Beans, Bourbon, and Blood

Book 1: Luke Jensen-Dewey Mckenzie Western

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

JOHNSTONE COUNTRY. HOMESTYLE JUSTICE WITH A SIDE OF SLAUGHTER.

In this explosive new series, Western legend Luke Jensen teams up with chuckwagon cook Dewey “Mac” McKenzie to dish out a steaming plate of hot-blooded justice. But in a corrupt town like Hangman’s Hill, revenge is a dish best served cold . . .

BEANS, BOURBON, AND BLOOD: A RECIPE FOR DISASTER

The sight of a rotting corpse hanging from a noose is enough to stop any man in his tracks—and Luke Jensen is no exception. Sure, he could just keep riding through. He’s got a prisoner to deliver, after all. But when a group of men show up with another prisoner for another hanging, Luke can’t turn his back—especially when the condemned man keeps swearing he’s innocent. Right up to the moment he’s hung by the neck till he’s dead . . .

Welcome to Hannigan’s Hill, Wyoming. Better known as Hangman’s Hill.
Luke’s pretty shaken up by what he’s seen and decides to stay the night, get some rest and grab some grub. The town marshal agrees to lock up Luke’s prisoner while Luke heads to a local saloon and restaurant called Mac’s Place. The pub’s owner—a former chuckwagon cook named Dewey “Mac” McKensie—serves up a bellyfull of chow and an earful of gossip. According to Mac, the whole stinking town is run by corrupt cattle baron Ezra Hannigan. Ezra owns practically everything. Including the town marshal. And anyone who gets in his way ends up swinging from a rope . . .

Mac might be just an excellent cook. But he’s got a ferocious appetite for justice—and a fearsome new friend in Luke Jensen. Together, they could end Hannigan’s reign of terror. But when Hannigan calls in his hired guns, it’ll be their necks on the line . . . or dancing from the end of a rope.

Release date: July 23, 2024

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

Luke Jensen reined his horse to a halt and looked up at the hanged man. The corpse swung back and forth in the cold wind sweeping across the Wyoming plains.

From behind Luke, Ethan Stallings said, “I don’t like the looks of that. No, sir, I don’t like it one bit.”

“Shut up, Stallings,” Luke said without taking his gaze off the dead man dangling from a hangrope attached to the crossbar of a sturdy-looking gallows. “In case you haven’t figured it out already, I don’t care what you like.”

Luke rested both hands on his saddle horn and leaned forward to ease muscles made weary by the long ride to the town of Hannigan’s Hill. He had never been here before, but he’d heard that the place was sometimes called Hangman’s Hill. He could see why. Not every settlement had a gallows on a hill overlooking it, just outside of town.

And not every gallows had a corpse hanging from it that looked to have been there for at least a week, based on the amount of damage buzzards had done to it. This poor varmint’s eyes were gone, and not much remained of his nose and lips and ears, either. Buzzards went for the easiest bits first.

Luke was a middle-aged man who still had an air of vitality about him despite his years and the rough life he had led. His face was too craggy to be called handsome, but the features held a rugged appeal. The thick, dark hair under his black hat was threaded with gray, as was the mustache under his prominent nose. His boots, trousers, and shirt were black to match his hat. He wore a sheepskin jacket to ward off the chill of the gray autumn day.

He rode a rangy black horse, as unlovely but strong as its rider. A rope stretched back from the saddle to the bridle of the other horse, a chestnut gelding, so that it had to follow. The hands of the man riding that horse were tied to the saddle horn.

He sat with his narrow shoulders hunched against the cold. The brown tweed suit he wore wasn’t heavy enough to keep him warm. His face under the brim of a bowler hat was thin, foxlike. Thick, reddish-brown side-whiskers crept down to the angular line of his jaw.

“I’m not sure we should stay here,” he said. “Doesn’t appear to be a very welcoming place.”

“It has a jail and a telegraph office,” Luke said. “That’ll serve our purposes.”

“Your purposes,” Stallings said. “Not mine.”

“Yours don’t matter anymore. Haven’t since you became my prisoner.”

Stallings sighed. A great deal of dejection was packed into the sound.

Luke frowned as he studied the hanged man more closely. The man wore town clothes: wool trousers, a white shirt, a simple vest. His hands were tied behind his back. As bad a shape as the corpse was in, it was hard for Luke to make an accurate guess about his age, other than the fact that he hadn’t been old. His hair was a little thin, but still sandy brown, with no sign of gray or white.

Luke had witnessed quite a few hangings. Most fellows who wound up dancing on air were sent to eternity with black hoods over their heads. Usually, the hoods were left in place until after the corpse had been cut down and carted off to the undertaker. Most people enjoyed the spectacle of a hanging, but they didn’t necessarily want to see the end result.

