A Good Day for a Massacre

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  CHAPTER 28

  Pecos took down a good third of his own frothy ale, licked foam from his mustache, and turned to Slash, keeping his voice low, though there was little need, as there were enough men in the saloon now to cover the former cutthroats’ conversation. “What do you think about that?”

  “Hattie’s uniform?” Slash asked. “I think it’s, well—”

  “The Spanish Bit, you cork-headed fool!”

  “Oh, I done already forgot about that,” Slash said, chuckling. He couldn’t help watching Hattie move about the tables, delivering beer and whiskey to the good dozen men in the place. Hell, every man left in the town must be here. “The Spanish Bit, eh? Well, I reckon we’d better ride out an’ look it over, do a little investigative work of our own.”

  “Yeah, we can’t let Operative Number One steal our thunder,” Pecos said, fingering his chin whiskers, while also indulging his eyes on the pretty Pink.

  “Don’t make much sense, though.” Slash took another sip of his beer, then revolved the heavy glass absently on the table, in its own wet ring. “Why would a gold mine steal gold?”

  “There’s a point.”

  “That old jasper Jupiter Dodge was probably hearing things. Or, hell, anything could have been meant by the word ‘Spanish.’ It didn’t have to be the Spanish Bit. Maybe one of the other riders was Spanish . . . or named Spanish.” Slash grimaced and shook his head.

  “What else we got to go on?” Pecos said.

  “Let’s mosey around town tonight, see if we kick anything else up. If not, let’s ride out tomorrow in search of this Spanish Bit Ranch and Gold Mine. Shake the tree a little. See if any gold eggs fall out of any hidden nests, though I’m right doubtful.”

  “I am, too, an’ it grieves me.”

  “Why?”

  “By now ole Bleed-Em-So prob’ly thinks we made off with the gold. He probably thinks we’re headin’ for Mexico.”

  “Well, if we’d run into a telegraph office somewhere along the trail here, we could have cabled him. But we didn’t. I didn’t see any lines on the way up here, so there’s probably no telegraph here, either. Which means we’re on our own. You, me, an’ Hattie. We can’t worry about what . . .”

  Slash let his voice dribble to silence when another man strode through the batwings and into the saloon. Right away, Slash saw the newcomer wasn’t a man. She was a young woman dressed like a man, though there was no way any man would wear her man’s attire the way she did—in pure female fashion. In addition to a supple, high-breasted female body, she had blue eyes and red-blond hair, which hung straight down from the flat brim of her tan, low-crowned Stetson, the crown of which was trimmed with a snakeskin band.

  She wore faded denim trousers, a less-faded denim shirt, and a red kerchief tightly knotted around her neck. On her right thigh rode a handsome Bisley revolver in a hand-tooled brown holster. On her left breast was pinned a five-pointed star, similar to the one the big, elderly gent with the red muttonchops had been wearing.

  The badge-toting young woman strode straight into the room like she owned the place, like she expected a crowd to converge on her in admiration. Like a princess braving the mire for a confab with her subjects. The badge-toting princess stopped near the bar, grinning from ear to ear, saucily, and looked over the men bellied up to the mahogany before her, their backs to her.

  When none so much as glanced over their shoulders at her, she frowned and loudly cleared her throat. “Pete . . . Norm . . . how you boys doin’?” she asked cheerily, pulling her shoulders back and cocking one soft leather boot out before her and wagging it.

  A couple of the men glanced at her in the mirror and merely nodded. Another glanced over his shoulder, gave her a fleeting smile, said, “Oh, hello, Lisa—how’s it goin’?”

  Before she could respond, he turned his head to stare at what every other man in the room was staring at—all except for Slash and Pecos, that was—which was Hattie.

  The badge-toting young lady, Lisa, followed the men’s lusty gazes toward the object of their attraction, to where Hattie was delivering a round of beers to several men on the other side of the bar. Lisa studied the comely Pinkerton chatting affably with her customers, and then Lisa’s mouth and eyes pinched, and her cheeks acquired an even deeper color than the deep tan they’d had before.

  She stood there for nearly a full minute, glaring at Hattie, her chest rising and falling heavily. She turned her head, and her angry blue eyes swept the room quickly. They came to rest on Slash and Pecos, who were staring back at her. She studied both men critically, as though she thought she recognized them from somewhere.

