The Wicked Die Twice Read online

  “Animals,” he grunted. “They beat me while Tiffanie screamed. They dragged her . . . inside.”

  He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth as the remembered images assailed him. “They dumped me in the ravine behind the house. I couldn’t move. They beat me so hard, took my gun . . . beat me with it. I could hear them whooping and hollering. I could hear Tiffanie screaming and then . . .”

  He sobbed, squeezed his eyes closed. “Then . . . slowly . . . her screams tapered off. I musta passed out . . . then woke up and I could smell the smoke . . . felt the heat of the fire.”

  He sobbed again, his head bobbing.

  Again, he scrubbed a muddy sleeve across his mouth, sniffed, and said, “I . . . I tried to climb out of the ravine. I wanted to get to the house . . . to save her . . . but I passed out. Just came to when I felt the rain . . .” He sniffed, gritted his teeth again, and wailed, “Oh, God—she’s dead and I let them kill her! ”

  “No, no,” Slash said, patting the young man’s back. “It wasn’t your fault. Like you said, they’re animals. Nothin’ you could have done.”

  “I should have shot them while they slept, right here at Carlisle’s! Shouldn’t have even taken ’em into custody. Should have just shot ’em like the wild dogs they are!”

  “No, you were just doin’ your job,” Pecos told him.

  Slash looked at Pecos. “I think we’d best get him upstairs, get him into a bed. He needs rest. Should have a doctor look at him, but . . .”

  They both knew the doctor had hightailed it earlier, when the rampage had started, or he was dead along with the others who’d gotten caught in the killers’ pillaging of Dry Fork.

  “I’ll look around and see if I can find some food,” Jenny said. “I’ll bring something up to him, try to get him to eat.”

  “Good idea,” Slash said with a grunt as he and Pecos lifted the marshal out of the chair.

  They helped him upstairs, moving slowly. He barely put any weight on either foot. He was injured, weak, and exhausted. They led him down the hall to a half-open door. Slash peered inside, making sure it was unoccupied. It was. Neither he nor Pecos had checked up here for survivors of the rampage, but they hadn’t heard any noises, so they’d assumed everyone who’d been in the building—aside from the dead man and the dead whore they’d found downstairs—was either dead or had pulled out.

  Judging by this empty room, anyway, it appeared they’d been right.

  They gentled the marshal onto the rumpled bed. A half-filled thunder mug was stinking up the room, so Slash set it down the hall aways. When he returned to the room, the marshal was muttering, “Keep a lookout . . . rest of the gang . . .” He’d grabbed Pecos’s arm and was squeezing it. Or at least trying to.

  “What’s he saying?” Slash asked.

  “Something about the rest of the gang.”

  “What’re you talkin’ about, Marshal?” Slash stood over the man lying wet and muddy on the badly rumpled, sour-smelling bed. “You think the rest of the gang will come for those three outside?”

  The marshal looked up at Slash through his swollen lids. “Two did,” he croaked out. By the way he was wheezing, his ribs must be badly bruised or broken. “They must have split up after the robbery. Two of the others got word . . . came here to spring those three. You’d best . . .” He winced as pain spasmed through him. Lightning flashed in the window flanking the bed. “You’d best assume the others will get word and come for ’em, too.”

  “How many in the gang?” Pecos asked.

  “At least twenty, I’m told.”

  Pecos started counting on his fingers.

  “That leaves fifteen, you idiot,” Slash told Pecos, who, flushing with embarrassment, dropped his hand to his side.

  Pecos glared at Slash.

  The battered marshal looked up at them dubiously. “Are . . . you . . . two . . . marshals . . . ?”

  “Yeah,” Slash said. “Don’t we look like it?”

  Larsen just stared up at him. His battered face made any kind of expression nearly impossible.

  “We’ll explain later,” Pecos said. “We’ll leave you to sleep. Say . . . you want us to help you out of them wet clothes? You’d feel a whole lot better dry.”

  The young man’s head shook slightly. “I’m too sore. I’ll just lay here for a while, try to get my strength back. I’ll wrestle out of them when I’m able.”

  “Sounds good.” Slash drew a quilt over him. “We’ll be back up to check on you in a while.”

