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  AVAILABLE FROM PINNACLE BOOKS

  A KNIFE IN THE HEART

  A HANK FALLON WESTERN

  WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE

  with J. A. Johnstone

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PART II

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  PART III

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Teaser chapter

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2020 J. A. Johnstone

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-4386-6

  Electronic edition:

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4387-3 (e-book)

  ISBN-10: 0-7860-4387-3p (e-book)

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  They come at him, just as they always do—at least six men, wearing the striped uniform of inmates. Harry Fallon can’t see their faces, and even if he could, it’s not like he knows these hardened lifers. He doesn’t even remember the name of the prison where he has been sentenced. Joliet? Yuma? Jefferson City? Huntsville? Detroit? Alcatraz? Cañon City? Laramie? Deer Lodge? But a bad memory is the least of his problems right now.

  He stands with his back against the door of six-inch cold iron, no bars, just a slit for a peek hole so the guards can check in every now and then. Ahead of him, to his left, are the cells on the fifth floor. Hands extend between the bars and rattle tin cups against the iron. The doors remain shut. Inside, prisoners chant some dirge or hum, mixed with curses and laughter, but all that proves hard to understand with the racket the cups make against the rough iron. To his right, there’s a metal rail about waist-high, and beyond that, the emptiness for thirty yards to the other row of cell blocks. Five stories below, the stone floor of this hellhole called a prison. And just in front of him, the six men, faces masked, but intentions clear. The knives they have—fashioned from the metal shop, or the broom factory, or the farms where they work—wave in hands roughened by a life of crime, followed by life sentences.

  “Hey!” Fallon shouts through the slit in iron, but dares not look through the opening. He can’t take his eyes off the six killers. By now, they are less than ten feet from him.

  “Hey!”

  Nothing.

  The big brute in the center of the gang laughs.

  Of course, there’s no guard here. Not now. Fallon has been behind the iron long enough to know that guards and prisoners have the ability to make a few deals when it comes to taking care of prisoners neither guards nor convicts like. A guard decides to head to the privy at a predetermined time, a trip that’ll take a good long while, and it just happens to coincide with other guards needing to find a cigarette, or a toilet, or happening to be escorting another inmate to see the warden.

  Handy.

  Right now, there’s probably not a guard anywhere in this particular house.

  So six cons, armed with shivs, start to smile.

  If only Fallon could recall where he is, what he’s in for, why these men want to kill him. If only Fallon could remember anything.

  My God, he thinks, has he been sent to prisons so many times his brain has become addled? Has he been hit on the head, suffered . . . what is it they call that . . . amnesia? Yeah. Amnesia. All right, at least he can remember some things.

  He remembers something else, too.

  Because one of the faceless men before him whispers a growling, “Take him,” and the thug on Fallon’s right charges, laughing, slashing with the blade, and Fallon leaps back, against the cold stone of the wall,
feeling and hearing the tearing of cloth but not of flesh. His intestines aren’t spilling out of his belly—yet.

  The remaining five killers merely laugh.

  The big fellow, eyes black, face pale, almost not even a face at all, pivots, cuts up with the blade, but Fallon uses his left forearm to knock hand and knife away. The man’s face, or what passes for a face, seems surprised. A moment later, Fallon is driving his right hand, flattened, hard against the killer’s throat. The crack is almost deafening. The man’s eyes bulge in shock, and the blow drives him back, back, back, till he slams against the iron railing at the corner, the end of the passageway. Fallon tries to grab the knife, but both of the man’s arms start waving as he tries to regain his balance, as he tries to remember how to breathe.

  But he can’t. Spittle comes between his lips. He’s like a whirlwind now, and the other five men outside of the cells watch in fascination and amusement. Even those still inside their cells are transfixed. All they do is hold their tin cups outside the bars. Fingers grip other bars as they watch, laugh, hiss, joke, and pray.

