Deadly Manhunt (A Tony Masero Western) Read online

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  New Mexico Territory 1880

  The bloodletting of the Lincoln County War is over but the range is crawling with gangs of surviving gunmen whose only remaining purpose is to steal and kill. Add to that Geronimo and his warriors on the loose and together it builds into a volatile situation.

  When the newly appointed marshal, Pat Garrett runs into ex-lawman Jack Slade, Slade is down on his luck. But Garrett recognizes a mean man with a gun when he sees one and that’s just the sort he needs to help clean up the Rio Ruidoso country.

  Garrett’s offer is his chance to even things up with himself.

  Soon he’s on the trail of a special prosecutor and his young son who’ve gone missing. But it looks like there’s a lot more to their suspicious absence than at first appears.

  Against the background of Pat Garrett’s hunt for bad boys Charlie Bowdre and William Bonney, Slade delves deep into the underbelly of Lincoln’s criminal activities whilst struggling to reassert himself not only as a lawman but also into the good graces of pretty widow Jane Lowry.

  There’s another explosion of violence due in Lincoln County as Jack Slade drags himself back from the brink of despair and rediscovers the power of the pistol and the pride of a lawman’s star.

  DEADLY MANHUNT

  By Tony Masero

  Copyright © 2012 by Tony Masero

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: November 2012

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading the book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Cover image © 2012 by Tony Masero

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book.

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  Chapter One

  He awoke to a great single eye staring at him.

  Brown and large and centered on a pale orb that glowed dully like the yellowish dome of a naked skull in the dim light under the sheet. It watched him unblinking. It was unnerving and he stared back at it fascinated, his own eyes sticky with drunken sleep and confusion. Then the whole thing moved. He heard the whore breath heavily as she shifted her huge bulk and watched as the other massive breast folded over to gawp at him balefully with a matching brown areola. Acres of fat slid softly in the shadows; rolling with a pale, slow buttery motion like melting wax on a candlestick. He averted his gaze from the staring teats and let his eyes wander downwards, impressed by the awesome majesty of it all. A crop of black bush crinkled from beneath pendulous white layers of drooping stomach and was compressed into a timid little V-shape between a pair of momentous thighs. A sight that made him sigh with the sudden sneaking realization of where he was and what he had been about.

  He tried to remember getting here under these covers with this monster but his head was already buzzing with the foretaste of the hangover to come. Had he really mounted this thing next to him last night? He could remember nothing. He knew the whiskey soaked high that had run through him often led to indulgent excess and from that he deduced that he had in fact climbed aboard this leviathan.

  He threw off the covers and breathed in the fetid air of the room with distaste but even that was fresher than the pit of iniquity he had been lying in. The sleeping whore sighed softly, burbled something and farted delicately as he searched for his pants. She was quite pretty-faced he noticed. Her features sweet and peculiarly childlike as she lay in repose, her dark curly hair spread out on a sweat stained pillow and looking as if she were no part of the mountain that lay beneath the sheets.

  Jack Slade sucked at his teeth and felt the rime of too much drink lying there. He strapped on his cross draw gun belt and buttoned his vest, fastening his watch chain as he did so. He shook out his pockets to lay a few extra dollar coins on the nightstand. He had no idea if she had been worth it but a moment of pity coursed through him as he looked at her.

  Momentarily he caught sight of himself in the mirror as he did so. It was a flaking, water bloomed old mirror. It did him no favors. A tall, lean and tangle-haired creature looked back. Unshaven and hollow cheeked with red-rimmed eyes. The once clipped military moustache now hung drooping and uncared for over his top lip. Hell! What had happened to him?

  Once he had stood tall and erect, sure of himself and a man to be reckoned with. Now he looked like nothing more than a dime-begging bum. He put on his jacket, a long black drape jacket, pin-holed with moth bites and worn smooth by a patina of engrained trail dust. The coat looked even sadder at both collar and cuff, with thin tendrils of thread hanging there in a fringe. His hat had the braiding loose at the brim and a high tide of dried sweat marked the dented walls. In all, not a pretty picture, he considered.

  He descended the creaking board staircase gently and crossed the empty parlor of the whorehouse, his shoulders stooping under the weight of his pounding head. There was no one about, only the remnants of the night before that littered the plank floor in the form of empty bottles, shed garments and the lingering taint of cheap perfume and stale cigar smoke. Slade opened the glass-paneled front door and stepped out onto the covered boardwalk.

