Yuma Prison Crashout
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YUMA PRISON CRASHOUT
A HANK FALLON WESTERN
WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE and 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
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Teaser chapter
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Copyright © 2018 J. A. Johnstone
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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.”
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ISBN: 978-0-7860-4490-0
Electronic edition:
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4210-4 (e-book)
ISBN-10: 0-7860-4210-9 (e-book)
CHAPTER ONE
For about ten seconds, perhaps as many as fifteen, Harry Fallon considered letting the inmates have at the fat weasel. After all this time, Fallon wondered if he would have enjoyed watching those butchers rip apart Captain Clyde Daggett. Maybe even those rioting prisoners would let Fallon join them. Because when the sweating, flushed captain of the guards ran up to him, Fallon could feel the lashes that Daggett had laid on his bare back, and the knots on Fallon’s head seemed to throb again from the leather-wrapped stick Captain Daggett carried when making his rounds. The brute often used that club to remind the convicts at the Illinois State Penitentiary—better known as Joliet, the city where it had been built back in 1858—that he, all five-foot-five and two hundred pounds of him, was boss in the washhouse, the cell blocks, the yard, the chapel, the cemetery, the work details, and here in the prison laundry.
“Hide me, Fallon!” Daggett cried.
Fallon watched the tears rolling down the fat man’s cheeks, mingling with the beads of sweat that quickly broke into rivers that flooded down the crevasses in the guard’s face.
“For God’s sake, Fallon, hide me!”
That was asking a lot. Outside, Fallon heard the screams, the ringing of the bells, the reports of shotgun blasts, and the incessant rat-tat-tat from the Gatling guns on the north and west walls. Outside, men were being butchered, and Fallon didn’t know who was doing the killing. Most likely the guards. When Fallon heard about the planned eruption of violence—nothing remained a secret among the hardened inmates at Joliet—he even briefly considered joining the boys. But the boys wouldn’t trust him, Fallon knew, and he understood something else.
Those prisoners who dared to revolt, to make a desperate but doomed attempt at freedom, would not stand a chance. They would be cut down, slaughtered. Likely, the inmates knew that too. They just didn’t give a damn anymore.
“Fallon!” the fat figure begged.
Reason returned to Fallon’s mind. Reason and humanity, which he thought he had lost after ten years in this inhumane place.
“In here,” Fallon heard himself saying—words that should have surprised him, but nothing shocked him anymore. Fallon nodded at the cart of laundry in front of him.
Daggett blanched. “Are you crazy?” he said.
“Then to hell with you!” Fallon barked. Why was he even helping the brute? By hiding Daggett, Fallon would be putting his own life in jeopardy. Outside, the Gatling gun silenced. A roar came from several prisoners, like a Rebel yell from charging Confederate soldiers during the late War of the Rebellion.
The bark of the Gatling gun resumed, and the victorious yells turned into the shrieks of bullet-riddled, dying men.
Footsteps sounded outside, and just before the door smashed open, Captain Daggett dived into the cart, pushing it against Fallon’s body. The inmate, in his tenth year of a fifteen-year sentence, stopped it with his body. He had always been lithe but strong and sturdy. Ten years in Joliet had hardened his muscles even more. Quickly, he tossed several black-and-white-striped shirts and pairs of relatively clean pants over the pathetic, fat pig. The guard had dropped his grip on the billy club, and Fallon picked that up and deftly slipped it inside the waistband of his own coarse prisoner’s pants near the small of his back. He pulled his striped shirt up and let it fall, covering the weapon.
Almost immediately, six men barged into the laundry. The last one slammed the door.
“Where’s Daggett?” the first man roared.
Fallon recognized him immediately. Joe Martin, six-foot-two,
sentenced to thirty years for myriad charges, maybe another fifteen to go before he could be released. He was shirtless, bleeding from both nostrils, missing his right ear and two fingers on his left hand. The ear had been severed in a fight with Hume something-another—Fallon couldn’t remember the man’s last name—that brawl had happened before Fallon arrived at the Illinois pen. The way Fallon had most often been told the story went something like this: a few days after the fight, Hume somehow got a makeshift knife stuck between his ribs, and Martin had gotten ten more years added to his original sentence. The fingers Martin had chopped off himself, scuttlebutt had it, to get out of a work detail. The busted nose was the only recent injury, and Fallon could imagine what had become of the guard who had landed that punch.