The fact that this man no longer wore a hood—if, in fact, he ever had—and was still here on the gallows a week later could mean only one thing.

Whoever had strung him up wanted folks to be able to see him. Wanted to send a message with that grisly sight.

Stallings couldn’t keep from talking for very long. He had been that way ever since Luke had captured him. He said, “This is sure making me nervous.”

“No reason for it to. You’re just a con artist, Stallings. You’re not a killer or a rustler or a horse thief. The chances of you winding up on a gallows are pretty slim. You’ll just spend the next few years behind bars, that’s all.”

Stallings muttered something Luke couldn’t make out, then said in a louder, more excited voice, “Look! Somebody’s coming.”

The town of Hannigan’s Hill was about half a mile away, a decent-sized settlement with a main street three blocks long lined by businesses and close to a hundred houses total on the side streets. The railroad hadn’t come through here, but as Luke had mentioned, there was a telegraph line. East, south, and north—the direction he and Stallings had come from—lay rangeland. Some low but rugged mountains bulked to the west. The town owed its existence mostly to the ranches that surrounded it on three sides, but Luke knew there was some mining in the mountains, too.

A group of riders had just left the settlement and were heading toward the hill. Bunched up the way they were, Luke couldn’t tell exactly how many. Six or eight, he estimated. They moved at a brisk pace as if they didn’t want to waste any time.

On a raw, bleak day like today, nobody could blame them for feeling that way.

Something about one of them struck Luke as odd, and as they came closer, he figured out what it was. Two men rode slightly ahead of the others, and one of them had his arms pulled behind him. His hands had to be tied together behind his back. His head hung forward as he rode as if he lacked the strength or the spirit to lift it.

Stallings had seen the same thing. “Oh, hell,” the confidence man said. His voice held a hollow note. “They’re bringing somebody else up here to hang him.”

That certainly appeared to be the case. Luke spotted a badge pinned to the shirt of the other man in the lead, under his open coat. More than likely, that was the local sheriff or marshal.

“Whatever they’re doing, it’s none of our business,” Luke said.

“They shouldn’t have left that other fella dangling there like that. It . . . it’s inhumane!”

Luke couldn’t argue with that sentiment, but again, it was none of his affair how they handled their lawbreakers here in Hannigan’s Hill.

“You don’t have to worry about that,” he told Stallings again. “All I’m going to do is lock you up and send a wire to Senator Creed to find out what he wants me to do with you. I expect he’ll tell me to take you on to Laramie or Cheyenne and turn you over to the law there. Eventually you’ll wind up on a train back to Ohio to stand trial for swindling the senator and you’ll go to jail. It’s not the end of the world.”

“For you, it’s not.”

The riders were a couple of hundred yards away now. The lawman in the lead made a curt motion with his hand. Two of the other men spurred their horses ahead, swung around the lawman and the prisoner, and headed toward Luke and Stallings at a faster pace.

“They’ve seen us,” Stallings said.

“Take it easy. We haven’t done anything wrong. Well, I haven’t, anyway. You’re the one who decided it would be a good idea to swindle a United States senator out of ten thousand dollars.”

The two riders pounded up the slope and reined in about twenty feet away. They looked hard at Luke and Stallings, and one of them asked in a harsh voice, “What’s your business here?”

Luke had been a bounty hunter for a lot of years. He recognized hard cases when he saw them. But these two men wore deputy badges. That wasn’t all that unusual. This was the frontier. Plenty of lawmen had ridden the owlhoot trail at one time or another in their lives. The reverse was true, too.

Luke turned his head and gestured toward Stallings with his chin. “Got a prisoner back there, and I’m looking for a place to lock him up, probably for no more than a day or two. That’s my only business here, friend.”

“I don’t see no badge. You a bounty hunter?”

“That’s right. Name’s Jensen.”

The name didn’t appear to mean anything to the men. If Luke had said that his brother was Smoke Jensen, the famous gunfighter who was now a successful rancher down in Colorado, that would have drawn more notice. Most folks west of the Mississippi had heard of Smoke. Plenty east of the big river had, too. But Luke never traded on family connections. In fact, for a lot of years, for a variety of reasons, he had called himself Luke Smith, instead of using the Jensen name.

The two deputies still seemed suspicious. “You don’t know that hombre Marshal Bowen is bringin’ up here?”

“I don’t even know Marshal Bowen,” Luke answered honestly. “I never set eyes on any of you boys until today.”

