The Hanging Party

Book 1: Texas Lightning

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Westerns; Thrillers

Synopsis

In this bold new series from the bestselling Johnstones, a legendary gunslinger tries to outrun his past and start a new life. But after so many years, so many bullets—and so much bloodshed—he finds old habits die hard. And new enemies die harder . . . 

THEY CALL HIM “TEXAS LIGHTNING”

His name is Jon Gage. Most folks know him as “Texas Lightning,” the fastest draw in the West. The deadliest, too. Rumor has it he’s killed more than thirty men in half as many years, a body count he won’t deny. His reputation as a gunslinger, widowmaker, and all-around hellraiser inspires awe, respect—and fear. But when an innocent woman dies in an ill-fated shootout, Gage decides it’s time to drop his guns and change his wicked ways. There’s just one problem: 

There is no rest for the wicked. 

A nameless drifter haunted by his past, Gage hopes to right the wrongs he committed. He’s fighting on the side of the angels now, whether it’s a widow losing her freight business, a wagon train of farmers in trouble, or a small-time rancher battling a big-time cattle baron. Wherever he goes, there are wicked men preying on the innocent—and some of them recognize Gage as the notorious Texas Lightning. Gage knows he can’t outrun his demons. But he can still outgun them . . .

Release date: November 26, 2024

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

“Hey, I know you—ain’t you the one they call Texas Lightning?”

The trim, dark-haired man at the bar sighed and looked at his half-empty glass of beer, wondering if he’d get to finish it.

“Hey, I’m talking to you!”

The dark-haired man sighed again, louder this time, and looked over his left shoulder. It was a task not as easy as it sounds when you’d been shot in your right shoulder. He’d been looking over his shoulder a whole lot these past few years.

“Do I know you?”

The man who’d spoken first stared at the dark stranger in town.

For his part, the stranger took in the man with a quick glance before turning back to his beer. He’d seen the same man, or a near-enough version anyway, in every town from his birthplace of Sourwood Springs, Texas, to here, wherever here was. Some little mining town in the eastern foothills of the great spine of the Rockies.

And every time, the stranger saw the same thing—a fat-faced, sunburned idiot with a look of wet-eyed, drunken glee on his red face. He almost always wanted the same thing—to become instantly famous for killing the world’s deadliest gunfighter. That’d be the stranger in town. Most folks knew him by his killer name, the one he had worn with smug, audacious pride for years. Until . . .

These days, getting recognized happened a whole lot less often than it used to, back when he was still supporting his reputation with gunplay.

“Don’t you turn your face from me, mister! I asked you a question and I dang well want an answer.”

The gunfighter flicked his eyes up from his glass, caught the gaze of the barkeep, who looked a little alarmed, but was doing nothing to calm the situation, save for standing with his chubby hands gripping his bar towel too tight above his big, aproned belly.

The barkeep had been a decent sort and the stranger didn’t think he’d do anything foolish. Not that he cared one way or the other.

The stranger’s gaze followed around once more, this time to the man who’d addressed him, who had moved and now stood a half-dozen feet from him at the bar, facing him. The promise of the unknown, of the expectation of some vague victory, hung within his grasp, mere moments away. The stranger had seen the look far too many times before.

“My name is Gage. Jon Gage,” said the stranger in a low, even voice. Then he once more turned his attention to the glass before him.

“I knew it! I knew it! You are him, you are Jon Gage, Texas Lightning! One and the same! I know all about you!” The man held his hands on his own gun belt. And he took a step closer.

The stranger named Gage ran his tongue over his teeth, then, without looking up, crooked his right index finger at the man, beckoning the hopeful fool closer.

The man swallowed and did as he was bade. When he was but a foot from Gage, he bent his head down as the gunfighter said, “I am who you say. And I won’t be prodded.” His voice came out low, cold, and grating—pitted, rusting steel sliding on pitted, rusting steel.

The red-faced man swallowed and pulled his head back.

Gage said no more. A few quiet moments passed; then the foolish, hopeful man turned, still wide-eyed, and hustled on out the door.

Gage sipped his beer. He knew he’d not seen the last of the man, who would, soon enough, blather to all his friends about the close call he’d had with Texas Lightning. Then they’d all gather and wait for him to leave the saloon. Maybe they’d challenge him, maybe they would just stare and shiver and try to look bold. It didn’t much matter to Jon Gage what they did.

He’d leave by the front door anyway. And then, come what may, if they chose to shoot him, fine. He could not do much to defend himself, as he wore no guns.

But for now, he would sit in the otherwise-empty little saloon and enjoy his warm beer.

