Hard Luck Money

by J. A. Johnstone

  “Howdy, Kid,” he said in his deep, rough voice. He lifted a hand to the brim of his cuffed-back black Stetson and added, “Miss Lace.”

  “How are you this morning, Asa?” Lace asked.

  “Well, it ain’t quite mornin’ no more,” Culhane replied, casting a glance at the big clock on the wall behind the registration desk. The hands stood at three minutes past noon. “But I’m fine. Ain’t even usin’ my cane no more.”

  “I noticed that,” Lace told him with a smile. “I’m glad to see you’re doing better.”

  “Yes’m, so’s my cap’n. He says I been lollygaggin’ around long enough and it’s time for me to get back to my Rangerin’ chores.”

  Considering that Culhane had gotten shot up in the line of duty, The Kid figured he had the right to take off and recuperate for as long as necessary, but he also understood the Ranger was eager to get back in harness.

  “We were just on our way to eat dinner,” he said. “You’re welcome to join us, Asa.”

  Culhane frowned. “Actually, I’ve been sent to fetch you, Kid. The cap’n wants to have a word with you.”

  “If this is about that badge you offered me—”

  “It ain’t. This is somethin’ else. If you’re interested, though, you’d be helpin’ out the Rangers, even if you don’t join up with us regular-like.”

  The Kid was puzzled, even intrigued. He looked over at Lace, who said, “Go ahead if you want to, Kid. I’m going to be busy this afternoon anyway.”

  “Oh?”

  “That’s right.” Her voice took on a tone of determination. “I need to start rounding up some supplies for that trip down south.”

  To Del Rio, The Kid thought. Where Jake Cisneros had been spotted.

  So that was how it was going to be, he told himself. Well, he had known it couldn’t last forever, no matter how much a part of him wanted it to.

  Nothing lasted forever, did it?

  He nodded to Culhane. “All right, Asa. I’ll go listen to whatever it is your captain has to say.”

  Chapter 3

  Huntsville

  When Quint Lupo regained consciousness, his head hurt like blazes. He had already absorbed quite a bit of punishment before Hagen came up and clouted him with that club. Getting knocked out cold made the pain of regaining consciousness worse.

  But at least the guard hadn’t beaten him to death, so Lupo supposed that was something to be thankful for.

  When he opened his eyes and looked around he saw whitewashed stone walls that were otherwise bare. The rough sheet he felt underneath him, rasping against his skin, told him he was in a bed.

  It was the prison infirmary, he thought. He had been there before, getting patched up after various scrapes in the yard. Never for anything quite as serious, though.

  He tried to turn his head, but it made more pain explode inside his skull. He groaned.

  That brought footsteps toward the bed.

  “You awake, Lupo?” a man asked. He leaned over so Lupo could see him. “I’ll go get the doc.”

  Lupo recognized the weaselly little convict as Ike Calvert, a trusty who worked in the infirmary. Calvert scuttled off, and a moment later a man in a white coat came over to the bed, the prison doctor, Simon Kendrick.

  Lupo had heard rumors that Kendrick was an opium addict, and the man’s hollow eyes and sallow countenance seemed to confirm it. But he was a fairly competent doctor despite his personal failings. He touched Lupo’s bandaged head gingerly, checking the dressing.

  “It took half a dozen stitches to close the wound Corporal Hagen’s bludgeon left in your scalp, Lupo,” Kendrick said. “You should be careful and not move around too much. Brain injuries can be tricky matters.”

  “I have ... a brain injury?” Lupo husked through dry, cracked lips.

  “Possibly. It’s hard to say. That’s why we have to proceed carefully. You’ll be here for several days before you go back to your regular cell.” Kendrick smiled. “I don’t suppose being out of your cell will bother you much.”

  It wouldn’t bother him at all, Lupo thought. His cellmate, a rustler named Jack Stallings, was a surly hombre, and they had little to do with each other. Lupo was fine with staying in the infirmary, although he wished his head didn’t hurt quite so much.

