CHAPTER 11
Penny walked up to within seven feet of Bledsoe and stopped, looking down at the wheelchair-bound lawman. “We ran into unexpected trouble.”
“I paid you to expect anything.”
“You didn’t pay us to expect an escape tunnel.”
Bledsoe scowled. “An escape tunnel?”
“That’s right,” Antrim said from the bar. “That cabin was outfitted with an escape tunnel. When we set the place on fire, they musta crawled out through the tunnel and snuck around us.”
“They cut us down like ducks on a millpond,” said Penny, and sipped his whiskey.
“Us?” Bledsoe grunted. He smiled. “I see that you and your little friend managed to get away unscathed.”
Antrim bristled at being called little. Penny sensed the smaller man seething behind him. As Antrim lurched away from the bar, setting down his drink, Penny stopped him with an upraised arm.
“We both dropped into some brush when the shootin’ started,” he said tightly, defensively. “Otherwise, they woulda cut us down with the others. The odds were against us, so we lit out of there. Live to fight another day, is what I say. We’ll have another chance at ’em. One with the odds in our favor. I got no doubt about that. None whatsoever.”
Bledsoe was grinning so broadly that anyone watching might have thought he was in danger of losing his teeth. “An escape tunnel?” He chuckled. “Of course. Why not? Pistol Pete probably thought of that, the old devil!” He chuckled some more. “And them two cutthroats an’ Pete’s woman took full advantage. Circled behind thirteen of supposedly the nastiest bounty hunters on the frontier, and laid waste to all but two!”
Bledsoe laughed again, clapped his big hands together, and glanced over his shoulder at the three deputies concealed in the shadows behind him.
To a man, they were as sober as judges. The one with the cheroot took another long pull on the cigar once more.
Bledsoe looked up at Abigail Langdon, who only quirked her broad mouth a little, keeping her eyes on Penny.
“You gotta love those two, don’t you?” said the chief marshal.
“What two?” asked Penny, incredulous.
“Slash Braddock an’ the Pecos River Kid. The woman, too—Jaycee Breckenridge. Hell, you gotta love all three.” Still chuckling with boyish delight, Bledsoe shook his head and wrung his hands together.
Penny glowered at him, one nostril flaring. “If you love ’em so damn much, why’d you sic us on ’em?”
Instantly, the smile left the chief marshal’s long, angular face with its deep-set, cobalt eyes. “I meant it figuratively.”
“You meant it . . . what?” Antrim asked skeptically. He glanced at Penny, then back to Bledsoe. “What’d he say?”
“I didn’t mean it literally,” Bledsoe said.
“I don’t care how you meant it,” Antrim said, stepping forward, his face red, his little eyes pinched with anger. “And I don’t see why you can’t talk in a way that—”
“Shut up, you little fool!” Bledsoe bellowed, lifting an arm to point his long, bony finger.
Antrim stopped and hardened his jaws, his little, pinched-up eyes spitting fire. He made a deep, breathy chortling sound in his chest and his feet moved in place, as though he were grinding bugs into the floor. His chest rose and fell sharply. He flexed his gloved right hand over the handle of the .44 jutting from the holster on that thigh, under the pulled back flap of his rain slicker.
“Go ahead,” Bledsoe said, leaning forward in his chair, his own face mottled with fury now. “Pull that smoke wagon, you little termite!”
The sounds Antrim was making deep in his chest grew louder. He looked at the three deputies sitting behind the table on the far side of the room, their faces in shadow, smoke from the one deputy’s cigar webbing in the guttering lantern light. Antrim shuttled his gaze from the deputies to the three dead men before him.
Penny smiled as he glanced over his shoulder at the smaller man. “Stand down, Bart.” His smile grew as he returned his gaze to the gray-haired cripple in the wheelchair. “Stand down, stand down,” he added drolly.
Antrim relaxed his hand. The noises stopped issuing from his chest but he held his acrimonious stare on the wheelchair-bound chief marshal.
