By the Neck

Book 1: Stoneface Finnegan Western

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Suspense

Synopsis

Introducing a new western hero in the grand Johnstone tradition: a mining town saloonkeeper who serves up justice like a shot of liquor—150-proof.
 
JOHNSTONE COUNTRY. BOOMTOWN JUSTICE.
 
Rollie Finnegan is a man of few words. As a Pinkerton agent with two decades of experience under his belt, he uses his stony silence to break down suspects and squeeze out confessions. Hence the nickname Stoneface. Over the years, he's locked up plenty of killers. Now he's ready to make a killing—for himself . . .
 
There's gold in the mountains of Idaho Territory. And the town of Boar Gulch is a golden opportunity for a tough guy like Finnegan. But when he arrives, the local saloon owner is gunned down in cold blood—and Finnegan makes a cold calculation of his own. Instead of working in a mine, he'll buy the saloon. Instead of gold, he'll mine the miners. And instead of getting dirty, he'll clean up this grimy little boomtown once and for all—with his own brand of Stoneface justice . . .  


 

Release date: February 1, 2021

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 277

Sample

Rollie Finnegan, two-decade veteran of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, almost chuckled as he descended the broad stone steps of the county courthouse. Not an hour before, he’d taken no small pleasure in seeing the arched eyebrows of the jury men when he’d been called to the stand.

He suspected it would be a long time before the defendant’s city-bred whelp of a lawyer would drag him up on the stand again. Finnegan had seen even more surprise on the pocked face of the inbred mess that was Chance Filbert, defendant and self-proclaimed “Lord of the Rails.”

Trouble was, “Lord” Filbert was gifted with bravado and little else. He also liked to swill tanglefoot, and at Corkins’ Bar he’d yammered about his impending robbery of the short-run mail train from Mason’s Bluff to Randolph. It hadn’t worked out that way.

Chance had managed to clamber aboard the train with the help of a fat cohort named Kahlil, who’d somehow mounted the rumbling car’s fore platform first. Not receiving any response to their rapping on the door of the mail car—the train was by then cranking along on a flat, the grinding steel pounding for all it was worth and the men inside didn’t hear the ruckus—Chance sent two shots at the door handle.

One bullet managed to free up the lock. The second found its way into the right temple of little Sue-Sue Campbell, who had been obeying her harried father, Arvin, one of the two workers sorting mail. He’d had no choice but to take her along on the run that morning, because her mother was deep in the agonies of pushing out a little brother for sweet Sue-Sue, who until then had been an only child. And so would her brother, Arvin Jr., be thanks to Chance Filbert and his eagerness to avoid a legal occupation.

Filbert’s greasy, snaky head had entered the car before the rest of him, and though he didn’t see the slumped girl to his left, he did see two men in the midst of sorting the mail. With hands full of letters, their jaws dropped, and they stared at the appearance of the homely man and the fat, long-haired one behind him, both with guns leveled.

In court, Rollie wore his twenty-dollar pinstriped, storm-gray boiled-wool suit, and capped it with a matching gray topper, what he referred to as his city hat. He recalled when the salesman had set it on his head while standing before the tall looking glass how much like his long-dead father he looked. He also had to admit that the salesman had been correct—the hat made the suit, and the entire affair looked damn good on him.

Though he’d rather tug on his old fawn Boss of the Plains, like he did most every day, Stoneface Finnegan did not ever miss a court date. He had vowed long ago to always see a case through, from top to bottom, front to back, and inside out. He knew, not unlike his old man once more, if he didn’t do everything in his ability to nail shut the door on each and every lawbreaker and miscreant he nabbed, he’d be setting himself up for a month’s worth of sleepless nights, all the while grinding down his molars and enduring his ticked-off-with-himself attitude. And at fifty-four, he didn’t need that crap in his life anymore.

If wearing a fancy suit and shaving himself close and pink and oiling his hair and waxing his mustache (which he did each morning anyway) helped the prosecuting attorneys send the devils to the prison or the gallows, then he’d tug on the suit and do the job.

There had been ample and irrefutable damning evidence and painful, tearful testimony from the dead girl’s parents. There had also been the precise recounting of events by Agent Rollie Finnegan. Despite this, in a last-minute courtroom effort, Moe Chesterton, attorney-at-law for Chance Filbert (and closet dice roller, much to the detriment of his anemic bank balance, had stood before the assemblage, red-faced and thumbing his lapels in an effort to draw attention to what he hoped were persuasive words.

