Massacre Canyon

Book 5: Family Jensen

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Westerns

Synopsis

Two outlaw brothers have been leaving a blood-trail on their way to infamy on the western frontier. Until bounty hunter Luke Jensen catches one of the black-hearted Kroll brothers away from his gang. But while Luke is trying to get Mordecai Kroll from jail to justice, he's ambushed by the Kroll gang and taken prisoner. And that draws Luke's own brother Smoke Jensen into the fight, guns drawn. . . Brothers By Blood. Brothers By Battle. With Smoke Jensen comes fire--adopted son Matt and lifelong friend Preacher, who storm into battle to save Luke Jensen from the Krolls. With trigger-happy back-stabbers, cutthroat outriders, and murdering devils joining the fray, the deadly mayhem paints the harsh landscape an unforgiving red--a place where Jensen's enemies go to die. .

Release date: May 6, 2014

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

Luke Jensen pressed his back to the wall of the corridor beside the hotel room door and raised the long-barreled Remington revolver in his right hand until it was beside his head. He waited patiently, a tall, rangy, muscular man with a rough-hewn face and a neatly trimmed mustache that matched the dark, slightly curly hair under the thumbed-back black hat.

Any minute now, the springs on the bed inside that room would start to squeal, and Luke would know that it was time to kick the door open and throw down on Mordecai Kroll. It was a shame to interrupt a man’s sporting fun with a particularly good-looking redheaded dove, but Luke would make an exception for Mordecai Kroll.

He would take any advantage he could get over a cold-blooded, rattlesnake-mean killer like Kroll.

There were bad men . . . and then there were men like Rudolph and Mordecai Kroll. If there was a state or territory west of the Mississippi where they weren’t wanted by the law, Luke wasn’t aware of it. He had seen reward dodgers issued on them from Texas to Montana, from Missouri to California.

Their list of crimes was as long as the list of places offering bounties on them. Murder, rape, robbery, arson, kidnapping, extortion, assault, horse theft, cattle rustling . . . Come up with a violent crime and chances were the Kroll brothers had committed it at one time or another.

At some point they had probably pried the gold fillings out of a dead man’s teeth.

As a result, if Luke could bring in Mordecai Kroll, dead or alive, he stood to earn the biggest payday of his career as a bounty hunter. The rewards for Mordecai added up to more than ten thousand dollars. The only way Luke could ever top that would be to corral Mordecai’s older brother, Rudolph, who had even bigger bounties on his head.

Of course, if he could get both of them, Luke thought, he would collect enough to give up his dangerous profession. He could afford to buy himself a cattle ranch somewhere, like the Sugarloaf spread owned by his brother Smoke.

But he couldn’t buy the goodwill and the friendship that Smoke had earned, nor did Luke know of any store where he could waltz in and buy himself a smart, beautiful wife like Sally Jensen.

No, he was just a bounty hunter, and while he might aspire to more, it was doubtful that he would ever achieve it, especially considering the fact that he wasn’t as young as he used to be.

Since that was the case, he would concentrate on doing his job he told himself, instead of standing in the dim, dusty second-floor hallway of a rundown hotel in a little town in Arizona and daydreaming about what might have been. He stood a little straighter as he heard the bedsprings squeak on the other side of the door.

“Get on with it, Mordecai,” Luke muttered to himself. “She’s a whore. She’s not expecting flowers and poetry.”

He’d been coming out of an eatery a short time earlier when he spotted Mordecai Kroll emerging from a saloon across the street arm in arm with a rather buxom redhead. The young woman had a shawl around her shoulders against the evening chill, but it didn’t do much to conceal the ample bosom that threatened to escape from the low-cut neckline of her dress. She still had her looks, which meant she hadn’t been working as a soiled dove for very long.

Mordecai appeared to be half-drunk. He stumbled a little as the two of them moved along the boardwalk, but the redhead didn’t let him fall. Both of them seemed to find his rotgut-induced clumsiness hilarious.

