But, then, the boy his father had been must have been as gone for Slash’s mother as Slash now found himself gone for Jaycee Breckenridge . . .
“Stop thinkin’.”
Slash glanced at Pecos as they both walked up the broad wooden steps fronting the Thousand Delights. “What?”
“Stop thinkin’ about it.”
“Stop thinkin’ about what?”
“You know what. Just follow your heart, or you’ll work yourself up so bad you’ll turn tail and run all the way back to Missouri, yippin’ like a butt-shot coyote.” Pecos chuckled as he paused to toss his quirley into the dirt of the street behind them.
“Oh, shut up!” Slash snarled, and pushed through the batwings.
The main saloon hall was filled to near bursting. Slash and Pecos had to sidestep their way through the men as well as Jay’s painted, scantily clad girls. The potpourri of male and female aromas was nearly overwhelming after several days of sniffing only the pure, high-country air.
Tobacco smoke hovered in a thick fog, skeining like ghostly snakes in the lights of the crystal chandeliers and gas lamps that lit up the well-appointed saloon, which resembled the tony set of some stage play or a mine magnate’s ballroom.
Varnished oak, velvet draperies, expensive wall hangings, shining brass spittoons, and glistening leaded-glass mirrors shone every which way. Some of the floor was carpeted. Some was hard maple. The fiddle music, now accompanied by a horn or two as well as a guitar, was issuing from a side room given over to dancing. Slash could hear the cowboys letting their hair down, yipping and laughing and stomping their boots.
When Slash and Pecos finally made it to the bar, squeezing in between two drummers who didn’t look happy about being crowded, one of the barmen, Vance Taylor, saw them and said, “Hey, Slash!”
“Set us up—will you, Vance? And, uh . . . where’s Jay?” He’d been looking around but so far hadn’t spotted her.
Taylor, flushed and harried, glanced at the ceiling. “She asked me to have you two head on up to her suite.”
Slash and Pecos cut befuddled looks at each other. “Her suite?” Pecos said. “Both of us?”
Taylor just shrugged and then waltzed off to fill shouted drink orders with the two other aprons, all dolled up in pinstriped shirts, celluloid collars, foulard ties, and sleeve garters, working behind the broad, horseshoe bar.
Slash and Pecos again worked their way through the crowd and up the broad, carpeted stairs. As they headed down the third-floor hall toward Jay’s suite of rooms, Pecos said, “What do you suppose she wants to see both of us about?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“That kind of cramps your style a little, don’t it, partner?” Again, Pecos gave a mocking grin. “I mean, you probably don’t want me around when you drop to a knee.”
“If you don’t shut up, you’re gonna find out it’s true that the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
Pecos snorted a devious laugh.
They stopped at Jay’s door.
Slash tapped lightly three times. “Jay? It’s Slash an’—I mean, it’s Jimmy and Melvin!”
He cursed under his breath. Their given names sounded so foreign as to be comical.
He frowned at the door. Behind it was only silence.
He was about to tap again when a strangling, gagging sound rose from inside.
“Slash! Pecos!” Jay screamed. “Hit the deck—it’s a trap!”
CHAPTER 5
You didn’t have to tell the former Slash Braddock and the former Pecos River Kid more than once that they’d walked into a trap. They’d moseyed into several over their long and storied outlaw careers, barely escaping with their lives at times.
They both hit the deck so fast that any onlooker would have thought their old legs had suddenly turned to wet mud. No sooner had their chests hit the nicely carpeted hall floor than an explosion sounded from behind Jay’s door. A round of what could only have been double-ought buckshot blew a pumpkin-sized hole through the door’s top panel.
Chunks of wood peppered both Slash and Pecos, lying prone in the hall. Chunks and slivers flew against the opposite wall.
“Die, you cutthroat bastards—die!” bellowed a man on the heels of the first blast and on the nose end of the next.
Ka-boom!
The second blast was every bit as loud as the first, if not louder. It seemed to make the hall floor buck up hard beneath Slash and Pecos.
A second hole joined the first hole, slightly lower down than the first one and connecting the two, so that now there was a single, hourglass-shaped hole in the middle of the door roughly the size of a rain barrel’s mouth. More wood chunks littered the two prone cutthroats and the floor around them.
Silence.
Slash lifted his head and turned to Pecos. Pecos looked back at him. Wood slivers peppered his hair, his beard, and his clothes. His blue eyes were bright with apprehension as, gritting his teeth, he reached down for the big Russian holstered on his right thigh.
As Slash reached for one of his Colts, a man inside the room said in a low, tense voice, “You think we got ’em?”
“Let’s make sure,” said another voice.
“No!” Jay screamed.
“You shut up, woman!” bellowed the last man who’d spoken.
As Slash and Pecos scrambled to their feet, what sounded like six-shooters began popping inside the room. The bullets screeched through the hole the two-bore had punched through the door and made new, smaller holes of their own. A couple even punched through the wall.
Slash rose to a crouch and pressed his left shoulder against the wall to the left of the door. Pecos rose and pressed his thick right shoulder against the wall to the door’s right, wincing as the bullets continued to punch through the door and through the walls to either side of him and Pecos, a couple coming within a cat’s whisker of hitting pay dirt.
They didn’t have time to wait around and keep hoping the men inside the room would continue to miss their marks until they emptied their pistols.
Slash turned to Pecos and yelled above the din, “Whatever you do—don’t hit Jay!”
He and Pecos glanced around the sides of the door to peer through the large hole the two-bore had carved. They swung their pistols up and shoved them through the hole and went to work, hurling lead at their targets inside the room, evoking indignant wails and curses and silencing the guns of the three men who were standing about seven feet back from the door, hurling lead through it.
Or had been hurling lead through it, blindly. Like fools.
Until Slash and Pecos had taken steady aim at their targets and sent the three gutless bushwhackers breaking into bizarre death dances and wailing and shooting their pistols into the floor and ceiling. When Slash, peering through the hole and into the smoky room beyond, saw that all three men were down, he pushed through the door, breaking out a remaining chunk of it and stepping into the room, keeping his six-gun aimed straight out in front of him.
Pecos followed him in, breaking out what was left of the door.
The two cutthroats stood side by side, peering through the smoke at the two shooters lying twisted on the carpeted floor before them. The third man was crawling away toward their right, toward an open window above Jay’s pink brocade fainting couch. Trying to gain his feet, holding a smoking six-shooter in one hand and clamping his other hand over his chest, the man glanced over his shoulder at Slash and Pecos.