Death Rides Alone

Book 5: Luke Jensen Bounty Hunter

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

Mountain Man Smoke Jensen's long-lost brother Luke Jensen is a dead shot scarred by war — the perfect formula for a bounty hunter. And he's cunning, and fierce enough to bring down the deadliest outlaws of his day....

Luke Jensen has earned this bounty, hunting down the violent man charged with murdering a preacher's daughter. The outlaw Judd Tyler confesses to many crimes, but not the girl's murder. And he tells Luke they won't reach the town of White Fork alive because a corrupt sheriff does the bidding of a cattle baron, and that man's son is the true killer. Sure enough, halfway to White Fork, Luke and his prisoner are battling for their lives, and when they finally reach town, they're greeted by a storm of bullets, betrayal, and blood.

With a band of innocent travelers caught up in the melee, Luke is outgunned, surrounded, and sure of only this: his only job now is survival — by the measured, efficient, righteous killing of as many men as he can....

Release date: June 28, 2016

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

Luke Jensen was in Bent Creek, Wyoming, on business. He didn’t want to waste time—or bullets—killing some obnoxious young fool who didn’t know any better than to prod him.

Unfortunately, it looked like he might not have a choice.

Luke stood at the bar of the Three of a Kind Saloon and toyed with a glass of exceptionally mediocre whiskey. The liquor wasn’t quite bad enough to convince him that the proprietor had brewed it out back in a washtub and thrown a few rattlesnake heads into the mix for flavoring, but it came close.

Some decent cognac would have been more fortifying after the long ride Luke had made today, but since this was Bent Creek, Wyoming—a squalid, muddy, vermin-infested hamlet if ever there was one—and not San Francisco or Denver, Luke supposed he would just have to make do with what was available. Any port in the proverbial storm.

He threw back the rest of the rotgut in the glass, grimaced slightly, and tried to ignore the young hardcase sitting at a table behind him with some friends.

“Don’t he look dangerous, dressed all in black that way?” the would-be troublemaker was saying. “And them fancy guns, well, it makes me scared just to look at ’em, boys.”

The youngster’s mocking tone grated on Luke’s nerves. He wasn’t an overly vain man, although the black hat, shirt, trousers, and boots he wore were well cared for and he had slapped some of the trail dust off of them before he walked into the saloon.

Nor were the revolvers riding in the cross-draw rig he wore as fancy as the hardcase made them out to be. They were long-barreled, .44 caliber Remingtons, nickel-plated, to be sure, with ivory grips, but they weren’t adorned with any elaborate engraving. To Luke they were simply the well-used tools of his trade.

None of that mattered. The kid was on the prod, and if it hadn’t been Luke’s clothes or guns, the harasser would have found something else to make fun of. Luke was a stranger in Bent Creek, and the young man, who probably considered himself the big he-wolf around here, had decided to goad him into a fight.

The short, fat bartender looked nervous, as if he had seen similar scenes played out in the Three of a Kind before. Most likely, he had. He picked up the bottle and gave Luke an inquiring look. Luke shook his head and said, “I believe I’ve had enough.”

“Next one’s on the house, mister,” the bartender said. The words made his three chins wobble.

“Obliged, but I’ll pass.” The bartender clearly didn’t want a shooting, so he was trying to stall for time hoping the kid would get bored and forget about starting a fight, Luke figured.

That was all well and good. The man didn’t want bullets flying around his business. Luke could understand that.

But he was tired and not in the mood to be charitable. Besides, he might be able to use this to his advantage.

“I should probably be moving on . . .” Luke began. He saw hope leap to life in the bartender’s eyes, the hope that Luke would leave before any gunplay broke out. “But I need to ask you one question first.”

“Sure, mister. What is it?”

“I’m looking for a friend of mine who might have come this way,” Luke lied—about the friend part, anyway. “Medium height, brown hair, just a little on the slender side.”

“That could be a lot of men. He got a name?”

“Judd Tyler.”

The bartender shook his head slowly and, Luke thought, sincerely.

“Sorry, mister. Don’t know the name. Anything else you can tell me about him?”

“Well, he was riding a paint pony a while back, but I don’t know if he still is.”

“What you should do, then,” the bartender said, “is go on over to Crandall’s Livery. It’s the only one in town. If anybody rode in lately on a paint, Fred Crandall will know about it.”

“And once again, I’m obliged to you,” Luke said. The young hardcase had fallen silent, and Luke thought maybe he had lost interest.

