The Killing Shot

by Johnny D. Boggs

Genres: Westerns

Synopsis

“Unparalleled in evoking the gritty reality of the Old West” (Shootist), Johnny D. Boggs mixes adventure and realism with a torrid storytelling style all his own. In The Killing Shot, Deputy U.S. Marshal Reilly McGilvern is hauling criminals to Yuma when his prison wagon is attacked, and McGilvern is left locked inside to die. When another outlaw gang comes upon the scene, McGilvern thinks he’s lived to see another day—but his problems are just beginning.

Release date: October 1, 2010

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

That morning found him bleeding more than usual.

“You gotta keep your head back, Jimmy,” Three-Fingers Lacy coaxed him in her nasal, whiskey-rotted drawl. “Keep your head back, honey, till the bleedin’ stops.”

“I keep looking into that sun,” he told her, “I’ll go blind.”

“Close your eyes, sweetie,” she said, and pressed the dirty, blood-soaked handkerchief tighter against his nose. “Close ’em tight.”

Reluctantly, Jim Pardo obeyed, but it didn’t help. Ten in the morning, and the sun blasted like a furnace. Of course, she could have suggested that they turn around, so they weren’t facing the sun, but Lacy didn’t have the brains to figure that out. It didn’t matter. His neck hurt. Keep this up, and he’d get a crick. Blind, with a bent neck, and a bitch of a nosebleed. Wouldn’t Wade Chaucer and the other members of his gang love that? He’d be deader than dirt.

“I’m gonna need another rag or somethin’,” Three-Fingers Lacy said. “This one’s soaked through.” She pulled the handkerchief away. Her tone changed. “I’m worried about you, Jimmy. It ain’t never bled this much before.”

She reached for him, but he shoved her arm away and slid off the boulder.

“Jimmy—”

“Shut up,” he told her. “Where’s Ma?”

He pinched his nose, looked at the blood on his fingertips, then wiped them on his vest. Three-Fingers Lacy dropped the bloody rag onto the dirt. The ants would love that. He scratched the palm of his hand against the hammer of his holstered Colt, looked around, tasting the blood as it dripped over his lips. He cursed his nose, loosened his bandana, and saw how his words had hurt Lacy.

Hell of a thing, he thought, softening, and gave her a reassuring grin. “Don’t fret over me, Lacy,” he told her. “Nosebleed ain’t going to bury Bloody Jim Pardo. Thanks for looking after me.”

“It wasn’t nothin’, Jimmy. Ain’t that what wives is supposed to do?”

His smile turned crooked. Wife. Concubine. Whore. Whatever she was. He rolled up the bandana and placed it under his nose, holding it there with his left hand, keeping his right near the Colt.

“Where’s Ma?” he asked again.

“Up yonder with The Greek.” She pointed.

He had to tilt his head back again, but the flow of blood seemed to be slowing. It wasn’t fair. Pardo never knew when his nose would start acting up. He had stopped six or seven bullets, plus a load of buckshot. He didn’t recollect how many men he had killed, and there were prices on his head here in Arizona Territory, plus in New Mexico Territory, Texas, Missouri, Kansas, even California. He led a gang of the toughest black-hearts he had ever known. Seven men, plus his mother and Lacy, not including Bloody Jim Pardo himself. But his nose, and those cursed weak veins, could stop him cold, damned near put him under.

He checked his watch.

“Running late,” he said, and swore.

“What if it don’t come?” Lacy asked. “What if there was some accident?”

“It’ll come,” he said. “The accident won’t happen.” With a wry chuckle, he pointed. “Till right there.”

“But Jimmy—”

“Why don’t you pour yourself a bracer?”

“It’s nine in the morn, Jimmy. That ain’t proper.”

The smile and friendliness vanished. “What the hell do you know about proper?” He walked down the hill toward the Southern Pacific tracks.

 

They had never tried robbing a train. Banks, stagecoaches, mines, Army paymasters, regular citizens, and wagon caravans, sure—so many times, Pardo had lost count—but never a locomotive, yet Ritcher had told Pardo about the payload, even suggested the place to pull off the robbery, and the Army major had never led them astray yet. Number 18 would be hauling passengers and an express car loaded with green-backs for the soldier boys stationed at Bowie, Lowell, Huachuca, and every other post that stank of Yankee fools in the Sonoran Desert.