Luke had moved quickly into the shadows of the alley next to the café and studied the two people on the other side of the street, just to make sure he really saw what he thought he was seeing. He’d heard rumors that the Kroll gang had been spotted in this corner of northeastern Arizona, not far from the border with New Mexico Territory, and he had drifted in this direction to have a look around.

It was hard to believe he’d be lucky enough to run smack-dab into Mordecai Kroll like this. Even more astounding was the fact that big brother, Rudolph, and the rest of the gang didn’t appear to be anywhere around.

Mordecai must have slipped off without telling the others, Luke thought as he studied the outlaw. He had seen countless posters with a variety of drawings of Mordecai Kroll on them, and the man with the redheaded whore matched up with those likenesses. He had the same angular features, the same bushy eyebrows, the same shock of fair hair, the same lanky build.

That was Mordecai Kroll, all right, Luke had decided. No doubt about it.

He followed them to the Sullivan House, which was a pretty fancy name for a second-rate hotel. Through the front window, which fortunately wasn’t as grimy as it might have been, he had seen the clerk behind the desk take a key from the pegboard on the wall and hand it to Mordecai. Luke’s keen eyes had no problem reading the number 14 printed on the slip of paper tacked to the wall under the peg where the clerk had gotten the key.

From there it was simple to slip in the rear entrance and go up the back stairs. He found Room 14 about halfway along the corridor with a threadbare carpet runner, faded wallpaper, and a lamp burning dimly on a table at the far end. The hallway was deserted except for Luke.

While he stood there waiting, he heard laughter and voices from inside the room. A man and a woman, and both sounded like they’d been drinking. That confirmed he had the right room. He slipped one of the Remingtons he wore in cross-draw rigs from its holster and waited.

The doorknob of another room clicked as it was turned. The door opened and a man stepped out into the hall. It happened too quickly for Luke to hide, and there was no place to conceal himself in this corridor anyway.

The man stopped short and his eyes got big with fear. He was tall and skinny, with a prominent Adam’s apple. He wore a tweed suit and a derby. The clothes had seen better days. Luke pegged the man for a drummer of some sort.

Carefully, Luke lifted his left hand and pressed the index finger to his lips in a signal for silence. The man took in the bounty hunter’s rugged face, the dusty black shirt and trousers, the pair of revolvers. He swallowed hard, which caused his Adam’s apple to bob up and down. Then he backed into his room and gingerly closed the door behind him.

Smart man, Luke thought. Whatever was about to happen, that hombre didn’t want any part of it.

Luke hoped no bullets punched through the thin walls between rooms. He would do his best not to fire a shot, but that really might be too much to hope for.

The bed noises from inside the room got louder. Luke got ready to make his move. He planned to kick the door open and rush in. If Mordecai was on top, it ought to be a simple matter to wallop him over the head with the Remington and knock him out. If he wasn’t on top, that would complicate things. He might be able to reach for a gun before Luke could stop him.

Luke was counting on the booze to slow down Mordecai’s reactions long enough for him to get the redhead out of the way. Then he and Mordecai would just have to take their chances against each other.

A thought flashed through his mind as he stepped away from the wall, drew his other Remington, and turned toward the door. With a quarry like Mordecai Kroll, some bounty hunters would start shooting as soon as they kicked in the door. If some of the bullets wound up in the whore, that was just too bad. They could always claim that Mordecai shot her, and chances were that nobody would question the claim.

Luke had never been that sort of man. He hadn’t lived a blameless life, not by a long shot, but he liked to think there was a core of decency in him, instilled there by the sheer fact that he was a Jensen, even though for a long time he hadn’t used the name and had called himself Luke Smith instead.

He had thought that he had good reasons for doing that. It had taken meeting his long-lost brother Smoke to show him that he was wrong. Now he was proudly once again a Jensen and would remain so.

He lifted his right foot and drove the heel of his boot against the door right beside the knob, as hard as he could. The jamb splintered under the impact and the door sprang open.