That wasn’t the case. Luke glanced in the mirror behind the bar and saw the kid watching him. The intent expression on the young man’s face told him all he needed to know.

Luke caught a glimpse of his own face, too: tanned, weathered, too craggy to be called handsome, dominated by a slightly larger than normal nose with a neatly trimmed black mustache underneath it. It was a tired face, weary from the years he had lived, the miles he had traveled, and the gunpowder he had burned. To be honest, the face of a man not to trifle with.

The hardcase, though, was blinded by youth and arrogance, and as Luke turned away from the bar, the young man scraped his chair back and stood up.

“Where you goin’, stranger?” he asked. A simple question, but it had an air of challenge about it.

“Over to the livery stable,” Luke said, his voice deceptively mild. “As late in the day as it is, I believe I’ll spend the night, so I’ll need to arrange to leave my horse there.”

“Well, maybe we don’t want fellas like you spendin’ the night in Bent Creek.”

Luke smiled at the bluster and said, “Fellas like me? Just what sort of fella do you think I am?”

“The kind who thinks he’s better’n everybody else. You can’t fool me, mister. I was watchin’ in the mirror and saw the face you made when you took your drink. You think Johnny’s whiskey ain’t no good.”

The bartender cleared his throat and said, “I, uh, didn’t notice anything like that, Tate.”

“He wouldn’t take a second drink, would he? Even when you told him it was on the house! Where I come from, by God, that’s a damn insult.”

“Where do you come from, Tate?” Luke asked.

The young hardcase frowned in confusion, the question clearly catching him by surprise. He said, “Why, right here in Bent Creek, of course. Born and raised on a spread a few miles outta town.”

“Well, if you’re actually in the place you come from, then you shouldn’t be saying where I come from, because that implies it’s somewhere else, other than where you are.”

Tate’s confusion was growing. He gave a little shake of his head and moved a step closer to Luke. Behind him at the table, his two friends had stood up as well and spread out a little. Typical tactics, Luke thought. They were ready to back Tate’s play, whatever it turned out to be.

Tate scowled and said, “You’re tryin’ to get me all mixed up—”

“Just pointing out a slight logical flaw in your manner of speaking—”

“You high-toned son of a bitch!”

From behind the bar, fat Johnny said, “Please, Tate, if there’s any more trouble in here, Marshal Donovan’s liable to shut me down—”

The tense way Tate held himself told Luke that Johnny’s plea wasn’t going to do any good. Tate had screwed his nerves so tight inside that there was only one way to let off the pressure.

“Look, maybe I’ll have that second drink after all,” Luke said, turning back slightly to the bar but not taking his eyes off Tate. The move made Tate frown and keep his hand from stabbing toward his holstered gun, as it had been about to do.

Johnny had set the bottle of whiskey on the bar. Luke’s left hand closed around the neck of it, and what happened next was so swift it was hard for the eye to follow. Luke twisted, whipped his arm out, and flung the half-full bottle at Tate. The bottom of it struck him in the center of the forehead with a solid thump but didn’t break. The impact knocked Tate back a step. His feet tangled with a chair and he went down in an ungainly sprawl.

Even before the bottle hit Tate, Luke’s hands had closed around the butts of the Remingtons and pulled the guns smoothly from their holsters. He had the revolvers leveled at Tate’s friends before the two men could do more than start their draws.

“Touch those guns and I’ll kill you both, gentlemen,” Luke informed them. He took a quick step forward. Tate was moving around on the floor, but his eyes weren’t clear and he didn’t seem to have much control over his muscles. His Colt had fallen from its holster. Luke kicked it and sent it sliding across the sawdust-littered floor.

He set himself, kicked again, and this time his boot thudded against Tate’s jaw. Tate sagged back, out cold.

“Hey!” one of Tate’s friends said. “You kicked him when he was down!”

“Yes, and I could have just as easily killed him. Johnny, come out from behind the bar and take their guns.”

The bartender hustled to do as Luke ordered, telling the two men, “Don’t hold this against me, fellas. I ain’t got no choice. I mean . . . look at him. He’s some kind o’ gunman.”

“Damn outlaw, more’n likely,” one of the men said as Johnny lifted his gun from its holster.

Luke smiled and said, “I’m on the other side of the law, for the most part.”

The second man’s eyes widened as he said, “Hell. You’re not one of them U.S. Marshals, are you?”