  The man moves farther over the rails. He opens his mouth as if to scream, but he can’t scream. He can’t breathe. He can’t do anything but die. Fallon has learned several things in prison, including how to crush an attacker’s larynx.

  The shiv drops over the side. Damn. Fallon could have used that to defend himself against the other five killers.

  The arms stop waving, and then the faceless man starts to slip over. His mouth opens as though to scream, but he cannot scream, either. A second later, and he’s suspended in the air, prison brogans pointing toward the hard ceiling, and then there is nothing.

  A long silence follows, stretching toward infinity, before the sickening crunch of a body seems to shake the prison house to its very foundation.

  Fallon’s heart races. He wets his lips, turns back toward the five other men. The shuddering of the passageway ends, and the man in the center, who might have a mustache and beard, although that appears to be against the prison policy—whatever house of corrections Fallon is in—walks to the edge, puts his hand on the rail, peers over. He spits saliva, which drops toward the corpse, broken and bloody, and stares sightlessly toward the impenetrable ceiling.

  Fallon knows because somehow he, too, has moved to the railing, to see the man he has just killed, another kill for a onetime lawman turned killer. The man’s dead eyes seem to follow Fallon as he turns back to the five men. The leader spits again, wipes his mouth, and slowly turns to stare at Fallon.

  As though on cue, the tin cups resume their metallic serenade. The grinding has now been picked up across the chasm. Prisoners there have likewise resumed raking cups against the bars. And so have the prisoners on the floors below. The noise intensifies. Surely the warden can hear this from wherever his office or house is. Fallon can hear nothing else but the grinding, pounding, insane bedlam of hell.

  The noise becomes deafening. Fallon breathes in deeply, watches the five men now back to staring at him. They could rush him, should rush him, for there’s no room for Fallon to move, and he can’t take down five men when they have knives and he has nothing but . . .

  He takes a chance, steps forward quickly, and as a tin cup rattles from one bar to another, Fallon strikes hard with his left hand against the wrist. The damned fool should have kept his hand and cup inside his cell. He thinks he hears a scream, but the fingers release the handle, and somehow Fallon has the cup in his own hand.

  That prompts a laugh from the leader.

  “You think a cup is a match for a blade?” the big faceless man asks.

  The killer closest to the cell laughs. But that stops when Fallon steps forward and smashes the man in the face with the hard, cold tin cup.

  Fallon quickly steps back, taking it all in, seeing the man, his nose gushing crimson, his lips flattened and bloody, spitting out teeth and saliva, and stumbling in a wild spin. An arm hits the man nearest him and pushes him against the leader, who steps back against the fourth man, who jolts the fifth killer to the railing. And now that man is screaming, screaming out for mercy from God, but God cannot hear any prayer in a prison, especially with cups grinding cell doors after cell doors, and just like that, the fifth killer has gone over the edge, plummeting like a rocket, but he can scream, and his cries overcome the drone of metal on iron, until a sickening crunch below silences him.

  But not the sound of cups.

  The fourth man catches the railing, looks over, and mouths, “Oh, my, God,” before turning to Fallon, and charging.

  Fallon feels the blade as it cuts into his side, but his right hand rams the cup into the man’s temple, and the man falls to his knees. The knife comes up, just as Fallon jabs his kneecap into the man’s jaw. The blade sticks in up to its makeshift handle of hardened lye soap, deep in Fallon’s thigh, and then the man goes down, tries to come up, and Fallon kicks him over the railing.

  “Get him!” one of the men calls.

  Fallon turns, blinks, confused and angry. Three men have been hurtled to the floor five stories below. There should be only three more inmates outside of their cells, but somehow the doors must have opened, and there are dozens, maybe hundreds. It’s as though every prisoner in this whole cell block has been turned loose on the alley. Fallon rips the knife out of his leg with his left hand. Blood sprays the striped trousers of the men as they cover the few feet separating them from him. He has a short blade and a tin cup. They have knives and clubs and rocks.

