The Killing Breed Read online

  “Didn’t know the Comanche were raidin’ this far north.”

  “Goddamnit,” Thornton growled. “If I’m open, I’ll have the sign saying as much in the front window. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  But before he could reach back to close the door, the tall, broad-shouldered Temple stepped forward,removing his stovepipe hat and swiping it across his legs to dislodge the trail dust. His voice even, his eyes hard, he growled, “Thanks for invitin’ us cold, trail-weary pilgrims into your more-than-humble abode, Thornton. Why, you must be a real God-fearin’ man to be so hospitable.” The bounty hunter turned to Thornton, a sneer making his iron gray eyes sparkle.

  Thornton stepped back with a sigh as the other four riders followed Temple into the room, a cold draft dogging their heels and blowing leaves over the threshold. The stocky, fiery-eyed blond, Frank Miller, gave his hat brim a wry pinch, while the young clap carrier, Benny Freeze, chuckled sneeringly, the tip of his tongue jutting out from between his little teeth.

  The Mexican, Chulo Garza, stared blankly at Thornton as he pushed on past him, while Kooch Manley, stocky, paunchy, fat faced below his weather-stained Stetson, clapped his gloved hands and said, “I been wantin’ a drink for the last five miles!”

  Scowling, Thornton closed the door. He kicked at the dancing leaves, then turned to the five bounty hunters standing with their backs to him, appraising the grim environs. He grumbled, “Don’t expect much. I’m out of beer, low on whiskey, and my girls have all drifted to rosier meadows.”

  Lowry Temple stood facing the room between Garza and Freeze, turning his head slowly and whistling softly. “What the hell happened, Thornton? I know it’s a weeknight an’ all, but Christ!”

  Thornton cursed as he shuffled toward the bar. “Didn’t you hear? The mine company in Gold Cache moved the main trail five miles south. What brings you out to this backside of the devil’s hell? Lost, are you?”

  “Me and the boys had business nearby,” Temple said. The other men were sauntering over to a table near the stove, pulling off their gloves and looking around with grim bemusement. “Bobcat Canyon, matter of fact.”

  Thornton fished a bottle of cheap rye whiskey off a sparsely populated shelf beneath the bar, and frowned at Temple, who still stood in front of the door. “Bobcat Canyon? That’s where the Johanssen brothers ranch.”

  Temple smiled devilishly as he bit the end off a long black cheroot. “Not anymore they don’t.”

  Near the stove, fiery-eyed Frank Miller threw his head back and laughed.

  Chapter 2

  “Christ,” Thornton muttered, carrying the bottle of rye and five shot glasses out from behind the bar, his elk-skin slippers sweeping the worn puncheons. “Oscar and Knute Johanssen were two of my few remaining regulars. And they made damn good gooseberry wine.”

  “Nice fellas, too.” Frank Miller tossed his tan hat onto the table, around which he and the others except Temple sat, and ran a hand through his close-cropped blond hair. His crazy blue eyes seemed lit from a conflagration inside his head, and his bull neck was sunset pink. “They cooked us a nice supper, let us sleep in their barn. Even served us breakfast. If they’d had a daughter, I don’t doubt they would have passed her around!”

  He and the others laughed.

  Thornton shook his head as he set the glasses on the table. “And you repaid their hospitality by killing them.”

  “A neighbor wanted ’em out,” Temple said with a shrug.

  Thornton sighed. “You’re a strange breed.”

  The bounty hunter chuckled as he moseyed up to the table, stretching from side to side to loosen his back. “Am I mistaken, or was that you who hired me to kill three of your competitors up the canyon only—what was it?—two years ago?”

  “They were conniving sons o’ bitches.” Thornton was filling the shot glasses. “Had no business in my canyon. Bastards and swine crowdin’ my territory. I’d hire you to kill ’em all over again!”

  He raised the bottle and turned to Temple, who now stood behind Benny Freeze. “But if you remember, that cheating cardsharp, Wendell Myers, is running with his tail up and his tongue flapping between Bismarck and Deadwood. I paid you to bring me his ears!”

  “‘Do not judge, lest ye be judged,’ ” Temple clucked as he sank into a chair and ran his hand over a bullet hole in the table before him. “Mine company come in and shoot up the place, too?”

  “Might as well have.” Thornton raised the bottle to his lips and took a long pull. Lowering the bottle, he stared down at the table, around which the bounty hunters sat, drinking and smoking. “Moving that trail was like cutting my head off slow with a rusty saw.”

  The old, familiar rage set the wound aflame once more, as though the whore were drilling him all over again with that pearl-gripped derringer. The girl, the half-breed, and the mining company’s new road were a single, jeering enemy, constantly prodding his festering wound—laughing, heckling, applauding the hopeless abyss into which his life had plunged.

  “I’d hire you to pluck the eyes from the skull of the son of a bitch that made that fine decision, only I’d probably have to send you to New York or Philadelphia to do it.” Thornton slammed the bottle onto the table and held out his hand. “That’ll be five dollars, and I’m in the unfortunate position of no longer being able to extend credit . . . even to my friends.”

