The Bounty Killers

Book 7: Loner

by J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Literary Fiction; Native American & Aboriginal

Synopsis

The Loner didn't just bust out of jail, he busted out twice. The third time might be the charm-or a bullet in the belly.

A Bounty On His Head. A Gun In His Hand.

He didn't want much-just the chance to drift out of Texas into New Mexico Territory. That's when the Loner discovered there was a price on his head. A victim of mistaken identity, he broke out of Hell Gate Prison a few years back. Now, he's behind bars again, until a sheriff's love-struck daughter decides to come to his aid, and a beautiful bounty hunter-who also has eyes for the Loner-joins in.

Riding out of the frying pan and into the fire of a land war, the Loner has all kinds of murderous cutthroats on his trail. But he doesn't have any problem with women-as long as they're willing to ride on the wild side once the lead starts flying.

Release date: January 28, 2011

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

The shot came out of nowhere.

The first warning Kid Morgan had was the whine of a high-powered bullet as it passed his head, followed a second later by a rifle’s distant boom.

Instinctively, he kicked his feet out of the stirrups, yanked the Winchester from the sheath strapped to his buckskin horse, and rolled out of the saddle. He hit the ground feet first and running. He ducked behind one of the pine trees growing thick on the Nevada hillside just a few seconds after the slug whipped past his ear.

Another shot sounded in the distance, but the bullet didn’t come close enough for him to hear it pass.

The Kid planted his back against the pine trunk, uncertain the tree would shield him, since he didn’t know exactly where the bushwhacker was. A moment later a slug thudded harmlessly into the far side of the trunk.

He was safe . . . as long as the rifleman didn’t move and get a better angle on him. And unless there were more than one of the bastards stalking him.

The buckskin had run off into a brushy grove. The Kid hoped the horse would be safe. It was possible the man who’d ambushed him might decide to shoot the horse, just to insure that he was set afoot.

It might be wise in the long run to draw the fire away from the buckskin, The Kid decided. Darting out from behind the tree trunk he dashed toward another pine, heading in the opposite direction, away from where the buckskin was going.

The bushwhacker tried to hit him on the run, the bullet kicking up dirt several yards behind The Kid. Breathing a little hard from the sudden exertion, as well as from the fact that after more than a year of drifting in and out of trouble, he still didn’t like people shooting at him, he hid behind a second tree.

According to the Kid’s father, Frank Morgan, the famous—or infamous—gunfighter known as The Drifter, a man never really got used to dodging bullets.

The distant rifle fell silent. The bushwhacker figured out he wasn’t going to be able to hit The Kid.

Maybe he would give up trying.

More than likely, though, he would move and try to get a better shot.

The Kid frowned in thought as the minutes dragged by. He could make a run for his horse, but it was possible the rifleman was waiting for him to do just that. He could call the buckskin to him, but if the bushwhacker figured out what was going on, he would shoot the horse for sure.

Or he could give the would-be killer a little surprise.

The Kid turned to face the tree trunk and tipped his head back. The pine branches above him were heavy with needles and cones, creating a thick layer of greenery. The lowest branch was barely out of his reach. If he jumped he might be able to get a hand on it.

He tossed the Winchester into some brush where he could retrieve it later . . . if he was still alive.

After rubbing his hands together for a second, The Kid bent his knees, gathered his strength, and jumped. He grabbed the branch with both hands and hung on tight. Ignoring the discomfort of the rough bark he pulled himself up. The toes of his boots dug against the trunk helping him climb.

He hooked an arm all the way over the branch and swung a leg up, getting it a little higher with each attempt until he was able to hook it over the branch, too. From there, it wasn’t all that difficult to pull himself up so he sprawled on top of the branch, which was about as big around as his thigh.

Being careful to keep himself balanced, The Kid took a minute or so to get used to being in the tree. Then he edged closer to the trunk and grasped it to help pull himself up.

Within seconds, he was standing on the branch, hugging the tree trunk. Branches thrust out from the trunk all around him. He clambered up them, moving carefully to avoid a fall. The last thing he needed with somebody gunning for him was a broken arm or leg.

