CHAPTER 17
“Whoa!”
Slash hurried down Carlisle’s steps and ran into the muddy street that had nearly become a river. Lightning forked over the burned-out town. Thunder crashed like cymbals. The rain lashing at him, instantly drenching him and sluicing off the brim of his black Stetson, Slash dropped to a knee beside the man who’d fallen in the street.
Beneath the storm he could hear the three human coyotes yipping and yowling in the jail wagon.
Pecos knelt on the other side of the fallen man and said, “Is he dead?”
“I can’t tell.”
“Let’s get him into the saloon.”
Slash grabbed the man’s left arm, Pecos grabbed the man’s right arm, and they pulled him up out of the mud. Immediately, the man began moving his head and muttering. He’d been badly beaten, his eyes swollen nearly shut, and his lips had been smashed and cut. Dried blood was caked on them, mixed with the mud of the street.
The former cutthroats each draped an arm of the beaten man around their necks and half led, half dragged him up the saloon steps. Slash could hear him groaning, grunting. Jenny Claymore held one of the batwings open as she stared in horror at the poor, beaten man whom Slash and Pecos led across the porch. Slash stepped through the open left door as Pecos bulled through the right one.
“Let’s get him into a chair,” Pecos said.
They led him over to their own table. Pecos kicked out a chair, and he and Slash eased the man into it. Slash retrieved a glass from the bar and splashed whiskey into it. He held it up to the beaten man in the chair.
“Here, son. Take a sip of that.” He thought the whiskey would bring him around.
The man opened his swollen eyes to slits. He looked like a large, drowned rat, though Slash suspected he was fine to look at under all that mud and bruising. Slash figured he was in his late twenties. He was clean-shaven with short dark brown hair, and he wore a store-bought, three-piece suit. The mud-caked, five-pointed star pinned to his vest had the words TOWN MARSHAL engraved on it, though Slash could barely read the words for the mud.
The man raised his muddy right hand. He seemed to have trouble getting it to the glass, so Slash shoved the glass into it. The man closed his thumb and fingers around the glass, brought it to his lips, and sipped. He sipped again, again, and again, and then threw back the rest of the shot and swallowed.
He gritted his teeth, shook his head.
“Christ, she’s dead!” he wailed, throwing his head back.
“Who’s dead, son?” Pecos asked.
The young man lowered his head and sobbed.
“His wife,” said Jenny Claymore, standing before the young town marshal, between Slash and Pecos. “He must mean his wife—Tiffanie.”
The man sobbed for a couple of minutes while Slash and Pecos and Jenny Claymore stood looking down at him, helpless. Finally, the young marshal brushed his sleeve across his battered mouth and turned to stare out the window to his left, at the jail wagon obscured by the heavy wedding veils of falling rain.
“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 spades 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.