A Good Day for a Massacre

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  Hearing the horses, he turned abruptly, raking a thick arm across his forehead and scowling curiously at the newcomers, turning his head slowly to follow them as they continued on into the town.

  Slash saw that Hattie had been right. The town was small, all right. Beyond the general store, on the trail’s right side, sat a small livery and feed barn. Beyond that was a barbershop and bathhouse. A little man in small, round spectacles and armbands was sweeping the raised boardwalk fronting the barbershop. He glanced up over his sagging spectacles as the newcomers passed.

  Beyond the barbershop was a harness shop and feed store. Across the street lay a butcher shop/grocery store, with a stock pen and chicken coop flanking it, and a gunsmith’s shop. The only other buildings were two saloons, sitting catty-corner across the street from each other, Alma May’s Café, a small hotel that doubled as a post office, a town marshal’s office, which was little more than a small stone shack, and an assayer’s office.

  That was it. Ten business buildings total, with a few log and canvas dwellings flanking them in no particular order, as though they’d been built where the boulders and large pines and cedars scattered along that southern ridge would allow. There also appeared to be a half-dozen shacks along both sides of the stream on the town’s north side, likely belonging to gold-panners.

  The only folks visible anywhere in town were the blacksmith, the barber, and a tall, elderly gent wearing a five-pointed tin star and thick, red muttonchop whiskers. He was parked in a hide-bottom chair in front of the marshal’s office. He held a double-bore shotgun across his bony knees.

  He wore a pair of rectangular, gold-framed spectacles on his long, thick nose, which bore what appeared to be a knife scar just beneath the bridge. He was fanning his angular face with his brown slouch hat and giving the three newcomers the same once-and twice-over that the blacksmith and barber had given them.

  No, there were two others, Slash saw as he and his trail pards reined up in the middle of town, on the broad main street. On a second-floor balcony of one of the town’s two saloons, two scantily clad women stood smoking—and giving the three strangers the woolly eyeball.

  Given their skimpy, garish attire, they were no doubt doxies, both well past their prime. One was short and fat, with jet-black hair likely from a bottle. The other was skinny, pale, and freckled, her own copper-red hair also from a bottle. The doxy’s red hair, which hung long about her shoulders, reminded Slash a little unpleasantly, given the circumstances under which they’d last parted, of Jay.

  Keeping his voice low, Pecos turned to Slash and said, “They musta come through here, them killers. Where do you suppose they are?”

  Slash poked a back tooth with his tongue, looking up and down the street. “Hard to say. Looks like the end of the line, though.” He couldn’t imagine there being any more towns beyond Honeysuckle. The trail to the west, opposite the direction from which they’d ridden in, appeared to narrow down to a single-track horse trail dwindling past an old, mossy-roofed log cabin into thick forest.

  “Reckon it’s time to do some detective work?” Pecos asked.

  “I reckon it is,” Hattie said.

  Both men looked at her. She was studying the front of the saloon, below where the two doxies gazed down at the three strangers in the street. A sign stretched beneath the second-floor balcony announced the name of the place as the Honeysuckle Saloon and Dance Hall. Honeysuckle blossoms were painted on each end of the sign. Or a crude artist’s depiction of such blossoms, anyway. One of the blossoms had been chewed by a bullet.

  “What you got in mind?” Slash asked her.

  “A job.”

  “A what?” Pecos said, stretching his lips back from his teeth in disdain for the three-letter word.

  Hattie dipped her chin toward the pasteboard sign tacked to the porch balustrade:

  WANTED: PURTY SERVENE GIRL. 25 SENTS A DAY PLUSS TIPPS

  “What?” Slash said. “You think you’re gonna work there?”

  “Why not?” Hattie smiled coquettishly at him, flinging her hair out from her neck with the back of one hand. “You think I’m purty, don’t you?”

  “No, no.” Slash shook his head, eyeing the run-down-looking place and the two well-worn doxies leaning forward against the second-floor balcony railing, smoking and regarding the newcomers with bland interest. “You can’t work there. That’s no place for you. You said yourself you hated tobacco smoke.”

