Mason reached into the pocket where he’d stashed the last weapon smuggled from his cabin. “I knew you would say something like that, just like I know you’re not going to make a reach for any of those guns. You rely on hired muscle too much. They’re good, but once they’re gone you’re vulnerable.”
“You’ve got nothing but a lot of talk on your side,” Greeley said. “Whatever you’ve done to distract my men, it won’t last forever.”
“You think I was bluffing about your men? Damn, how the hell did I lose that hand to you?” Mason slipped the knuckle-duster onto his right hand and closed his fingers around the curved iron brace. He looked down at the dented strip crossing his knuckles and then to the little sharpened spike emerging from his fist. “I am really going to enjoy this.”
Greeley stood tall and confident that he could not possibly be harmed while on the holy ground of his precious Delta Jack. Mason convinced him otherwise by slamming a reinforced fist into Greeley’s stomach.
Greeley straightened up and took a swing at Mason in return. He missed his first attempt but connected on the second, which was a strong left hook. “You misread me again, Abner,” he said as he drove a quick uppercut into Mason’s midsection. “That’s why you’ll always be a loser.”
Even though Mason was surprised at how well Greeley took that first punch, he didn’t let that prevent him from delivering a few more. The first two were jabs to Greeley’s chest. The next two went to the ribs. When wearing a knuckle-duster, picking the proper targets was essential if a man wanted to keep his opponent awake or alive.
“You wanted me to be the one seen going after Simons,” Mason said while continuing to pepper Greeley with punches. “And you wanted me to be seen leaving Sedrich just like you wanted me to be seen going after Seth Borden. That way, I could take the blame for whatever happened to them.”
Greeley pulled in a labored breath. When he tried to stand upright, he didn’t quite make it. “You weren’t supposed to make it out of Sedrich alive, but you did and you ruined the sweetest deal any men like us could hope to get. After how you carried yourself through this, I was thinking about cutting you in on the profits from this gold mine. Now you’ll get nothing!”
Thanks to the difficulty Greeley had in drawing breath, Mason could see the next punch coming at him from a mile away. He stepped out of its path and pounded the knuckle-duster into Greeley’s face. That dropped Greeley to one knee, where he spat some blood onto the expensive carpet.
“I’m getting my reward right now,” Mason said.
“Lazenby will hurt all of us,” Greeley wheezed. “Damn near everyone on this boat has cheated and we all got things to hide. That inspector woulda found out about me and my overmen, but he woulda found out about you too! I was protecting all of us!”
The fight had taken them into the theater. There was nobody onstage at the moment, but most of the tables were filled by people who couldn’t believe what they were seeing and were unwilling to look away. “None of us is putting our necks on the block for you or those bloodthirsty animals on your payroll,” Mason declared. “Isn’t that right?”
Nobody in that room was about to disagree.
Gritting his teeth, Greeley reached down to expose one boot so he could pull out the.32 holstered there. He stopped before drawing the weapon when he felt the knuckle-duster’s short blade pressed against the side of his neck.
“If I so much as twitch right now,” Mason warned, “this part of your neck gets opened up and you bleed out like a stuck pig in less than a minute. You really want to take a shot at me that bad?”
Greeley eased his hand away from the holster and let out a tired sigh when Oscar Lazenby and his deputies walked in through the theater’s main entrance.
“I would’ve paid my debt,” Mason said. “But you wanted more than that. You wanted to run me into the ground, step on me to get what you wanted, and then bury me just because it suited you. Well, since you got so greedy, you won’t get anything you were after. I didn’t kill Simons, but I also got him stashed somewhere safe so when you’re put in front of a judge and witnesses are needed to prove you guilty, Simons will provide them. Seth Borden and his family are alive, so the old man will get his boat back. He’ll name it after his girl and Mr. Lazenby will surely help him get his permits. You’ll be the one hung up and left dangling, Cam. All because you got greedy.”
“I’m gonna—”
“Enough idle threats,” Mason said. “You see all these folks here? They spend their days and nights sitting at card tables, swapping stories, and right now I’m giving them a good one to tell. They’ll spread the word about how your big, bad overmen were swept away and you were dragged out of your office to be beaten down for all to see.”
Greeley looked up at him and said, “I’m not down yet. You don’t have the—”
Mason hit Greeley with all he had, square in the jaw. Greeley flopped back, bounced off the leg of the closest table, and fell facedown on the floor.
“That was impressive,” Maggie said as she approached them.
Mason straightened up, removed the knuckle-duster, and wrapped an arm around Maggie’s waist. “I suggest we do ourselves a favor and leave,” he said.
“Why?” she asked while Lazenby and his men swarmed around Greeley.
“This boat is about to change ownership and I doubt it’ll bode well for the atmosphere around here. Greeley may have been a slimy bastard,” Mason said with a tired grin, “but he ran a damn good casino.”
Read on for an excerpt from
SHOTGUN CHARLIE
A Ralph Compton Novel by Matthew P. Mayo
Available now from Signet in paperback and e-book.
The dove’s throaty growls had startled him at first, made him jump right off the bed. Surely she was in pain, some sort of trouble. A bad dream at best. Then it had occurred to Charlie that no, this was a natural sound. And this was as close as he’d ever come to hearing it.