  “You should be feeling better by tomorrow,” Kendrick went on. “There’s nothing for you to do now except rest, so you might as well enjoy it.”

  “That’s fine, Doc. Thanks.” Something occurred to Lupo. “What happened to Boozer?”

  “The man you assaulted?” Kendrick shrugged. “Nothing, as far as I know.”

  “I didn’t—” Lupo stopped. He’d been about to say he hadn’t assaulted Boozer. It had been the other way around. Boozer had started that fight.

  But he recalled how Hagen had rushed up after the fight had gone on for several minutes. Boozer and the other prisoners had already dealt out quite a bit of punishment, making him groggy and easy to handle. Hagen hadn’t asked any questions, hadn’t hesitated to lift his club and bring it crashing down on Lupo’s head.

  As if he had known all along which one of the fighters he was going to hit.

  Lupo sighed and closed his eyes like he wanted to rest, just as Kendrick had told him. He heard the doctor and Calvert move away from the bed.

  But Lupo wasn’t sleeping. He was thinking. His ability to figure things out had made him a successful outlaw for a number of years, before the odds finally caught up to him. He went back over everything that had happened in the yard and could see how it really laid out.

  The fight hadn’t happened because of a misunderstanding. Boozer had jumped him because somebody had told him to. Maybe even slipped him a little payoff of some sort.

  That somebody had to be Hagen. He might be only a corporal, but it was well known among the prisoners that he had a lot of power inside the prison walls. He was the man to go to if a convict wanted a special favor, and it worked the other way, too.

  So Hagen had set him up, Lupo concluded. Nothing else really made sense.

  But why? He’d never clashed with Hagen. He’d had very little to do with the guard and certainly had never defied him. Lupo just wanted to serve his sentence and get out of there. He didn’t go looking for trouble.

  He’d figured out what had happened, but had no idea of the motive and was more tired than he’d thought. Sleep dragged at his brain.

  He surrendered to it. There would be time enough later to ponder on the mystery, he told himself.

  By the next day, the intense pain in Lupo’s head had receded to a continuous dull throb, and he was able to keep down some beans, a chunk of bread, and a cup of coffee.

  Surprised he hadn’t been moved to the infirmary’s regular ward, he could hear other prisoners as they cursed, groaned, and complained of various ailments and injuries. He was alone in a separate room, with its single high, barred window.

  Lupo didn’t mind the solitude, although after a while he got bored just lying in bed.

  By evening, the pain in his head had slacked off to the point that when Kendrick came around to check on him, he asked, “How much longer do I have to stay here, Doc?”

  Kendrick smiled thinly. “You want to go back to work in the fields, is that it?”

  “Well, I didn’t say that—”

  “You’re in no shape to return to your normal routine yet, Lupo. If I were you, I’d just count my blessings and stop questioning things.”

  Lupo shrugged. “Fine.”

  But things weren’t fine. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong, that something not readily apparent was going on.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, light suddenly washed over his bunk and woke him. Blinking against the harsh glare, he tried to push himself to a sitting position.

  Before he could make it, strong hands grabbed his arms and hauled him off the thin, hard mattress, standing him up so his bare feet were on the cold floor. A voice growled, “Get those clothes on him.” />
  Lupo squinted as his eyes adjusted to the light. He made out several hulking forms filling the room and casting grotesque shadows on the whitewashed walls. The light came from a lantern held high over the head of the man who had given the order. Lupo thought the voice belonged to Hagen.

  Were they going to take him out and kill him, for some reason he couldn’t begin to fathom? Some of the prisoners talked about things like that happening. From time to time a convict disappeared mysteriously, never to be seen or heard from again.

  That thought put fear in him, and Lupo struggled as his captors yanked his prison uniform off him and began pulling civilian clothes onto his body. None of it made sense, but every instinct he possessed told him those men weren’t trying to help him.

  “Hurry up, damn it.”

  That was definitely Hagen behind the glare of the lantern, Lupo decided.