  “Oh, I can put up with it for a day or two. And don’t be so protective, Sla . . . er, I mean, Uncle Jim.” Still smiling, Hattie batted her long, lovely ashes at him, then cut her gaze to Pecos. Her voice acquired a sharp but melodramatic scolding tone. “You neither, Uncle Melvin. You two old scalawags drank up all our money in that tumbledown mining cabin of ours. We have nary a dime to our names. I think it’s time I take matters into my own hands and try to build us a stake so we can ride down out of the mountains before we get snowed in for the winter. If I left earning a living to you two, we’d starve!”

  “You gonna apply for the serving girl job, princess?” asked the short, fat doxy with the jet-black hair, grinning down over the balcony rail at Hattie.

  Looking up at her and the redhead, Hattie shaded her eyes with a gloved hand. “I was pondering on it. These two jackasses can’t make a living, sure enough, so I thought I’d give it a go.”

  Pecos gave an injured chuff and said under his breath to Slash, “She don’t have to sound that convincing, does she?”

  “I know what you mean, honey,” said the redhead, then scowling at Slash and Pecos. “Men aren’t worth the cheap busthead runnin’ through their veins these days.”

  She hacked phlegm from her throat and spat the big plop into the dirt of the street near Slash. To Hattie, she said, “Come on in and talk to Clifford. He runs the place, what there is of it.”

  “You just stick to servin’, though, honey,” instructed the black-haired whore, letting her dark-eyed gaze flick with no little envy across Hattie’s young, ripe frame. “Don’t you go crowdin’ me an Iris. The tough nuts around here would take one look at you an’ never throw another dollar in our jars again!”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Hattie assured them, swinging down from her sorrel’s back. “I have no intention of working the line.”

  “No, she don’t,” Slash said pointedly to the two doxies. “If we caught her doin’ that—me an’, uh, Uncle Melvin here—we’d take a switch to her backside so she wouldn’t sit down again till Christmas.”

  “Say, you’re handsome!” said the black-haired gal. “Why don’t you come on up here an’ let me curl your toes for you, handsome?”

  “You too, big man,” said the redhead to Pecos, beckoning broadly with her arm. “Get up here, an’ let’s me an’ you play some slap ‘n’ tickle.” She dipped her chin and raised a flirtatious brow. “You can tickle me all you want. I don’t slap hard at all!”

  She and the dark-haired gal had a good, long, cackling laugh that quickly turned into a raucous coughing fit for each. It ended with both hacking more phlegm over the balcony and into the street near Slash and Pecos’s horses.

  “I do apologize,” Hattie told the doxies. “But Uncles Jim an’ Melvin have little but lint in their pockets. They can’t afford either one of you ladies, and even if they could, they too need to be looking for work. Don’t you, Uncles Jim and Melvin?”

  Hattie smiled sweetly at them.

  Slash and Pecos grumbled.

  Hattie tossed her horse’s reins up to Slash. “Tend my horse for me, Uncle Jim. You two behave yourselves, now, you hear?” She started for the saloon’s front steps but glanced once more over her shoulder to say, “And make yourselves useful. I’ll be checking!”

  With that, she lifted the hem of her skirt up above her ankles and mounted the Honeysuckle Saloon’s front veranda.

  When she’d disappeared inside, Slash turned to Pecos and said, “You know, I think she was really enjoying that.”

  “Yeah.” Pecos snor
ted. “Maybe you shoulda shot her and let ole Otis Pettypiece live.”

  They chuckled as they rode off down the street.

  CHAPTER 26

  Hattie straightened her blouse, tossed her hair behind her shoulders, and stepped through the batwings. She paused to look around the shabby room, with its dirty windows and dusty animal heads mounted on the papered walls above a five-foot-high strip of shabby, bullet-pocked wainscoting.

  The horseshoe-shaped bar lay straight ahead, curving into the middle of the room from the left. A wooden stairway flanked the bar, rising to the second story, all the rooms of which faced the first floor from behind a railing that ran along all four of the building’s walls.