Through a thin lath-and-plaster wall mostly covered with paper, still pretty but not nearly so vivid as he was sure it had been a long time since, with tiny pink flowers—roses, he thought they might be—surrounded by even tinier green leaves, Charlie finally knew the sounds for what they were. They were the sounds of a man and a woman doing what he was still a stranger to. Would be forever, he guessed.
And so, big ol’ Charlie Chilton, barely fifteen years old, spent the first night he had ever spent in a town, the first night he’d ever spent in a hotel, the first night he’d ever spent in a bed—an honest-to-goodness spring bed under a cotton-ticking mattress and all—and he spent it mostly awake.
He wondered as he was roused again and again from a neck-snapping slumber, if he should rap on the wall. He didn’t want to invite trouble, but he needed sleep. He felt sure when he’d checked in that he was about to receive the finest night’s sleep a body could get.
That the hotel was in the habit of renting out unoccupied rooms for short-term trysts was something that Charlie would not know for a long time to come. But that night’s introduction had startled him. All the long days preceding his arrival in town had been one odd surprise after another, saddening and shocking and worrisome. And so this last one, despite his earnest hopes, proved more of the same.
This was what the world was like? Not much different from the everyday misery of life on the little rented farm with his gran. He’d hoped for so much more. As he listened to the moans and thumpings and occasional harsh barks of laughter from the men, he hoped that at least his mule, Teacup, was safe and sound and enjoying a good night’s slumber in the livery.
It had cost a few coins that he knew he shouldn’t have spent, but he’d never indulged in anything in his life, and the money he’d earned at that last farm had burned a hole in is trouser pocket until he’d spent some.
Charlie passed some of the long, noisy night by counting out the last
of it, searching his pockets over and over again, sure he’d dropped some of the money somewhere along the way. But no, when after long minutes he’d tallied the figures in his head, he had one dollar and twelve cents left. And he decided then that something had to change. He figured he’d worry about it in the morning, but morning came with little interruption from night by sleep, save for brief snatches.
He left the hotel early, the sun was barely up. The woman’s cries had continued long into the early hours, then dwindled, allowing him precious little rest. Before he left the room, his eyes had once again taken in the small lace doily, a marvel of hand stitching the likes of which he’d never seen. He’d studied it for some time the night before, then set it aside.
It was white, with a pointed-edge pattern, round in shape, smaller than his palm, but large enough to fit under the dainty oil lamp on the chest of drawers. When he’d lifted the lamp to peek at it, he’d seen tiny flowers, a dozen of them arranged in a circle. It was one of the single most pretty things he’d ever seen in his life, if you didn’t count all the wonders nature had up her sleeve.
Those could hardly be topped by man, he figured—a new calf, the soft hairs on its head, how it felt when you rubbed it before the calf awoke, the long lashes on its eyes staring up at you in innocence; spring buds on an apple tree, then how they unfolded over a week or so, the little leaves getting bigger and darker and tougher as the season wore on.
They were special things, to be sure, but that little doily was a corker, maybe it was because it had no real purpose? Even its prettiness was hidden by the oil lamp. How many folks got to see what some woman had worked so hard to make, hidden as those little flowers were by the lamp? He appreciated them, at least.
And so as he left the room, he spied that doily and thought to himself, “Why not, Charlie? Why not have something pretty in your life? After all, didn’t they sort of cheat you out of your good night’s sleep?” And so he had slid the doily off the polished top of that chest of drawers and poked it quickly down into his trouser pocket with a long, callused finger, reddening about the neck, cheeks, and ears even as he did so.
By the time he reached the bottom of the long staircase in the lobby of the hotel, he felt as if his entire head might catch fire. He shuffled toward the front door and thrust a hand into his pocket. His fingers tweezered the crumpled little doily. He would set it on the counter and leave, walk right out. It was so early, no one was there. He lifted it free, and that was when he noticed in the mirror that the desk clerk, the same man as the night before, was watching him from across the big room where he was busy sweeping the hearth of the great fireplace. How had Charlie not seen the thin, pasty-looking man when he came down the stairs?
Charlie nodded; the man watched him, but didn’t look particularly angry. No angrier than he’d been the night before when Charlie had checked in. He’d looked confused then and looked more of the same now. Charlie pushed the doily back down into his pocket and struggled with the fancy brass knobs of the leaded glass doors, worry warring with fear and guilt in his brain. Worry and guilt that he’d stolen the first thing he’d ever stolen in his life, fear that he’d soon be arrested, and slim wonder, too, that maybe, just maybe, he’d get away with it.
By the time Charlie reached the livery and, with frequent glances back over his shoulder, saw no one trailing him from the hotel, he became more and more convinced that he and he alone deserved to own that doily, that it had been made and was meant for him to admire, to appreciate. He rode out of that town and vowed, just the same, to never return to Bakersfield. Just in case.
Little did he know that a few short years later, he would be a member of an outlaw gang dead set on committing a crime that made stealing a doily the very least of life’s offenses.
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Ralph Compton Straight to the Noose Page 25