“Another?” said the barkeep.

Gage looked at the man a moment. “Sure. Why not?”

The barkeep filled a new glass and set it before Gage. Then he cocked his head to one side. “Why didn’t you just say, ‘No, that isn’t me. Sorry, you don’t have the right person’?”

“Because that would be wrong.”

“Huh?”

“Dishonest,” said Gage. “It’d be a lie, and I won’t do that.”

He looked at Gage as if the gunfighter had just gutted a kitten with a wooden spoon.

Gage knew the reason and the logic behind the sideways look. A gunfighter who won’t lie? To most folks, that’d be like a lion that eats oats.

The barkeep shrugged and worked his rag in slow circles down the length of the already-gleaming bar top, leaving Jon Gage to once more walk his way through the stump field that was his mind.

Far from the first time, Gage ruminated on the fact that life was an odd affair. Most folks start off in much the same way, with a big future wide open before them. And almost as soon as you begin to draw breath and yelp and gurgle, you begin limiting yourself and narrowing your future by making choices, good ones, bad ones, downright vile ones, but all choices, nonetheless.

As odd as many of those choices and the lives surrounding them might get, very few folks wake up one day and say, “I’m going to kill people for a living.” Very few, indeed. But he did. In a roundabout way, that is.

And with that thought, Jon Gage, a slender, broad-shouldered, dark-haired man, with the beginnings of early gray dusting his temples, sat at the bar in a little mountain mining town in the eastern foothills of the Rockies, with a fresh glass of beer before him.

With that, Jonathan Gage, aka Texas Lightning, levered himself, like a boulder freshly unearthed, and sent himself toppling and rolling, crashing and careening downhill, back into his past.

Twelve years earlier than his present day

“You will marry and you will take over this here ranch and you will take care of me as I have taken care of you, by gaw!” The rangy, raw-boned man who bellowed this did so from a swaying, spraddle-legged stance, sunken chest working like a bellows, paunched gut slopping.

His veiny face and bulbous red nose shone with sweat, his eyes glistening and wet and reddened. His skin’s gray pallor looked as if it might be more at home on a dead man.

Jonathan Gage stared at this swaying man, Jasper Gage, his father, a bullying, brawling drunkard, who, despite spending most of his life upending one bottle of whiskey after another, still stood half a head taller than his son.

Both men regarded each other, open contempt pulling their features into sneers. Then Gage the elder turned and looked about him for his bottle. He finally realized it was clutched in one of his clawlike hands. He hoisted it and glugged back a couple of swallows.

“If Mama was here, you’d not act this way.”

The older man swung around, his latest bottle arcing wide as he spun. “What? You dare mention your sainted mother to me?”

Jon Gage snorted and shook his head. “Now she’s sainted? Seems to me you should have thought about that before you drove her to her grave.”

“Me? Why, you whelp! I’ll show you a grave!” The big man lunged, clearing half the room in two bold strides, upending chairs and a small table. “Ain’t no way no child of mine is going to talk to me that way. And in my own home, too!”

Nothing his father was doing much surprised Jon Gage, as they’d plowed this same ground many times in the past.

“I told you more times than a man can count,” said Jon, sidestepping his wildly lunging father, “that I am not a child and I am not afraid of you.”

The older man pulled up short, realizing with a headshake that his son was not in front of him, but standing to the side, arms folded over his chest. The younger man continued to speak. “I am dang sure not going to marry to please you. And I am not going to take over this snake-infested sand pit you call a ranch! Heck, even the cattle we got don’t know it’s a ranch! It’s no small wonder they look more like mangy coyotes than beeves, and light out for anywhere but here all the time anyway. No, sir.” He shook his head. “I won’t do any of that.”

Jasper Gage leered, his lips pulled back tight over his yellow teeth. He was about to launch into the familiar bellow that, in his whiskey-addled mind, he was perennially convinced would finally, finally convince his useless, fool-minded boy he’d best do all the things his father told him, without question, and right quick.

But as happened each time the topic came up, at least once a week now that the boy was of marrying age, Jasper Gage’s volley of words had been preempted by the young man’s usual final protest of the night.

Once more, Jonathan Gage stood his ground, tall and bold, chest filled with air, broad shoulders squared, and outthrust finger pointed at his father. “You pathetic old drunkard! You honestly think I’d take any advice from you? You honestly think I’d take care of you? Way you’re going, it wouldn’t be a long-term job, I’ll grant you that. But ha to that, I say. Ha!” He snorted and shook his head, the smile on his mouth a brief, tight one, the rest of his visage hard-set in scorn and disgust.

