Slocum and the Yellowstone Scoundrel Read online

  Breaking the Law

  The thief studied Slocum’s face for a full minute, then said slowly, “Damned if I don’t believe you. But you got to know the risk I’m takin’.”

  “I’ll do as I promised.”

  “Ain’t no love ’tween Innick and the marshal, that’s for sure. And you and the marshal don’t get on too good either.”

  “I couldn’t care less about the marshal or Innick. I’m being paid to do a job—breaking you out is part of it.”

  “There was this fellow. He was the one who put me up to the robbery in the first place. He was dressed like he was from a circus.”

  Slocum remembered the storekeeper’s description. Purple velvet coat, brocade vest, silk pants. “Only he wasn’t from a circus,” Slocum said. “You said he told you about the jewelry?”

  “He had it all planned out. A real thinker, he was. I did like he told me, and I waltzed away with everything. And that was the strange part. He only wanted that ruby. The rest he let me keep. He ran his finger over that ruby like he was fondlin’ a whore’s tit.”

  The jailhouse’s outer door creaked open. Slocum caught a glimpse of the marshal and dropped out of sight.

  “You promised!” the thief called.

  And Slocum had. First he wanted to be sure about this peacock of a criminal mastermind.

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  SLOCUM AND THE YELLOWSTONE SCOUNDREL

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2013 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

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  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-62236-0

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Jove mass-market edition / May 2013

  Cover illustration by Sergio Giovine.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Contents

  MORE ALL-ACTION WESTERN SERIES

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  1

  “Get back!”

  John Slocum’s warning came an instant too late. Blood sprayed upward and over him. He recoiled, threw up his bare arm, and tried to keep the blood from his eyes. He failed. The world went black around him as Joe Reese’s blood blinded him. Rubbing furiously, he made his eyes water. Cries of utter anguish made it even more important for him to see clearly.

  Reese’s moans lost their shrill, frightened sound and turned to whimpers.

  “Get some help over here!” Slocum shouted. His words were snuffed out by the whine of the sawmill blades chewing through shaved tree trunks to turn out ten-foot-long planks of rough-cut wood.

  “Slocum, help me! Gettin’ so cold,” Reese sobbed out. “Can’t hardly feel nuthin’.” The man moved, trying to reach out for aid. His arm had been severed just above the elbow so all he did was point his stump in Slocum’s direction.

  Slocum fumbled around and found where he had cast off his flannel shirt in the heat of the sawmill and used the sleeve to wipe the other man’s blood from his face. Blurred images came, and then he saw where Reese lay at the foot of the still spinning silver blade.

  How it had happened didn’t matter because nothing now would change the fact that Reese had lost most of his right arm to the huge, spinning saw blade. The spurts of blood from the stump just below the shoulder were diminishing. Slocum knew what that meant. Joe Reese wasn’t long for this world.

  He dropped to his knees beside the man. He pushed him back flat onto the sawdust-covered floor.

  “Lay still,” Slocum snapped. He whipped the sleeve of his shirt around the bloody stump, tied it tight, then found a small branch on the floor. He shoved it between shirt and flesh, then began turning. The tourniquet cut off the tiny blood flow and squeezed down on the stump, threatening to slide off as the skin compressed all the way down to bone.

  Slocum had to readjust it to keep the pressure on. Reese’s blood still oozed out in a gory mix of flesh, dirt, and wood chips. As long as he bled, he lived.

  “What are you two goldbricks doing? Get your asses back to work!”

  Slocum ignored the foreman, Hank Tomasson. He leaned forward and gave the tourniquet another twist. Reese had gone pale, and his lips were turning fat and blue. A minute earlier his face had turned a deathly gray.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Get him some help,” Slocum said. “
This isn’t working. He’s lost too much blood to—”

  He rocked back on his heels and released the tourniquet. Blood dripped from the stump. If Reese was still alive, even with a feebly beating heart, there would have been a renewed spurt.

  “He’s lost it all,” the foreman said. “Ain’t no more to leak out. Damnation. What am I gonna tell the boss? That we’re a hand shy?”

  Slocum looked up, his vision still fuzzed. Tomasson held the severed arm aloft as if it might bite him.

  “You don’t go nowhere, Slocum,” the foreman said. Bellowing to be heard above the din, Tomasson brought half a dozen other men running.