He’d told the crowd stinking of sweat and the weary jury that Stoneface Finnegan had once more put his charge, in this instance Chance Filbert, in a most dire situation. Most dire, indeed. Yes, it was true, Chesterton nodded. And he could prove it. The lawyer’s pink jowls quivered and drooped suitably. “Hold up your hands, Mr. Filbert . . . if you are able.”

With much effort, the smirking killer had managed to raise his palsied hands aloft. Soon, they dropped to the mahogany tabletop before him and his head bowed, exhausted from the strain.

Rollie had rolled his eyes then, from his seat in the first aisle behind the prosecution. Not for the first time in the proceedings did he wish he had let his Schofield have its way with Chance when he’d finally caught up with him in that creekside cave in Dibney Flats. All that nonsense could have been avoided. Waste of time, waste of money.

But the law, was the law, and Rollie told himself if he had wanted to break it, he should have taken the owlhoot trail instead of tracking scofflaws after the war. Or gone into politicking, making laws to suit his base whims like those oily rascals in capitol towns everywhere.

Instead, on that thundering, wet morning in the cave two months before, after tracking the outlaws for a day and a night, the snout of Rollie’s Schofield parted the desiccated viny roots draping the entrance. It was then he’d seen Chance Filbert seated inside on a low boulder. He’d watched the oily man a moment, uncertain of Kahlil’s whereabouts in the dim hole. The close air, scented of warm muck, had forced thoughts of thick, slow snakes and crawling things.

Rollie had seen Chance and fat Kahlil ride there with intent, then dismount, tie their horses, and enter the cave. They’d lugged in what they made off with from the train, a small arch-top wooden trunk and a squat strongbox wrapped in riveted strap steel. They’d left their horses lashed to a low, jutting branch, saddled and without reach of water. The poor beasts swished and nipped and stamped at a plague of biting flies.

For minutes, Rollie had wondered if Chance was the only man alive in the cave. Of the two, Rollie had seen only Chance venture out with increasing frequency as the hours dragged by. He’d poked his malformed face between the mossy vines, then, satisfied he was not surrounded, would saunter out more loosely each time, limbered, no doubt, by drink. Of Kahlil, there had been no sight or sound.

Unless the man had a steel bladder or there was a back entrance to the cave, which from Rollie’s reconnoiter of the region didn’t seem likely, he bet himself a bottle of Kentucky’s finest that Chance had knifed his slop-gutted partner.

Rollie had won the bet when he’d looked inside and saw a massive, unmoving dark form off to the left. Not even snoring. To his right and babbling in a whiskey stupor, Chance sat atop that boulder before the flop-topped trunk, torn papers all about the muck-rock floor—intimate letters unlikely to make it to their destinations, orders for goods long saved for by some lonely bachelor dirt farmer or farmwife helpmate, or perhaps awaited countersigned deeds to land and goods—all pillaged for cash by the stunted, drunken Chance Filbert.

The strongbox had fared better and appeared to be intact. Rollie hadn’t heard shots, Chance’s favored means of opening locked things. Maybe he had been afraid of a bullet whanging back at him, though Rollie had not credited the man with such forethought. Likely he was saving the strongbox for dessert and pilfering the easiest pickings first.

Subduing the killer had been a simple matter of pushing his way through the clingy green vines and thumbing back the Schofield’s hammer. The hard, solid clicks would make a dead man rise. Except for Kahlil. Rollie had quickly inspected the dark shape enough to note it had indeed been slit open. He’d smelled the rank tang of blood mixed with the dank earth stink of the cave. He was glad he’d decided to keep his hat on his head, tugged low though it was, mashing his ears in an undignified manner. Beat having something with too many legs, or too few, squirming on his head and down the back of his shirt.

“Who you?” said Chance when his vision and his head had together in a wobble.

For a moment Rollie had considered replying, but he was not fond of excessive chatter. Why speak when you could act? The unspoken motto had served him well for years. He reckoned it was proven enough to keep on with. He stepped forward quick—one, two strides—while Chance made a sloppy grab for his own gun. His fingertips barely touched the nicked walnut grips as the butt of a Schofield mashed his hat into his head above the left ear.

Chance knew no more until he found himself lashed over the saddle of Kahlil’s horse. The saddle and the horse under it smelled bad. Why was he on his dead pard’s horse? He could see his own, perfectly good horse, walking along, tied, behind this one. But hold on there. Fat Kahlil was tied to it, dripping all manner of black-looking goo and cultivating a cloud of bluebottles that rose and dipped together as if they were training for a stage presentation.