That’s when the old man did something that surprised them both. He whipped his right arm around, the one ending in a balled fist clutching the nearly empty whiskey bottle.

The thick fingers released the vessel, which spun end over end, spraying the amber liquid about the room, the bottle aimed right at Jonathan’s head.

The younger man, blessed with a sober mind and the reflexes of youth, was able to jerk his head to the side in time to avoid a full-on, direct hit to the face. But not quick enough to prevent the bottle smacking the side of his head, just behind his left eye, before glancing off and smashing on the flagged floor.

Jonathan’s temple throbbed with eyeblink speed and his fingertips patted the spot. No blood, but it was already swelling. The younger Gage had spent much of his life under the man’s thumb, and hated his father for being who he was: a bully; a domineering, loudmouthed braggart with a ready, brutal word, and an even quicker taste of knuckles across the teeth.

Despite all this, and so much more, at that moment young Jonathan knew he was too much like his father in so many other ways. His hair-trigger temper was the most prominent of them.

Granted, it took Jonathan a whole lot longer to touch off than it did Jasper, but when he did, he was a whole lot like the old man, but a whole lot younger and quicker, too. And stronger, despite the fact that Jasper was an old bull with a lot of ranch-built power still backing his walloping, ham-size hands.

At that moment, the leeching color of blood red drizzled down before his eyes, not from a cut, but from within, fueled by rage, Gage rage, and he set his jaw and met the old man.

Jasper barreled at him, growling low and deep like a bull grizz. The two men met in the midst of the mess of the room.

It was Jonathan Gage’s hard, quick, solid, slamming fist that made first contact between the two men, father and son, that night. It was not the first time they had come to blows over this threadbare topic, but neither man knew it would be the last.

Jonathan’s big fist slammed hard into his father’s once-broad chest, square and true. The blow stopped the older man as if he’d run smack into a stone wall. He jerked upright to his full height, eyes pulled wider than they had been since he’d begun tugging on the bottle’s mouth that day, and they looked straight at the younger man.

Jasper’s mouth opened in a big O and a thin, wheezing, scratchy sound came out, the only sound at that moment in the low-line ranch house.

Jonathan stood before the rigid man, his eyes also wide, his breath also stoppered, and his leading fist still balled and held before him, as if he were hoisting a lantern by the bail.

Jasper remained rigid, then swiveled his rheumy eyes up at his son and they narrowed. A low growl rose up from the depths of his once-mighty chest and a slow grin spread over his mouth. He tried another sloppy swing, but his eyes once more went wide and he stiffened, seemed to see something beyond Jon’s right shoulder, and spasmed as he dropped to the floor in a sloppy heap.

“Pop?”

Jon remained immobile, his fist held before him, and he eyed his father sprawled at his feet.

“Pop!”

The old man remained motionless, curled in a heap on the scarred plank floor. His son’s fist sagged, then dropped to his side. He knelt and felt for the man’s breath. It was there.

“Lousy drunkard.” Jonathan turned and walked away.

“Yes, sir, Monty, I figure what I am best suited to is tending to the cards at the baize goddess over there, and dallying with the pretty ladies in this wind-stripped border town. And”—he smacked his empty mug on the bar top—“sampling the fine beer you serve here at the Top Palace! And speaking of, what say you top up that glass, huh, Monty?”

“You’ve about had enough, ain’t you, Jon?”

Quicker than it seemed a man was capable of, Jon Gage shoved back and upright, sending the tall stool he’d been perched on stuttering, then pitching backward. “You going to tell me what I am and ain’t capable of, Monty?”

“Oh, heck, Jon, set yourself back down.” Monty barely blinked, accustomed as he was to the hair-trigger reactions of the Gage men. He drew another beer and set it before the still-sneering Gage.

Jon Gage eyed the beer, then smiled and stood his stool up and settled himself once more.

“Aw, you know I’m funning you, Monty. I’m just worked up about the old man.”

“What’s new?”

Gage nodded. “Yeah, we had ourselves another session. He won’t listen to reason. He wants me to take over that rank little ranch and get married to some brood cow and tend to his sorry self so he can spend all his time drinking. Which he does anyway!”

Monty nodded and poured a shot for a newcomer who’d just sidled up to the bar. Gage glanced sideways at the man. “I know you, stranger?”

The newcomer sipped his whiskey, without looking to his right. He was an average-height man in a low-crown black hat, with more than the usual scatter of lines about his eyes and mouth, and a day’s worth of peppered whiskers on his hard-lined jaw. And he wore a tied-down, double-gun rig hanging low beneath his short, rawhide brown vest. “Doubt it.”