Luke leaped through the doorway with both revolvers thrust out in front of him. Either Mordecai or the redhead had lit the lamp on the small dressing table, so a yellow glow filled the room and revealed that the bed was . . .

Empty.

But the redhead stood beside it, still fully dressed, bent over with both hands resting on the mattress. She appeared to be frozen in that position with a look of terror on her face, and in that frozen instant of time, Luke realized why.

She had bounced the bed up and down and made it sound like both occupants of the room were romping on it, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, Mordecai Kroll was all the way on the other side of the room, holding a shotgun that he pointed at Luke.

Flame erupted from both barrels as Mordecai triggered them.

Luke’s quick reflexes were all that saved him. He dived forward as the terrible boom of the shotgun’s discharge filled the room. He hit the floor hard on his belly. The double load of buckshot passed over his head. A couple of pellets stung his legs as the loads spread, but that was all.

He angled the Remingtons upward and fired both revolvers. Mordecai had already darted to the side and barely avoided the .44 slugs, which ripped into the wall.

At least the bullets were traveling at such an angle that they probably went well over the head of anybody in the next room, Luke thought as he cocked the guns to try again.

If Mordecai had fired just one of the shotgun’s barrels, he could have finished Luke off with the second one. The weapon was empty, though, so he was forced to swing it as a club. The twin barrels hit Luke’s left-hand revolver and knocked it over into the other Remington as the guns discharged again. Still unscathed, Mordecai slashed at Luke’s head with the stock.

Luke rolled out of the way of the blow and twisted on the floor so he could hook a booted foot between Mordecai’s calves. He jerked hard with it and swept the outlaw’s feet out from under him. With a startled yell, Mordecai went over backwards.

Luke started to scramble up, but Mordecai recovered quickly enough to kick him in the chest. That knocked Luke back against the bed. He was off-balance and sprawled against the side of the mattress.

Mordecai had been able to hang on to the shotgun. Even though he was fighting for his life, a cackle of vicious glee exploded from him as he rammed the shotgun’s barrels into Luke’s belly. Luke doubled over in pain and fell forward on his knees.

Since he was already bent over and low to the floor, he drove forward and butted Mordecai in the belly. The breath whoofed out of Mordecai’s lungs as he fell on his butt. Luke surged ahead and planted a knee in the outlaw’s groin. Mordecai groaned, and Luke smelled rotgut whiskey and spicy food.

He had the advantage now. He smashed his right-hand gun against Mordecai’s jaw. The impact slewed Mordecai’s head around. While Mordecai was stunned, Luke cracked the barrel of his left-hand gun across Mordecai’s right wrist. That finally made Mordecai drop the empty shotgun.

Luke kneed him again and took some vicious satisfaction of his own from the agonized, high-pitched scream that Mordecai let out. No man could take punishment like that and keep fighting for very long. Mordecai Kroll was no exception. He curled up in a quivering, whimpering ball of pain.

Luke shoved himself up and staggered to his feet. His chest rose and fell hard from the effort and the sheer desperation of the fight. He eared back the hammers of both Remingtons and pointed the guns at Mordecai, even though the outlaw seemed helpless at the moment. Without taking his eyes off his prisoner, he asked the redhead, “Are you all right, gal?”

No answer.

Fearing the worst, Luke backed a couple of steps toward the door and glanced to his right so he could see on the other side of the bed. The young woman lay there, and she wasn’t pretty anymore after what the buckshot had done to her face. A pool of blood spread slowly around her head.

Luke cursed bitterly. He didn’t blame himself for the redhead’s death; Mordecai Kroll was the one who had pulled the triggers on that shotgun. But Luke regretted what had happened, just as he always regretted what happened when somebody innocent got in the way of a cold-blooded killer.

He stepped closer to the mewling outlaw, leaned down, and struck again with the right-hand Remington. The blow knocked Mordecai out cold and shut him up.

The sound of rapid footsteps in the corridor made Luke swing toward the door. His guns came in line with the opening just as a man appeared in the doorway. His eyes widened at the sight of the Remingtons pointed at him, and he took a quick step back.