  Footsteps sounded in the hall—a light tread. Jenny appeared in the doorway holding a steaming bowl in her hands. A thick piece of brown bread poked up from one side of the bowl. The schoolteacher came into the room, looking at Larsen and saying, “I found some canned stew, heated it up. If you feel like eating . . .”

  “Not now.” Larsen glanced at a chair by the bed. “Just set it there, will you, Miss Claymore?”

  “Of course.” She set the bowl on the chair.

  As she straightened, Larsen reached out and gently grabbed her hand. “Are you . . . are you . . . all right?”

  She compressed her lips, trying to smile. It didn’t work. She nodded, and tears glazed her eyes. “I’m all right. Better shape than you.”

  “I doubt that,” he said, staring up at her knowingly.

  She patted his hand holding her own. “I’m sorry about . . . about Tiffanie. She and I were friends. I’m going to miss her.”

  “Me too,” he said tightly, lifting his dark eyes to stare up at the ceiling.

  Jenny patted his hand again. “It wasn’t your fault, Glenn.”

  “Yes, it was.” Larsen removed his hand from between hers and stuffed it down beneath the quilt.

  “No . . .” the teacher insisted.

  Pecos took her arm. “Come on, Miss Claymore. We’ll let the marshal sleep.”

  She let Pecos lead her to the door. As she did, she kept her concerned gaze on the miserable-looking marshal. Slash followed them out into the hall and closed the door behind him.

  Miss Claymore walked down the hall ahead of them, toward the stairs. Slash could hear her sobbing quietly, one hand to her mouth.

  “Nasty situation,” Pecos said through a sigh.

  “About as nasty as I’ve ever seen, and we’ve seen a few.”

  “I reckon we’d best assume the rest of the gang could show up any ole time and try to spring those three wolves from the wagon.”

  “I reckon we’d better.”

  They moved off toward the stairs.

  * * *

  Later that night, after the storm had rolled and grumbled and flickered off to the northeast, Slash laid out a game of solitaire at his and Pecos’s table in Carlisle’s and said, “Maybe we oughta roll that wagon up closer to the saloon so we can keepa closer eye on it.”

  Pecos sat near the batwings, which he’d nailed back so he could see outside. He sat to one side of the doors, facing the opening in his chair, his Colt rifle and Richards coach gun resting across his knees. They’d lit only one lamp in the whole, big, cavern-like place, so anyone outside would have trouble seeing in.

  “I can see it just fine,” Pecos said.

  “Can you see ’em in there—them curly wolves?”

  “No, they must be sound asleep or too miserable to move around much. But they’re in there.”

  Slash squinted down at the cards in the weak light that was mostly shadows, a quirley smoldering in one corner of his mouth. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Think they found a way out?”

  “Wouldn’t put it past ’em.” Slash laid a queen of spades down on a king of hearts. “Maybe their gang came and sprung ’em.”

  “Without makin’ a sound?” Pecos gave a snort. “They’d need dynamite to blow that iron door open. We’d hear a dynamite blast, Slash. Even from here. Even you would from here!”

  “All right. Just remember it’s gonna be your ass on the block if they ain’t in that wagon tomorrow,” Slash said, laying a ten of spade
s on a jack of hearts. “I hate to think about what ole Bleed-Em-So’s gonna do to you. I can already hear you hollerin’!”

  Pecos looked through the doors and yelled, “Hey, curly wolves—how you doin’ out there? You need a warm blanket, a hot meal? Maybe some whiskey?”

  Silence for a time. The only sound was the dripping of the rain from the saloon’s eaves.

  Slash had started to turn in his chair, apprehension growing in him, when the wagon creaked as one of the three sodden devils stirred. The man groaned, hacked phlegm, and in a voice quaking with a sodden chill, told Pecos to do something physically impossible to himself.

  “There—you satisfied?” Pecos said to Slash. “Snug as three bugs in a rug.”

  Slash turned back to his game with a relieved sigh. “I’m just sayin’ it don’t hurt to check from time to time.”

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs at the back of the room. Slash turned that way to see Jenny coming down from the second story. She was a slender silhouette in the near darkness, one hand on the bannister. The weak light touched her hair and made the outer strands shine like amber. Slash and Pecos had hauled buckets of hot water upstairs for her, so she could take a bath and wash her hair, and change into some clean clothes. She’d intended to crawl into a bed up there afterward.