“Huh,” said Jon. “You sure do look familiar.” He sighed. “All right, then, since we don’t know one another, and since my sainted mother always said folks you ain’t yet met are just friends waiting to happen, or something like that, let me buy you a round of that rye whiskey you’re nibbling on.”

That finally drew the stranger’s attention enough for him to turn his gaze on Gage. “Why?”

“Why what? Why would I buy you a drink?” Gage looked at Monty, smiling, but only with his eyes. “This fellow is a character, all right. Suspicious of someone who’d buy him a shot of rye!” He smacked the bar top and then knocked back a shot himself. He refilled it, held up the glass, and winked at the stranger. “Here’s to you!”

The stranger seemed to relax, perhaps even smile a little, and finished off his drink, then had himself another.

Monty moved on down the bar, shaking his head, to serve other customers. The stranger nodded once at Gage. “I thank you kindly, son,” he said.

“You bet . . . Pops!” Gage let loose with a burble of laughter and tucked into another shot of rye.

He did not notice that the stranger had lost the meager beginnings of a smile he’d tried to conjure. Now he looked cold and hard once more.

Several long minutes passed as Jon Gage felt the familiar but welcome roar of heat from all that whiskey in so short a time, sending pleasurable flames up his throat and warming his chest and face.

Finally he said, “I will say that you are the touchiest old fellow I ever did meet hereabouts. Oh, oh, wait a minute!” Gage poked skyward with a finger. “I take that back. My old man is by far the prickliest hereabouts. But you are a sour close second—yes, sir!” He nodded and knocked back another round.

“That’s it!” The older stranger spun, both hands on the butt ends of his revolvers. “You have insulted me for the last time, you wet-nose pup.” His words had a drawl to them, not local, as far as Gage could tell.

But at that moment, he did not think much about the man’s accent. Nor did he hear the rest of the sounds in the well-filled, smokey room stutter to a stop.

The piano player, a garter-armed old soak named Benny, spun in his stool, facing the impending scuffle with a ripple of glee up his spine and a grin on his face.

All the gamblers at the baize tables paused, too, their cigars and pipes clamped in their lips, eyes wide, cards held in midair, chips no longer clinking. Even the two women cavorting with cowhands stilled their twittering ministrations.

Only Monty, the barkeep, spoke up. “All right, you two. Enough of this. You have a complaint, you take it up with each other anywhere but in here. I have no doubt you two could wind up killing one another.”

“Outside, then,” said the stranger, and pushed past Gage, notably not knocking into him as he did several other men no less far from his steam-fueled swagger.

“I reckon not,” said Gage in a low, cold tone.

The stranger had just about reached the double doors. He jerked to a halt; those who could see him saw a slow sneer spread across his stubbled features. He half turned. “That mean you are too yellow to fight me . . . pup?”

“Benny!” shouted Monty to the piano man. “Go get Marshal Wickham.”

The piano player didn’t move.

“Benny!”

He relented. “Aw, Monty, I’m going to miss all the doings!”

“You’ll have plenty of time to miss things when you’re out of work. Now get gone!”

Monty’s exaggerated threat struck a note of humor with everyone there, despite, or perhaps because of, the drama of violence unfolding before them. Several folks giggled and others used the moment as a means of releasing nervous chuckles. The moment did not last long.

“Shut it!” growled the stranger, presuming he was in charge.

Monty palmed the bar top and vaulted over, landing hard on his backside on the polished surface to skitter coins and clatter glassware. He did not stop, but shoved off and, though a large man, bounded between Gage and the stranger and held up both arms wide, one big hand aimed at each. “No, sir! Not in my bar! No, I say!”

“Fine,” said Gage, shoving past Monty’s arm and knocking into the stranger’s shoulder as he kicked on through the door and onto the planking of the boardwalk out front.

“Gage! Don’t do it!”

But the riled young man was beyond hearing.

A dozen folks spilled out behind him, whispering and jostling each other to get out there, eager for a closeup spot to what was looking like it might well be an honest-to-goodness shoot-out right there on the mangy, dusty, little main street of Sourwood Springs, Texas. Who would have thought it?

The stranger strode out, once more shoving past Monty, who, still holding a bar towel in a balled fist, turned back to his nearly empty establishment and threw it down hard onto the floor.

His gaze flicked up to the one person in the bar, an old drunkard named Jubal, who swamped the place for Monty now and again. He wasn’t up to tasks any more menial than emptying spittoons and sweeping because he’d all but pickled himself through long years of guzzling booze whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Such as it was doing at that moment.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Jubal!”