“Whoa, hold on there, mister!” he said. “Don’t shoot!”

Luke spotted the badge pinned to the pudgy hombre’s vest and lowered the Remingtons. The lawman had a six-gun on his hip and carried a Winchester, but he made no effort to point the rifle at Luke.

“Take it easy, Marshal,” Luke told the newcomer. “The shooting is all over.”

To prove it, he holstered the left-hand gun and started reloading the two chambers he had fired from the other Remington. He had to break the revolver open and expose the cylinder to do that.

The lawman stepped into the room and asked, “Anybody hurt in—” Then he stopped short and gulped as he spotted the redhead’s legs sticking out on the far side of the bed. He leaned over to look, jerked upright, and a sick, greenish expression came over his face.

“I didn’t do that,” Luke said. “You can see for yourself that the poor woman was killed with a shotgun. That bastard on the floor is the one who did it.”

He snapped the Remington closed again and nodded toward the senseless Mordecai Kroll.

“Who . . . who’s that?”

Luke started reloading the other gun. A man in his line of work often needed all the firepower he could get. He said, “That’s Mordecai Kroll.”

“The outlaw?” The local star packer sounded like he couldn’t believe it. “Mordecai Kroll was in my town? Really?”

“You can see him with your own eyes. Surely you have wanted posters on him in your office. You can compare the likenesses on them to Kroll in the flesh if you want, after you’ve gotten him safely behind bars.”

“I’ll do that. If that’s Mordecai Kroll, I reckon that makes you . . . what? Some sort of bounty hunter?”

“That’s right,” Luke agreed dryly. “Some sort of bounty hunter. My name is Luke Jensen.”

He could tell that the marshal had never heard of him, which was all right. Luke had never sought notoriety. That was one reason he had kept his true identity a secret for many years. He didn’t want to bring shame to his family over the failures and tragedies of the past.

He had put all that behind him now. Anyway, there was no way he could ever be as famous as his brother Smoke, who quite possibly was the fastest, deadliest gunfighter the West had ever known. Despite all that, Smoke had built a reputation as a solid citizen, so Luke supposed there was hope that a bloody-handed bounty hunter might become respectable someday . . . but for now he was content to lie low and do his job.

The marshal suddenly looked even more worried. He said, “If that’s Mordecai, where are Rudolph and the rest of that wild bunch of theirs?”

“I have no idea,” Luke replied honestly. “I just spotted Mordecai on the street a little while ago. He had that young woman with him and appeared to be drunk, so I decided to follow him and see if I might have a chance to take him into custody.”

“You don’t really talk like most bounty hunters I’ve run into,” the lawman said with a slight frown.

“I read a lot,” Luke said simply.

That was true. He always had several books stuck in his saddlebags, and he picked up more whenever and wherever he had a chance. In the lonely existence he had led, sometimes it seemed like books were his only friends. They were certainly the only ones who were always there for him.

The marshal’s thoughts must have gone back to what he had been talking about before. He said, “You must not’ve been able to get the drop on him like you hoped.”

“He must have spotted me following him,” Luke said, and once again that note of bitterness was in his voice. “He forced the girl to make the bedsprings bounce and squeal like they were busy. Then when I kicked the door in, he was ready and cut loose at me with that greener. I barely got out of the way.”

“Yeah, but Sheila didn’t,” the marshal said with a gloomy expression on his face. He shook his head.

“That was her name? Sheila?”

“Yeah. Not a bad sort, for a whore. She seemed to genuinely like folks. I reckon she probably would’ve stopped feelin’ like that if she’d stayed in the business long enough. Maybe it’s a blessin’ that she didn’t have the chance.”

Luke couldn’t bring himself to feel that way. Any life cut short before its time was a bad thing. But he wasn’t going to argue philosophy with the local badge-toter in an Arizona cowtown.

“We’d better get Kroll locked up while we’ve got the chance,” he said.