She would come charging around that blind curve, and the boys would jerk the rail loose, sending the locomotive and her cars crashing down the embankment, likely killing everyone on board, and thus making it easy for Ma and the boys to collect the strongboxes full of money. They could take anything of value off the dead passengers and be back in their hideout in the Dragoons before the blue-bellies knew they wouldn’t be collecting their fifteen dollars that month and those fools waiting at the Tucson depot realized their loved ones were feeding buzzards.

 

With dead eyes, Wade Chaucer watched Pardo slide down the hill. Despite the heat, Chaucer wore a coat of black wool, a fine silk shirt, and red necktie accented with a fancy diamond stickpin. The coat remained unbuttoned, and the slim fingers of his right hand drummed a tune on the holster he kept below his stomach. His left hand emptied a cup of coffee by his black boots, and slowly pushed back his wide-brimmed gray hat.

“How’s your nose, Pardo?” he said easily.

Smiling, Pardo slung the bloodstained bandana over his neck, but didn’t bother to tie the ends into a knot. That would take two hands, and Pardo wasn’t foolish enough to give Chaucer any notions, or chances.

“I’ll live,” he said.

Chaucer grinned back. “For how long?”

“Longer than you.”

With a shrug and a bow, Chaucer said in Spanish, “Vamos a ver.”

They were opposites, and Pardo hated Chaucer for it. Wade Chaucer was tall, handsome, knew about good wines and champagne, wore a nickel-plated Remington, and could speak, when he wanted to, like an educated man. Pardo had even heard him talk in some fancy language. Latin, Chaucer had told him. Ma had never got around to teaching Jim Pardo how to read, probably because she couldn’t read or write herself, though she often pretended to. Pardo couldn’t make five-foot-four with two-inch heels on his boots, and he dressed like some saddle tramp with an old Colt that was beaten and scarred, but well-used. So Chaucer and Pardo despised each other but needed each other.

At least, for now.

Pardo pointed a short finger at the small fire a few yards away underneath a outcropping of rock, a blackened coffeepot on the coals. “Your idea?”

Chaucer’s reply came as a shrug, but the gangly man with the rough beard squatting next to the fire answered for him. “We rode hard, boss man. Ain’t et nothin’ since day ’fore yesterday. We figured coffee would put somethin’ in our guts.”

Pardo’s right hand gripped the Colt, and he glared. “I’ll put something in your gut right now, Duke, if you don’t put that fire out. If that engineer spots our smoke…”

“The fire’s small, boss man, and we built it under—”

Pardo drew the Colt, but Duke started furiously kicking sand over the fire, spraying the pot and cups while he pleaded with Pardo that he was doing it, he was doing it, the fire was out, no harm had been done.

Glancing back at Chaucer, Pardo kept the Colt level. The black-clad gunman merely smiled and rose easily.

“Train isn’t here, Pardo.”

“It’ll be here. Major Ritcher said—”

“What if it doesn’t come?”

“Then you can help Duke build another fire and make another pot of coffee.”

“Where’s Lacy?” Chaucer looked up the hill.

Pardo shoved the short-barreled .44-40 into the holster. “That’s Missus Pardo to you, pal.”

“So you keep reminding me.”

The flash of white light caught his eye, and Pardo was moving past Chaucer and Duke, stepping up a series of rocks. He saw the sunlight reflecting off his mother’s Winchester.

“Train’s coming, boys,” Pardo said, his smile widening again, and he whipped off his sweat-stained hat, and waved it at the lookouts, turning, moving quickly.

“Duke, you sure those ropes are tied good?”

“Yes, boss man!”

“They’d better be. Soledad!”

Two wiry Mexicans in buckskins, appearing out of nowhere, suddenly slid down the hill.

“You and your brother know what to do, amigo?” Pardo asked.

“Sí,” the older one, with the salt-and-pepper mustache and goatee, answered.

“Then do it. Come on, Chaucer.”

Running now, sniffing, Pardo climbed back up the hill, kicking dust and gravel at Chaucer, who was coming up right behind him. Three-Fingers Lacy had found a bottle where he had left her, but she quickly corked it and dropped the rye in the brush beside her.

“The train?” she managed.

“Get to the horses,” Pardo barked. “When that train goes over, it’s going to sound like the world’s coming to an end, and if those horses spook, leave us afoot, we’re all dead. But you’ll be the first to reach hell, girl. Phil?”