The old soak smirked and shrugged his shoulders as he guzzled back whatever remained of the drinks Monty’s patrons had left behind as they hustled out front.

“Knock it off, now, and get out there. I don’t trust you any more than I trust a cat to guard a jug of cream.”

Jubal dragged his feet as he trailed along the bar, keeping his eyes on Monty.

The big barkeep turned away for a moment to glance out the doorway at the proceedings and Jubal took that moment to claw a half-filled bottle of rye whiskey and snatch it back as quick as his trembly old limbs would allow. He had just gotten it snugged beneath the ragged front of his rancid-smelling coat when Monty glanced back at him.

The barkeep had seen the theft, but let it go. He reckoned Jubal was close to ending his days anyhow. A victory now and again to think back on might comfort him when the time came.

Both men were almost to the door when over his shoulder, old wobbly Jubal said, “All I know is I wouldn’t want to be in no gunfight with Lightnin’ Shiller.”

Monty grabbed the old man by the shoulder and spun him. “What’s that you say?” He ignored the bottle of rye Jubal had already palmed and was fishing out of his coat.

“I said that stranger yonder in the street fixing to gun down young Jon Gage is none other than Lee Shiller from Arkansas. Course most folks know him as Lightning Shiller. But you knew that.”

He’d gotten about half of that out when Monty shoved him to the side and barreled on through bystanders thronging the porch before his bar. By the time he reached the steps, two shots cracked the near-silent, stifling Texas air. One shot gnashed its teeth at the heels of the first.

Monty looked left, then right, and saw astonishment on the faces of both men.

It hadn’t taken the two riled men, strangers to one another, very long to make their way out to the dusty street.

“You called me out,” shouted Gage, standing in the midst of the dusty street, facing the other man some fifty feet from him. “Get to it!”

“You heard him,” shouted the stranger to the crowd. “I am defending myself here! This young pup has threatened me!”

“He did no such thing!” an irate fellow shouted from atop steps across the street.

Both gunmen ignored him, and just as the stranger’s right arm began to tighten and flex, drawing itself upward, a voice from the western end of the street shouted, “Hold there! This is Marshal Wickham! Hold, men!”

But it was too late.

From Marshal Wickham’s vantage point, more or less aligned with the two shooters, he could see both, and knew the name of one—young Jon Gage, at the far end. The other, a stranger to Sourwood Springs, was unknown to him.

But as the last of his bellowed commands to cease this madness were clipped off by double gunfire, what he saw was the stranger jerk as if gripped by a brief bout of ague.

Blue smoke drifted upward, obscuring Wickham’s view of Gage, in the distance. Closer in, with his back to the lawman, the stranger followed up his jerking motion with a sideways step, showing him in profile to the lawman.

Past him, through the clearing smoke, Marshal Wickham now saw Gage, still holding his own six-gun at gut height, his tall form bent forward in a slight crouch, his gun-free right hand slightly raised as if he was about to bat away an irksome bluebottle.

The lawman realized that he’d neglected to draw his own weapon, so shocked had he been at seeing this, and hearing the fool piano player tell him there was about to be a gunfight in Sourwood Springs, his very town.

Marshal Wickham snatched at his gun and tried to jerk it free of the holster, but the rawhide thong was tied over the hammer. He fumbled with it, without lifting his eyes from the scene before him.

And then, before he could do anything else, the stranger, still holding his six-gun in his right hand, completed his turn and stared now at the lawman.

Wickham drew and cocked, aiming at the stranger. “Drop it, mister! Now!” But even as he said it, he saw the reason for the man’s jerking and sloppy turn—the stranger had been shot, just below the chest.

His shirt sported a dark stain leaching outward from a puckered, smoking hole between the wings of his unbuttoned rawhide vest. For a flash of a second, it looked to the lawman as if the man had spilled wine on himself. But no, this was no wine stain.

As if to prove the lawman’s assessment, the stranger’s left knee buckled forward and the man dropped as if time had slowed, falling face down on the dusty street.

For a long moment, still stretching out that sliver of slowed time, or so it seemed to Marshal Wickham, the entire town of Sourwood Springs, Texas, fell silent. Not a rooster could be heard crowing from one of the many coops behind the houses and businesses lining the dusty street. No children shouted, no steers bellowed, not even a fly buzzed.

Everyone on the street merely stared—and that turned out to be most of the residents of the town proper, plus whoever happened to be in town shopping or otherwise engaged. And what they stared at was the face-down, dead man, a stranger in their midst, a stranger who would never leave. Indeed, he would become enmeshed in the town’s history, its folklore, forever.

Beyond the dead man, also in the street, half crouched, the man who had sh. . .