On his latest bullion run for the Reverend’s Temptation Gold Mine, Shotgun Johnny crosses paths with three desperate strangers. One is an old man. The other is his daughter Dixie. The third is the old man’s son, Jake Teal, a bank robber who’s wanted dead or alive. Thing is, Jake is already dead—stuffed in a pine box on his family’s wagon. Now every bounty hunter in the state is after his body . . .
BRING OUT YOUR DEAD
Johnny feels bad for the grieving family and agrees to escort them to Pueblo for a proper burial. Of course, no good deed goes unpunished. A sudden snow storm turns the trail into a frozen hell—but that doesn’t stop the bounty-hunting devils who want to cash in on Jake’s corpse. Some of them think Dixie knows where he hid the cash from his last bank job. Or maybe they’re really after Johnny’s cargo of gold. Either way, they all could end up dead on arrival . . .
Release date:
April 29, 2025
Publisher:
Pinnacle Books
Print pages:
304
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Jake Teale lined up his Winchester’s sights on the broad back of the man riding horseback on the trail below Teale’s rocky perch. Teale grinned, his heart quickening. He had the old bounty hunter, Weldon Parsons, dead to rights.
Teale drew a breath, held it, keeping the sights steady on his quarry’s back, and slowly squeezed the trigger. The rifle belched, spitting flames, the butt plate slamming back against Teale’s right shoulder.
Jake smiled again as he watched through his own wafting powder smoke Parsons slump forward in his saddle then drop down over his left stirrup. The bounty hunter hit the ground with a grunt so loud that Teale could hear it from his position a hundred feet up the rocky escarpment. Parsons’s horse, startled by the echoing rifle report, put its head down, laid its ears back, and kicked its rear legs straight out behind it, like an angry jackass.
The horse galloped straight up the trail, buck-kicking, reins bouncing along the ground, bouncing higher after a hoof came down on them. The mount followed a curve in the trail and was soon gone from Teale’s sight, hoof thuds quickly fading. Parsons lay in the horse’s sifting dust, unmoving on the narrow, two-track mining trail. The beefy man clad in a blanket coat lay on his side, one arm thrust above his head, the other hanging slack over the Colt revolver holstered on his right leg. He’d lost his curl-brimmed hat in the fall.
Jake Teale laughed. “There you go, Weldon. That’s what you get for comin’ after Jake Teale, you lowly headhunter.” He rose from his kneeling position and shouted at the top of his lungs. “Feel good? That bullet in your back—feel good, does it, Weldon?”
Jake wasn’t worried anyone would hear him. He was high up in the remote Sierra Nevadas west of the Avalanche River and the mountain boomtown of Hallelujah Junction. Oh, maybe a few bighorn sheep, even one or two human sheep, sparsely populated the area, the human sheep panning for gold in one of the bitterly cold snowmelt streams that drained this craggy, pine-stippled, up-and-down country. Otherwise, all that inhabited this remote, rocky promontory were eagles, condors, grizzlies, mountain lions, and wolves.
They didn’t give a rip about Jake Teale nor about the old bounty hunter he’d just killed—Weldon Parsons. The prospectors, too. They kept to themselves; they betrayed no secrets.
And now Jake Teale had one less scavenger dogging his heels.
“Feel . . . real . . . gooooood?” he shouted again, even louder than before.
As his shout echoed off the craggy spires around him, Teale made his way down the rocky finger he’d perched on. He followed a deer trail down the steep declivity—the same one he’d followed up from the trail after tying his horse in a ravine off the trail’s opposite side, well out of sight.
Teale stepped onto the trail and walked toward where Parsons lay, still as a statue. Dead as stone. Jake grinned.
His heart warmed to see the notorious bounty man lying dead like that, sprawled upon a trail in some nowhere neck of the high-and-rocky. Never to be seen or heard from again. Jake would drag the man off the trail and dump him into the same deep ravine in which Jake had tethered his dapple-gray gelding. No one would know. He’d just be gone. As though Parsons had never even lived.
Likely, no one would miss him. Who could miss a man like that—a man who’d hunted men for the bounty on their heads for the past twenty, thirty years? A foulmouthed, old ex-Confederate who’d dragged his raggedy ass west after losing the War of Southern Rebellion and made a living hunting other men . . .
Damn fool.
That was Parsons. A drunken lout and a braggart not above cutting the head off a man to bring back for bounty so he didn’t have to haul back the entire heavy, smelly carcass.