But even that was the least of Chance Filbert’s concerns.

He’d known for certain his head had somehow been cleaved in half and was leaking out what he was certain were the last of his precious brains onto the heat-puckered earth. Nothing less could account for the volleys of cannon fire thundering inside his skull.

The pain doubled as the day had ground on, one pounding hoof step after another. He’d tried several times to speak to the vicious brute who’d ambushed him, but his strangled pleas, which came out as little more than gasps and coughs, brought new washes of agony that ended in his throbbing hands lashed behind his back.

The man on the horse ahead showed him only his back, tree-trunk stiff and wide-shouldered. Who was he, and why did he think it was acceptable to bust in on a man when he’d been tucked away in a cave, tending his own business?

The farther they walked, the angrier Chance became. He’d regained more control of his throat, but the lack of water, a desperate need at that point, rendered his usually loud voice to little more than a hoary whisper.

Several yards ahead of Chance, Rollie had struck a match and set fire to the bowl of his briar pipe, packed full of his least favorite tobacco, a rank, black blend of what tasted like the leavings of an angry baby and a gut-sick drunkard. The thick clouds of smoke would drift back into Chance Filbert’s face and gag him. With hours to go yet, Rollie had two pouches of this special blend. He had smiled then, for a brief moment.

In the courtroom two months later, Moe Chesterton had asked Rollie what he thought about the fact that Chance Filbert’s hands had been rendered all but useless by the too-tight restraints Rollie favored—smooth fence wire.

“It’s a shame,” said Rollie.

“A shame,” repeated the lawyer. “And, Mr. Finnegan, would you care to enlighten us as to why you feel this . . . this avoidable affront ... is a shame?”

“A man without hands is near useless.”

“Near useless, but not wholly useless? Hmm. I wonder what you could mean by that.”

Rollie looked at Chance. “I assume he has his pecker. I guess he could be of use to somebody. Likely will in prison.”

That had caused a stir and Rollie had nearly smiled, but not quite. He knew that Judge Wahpeton, indulgent though he may be, was not inclined to tolerate uproar in his courtroom. His gavel rapped hard and his bushy eyebrows arched like the wings of some great, riled eagle. The courtroom hushed.

“Any talk of prison will be of my own making, Agent Finnegan.” The judge surprised everyone by stepping down from his dais and walking across the front of the room. Without warning, he pivoted and lobbed a palm-size brass ashtray toward the sneering defendant. The man snatched it from the air with ease.

Too late, Chance realized his mistake. He dropped the ashtray to the tabletop and fluttered his hands before him like two agitated sparrows.

“I think not, Mr. Filbert,” said the judge as he mounted the steps to his dais and cleared his throat before proceeding to pass his commandments to the jury.

The jury took shy of five minutes to render its verdict.

And so, with Judge Wahpeton’s final words, and then the mallet-strike echoing in his head and warming his heart, Rollie “Stoneface” Finnegan stood outside, waiting for a fringe topped surrey to pass by. It ferried a fetching woman wearing a long-feathered hat that looked to be more feather than hat, with a veil that didn’t hide the pretty smile he imagined was meant for him. He was tempted to wave her down, strike up a conversation perhaps.

He crossed the street and recalled the reason he was walking west—yes, he could almost smell the heady aromas from Hazel’s Hash House. The eatery was two streets over and one lane back behind the courthouse. His nostrils twitched in anticipation of hot coffee and the singular pleasures of Hazel’s sticky, sweet pecan pie, a slice as wide as it was tall and deeper than the tines of a fork. He’d earned it, after all, helping cinch tight the legal noose on Chance Filbert’s pimpled neck.

The bum’s death wouldn’t bring back the seven-year-old girl or even Kahlil, but it damn sure made Rollie’s day a good one. Then came the pretty lady in the surrey, and he was about to indulge in a slice of heavenly pie and a couple cups of hot coffee before tucking into his next assignment. Yes, the day was turning out to be one of the best Rollie Finnegan had had in years.

He warbled a low, tuneless whistle as he angled down the alleyway that would cut off an extra block’s worth of walking.

He never heard the quick figure catfoot up behind him, never felt the long, thin blade slide in. It pierced the new wool coat, the satin lining, the wool vest, the crisp white shirt, the undershirt, the pink skin. The blade was out, then in again for a second quick plunge into his back, high up, caroming off a rib and puncturing the left lung, before retreating for a third slide in.