It was just a matter of waiting for the bushwhacker to get curious enough to ride over there and investigate.

Luckily, The Kid had developed some patience, a quality he’d never had to any great degree when he was still the rich, spoiled young man named Conrad Browning. He had started to grow up a little when he met and got to know his father, but that first meeting hadn’t happened until Conrad was nearly grown.

Meeting and marrying Rebel Callahan had helped mature him even more. But Rebel was dead and buried, and once the men responsible for her death had been tracked down and dealt with, Conrad had decided to bury his own past as well.

He had adopted the identity of a gunfighter and became known as Kid Morgan to conceal his true identity and help him in his quest for vengeance. Even though it was no longer needed, he had realized that he would rather continue to be The Kid than go back to being Conrad Browning.

So he had turned his back on what he was and kept drifting. Despite his desire to be left alone with his grief, trouble and danger seemed to seek him out. Being ambushed was the latest instance.

Confident that he couldn’t be seen from the ground, at least not easily, The Kid remained motionless. After what seemed like ages but was probably more like an hour, he heard a horse’s hoofbeats steadily coming down the hill toward his hiding place.

The rider wasn’t in any hurry. He knew that his quarry might be laying a trap for him.

The Kid was counting on the fact that the bushwhacker might not expect any danger from above.

The horse came closer and closer. Carefully, The Kid parted a couple pine boughs, taking pains not to dislodge any cones. He looked down and saw the rider pass underneath the tree.

“Damn it, I know it was somewhere right around here that I saw him last,” the man muttered.

The Kid couldn’t see the bushwhacker’s face, since he was looking almost straight down at the man. All he could see was the top of a broad-brimmed hat and enough of the man’s clothes to tell that he was wearing range garb. He carried some sort of long-barreled hunting rifle across the saddle in front of him, which had enabled him to take those long-range shots.

The Kid was fortunate the man’s aim had been slightly off on his first attempt. After that, The Kid had been moving enough so the man hadn’t been able to draw a good bead on him.

The bushwhacker kept riding. The Kid moved another branch aside so that he could watch the man. He leveled the Colt and centered the sights on the man’s back.

It would have been easy to pull the trigger and blow the man out of the saddle. But that would probably kill him, and a dead man couldn’t answer any questions. The Kid wanted to know why someone was trying to kill him. A thing like that could turn out to be important.

The rider kept moving. Since there was no telling where he might go, The Kid holstered his gun and crept out quickly on the branch, until it started to droop under him. Grasping it with his hands, he let his feet drop and swung out, releasing his hold so that he dropped right on the bushwhacker’s back.

The unexpected impact knocked the man forward on his mount’s neck. The horse shied and lunged ahead. The Kid felt himself falling, and wrapped an arm around the man’s neck. Hanging on tightly, he dragged the man out of the saddle with him.

They crashed to the ground, the landing knocking them apart. The Kid rolled over and came up swinging. The bushwhacker, gasping for breath, struggled upright just in time for The Kid’s rocketing fist to slam into his jaw.

The blow landed cleanly and knocked the bushwhacker sprawling. The Kid leaped and landed on top of him.

Before the man could fight back, The Kid palmed out his revolver and pressed the muzzle up under the man’s chin.

“Freeze or I’ll blow your head off,” The Kid warned.

“That’s good advice, friend,” a voice said from behind him. “You’d damned well better heed it.”

The Kid knew the words had the threat of a gun behind them. But he was far from helpless. He said, “Back off, mister. No matter how fast you shoot me, it won’t be fast enough to keep me from killing your friend.”

The second man laughed. “Friend?” he repeated. “Who said anybody so damned dumb as to get himself jumped on from a tree would be a friend of mine?”

The man had a point there, The Kid supposed.

He could see the face of the man he had tackled. The man’s hat had come off, revealing thinning dark hair over an olive-skinned face. The left eye had a peculiar cast to it. Dark beard stubble shadowed his jaw.

The Kid had never seen him before.

Without moving the gun, he said, “Did you fellows ever stop to think that maybe this is all a misunderstanding?”