  Slash slowly raised his hand to pinch his hat brim to the young, badge-toting lady, and offered a tentative smile. She did not return the acknowledgment. She merely stared, lips pursed, as though trying to quell a building rage inside her. She glanced once more at Hattie, her angry flush in place, then wheeled and pushed back out through the batwings, disappearing as quickly as she’d appeared.

  Pecos frowned at Slash. “What do you suppose that was all about?”

  Slash shrugged, shook his head. “Heck if I know. Don’t look like she cottoned to Hattie overmuch.”

  “Probably hasn’t had all that much competition for the menfolk’s stares in this one-hoss town,” Pecos said with a chuckle.

  Slash finished his beer, set the glass down on the table. “Let’s haul our freight, walk around a little, find something to eat.”

  Pecos finished his own beer and rose from his chair. “I could use a steak.”

  “Me, too.”

  They took their time devouring tough but tasty elk steaks and fried potatoes in Alma May’s Café, finding Alma May, the spidery little aged gal who ran the place, to be warm, spry, and friendly. She was chatty while she cooked and served the two former cutthroats until Pecos, swabbing the last of the grease from his plate with a baking powder biscuit, cleared his throat and asked, “I wonder if anyone’s hirin’ out at the gold mine.”

  Alma May was standing at her counter, filling her corncob pipe from an open tin of Union Leader. She jerked her eyes to Pecos, frowning, and said, “What gold mine?”

  “The Spanish Bit,” Slash told her, hooking an arm over the back of his chair, regarding her over his shoulder.

  “We don’t talk about the Spanish Bit around here, understand? It ain’t healthy. Now, if you two handsome devils wanna make it to my age, you’ll dry yourselves up on that topic an’ go back to where you came from.”

  Before Slash or Pecos could probe her further, she swung around and disappeared through a curtained doorway. Presently, the sound of clattering pots and pans issued from the kitchen, as did the aromatic smoke of Alma May’s corncob pipe.

  Slash and Pecos shared a look. “We’re makin’ friends real fast here in Honeysuckle.”

  Slash finished his coffee and rose from his chair.

  They fetched their saddlebags and rifles from the livery barn, then tramped over to the tall, narrow, three-story log hotel. The proprietor was an elderly gent named Dan Syvertson. Was everyone left in town, save the good-looking deputy town marshal, old? Likely, the young had had somewhere else to go when the boom went bust. The older folks did not, so they stayed on. Slash shivered, thinking about the chill of the snowy winters up in these climes.

  Old Dan Syvertson remained in his padded rocking chair by a hot fire snapping and crackling in a stone hearth, stroking a large black cat stretched out on his lap. “A dollar a night for the two of you. Full payment up front. Sign the register and you can have, uh . . . room nine. No!”

  Old Syvertson paused, studying the low timbered ceiling. “Was it room nine?” he asked himself, moving his lips beneath his chalk-white, soup-strainer mustache. His head was bald on top and badly liver-spotted, with a fringe of snowy hair around the sides, covering his ears. “No, no—room ten!” he amended. “Room ten.”

  He smiled sheepishly. “I was tryin’ to remember the one with two beds. Fetch the key yourself from
the ring there behind the counter, and don’t be shootin’ up the place or cavortin’ with fallen women, or I’ll sic the town law on ya, an’ it won’t go well for ya. No, sir! Toss your jingle on the counter there. I’ll tend to it later, after Felix here has had his beauty sleep an’ decides it’s time to head out to wreak holy hell on the mouse population.”

  He chuckled and continued rocking and stroking the sound-asleep cat.

  Slash and Pecos tossed their coins onto the counter.

  Pecos plucked the key from the ring.

  As he and Slash headed for the narrow, halved-log stairs flanking the lobby’s front desk, Syvertson said, “Market hunters?”

  Slash and Pecos glanced back at the old-timer. He was eyeing their rifles and the big sawed-off shotgun hanging down Pecos’s back. “Somethin’ like that,” Slash said. “ ’Night to ya, pops.”

  He and Pecos climbed the stairs to the second story. Pecos took the lead as they walked down the narrow hall, the floorboards squawking beneath their boots. Their spurs chimed softly. Otherwise, the building was silent.

