Hard Luck Money

by J. A. Johnstone

  “And I don’t stand to gain anything by giving you the opportunity to double-cross me.” Grey had smiled. “Just be patient, Quint.”

  It wasn’t like he had much choice in the matter, Lupo thought as he looked down across the river at La Grange. Grey had him over a barrel. The man could turn him in to the law at any time.

  “All right,” Lupo said. “Let’s get this done.” They followed the road zigzagging down the side of the steep hill and clattered across the wooden bridge spanning the Colorado.

  It was the middle of a warm June afternoon. The square was busy, with a number of wagons parked in front of businesses and horses tied to hitch racks. Not as busy as a Saturday, the day when farmers and ranchers in the area came into town, but still, too many people for Lupo to feel comfortable about what they were doing.

  Well, it wasn’t the first time he had ridden into a town in broad daylight to rob a bank, he told himself.

  He and his companions moved along the street at an easy pace, not doing anything to draw attention to themselves as they approached the bank.

  It sat on a corner of the square in a redbrick building with various offices on its second floor. Next to it was Al’s Grocery Store, where Lupo, Brattle, and the other men reined in and dismounted.

  After tying up their horses, Lupo and Brattle moved along the boardwalk and went into the bank while the other men drifted into the grocery store.

  Lupo wanted to take a look around first, and of course Brattle wasn’t going to let him out of his sight. The other outlaws would make their way into the bank, one by one, after approximately ten minutes had passed.

  Right away, Lupo saw the place had a typical setup: a row of tellers’ cages to one side, several desks behind a railing where the bank executives did their business, the massive vault in the middle and to the back.

  All the tellers were occupied with customers, and several more customers stood at a marble counter filling out slips to make deposits or withdrawals.

  The key to a successful bank robbery, Lupo knew, wasn’t the physical layout of the place. It was the people involved.

  Without being obvious about what he was doing, he studied the two men sitting at the desks. The middle-aged one, well padded with fat, would be the bank president. He had a broad, friendly face, and the reddish tinge of his nose revealed he liked to drink a little too much. He wouldn’t be a danger.

  Lupo would stake his life on it ... which might well be what he was doing.

  Ah, but the other man, the younger, slimmer one with the eager expression on his face as if he actually enjoyed the paperwork he was doing ... he might present a problem. He was the bank vice-president, more than likely, and he’d have his eye on the president’s job, which meant he would be quicker to defend the customers’ money. Ambition nearly always equaled foolhardiness.

  In one of the drawers of the young man’s desk would be a gun, and when the holdup started he’d be tempted to make a grab for it.

  Lupo caught Brattle’s eye and gave a tiny nod toward the bank vice-president. Brattle nodded back to show he understood Lupo was telling him where the greatest danger lay. He would be ready if the vice-president tried anything.

  The three tellers were men approaching middle age, all with the resigned look of hombres who knew they would never do anything else with their lives. It was possible one might put up a fight, but it was just as possible they would be more concerned with their own hides and would cooperate with the robbers. Lupo would keep an eye on them, of course, but he really didn’t expect any trouble from that direction.

  That left the customers. They were a mix of housewives depositing butter-and-egg money, local businessmen, and a couple rangy men in cowboy hats and boots who probably owned spreads in the area.

  Those cattlemen weren’t carrying guns, which was good, because they looked like the sort of hombres who would use them, if they had them. Lupo preferred they not be there, even unarmed. Maybe the ranchers would finish up their business and leave before the other members of the gang were in position, he thought.

  One of the cattlemen did indeed stroll out a few minutes later, but the other lingered to jaw with the bank president.

  Lupo stood at the marble counter, holding a pencil and pretending to do some figuring on a piece of paper, as he watched the other members of the gang drift in casually. Nobody in the bank did more than glance idly at them, but if they stood around doing nothing for very long, people would start to get suspicious.

  It was time to move.

  Lupo looked over at Brattle and nodded.