Damn savage! That was Weldon Parsons.
Teale continued walking up to the dead bounty hunter, barely able to contain his joy, repressing the urge to break out in song. Nothing stood between Teale and Dixie Wade now. God, how he loved that woman! Imagine that. Jake Teale having tumbled for a girl. Have fallen in love, no less. With a percentage girl, no less.
Hah!
Oh, but Dixie Wade was not your ordinary percentage girl. No, no, no. Dixie had turned to servicing lonely Lyles as a last option. Her good, upstanding family had died in a boardinghouse fire down in Reno, and she’d had no way to make a living for herself. No other way but to practice the world’s oldest trade, that was.
Dixie was a charmer. A real charmer. She had depth and intelligence. She had a big warm heart, and that heart and spirit were reflected in her soft blue eyes and in her heart-shaped face with that cute little pug nose of hers. Her warmth and kindness fairly shone like gold in her long, straight blond hair. It radiated like a halo in those satiny tresses.
Jake had never tumbled for a girl before. Not in all his twenty-three years. He’d never really even had a crush on a girl. Oh, he’d enjoyed their bodies, sure enough. He’d loved their bodies. But real love for the whole dang package?
Nah.
Not Jake Teale. His heart had been as hard and cold as the stones lining one of these snowmelt streams.
He’d tumbled for Dixie the moment he’d laid eyes on her in the Grizzly Ridge Inn, ten or so miles from the Reverend’s Temptation Gold Mine. She’d been singing a church hymn while the old pimp and whiskey-slinger, Heck Torrance, had played the piano. “The Old Rugged Cross,” if Jake remembered right. Imagine singing a church hymn in a brothel. Hah! Only Dixie Wade could pull that off and not get struck by lightning. Only Dixie could have all the customers—right down to the last jaded man jack of ’em—holding his hat over his heart and showing the glitter of emotion in his eyes.
He envisioned her now—her sweet little face, long pale neck, cool arms and legs and dancing eyes, her little nose that wrinkled so beautifully when she laughed. All that long blond hair curling around her head when she wore it up or down over her shoulders when she let it tumble where it may. He imagined her taking off her clothes in her second-story room lit by candles, sitting on the bed before him, looking up in that special secret way of hers, a look she reserved only for Jake, as she removed her camisole, making it look so darn sexy and—whoa, hold on, now, boyo!
Jake laughed at himself.
He couldn’t think about that. He couldn’t think about sweet Dixie under the sheets. He still had a few miles to ride, and he didn’t want to get bogged down in lusty thoughts. That would only make the ride up to the Reverend’s Temptation seem that much longer and more painful on his nether regions.
Teale laughed again, tamping down the heat of lust in his blood.
Soon, he’d have Dixie in his arms. They’d spend one more night in the Grizzly Ridge Inn, which was where she was working now, only a few miles farther up the mountain. Jake didn’t mind that she was still working. It didn’t mean anything to him because it didn’t mean anything to Dixie. It was just a job to her. At least, lying with other men was a job. Jake had known from their very first time together that lying with him was far more than a job to Dixie, though he’d paid her that first time and even for the second and third times.
After that, she was free.
And Dixie had Jake for free, too—his entire being, including his heart.
All right, stop thinking about that stuff now, you cork-headed polecat, or you’re gonna get yourself all worked up!
Tomorrow morning, packing the money he’d taken from the last two banks and one stagecoach he’d robbed across the border in California, he and Dixie would light out together. They were going to celebrate their newfound freedom in San Francisco. They were going to get hitched by a real Presbyterian preacher, because that’s how Dixie wanted it. She wanted their union to be sanctioned by God. Later, they’d head to Mexico, where the loot Jake had hauled in—almost fifty thousand dollars—would take them so much farther than it would here in their home country.
If they played their cards right, neither Jake nor Dixie would ever have to work another day in their lives.
Teale stopped and looked down again at Weldon Parsons. He frowned, his heart lurching a little in his chest. He could have sworn Parsons’s Colt had been in the man’s holster just a minute ago.
It wasn’t there now, however. The holster was empty. In fact, glancing around quickly, Jake didn’t see Parsons’s Colt anywhere . . .
In a blur of sudden motion, Parsons lifted and turned his head quickly toward Jake. He raised his right hand. That’s where the Colt was.
In Parsons’s consarned hand!
“Whoa!” Jake said, stumbling back one half step and throwing his free hand and rifle forward, as though to shield himself from the bullet he knew was coming—and knew he couldn’t stop.