“Yeah, we don’t want the others to show up while we’re takin’ him down the street.” The marshal sounded like it would have been all right with him if Luke hadn’t captured the infamous outlaw. Now he had to worry about the rest of the Kroll gang riding into town to bust Mordecai out of jail. With a sigh, he added, “I’ll have to get the undertaker up here to take care of Sheila, too. Not to mention the damage to the hotel from the blood and the buckshot and the bullets and such.”

Luke would have been willing to bet that this wasn’t the first time blood had been spilled in the Sullivan House, nor were those bullet holes the first ones that had been put in the walls. He would pay the proprietor for the damages, though. With the rewards he would collect for capturing Mordecai, he could easily afford the expense.

He rolled Mordecai onto his belly and took a strip of rawhide from his pocket. Some bounty hunters carried handcuffs, and Luke had a pair of the metal bracelets in his saddlebags, but the rawhide served well for tying a prisoner’s wrists together, too, with the advantage of being compact and lightweight. It wouldn’t clink against something at a bad time and give away his presence when stealth was important, either.

Mordecai started to come around as Luke jerked his arms behind his back and lashed his wrists together with the rawhide. He pulled the knot good and tight and wasn’t any too gentle about it. Then he took hold of Mordecai’s arms and hauled the outlaw to his feet.

Mordecai yelped in pain and cursed.

“Careful,” he said.

“Like you were careful when you practically blew poor Sheila’s head off?”

“Was that her name? Hell, if she don’t have sense to duck, it ain’t my fault, is it?”

Luke drew his right-hand Remington, pressed the muzzle to Mordecai’s head just behind the right ear, and pulled back the hammer.

“If my thumb happens to slip, it’s not my fault, is it?” he grated. “Anyway, all the reward dodgers on you say dead or alive, so it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

Mordecai stood stiff as a board now. He must have realized that his callous remark had pushed Luke a little too far.

The local lawman broke the tense spell by clearing his throat and saying, “Uh, Mr. Jensen . . . we said we were gonna lock him up. . . .”

“And so we are,” Luke agreed as he got control over his anger. He lowered the Remington’s hammer and slid the revolver back into leather. “But if you’re smart, Kroll, you’ll keep your mouth shut for a while. Just remember . . . dead or alive.”

Marshal Jerome Dunlap sighed in obvious relief when the cell door clanged shut behind Mordecai Kroll. He had told Luke his name while they were marching the prisoner up the street and into the squat stone building that housed the local marshal’s office and jail.

Luke said, “Turn around and back up to the bars, Kroll, and I’ll untie your wrists.”

Kroll did as Luke told him. When his arms were free again, Mordecai brought them around in front of him and massaged his wrists as he glared at Luke.

“You’re gonna be mighty sorry you ever crossed trails with me, Jensen,” he said. “That was your name, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Luke said.

With a sneer, Mordecai told Dunlap, “You better make a note of that, Marshal, so you can tell the undertaker what name to put on this dumb bastard’s grave marker.” Mordecai paused, and then went on. “No, wait, that’s right, you’ll be dead, too, so you won’t be able to tell the undertaker a damned thing.”

He laughed raucously. Luke ignored him and turned back to the marshal’s office.

Dunlap followed him out of the cell block and dropped the big ring of keys on the desk with a jangling thump.

“I’ll have to send to St. Johns for the sheriff,” he said. “That’s the county seat of Apache County. We can’t hope to hold Kroll here in this cracker box of a jail.”

Luke thought the marshal was underestimating the building’s strength, but Dunlap had no deputies and it was certain that just the two of them wouldn’t be able to withstand an attack in force by the entire Kroll gang. The sooner they could get Kroll to the county seat and surround him with armed, experienced deputies, the better.

“Have you got a telegraph office here?” he asked.

Dunlap shook his head.

“No, I’ll have to send a rider to St. Johns. Fella who owns the livery stable has a boy who carries messages for me sometimes. Got a fast horse, too.”

“How long will that take?”

“Start him first thing in the morning, the sheriff ought to be back here with a jail wagon and some men by nightfall.”

