Hang Him Twice Read online

  At least, he had.

  Oh, his name was still stenciled onto the fancy glass, but tacked to the door was a crudely written note.

  FOR RENT

  SEE John Price

  at Bank

  (downstairs)

  Dooley felt his breakfast teetering in his stomach, and he caught his breath and hurried back outside, down the stairs, around the corner, and into the bank. He looked around—that early in the morning, the bank had few customers—and walked to the first teller he saw.

  “Is John Price in?” Dooley asked.

  The teller shook his head. “Should be in—oh, there he is now.”

  Dooley turned and saw a portly gent with two chins close the door and use a cane as he made his way through one of those banker’s gates and toward an office that had a door to it. Hurrying toward the big man, Dooley called out his name. The man turned, smiled, and said, “Yes, sir, what may I do for you this fine morning?”

  “It’s about the lawyer, Mr. Cohen, upstairs.”

  “Ah. Do you wish to lease it? It is fine, a good view, and I’m sure you’ll find our rates reasonable—for Leadville prices. Come in, sir, come in.” He pulled open the office door, but stopped when Dooley said he wasn’t here about renting space.

  “He was my attorney,” Dooley said.

  “Oh.” The man looked Dooley over, but found him to be a respectable-looking man in his striped britches and coat and ribbon tie and all.

  “Do you know where he happened to move to?”

  The fat man shook his head. “No. He came in last week, said he was bound for the Sandwich Islands. I guess one of his clients must have won a gigantic lawsuit for Mr. Cohen to be sailing across the Pacific. He certainly was dressed quite prosperous when he came in, and smiling as though he had found the golden goose. He closed his account and left.”

  The fat head shook again. “But I am certain he will write you when he resettles, or perhaps he has turned his business over to another attorney here in town. I’m sure that is the case . . .”

  “Yeah,” Dooley said, but he knew better. He thanked the banker and the teller and walked out the door.

  Julia had been right. The silver barons could get to an attorney after all. At least he still had his letter with the U.S. marshal in Denver, and with that inkslinger at the Denver Telegram.

  “Hey, Dooley.”

  Across the street, George Miller waved him over. “I want you to meet some folks,” Miller called out.

  Dooley saw two men, one lean and hard, the other fat and pale, standing outside the door to the county clerk’s office. They did not look like gunmen, which made Dooley look across the street at the roofs of the buildings. No sunlight reflected off a rifle barrel. He did not see Harley Boone anywhere, and nothing looked out of the ordinary in the alleys. Some riders, about six, wearing dusters, were riding slowly down the street, but did not look to be keeping their horses under a strong rein and ready to give them their head and run over Dooley if he crossed the street. “You’re going to worry yourself to death, Dooley Monahan,” he told himself, laughed off his paranoia, only to realize that, in his excitement to check in with his lawyer, he had made a mistake. Blue was upstairs again in his hotel room. So was Dooley’s gun belt and .45.

  After all, respectable mine owners did not go heeled when visiting lawyers.

  “Well,” Dooley told himself, once he saw how crowded the streets were becoming. “They won’t ambush me now. And it’s not like those two gents with that scoundrel are the U.S. marshal and the editor at the Telegram.”

  He let a freight wagon cross, then stepped onto the street—dry now, but rutted from all the traffic during the muddy season—and found his way to the clerk’s office. Miller and the two strangers remained outside. All were smoking fine cigars.

  “Dooley Monahan,” George Miller said after removing his cigar, “allow me to introduce you to Richard Blue, deputy U.S. marshal out of Denver. And this, I’m sure you know, is Paul Pinkerton of the Denver Telegram.”

  The lean one was, to Dooley’s surprise, the journalist. The fat one was the marshal. Yeah, Dooley thought, fat from taking bribes and living off other folks’ misfortune.

  Neither made a move to shake Dooley’s hand. Dooley unbuttoned his coat. Let them think I am heeled, Dooley figured. That might get me through this day.

  “Maybe we can talk again, Dooley, about a business deal.” Miller gestured with his cigar in the general direction of Dooley’s silver mine. “A lot of things can happen in a town like this.”