Parsons grimaced, flaring his broad, pitted nostrils in pain and anger. The gun in the bounty hunter’s hand thundered, flames lapping from the barrel.
The bullet was like a punch from a burning hot fist.
Jake looked down to see red blossoming from his checked flannel shirt, maybe six inches above his cartridge belt. Parsons raked out a curse from taut jaws, and again the .45 barked.
“Oh!” Jake said. “Mercy!”
He took one step back and twisted to his right a little. More blood blossomed from his shirt. The second blossom was a little above the first one. Even as he watched, the twin blossoms became one.
Jake returned his gaze to Parsons.
The bullets had come so quickly that only now did Jake realize what had happened. Jake had let his guard down. He’d been so certain-sure that Parsons had been dead that Jake had gotten careless. He’d started thinking about Dixie, and he’d thrown caution to the wind.
Distracted by those lusty dang thoughts.
Meanwhile, the bounty hunter had been playing possum.
Rage filled Jake. Cursing loudly, he raised the Winchester in both hands and levered a fresh round into the action. As he did, Parsons slumped backward, rolling onto his back, his gun hand dropping to the ground at his side. The light had left his still-open eyes, but Jake pumped two more rounds into the man, anyway.
“Damn you!” he said, firing yet another shot into the man’s inert body. “Damn you, Parsons!” He fired one more shot before the rifle became too heavy for him to hold anymore.
Jake’s hands opened. The rifle clattered onto the ground at his boots. He took another couple of stumbling steps backward before his knees buckled and he sat down hard on his butt.
“Damn!” he said, staring down at his shirt. “Oh, dammit all, anyways!”
His dipped his right index finger into the blood soaking the right side of his shirt—nearly the entire right side now. Jake raised the finger, looked at the dark red blood. For some reason, he found the sight of his own blood amusing, and he let out a bewildered chuckle.
He’d been robbing banks and stagecoaches for several years now—since he was fifteen years old, in fact, after leaving a bad situation at home—and he’d never once been shot. He’d been shot at several times, but never actually shot.
Lead had never pierced his youthful body.
Until now. And here he sat in the middle of the trail, ten feet from the dead bounty hunter who’d shot him, looking at his own blood and chuckling incredulously. Suddenly, the full force of the pain hit him. It was like a giant rabid rat tearing into him. He must have been in shock before, because the wounds hadn’t felt this bad.
But they felt bad now.
What’s more, he was in real trouble. He was losing blood fast. He needed a sawbones. If a medico didn’t dig the bullets out and sew him up, he was going to die.
That thought was like an extra bullet. It left him reeling in terror, his heart racing and skipping beats.
Dixie.
He had to reach Dixie. She’d know where to find a sawbones out here, if one existed. He had to believe that one did, or he was a dead man. And he and Dixie would never get that chance they’d been hoping and planning for, of a free life together.
Christ almighty—he had fifty thousand dollars in stolen loot. He couldn’t die!
He had to get to his horse.
He heaved himself to his feet. It wasn’t easy. He seemed to suddenly weigh three hundred pounds. The maneuver caused more blood to gush out of him. He could feel it leave him, such a terrifying feeling. His very life oozing out of him by the cup, by the pint. He was leaking like a sieve, his shirt growing more and more soaked with the thick, oily stuff.
Weak. Oh God—he was so weak!
He couldn’t do anything with Parsons. The bounty hunter would have to lie right where he was. That was all right. The predators would take care of him. A grizzly or a wildcat would likely drag him off during the night and feed on him. Probably by tomorrow or the next day there would be no sign of him. No one would find the body. This was a seldom-used trail, a shortcut to the saloon at the northeast end of Grizzly Ridge.
Jake looked around, got his bearings, then slogged off the south side of the trail and into the high grass and brush. He was so weak that he was almost literally dragging his boot toes. Somehow, he remembered the way down into the ravine, and he made the descent without stumbling and falling and ending it all right there.
He finally reached his horse, Lucky. He’d named the dapple-gray after what had up to now seemed his own boundless luck. Eight years of outlawry including a couple of killings, and, until now, not a single bullet. The law had been after him. Bounty hunters, too. More than just Parsons. Better men than Parsons, in fact. Younger men.
Teale had eluded them all.
Damn Parsons. He’d finally gotten him. Jake had lost his head, thinking of Dixie, sweet Dixie, a vixen under the bedcovers. And Parsons had drilled him twice through his consarned liver!