“The marshal told us to make sure you wasn’t plannin’ on interferin’. This here is a legal hangin’ we’re fixin’ to carry out.”

Luke gave a little wave of his left hand. “Go right ahead. I always cooperate with the law.”

That wasn’t strictly true—he’d been known to bend the law from time to time when he thought it was the right thing to do—but these deputies didn’t need to know that.

The other deputy spoke up for the first time. “Who’s your prisoner?”

“Name’s Ethan Stallings. Strictly small-time. Nobody who’d interest you fellas.”

“That’s right,” Stallings muttered. “I’m nobody.”

The rest of the group was close now. The marshal raised his left hand in a signal for them to stop. As they reined in, Luke looked the men over and judged them to be cut from the same cloth as the first two deputies. They wore law badges, but they were no better than they had to be.

The prisoner was young, maybe twenty-five, a stocky redhead who wore range clothes. He didn’t look like a forty-a-month-and-found puncher. Maybe a little better than that. He might own a small spread of his own, a greasy sack outfit he worked with little or no help.

When he finally raised his head, he looked absolutely terrified, too. He looked straight at Luke and said, “For God’s sake, mister, you’ve got to help me. They’re gonna hang me, and I didn’t do anything wrong. I swear it!”

The marshal turned in his saddle, leaned over, and swung a backhanded blow that cracked viciously across the prisoner’s face. The man might have toppled off his horse if one of the other deputies hadn’t ridden up beside him and grasped his arm to steady him.

“Shut up, Crawford,” the lawman said. “Nobody wants to listen to your lies. Take what you’ve got coming and leave these strangers out of it.”

The prisoner’s face flamed red where the marshal had struck it. He started to cry, letting out wrenching sobs full of terror and desperation.

Even without knowing the facts of the case, Luke felt a pang of sympathy for the young man. He didn’t particularly want to, but he felt it, anyway.

“I’m Verne Bowen. Marshal of Hannigan’s Hill. We’re about to carry out a legally rendered sentence on this man. You have any objection?”

Luke shook his head. “Like I told your deputies, Marshal, this is none of my business, and I don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on here. So I’m not going to interfere.”

Bowen jerked his head in a nod and said, “Good.”

He was about the same age as Luke, a thick-bodied man with graying fair hair under a pushed-back brown hat. He had a drooping mustache and a close-cropped beard. He wore a brown suit over a fancy vest and a butternut shirt with no cravat. A pair of walnut-butted revolvers rode in holsters on his hips. He looked plenty tough and probably was.

Bowen waved a hand at the deputies and ordered, “Get on with it.”

Two of them dismounted and moved in on either side of the prisoner, Crawford. He continued to sob as they pulled him off his horse and marched him toward the gallows steps, one on either side of him.

“Just out of curiosity,” Luke asked, “what did this hom-bre do?”

Bowen glared at him. “You said that was none of your business.”

“And it’s not. Just curious, that’s all.”

“It doesn’t pay to be too curious around here, Mr. . . . ?”

“Jensen. Luke Jensen.”

Bowen nodded toward Stallings. “I see you have a prisoner, too. You a bounty hunter?”

“That’s right. I was hoping you’d allow me to stash him in your jail for a day or two.”

“Badman, is he?”

“A foolish man,” Luke said, “who made some bad choices. But he didn’t do anything around here.” Luke allowed his voice to harden slightly. “Not in your jurisdiction.”

Bowen looked levelly at him for a couple of seconds, then nodded. “Fair enough.”

By now, the deputies were forcing Crawford up the steps. He twisted and jerked and writhed, but their grips were too strong for him to pull free. It wouldn’t have done him any good if he had. He would have just fallen down the steps and they would have picked him up again.

Bowen said, “I don’t suppose it’ll hurt anything to satisfy your curiosity, Jensen. Just don’t get in the habit of poking your nose in where it’s not wanted. Crawford there is a murderer. He got drunk and killed a soiled dove.”

“That’s not true!” Crawford cried. “I never hurt that girl. Somebody slipped me something that knocked me out. I never even laid eyes on the girl until I came to in her room and she was . . . was layin’ there with her eyes bugged out and her tongue sticking out and those terrible bruises on her throat—”

“Choked her to death, the little weasel did,” Bowen interrupted. “Claims he doesn’t remember it, but he’s a lying, no-account killer.”

The deputies and the prisoner had reached the top of the steps. The deputies wrestled Crawford out onto the platform. Another star packer trotted up the steps after them, moving with a jaunty bounce, and pulled a knife from a sheath at his waist. He reached out, grasped the dead man’s belt, and pulled the corpse close enough that he could reach up and cut the rope. When he let go, the body fell through the open trap and landed with a soggy thud on the ground below. Even from where Luke was, he could smell the stench that rose from it. He didn’t envy whoever got the job of burying the man.