“Where is he?” Martin demanded.
Fallon nodded at the door that led to the yard.
“C’mon!” Martin shouted, and moved toward the heavy door that led to the exercise yard. Fallon watched the horde run, and he tried to stop from sweating, even though the laundry became a furnace this time of year and no one would notice sweat. Hell, by this point, everyone in Joliet—guards, the warden, and the prisoners—were drenched with sweat. So, most likely, were the people on the other side of the prison’s stone walls.
The newcomers to the laundry wore desperation on their faces. No pistols, no firearms, that Fallon could see—and if these men had managed to get a shotgun or a revolver, they would not be hiding those at this point in their futile game. Two held sticks like the one Fallon had procured. The others had the makeshift knives, forged in the factory, smuggled in through the prison walls, carved out of wood or stolen from the kitchen, or paid with bribes to trusties and corrupt prison guards. Fallon even had a handmade knife sheathed in his left brogan. He doubted if any prisoner in Joliet did not have a knife or something similar.
In a place like this, if you weren’t armed—or if the inmates didn’t think you carried a weapon—your life wasn’t worth spit.
“Wait, Joe!”
Fallon frowned at the grinning man, the prisoner bringing up the rear of Martin’s gang.
Baldheaded, rail-thin, pale, pockmarked Dan Watrous, better known among prisoners, guards, the warden, and even the chaplain as the Deacon. An Old Testament, fire-and-brimstone preacher awaiting a date with a hangman in roughly three weeks.
Martin stopped, angrily spun around, and cursed the Deacon, who never took his eyes off Fallon.
“It’s Fallon,” the Deacon said.
“So what? I want Daggett!”
“Fallon’s a lawdog. Remember?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that bandied about. But he ain’t never turned a key on me, Deacon,” Martin said. “And never turned ag’in me in the years he’s been here.”
“Till now,” the Deacon said.
The Gatling gun fell silent again, but not the shotguns and not the screams. But that was outside, or in the main cell block. Those places Fallon had no control over, and he felt his control in the laundry slipping from his grasp.
The Deacon smiled, spread his arms, and said in a mocking voice, “We are in the Garden of Gethsemane, Deputy Marshal Hank Fallon. And we have come for you.”
Fallon heard the muffled gasp of Daggett beneath the laundry. No one else appeared to have caught it, and Fallon said, “You want to avenge your brother, Watrous, come ahead.”
Blood turned the pale man’s face a beet red. “Don’t you mention Jimmy to me, lawdog.”
Of all the prisoners in Joliet to try to escape through the laundry room, to go chasing after the cowardly brute Daggett, the Deacon had to be one of them. Fallon had never met Dan Watrous until the baldheaded killer came to Joliet, to be housed briefly, for no more than six months, before he was to be returned to Effingham, Illinois, to hang for rape and murder. The Deacon had never set foot in Judge Isaac Parker’s courtroom in Fort Smith, Arkansas, thirteen years earlier, to testify to the character of his brother, Jimmy Watrous, or even offer an alibi, or beg Judge Parker for mercy. Parker, on the other hand, was not a man known to be prone to show mercy to a man charged with running poisonous whiskey in the Creek Nation and for killing a deputy United States marshal while resisting arrest. Fallon, however, had not killed Jimmy Watrous. He had merely put a .44-40-caliber Winchester bullet in the kid’s thigh, testified the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as a witness to the murder of federal deputy J. T. Oakes, and Fallon had identified the young Watrous as the killer. Judge Parker had sentenced him. The hangman had pulled the lever on the gallows.
“You got a personal feud with Fallon, that’s your business,” Martin told the Deacon. “All I want is Daggett, and to get out of this hellhole.”
“Then you best hurry,” Fallon said. The gunfire outside now echoed with whistles in addition to the screams, curses, and bells. All intensified. “Your window’s closing.”
“C’mon!”
The Deacon started his sermon, that he would wash his hands after he turned Fallon over to the people, the people being Joe Martin and the other convicts, but no one listened to him. No one but Harry Fallon.
Martin resumed his hurried march toward the door. Fallon never took his eyes off the Deacon. Feeling the sweat darkening the back and the armpits of his shirt, Fallon also felt something that steadied his nerves and almost reassured him that he might live through the next few minutes: the billy club pressing against his buttocks and backbone.
