The Wicked Die Twice Read online

  “It’s Miss Breckenridge,” he said, turning to the table behind him.

  The other men sat at a table on the far side of the room, three billiard tables arranged around the room to their right.

  Jay stepped forward, brushing past the cowhand with the wandering eye and fashioning her best toothy smile as she strode toward the table. Trying to ignore the anxious fluttering of her heart, she said, “Gentlemen, I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I’ve brought you a bottle of our best brandy—Spanish brandy, of course—and five rum-soaked cigars that arrived all the way from Cuba only last week!”

  She knew she was speaking too loudly and with too much ebullience, but she couldn’t help herself.

  Calm down, Jay, she told herself. It’s not what you think it is. It is not what you heard!

  The men around the table studied her in troubled silence. The table was oval-shaped. Cisco Walsh sat at the left end. The rancher, Jason Hall, a small, gray, hard-eyed man, stood at the other end, his big cream Stetson overturned on the billiard table to his left. His face was still red from his previous anger. Between Walsh and Hall sat the foreman, Keldon Reed. The man who’d opened the door remained near the door, gaping at Jay.

  They were all gaping at her, eyeing her suspiciously.

  She could read their minds. How much had she heard?

  Trying desperately to look nonchalant, Jay removed the brandy bottle from the tray. She tried to keep her hand from shaking but was not able. Her hand and the bottle shook slightly as she set the bottle on the table.

  Had Walsh noticed?

  She slid her eyes to his. His own eyes were on her hand just as she removed it from the bottle. A smile curled his upper lip, but his eyes looked stricken.

  “Best brandy I serve,” Jay said, her own stiff smile in place as she set the five goblets on the table, one at a time so they wouldn’t clink together in her shaking hand.

  Calm down, dammit! Just calm down, Jay!

  When she’d gotten each glass onto the varnished wooden table, she set the cigars down beside them. Folding the tray down in front of her, she stepped back and arched a brow at Jason Hall, whose own suspicious gaze was fixed on her, and then at Walsh. “Would you like me to pour?”

  Hall looked at Walsh. Walsh returned the man’s dark look, then lifted his gaze to Jay and widened his smile a little, but his lips could have been made out of plaster of Paris. They appeared about to crack and crumble onto the table. “No, that’s fine, Miss Breckenridge. I’ll pour. Thank you very much for your hospitality.

  Jay glanced at the Tumbling Box H foreman, Keldon Reed, a tall, long-limbed man with a walrus mustache. He sat as though frozen in his chair, facing the far wall. His big, brown, rope-burned hands lay flat atop the table before him.

  “All right, then—enjoy, gentlemen,” Jay said, stepping back. “Whups!” She stumbled into a corner of the billiard table. Chuckling, she swung around and made her way past the cowhand with the unmoored eye to the door. The distance between the table and the door was only ten or fifteen feet, but the walk seemed to take a long, long time. The cowhand watched her, swinging his head slowly, tracking her with his good eye, and she was worried for a second that he was going to stretch his arms out and grab her.

  She moved through the doorway and drew the door closed behind her.

  She stopped just outside the door. Pressing the tray against her chest, she drew a deep, calming breath and released it slowly. It did nothing to calm her. She felt her heart pounding against the tray.

  CHAPTER 11

  Steering the jail wagon with a light hand on the ribbons, Slash sniffed the air.

  He turned to where Pecos had fallen into a herky-jerky sleep beside him, his head shuddering with the wagon’s bounce and sway over the rough two-track trail.

  “Pecos, you smell that?”

  “Huh? Huh?” The bigger ex-cutthroat lifted his head and poked the brim of his hat up off his forehead. “Smell what?”

  Slash sniffed again. “That.”

  Pecos lifted his chin and sniffed. “I don’t smell . . . Oh!”

  “Yeah.”

  Pecos frowned at Slash. “Smoke?”

  “I been smellin’ it for the past ten minutes. The smell’s been gettin’ stronger. I thought maybe wildfire, but . . .” Slash looked around in all directions. “I don’t see smoke. If there was a wildfire out here, with all this dry brush, we’d for sure see it, as strong as it smells.”