“How about him? What did he do?”

“A thief,” Bowen said. “Embezzled some money from the man he worked for, one of our leading citizens.”

Luke frowned. “You hang a man for embezzlement around here?”

“When he was caught, he went loco and tried to shoot his way out of it,” Bowen replied with a shrug. “He could have killed somebody. That’s attempted murder. The judge decided to make an example of him. I don’t hand down the sentences, Jensen. I just carry ’em out.”

“I suppose leaving him up here to rot was part of making an example.”

Bowen leaned forward, glared, and said, “For somebody who keeps claiming this is none of his business, you are taking an almighty keen interest in all of this, mister. You might want to take your prisoner and ride on down to town. Ask anybody, they can tell you where my office and the jail are. I’ll be down directly and we can lock that fella up.” The marshal paused, then added, “Got a good bounty on him, does he?”

“Good enough,” Luke said. He was beginning to get the impression that instead of waiting, he ought to ride on with Stallings and not stop over in Hannigan’s Hill at all. Bowen and those hardcase deputies might have their eyes on the reward Senator Jonas Creed had offered for Stallings’s capture.

But their horses were just about played out and really needed a night’s rest. They were low on provisions, too. It would be difficult to push on to Laramie without replenishing their supplies here.

As soon as he had Stallings locked up, he would send a wire to Senator Creed. Once he’d established that he was the one who had captured the fugitive, Bowen wouldn’t be able to claim the reward for himself. Luke figured he could stay alive long enough to do that.

He sure as blazes wasn’t going to let his guard down while he was in these parts, though.

He reached back to tug on the lead rope attached to Stallings’s horse. “Come on.”

The deputies had closed the trapdoor on the gallows and positioned Crawford on it. One of them tossed a new hangrope over the crossbar. Another deputy caught it and closed in to fit the noose over the prisoner’s head.

“Reckon we ought to tie his feet together?” one of the men asked.

“Naw,” another answered with a grin. “If it so happens that his neck don’t break right off, it’ll be a heap more entertainin’ if he can kick good while he’s chokin’ to death.”

“Please, mister, please!” Crawford cried. “Don’t just ride off and let them do this to me! I never killed that whore. They did it and framed me for it! They’re only doing this because Ezra Hannigan wants my ranch!”

That claim made Luke pause. Bowen must have noticed Luke’s reaction because he snapped at the deputies, “Shut him up. I’m not gonna stand by and let him spew those filthy lies about Mr. Hannigan.”

“Please—” Crawford started to shriek, but then one of the deputies stepped behind him and slammed a gun butt against the back of his head. Crawford sagged forward, only half-conscious as the other deputies held him up by the arms.

Luke glanced at the four deputies who were still mounted nearby. Each rested a hand on the butt of a holstered revolver. Luke knew gun-wolves like that wouldn’t hesitate to yank their hoglegs out and start blasting. He had faced long odds plenty of times in his life and wasn’t afraid, but he didn’t feel like getting shot to doll rags today, either, and likely that was what would happen if he tried to interfere.

With a sour taste in his mouth, he lifted his reins, nudged the black horse into motion, and turned the horse to ride around the group of lawmen toward the settlement. He heard the prisoner groan from the gallows, but Crawford had been knocked too senseless to protest coherently anymore.

A moment later, with an unmistakable sound, the trapdoor dropped and so did the prisoner. In the thin, cold air, Luke distinctly heard the crack of Crawford’s neck breaking.

He wasn’t looking back, but Stallings must have been. The confidence man cursed and then said, “They didn’t even put a hood over his head before they hung him! That’s just indecent, Jensen.”

“I’m not arguing with you.”

“And you know good and well he was innocent. He was telling the truth about them framing him for that dove’s murder.”

“You don’t have any way of knowing that,” Luke pointed out. “We don’t know anything about these people.”

“Who’s Ezra Hannigan?”

Luke took a deep breath. “Well, considering that the town’s called Hannigan’s Hill, I expect he’s an important man around here. Probably owns some of the businesses. Maybe most of them. Maybe a big ranch outside of town. I think I’ve heard the name before, but I can’t recall for sure.”

“The fella who was hanging there when we rode up, the one they cut down, that marshal said he stole money from one of the leading citizens. You want to bet it was Ezra Hannigan he stole from?”

“I don’t want to bet with you about anything, Stallings. I just want to get you where you’re going and collect my money. Whatever’s going on in this town, I don’t want any part of it.”