  “We don’t have a lot of time to waste.”

  Time for what? Lupo asked himself wildly.

  But no answer was forthcoming.

  There were too many men. Lupo couldn’t stop them from dressing him in the new clothes and boots and dragging him out of the room.

  When they did, he saw that screens had been set up to block off the view of the corridor from the regular ward. If any of the convicts in there had been disturbed by the commotion, they gave no sign of it.

  Inside the walls, men learned quickly if the trouble didn’t have anything to do with them, it was best to pretend they didn’t see or hear it.

  Lupo got a better look at his captors and was surprised to see they were a mixture of guards and convicts, including Leroy Boozer, working together to hustle him along the corridor. He couldn’t imagine what had prompted these natural enemies to cooperate, but it couldn’t be anything that boded well for him.

  The infirmary was located inside one of the prison’s administrative buildings. The offices they passed were closed and dark. Only one sally port stood between that part of the penitentiary and the outside world.

  The crazy idea that they were taking him out of the prison entered Lupo’s head. But if he was caught out there, he would be considered an escapee. Nobody would believe the story that some guards and prisoners, working together, had forced him out of the prison. He would be brought back, and more years would be added to his sentence. He wasn’t a young man, by any means, and if he had to spend an extra ten or fifteen years in there, he would probably never leave, at least not alive.

  “No!” Lupo yelled. “Stop it! I don’t want to go!”

  Hagen paused and looked back over his shoulder with a snarl. “Shut him up!” he ordered. “We can’t risk anybody who’s not in on the plan hearing him!”

  So there was a plan. The whole thing really had been a setup all along. But why?

  The next instant one of the men grabbed Lupo’s jaws, forced his mouth open, and shoved a rag into it. Lupo couldn’t do anything but make some frantic, muffled noises.

  They reached the front door of the building and his captors forced him out into the night air. They went down the steps and across the narrow gravel yard to the sally port. Two guards armed with rifles waited there.

  The gates were open.

  The guard towers didn’t command a very good view of that location. Even if they had, Lupo wouldn’t have been surprised to find the guards manning those towers were part of Hagen’s scheme.

  After the past few minutes, not much of anything would have surprised Lupo.

  But one thing did. A sharp voice demanded, “Wait a minute! Where are you taking that man, Hagen?”

  Chapter 4

  The group had just started through the sally port. Hagen came to an abrupt stop and turned. “Sergeant Flynn. You’re supposed to be off duty tonight.”

  A big man wearing only the trousers from a guard’s uniform and the upper half of a pair of long underwear strode toward them. His rusty hair was tangled and his sweeping handlebar mustache was rust-colored as well.

  “Does it look like I’m on duty?” he snapped. “I couldn’t sleep, so I came over from the guard barracks to work on next month’s duty rosters. Heard somebody go past in the hall and figured I’d better see what in blazes was going on.”

  Hagen handed the lantern to one of the other men and walked past the others to confront Flynn. “It’s nothing for you to concern yourself with, Sergeant. I have this under control.”

  Flynn glared darkly at him. “I see four of my guards and three prisoners giving a civilian the bum’s rush out of here, and I’m not supposed to be concerned?” Flynn peered at Lupo, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. “My God, that’s no civilian! That’s Quint Lupo! What deviltry are you up to, Hagen? I’ve had my eye on you. I know you can’t be trusted—”

  “Then you should’ve thrown me out of here a long time before now, Sergeant,” Hagen said.

  Lupo saw the sudden glint of lantern light on steel, but with that rag in his mouth he couldn’t call a warning to Flynn. It probably wouldn’t have done any good even if he’d been able to. Hagen brought a knife up and around with blinding speed and plunged it into Flynn’s chest.

  Flynn took a half step back, obviously shocked by the unexpected attack. He reached for the knife with one hand, but his other hand shot out and grabbed Hagen by the neck. Flynn was big and strong and wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

  Unfortunately, the knife must have pierced his heart because his strength deserted him almost immediately. He let go of Hagen and pawed at the knife with both hands. His knees unhinged, and he fell. A brief drumming of Flynn’s feet on the gravel signaled his death.