  “Let’s not talk about wildfires. The only thing I hate worse than bein’ ambushed is havin’ to outrun a wildfire. Remember that one we had to outrun in Arizona?”

  “At least it got that posse from Payson off our tails.”

  “Yeah, but if that fire had caught up to us, which it damn near did—man, those wildfires can run faster’n a mean ole grizzly bear!—we’d have been wishin’ the posse had caught us instead. The only thing I can think of worse than hangin’ is . . . holy moly—look at that!”

  Slash had just pulled the jail wagon up to the top of a hill. Now he stopped the horses and stared ahead and down the other side of the hill, toward where Pecos was staring, the big man’s lower jaw hanging nearly to his chest.

  Pecos said, “Is that . . . is that Dry Fork?”

  Slash thumbed his own hat back off his forehead. “I reckon it was.”

  What was left of the town sprawled in a shallow, brightly sunlit valley before them, roughly a half a mile away. Most of the town had been burned, and a few fires were still burning. Black smoke rose to hang in a stormy black cloud over the town, low enough in the valley that it couldn’t be seen from far beyond it.

  The fire must have started the previous day; most of the wooden buildings had already been reduced to smoldering rubble. A few buildings remained standing, but damned few. Most of even the outlying shacks and small, frame houses had either been burned or were still in the process of burning. Horses and other livestock that had likely been released from stock pens milled on the low slopes encircling the burned town—horses, cows, pigs, chickens, and even some goats.

  Two churches bookended the small settlement. At least, Slash thought the large pile of rubble on the town’s east end was . . . or had been . . . a church. He could still see the bell tower and the cross rising up out of the cupola, though both were now on the ground, partly burned and canted to one side. The rest of the smoldering ruins humped up blackly behind it.

  A small fire burned in the brush behind the church, though most of the fuel feeding it appeared to have already burned.

  The church standing on the town’s west end hadn’t been burned, though it was somewhat obscured by the sprinkling of willows and cottonwoods encircling it and the cemetery spread out on the hill below it, to the right of it. The church was a simple white frame structure with stone steps rising to the double doors. It also had a cupola, but no cross rose from it, unlike the church on the opposite end of the town.

  Slash and Pecos shared a dark look.

  Then Slash turned his head forward and slapped the ribbons over the geldings’ backs. “Hy-yahhh! ” he cried, putting the two beasts into a fast run down the slope toward the broad, shallow valley. “Hy-yahhhh, you cayuses!” Tied to the rear, the saddle mounts galloped along behind them.

  The jail wagon rocked and rattled wickedly, its clattering so loud that Slash could barely hear beneath it the thudding of the horses’ hooves. Beside him, Pecos held tight to the seat. Slash knew that Pecos was thinking the same thing he was thinking—the three prisoners had been busted out of jail by their gang. Once loose, they’d gone on a rampage and burned the town.

  Following the trail, the wagon dropped straight down the hill and into the valley before swinging west and becoming the town’s main street. Slash put the wagon up to the burned-out church. As he did, a wicked, pungent stench filled his nose, making his eyes water.

  Beside him, Pecos lifted his arm to his nose and said in a muffled voice, “That’s the stench of burned flesh, Slash. I know that smell. Once you smell
it, you never forget it. There was folks in that church when they burned it!”

  Slash checked the team down in front of the church and gazed somberly at the ruins. Some of the fallen timbers were still smoldering. Squinting, looking closely, he thought he could make out the charred remains of humans amongst the heaped black and gray ashes and the remains of pews and ceiling beams.

  The geldings whickered and shook their heads, not liking the stench any more than Slash and Pecos did.

  Slash gigged the team ahead. As the wagon rattled slowly down the broad main drag, he and Pecos looked around at the burnt-out hulks of the business buildings on both sides of the trace. A couple were still burning, but they were all reduced to rubble. At least, the wood frame buildings were rubble. The adobe brick or limestone block buildings had been scorched black by the fires around them.

  Slash’s insides churned when he saw several dead men lying amongst the rubble. Several men and even a few women lay in the street. So did dogs and horses. Most of the men and women in the street hadn’t been burned. They’d been shot and left to lie in their own blood pools.