  Brattle reached for the bandanna tied around his neck and pulled it up over the lower half of his face. The other robbers did the same.

  Lupo was the only one with his face still uncovered as he pulled his gun, stepped back so he could cover the whole room, and shouted, “Everybody put your hands up and stand still! This is a holdup!”

  Telling people to stand still worked better than ordering them not to move, Lupo had discovered through experience. People were more likely to obey if they were told to do something rather than to not do something, even if the end result was exactly the same.

  But there was always somebody who wouldn’t follow orders. The trick was to get on top of them right away and stop them from making trouble.

  The rancher who’d been talking to the bank president whirled around and took a step toward the gate in the railing.

  Lupo pointed his gun at the man and eared back the hammer. The sound of a gun being cocked when it was aimed right at him tended to freeze the blood of any man.

  It worked with the rancher. He stopped in his tracks and glared at Lupo, but didn’t move anymore except to raise his hands slowly.

  He had no way of knowing Lupo’s gun was empty ... unless he looked closely enough to see that no bullets were visible in the Colt’s cylinder. Lupo hoped the man wouldn’t be that observant.

  Brattle had his gun pointed at the vice-president, who had bolted up out of his chair at the sound of Lupo’s shouted command. The young man froze just like the rancher as Brattle was quick to cover him.

  Maybe they could get this job done without any gunplay, Lupo thought.

  One robber kept his gun on the customers while the other three moved in on the tellers’ cages. They pulled out canvas sacks from under their shirts and tossed them to the frightened tellers.

  “Fill ’em up,” one of the outlaws growled.

  Lupo moved closer to the railing and told the bank president, “You’re going back there to open the vault now, friend. Do it and no one gets hurt.”

  The man’s face had turned pale and looked like lumpy bread dough. “I ... I can’t open it. I don’t know the combination—”

  “The hell you don’t,” Lupo interrupted. “Get back there and do it now.”

  The rancher said, “You’d better do what he says, Carl. I recognize this fella. He’s that mad dog son of a bi ... gun Lupo who broke out of Huntsville a week ago. Killed a guard on his way out, the newspaper said.”

  Lupo let a menacing smile curve his mouth. “That’s right, Carl. So move or I’ll kill you, too, and get somebody else to open the vault.”

  Holding his hands up in plain sight, the bank president struggled to his feet. “I’m going. I ... I ...”

  His eyes widened and he looked like he was about to choke. Instead of moving to follow Lupo’s order, he suddenly clasped both hands to his chest. With a strangled groan, he pitched forward across his desk.

  That was so unexpected Brattle turned to look, giving the vice-president the chance he had been waiting for. Reaching down, he jerked open a drawer in his desk, and plucked out a gun.

  He never had a chance. Brattle’s Colt boomed twice and sent a pair of slugs ripping into the young man’s chest. The bullets drove him off his feet and dropped him in a bloody heap.

  The gunshots ended the possibility of emptying the vault—not enough time for that now.

  But the canvas bags were already bulging with
loot scooped from the tellers’ drawers.

  “Move!” Lupo shouted through the echoes of Brattle’s shots. “Get to the horses!”

  He swung his gun back and forth, keeping the rancher and the other customers covered as the masked men ran for the door and burst through it. Lupo was the last one out and the last one to hit the saddle.

  As Lupo wheeled his horse, the rancher ran out of the bank with the gun the vice-president had dropped, and started shooting at the robbers.

  Brattle returned the fire, his slugs striking the rancher and twisting the man off his feet.

  The six outlaws galloped past the courthouse and headed for the river. People shouted curses and questions and scurried to get out of the way before they were trampled.

  As he rode hard, leaning forward over his horse’s neck to make himself a smaller target, Lupo reached into the saddlebags for the items he had told Grey he would need after he’d scouted the job. He pulled out a bundle of three sticks of dynamite tied together with twine. Their fuses were twisted together.