Instinct drove Rollie to spin, to face the source of this sudden flowering of pain as his left hand shoved away the hanging coat, then grabbed at the holstered Schofield. But he was already addled enough that his gun never cleared the stiff leather sheath. He made it halfway around as the knife slipped free of his back a third time and plunged in a fourth, into the meat of his left thigh.

The spin lacked strength. Hot pain bloomed inside him with eye-blink speed. As Rollie’s slow dervish spin gave way to collapse, he saw a dim specter—a thin, dark, wavering flame drawn upward. Red, not from rage but from spattering blood, washed before him, over him, becoming a choking black curtain.

Rollie “Stoneface” Finnegan would not get to taste his sweet pecan pie and hot coffee.

The room smelled of camphor and unwashed hair. But the worst stink was the base smell, the one that would not leave, no matter the washing, the cologne, or the window he insisted stay open, all day, all night, despite Nurse Cherborn’s constant underminings.

It was that smell he could not disguise that haunted Rollie Finnegan the most. It reminded him of his father at the end. It was the stink of old man. Problem was, Rollie didn’t think of himself as old. He was not a young man, but it’d be a damn long time before he was ancient. At least he’d felt that way before some gutless being knifed him in an alley two months before.

As long as he had the Schofield within reach, which he’d made certain of as soon as he regained his senses a week into this mess, Rollie would do his best to keep the window open and the nurse from treating him like a gimped old man. A stinking, gimped old man. That morning, he’d had to reinforce his intent where the window was concerned by cocking his pistol.

“Mr. Finnegan, you are impossible.” The nurse rested her dimpled knuckles on her broad waist and tried to rile him with her sharp blue eyes, fierce specks in her doughy face. It didn’t work.

“Not yet,” he said. “But I’m getting there.”

“The fresh air could well set you back a week or even two, if it doesn’t kill you outright.”

He stared at her. She stared back and after a full minute, he gave up, looked out the window at the blue April sky. The hard stare had always worked with his captives, why not with this dress-wearing devil?

“You have the best part of a month, I believe, before you will be fit enough to venture out-of-doors.”

He didn’t bother responding. She was almost done for the day anyway. What good would another argument with her do? Besides, he felt he owed her some sort of obedience, at least for a time. She’d nursed him the entire spell, from the day he’d been brought back to his rooms after a week in the doctor’s office.

Without Nurse Cherborn, Rollie knew he’d have been dead months ago. He also thought she’d taken a shine to him. Otherwise why would a knowledgeable woman such as herself, all but a full-bore doctor, despite the fact she was a woman, tend him all this time for the paltry weekly sum he could pay?

Weeks in, Rollie saw how quickly his medical and nursing bills were gnawing through his modest wad of banked savings he’d managed to amass over the years of tracking criminals in and out of all manner of foul deed and nasty last-stand gun down.

It hardly seemed necessary, but he’d dictated a letter and had it sent to the boss requesting the agency cover his medical and nursing fees while he convalesced. He’d been surprised they hadn’t stepped in to help him sooner. He explained that if he had good care he would be able to return to work sooner than with poor care. The boss had not agreed with him in saying he had been attacked because of his work. Instead, the skinflint had said it had happened while Rollie was off the clock, that it had doubtless been a random mugging.

How can a man be mugged when his wallet and six-gun are left behind, untouched? Rollie stewed over this for a couple of days, and was in the midst of a second letter to the boss when a messenger delivered a package. It contained a fancy-worded document that amounted to a brief and unconvincing “thank you for your service” note. The package also contained a small wooden box. Rollie opened it and saw a silver pocket watch nested in a bed of green silk. He lifted it free and clicked it open. Inside the cover was inscribed with his name, followed by the words Indispensable, steadfast, and true.

“Apparently not,” said Rollie, not for the last time, and clicked shut the watch.

He would later credit his recuperation not wholly to the most-deserving Nurse Cherborn and her ample bosom that had threatened to suffocate him each time she fluffed his pillows and adjusted his sheets, but ultimately to Allan Pinkerton, whose miserly treatment of him left Rollie ticked off, near broke, and more determined to live than he’d been since he woke in the doctor’s office, bandaged like an Egyptian mummy and too stiff and sore to move anything but his eyes.