  But, Dooley thought, they can’t just gun me down on the streets. The Leadville Ledger is an honest newspaper—especially since I’ve paid them money for advertisements and even pay the $2.50 annual subscription. If I’m killed, murdered most foully, or come to some unfortunate accident, they will investigate.

  Not that that’d do me any good, being dead and all.

  “What do you think, Dooley?” George Miller asked. “Want to step inside and work out a deal that favors us both?”

  You get rich. I stay alive.

  Dooley shook his head.

  “Suit yourself,” Miller said, and stepped into his office. The low-down, bribe-taking federal deputy and scribe for that horrible little rag of a newspaper in Denver followed him. The door closed behind them. The shades remained closed.

  Again, Dooley looked up and down the street. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary—no gunmen looking to kill him, no strangers on the rooftops, no Harley Boone anywhere to be found. Dooley decided that maybe, before heading to the livery to get his horse and ride to work—if you could call being a boss work—maybe he would check with the postmaster inside the Wells Fargo station and see, on the very off chance, if lawyer J. T. Cohen had left a forwarding address.

  That’s where he was going when, halfway across the street, someone sang out:

  “The bank’s being robbed!”

  Dooley froze. He saw the six mounts, remembering those men in the linen dusters from just moments earlier. They were tethered to the hitching rail in front of the bank where J. T. Cohen leased an upstairs office.

  When he later found time to think, he realized that the warning about the bank robbery came from behind him. How could that person have known the bank was being robbed? Six horses tethered in front of the bank wasn’t out of the ordinary. The shades remained closed inside, so nobody could see what was happening. No guards had been posted outside the bank, drawing attention to himself. And later, Mr. John Price of that very bank reported himself that the bandits did not make off with one single bank note.

  Dooley did not freeze long, because the doors of the bank were being pushed open, and a man in a linen duster raised a sawed-off shotgun at Dooley.

  He ran, ducking, feeling the whistle of buckshot over his head. One of the horses reared, pulled free of its tether, and crashed into the boardwalk. That gave Dooley a chance because the robber couldn’t—at least, he didn’t—fire over the horse and try to kill Dooley with his second barrel. Out of the corner of his eye, Dooley saw him dropping the scattergun and moving desperately to catch up the reins to the frightened bay gelding.

  Another outlaw came out of the building and fired a shot that tore off a chunk of wood as Dooley rounded that corner. His plan was to keep right on running. Hell, he didn’t have a gun, couldn’t put up a fight. Another man in a linen duster came around the other corner of the bank and sent a slug that burned Dooley’s left ear. He shifted directions and came up the stairs. Gun smoke attacked his nostrils. Gunshots rang in his ears. He heard the wood splintering the wooden steps Dooley climbed three at a time as the man with the six-shooters blazed away. How he managed to reach the top had to be a miracle. He grabbed the knob and turned.

  “Oh, hell!”

  The door was open just a few minutes earlier when he had discovered J. T. Cohen’s office was being rented out. Now some fool had locked the damned thing.

  More gunshots sounded. Dooley hoped one of those guns being fired came from
that deputy marshal out of Denver. Another bullet smashed the door Dooley was trying to open. He ducked, saw the linen duster–wearing hombre with the six-shooter had reloaded. Then he saw another bank robber in a duster coming around the corner, carrying two pistols. Dooley ran as hard as he could and threw himself against the door, feeling the heat of a bullet tear through his frock coat, and another rip off his fancy hat. Yet the door splintered, a hinge broke off, and Dooley tumbled inside. He landed hard against the floor, rolled over, kicked the door shut, knowing: a lot of good that’ll do.

  There was no time to catch his breath. He came up and ran, only to catch a shout from outside.

  “He’s upstairs, Clint!”

  Only then did Dooley remember the staircase that led to the offices from the bank lobby.

  Footsteps sounded from downstairs on the bank floor. Dooley stopped. Footsteps sounded on the bullet-riddled staircase outside, too. Inside, he saw the shadow, and heard a hammer being clicked.