  Despite the dust and bullet holes, the place tried for a Victorian splendor, with its carpeted stairs, papered walls, varnished oak bar, leaded backbar mirror, and the large oil painting of hard-charging wild horses above the piano abutting the wall on the saloon’s far side, on the other side of the bar. Instead of sandboxes, brass spittoons stood here and there around the room, though one had been kicked over and not picked up yet, muddy brown liquid oozing from its lip onto the dark brown wooden floor.

  There was even a crystal chandelier, an elaborate, expensive trimming for these far-flung parts, plunging down from the second-floor ceiling. Hattie wouldn’t have been surprised to see a bird’s nest in it.

  The Honeysuckle Saloon was nearly deserted, though it must have had a profitable lunch hour, for several tables were still cluttered with dirty plates, beer glasses, and coffee cups. One old man sat at the bar, pensively drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. He found Hattie’s figure in the backbar mirror, and smiled at her, half-closing his eyes as though enjoying a particularly vivid waking dream.

  Three other men were toiling on the far side of the bar, to the right of the piano and a potted palm. Two were toiling, rather, installing a new window in that wall, while the third man stood behind them, his back to Hattie, issuing orders in a thick Irish brogue.

  “Easy now, Clell. Go easy there, Beau—that window came all the way up from Denver. It’ll likely get shot out again on Saturday night, but by God I want it put in right and without so much as a nick!”

  The toilers merely grunted and grumbled as they fitted the window, with a stained-glass upper quarter—the stained paintings portraying lounging, naked women—into the frame. The toilers were beefy men in shabby work clothes, a wooden toolbox bristling with tools on the floor near their hobnailed boots.

  The third man was short and stocky, a thick, unruly brush of silver-gray hair clumsily swiped to one side of his head. As Hattie walked around the bar, heading toward him, the man glanced toward her, glanced away, then turned back again, his blue eyes flickering with sudden male interest.

  “Are you Clifford?” Hattie stopped before him, clenching her hands together in front of her. She was only half-feigning nervousness. She did in fact want the serving-girl job. She knew from experience that from such a position she could find out in a very short time far more about the under-workings of a town than she could if she wandered about the boardwalks with a notebook in hand, interrogating the town’s citizens or sitting in cafés and saloons, hoping to eavesdrop on a particularly informative conversation.

  “Why, yes . . . yes, I am,” Clifford said, smiling unctuously at the pretty Pinkerton, not bothering to restrain the indiscreet forays of his goatish gaze. “What can I help you with, young lady?”

  “I wanted to apply for the job you have posted on the porch rail—the serving-girl job.”

  “The serving-girl job? You? Really?” There went his eyes again. It was almost as though he could see right through her clothes. The man’s scrutiny made her skin crawl, but she’d better get used to it. She’d gotten used to it before. She could get used to it again.

  “Yes. Aren’t . . .”—Hattie closed her hands together, dipped her chin demurely, and made her voice small—“aren’t I pretty enough?”

  “Oh, I don’t know . . .” Clifford used the occasion to give her another thrice-over. He chuckled under his breath, brushed his fist across his nose, and said, “Well . . . it sorta depends on how you look in your uniform.”

  Hattie just realized that the two window installers had stopped their work to stare at her. The shorter of the two was down on one knee, on one side of the window, while the other one, taller, was on his feet, on the other side of the window, holding a hammer down low by his side. Nails bristled from between his thick, chapped lips as he breathed, his lumpy chest rising and falling heavily.

  Clifford realized they were staring at her, too. “You two get back to work. I hired you to install a window, not ogle my prospective help!”

  Reluctantly, they returned to their work.

  “Uniform?” Hattie asked.

  Clifford walked around behind the bar. He leaned down, looked around some shelves, and finally pulled out a flat box from beneath the bar. He set it atop the bar and said, “You run along upstairs and try that on. Let me see you in it. Then I’ll know if you’re right for the job. My business depends on a servin’ girl who can look good in the uniform. I haven’t had one in a coon’s age—not since the gold boom, what little there was of it, fizzled out before it really got started and half the town, purty girls included, left for the lower climes.”