“It’s done, Jim.” Good old Phil, Pardo thought. Phil had been riding with Pardo since Missouri during the War. He was the only man out here Pardo could trust, though not enough to turn his back on him.

He spotted the dust, sifting off to the southwest on the other side of the butte, and heard the hoofbeats as Ma whipped the bay gelding. That old woman must have been born in a saddle, Pardo marveled, as she reached the bottom and never slowed, leaping over the Southern Pacific rails, then swinging from the saddle and handing the reins to Duke. Winchester in her left hand, she scurried up the hill and slid to a stop.

“How you feeling, Jim?”

“I’m fine now, Ma,” Pardo answered. “Finer than frog hair cut eight ways. Where’s The Greek?”

“Up yonder. With his Sharps. Just like you wanted.”

“Good. How far away’s the train?”

“It’ll be here in a few minutes. Then it’ll be in hell.”

He laughed. There was nothing to do but wait.

The Greek, that sharpshooting son of a bitch, would keep them covered with his .45-70 in case anything went wrong. Three-Fingers Lacy and Phil would hold the horses. Soledad and Duke had mounted up and dallied the ends of their lariats around the saddle horns. As soon as they heard the train roaring around that curve, they’d spur their mounts and pull out the rail they had loosened last night. Soledad’s brother, Rafael, stood closer to the tracks, his hands gripping a double-barreled Parker ten-gauge.

Pardo, Ma, Chaucer, and Harrah, who had just come out of the brush after nature’s call, stood on the ledge, hands on their guns, sweating, hearts pounding, excited.

Black smoke drifted into the pale sky. That was all for several minutes. Then they could make out the chugging engine. Pardo wet his lips. At least his nose had stopped bleeding. He scratched the palm of his hand on the .44-40’s hammer. The chugging turned into a roar, almost deafening it seemed, but Pardo figured that had to be his imagination. Smoke, thicker now, blackened the sky as the 4-4-0 Baldwin rounded the curve and came into view.

Immediately, the air brakes screamed, and the giant wheels bit into the rails—even before Soledad and Duke spurred the horses and jerked the rail off the track. That engineer was savvy, Pardo conceded, had a pair of eyes on him a falcon might envy. Must have spotted the ropes tied on the loose rail, hit the brakes, and tried to reverse the engine. But that old 4-4-0 was going too fast. Trying to make up time. Damned shame. Pardo laughed.

One man leaped from the cab. The fireman, Pardo figured, and then Pardo saw nothing but dust, steam, black smoke, and black metal. The 4-4-0 leaped off the rails and slammed down the embankment, the tender toppling over and crashing down on the locomotive as it smashed a boulder and toppled onto its side, followed by a violent explosion that knocked Pardo off his feet and started his nosebleed again.

His ears rang, and the dust blinded him. Pardo swore, trying to find his Colt, but he had lost it. He shook his head, felt strong fingers on his shoulders, and he fought them off, but couldn’t, felt the fingers biting into him, shaking him. Then he heard the words:

“Son. Jim! Jim! It’s me. It’s your mother! Son! Are you all right?”

Another explosion.

He shook his head. Tried to answer his mother. Tell her he was fine.

Metal smashing metal, the splintering of wood, savage blasts, and that damned ringing in his ears. Pardo tasted blood again. He spit. Cursed. Felt his mother putting the Colt in his right hand, and he saw her old, weather-beaten face, those cold blue eyes, felt himself being helped to his feet. His hat, somehow, remained on his head. He pulled it off, waved at the dust, seemed to tell his mother he hadn’t been hurt, and wiped the blood from his nose with the back of his left hand.

The hellish noise ceased, as did the ringing in his ears, and he walked to the edge and looked down upon his handiwork.

Beside him, heavy sarcasm laced Wade Chaucer’s laugh.

“Is that the way Jesse James used to do it, Pardo?” Chaucer asked.

A piercing scream sounded below. Ignoring Chaucer, Pardo looked at the tracks. The bay gelding his mother had given Duke was a gory mess, but Duke seemed to be all right. So was Soledad. He couldn’t say the same about Soledad’s brother, who lay writhing on the ground like a dying snake. Soledad tried to hold him down. Duke stared, gagging, at Rafael’s bloody body.

Pardo spit and looked down at carnage that had once been a Southern Pacific train.