“Nothing that official.”

“I bet he’s a bounty hunter,” the first man said, spitting out the words bitterly. “Look at him! A born killer!”

“Yeah, Tate should’ve seen that,” the second man said with a gloomy sigh. “We tried to tell him to leave you alone, mister. Sorry things got to this point.”

“Will you quit kissin’ up to him?” the first man said. “We don’t have to worry about a damn bounty hunter. Ain’t any reward dodgers out on us.”

“What about him?” Luke asked, nodding toward the still senseless Tate.

“There ain’t no charges against him. Every shootin’ scrape he’s been mixed up in was self-defense.”

“Like this one here tonight would have been if I’d let him push me into reaching first?” Luke shook his head and went on disgustedly, “You two had better open your eyes and think about something. You keep following Tate around and giving him an audience for his little gunfights, there’s a good chance you’ll die right along with him one of these days. I could have killed all three of you if I’d been of a mind to.”

“I reckon he could have,” Johnny said. “You seen how fast he got them guns out.”

“Here’s something else you should remember: I’m not really that fast,” Luke said. “Not compared to some I’ve seen.”

He was talking about his brother Smoke and his other brother Matt, both of whom could have shaded Luke on the draw if it ever came down to that . . . which it wouldn’t, seeing as they were all family and good friends, to boot.

“Tate, there,” Luke went on, “he may be Bent Creek fast, but that doesn’t mean he’s fast enough to survive for long anywhere else.”

“You’re preachin’ to the choir, mister,” the more reasonable of the duo said. “We don’t want any more trouble. Why don’t we just all go on about our business and forget this ever happened?”

“That would be the smartest thing for all of you to do, including Tate.” Luke lowered the Remingtons. “But if he’s the sort to hold a grudge, I won’t cut him any slack next time. If he’s really your friend, you should make sure he understands that.”

He didn’t pouch the irons until he had walked to the saloon’s entrance, watching the three men from the corner of his eye as he did so. Tate’s two friends knelt next to him and started trying to bring him around.

Luke pushed out through the batwings and paused on the boardwalk to sigh as he looked across the street toward the livery stable. It had started raining while he was inside the Three of a Kind, so the street was even muddier than it had been when he rode into Bent Creek a while earlier. Now he was going to have to slog across there, leading the rangy gray gelding he was riding these days, and talk to the liveryman to see if he had seen Judd Tyler or the paint pony Tyler had been riding.

Luke hoped he was nearing the end of this pursuit. Tyler had a decent bounty on his head, a thousand dollars, but more than that, he was the sort of owlhoot Luke enjoyed taking out of circulation: a mad dog killer who had beaten and choked the life out of a young woman, a minister’s daughter, at that. Tyler richly deserved the hangrope that was no doubt waiting for him up in Montana.

Luke led the gray toward the stable in the fading light as the rain droned around him and pelted on his hat. Bent Creek had a single hotel, so there wasn’t any choice in accommodations. Luke hoped they had a bathtub. He wanted a hot soak and some dry clothes.

He wasn’t so lost in his thoughts that he failed to hear the batwings slap aside suddenly behind him. He dropped the gray’s reins and wheeled around in time to see the young hardcase called Tate lunge out onto the boardwalk with a gun in each hand, flame spouting from their barrels as he fired.

Could be Tate wasn’t seeing straight because of the clonk on the head from the whiskey bottle, or he might have been so furious that emotion was throwing off his aim. Or maybe he just wasn’t that good a shot when he wasn’t facing some scared wrangler or sodbuster.

Whatever the reason, some of his bullets whined over Luke’s head while others plunked into the mud in front of him.

In smooth, unhurried fashion, Luke drew his right-hand Remington, lifted it, and fired one shot.

The .44 round sizzled through the rain, punched into Tate’s chest, and knocked him back against the batwings. He didn’t fall through them but caught the one on his left instead, hooking his arm over it as he tried to hold himself up.

The batwing wasn’t very stable, though, and neither was Tate. He swayed back and forth for a second as he struggled to raise the gun in his right hand for another shot.

Luke didn’t particularly want to shoot him again because of the possibility that the bullet might go all the way through the young fool and hit somebody in the saloon, but he was about to run the risk when blood gushed from Tate’s mouth and his strength finally deserted him. He pitched forward to lie facedown on the boardwalk. Both guns fell in the muddy street.