  Slash had a feeling that not only were there no other customers currently enjoying the hotel’s accommodations, there likely hadn’t been any rooms rented here in some weeks. Syvertson probably kept the place open because he had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.

  The hall was lit by the single window at the hall’s far end. As the sun had sunk behind the western ridges over an hour ago, there wasn’t much light left in this valley in which the town nestled, which meant the hall was in twilight edging toward deep darkness. Pecos stopped in front of room ten, identified by a small block of wood tacked to the door, with the number 10 burned into it. Balancing his saddlebags on his left shoulder and holding his rifle in his left hand, he fumbled the key into the lock.

  Slash stepped up beside him. “Hold on.”

  Pecos glanced at him. “What?”

  “What did you think about that look on old Syvertson’s face?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one when he was trying to remember which room to put us in.”

  Pecos bunched his lips, shrugged. “So the old-timer had trouble rememberin’ which room had two beds. Hell, you have trouble rememberin’ which boot goes on which foot even when you ain’t three sheets to the wind.”

  “All right—go ahead.”

  “Go ahead an’ what?”

  “Go ahead an’ go on in. Throw caution to the wind!”

  “Caution to the—?” Pecos scowled at his partner. “What, you think there’s trouble on the other side of this door?”

  “I reckon we’re about to find out. You just go in first. Your big ugly carcass makes a good shield.”

  “Well, hell, now you’re makin’ me nervous.”

  “Go ahead, Mister Smart Mouth. Go on in.”

  “All right—I just will!” Pecos poked the key in the lock, jerked it angrily to one side. They heard the metallic rasp of the locking bolt being slid out of the frame and then the click as it fit snugly into the door. Pecos shoved the door open wide. “Here I am—goin’ in fir—”

  He took one step into the room and froze. He cursed softly.

  Slash stood behind him, staring over Pecos’s left shoulder. He drew a low, whistling breath through taut lips when he saw the silhouetted figure aiming a double-barrel shotgun straight out from his right shoulder.

  Her right shoulder, he saw when she took two slow steps straight forward and into the watery, yellow light of a lamp burning on the room’s wall in front of her. The deputy town marshal, Lisa, held the shotgun steady in both hands, the flickering light winking off her blue eyes beneath her hat brim and off the badge pinned to the swell of her denim shirt.

  Slash could only see part of her face because of the room’s dancing shadows, but it was her, all right. The angry eyes and the badge gave her away, as did the signature swells of her denim-clad figure.

  “Make one ill-advised move toward any of that arsenal you two cutthroats are carryin’,” she said tightly, “an’ I’ll go to work with this twelve-gauge, an’ Old Syvertson will be scrubbin’ you both off the walls from now till Christmas!”

  CHAPTER 29

  “Now, what’d I tell ya, Mister Smart Mouth?” Slash poked Pecos in the back. “I don’t know what you call that there, but I call it trouble. Honey, did you say that was a twelve-gauge?”

  “I did say it was a twelve-gauge.”

  “Ain’t that funny? That’s what my big, stupid friend here carries.”

  “Shut up.”

  Slash raised his left hand and the rifle he held in his right hand, keeping the barrel aimed at the ceiling. “All right, I will. I will shut up.”

  The young woman backed up. “Step in here. Like I said, you try anything . . .”

  “Oh, I know,” Slash said, following Pecos into the room, the man’s broad back and shoulders right in front of him. “That’s a twelve-gauge. I know what a twelve-gauge can do, ’cause, like I said, my friend here—”

  “I told you to shut up,” the young deputy said, her voice as taut as freshly stretched barbed wire, and just as prickly. She stared straight down the double bores at the two men as she pressed her back up against a dresser, which was the room’s only furnishing aside from the two small beds covered in bearskins. “Now, close the door.”

  “What you got in mind, darlin’?” Slash asked.

  “Not what you’re thinkin’,” the girl shot back at him, through gritted teeth. “You two are nearly as old as Old Syvertson, an’ he’s so old the hills stand up and give him their chairs!”

  “Not by a long shot!” Pecos said. She’d finally riled the big man into speech.

  “Pretty close.”

  “Syvertson’s old enough to be our father,” Slash pointed out, also feeling nettled by the girl’s arrogance. It was one thing for a pretty young woman to threaten a man’s life with a double-bore shotgun, another altogether to assume he was older than he really was.