The tender, smashed to pieces, lay atop the locomotive, which had been turned into nothing more than a pile of twisted black metal that looked as if it had been blown apart by ten howitzers. The express car and two passenger cars had slid off the rails and fallen onto their sides before the caboose had flown over the rails, splintering the last coach.

“Which one’s got the money, Cap’n?” Harrah asked.

“Express car.” Chaucer answered for Pardo. “The one that’s burning like hell.”

Pardo’s eyes smarted. Damned car was going up like a tinderbox. Wood crackled, and Rafael screamed for mercy.

“The money,” Harrah said. “The Army money. It’s burning—”

“Check on Lacy and the horses, Ma.” Pardo’s voice was soft. He wet his lips, shoved the Colt bitterly into the holster. “Tell Phil we won’t have need of the buckboard.”

Chaucer snorted again.

“One more snigger, and I’ll bury you here, too.” Pardo spit again, before turning to Harrah. “All right, boys. Might as well go check out the passenger coaches before they go up in smoke, too. Salvage something out of this mess.”

He slid down the hill and made a beeline for Soledad, Duke, and what once had been Rafael. When the engine’s boiler blew, it had sprayed slivers of wood and steel like grapeshot. The bay gelding had caught most of the blast. Rafael had gotten an unhealthy chunk. Only something short of a miracle had protected Duke, Soledad, and the other horse, not to mention Pardo, his mother, and those watching from the hilltop.

Blood poured from both corners of Rafael’s mouth, his nose, and what looked like a thousand holes in his body. His left arm was gone at the elbow, and a piece of metal three inches wide and two feet long stuck out of his groin like a saber. Pardo knelt beside him and slowly lifted his head to find Soledad.

Tears streamed down the tall Mexican’s face. He crossed himself, and made himself look at Pardo. He mouthed something in Spanish. Pardo didn’t know what he had said for sure, but he knew what he had to do.

Slowly, he drew the Colt, thumbed back the hammer, and shot Rafael in the head.

“Sorry, amigo,” he told Soledad, as he stood, shoving the revolver into the holster.

“Gracias.” Soledad wiped his eyes with a gloved hand. “With your permission, I will take my brother back to the home of my blessed mother.”

“Take your time.” That was proper. He liked the Mexican for that, for thinking of his mother. Family was important. The most important thing, maybe, next to money and dead Yankees. “We’ll see you in the Dragoons.”

Pardo was moving again. Seemed like he was always moving. He saw the fireman, half-buried in debris, his neck broken, and wondered if he’d find the engineer somewhere beneath the rubble, probably his hands still pulling on the brake. The engineer had died game, which is more than he could say about the fireman. Or Rafael. Or Ma’s bay gelding.

He slid down with an avalanche of stones, dirt, and pieces from the train, feeling the heat from the roaring fire, put his hand on the smashed wood of the second passenger coach, or maybe it was the caboose. Hard to tell amid all this ruin. A fire had started licking its way down the smashed wood. Behind him, The Greek was riding his dun horse down the butte, letting the horse pick its own path downhill, keeping his Sharps cradled across his saddle. Harrah and Chaucer were checking the first passenger coach. Mostly Harrah. Chaucer had kept his distance from the wreck. Now Duke ran over to help.

Pardo swallowed and looked into what once had been a window of the second coach. He saw a dead man’s face, and walked on, then stopped, frozen.

Harrah had climbed out of the ruins of the first coach, stopping to mop sweat off his face with a calico bandana. Behind him rose a small arm, so white, so stained with blood. The scene completely mesmerized Pardo.

The fingers stretched out, fell on Harrah’s shoulder, and Harrah screamed.

Charleston’s whores came out that morning to serenade the Kraft brothers.

A couple of strumpets, Deputy U.S. Marshal Reilly McGivern decided, could actually sing, so well that he found himself humming a few bars of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” when deputies Gus Henderson and Frank Denton led L.J. and W.W. Kraft, arms and legs chained, out of the jail and toward the black-barred prison wagon waiting for them at the corner of Stove and Second streets. Deputy Slim Chisum, who was the definition of the word cautious, climbed into the wagon’s driver’s box and thumbed back the hammers of his sawed-off twelve-gauge.

Reilly pulled open the door at the back of the wagon and waited.