  There were only two exits, and men in linen dusters were coming up those steps. He wanted to think that surely Richard Blue, deputy United States marshal out of Denver, had some honor. That as a duly sworn officer of the law he would try to stop a bank robbery. That he was shooting at men in linen dusters right this very second.

  The steps sounded closer outside.

  Of all the times to leave my Colt in my room! Dooley thought.

  He was a dead man. Because he had not taken precautions. Hell, Julia had warned him.

  Damn it all, he thought, I really need a gun.

  The bad men climbing the stairs certainly wouldn’t be loaning him any of theirs.

  That’s when he saw the office to his left, next door to the vacant office of J. T. Cohen, attorney-at-law.

  It had a fancy glass window with stenciling on it, too, and no FOR RENT sign tacked to the door.

  Just as the man in the linen duster from the inside staircase jumped into the second-story hallway, and just as two men wearing dusters crashed through the already-broken door to the outside corner staircase, Dooley hurled himself against the pretty cursive stenciling on the door’s window.

  The pretty glass and the words—O’BRIAN’S GUN SHOP—disintegrated underneath Dooley’s weight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  He ignored the blood on his cheeks and hands, but couldn’t block out the pain as he pushed himself up quickly with his left hand, and a shard of glass ripped through his palm. Groaning, Dooley came up to the left side of the door and reached with his right hand for whatever he could grab to defend himself.

  There was no time. The man from the inside staircase rammed his Colt through the opening Dooley had made through what once had been a window of fancy glass. Dooley saw the revolver. The man saw Dooley, and tried to turn his hand. Only, an instant later, the man had no hand at all.

  Dooley saw the heavy bowie knife, with the D-shaped bronze guard, in his right hand. He saw the man stagger away, spraying blood against the ruined door and into the hallway outside.

  A knife? Someone had left a big bowie knife on the counter in a place that repaired guns?

  Curses came from the other two gunmen in the upstairs hallway, but could not drown out the cries of the man whose hand Dooley had just chopped off. Another shot rammed against the door’s frame, and Dooley dropped below the shattered glass. The man with two pistols appeared first, his revolvers already cocked, his face masked with grim determination as he trained the two barrels on Dooley.

  “Take this!” the outlaw shouted.

  He took it instead, took that knife Dooley threw through the opening. The blade drilled him plumb center, moving through ribs and muscle and into the badman’s heart. That impact was enough to force his two hands to move slightly. Both guns roared, filling O’Brian’s office with smoke, but both .44-40 slugs whistled past Dooley’s ears. Dooley couldn’t see the man because of the thick smoke from his two pistols, but despite the ringing in his ears from the close range of the .44-40’s reports, he heard the man with the bowie knife in his chest hit the floor.

  As a cowboy, Dooley had seen many a waddie who got a finger sliced off trying to dally his lariat around the saddle horn. A few times Dooley had come close to losing a digit himself. But he had never seen a bloody hand cut off with a bowie knife. It was enough to make a body sick.

  Dooley had no time to be sick.

  He pried the Colt from the sticky fingers of the cleaved-off hand. The gun came up—it was already cocked by Clint, or whoever it was who was still yelping out in the hallway—and he touched the trigger as the third man, the one who had cut loose with Dooley and shot up the doorsteps outside, tried to gun down Dooley.

  The man in the duster probably would have killed Dooley, but he must have slipped on the blood spraying out of the arm of the first bank robber. That spoiled his aim. Dooley’s shot missed, too, but only because the gunman went crashing to the floor. He heard the man try to rise, but his boots went out again from under him, and he rocked the floor. By that time, Dooley had risen, thumbed back the hammer of the Colt, and quickly pushed his torso through the ruined window.

  There was a saying Dooley remembered that went something along the lines of: You never kick a man when he’s down.

  Dooley did not kick the man, but he sure shot that low-down snake lying on the floor.

  It was not cold-blooded butchery or revenge. The killer in the now-bloodstained linen duster was bringing up his Colt, about to try to blow off Dooley’s head, when Dooley shot him dead center and killed the bank robber instantly. His gun hand crashed against the door, and slid down.