  “Couldn’t sleep, honey?” Slash asked her.

  She shook her head as she strode out from the bottom of the stairs. She grabbed her coffee cup off the table she’d occupied earlier, walked over to Slash’s table, and splashed some of his whiskey into her cup.

  She took the cup to the potbelly stove in which a fire burned against the damp chill, and filled the cup with coffee that had been smoldering there for a while. It tasted like tar, but Slash was used to burned coffee. In fact, he preferred it. Maybe it conjured his younger, wilder cutthroat days, when they’d carelessly burn coffee in remote outlaw lairs, though he’d never been in a situation as wild as this one. He just wasn’t young enough to appreciate it anymore, he supposed.

  Jenny returned to Slash’s table and sat down across from him. She’d changed into a nice, stylish dress with a white shirtwaist with puffy sleeves and a long, pleated skirt. One of the doxie’s outfits, most likely, though not overly enticing even though it complemented Jenny’s trim, buxom figure nicely. Because of the current circumstances, Slash discreetly kept his eyes off her figure, however. At least, he didn’t let them linger.

  “Thank you for the bath, fellas,” she said, and blew on her coffee.

  “Feel better?” Slash asked her.

  Sort of hunched into herself, she shook her head. “No, just cleaner. But only on the outside. I feel soiled deep down to my core.”

  “It’ll pass,” Pecos said from the nailed-open batwings.

  She turned to him and said sharply, “Oh, really? How would you know?”

  “I reckon I wouldn’t,” Pecos said with chagrin, and returned his gaze to the street.

  “I’m sorry,” Jenny said.

  “Don’t be,” Slash said. “That dumb old catamount deserves a tongue-lashing from a woman from time to time. He don’t take it serious when I do it.”

  Jenny took another sip of her whiskey-laced coffee. “Do you think they’ll come? More . . . like . . . them . . . ?” She peered out the night-dark window flanking Slash.

  Slash laid another card down. “If they do, you’ll be safe. Me an’ Pecos have stood against steeper odds than them an’ come out a little rumpled and sore maybe, but otherwise little worse for the wear.”

  Pecos turned to him from the batwings. “It’s Pecos and I, you damn fool.” He glanced at Jenny. “He’s worse than a Georgia mule. You can’t teach him anything.”

  “I wish I could sleep,” Jenny said. “But every time I close my eyes . . .” She gave a shiver and held her coffee up close to her chin.

  “You need more whiskey in your coffee.” Slashed added an extra jigger of busthead to her mug. “See, that’s a trick you learn with age.”

  She fought back a genuine smile, tucking her lower lip under her upper lip. “Thank you for your wisdom, Slash.”

  “Jimmy.”

  “Slash,” she said with quiet insistence, looking at him over the rim of her cup.

  Slash gave a hangdog shrug and laid down another card.

  Pecos laughed.

  CHAPTER 18

  Jay was standing at the bar the next morning, sipping her first cup of coffee, when Cisco Walsh walked into the Thousand Delights. Jay drew a sharp breath, held it, steeling herself for what would come.

  In the backbar mirror, she watched the town marshal doff his hat as he stepped through the swinging doors. Brushing a lock of his thick, wavy, nicely barbered hair back from his left eye, Walsh looked around briefly before his gaze fell on Jay standing at the bar before him. He must have just that morning polished his large, silver, five-pointed star, for it glinted brightly on his freshly brushed, fawn leather vest as he moved toward the bar, his serious gaze pinned on Jay.

  The silver star looked larger than usual, for some reason.

  But, then, so did Walsh.

  Jay felt her spine tighten.

  She’d known, of course, that she’d have to talk to him eventually. She couldn’t hide from the man forever. Her world was a small one. It consisted almost solely of the Thousand Delights. She couldn’t hide upstairs in her suite forever. She had to come down and run the saloon and her girls, and oversee the kitchen, as well as the gambling layout, and of course, Cisco would eventually enter the place and they would . . .

  Do just what they were about to do.

  Speak.

  Still, despite knowing their meeting was inevitable, Jay’s heart raced and her palms grew moist.