  As the horses pounded onto the bridge over the river, Lupo guided his mount with his knees and used his other hand to snap a match into life with his thumbnail.

  Sparks flew in the air as he lit the fuses, hanging back to let the others get well ahead of him.

  A glance over his shoulder told him several men had mounted up and were galloping in pursuit. When he reached the far end of the bridge, Lupo wheeled his horse and gave the dynamite an underhanded toss, sending it bouncing and rolling about forty feet away onto the span.

  A bullet whined over his head at the same time a rifle cracked in the distance. Somebody was shooting at him from the town. He turned his horse and galloped for the hill.

  Behind him, the pursuers had raced onto the bridge when the dynamite blew. The bridge was long enough that they weren’t caught in the explosion, but the blast made the horses rear up in panic. Several men were thrown from their saddles. Debris from the explosion rained down around them.

  Another bridge was located two miles upstream. The closest bridge downstream was five miles away. By the time a posse could get across the Colorado and give chase, the bank robbers would have an insurmountable lead.

  That was just the way Lupo had planned it.

  The job would have to be considered a success, even though the take might not be as big as Grey expected. Lupo had passed his first test. He had been recognized, sure, and that would get him in deeper trouble with the law, but the undeniable truth to that old saying was they could only hang him once. The murder of that prison guard was enough to doom him to spending the rest of his life as a fugitive.

  His plans to go straight were ruined. He would never be able to give Katie any sort of a normal life. She would always be the daughter of an outlaw and a killer.

  He’d wait for his chance to turn the tables on Alexander Grey.

  If he had to be an outlaw again, then by God he would be the boss outlaw!

  Chapter 7

  Three men died in the La Grange bank robbery: the bank vice-president, the rancher who’d been shot, and the heavyset bank president whose heart gave out from the fear and strain of the holdup.

  The robbery itself netted a little under nine thousand dollars. Alexander Grey took about a third of that, leaving a thousand apiece for the men who had done the actual work.

  That difference in the payoff might make a nice wedge to drive between Grey and the other men sometime in the future, Lupo thought.

  A few days after the La Grange job, the bounty on Quint Lupo rose to four thousand dollars.

  Two weeks later, Lupo, Brattle, and the rest of the gang held up the bank in Hallettsville, down on the Lavaca River. Nobody was killed, although a townsmen caught a slug through the thigh during a brief flurry of shots as the outlaws were riding out of town.

  A month later, they ventured farther west to San Marcos and hit the bank there. One of the tellers made a grab for the gun in his cash drawer and got a bullet through the brain from Brattle’s gun.

  Three weeks after that, they stopped a train near Seguin and emptied the safe in the express car. The express messenger and the conductor both died in that holdup when they tried to put up a fight.

  Three things remained constant during that stretch. Lupo was the only one of the gang who wasn’t masked during the jobs, so he was recognized each time. With each new crime, the bounty on him was raised, especially after they hit the train. With the money the railroad kicked in, the reward on Lupo’s head rose all the way to twelve thousand dollars.

  The third thing was that Alexander Grey took approximately a third of the loot as his share, even though he didn’t run any of the risks.

  It was time to make his move, Lupo sensed.

  No one had ever tracked them back to the old plantation. He knew all the tricks of throwing a posse off his trail, so the place was their sanctuary, where they could take it easy between jobs.

  The men grew more and more restless, though. Each had a pretty good poke of stolen loot built up, with nothing to spend it on. Whiskey, women, cards ... all those things called to the outlaws, but Grey insisted they had to lie low.

  Lupo planned to use that dissatisfaction to his advantage.

  He wasn’t guarded all the time, as he had been at first, although Grey still didn’t trust him enough to allow him to carry a gun while he was there.

  At least when he went on a job, his gun had bullets in it. So far he hadn’t had to fire it. Brattle and the other men had taken care of all the gunplay.