  He has no chance, and soon they have him, his cup and knife thrown to the floor. He smells their sweat, feeling blows against his arms, back, head, neck. Cursing them as they curse him, he tries to free his arms, his hands, his legs, but there is nothing for him to do.

  A moment later, he is at the iron railing. Now he glances through the opening in the slit of the door, and he sees the faces of the guards, and the guards are laughing, too, shouting.

  “Toss him overboard, boys!”

  Which they do.

  Fallon looks below as the stone floor rushes up to greet him. He sees the bloody, crushed, lifeless bodies of the three men he has killed on this day. Their eyes remain open, as well as their mouths, and he can hear these dead men laughing at him. One says, “Join us, Fallon . . . in hell.”

  And the stones are there to greet him and send him to the fiery pit.

  Where Harry Fallon knows he belongs.

  He screams.

  CHAPTER TWO

  His own scream woke him up.

  Fallon tried to catch his breath, feeling suddenly freezing, and realized sweat drenched his night robe. While trying desperately to catch his breath, he noticed his right arm was up, crooked, and his clenched fist trembled. He held a pair of scissors. Fallon stared as early morning light seeped through the curtains of the parlor of his home. He waited until he stopped shaking, could breathe normally, and stared at the scissors.

  Sobs came somewhere down the foyer beyond the formal parlor.

  A woman’s voice soon whispered, “It’s all right, baby. It’s all right. Papa just had another bad dream.”

  He lowered his hand, swung his bare feet over the chaise. Feet on the rug, he managed to swallow and gently laid the scissors down on the side table. How he had managed to find them was beyond him, but thank God, he prayed, he was sleeping in the parlor.

  Sleeping in the parlor. One more time. Instead of in the bedroom with his wife.

  Fallon planted his elbows on his thighs, buried his face in his hands, and waited until he stopped shaking, bits and pieces of the nightmare returning to him, but only in fragments. He didn’t need to remember every single detail. It was the same damned nightmare he always had. A few things might change: the location, the number of inmates, how men were trying to kill him, or execute him. Sometimes he knew the men, the crazed killer named Monk from Yuma; the leader of the riot from Joliet; the Mole from Jefferson City; even John Wesley Hardin from Huntsville. Mostly though, they were cretins and monsters and blurs
of men, often without faces, but always trying to kill him. In the worst of the dreams, they were about to succeed before he woke up. On the good nights, he woke up quickly before his own shouts awakened his family . . . one more time.

  This, he knew, was no way to live. Not so much for his sake, but for Christina and the five-year-old girl, Rachel Renee.

  He managed to stand, ran his fingers through his soaking hair, looked at the chaise, and tossed a blanket on it, hoping the wool would soak up the sweat. The chaise had belonged to Christina’s grandmother. He would hate to ruin it, like the leather-covered sofa he had slept on one night that he had ripped apart with a paper opener he happened to find in his sleep.

  As long as he didn’t start sleepwalking. God, wouldn’t that be awful.

  He moved out of the parlor and into the hallway, stopped in the indoor bathroom to dry his face, comb his hair, drink a cup of water, and maybe make himself look halfway presentable, with luck mostly human, and then to the girl’s bedroom. It was empty, her covers thrown off the little bed. Which is what usually happened.

  Fallon took a few more steps before pushing open the door at the end of the hallway.

  Christina Whitney Fallon sat in the four-poster bed, hugging Rachel Renee tightly, kissing the top of her dark hair. Dark hair like Fallon’s, not the soft blond of his wife’s.

  Both stared at him in silence.

  “Good morning,” Fallon said, realized the absurdity of such a greeting, and sighed. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right, Papa.” Rachel Renee’s voice trembled.

  “Are you all right?” Christina asked. Her voice was noncommittal, professional, like she was interviewing a witness or a suspect from her days just a few years back as an operative for the American Detective Agency in Chicago.

  “Bad dream.” He shrugged. “The usual.”