“Good luck, boys,” Jay called.
“Good luck, boys,” Slash growled to himself as he picked his hat up off the hall floor, where it had tumbled when he’d first hit the carpet. “See you around . . . my ass!” Setting his hat on his head, he added, keeping his voice low, “Not if I see you first, you starch-drawered hooplehead!”
Pecos had retrieved his own hat and, donning it, caught up to Slash. He walked along beside him, scowling at him. “What the hell’s got into you?”
Slash tried to respond, but only a growl bubbled up out of his throat.
“What is it?” Pecos prodded as they started down the stairs. “You think Jay’s got somethin’ goin’ with the marshal?”
“Ain’t it obvious?”
Pecos frowned, shrugged. “No. I mean, they’re obviously friends. Like Jay said, they met back in Dodge. Before Pistol Pete. But old friends—that’s all they are.”
As they gained the bottom of the stairs and began sidling through the swarming crowd, heading for the front door, Slash said, “How do you know they were just friends? How do you know they’re still just friends?”
Pecos threw his head back and laughed.
“What’s funny?”
“You.”
“How am I funny?”
Pecos snarled when they stepped through the batwings and started across the Thousand Delights’ broad front veranda.
“You’re jealous. Why, you stiffened up like a conquistador’s suit of armor as soon as that big rake walked into the room. It was obvious as the nose on your face.”
“Well, of course I’m jealous. Did you see that tailor’s dummy? Some women like ’em . . . you know . . .”
“Tall and handsome as a freshly minted penny? Men who know how to dress an’ comb their hair? I’ll be damned if he don’t bathe at least once a week, too. Oh, yeah—women are all over that!” Pecos chuckled as they headed for the freighting compound and the corral in which they kept their horses.
“Wears a badge, too.” Slash shook his head and added through gritted teeth, “Big fancy pistol . . .”
“I bet he rides a big black Thoroughbred, too,” Pecos teased his friend. “A stallion, no doubt. With fire in its eyes. Hah!”
“Oh, stop makin’ fun of my misery,” Slash railed as they approached the barn and corral to the left of their business’s main office. “Can’t you see she’s gone for that . . . that badge-totin’ fancy Dan?”
Pecos stopped in front of the barn door. “Oh, she is not.”
“She is, too!”
“No, she’s not.”
“Is too!”
Pecos placed a hand on Slash’s shoulder. “I seen the way she looked at that fancy Dan, as you call the jake. But I’ve seen the way she looks at you, too, and, believe me—because if I’ve learned one solid thing in this life, it’s the hearts of the ladies—when Jay’s eyes fall on your rancid countenance, for some reason or another they light up even brighter than they did for Cisco Walsh.”
Slash frowned, canted his head to one side, skeptically. “Really?”
“And she gets an even pinker flush in those pretty cheeks of hers.”
“Ah, hell—you’re just sayin’ that so I’ll get the hump out of my neck.”
“No, I’m not. She’s gone for you, Slash. Pure and simple. You keep that ring in a safe place till you’re ready to put it on her finger.” Pecos paused. “Take one more word of advice?”
“Go ahead—you’re on a roll!”
“Ask her soon. She’s not gettin’ no younger. You can’t expect her to wait around forever, wonderin’ if you’re ever gonna pull the trigger.”
He lifted the wire loop from the corral gate and drew the gate open. “Come on. Let’s see what kind of nastiness ole Bleed-Em-So’s got in store for us now.”
CHAPTER 7
Chief Marshal Bledsoe thought it prudent that he and the two former cutthroats keep their arrangement as secret as possible. The marshal didn’t think it would reflect well on the federal government if folks knew it had amnestied two career criminals in return for their service, that is, running down owlhoots every bit as bad as Slash and Pecos once were—and worse—and killing them.
The eastern newspapers would have an ink-fest if they found out that Uncle Sam had amnestied two career criminals and turned them into paid assassins.
Apparently, Bledsoe and even the president of the United States thought it made sense, though, given the nasty cut of the outlaws who currently ran off their leashes on the still relatively lawless western frontier. Who but two cutthroats would be better qualified for running down and bringing to justice—or flat-out killing—their own?
Bledsoe’s sending Jack Penny and a whole pack of nasty bounty hunters to kill them, and then Slash and Pecos in turn killing the bounty hunters, with Penny now included, had been a pretty good test of their abilities. Even at their advanced ages, though neither Slash nor Pecos saw their mid-fifties as being all that advanced. Of course, Bledsoe hadn’t intended Penny’s ambush to be a test. He’d genuinely wanted Slash and Pecos dead.
Who could blame the man?
Slash himself had crippled Bledsoe many years ago. He hadn’t intended to, but the lawman—a deputy U.S. marshal at the time—had caught one of Slash’s ricochets. It had shattered Bledsoe’s spine, confining him to a pushchair.
Slash knew that, given their history, Bledsoe wasn’t going to pull any punches when handing out job assignments to the two former cutthroats. Slash and Pecos were always going to be going after the worst of the worst.
Until their tickets were punched.
Luther T. “Bleed-Em-So” Bledsoe would not shed any tears at their funerals. If they received funerals. Which they almost certainly wouldn’t.
Bledsoe kept an office of sorts in the little near-ghost town of Cedar City, which sat amongst rocks and cedars in a broad horseshoe of the Cache la Poudre River. The town had never been a city, despite its obvious aspirations, and had ceased even to be a town when the army pulled out of Camp Collins, which was the original name for Fort Collins. Now it wasn’t even a fort anymore, and all that remained of Cedar City were a few abandoned mud-brick dwellings, an abandoned livery barn and stock corral, and a single saloon, the Cormorant, which mostly served the rare drifter and local cowpuncher and acted as a home to the old gentleman who owned the place—a stove-up former Texas Ranger, Tex Willey.
Tex and the chief marshal had been friends for a couple of generations, having worked together in chasing curly wolves in their heydays.
These days, Bledsoe came out here to get work done when he found himself drowning in red tape in his bona fide digs in the Federal Building in Denver. It was a handy location, given its close proximity to the railroad line. An old freighting trail, still in good repair, offered access from the rail line to Cedar City.
Now as Slash and Pecos rode into the ghost town from the west, they saw the old Concord mud wagon that Bledsoe had customized for himself, nattied up a bit with brass fittings and gas lamps, softer seats and velvet drapes offering privacy, and brackets on the side for housing his pushchair. The horses milling in the corral flanking the mud wagon were likely the two that had pulled Bledsoe out here from the train.
The other two would be those of the two deputies who always escorted and ran interference against possible assassins. The wily old reprobate