  She kept her eyes on the marshal until he bellied up to the bar beside her, on her right. Then she lowered her gaze to her coffee mug. Chicken flesh rose across her shoulders and down her back. Walsh set his brown bowler hat on the bar, drew a deep breath. She could smell the mint of his shaving balm and his hair tonic, feel the threatening heat of his body next to hers.

  He said just loudly enough for Jay to hear above the soft conversational hum of the breakfast diners, “Don’t you think we’d better talk about this?”

  Jay lifted her gaze, looked at Walsh in the mirror. Somehow, it felt safer to look at him in the mirror as opposed to confronting him directly. “What’s there to say, really, Cisco? I overheard your conversation with Hall. I know it and you know it. How can you defend it?”

  “I can’t.”

  The reply startled her. “What?”

  “I can’t defend it.”

  The morning barman, Grant McMichael, came up holding a pot of coffee. “Coffee, Marshal?” he asked in his customary affable tone.

  “No,” Cisco brusquely replied, keeping his hard, level gaze on Jay now as he turned to face her, resting his right elbow on the edge of the bar.

  Jay saw a vaguely hurt, vaguely puzzled expression pass like a fast-moving cloud over the barman’s face as he muttered something inaudible, nodded, glanced curiously at Jay, and then carried the pot over to the two customers standing on the opposite side of the bar.

  “Then what is the point of us having a conversation?” Jay asked, her own voice low and tight.

  “You never know,” Walsh said, “it might save your life.”

  Now she turned to him, her heartbeat quickening. “Are you threatening me, Cisco?”

  Suddenly, he smiled. It almost looked warm. It almost looked genuine. “No, you know how I feel about you, Jay.” He paused, his smile in place. “I’m going to offer you an opportunity.”

  “An opportunity.”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’ll cut you in . . . in return for your silence. When the job is done, we’ll both have enough to money that we can shed this backwater, louse-infested village—together.”

  “Together?”

  “How does San Francisco sound? I’ve been offered a job with the Pinkerton’s ou
t there.”

  Jay stared at him in astonishment. “You actually think that I’d—”

  “Why stay here? Honey, pardon me for saying so, but you’re not getting any younger. This is a big place to run, to keep up. You can’t continue to carry the load of the Thousand Delights forever. Of course, there’s Slash, but . . . please, you’re not really, serious considering marrying him, are you?”

  “Yes, Cisco,” Jay said. “I am. I’m going to, in fact.”

  “Do you think he really loves you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That wild old scalawag! Ha!” Loudly, Walsh slapped the bar and seemed oblivious of all the heads swinging toward him. “He’s incapable of love. Oh, he might think he loves you, but that old train robber and whoremonger has a heart like granite. Me? I think he’s just scared of growing old alone. Even if he did love you, Jay, how long do think it would last? How long do you think it would be before he got shifty feet, started to miss the excitement of the robbery and the chase to some outlaw camp in the mountains? Or the pretty little señoritas down Mexico-way?”

  Jay just stared at him, biting her tongue, anger burning inside of her.

  Cisco continued. “Slash Braddock has never sunk a picket pin in his entire life. Neither has Pecos. Those two might be putting on a good show, running their legitimate freighting business while working for Bledsoe, but how long do you think that’s gonna last?” He leaned toward her, his lips smiling but his eyes flashing with mockery. “Those two are outlaws, Jay. Through and through.”

  “I guess it takes one to know one—doesn’t it, Cisco?”

  “Shut up!” Walsh looked around. Leaning closer to Jay, he grabbed her arm and gave it a painful squeeze. “Keep your voice down, dammit!”

  Raising her voice even louder, Jay said, “You’re not going to get away with it, Cisco. I won’t let you. You’re a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and it’s time the people around here know about you!”

  “Damn you—I told you—”

  “Go to hell!” Jay slapped his face hard. The sharp crack sounded like the report of a small-caliber pistol. She jerked her arm free of Walsh’s grip and backed away from him, looking around the saloon and yelling, “Everyone needs to know that Marshal Walsh is planning to rob a gold shipment from one of the mines. Which shipment, I don’t know. But it’s going to happen in the coming week, and it’s going to be a big haul—eighty thousand dollars in gold bullion!”