The fight wasn’t over, though. One of Tate’s friends, the one who hadn’t wanted to be reasonable, rushed out gripping a double-barreled shotgun he had gotten from somewhere. He yelled a curse and swung the barrels toward Luke.

The Remington roared and bucked twice in Luke’s fist. Both bullets drove into the shotgunner’s midsection, just above his belt buckle. As he doubled over, his finger must have jerked the shotgun’s triggers, because it boomed like thunder as both barrels discharged.

The weapon was pointing down now, though, and the double load of buckshot slammed into Tate’s back at close range, shredding and pulverizing it. The only good thing about that grisly turn of fate was that Tate was likely dead already and didn’t feel the terrible blast.

Luke stood in the warm rain, revolver leveled toward the saloon, and waited to see if the third man was going to come out. After a long moment, the batwings swung outward slowly and the man emerged from the Three of a Kind, but he immediately held his empty hands high and in plain sight.

“Don’t shoot, mister!” he called to Luke. “Tate took my gun! I’m unarmed!”

“If you came to help your friends, you’re too late,” Luke said. His clothes were soaked now. He was wet, uncomfortable, and mad, and he felt like shooting the third man just on general principles. That would have been cold-blooded murder, though, and even bounty hunters drew the line somewhere. At least this bounty hunter did.

“Tate’s dead, ain’t he?”

“Not much doubt about that after your other friend unloaded both barrels into his back.”

At that moment, the gutshot man let out a long, pain-racked groan.

“Clevenger ain’t, though,” the third man went on. “I just want to get the doc for him.”

“Go ahead, although I doubt it’ll do much good. Wounds like that are invariably fatal.”

“You’re sayin’ he’s gonna die no matter what I do?”

“The odds are overwhelmingly against him.”

The third man thought about that for a couple of seconds before saying, “Well, then, the hell with it. I figure to get on my horse and head outta this town. I know when I’d be pushin’ my luck to stay in a place.”

“Go ahead,” Luke told him. “Nobody’s going to make you hang around.”

The man went to one of the horses at the hitch rack in front of the saloon, jerked the animal’s reins loose, and swung up into the saddle. He hauled the horse around and spurred it into a run that sent mud flying in the air from its hooves. Luke watched him disappear into the rain.

Johnny came out of the saloon, followed by a couple of the citizens of Bent Creek who had been in the saloon.

“Somebody’ll fetch the undertaker for these two,” the bartender said.

“One of them isn’t dead yet,” Luke pointed out. Clevenger was still squirming slightly and moaning, although the sounds were getting weaker.

“He will be, time the coffin’s ready for him.”

Luke finally holstered the Remington and nodded.

“More than likely. Do you have any law around here?”

“Town marshal,” Johnny said. “Deputy rides up from the county seat once a month or so, but he was just here last week so I don’t expect to see him again any time soon.”

“Well, if the marshal wants to talk to me, I’ll be at the livery stable or the hotel.”

Johnny shook his head and said, “We all saw what happened from inside the saloon, mister. Tate and Clevenger came after you, pure and simple. I told Clevenger not to take that Greener from under the bar, but he wouldn’t be stopped. You didn’t have any choice but to kill ’em.”

“That’s the way of the world,” Luke said. “Too often it doesn’t give a man a choice.”

He knew as soon as he stepped into the cavernous livery barn that he had found what he was looking for.

At least, there was a good chance he had, because a brown-and-white paint pony stood in one of the stalls, its serene gaze turned in his direction.

Luke had never laid eyes on Judd Tyler or on the horse Tyler had stolen to make his getaway from White Fork, Montana, after murdering poor Rachel Montgomery. This horse sure fit the description on the wanted poster currently folded up and stowed in one of Luke’s saddlebags, though.

Of course, it was possible Tyler had traded horses or simply abandoned the paint and stolen another mount since fleeing from White Fork. If he had any sense at all, he wouldn’t still be riding such a distinctive animal.

And there were quite a few paint horses around, Luke reminded himself. This one didn’t have to be Tyler’s.

The instincts he had developed from surviving for so many long years in a dangerous business told him that his quarry was nearby, though. Luke carried a number of different maps with him, and all of them agreed there wasn’t a hell of a lot between here and White Fork. A few small settlements and some ranches, that was all. Tyler might not have been able to find a better horse.

It was the maps that had brought Luke to Bent Creek. He had been in another town, several days’ ride south of here, when he had seen the poster on Tyler in the local badge-toter’s office. Luke had studied the maps and seen that Tyler was likely to head for Bent Creek if he continued south.