  Hagen reached down and pulled the knife free. “Too bad,” he said coldly. “Flynn was in the wrong place at the wrong time and Lupo killed him during the escape.”

  Lupo’s eyes widened, and he made noises again as he tried to push the rag out of his mouth using his tongue. It was bad enough they were making it look like he’d escaped. If he was blamed for Flynn’s murder, every lawman in the state would be looking for him, including the Texas Rangers. He’d be caught, brought back, and hanged.

  But it would never come to that, he realized as his captors once again hurried him through the night, past the sally port, out of the walls, and toward a distant stand of trees. He was convinced they were taking him out to kill him, for some reason he couldn’t begin to understand.

  Behind them, the prison remained quiet and sleeping.

  The group plunged into the thick shadows under the trees. The growth cut off any moonlight or starlight, and when the man carrying the lantern blew it out, the darkness was almost complete. They came to a stop.

  “Now we wait,” Hagen said in a half whisper.

  Despair made Lupo sag in the grip of the men holding him. He had never been the sort to give up, but he didn’t see how he could get away.

  But maybe if he could make them think he wasn’t going to fight anymore, they would get careless. If one of the guards got close enough to tackle, and Lupo could tear loose just for a moment, he might be able to get his hands on a gun... .

  He didn’t harbor any foolish notion of being able to shoot his way out, but if they were going to kill him anyway, he might as well go down fighting and take some of the bastards with him, he thought.

  Especially Hagen.

  But he never got the chance. The men who were holding him, one of whom was Boozer, never let up. They kept him pinioned firmly between them. None of the guards came close enough for him to make a grab for a gun, either, even if he could have gotten loose.

  “How long do we have to wait?” one of the men asked.

  “Until the fellas I’m working with get here,” Hagen snapped.

  So someone else was involved, Lupo mused. That put a new angle on the situation, but didn’t clear anything up. He was as much in the dark as ever, figuratively as well as literally.

  Time didn’t have much meaning in such circumstances. Lupo didn’t know how much of it had passed when he heard hoofbeats approaching. What
sounded like five or six riders were making their way slowly through the trees.

  The hoofbeats stopped, and someone made a noise like a night bird.

  Hagen said, “That’s the signal,” and scratched a match into life to light the lantern again. The men holding Lupo had to squint against the glare.

  So did Lupo. The thought that it might be his last chance flashed through his mind. He tensed his muscles, about to make one more attempt to break free, but Boozer’s hands tightened on his arm and the big convict growled, “Don’t even think about it, Lupo.”

  Muttering a curse under his breath, Lupo waited to see what was going to happen.

  The riders started moving again, tall, looming shapes making their way through the trees. They reined to a stop about twenty feet away from the group of guards and convicts.

  One of the newcomers edged his horse forward. He was a big, barrel-chested man with an ugly face adorned by a ragged gray mustache that didn’t help its appearance. “Is that him?” he asked in a gravelly voice.

  “That’s him,” Hagen confirmed. “Quint Lupo. One of the most successful bank robbers in Texas for a long time. Held up quite a few trains, too. But the law finally caught up to him.”

  “And now the law’s about to lose him again,” the stranger said.

  That brought a laugh from Hagen. “We’re not losing him. We’re giving him back.”

  “All right.” The man on horseback made a curt gesture. “Bring him on over.”

  “There’s one thing you ought to know,” Hagen said.

  The man stiffened, and Lupo saw his hand move slightly closer to the butt of the gun holstered on his hip.

  “What’s that?” the man demanded. “You’d better not have changed your mind about the price you agreed to.”

  “That’s not it,” Hagen said with a quick shake of his head. “There’s a dead guard back at the prison. A couple of my men are sitting on the body right now, but they’ll pretend to discover it as soon as I give the world.”