Bledsoe sat back in his chair. To Penny he said, “You let two of the most elusive cutthroats on the western frontier get away from you, after you had ’em both and that outlaw woman, Breckenridge, corralled in their outlaw cabin. You know how long I’ve been after those two—Braddock and the Pecos River Kid?”
“A long time, I’d imagine,” Penny said, playing along with the strange man’s game. “They been at it a long time.”
“I’ve been after them for nigh on twenty years now. Ever since I was a deputy ridin’ for ole Cleve Butterworth, who held the position I hold now, in the Denver Federal Building. I almost had ’em once. We thought we had ’em corralled in Abilene, Kansas—eleven of us deputy U.S. marshals and three Pinkertons—when the Snake River Marauders were robbing the Stockman’s State Bank on Front Street.”
Bledsoe grimaced, shook his head slowly, fatefully. “Somehow, they slipped away. Slick as dog dung on a doorknob on the Fourth of July!”
He shook his head again and added in a low, throaty voice, “That was the day I got the bullet in my back. From Braddock himself when he was comin’ out of the bank, both pistols blazing, laying down cover for the Pecos Kid, whose hands were full of money. I caught a ricochet off the sandstone wall behind me.”
Penny doffed his still-dripping hat and held it down before him in both hands, and dropped his chin gravely, looking at Bledsoe from beneath his shaggy brows. “I do apologize for your misfortune, Marshal Bledsoe. I didn’t know that bullet came from Braddock.”
“No,” Bledsoe said. “You wouldn’t.”
“Again,” Penny said. “I can’t imagine a worse thing than bein’ confined to a—”
“Shut up!” the old marshal bellowed.
Penny felt his gut tighten under the crazy old lawman’s onslaught. He slid his eyes to one side, glancing at Antrim behind him. Bart slid his own tense, angry gaze to Penny, then to the fiery chief marshal before them, flanked by the severely beautiful blonde in the spruce-green cape, who might have been carved out of alabaster, complete with her coolly mysterious smile.
“The only thing you two corkheads need to be sorry for is letting yourselves get outsmarted by those two cutthroats and that outlaw woman, Breckenridge. You got that close”—Bledsoe raised his hand, holding his thumb and index finger an inch apart—“and let ’em get away. Get outta here! You’re fired!”
“You can’t fire us!” Antrim shot back, raising his arm and pointing an angry finger.
“You gave us contracts!” Penny added, also pointing an accusing finger at the old marshal. “You agreed to pay us like deputy marshals as long as we tracked Slash ’n’ Pecos and only Slash ’n’ Pecos till we ran ’em down and killed ’em an’ brought you back their heads! Then we’d both get the reward money on their heads—doubled!—and the rest of our men would get a thousand dollars from Uncle Sam. That was the deal!”
“It ain’t our fault they had an escape tunnel,” Antrim argued, leaning forward at the waist, glaring at Bledsoe. “So, they pulled one over on us? They pulled one over on you in Abilene!”
He straightened, beaming victoriously.
Bledsoe glared back at the shorter bounty hunter. His eyes were bright with fury though the rest of his face appeared passive except for a nerve that was twitching in his left cheek, just beneath that deep-set, cobalt eye.
The room was silent. The only sounds were the din kicked up by the storm outside. Lightning sparked in the windows, at times filling the entire room with those eerie, blue-white flashes.
Finally, Penny gave a nervous chuckle and, grinning at the ominously silent Bledsoe, holding out his right hand to calm his enraged partner, he said, “Now, now, now. Pshaw! No point in callin’ out everbody’s mistakes. So, we let them two owlhoots slip out on us here today, just like you did way back in Abilene.”
He threw out his arms, shrugging. “None o’ that means a damn thing right here an’ now, does it? Me an’ Bart here will go after them two as soon as the storm clears out. We’ll track ’em from the cabin an’ finish ’em right an’ proper. We’ll cut their heads off, cart ’em back to your office in Denver, and collect the money we’ll have comin’ to us.”