Luke had ridden hard in order to get here in time to intercept the fugitive. It had been a gamble, but he sensed it was going to pay off.

A tall, gaunt old man in overalls and a battered hat stood just inside the barn doors. His left cheek bulged out from the chaw of tobacco he had stashed there.

“Mr. Crandall?” Luke asked him.

“Yep,” the man said around the chaw. He nodded toward the far side of the street, where a man carrying a black bag had just hurried up to the scene of the shooting.

Luke and the liveryman watched as the doctor dropped to one knee beside Clevenger, looked at the wounds for a moment, then stood up and shook his head at Johnny and the other bystanders. He walked off without ever opening his medical bag.

“I seen some of what happened,” Crandall said. “Shot the hell outta them boys, didn’t you?”

“It seemed like the thing to do at the time,” Luke said.

Crandall spat a long, brown stream into the rain, then said, “Nobody’s gonna miss ’em, if that’s what you’re worried about. Tate’s been a pain in everybody’s butt around here ever since he growed up and decided he was a tough hombre. Clevenger was mite near as bad.”

“Tate said he grew up on a ranch near here?”

“Yeah, but his folks are dead and it’s his uncle’s place now, and his uncle couldn’t stand him. Ran him off and told him never to set foot on the spread again. So you don’t have to be afeared of anybody comin’ after you to settle the score.”

“I wasn’t afeared,” Luke said.

Crandall looked at him with narrowed eyes for a second, then said, “No, I reckon you ain’t very often, are you?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on, “Lookin’ for a place to put your horse up for the night?”

“That’s right, and I’m in search of some information as well.”

Crandall scratched his angular jaw and said, “Got some empty stalls, but I dunno about the information. Most folks figure my head’s pretty empty, too.”

“Oh, I doubt that very seriously,” Luke said. “For example, I’ll bet you can tell me all about the man who rode in on that paint pony over there.”

Crandall glanced toward the paint and grunted.

“How come you want to know?”

“I think he might be a friend of mine.”

Crandall spat again, said, “Man who shoots like you gen’rally don’t have many friends.” His bony shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. “But I just rent out stalls and take care o’ horses. Fella who rode in on that paint yesterday is young, twenty-three or twenty-four, I’d say. Got brown hair. A mite on the scrawny side. Sound like your friend?”

“It very well could be. Is he still in town?”

“His horse is still there, ain’t it?”

“He could have worked out a trade with you for another horse,” Luke said.

“Could have, but he didn’t. He seemed to set a heap of store by that animal. Said he needed to be movin’ on today, but he couldn’t do it. He was afraid of runnin’ that paint into the ground. He was right, too. That varmint was plumb in need of a day’s rest.”

“Been ridden hard, had it?”

“Yep.”

“Did you happen to get a name?”

Crandall waved a knobby-knuckled hand and said, “Oh, he didn’t call the horse nothin’, not while I was around, anyway.”

“I think you know what I meant.”

“A fella’s got cold, hard cash, I don’t need his life story or his name,” Crandall said. “Anyway, he’s your friend. Reckon you oughta know his name.”

“Then maybe you can tell me where to find him,” Luke said, although he had a hunch he already knew the answer.

Crandall pointed with a thumb and said, “He’s stayin’ at the hotel. If he ain’t there, he’s likely in one of the saloons or the café. Gettin’ on toward suppertime, so he might be gettin’ something to eat.”

Luke took a five-dollar gold piece from his pocket and tossed it to Crandall, who caught it with practiced ease.

“You’ll see to my horse?”

“Sure, mister, but it ain’t gonna cost this much.”

“The rest of it is for your help,” Luke said.

“Not sure I helped all that much. Did I tell you anything you hadn’t already guessed?”

“Not really, but it was only a hunch. It’s always nice to have confirmation.”

Luke handed the reins to the old man, then started to turn toward the open doors.

As he did, he heard something behind him and caught a flicker of movement from the deep shadows under the hayloft. He tried to twist back in that direction as his right hand darted across his body toward the forward-facing butt of the Remington on that side.

The gun came clear of the holster, but Luke didn’t have a chance to use it before something crashed against his head with enough force to make it feel like his brain had popped right out of his skull. He heard Crandall’s startled shout, but that was the last thing he was aware of before he plunged into seemingly endless darkn. . .