“Naw, you’re the varmint we’re after,” said the man behind him. “You match the description on the wanted posters.”

Bounty hunters! The men were bounty hunters. That explained everything, and they had indeed come close to killing him over some stupid mistake. “Listen to me,” he said. “I’m not Bloody Ben Bledsoe. I just look a little like him.”

A couple months earlier, The Kid had gone through pure hell because of that resemblance. Bloody Ben Bledsoe was an outlaw who had broken out of prison in New Mexico Territory. The Kid had been captured by a bounty hunter who mistook him for Bledsoe and dragged him back to that hellhole.

It had taken all sorts of trouble to straighten everything out, and a lot of people had died along the way, some innocent, some definitely not.

“Bledsoe?” the man behind The Kid repeated. “I heard Ben Bledsoe got hisself killed down in Arizona. I’m talkin’ about Kid Morgan. You’re him, and we’re takin’ you in.”

The Kid’s breath caught in his throat. He felt like he’d been punched in the gut. “That’s crazy. There aren’t any charges against me.”

“That ain’t what the wanted posters say. The Territory of New Mexico wants you for breakin’ out of prison and killin’ some guards. There’s a bounty of ten thousand dollars on your head, Kid. Ten grand, American . . . and Lester and me aim to collect.”

“Be . . . be careful, Mack,” the man on the ground said. “He could kill me with the twitch of a finger!”

“Well, that’d be a damned shame,” Mack said. “But you know, if he did, I don’t reckon I’d have to share that ree-ward with nobody, now would I?”

The Kid heard the finality in Mack’s voice. The bounty hunter had decided it would be easier to go ahead and shoot him, no matter what happened to the man’s partner.

Knowing that a bullet was about to be on its way to his back, The Kid threw himself aside just as Mack’s gun roared.

The other man tried to roll out of the way as soon as The Kid’s weight was no longer pinning him to the ground, but he moved too late. The slug sizzled through the space where The Kid had been a shaved heartbeat earlier, struck Lester in the face, and tore half his jaw away.

The Kid landed on his back and spotted a short man with a big beer gut standing about ten feet away. He tried to swing his .44 toward The Kid, but he was far too slow.

The Colt in The Kid’s hand bucked as he squeezed off three shots so swiftly the blasts sounded like one long roar. The slugs punched into Mack’s midsection, boring through the layer of fat, penetrating deep into his belly. The impact of the bullets knocked him back a step and made his derby hat fall off his bald head. He stayed on his feet for a moment, groaning and staggering to the side as he dropped his gun.

“You . . . son of a . . .”

He couldn’t finish the curse. Blood welled over the fingers he pressed to his bullet-ravaged belly. He fell to his knees and then pitched forward onto his face.

The Kid leaped to his feet and swung around to check on Lester.

Moaning and flopping around as he pawed at his ruined face, he was no longer a threat. Dark red blood pooled around his head.

As The Kid watched, Lester went limp and sagged back against the ground. His head flopped to the side, and his glassy eyes seemed to be staring right at The Kid, even though they could no longer see anything.

The Kid hoped there had only been two of them.

Carefully, he checked to make sure both men were dead. Satisfied that they were, he replaced the three rounds he had fired with fresh cartridges from the loops on his shell belt under the tails of the dark coat he wore and then holstered the gun.

He looked around until he found his black, flat-crowned hat that had come off when he first leaped out of the saddle. Picking it up, he slapped it against his leg to get the loose pine needles off, and settled it on his head.

Lester’s horse hadn’t gone far, and The Kid brought it back to the place where the two men had died. The coppery scent of blood hanging in the air, along with the acrid tang of gunsmoke, made the animal nervous. The Kid tied the reins around a sapling to keep the horse from bolting again.

With that done, he fetched his buckskin and the Winchester and looked around for Mack’s horse. He found the animal about a hundred yards up the slope, tied in the trees.

Returning to where he’d been ambushed, The Kid muttered, “You were nothing but a Judas goat, Lester,” then chided himself silently for talking to a dead man.

He checked their pockets and found a small amount of money, a deck of greasy cards, tobacco pouches and cigarette papers, and, in a pocket inside Mack’s coat, a small silver flask half full of whiskey.