He added with a wry chuckle, “Of course we’ll forget the money you owe the rest of the bunch, since they’re dead an’ all. You just keep that money in ole Uncle Sam’s bank. That’s a savings for you. As soon as Bart and me have collected the reward money . . . along with our retainer fees . . . you and us will fork trails, Chief Marshal Bledsoe. You’ll never have to lay your eyes on our ugly faces again.”
Penny chuckled again nervously, shifting his eyes from the three deputies sitting silently in the shadows to the right of the chief marshal sitting in his wheelchair, his eyes still blazing at Bart Antrim.
For nearly another full minute, Bledsoe remained silent.
Then he lifted his big, horny hands, opened his coat, and reached into a pocket. He pulled out two sheets of cream paper, which were folded lengthwise. He opened both pages, turned them so that they faced the room, and ripped them along the crease.
Bledsoe’s face suddenly brightened in a mocking grin.
“Here are your contracts!” He placed his hands on the arms of his chair and leaned forward over his knees, pointing his chin like a pistol barrel at the two men before him. “Now get your cowardly asses the hell out of my sight!”
Antrim gave a mewling cry of outrage. He bounded forward, reaching for the pistol thonged on his right thigh. “Why, you crippled old son of—”
He didn’t get the rest out.
Or if he did, it was drowned by the sudden concussion of Bledsoe’s sawed-off shotgun, which the old marshal had drawn with lightning speed from its greased scabbard and held straight out before him in both hands, thumbing the left hammer back and squeezing the trigger.
Antrim was picked up and flung straight back, triggering his Colt into the ceiling just before he hit the floor on his back and lay writhing like a bug on a pin.
Penny stared down at his partner in shock. Antrim stared up at him, the light quickly leaving his eyes as he held both his gloved hands to what remained of his belly. Bart tried to speak but he managed only a few strangled gurgling sounds. His eyes rolled back in their sockets, his bloody hands dropped to the floor, and he lay still.
Penny turned to the chief marshal. Bledsoe gazed back at him, eyes bright with anticipation. Smoke curled from the maw of the shotgun’s right barrel. Both barrels were aimed at the bounty hunter’s chest.
Bledsoe curled his upper lip. “Want some?”
Penny raised his hands, palms out, and shook his head. He glanced at the three deputies. They hadn’t moved. They sat as before, the one with the cheroot just now stubbing out the cigar in the ashtray and exhaling smoke through his nostrils.
Abigail Langdon stood behind and above the little, crippled chief marshal, gazing coolly at Penny. She might have been watching some mildly entertaining theatrical play in a frontier opera house.
Penny’s heart thudded heavily, painfully.
“I reckon I’ll, uh . . . I reckon I’ll just take a bottle and go to bed.” He began backing toward the bar where he intended to secure a room for the night.
“The place is done filled up,” Bledsoe growled, sliding his shotgun toward the door. “Take the barn.”
Penny compressed his lips. Fury was a living thing inside him, trying to claw its way out. He looked at the smoking shotgun before him, then at the three deputies and the cool eyes of Bledsoe’s ethereally beautiful assistant gazing at him blandly.
There would be another time, another place for Bledsoe.
Just as there would be another opportunity for the bounty hunter to take down Slash Braddock and the Pecos River Kid.
Penny sidled over to the door, shrugged deeper into his rain slicker, and left.
Bledsoe sheathed his shotgun and sat staring at the closed door, slowly shaking his head and chuckling.
“What’s funny, Chief?” asked Abigail Langdon, gazing down at him. Her voice sounded like the keys of the most finely tuned piano in the world.
“Braddock and Pecos,” Bledsoe said, shaking his head as he stared at the door. “Those two old cutthroats got no quit in ’em—I’ll give ’em that.”
He threw his head back, laughing.
“But I got one more big surprise for ’em!”
The old chief marshal laughed harder.
Outside thunder roared.
Lightning lit up the entire room.