Stallings was silent for a moment, then said, “I suppose there wouldn’t be anything you could do, anyway. Not against a marshal and that many deputies, and all of them looking like they know how to handle a gun. Funny that a town this size would need that many deputies, though . . . unless their actual job isn’t keeping the peace, but doing whatever Ezra Hannigan wants done. Like hanging the owner of a spread Hannigan’s got his eye on.”

“You’ve flapped that jaw enough,” Luke told him. “I don’t want to hear any more out of you.”

“Whether you hear it or not won’t change the truth of the matter.”

Stallings couldn’t see it, but Luke grimaced. He knew that Stallings was likely right about what was happening around here. Luke had seen it more than once: There was some rich man ruling a town, and the surrounding area, with an iron fist, bringing in hired guns, running roughshod over anybody who dared to stand up to him. It was a common story on the frontier.

But it wasn’t his job to set things right in Hannigan’s Hill, even assuming that Stallings was right about Ezra Hannigan. Smoke might not stand for such things, but Smoke had a reckless streak in him sometimes. Luke’s hard life had made him more practical. He would have wound up dead if he had tried to interfere with that hanging. Bowen would have been more than happy to seize the excuse to kill him and claim his prisoner and the reward.

Luke knew all that, knew it good and well, but as he and Stallings reached the edge of town, something made him turn his head and look back, anyway. Some unwanted force drew his gaze like a magnet to the top of the nearby hill. Bowen and the deputies had started riding back toward the settlement, leaving the young man called Crawford dangling limp and lifeless from that hangrope. Leaving him there to rot . . .

“Well,” a female voice broke sharply into Luke’s thoughts, “I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

Luke knew he should probably keep riding. Instead, he reined in and looked over at the woman who stood at the end of the boardwalk in front of the businesses to his right.

As he did that, a wagon rattled past on his left. From the corner of his eye, Luke saw that the man driving the rig wore a black suit and a black top hat.

The local undertaker, on his way up to the top of Hangman’s Hill to retrieve the body that had been cut down. Had to be. That was going to be a mighty unpleasant task.

Luke turned his attention to the woman who had spoken to him. She was worth paying attention to. Blond, in her late twenties, pretty, and well-shaped, in a long brown skirt and a white long-sleeved blouse.

“You need a coat if you’re going to be out in weather like this, ma’am,” Luke said.

“I’m too hot under the collar to get chilled.”

She looked angry, sure enough, as she gazed at Luke with intense blue eyes. He sensed that her anger wasn’t directed solely at him, though. She seemed like the sort of woman who might be mad at the world most of the time.

Then she looked past him, up the hill, and sick dismay crept over her face.

“They hanged him,” she said softly. “They really did.”

“Friend of yours?” Luke glanced at her left hand and saw the ring on her finger. “Not your husband, I hope.”

“What?” The woman looked confused for a second, then gave a curt shake of her head. “No, of course not. I barely knew Thad Crawford. Well enough, though, that I refuse to believe he was a murderer, no matter what the judge and jury said.”

“Well, I didn’t know the man at all, so I didn’t feel like getting shot over something bound to happen, anyway. If that’s what’s got you upset with me, you’re off the mark, lady. There was nothing I could do.”

She glared at him for a few seconds, then said, “I suppose you’re right. Verne Bowen and his men would have killed you if you’d tried to interfere, and Thad Crawford would still be just as dead.”

“Seems like the only logical way to look at it,” Luke drawled.

“But I don’t have to like any of it.”

“No, ma’am, you don’t. Neither do I.”

She blew out an exasperated breath, shook her head, and turned to go back into the building behind her. Luke looked at the words lettered on the front window: HANNIGAN’S HILL CHRONICLE.

So the blonde had something to do with the local newspaper. Maybe he would pick up a copy of the current issue while he was in town, Luke mused. He wondered if it would have something to say about the hangings.

He heeled the black horse into motion again. He hadn’t thought to ask the woman where the marshal’s office was, but he didn’t need to. He had already spotted the squarish stone building in the next block on the left, with a sign over the door that had Marshal Verne Bowen’s name on it.

“That was a pretty woman, even if she was mad as a hornet,” Stallings said. “You should have introduced me.”

Luke grunted. “Not likely. I don’t reckon she would’ve had any interest in meeting a swindler. Anyway, I don’t know her name, so I couldn’t have introduced you, could I?”

“I suppose not. I wouldn’t mind seeing her again, though.”

“Give it up, Stallings. It’s your weakness for women that got you caught in the first place, remember? If you hadn’t bedded that ranch wife while her husband was away, and then ran out on her, she wouldn’t have been mad enough to put me on your. . .