And so it was in late April 1881 that Rollie “Stoneface” Finnegan, former top operative for Pinkerton Detective Agency, found himself pacing the largest of the three rooms he could afford for less than a week longer before resorting to asking favors, something he had never done and would never do. One, two, three and a half paces forward, turn in a wide arc on the board-stiff left leg, lean on the sturdy oak cane, one, two, three and a half paces back toward the door, for hours a day. His left lung whistling in time, and increasing in intensity and pitch, with his efforts.

While he paced he formed a plan, one step at a time, as methodical as he had ever been in dogging suspects and criminals. One clue at a time, one thought on another, then another, and by the end of the day, two days before his rent was due, Rollie had a solid plan. The newspapers had helped him as much as the nurse and Pinkerton had.

He hadn’t let Nurse Cherborn shave his face as she had intended, each damn week. He’d let his beard grow rather than risk a stranger free rein with a razor blade over his face. Rollie had made a lot of enemies in his years as an agent, or as Pinkerton liked to call them, “his operatives.” Rollie wasn’t about to trust anyone any more than he had to. That was the ironic part of it all. He was beholden to strangers for saving him and nursing him back to life even as he plotted shrugging them off.

Before he’d been able to pace, he’d spent most of his time in bed and then seated, slumped, in his wingback chair, wheezing and coughing, with that eerie whistle leaking through his parted lips. He found he could vary the pitch of the sound with his throat and mouth. It was a game he played when he’d wearied himself of raking over again and again in his mind the savaging he’d endured in the alley. So many people over the years who swore harm to him should they ever again taste freedom. Who was it? Or had it been someone new? Then why not rob him?

The Denver City constabulary had come up with no clues, no answers. He’d read each edition of the Denver City Bulletin during his convalescence, and any mention of the attack had dried up after the first week.

A most odd slice of news that at first had incensed him, then had brought a grim smile to his mouth was his obituary, a short, tight paragraph with no flowered phrases, and only the barest mention of his occupation. Erroneous information from the doctor? A drunken mistake by a hack reporter? Did it really matter?

If Denver thought him dead, he could recover and reinvent himself somewhere else, anywhere else. As anyone else. And as much as the notion beckoned him, the one piece of such a plan he would not indulge in was giving himself a new name. He had been Rollie Finnegan since birth, and if the name was good enough for his sainted mother and red-faced father to bestow on him, by God, he’d carry it with pride . . . beyond the grave or come what may.

With a day left on the rent of his rooms, he rummaged through his meager belongings, packed two old canvas war bags, and cleaned and oiled his Schofield, a two-shot derringer, a Colt Dragoon, and a Winchester repeater.

If a stranger gazed on him they would see a medium-height-to-tall man, not overly muscled, but exuding confidence and solidity, despite the oak cane. He sported a full thatch of peppered hair, heavily silvered, and what was visible of his face beneath the pepper-and-silver beard was lined, weathered from years on the trail. A full handlebar mustache, his one indulgence in daily vanity, rode proud beneath a sharp nose, nostrils always flared, as if forever sniffing out the truth in a matter.

He had dressed once more in his favored work togs—black stovepipe boots, into which were tucked striped woolen trousers. He wore a short canvas work coat with a green corduroyed collar and ample pockets in and out, a tobacco-brown leather vest, and leather braces over a dark blue, low-collar work shirt. He topped it all with his sweat-stained fawn Boss of the Plains, tugged low. Inner pockets held various items including a Barlow folding knife, his two-shot hideout gun, an apple-bowl briar pipe, matches, and a leather tug-string sack of tobacco.

Given the limp and the peppery beard, stable owner Pete Buddrell, busy mucking out stalls, didn’t recognize the man who shuffled in that day of April, working a cane, and followed by a stout lad lugging two war bags. The man paid the lad, who dropped the bags, took the coins, and bolted back out the big double doors.

“What can I do for ya?”

The stranger looked about him. He seemed to be sniffing in the rank smells of the stable then turned to Buddrell. “Rollie Finnegan’s big gray.”

Buddrell leaned on his fork, nudged his hat back. “Oh, nah. He’s dead.”

“The horse or the man?”

Buddrell looked at the stranger a long moment. “Both.”

The stranger walked closer, into the stall and within an arm’s reach. “Nope.”

Buddrell couldn’t see the face, but something about the man was unnerving. He swallowed, ran a tongue tip over his dry lips. “Was told he’d died. Figured—”

“Nope.” The man raised his eyes, looked into Buddrell’s.

“But . . . you’re . . .