  Kicking the bloody hand across the gun shop, Dooley pulled open the door. He glanced at the staircases, and at the man with the bloody mess of a right arm, and came outside. Quickly, he knelt, trying to keep his new boots out of the pools of blood on the floor—although his own leaking left palm did its share of bloodying his duds—and pried the Colt from the hand of the dead man on the floor.

  Something clicked, and Dooley spun, seeing the recently one-handed killer in a linen duster bring up a Remington over-and-under derringer in his left hand. The little pistol popped, but the man was in a lot of pain and was likely not good with both hands. Besides, even at close range, a derringer wasn’t always reliable.

  Grimacing, the man tried to shoot the second barrel, but Dooley pulled the trigger. The man spun, dropped the derringer, and tumbled down the stairs, leaving a trail of blood on the wooden steps.

  Again, Dooley looked out the busted-open door that led to the outside stairs. He moved over dead bodies and more bloody ponds, braced himself against the wall, and inched his way to the edge of the opening to the stairs.

  Whispers sounded downstairs. No guns barked outside, although Dooley could make out the barking of dogs.

  He hollered, “Downstairs in the bank?”

  A few gasps answered.

  “It’s me! Dooley Monahan. Owner of the Blue Grant mine.” He had named the strike after his two loyal companions.

  More whispers. Dooley again looked at the opening outside.

  “Any of the robbers still downstairs?”

  “No.” That was a woman’s voice. Dooley thought about this. Three outlaws were dead at Dooley’s hand. Hand. He shook off the image of the hand he had hacked off with a D-ring bowie and then kicked across the floor of a gun shop. That meant three were left. But if just one of them was downstairs, wouldn’t that be enough for anyone to lie, to say no one was down there?

  A floorboard squeaked outside, and Dooley turned, dropped to his knees, and brought up the Colt in his right hand. Almost immediately, a figure in a linen duster kicked through the already kicked-in door, saw Dooley, and also the bloody carnage surrounding Dooley. Still, he tried to touch the trigger, but Dooley fired first. The man went backward, pulling his trigger but only puncturing the FOR RENT sign and the door itself to lawyer J. T. Cohen’s office. He backed up, onto the landing outside, and tried to fire again.

  Dooley gut-shot him,
and the man groaned, leaned against the railing, but again refused to die. He died, though, as Dooley put a third round into his chest. Then the man was gone, falling over the railing and landing in the street.

  Dooley grimaced at the sickening thud outside.

  Four men, he counted. Two left. He checked the loads to the Colts he had procured, dropped one, replaced it with another, and pried a few cartridges from the holster of one of the recently deceased duster-wearers. Once he held two fully loaded six-shooters in his hands, he moved toward the opening outside, but kept listening to the commotion downstairs.

  He heard what he wanted. Downstairs, the front door opened. Dooley stopped walking and now eased his way, gently, so no one could hear his movements downstairs, until he reached the edge of the doorway. He came down cautiously, seeing the main doors still open, and watched the ashen-faced tellers and the sweating, trembling John Price stare at him as he came down the stairs.

  The woman teller, a buxom redhead, pointed out the window. “Two men!” she said. “They just ran out!” He could tell she felt sorry for having lied to him earlier. Of course, he wished she had not yelled. Now he ran, just in case the linen duster–wearing hombres came back toward the bank, down the stairs and across the floor, stopping at the door.

  Six horses remained tethered out front. The two killers left had not fled. He shot a glance across the street. The shades to the county clerk’s office remained closed, the door shut. Inwardly, Dooley cursed every deputy marshal in Colorado. He looked down the streets.

  Nobody rode down the road. No one stood on the boardwalk, behind a water trough or column or in the corner of an alley. He had read all sorts of newspaper and magazine articles about towns whose residents rose up in defense when ruffians tried to pull off a raid or robbery of some kind. But not here in Leadville.

  Dooley stared down the boardwalk. “Which way?” he asked the redheaded teller, figuring she would still feel guilty about having lied to him earlier. Not that Dooley blamed her any.