  “A uniform, eh?” Hattie hefted the box in both hands. “Sure is light.” She laughed a little uneasily.

  “You go on upstairs and try it on. You can have Lilac’s old room.”

  “Lilac?”

  “My last serving girl. Iris an’ Lilly work the line. I call all my girls flower names. You know—so they fit in with ‘honeysuckle’?”

  “Brilliant.”

  “Iris an’ Lilly don’t normally have time to sling drinks. They’re professionals, you understand. Big moneymakers.” Clifford winked meaningfully at Hattie, and chuckled.

  The other two men snorted laughs as they installed the window, casting quick furtive glances over their shoulders at Hattie.

  Clifford added, “I like to keep a girl on special for hustlin’ drinks out from the bar, an’ maybe dancin’ to the piano on Saturday nights now an’ then. I got a good piano player. That’s him at the bar.”

  Hattie glanced at the old man at the bar, who raised his beer glass to her in salute.

  Clifford said, “The girl’s gotta look good in the uniform.”

  “I understand, Mister, uh . . . ?”

  “Hicks. Clifford Hicks. You can call me Mister Hicks until we see what you look like in the uniform.”

  Again, the window installers laughed.

  “All right... Mister Hicks.” Again, Hattie’s skin crawled.

  “Go on upstairs, now,” Clifford said, giving Hattie a gentle shove toward the stairway. “Room number four. You’ll see the plate. I’ll look you over, and if you don’t look too bad, we’ll talk turkey.”

  “Turkey,” Hattie said, fingering the light-as-air box in her hands. “All . . . all right. Room four it is. I hope I don’t disappoint you, Mister Hicks.”

  “Me, too, honey,” Hicks said. “Hard to find a girl who looks good in the uniform. Damn hard.”

  Feeling the eyes of all three men on her, hearing them snickering softly, Hattie drifted on up the stairs and into a room off the balcony, opposite the side of the saloon in which the window was being installed. She came out ten minutes later.

  Clifford Hicks had been waiting impatiently, pretending to be supervising the two window installers. In reality, he was imagining what was going on behind the closed door of room four on the balcony.

  Now, as he heard the door latch click and turned to see Hattie step out of the room, a giant fist tightened around his gut. He stepped heavily out toward the middle of the room, where he could get a better look at the girl in the red-and-black, lace-edged corset and bustier, as well as fishnet stockings and the black stilettos she’d obviously found in Ivy’s room.

  She stepped up to the railing and looked down at Clifford gazi
ng up at her, his lower jaw hanging, his cheeks turning crimson. “Do I look all right?” Hattie asked him.

  Clifford’s throat went dry. Sweat beads popped out on his forehead.

  Behind him, the two window installers—the shorter one holding up one side of the window, while the taller one tacked the other side into place—both stopped what they were doing to turn around and stare up in openmouthed fascination.

  Behind them, the window lurched, glinting, then slipped out of its frame. The bottom right corner struck the floor with a bang, and the entire pane shattered loudly, glass flying every which way.

  Clifford wheeled to stare in silent horror at his precious window.

  Hattie chewed her thumbnail. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, and flounced back into the room.

  * * *

  Slash and Pecos took a ride around town, getting the lay of the land, before riding over to the barbershop. They tied their horses outside, then Slash walked up onto the boardwalk and pushed through the door, making the bell jangle loudly.

  The bespectacled little barber had been sacked out in one of the two barber chairs, his arms crossed on his chest. Now he jerked his head up with a wailing yell, startled out of a deep sleep. He thumbed his glasses up his nose and eyed the two newcomers as though they were grizzlies busting into his shop for a meal.

  “Oh . . . it’s you two,” he said, relaxing slightly but remaining in his chair, his hand on the arms. The horror left his gaze, but a wariness remained. Glancing at the two strangers’ holstered pistols, he appeared to be wondering if he were about to be robbed.

  “Just us,” Slash said, holding his hands out away from his guns as he stepped into the room. Pecos walked in behind him. “How much for a bath, amigo? Me an’ my pard here been rode hard an’ put up wet.”