  He was in his second floor room one evening when a knock sounded on the door. He’d been sitting in a chair, smoking one of Grey’s cigars, and reading a book he’d taken from the library downstairs, some far-fetched adventure yarn by an Englishman named Stevenson. Some of the pages were crinkled from water damage, but he could still read them.

  When the knock came, he set the book and the cigar aside and called, “What is it?”

  “Boss wants to see you downstairs,” Brattle replied through the door.

  Lupo stood up. It had been a week since the last job, so he figured Grey probably wanted to start talking about the next one. Lupo opened the door and grinned at Brattle standing there wearing his six-gun and Stetson, as usual.

  “What’s so funny?” Brattle demanded.

  “I was just remembering how Grey called you his butler, the night you first brought me here.”

  Brattle snorted. “The boss gets some funny notions in his head. Do I look like a butler to you?”

  “No, you look like a bank-robbing outlaw.”

  “Damn right. Come on.”

  As they went down the stairs covered by a frayed runner, Lupo asked, “Do you know what this is about?”

  “Nope. The boss don’t let me in on his plans unless he figures I’ve got a good reason for knowin’ about ’em. He just said to fetch you.”

  “Well, I suppose I’ll know soon enough.”

  “I expect so.” Brattle escorted Lupo to the library. Lupo didn’t say anything else as they walked through the plantation house.

  A few times lately, he had made some idle comments to the other men about how they were running all the risks while Grey claimed the lion’s share of the loot. The men seemed to resent that arrangement, which was encouraging for Lupo’s long-term plans.

  So far, he hadn’t approached Brattle in the same way. Since Brattle was closer to Grey than the other men it seemed a bigger risk.

  The last thing Lupo needed was somebody telling Grey that he was trying to stir up a mutiny.

  Brattle didn’t pause to knock on the library door, just opened it and motioned for Lupo to go on in. He did so and was surprised to see Alexander Grey sitting at the desk with a stranger in the red leather chair in front of him.

  Grey looked up with a smile of greeting on his lean face and got to his feet. “Come in, Quint. We have a visitor I want you to meet.”

  The stranger stood, too, and turned around. He was a dour, medium-size
d man with slightly graying dark hair above a tanned face. He was dressed all in black, including his gunbelt and the grips of the Colt he carried. A black Stetson sat on the corner of Grey’s desk.

  “This is Angus Murrell,” Grey introduced him. “Angus, you know all about Quint Lupo.”

  “Yeah, I should.” Murrell held out a hand. “Howdy, Lupo.”

  Lupo shook hands with the man, then asked, “How do you know about me?”

  That brought a laugh from Grey. “You may have wondered how I got those wanted posters on you, Quint. Angus takes care of things like that for me. In fact, he’s brought a new one tonight.” Grey picked up a sheet of paper from his desk and extended it toward Lupo. “Here, take a good look at it.”

  Lupo took the paper. He recognized the familiar photograph of himself printed on it, but the amount of the reward listed below his face was new. He let out a low whistle to show that he was impressed. “Fifteen grand. I’m worth a lot of money.”

  “You certainly are,” Grey agreed, and something about his voice made Lupo glance up sharply.

  Boot leather scraped on the floor behind him. Brattle was still back there.

  Lupo had forgotten all about him, but his instincts shrieked a warning.

  That warning came too late. With stunning force, something crashed against the back of Lupo’s head as he started to turn. He felt himself falling.

  He didn’t feel himself hit the floor in front of Grey’s desk.

  He was already out cold by then.

  Awareness seeped back into Lupo’s brain and brought with it pain and fear. He knew he had been the worst kind of fool. He had been making his plans, scheming to double-cross Grey and take over the gang, when all along Grey had been using him, setting up a double cross of his own.

  He lay sprawled uncomfortably on a hard-packed dirt surface, his arms tied behind his back. He opened his eyes, and realized he was in one of the plantation’s old barns. The big, drafty building was slowly rotting away, but it was still intact for the moment.

  They had taken him out there because Grey didn’t want to get blood on the floor of his study, Lupo thought grimly.