Bolt’s offer to hold it in the gambling room’s safe vault until such time as Bill should actually need it. All except some petty cash for immediate necessities, which he now had on hand.

  Bill Longley found himself half-hoping that Damon and friends would try to steal the cash so as to restore his, Bill’s, lack of faith in humanity.

  And yet Bill also found himself hoping that Damon Bolt and, yes, even that damned Yankee Sam Heller would prove out to be, in this world of bent and crooked men and women, that rarest of rarities in town or country: straight dealers and square shooters.

  In the meantime, fast recovering and with vigor returning, Bill Longley found other interests with which to occupy his time.

  Such as Dallas.

  “Dallas,” actually.

  Not the city but the woman who was known only as “Dallas.” She was one of Mrs. Frye’s “girls.” A high-line, high-spirited sporting girl who plied her trade at the Golden Spur. Her room was just a few doors down the gallery from Bill’s.

  Convenient.

  Especially since Dallas was a luscious brunette with a mass of curly chestnut brown hair pinned up to the top of her head, crowning the dark-eyed face of a fine-featured vixen. She was twenty years old, slim, leggy, high bosomed.

  Dallas had helped take care of Bill when he was too weak to get out of bed. Now that he was on the mend and feeling better, he was trying to get her into bed. He had arranged for her to come to his room in mid-afternoon when the Golden Spur was at ebb tide, quiet and practically em
pty.

  Bill also made arrangements with Cousin Cozzens, guarding his room at this particular time. A silver dollar from Bill’s stock of petty cash bought Cousin’s ready compliance to go along.

  Dallas really was a sweet thing. Her skirt and petticoats were bunched up around her slender waist.

  Bill was reaching for her when Mrs. Frye came sailing into the room.

  Bill was outraged though he knew better than to show it. Where was Cousin? This was the very sort of interruption Bill had paid him to watch out for.

  Dallas jumped away from the bed to be confronted by her boss. The young woman was in a considerable state of disarray. Loose bobbing curls framed her red face. Her lip rouge was smeared around her mouth.

  “My apologies, Miz Frye. It’s all my fault,” Bill said, forcing a halfway grin. “Miss Dallas stepped in to see how I was getting along. She looked so good I tried to steal a little kiss.”

  “Where? Down her blouse or under her skirt?”

  “Please, Miz Frye, you’re going to make me blush.”

  “I doubt that. I know how a man’s mind works, Bill, but don’t overdo it. There’ll be hell to pay with Doc Ferguson if you open up your wounds.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And don’t give me that ‘Yes, ma’am’ crap. You’re not a boy and this isn’t a schoolhouse.”

  “You’re going to make me blush again, Miz Frye.”

  Mrs. Frye turned her attention to Dallas. “We’ll iron this out later. For now go to your room and freshen up. It’s getting on toward working hours.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Frye.” Dallas used her hand to brush back wayward bobbing curls that hung over her eyes.

  “And stop sulking or I’ll slap that pout off your face,” Mrs. Frye said.

  Dallas bit her lip, nodded, and went out of the room.

  Mrs. Frye was alone with Bill. “If you’re well enough to try and make one of my girls, you can pay for the privilege. There’s no free rides in this house.”

  “I understand. Sorry.”

  “Okay. It’s done and forgotten. As they say, boys will be boys, or something.”

  Mrs. Frye went to the door, gripping the doorknob. “You’ve got a visitor. I’ll send him in presently, give you time to catch your breath and wash your face, there’s lip rouge smeared around your mouth.”