Luke nodded and said, “So we’ve got to wait less than twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty-four hours can be a mighty long time when you’ve got trouble rainin’ down on you,” Dunlap pointed out.

He was right about that, Luke thought. But all they could do was hope for the best.

“You mind stayin’ here while I go roust out the undertaker and tell Benji Porter I need him to ride to the county seat in the mornin’?”

“Go ahead, Marshal,” Luke said. “I’ll keep an eye on Kroll.”

Dunlap nodded. He looked like he would be glad to get out of the office. Luke wondered briefly if the marshal would come back tonight or manage to be occupied elsewhere. He didn’t think Dunlap would abandon his duty like that, but you never could be sure about people.

Once Luke was alone in the office, he looked at the few wanted posters that were pinned to the wall. He figured that Dunlap had to have more reward dodgers than that, unless the marshal had been using them for kindling, so he took a look in the scarred old desk. In the second drawer he found a big stack of the posters.

He didn’t have to flip through them for very long before he came across one with a drawing of Rudolph Kroll on it. The man staring out balefully from the penciled likeness was considerably older than Mordecai, but Luke could see a slight resemblance in their craggy faces. Rudolph was dark where his younger brother was fair. His nose was bigger, and underneath it was a thick, dark mustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth. If anything, Rudolph Kroll looked even meaner and more filled with hate than Mordecai, although such a thing didn’t seem possible at first glance.

Luke found posters on some of the other members of the Kroll gang in the stack: Fred Martin, Calvin Dodge, Pete Markwell, a handful more. All of them ruthless, hard-bitten, dangerous men, even if their reputations weren’t quite as bad as that of the Kroll brothers’. Luke had no doubt that any one of them would have killed him in an instant if given the chance.

He didn’t intend to provide them with that opportunity.

“Hey!” Mordecai called from the cell block. “Hey, Marshal, you still out there?”

Luke put the wanted posters back in the desk drawer and closed it. He stood up and went over to the cell block door to ask through the barred window in it, “What do you want, Kroll?”

“That you, Jensen? Where’s the marshal?”

“Busy. If you don’t want anything, shut up.”

“I didn’t say that. I could use some coffee. My head really hurts where some big dumb son of a bitch walloped it with a pistol.”

He chuckled at his own cleverness, or what he regarded as cleverness, anyway.

Luke had already noticed the coffeepot staying warm on a pot-bellied iron stove in a corner of the office. Several tin cups sat on a small shelf to the side. He supposed it wouldn’t do any harm, and since there was a good chance he would have to stay awake all night to guard the prisoner, he decided he ought to have a cup for himself.

“All right, but don’t try anything,” he told Mordecai. “I’d just as soon put a bullet in you as look at you.”

He poured thick, black coffee into one of the cups and took it over to the desk where he picked up the key ring. He had seen which key Dunlap used to lock the cell block, so it was simple to unlock it. He drew one of his guns as he used the other hand to carry the coffee into the cell block.

Mordecai was in the first cell on the left. Luke told him, “Back off all the way over there under the window. Take a step in this direction before I tell you to and I’ll blow your kneecap to hell. You’ll have a bad limp when you walk to the gallows.”

“You’re mighty confident,” Mordecai said as he backed over to the far wall. “I’m gonna enjoy watchin’ you die.”

Luke just grunted. He bent, reached through the bars, and placed the cup of coffee on the cell’s stone floor. Then he backed up well out of reach and said, “All right, you can go ahead and get it now.”

Mordecai did so. He took a sip and made a face, then said, “Has the marshal been boilin’ this stuff for a week? It tastes like it.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Luke said. “I can take it back—”

“No, no, that’s fine.”

Mordecai sat down on the bunk, took another sip, and sighed.

Luke had encountered scores of outlaws during his career as a bounty hunter, and few if any of them had ever given much thought to the havoc they wreaked in innocent lives. Despite knowing that, he asked, “Doesn’t it bother you that you killed that girl?”
. . .