None of that was what The Kid was looking for. He dug into their saddlebags, and in the one on Mack’s horse, he found what he sought. He unfolded the piece of paper and smoothed it out. It was a wanted poster, all right, with his name and description on it. In big letters across the top, it declared $10,000 REWARD. The charges were murder, attempted murder, and escaping from prison.

The Kid’s pulse pounded like a drum inside his skull as he stared down at the crudely printed poster. The charges were lies, all lies. He had never killed any of those guards at Hell Gate Prison, nor had he tried to kill them.

He had escaped because it was the only way to clear his name. In the end, when the real Ben Bledsoe had been brought to justice, The Kid has been assured there would be no charges leveled at him because of the prison break.

It was all a terrible mistake.

But two men lay dead on the ground at his feet because of that mistake. And with a ten grand price on his head, Mack and Lester wouldn’t be the last ones to come hunting The Kid.

He uttered a bitter curse as he thought about what might happen if the bogus reward dodgers had spread across the frontier already. There was no place he would be safe. Ten thousand dollars was enough to put every bounty hunter west of the Mississippi on his trail. And something else on the wanted poster made the situation even worse.

Under his name and description and the list of the charges against him was the legend printed across the bottom of the paper.

In big, bold letters, just like the amount of the reward . . .

The Kid left the two dead bounty hunters where they had fallen. He wasn’t by nature a callous person, but Mack and Lester had tried to kill him, so he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over leaving them for the scavengers.

As he rode away, he pondered his best course of action. He was in the southeastern corner of Nevada, where the state extended in a triangle between California to the west and the territories of Arizona and Utah to the east. The nearest settlement he knew of was the little mining town of Las Vegas, which he had passed through a few days earlier.

A long way off in the mountains to the northwest lay his former home, Carson City, and the mining town of Buckskin, where his father had served for a time as marshal. The Kid had friends in both places, or rather, Conrad Browning did.

But both places also held bitter memories for him, memories that went far beyond the taste of wormwood and gall. Rebel had been abducted from their home in Carson City. Later Conrad had burned it down to make it look as if he, too, had died so the men responsible for Rebel’s death wouldn’t expect him to come after them.

He wasn’t going back to that part of Nevada, he decided. He might never visit Carson City or Buckskin again, and that would be just fine with him. There was nothing left for him in either place.

It would be a good idea, though, to get in touch with his personal attorney, Claudius Turnbuckle in San Francisco. Claudius would be able to contact the territorial authorities in New Mexico and find out why those wanted posters had been issued. The Kid needed to get the price on his head lifted as soon as possible, before too many bounty hunters set out on his trail.

Las Vegas had a telegraph office, he recalled. He could backtrack and send a wire to Claudius from there, so the lawyer could get started toward clearing up the mess.

The Kid rode east toward the little settlement.

It didn’t take him long to reach the edge of the mountains. He paused in the foothills and looked out over the vast sprawl of desert and plains in front of him. He could make Las Vegas in a day if he pushed the buckskin.

But it was too late in the day to start across. The sun was almost touching the rugged peaks behind him. Better to wait and get a fresh start in the morning, he told himself.

His eyes narrowed as he spotted a thin haze of dust hanging in the air. That meant riders. He couldn’t tell if they were coming toward him or going away from him.

The Kid’s frown deepened as he watched the dust for several minutes. Definitely coming toward him, he thought. More than one or two riders, maybe as many as half a dozen.

Of course, they weren’t necessarily looking for him. They could be on their way somewhere else and not have anything to do with him at all. But it wasn’t a well-populated or widely-traveled area The Kid was riding through. He was simply drifting. He’d wanted to put Arizona, and his troubles there, behind him.

The sight of that dust definitely made him suspicious. All the more reason to hole up somewhere for the night, he told himself. If those riders were looking for him, he didn’t want to run right into them.

With that in mind, he rode north along a rocky ridge until he came to a spot where several large boulders clustered, and he could make a small fire without it being seen. There wasn’t much graze for his horse, or water for either of them, bu. . .