  An old lady in a dark brown dress and poke bonnet lay in the middle of the street just ahead. The handle of a wicker basket was still hooked over her right arm. She lay twisted on her side in death, eyes open, staring sightlessly at the ground.

  “Whoa.”

  Slash drew the team to a halt. He handed the reins to Pecos, then leaped down from the wagon. He walked up to the dead woman and dropped to his haunches. He removed his right buckskin glove and poked a finger into the blood pool beneath the bird-like body. The blood was thick, almost of the consistency of jelly.

  Scrubbing his finger off in the dirt, he looked up at Pecos scowling down at him from the driver’s seat. “She’s been dead since last night. Maybe earlier.” He looked down at the old lady again. Brown eggs, some broken, lay scattered in the dirt around her overturned basket.

  “Sorry, old woman.”

  Slash rose with a curse and climbed back into the wagon. As he put the wagon ahead once more, Pecos pointed and said, “Look. That’s the marshal’s office up the street, on the right.”

  Slash followed the man’s gaze to the small, limestone structure a block ahead. A wooden sign over the door announced in simple, square black letters: TOWN MARSHAL. There was no porch, just a small boardwalk fronting the wooden door, which was open.

  Slash angled the wagon over to the office. He grabbed his Winchester out from beneath the wagon seat and climbed down from the wagon. Pecos grabbed his sawed-off, double-barreled, twelve-gauge shotgun out from beneath the seat and slung its wide leather lanyard over his head and shoulder. The Richards was Pecos’s weapon of choice—at least, for interior, close-range work. Outside, he preferred the Colt’s revolving rifle and his Russian.

  Slash had another gun, too—a pretty, pearl-gripped, over-and-under Derringer residing in his vest pocket. The hideout was his weapon of choice in tight situations and as a last resort. Now, however, he racked a live round into his Winchester’s action and stepped up onto the small boardwalk fronting the marshal’s office.

  He glanced at Pecos, then nudged the door open wider with the rifle’s barrel.

  “Hello?” he called.

  He stepped inside, looking around. As his eyes adjusted to the building’s heavy shadows, he saw two men lying on the limestone floor near a large, cluttered desk abutting the room’s far, front corner. Four steel-banded cages were lined up against the rear wall. All doors were open and all cells were empty, of course. After what he’d seen outside, Slash hadn’t expected to find anyone in here. At least, no prisoners. He hadn’t expected to find lawmen in here, either.

  At least, not living, breathing ones. And he’d been right, it appeared.

  The first man nearest the door lay belly down. His throat had been slit. He was younger than the other man who lay near the desk. The second man was maybe in his late fifties to early sixties. He had some Indian blood. He also wore a deputy town marshal’s star. He lay on his back, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. He’d been tortured with knives and then gutted. The floor around him was thick with a broad pool of blood. His passing had been painful; the man’s lips were stretched back in agony from his teeth.

  Three pairs of saddlebags sat atop the office’s rolltop desk. Slash opened a flap and peered inside and widened his eyes at the gold coins and silver certificates stuffed inside. “Well, well,” he said to himself. Likely the money the killers had taken off the Sundance stage.

  “Jesus.”

  Slash whipped around with a start to see Pecos standing behind him.

  “Dammit, you scared me, ya big galoot!”

  “I thought you heard me come in.”

  “Well, I didn’t.” The burned town, the death, the poor dead half-breed deputy before him had frayed Slash’s nerves. “Anybody alive out there?” He jerked his chin at the street.

  “I didn’t see nobody.”

  “One’s alive—but I’m about it,” said a man suddenly standing in the open doorway.

  Both Slash and Pecos jerked with starts this time.

  Their sudden movements startled the little man in the doorway. He stumbled backward, holding up his hands as though to shield himself from a bullet. “Easy, now, easy!” he cried, cowering like a whipped dog. He had greasy dark brown hair. He was relatively clean-shaven, maybe in his late forties, and he wore a dirty, soot-smudged, pin-striped shirt and an apron. “Don’t hurt me, dammit. I didn’t do nothin’ but get my feed store burned to the ground by them savages!”

