pulled the short, savage-looking gut-shredder out from beneath the seat and swung it in a broad arc toward the limey, who’d just turned to stare in shock toward where the kid’s precious bodily fluids were geysering out of the hole in his neck. As the Brit’s eyes flicked toward Pecos, dropping his lower jaw in sudden exasperation as he began raising his rifle once more, Pecos tripped one of the double-bore’s two triggers.
The limey’s head turned tomato-red and bounded backward off the man’s shoulders. Even as the limey was still raising the Spencer in his hands, his head bounced into the brush and rocks beside the trail.
As the head continued rolling and bouncing, like a child’s bright-red rubber ball, Slash slid the smoking derringer toward Cord, who shouted, “Hey!” and lunged forward, raising his Henry repeater. The gray-eyed Cord didn’t quite get the butt plate snugged against his shoulder before Slash squeezed the pretty little popper’s second eyelash trigger.
Having only one more round with which to save himself from St. Pete’s bitter judgment, Slash decided to play the odds. He aimed for the redheaded mongrel’s broad chest and curled his upper lip in satisfaction as the bullet nipped the end off the man’s string tie as it plowed through his shirt into his breastbone and then probably into his heart.
“Oh!” the redhead said through a grunt, looking down at his chest in shock as he staggered backward, the Henry wilting in his arms.
At least, it appeared to Slash that “Oh!” is what the man said as the bullet shredded his ticker. He didn’t know for sure, for the man’s exclamation, whatever it was, was resolutely drowned out by the second, dynamite-like blast of Pecos’s twelve-gauge on the other side of the wagon.
That fist-sized round of double-ought buck punched through the chest of the Mexican, who, just like his cohort on the other side of the mules from him, was bounding forward as he realized he and his brethren had just found themselves in dire straits. He didn’t get his rifle raised even halfway before the buckshot picked him two feet off the ground and hurled him straight back into the brush already bloodied by the limey’s disembodied head.
Meanwhile, Slash looked at the redheaded mongrel who’d stumbled backward to sit down against a boulder a few feet off the trail. He sat there against the rock, his chest rising and falling sharply as blood continued to well out of his chest and turn his shirt dark red.
He stared at Slash in slack-jawed, wide-eyed shock and said, “I’ll be damned if you didn’t kill me.”
“If I hit your ticker, then you’d be correct,” Slash said. “Do you think I hit your ticker? There’s a chance it might have ricocheted off your brisket and missed your heart. If so, I’d better reload.”
Cord shook his head once, his gray eyes glazed with deepening shock and exasperation. “No, no. You got my ticker, all right.” He paused, staring at Slash, then added simply, “Hell,” because in his shock and mind-numbing realization that he was teetering on the lip of the cosmos, he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Slash couldn’t blame him. He didn’t know from personal experience, of course, but he was sure that the place where Cord was just now entering was hard for a mere mortal to wrap his mind around. Slash would know soon enough. Every day, he was a little closer and more and more aware of that bitter fact . . .
Slash looked at the kid, who was rolling around on the ground, squealing like a stuck pig and cursing like a gandy dancer, clamping his hands over his neck, for all the good it did him. He was losing blood fast.
Slash looked across the wagon to see the carnage Pecos’s shotgun had left in the brush over there. He glanced at his partner, who was just then breaking open his twelve-gauge and plucking out the smoking, spent wads.
“How’s your ticker?” Slashed asked him.
Pecos grinned. “Better.”
Slash chuckled as he climbed down off the side of the high, stout wagon, a Pittsburgh freighter he and Pecos had bought along with the business. He walked over to the brush where he’d tossed his weapons and picked up one of his .45s.
“I need help,” the kid croaked out, sitting up against a rock, holding his hands over his neck.
“You’re askin’ the wrong jake, kid.”
“Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!”
“Kid, even if you weren’t already a goner, I’d still kill you. Think I’d leave a little demon like you alive to sow your demon seed? What this world does not need is more of you.”
The kid’s eyes appeared ready to pop out of their sockets. “Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!”
Slash killed him with a neat, round hole through the middle of the kid’s forehead.
The demon spawn fell back against the ground and lay quivering.
“Kid,” Slash said, flicking open his Colt’s loading gate and shaking out the spent round, “I’ve come to know that what we want in this life and what we get are very rarely the same damn thing.” He glanced at Pecos, who was staring down at him from the driver’s boot. “Ain’t that right, partner?”
Pecos laughed and shook his head as he shoved his shotgun back into its cage beneath the seat. “Partner, sometimes your wisdom astounds me. Purely, it does!”
CHAPTER 3
Slash and Pecos chinned for a time about what to do with the dead men.
Slash wanted to drag them off the trail and bury them under a few rocks. They weren’t worth burying, but since they were men, albeit no-accounts to a man-jack of them, he supposed someone should make at least a little effort by way of laying them to rest.
Pecos, more tenderhearted than his lean, dark, and moody partner, wanted to deliver the dead men to the town marshal in Fort Collins. “I mean, they might have family in the area, Slash. Or family somewhere. If one of your kin met his demise, you’d want to know about it. You wouldn’t just want to have to think about it all the rest of your life, would you? To be left to imagine all the various nasty ways they might have met their ends? I mean, even if said kin had gotten exactly what they deserved . . .”
Pecos usually won such arguments. He won this one, as well. As hard and cynical as Slash was, he knew his partner was the better man. Besides, he always felt guiltily wicked when he found himself trying to argue with Pecos’s moral authority. He might have been a wicked man in other folks’ eyes, but he didn’t like feeling that way himself.
Also, he had an ulterior motive in caving in to his partner’s wishes so easily. There was a chance there was a bounty on the heads of one or all of these men. Slash figured this wasn’t their first holdup. If so, and if someone had put a reward on their heads—well, in this humbler life the two former cutthroats were now living on the right side of the law—he and Pecos could use all the extra cash they could get.
They loaded the dead men into the wagon, covered them with the canvas tarpaulin they’d used to cover their freight on the way into the mountains a couple of days ago, and vamoosed on up the trail. When they came to a broad, grassy area in some trees along Marmot Creek, they pulled off the trail and into the shade of the breeze-ruffled aspens and pines. They fed and watered the mules and built a fire over which they boiled coffee.
It