Oh well, maybe this was a good lesson. He wouldn’t make the same mistake again.
Yeah, that’s what this was. A good lesson. He’d find Dixie and a sawbones and he’d live to learn from this lesson.
He untied the reins from the aspen branch and crawled heavily onto Lucky’s back. The gray sniffed him, whickered edgily. The horse didn’t like the smell of blood. Wasn’t used to it. He’d probably never smelled it before because he and his rider had been, well, lucky!
As Jake turned Lucky away from the aspen growing out of a crack along the ravine’s base, he glanced at the saddlebags draped over the gray’s hindquarters, behind him. He pulled back on Lucky’s reins, stopping the horse. He stared at the bags.
In his condition, should he ride up to the Grizzly Ridge Inn with fifty thousand dollars bulging those bags? He was wounded, vulnerable. Someone would likely lighten his load by fifty thousand dollars and maybe finish him off for his stupidity.
He thought for a time, sucking back the rusty bayonet blades of pain lancing his side.
Maybe he should hide the bags around here somewhere. Once he was in better condition, all healed up, he and Dixie would return for the loot and head on over to San Francisco on the other side of the mountains and get married.
Once he was feeling better.
Oh God—the pain!
Breathless, vision sparking with the pain of his wounds, and growing weaker from blood loss, Jake nixed the idea of hiding the bags. That would be a recipe for losing them. He likely wouldn’t remember where he’d hidden them, and he probably wouldn’t be able to give Dixie clear enough directions to the cached loot. No, he’d keep the bags close. Real close.
Groaning and cursing, he twisted around in the saddle. Sobbing with pain, he grabbed the bags off the dapple-gray’s rear end and pulled them around in front of him. He draped them over his saddle pommel, half sitting on them.
He’d keep them close. Damn close. Anyone trying to separate him from the bags would get a gut full of lead for his trouble.
He nudged the horse forward with his spurs. He crouched low in the saddle, holding the reins in his left hand, clamping his right hand over the wound, trying desperately to hold his life-sustaining fluids inside.
He put Lucky up the game trail and leaned ever farther forward, trying to keep his seat, to not be hurled back over the horse’s tail. Once back on the trail where Parsons lay, already looking pale and yellow, his lips turning blue, Jake swung the horse northeast, meandering between the stony spires and pine-peppered pinnacles like that from which he’d back-shot Parsons.
Damn bit of lousy luck.
He had love to blame, he supposed.
Dixie. Oh God, he couldn’t wait to see Dixie again!
“Who in thunder are you, anyway, hombre?”
“Deputy U.S. Marshal Johnny Greenway.”
“Ah hell!”
“That a problem for you, feller?”
“Yeah, I reckon it is,” the dying man said as he dropped to his knees on the ground still wet from a recent rain, the mud and grass around his knees turning pink from the man’s blood and viscera. “I was just killed by Shotgun Johnny!”
He dropped facedown and lay quivering as he died. His straw sombrero slid down from his head to lie against his back, fluttering in the strong wind that had blown up after a recent storm had passed.
Running footsteps sounded behind Johnny, beneath the wind, making squeaking sounds in the wet grass. Johnny whipped around, raising both of his signature sawed-off, double-bore shotguns. The right shotgun’s left barrel, which he’d discharged into the dead man, was still smoking though the wind was tearing it quickly from the large, round maw.
“Don’t shoot, Johnny,” the raspy voice urged. “It’s Mike!”
“Mean Mike,” that was. No moniker had ever been better suited to man or beast.
Johnny lowered the shotguns. “Did you take out the other guard?”
“Of course!” Mike crowed, grinning. He was a little birdlike man with an owl-like face and a lunatic’s glittering eyes. He’d tugged his battered, curl-brimmed hat down tight on his head so the wind wouldn’t take it.
Dryly, Johnny said, “You must have performed the task a little more quietly than I did.”
Again, Mike grinned and drew his gloved right index finger across his throat then glanced down at the big Arkansas toothpick sheathed on his skinny waist.
“You’ll do, Mike,” Johnny said, chuckling and placing an affectionate hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. “You’ll do just fine.”
“In a pinch,” Mean Mike quipped.
Johnny looked down at the dead man and grimaced. He’d intended to take down “his” guard quietly, as well, but the Mexican must have winded him, for he’d turned around suddenly when Johnny had stolen up to within five feet of him. Or maybe he’d heard the soft squawk of Johnny’s boots in the wet grass. “I hope none of those other jaspers down at the road ranch heard my Twin.”