  “Five dollars?” grunted the Mexican, Garza, who wore his black hair in several thin braids wrapped in greased rawhide. He extended his hand toward his half-empty shot glass. “For this javelina juice?”

  “You know how much it costs to have supplies hauled up here to this pimple on the devil’s backside?”

  “I’ll take it out of what you still owe me for the previous job I done for you.” Temple scowled across the table at the roadhouse proprietor and threw back his entire shot, gritting his teeth as though he’d just eaten a lemon, rind and all. “You sent me to kill three men and a woman. I had to kill a coupla whores, too, and you didn’t pay me for that.”

  “You didn’t have to kill the whores. You just like killin’ whores.”

  “They mighta sent me down the river.”

  “You’re cloudin’ the issue. I’m talkin’ about that sharpie, Wendell Myers.”

  “Temple don’t like the temptation of whores,” said the middle-aged gent, Kooch Manley, laughing as he puffed on his stogie. “On account of his ma bein’ . . .”

  Apparently thinking twice about finishing his sentence, Manley let it trail off, flushing slightly as he scowled into the cigar smoke webbing around his head.

  “A what?” Temple said, keeping his voice low and even. “A whore? That’s right, Kooch—she was a whore. Only my mama was a God-fearin’ whore.” He leaned forward suddenly, jutting his head toward Manley, who sat across the table from him. He tapped his forehead. “That’s who done gave me this here tattoo, don’t ya know!”

  A heavy silence filled the room, thick as tar. The men looked around at one another skeptically, bracing themselves as though they expected Temple to suddenly fill his hands with iron and start shooting. The walls creaked as the wind moaned. A loose outbuilding door thumped against its frame.

  “Christ!” Thornton snapped his still-outstretched hand closed as he turned toward the stove. “Your misguided sense of entitlement is worse than Bardoul’s, Temple.”

  “Bardoul?” said Frank Miller, raising his pale brows. “You know Wit Bardoul?”

  “Knew him,” Thornton corrected as he opened the stove door and set a pile of pinecones and feather sticks onto the cold ashes within. “Been pushin’ up daisies since fall before last, up around Sundance Gulch. He was foggin’ the trail of one of my whores and a wild-assed half-breed. Near as I can figure, the half-breed gave him a pill he couldn’t digest.”

  “And vamoosed with the whore?” said Manley, chuckling.

  “You got it.” Thornton struck a match and set it under the tinder inside the stove. “Haven’t seen hide nor hair of ’em since
.”

  “Damn,” Temple said, holding his shot glass up to his eye like a spyglass. “You’re getting too relaxed in your old age, Thornton. A breed running off with one of your whores? Can’t imagine you standin’ for that.”

  “I didn’t stand for it. That’s why I sent Bardoul.”

  “And Bardoul’s dead.” Frank Miller wagged his head, his crazy eyes still bright but somehow forlorn. “Imagine that. Wit Bardoul . . . dead.”

  Frank Miller laughed as he poured another drink. “That’s a sad story.”

  “Yeah, it’s sad, all right,” said Manley. He looked at Thornton. “Why don’t you bring us another bottle of that panther juice so we can drown our sorrows over the loss of a fellow bounty hunter—a god amongst men?”

  “Yeah, another bottle,” Benny Freeze said.

  Thornton shoved a couple of small branches onto the fledgling flames, then closed the stove door and began pushing off his knee. The movementaggravated the festering wound in his side, and he grimaced, gaining his feet and scuffing toward the bar. “Why not? No others around to drink with.”

  “Wit Bardoul—dead.” Frank Miller shook his head, sending thick puffs of cigarette smoke toward the bullet-riddled wagon wheel chandelier not quite centered above the table. “That’s hard to believe. I worked with Wit a time or two. Taught me a few things about trackin’ and shootin’.”

  Temple poured out another round of drinks, finishing the first bottle. “Bardoul was a bushwackin’, whoremongerin’ fool.”

  Frank Miller glanced at his leader, his blue eyes fairly glowing with contempt, and for several stretched seconds it looked as though he might voice umbrage with Temple’s estimation of Miller’s deceased mentor. Apparently deciding against it, he muttered a curse, lifted his shot glass, and downed the whiskey in a gulp.

  Returning from the bar, Thornton set another bottle of inferior rye on the table. He hauled his own bottle out of his robe while angling a chair toward the cracking stove whose heat was beginning to nibble at the room’s dense chill.

  “Who’d you say it was took him down?” Miller asked him.

  Thornton took another pull from his bottle, set it on his thigh, and turned to Miller. He enunciated his words carefully as he stared at the stove. “Henry. Yakima Henry. Green-eyed half-breed. Shot up my place. Ran off with my best whore. Killed every man I sent after him.”

