FIFTY-FIVE CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Teaser chapter ABOUT THE AUTHORS
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Copyright © 2020 J. A. Johnstone
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
ISBN: 978-0-7860-4386-6
Electronic edition:
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4387-3 (e-book)
ISBN-10: 0-7860-4387-3p (e-book)
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
They come at him, just as they always do—at least six men, wearing the striped uniform of inmates. Harry Fallon can’t see their faces, and even if he could, it’s not like he knows these hardened lifers. He doesn’t even remember the name of the prison where he has been sentenced. Joliet? Yuma? Jefferson City? Huntsville? Detroit? Alcatraz? Cañon City? Laramie? Deer Lodge? But a bad memory is the least of his problems right now.
He stands with his back against the door of six-inch cold iron, no bars, just a slit for a peek hole so the guards can check in every now and then. Ahead of him, to his left, are the cells on the fifth floor. Hands extend between the bars and rattle tin cups against the iron. The doors remain shut. Inside, prisoners chant some dirge or hum, mixed with curses and laughter, but all that proves hard to understand with the racket the cups make against the rough iron. To his right, there’s a metal rail about waist-high, and beyond that, the emptiness for thirty yards to the other row of cell blocks. Five stories below, the stone floor of this hellhole called a prison. And just in front of him, the six men, faces masked, but intentions clear. The knives they have—fashioned from the metal shop, or the broom factory, or the farms where they work—wave in hands roughened by a life of crime, followed by life sentences.
“Hey!” Fallon shouts through the slit in iron, but dares not look through the opening. He can’t take his eyes off the six killers. By now, they are less than ten feet from him.
“Hey!”
Nothing.
The big brute in the center of the gang laughs.
Of course, there’s no guard here. Not now. Fallon has been behind the iron long enough to know that guards and prisoners have the ability to make a few deals when it comes to taking care of prisoners neither guards nor convicts like. A guard decides to head to the privy at a predetermined time, a trip that’ll take a good long while, and it just happens to coincide with other guards needing to find a cigarette, or a toilet, or happening to be escorting another inmate to see the warden.
Handy.
Right now, there’s probably not a guard anywhere in this particular house.
So six cons, armed with shivs, start to smile.
If only Fallon could recall where he is, what he’s in for, why these men want to kill him. If only Fallon could remember anything.
My God, he thinks, has he been sent to prisons so many times his brain has become addled? Has he been hit on the head, suffered . . . what is it they call that . . . amnesia? Yeah. Amnesia. All right, at least he can remember some things.
He remembers something else, too.
Because one of the faceless men before him whispers a growling, “Take him,” and the thug on Fallon’s right charges, laughing, slashing with the blade, and Fallon leaps back, against the cold stone of the wall, feeling and hearing the tearing of cloth but not of flesh. His intestines aren’t spilling out of his belly—yet.
The remaining five killers merely laugh.
The big fellow, eyes black, face pale, almost not even a face at all, pivots, cuts up with the blade, but Fallon uses his left forearm to knock hand and knife away. The man’s face, or what passes for a face, seems surprised. A moment later, Fallon is driving his right hand, flattened, hard against the killer’s throat. The crack is almost deafening. The man’s eyes bulge in shock, and the blow drives him back, back, back, till he slams against the iron railing at the corner, the end of the passageway. Fallon tries to grab the knife, but both of the man’s arms start waving as he tries to regain his balance, as he tries to remember how to breathe.
But he can’t. Spittle comes between his lips. He’s like a whirlwind now, and the other five men outside of the cells watch in fascination and amusement. Even those still inside their cells are transfixed. All they do is hold their tin cups outside the bars. Fingers grip other bars as they watch, laugh, hiss, joke, and pray.
The man moves farther over the rails. He opens his mouth as if to scream, but he can’t scream. He can’t breathe. He can’t do anything but die. Fallon has learned several things in prison, including how to crush an attacker’s larynx.
The shiv drops over the side. Damn. Fallon could have used that to defend himself against the other five killers.
The arms stop waving, and then the faceless man starts to slip over. His mouth opens as though to scream, but he cannot scream, either. A second later, and he’s suspended in the air, prison brogans pointing toward the hard ceiling, and then there is nothing.
A long silence follows, stretching toward infinity, before the sickening crunch of a body seems to shake the prison house to its very foundation.
Fallon’s