Two of the men—the redheaded Irishman who had burned down a saloon in Chicago, and the old man who had ridden with the Reno brothers back when he was a fool green kid—slowed, keeping their eyes on Fallon. The Deacon touched the edge of the laundry cart, and he even looked down at the freshly laundered clothes. Fallon almost held his breath, but somehow kept his cool, and trained his cold brown eyes on the men as they passed.
Once he had reached the door, Joe Martin placed his hand on the handle. Two others, the one-eyed Italian from Springfield and the burly brute who had derailed a Burlington Route express in Adams County a year ago, waited by the door, listening to the violence outside.
They hesitated, uncertain.
Planning a riot, a slaughter, and with luck a prison break was one thing. Living through it was altogether something else.
The old man spit on the clothes and moved as fast as his brittle bones could take him. The redhead stopped abruptly, grinned like the simpleton he was, and reached for the shirt the Reno gang member had just spit on.
“Hey, Joe!” the kid yelled. “You want a clean shirt?”
Fallon’s one chance was that the coward underneath the laundry would keep his wits.
In his gut, he knew that would not happen.
The shriek beneath the clothes startled the redhead. He dropped the shirt, stepped back as if the cart held slithering serpents ready to strike. Fallon began stepping back, as well, away from the inmates. All this while Captain Daggett tried to climb out from the laundry, turning over the cart onto the hard, stone floor.
“What the . . . ?” Martin stepped away from the door.
“God help me! God help me! God help me!” Daggett tried to scramble to his feet, but his brogans slipped on the pants of men he had abused, and down he went.
“It’s Daggett!” the old man who had ridden with the Reno brothers shouted, and brought up his blade.
There was no time for Fallon to think. Thinking left men dead. Besides, Fallon’s silence had just betrayed Joe Martin, and Joe Martin showed about as much mercy as Judge Parker.
Fallon’s left hand jerked up his shirt from the back. His right gripped the handle of the club, and he stepped forward, bringing the leather-wrapped stick around, slamming it across the Deacon’s jaw. The man’s face contorted, and blood and teeth splattered the overturned cart as down he went.
From the corner of his eye, Fallon spotted the petrified captain of guards crawling over laundry, trying to find his footing. Fallon let the momentum of his swing carry him around. Then he brought the stick up and down, smash
ing the Irishman’s wrist. Bones snapped. The kid screamed. The metal and wood knife dropped onto the side of the cart.
The Reno lifer rushed toward him, started his thrust of his pike toward Fallon’s ribs. But Fallon proved to be too fast. Where he found that speed, he could not fathom, but men could summon up anything when they had no other choice. The club swung, caught the old-timer in his throat, smashing the larynx and sending the man against the tubs of dirty water. Water sloshed over the edges. The lifer stood there, clutching his throat, sucking for air that would not come. He was dead before he toppled onto Captain Daggett.
“You—” An angry scream replaced Joe Martin’s voice. He and the burly man turned away from the door and rushed toward the mangled and dead inmates, terrified guard, and Harry Fallon.
Only the one-eyed Italian kept his wits. This wasn’t his fight. One way or the other, he just wanted to get out of Joliet, and, serving a life sentence, this was his only chance. He jerked open the door and disappeared outside, leaving the door open.
The Gatling spoke its ugly sound. Fallon figured the Italian died quickly, but died trying to escape this repugnant place, and not to kill just to kill before you died.
Fallon shifted the nightstick to his left hand. His right grabbed the knife the Irishman had dropped onto the overturned cart. He raised it, meaning to gut the burly man, who was running ahead of Joe Martin. Instead, the Irish punk came up. The redhead was full of surprises. He drew a butcher knife from his boot, and, gripping the knife with his good hand, lunged toward Fallon.
CHAPTER TWO
Fallon reversed course. He ducked underneath the redhead’s swing. With his right hand, Fallon slashed with the blade. It was luck, nothing but pure luck, but Fallon took it. The blade somehow caught the Irishman across his throat, and the redheaded punk spun around, falling to his knees, slipping in the lake of blood that came from his gushing jugular. Almost at the same time, Fallon brought the stick up with his left hand. The heavy club caught the charging brute between his legs. The big man’s blade came down, slicing into Fallon’s back, but the ugly cur had lost his grip on the blade and now he staggered to his right—right into Joe Martin’s path.