That’s what Johnny called his sawed-off, double-bore, ten-gauge shotguns, each housed in a custom-made leather holster tied down on each thigh—the Twins. He preferred the savage little gut-shredders over revolvers in close quarters, for they were far more efficient than six-shooters, if rather messy.
They were also more intimidating.
That said, he often carried a Winchester in his saddle boot as a backup to the gut-shredders. He’d left the rifle in its scabbard today, however. Since the robbers had taken two bank tellers hostage when they’d robbed the bank in Hallelujah Junction, he’d likely need to steal in close and go to work with the Twins.
“Hell, I can hardly hear myself think up here,” Mean Mike said, loudly enough to be heard above the near-constant roar of the wind. “I doubt them toughnuts heard a thing. They’re prob’ly all snug as bugs in rugs down there. What with the rain covering their tracks, they’re likely cocksure they done got out of Hallelujah Junction with twenty thousand dollars of Miss Bonner’s money. Little do they know what a fine tracker I am!”
The little crow of a man grinned delightedly and bounced up and down on the toes of his mule-eared cavalry boots.
Johnny gave him a blank look.
“All right, all right,” Mike said with boyish chagrin. “What fine trackers we are.”
Johnny broke open the ten-gauge and replaced the spent wad in its left tube with fresh from his cartridge belt. He snapped the Twin closed and looked around, narrowing his dark brown, raptorial eyes as he scrutinized the pines towering around him. His thick, dark brown hair curled down over his ears to touch his neck-knotted red bandanna, the long ends of which flapped around his thick, ruddy neck in the wind.
He started walking through the cedars and spruces peppering the ridge, holding the ten-gauge in both gloved hands before him. “Keep your eyes skinned, Mike.”
Mean Mike hurried to keep up with the taller man. “Hell, I was born with my eyes skinned, Johnny. I came outen my mother’s belly so mean I knew right away I was liable to get back-shot even before I left rubber pants!” He laughed through his tobacco-rimed teeth and brushed his bony fist across his nose.
As Johnny approached the lip of the ridge, he dropped to his hands and knees. Mike followed suit. Both men doffed their hats to avoid being seen from below. Johnny gazed down at the road ranch nestled in the canyon directly below his and Mike’s position.
The ranch consisted of a two-story, mud-brick saloon with a barn, corral, and privy flanking it. The place had been established here at the junction of two mining trails a few years ago, after gold had been discovered in this neck of the Sierra Nevadas, and when the Washoe Indians had been driven out.
The canyon was filled with cool blue shadows now in the early evening. It wasn’t as windy down there as up here on the ridge. Woodsmoke rose from the large stone chimney jutting up from the roof at the building’s east end. The smoke was pushed down by fierce, errant drafts of wind hurling their way down from the ridge that Shotgun Johnny and Mean Mike were on, shoving the smoke down low to the ground.
A long-haired young man was out in the corral behind the main building, lazily setting feed buckets down for the horses milling there—a good dozen or so mounts still silvered with sweat lather from their recent hard ride out from town. The horses belonged to the men who’d robbed the Hallelujah Bank & Trust in Hallelujah Junction earlier that day, making off with twenty-six thousand dollars in greenbacks and coins as well as two of Sheila Bonner’s pretty young bank tellers—Camilla Rodrigues and Rachel Harper.
The robbery had occurred around ten in the morning. Johnny hadn’t been in town at the time. He’d ridden out to arrest a couple of moonshiners in a neighboring village for selling whiskey at a nearby Indian agency. Serving federal warrants was in Johnny’s purview now, since he’d accepted the job not only of Hallelujah Junction town marshal but a commission as deputy U.S. marshal for Nevada and California’s northern district, as well.
He liked having the old moon-and-star pinned to his shirt again, though it weighed heavy at times. Especially when he thought about what he’d given up to get it—namely, the woman he loved.
Aside from the hostler feeding the horses, Johnny couldn’t see anyone outside the road ranch’s main building. The small, square windows shone with wan lamplight from within. Brother Tobias, the defrocked priest who ran the place, had lit the lamps against the canyon’s early night though the flour-sack curtains further muted their glow.
The curtains would make it harder for anyone inside to see out.
“What’re we gonna do, Johnny?” Mike asked softly, kneeling to Johnny’s right. “How you think we should play it? Wait till good dark? T. . .
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