  He looked desperately between the open hands he held up in front of his ash-smudged face and said, “You ain’t part o’ them, are ya? I didn’t think so or I wouldn’t have come out of hiding. I seen the U.S. MARSHALS sign on your wagon out yonder, an’ I figured it was safe . . .”

  “You’re safe,” Slash said. “We’re with the marshals. We’re here—leastways, we were here—to pick up three prisoners.”

  “Yeah, well, good luck!” the obviously terrified little shopkeeper cried, though it was partly a laugh, as well. Mostly it sounded like a strangled croak.

  “Where are they?” Pecos asked.

  The little man, whose pale face was badly pock-marked, gave another little strangled croak, then flinched and held a finger to his lips. He looked around fearfully, then, pushing Slash and Pecos back, he stepped into the marshal’s office and closed the door. He latched it with a wince and then turned back to Slash and Pecos.

  He was sweating, and a muscle beneath his left eye twitched wildly.

  “I ain’t sure where they all are. Maybe some left town. I don’t know. B-but t-two of them loco savages are over at Carlisle’s. After they were all through shootin’ up the town—oh, Lordy, that went on all yesterday afternoon and most of the night. Shootin’ and stabbin’ an’ laughin’ an’ killin’ just for the sake of killin’. Oh, and what they did to the women. The girls! The teacher from the school! My God, they made a party out of it. Some o’ the men tried to stand against ’em, but they were so fearful they couldn’t shoot straight. They died first while the killers laughed! Some folks—they got away. Left town. Either on horseback or just runnin’, nothin’ but the clothes on their backs. Some folks holed up in the Catholic church, but them crazy loco savages burned it down! Oh, you shoulda heard the screams from inside!”

  The terrified little man closed his hands over his ears and shut his eyes as though to quell the screams he was still hearing inside his own head.

  Slash stepped forward and pried the man’s hands from his ears. “Listen, Mr . . . what’s your name?”

  “S-Stanley D-D-Donovan. I hid in the communal cellar! I peeked up through the door . . . seen it all. Oh, Lordy, I’ll see it . . . hear it! . . . for the rest of my life!”

  “Easy, now, Mr. Donovan,” Pecos said in his gentle, resonant voice. “You say two are still over at Carlisle’s?”

  “Yeah . . . y-yes . . . I seen ’em go over there early this mornin’.
They didn’t burn the place. They wanted the liquor an’... the-the g-girls. The girls musta been hidin’ in there, but they still found ’em, all right. I heard the screams. Two . . . two of them killers are over there now. The two that busted the other three out. It’s been quiet. God only knows what’s goin’ on.” Donovan stared up at Pecos hopefully. “Maybe they’re asleep!”

  Slash said, “The two who busted the other three out of the jail here are over at Carlisle’s?”

  “Th-that’s right.”

  “Where are the three prisoners? The men we were sent to pick up.”

  “God only knows! They’re off prob’ly still wreakin’ havoc on the land somewheres!”

  “What about the rest of the gang?” Pecos asked.

  “I don’t know. As far as I could tell, only two of the rest of the gang rode into town. M-maybe the rest is still on the way here. Oh, Gawddd!”

  “Take it easy, Mr. Donovan.” Slash took the man’s arm and, stepping over the two dead men, led the little man over to the chair by the desk. He shoved Donovan into the chair and said, “You sit here out of sight. You’ll be all right. Just rest, take it easy. Take some deep breaths. We’ll be back for you soon.”

  Donovan shuddered and grabbed himself as though deeply chilled. He lowered his chin to his chest and sobbed.

  Slash moved back to the door. Pecos had already stepped outside. He stood on the small, wooden boardwalk. Slash stepped out beside him. Both men stared off to the west, where a large, sprawling, white-frame building stood on a street corner, on the opposite side of the street from the marshal’s office. A big sign running across the second story, above the first-story veranda roof, announced simply: CARLISLE’S.

  Carlisle’s was the only wooden building still standing on that side of the street. It had probably been sheltered from the flames of the rest of the burning town by the two adobe structures on either side of it and by its wide separation from the other wooden structures that had burned.