Next, the whores started “Oh, My Darling, Clementine,” which everyone seemed to be singing that year. Reilly hated that stupid song and tried to hum “Lorena” instead, but he couldn’t keep it up because of the whores, who crowded Charleston’s streets while other residents, the kinds usually seen on the streets in the daylight, gathered along the boardwalks—keeping a respectable distance, naturally, from the whores—to watch the show.

It had turned hot that morning, and the air stank of the smoke pouring out of the stamp mills along the river. Reilly shot a glance at the rooftops, spotting the sheriff’s deputies and town marshal’s men in position, rifles ready, and made himself relax. K.C. Kraft wouldn’t try anything today. Not here. The only threat out in Charleston, he thought with a grin, was a case of the clap.

He kept his left hand on the door.

Marshal Zan Tidball had spent a lot of money on this prison wagon, and Reilly had decided it would pay for itself once he got the Kraft brothers to Yuma. If he got there. It was a black wagon—except for the freshly painted yellow wheels, and silver words, U.S. MARSHAL, ARIZONA TY., on the left side—with a wood bottom, housing an iron jail on the bed that would soak up the Arizona heat like the sand swallowed water. The iron bars allowed a breeze, at least, and they could chain the brothers to the floor if needed.

Marshal Ken Cobb, who typically oversaw the district that covered Cochise and Pima counties, had instructed Reilly to transport the prisoners in the wagon along the San Pedro River north to Contention City, where they would board the train to Benson, then catch the Southern Pacific all the way to Yuma, where they would deliver the two Krafts to the warden at the territorial pen.

Simple enough.

Except everybody in Arizona Territory knew about it, including K.C. Kraft, the third, and meanest, brother, who hadn’t been captured or killed. So Reilly had thought of something better, although he hadn’t gotten around to telling Cobb or Marshal Tidball, or anyone else. Hell, Reilly never had been good at following orders.

“All right, ladies,” he said easily. “Let’s make room for the gentlemen.”

He wore blue trousers tucked inside black, $15 stovepipe boots inlaid with green, four-leaf clovers; a mustard and brown-checked collarless shirt; faded blue bandana; and a wide-brimmed, flat-crowned hat the color of wet adobe. A six-point star hung from the lapel of his gray vest, and a long-barrel Merwin, Hulbert & Co. .44 fit snugly on his right hip, six shells for easy access on the tooled leather holster. He turned so that the Krafts couldn’t reach the revolver, and let the whores keep singing.

L.J. Kraft climbed into the wagon without a word, but W.W. stopped to hold out his manacled hands.

“How about taking these bracelets off, Mac?” W.W. showed his yellow, crooked teeth.

Reilly stared.

“Hell,” W.W. said, “I just want to feel Matilda’s tit-ties before I take my leave, and don’t want to hurt her none with this iron.”

Somewhere in the crowd, Matilda giggled.

“That iron,” Reilly said, “stays on till you get to Yuma.”

“You ain’t Cupid,” W.W. said, and climbed into the wagon with his older brother. Reilly slammed the door, locked it, and tossed the keys to Frank Denton.

“Gus,” Reilly told the young, pockmarked deputy, “get up there with Chisum. Frank, fetch our horses.” He looked at the rooftops again. A sheriff’s deputy nodded that everything looked fine. Reilly let out a breath.

“All this for just us two poor, misguided souls.” W.W. Kraft laughed. “We can’t be that dangerous.”

No, Reilly thought. K.C. was the dangerous one. The free one. That’s what worried him.

The whores started singing “Rock of Ages.”

Stepping back, Reilly wiped the beads of sweat peppering his forehead.

“Why don’t you shut them the hell up, McGivern?” Slim Chisum grumbled from the driver’s box. He hadn’t lowered the hammers of the scattergun.

Reilly shrugged. “Maybe I’m Cupid after all,” he said, but not loud enough to be heard, and walked across the street toward Denton, the horses, and, most importantly, Reilly’s .44 Evans Sporting Rifle in the saddle scabbard. Taking the reins from Denton, Reilly started to swing onto the buckskin gelding. That’s when he saw her, moving through the crowd down the boardwalk, past Wilbur’s Tonsorial Parlor, and into the sea of whores.

He almost didn’t recognize her, not wearing that French sateen skirt with the ruffled bottom and the silk ottoman wrap. Then again, he tried to think of how many times he had seen her with her clothes on. Not that many. At least, never for long.

“Oh, hell,” he. . .