  Slocum sat cross-legged in the sawdust, staring at Tomasson and the arm in the man’s hand. As the foreman finally realized he still held it, he threw the appendage away onto a heap of wood scrap.

  “I tole that stupid son of a bitch to keep his arms free of the blade. That wheel’s a man killer, for certain sure.”

  “Looks like his sleeve got caught on a blade tooth and that pulled him in,” Slocum said.

  “Wasn’t hot enough for him to take off his shirt, I reckon. He shoulda worked hard enough to break a sweat. His loss,” Tomasson said.

  Slocum picked up his shirt and tried to worry out the knot he had tied in the sleeve. The drying blood made that hard. He turned from the body and started out of the sawmill.

  “Where you goin’, Slocum? You get on back here now, you hear? There’s still work to be done!”

  Slocum heard. He didn’t care. He had labored at the sawmill on Otter Creek for the better part of a month after drifting north from Salt Lake City. The Wasatch Mountains in spring didn’t hold much in the way of employment, but he had been lucky to get the job here. Samuel Innick had bought the land and equipment and needed an entire crew when the old one quit as a man, refusing to work for him. Slocum had worked as a lumberjack in the Pacific Northwest a few years earlier, but his experience around the immense blades had gotten him a plum job making twice what a man with an ax could out in the woods.

  He went to the creek and flopped forward, thrust his head under the rapidly flowing cold, crystal water, then sputtered when he couldn’t hold his breath any longer. Dipping his shirt in the frigid river was more likely to set the stains than clean them, but he was past caring. He heard the commotion up in the mill, even over the whup-whup of the turning waterwheel powering the saw blades.

  He scraped at the clotted blood and beat his shirt on the rocks. The blood hadn’t set, not entirely, and he got most of it out. After wringing it as dry as he could, he put it on. The day was warm, but the clammy flannel next to his skin made him shiver.

  “Slocum, the boss wants to see you.” Tomasson wasn’t a man to mince words. For that, Slocum was glad. Pussyfooting around what was likely to come didn’t suit him one little bit. They wanted someone to blame for Reese’s death, and he had been there.

  Case closed.

  He got to his feet and took a deep breath. It did nothing to calm him. He had seen men wounded worse during the war, but so much blood and death weren’t a part of his everyday life now. Not for a spell.

  Plodding back up the steep slope, he started for the mill but Tomasson pointed in the opposite direction.

  “Mr. Innick’s office. He sounded real upset.”

  “Do tell,” Slocum said. From back at the mill came the sounds of men laughing and joking about how dumb Joe Reese had been.

  Their humor disgusted him. Reese had been careless, and it had cost him his life. There wasn’t any call for them to rag on him now. Slocum went to the small cabin where the mill owner kept the books, hired and fired, and passed out the pay every two weeks.

  Slocum was a week from getting more money. He wasn’t sure he could afford to lose that much pay, but the only reason Innick would have to see him was to fire him. Blame him for Reese’s death, chew him out for not instructing the man better, simply vent his own frustration at losing an employee. Slocum didn’t know. What he did know was that the shock was wearing off and a cold fury was building. His hand touched his left hip. He didn’t bother wearing his Colt Navy slung in its cross-draw holster while working. It would only get in his way.

  He had to retrieve it from the bunkhouse before riding on. Going southwest toward Salt Lake City didn’t appeal much to him. The Mormons weren’t inclined to let a man kill the aches and pains of being in the saddle too long with a shot of whiskey. They certainly didn’t cotton to the notion of a man needing the comfort that only a woman could offer unless there was marriage involved. Better that he ride north a ways to Sage Creek Junction, get what supplies he could, and press on into Wyoming or north even farther to Montana. There had to be a horse rancher in need of a wrangler.

  About all the money he had in his jeans was left from the last pay he’d received. Slocum doubted it amounted to more than four dollars, and most of that in greenbacks issued on a local bank. Leave the area and nobody else would touch that paper money.

  The cabin door stood ajar. Slocum pushed it open all the way and waited until Innick noticed him. The mill owner impatiently motioned him inside.

  “Close the door, Slocum.” Innick frowned. “You fall into the millrace or something?”

  Slocum said nothing. This wasn’t going the way he had anticipated.