  Thornton turned to sweep his gaze across the bounty hunters lounging around the table to his left. They stared back at him through the room’s gloom and webbing wood and tobacco smoke.

  Thornton’s heart quickened slightly. He licked his lips, felt an eager smile twitch at his mouth. “I don’t know . . . you boys might be able to take him down . . . if you all went after him. Long odds, still.”

  “Like I said,” Temple growled, leaning back in his chair. “Bardoul was a fool. Harvested bounties by shootin’ men in the back. Wouldn’t take much of a man to snuff his wretched wick.” He cast a challenging glance toward Miller, whose jaws hardened in anger. “Bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “Oh?” Thornton cocked an eyebrow at the tattooed gent. “This half-breed isn’t any normal man. You should’ve seen him dancing across the tables right here in this very room, dodging bullets triggered at him from every direction. Then he swung from that chandelier over there and crashed through the window . . . gone!”

  Thornton pretended to study each of the bounty hunters, coldly critical. Then he pursed his lips, shook his head, and turned back to the stove. “Nah,” he muttered, raising the bottle to his lips. “Forget it.”

  “Forget what?” Temple said, frowning from across the table as he slouched back in his chair, his iron gray eyes glassy from the cheap but potent hooch. “You don’t think the five of us could take him down?”

  “Oh, maybe you could,” Thornton said, not wanting to seem overconfident. Bounty killers worked best when they had something to prove. “But it ain’t really the breed I care about.” He turned to Temple, hardening his jaws and gritting his teeth. “What I want is the whore. Alive.”

  Thornton had considered sending more men after Henry and Faith months ago, but he’d nixed the idea. Doubtless, the half-breed would have beefed the others, too, and left Thornton that much poorer and just as desolate.

  But if anyone could kill the breed and bring Faith back to the roadhouse where Thornton could punish the wayward whore in all the ways he’d been dreaming about for the past two years, it was these hard-eyed killers gathered before him now.

  “Well, that’s just damn insultin’,” Manley said, staring hard at Thornton as he leaned forward in his chair and dropped his right hand beneath the table.

  Temple, sitting to Manley’s right, grabbed the man’s arm. “Pull your horns in, Kooch. He’s playin’ us, tryin’ to keep his price down.”

  Thornton chuckled and let another brief silence fill the room beneath the warming stove’s creaks and sighs.

  “A thousand for each of you,” he said suddenly. “Half now, half when you’ve brought the whore back . . . alive.”

  “Alive?” Benny Freeze said, chuckling drunkenly. “Ain’t sure Temple can—”

  “Shut up!” the group’s ramrod said out the side of his mouth, keeping his gray eyes on Thornton. “Where is she?”

  “A drummer I know saw them in Arizona. A place called Saber Creek. They were filling a supply wagon, so my guess is they have a place in the sticks.”

  “That’s a fair lot o’ ground to cover.” Temple grinned and looked at Thornton from beneath his dark brows, the cross tattoo rising on his forehead. “Fifteen hundred apiece. Half now, half when we’ve brought the whore back fresh as a spring daisy.”

  Thornton opened his mouth to respond, but Temple cut him off by holding up his hand. “And you forget this hog tripe about Wendell Myers. I’ll probably kill the son of a bitch because he’s a son of a bitch, but I don’t see how he’s worth a special trip up north in the wintertime.”

  Thornton kept his face calm as he stared back at the head bounty hunter. But his pulse squawked in his ears. He had a quick, flashing vision of slowly carving Faith up with a dull butcher knife, and he could already feel life, like a healing elixir, trickle back into his fetid, green-rotting soul, killing the razor-toothed rat in his belly.

  “Deal.”

  Before Thornton could drink to it, Kooch Manley leaped to his feet with surprising swiftness for a man of his middling years and size. “Holy shit!” In a blur of motion, the man grabbed his revolver from his thigh and leveled it just above Thornton’s head.

  “What the hell?” Thornton cried, ducking down in his chair and folding his arms over his head.

  Manley’s Remington roared three times in quick succession, sounding like a cannon echoing off the hall’s cold, silent walls.

  Thornton lowered an arm to peer at the back of the room. A cat-sized rat lay on its back at the base of the carpeted stairs. The varmint had been blown nearly in two. All four feet jerked as it died.

  A hushed silence fell over the room. Behind Thornton, Benny Freeze giggled like a girl.

  “I ain’t seen a rat that size in years,” Manley grumbled, slowly lowering his pistol and sinking back down in his chair.

  Thornton shuttled his gaze from the rat to the middle-aged bounty hunter, surprise and appreciation for a well-placed shot mixing with the indignation at having more bullet holes in his roadhouse. Frank Miller began chuckling then, too, and he opened his mouth to speak but stopped suddenly, his eyes rising to the ceiling over the bar.

  Upstairs, bedsprings sang as though suddenly released, and the patter of quick footsteps sounded. They grew louder until Ruby ran out onto the balcony, holding a buffalo robe around her shoulders.