  Slash closed the door.

  “Just wanted to make sure you didn’t try to skin out on me,” the young deputy said, still aiming down the barrel. “Now—all guns on the bed. Slow. One by one. Any fast moves an’ they’ll be dumpin’ you both out of the same bucket into a single grave.”

  “You sure got a way with words,” Pecos said, dropping his Colt revolving rifle onto the bed to his right.

  Slash dropped his own rifle on the same bed. “She paints a right purty picture, don’t she?”

  When all their guns were on the bed, their bowie knives as well, and their hands were in the air, Pecos said, “Now suppose you tell us what this is all about. We haven’t been in town long enough to have broken the law.”

  “You two old cutthroats have broken plenty of laws,” the girl said. She laughed caustically, showing the white ends of her teeth, her blue eyes flat and hard. “I know who you two are. Slash Braddock an’ the Pecos River Kid. Pa was pretty damn sure when he seen you ride into town, but after I took a look at you over to the Honeysuckle, I went back over to the office and shuffled through a stack of ancient wanted circulars.”

  “There she goes insultin’ our ages again, Slash,” Pecos said, keeping his hands in the air.

  “Young folks these days.”

  “Most folks prob’ly couldn’t tell from the likenesses on those old pictures.”

  “They could tell, all right,” Slash said. “We haven’t changed all that much.”

  “But I could tell,” the young deputy continued. “I’ve been a student of your work for a long time. I’ve read about your depravations and sundry reprehensible high jinks in the Police Gazette and the Rocky Mountain News. You robbed the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe more times than anybody. For five years running, the Butterfield Stage Company put a four-thousand-dollar bounty on your heads. They wanted you shot on sight! You rode with Pistol Pete an’ was there when that old scalawag an’ reprobate was killed in the Lunatic Mountains. You paralyzed Chief Marshal Luther T. ‘Bleed-Em-So’ Bleds
oe, an’—”

  Pecos pointed an angry finger at her. “Pete weren’t no scalawag an’ reprobate. He was a man to ride the river with, Pete was!”

  “And as honest as the day is long!” Slash said. “An’ wounding Bledsoe was an accident, though he sure had it comin’.”

  Without blinking, sliding her bright-eyed, zealous gaze between the two veteran owlhoots, the young deputy continued. “You once rode the border country with ‘Cormorant’ Jim Clark and Sassy Maldoon and Frank Sanchez until Judge Isaac Parker’s deputies ran Clark an’ Maldoon down in the Indian Territory an’ gave ’em necktie parties in Fort Smith. Tilghman killed Clark in Taos. You killed Wild Wayne Tatum in Cross-Eyed Kate’s Parlor House in Bisbee, Arizona—”

  “That was a fair fight,” Slash pointed out, defensively. “He drew on me first, but he was so drunk he—”

  “. . . an’ they call you Slash ’cause Roscoe Lee Rose caught you cheatin’ at stud poker an’ tried to cut out your heart.”

  “I’ve never cheated at poker a day in my life!”

  “Hah!” Pecos said.

  She cut her eyes to Pecos. “They say you once sparked the actress Delilah O’Bannon.”

  “That’s true,” Pecos pointed out a little sadly. “She broke my heart.”

  “He sparked her, all right,” Slash laughed, “till her husband found them together, drunker than Georgia moonshiners in the storeroom in the White Buffalo Saloon in Cheyenne, an’—”

  “That’s enough, Slash!” Pecos said.

  “He still has buckshot where the sun don’t shine due to that reprehensible bit of cuckolding high jinks,” Slash told the shotgun-wielding young woman. “It wasn’t a broken heart he got out of the deal. It was a mighty sore ass!”

  Pecos whipped toward him, gritting his teeth and clenching his fists at his sides. “That does it—I’m haulin’ you outside, an’ I’m gonna—”

  “Pipe down, both of you!” the girl yelled.

  Pecos turned back to her, remembering that she was holding a shotgun on them. “Say, uh, darlin’,” he said, frowning curiously at her, “what’s this all about, anyways? We left trouble behind us, an’ we’re only just passin’ through Honeysuckle. We don’t do what we used to do no more. We’ve settled down.”