  “Set yourself down.” Innick scowled as Slocum sank into a chair, then said, “You got the look of a man who can use a six-shooter.”

  “I can.”

  “Thought so from the condition of your iron. Looked worn, used but cared for.”

  “I didn’t shoot Reese,” he said.

  Innick’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. He started to say something, then sagged a little.

  “Damned mill. Everything falls on my shoulders at the same time. Tomasson let me know about the accident. A shame, a damned shame. Now, you willing to earn a reward?”

  “You pay for Reese’s burial?”

  “I don’t—is that part of your price?”

  “What do you want from me?” Slocum knew they could dance around whatever was eating at Innick, and he was in no mood for that.

  “I’ve been robbed. My wife’s jewelry was stolen, and I want you to track down the man who took it.”

  “I’m not a lawman,” Slocum said. The notion of wearing a badge turned him cold.

  More than once he had crossed the line of legality and taken part in bank and stage robberies. It had been a year and longer since that had been the only way to earn money, but if Innick hadn’t given him the sawmill job, he would have been interested in snatching his wife’s jewelry for the paltry few dollars it would get him.

  “Don’t want a lawman, want a bounty hunter.”

  “I’m not a bounty hunter either.” Slocum had been pursued by those relentless men more than once, coming after him for a dispute over land back in Georgia.

  He had been gut shot and left for dead toward the end of the war. Recuperating on the family farm in Calhoun, Georgia, had taken long, lonely months since his parents were dead and his brother had died during Pickett’s Charge. A carpetbagger judge had decided to steal the farm using forged documents. Slocum hadn’t been agreeable. He’d buried the judge and his hired gunman by the springhouse, then ridden on.

  He hated bounty hunters more than he did lawmen. They usually held on to an old wanted poster with his likeness on it on the off chance their wanderings might bring him into their gun sights. Killing a federal judge, even a thieving carpetbagger judge, had dogged his heels ever since.

  “Look, Slocum, I’m offering you five hundred dollars to get back my wife’s jewelry. She got most of it from her ma and grandma. It’s worth a tidy sum, but her family history’s worth far more.”

  Slocum simply stared. Five hundred dollars was more than he had seen in the entire past year. Innick mistook his look.

  “Five hundred and seeing your part
ner isn’t buried in the potter’s field.”

  “Reese? Yeah, good.” Slocum’s mind raced. “Why not let the marshal look into this? You suspect him of being the crook?”

  “I knew I’d picked the right man,” Innick said. “Me and Marshal Smith don’t get on very well. His people come from Scotland, mine from Ireland. Bad blood stretches back all the way to the Emerald Isle.”

  “When was the theft?”

  “Last night, best we can tell. The missus went to put on a cameo broach and the entire box was empty. Gold chains, precious stones set in rings and bracelets, heirlooms.”

  “How much would all this weigh? Could the crook have stuffed it into a coat pocket without being noticed?”

  “I see how you’re thinking, Slocum. He could. A large pocket would hold it all. Or saddlebags. Who’d notice a man walking around here with saddlebags slung over his shoulder?”

  “Anyone missing?”

  Innick turned to stone.

  “I searched everyone’s belongings. Nothing was stashed in the bunkhouse.”

  “That how you came around to the idea I knew how to use my Colt?” Slocum read the answer on the man’s face. This was exactly what had happened. While he sifted through everyone’s belongings looking for the stolen loot, he had found Slocum’s ebony-handled Colt Navy, a six-gun that wouldn’t be out of place in the grip of a gunslinger.

  “I’m offering a lot of money.”

  “How do you know you can trust me?”

  “The jewelry’s not worth five hundred dollars, that’s how. You stand to make a hell of a lot more by being honest.” Innick paused, then said, looking Slocum squarely in the eye, “I can read men pretty good. You might cut corners, but you keep your word. If you promised to do the job, you’d do it honestly.”

  “I need to look around the place where the jewelry was kept. There might be a chance I can track whoever stole it.”

  “A good idea. That never occurred to me. Come along.”

  Innick shot from his chair and almost bowled Slocum over as he hurried from the cabin and started climbing the steps cut into the side of the hill leading to the house perched on top. Slocum shivered as he followed. The drying flannel shirt reminded him of how quickly Joe Reese had died. At least Innick would see to the man’s funeral.