  Bright sunlight made him wince. Pale weathered wooden shacks and adobe huts sat in a bleached row opposite, the tired wood as paper white as the dust of the street itself. Nothing stirred in the simmering heat except a solitary yellow dog, starved and favoring a damaged forepaw, busy scavenging in an alleyway between the shacks.

  Slade sympathized. He knew just how the mutt felt.

  Jack Slade had fallen from grace much through his own fault than anybody else’s. Guilt had been his crime. An overwhelming sense of guilt that had eaten deep into his soul and pulled him down to the penitent shadow of his former self where he found himself today. He paid for it every day as he sunk deeper and deeper in the wallow of self-flagellation that was his penance. A gradual erosion over time. Silent and insidious it had stolen his self-respect and had left him, sometimes embittered and violently angry and then at other times self pitying and remorseful. A hair trigger of moods that set him apart from others, who had no time for his violent aberrations.

  He looked at his pocket watch. A quarter of noon. And way too hot. Anybody who wanted to be cool and collected did not spend their days in New Mexico Territory at midday or any other time, comes to that. The street boiled under a quivering hundred and forty degrees and Slade hesitated fearing to step out into it. He had a few dollars left. How should he spend it? Find a place and get himself a meal. The mere thought caused the bile in his already grinding insides to revolt. There was only one other alternative. Slade braved the heat and stepping off the boardwalk walked on down the street.

  The No. 13 Saloon looked about as unlucky as its name suggested. A peeling wooden false front that raised the level of its existence from amongst the rest of the shacks by a few feet and a sign that proudly proclaimed: ‘Good Fude and Drinx at Reezonabul Prices’. A worn hitching rail stood outside fronted by a dusty and dry zinc horse trough. Slade glanced at the pair of indolent scorpions lying in the bottom, they lay there unmoving and apparently exhausted, as if even they were too stunned by the heat to move, then he pushed open the swing doors and went in.

  It was suffocatingly hot inside, as if an oven were blasting somewhere in the dark recesses of the place. Automat
ically, Slade stepped sideways away from the doorway, waiting until his eyes adjusted to the gloom. A black silhouette against the daylight would make him an easy target. This was not a considered or practiced move on his part, by now it was merely a habitual one. Two slit windows cut high in the false front allowed strong beams of sunlight to cut the shadowy interior at a steep angle and allowed some illumination inside. Chilies hung in bundles from the ceiling, their raw red skins shinning like brilliant daggers of blood in the descending mote-filled shafts of sunlight.

  A man stood at one end of the short bar gutting a chicken on the bar top with a broad bladed knife. A large overweight man, with thinning oily hair plastered over his balding pate.

  ‘Help you?’ he said, without looking up, sweat running freely from his double chin and dripping onto the mess of blood and flesh beneath his chopping blade.

  Slade crossed to the bar.

  ‘Give me a beer and a shot.’ Without a word and one handed, the bartender placed glasses before Slade, his messy fingers inside a pair of rims already milky with a grey coating of filth. He turned to take a bottle from the shelves behind him.

  ‘Clean glasses and a bottle from under the bar,’ Slade ordered abruptly.

  ‘What d’you say?’ asked the barman finally looking at Slade with a frown.

  ‘I said get me a clean glass and some decent whiskey. And wash your damned hands whilst you’re about it.’

  The barman turned and glowered, hunching he spread his hands on the bar top, bloody fingers spread wide.

  ‘Just where the hell do you think you are, mister? The Ritz Hotel in San Francisco. You don’t come in here telling me what to do. This here is my place and I’ll do as I damned well please in it. You don’t like it you go elsewhere.’

  Slade may have appeared tattered around the edges but he was still fast. No one could deny that. His pistol was out in double quick time, he upended the gun, tossing the weapon in a spinning arc and catching it by the barrel then bringing the butt down hard and hammer-like on the man’s spread fingers.

  The bartender howled and whipped his hand away, momentarily hesitating as he decided whether to cradle his sore fingers or reach for the scattergun under the bar.

  Slade leaned across and slowly pointed the pistol at the barman, leveling his gaze along the barrel which centered somewhere between the man’s blinking eyes.

  ‘You can go for that blaster under the bar if you like,’ he said quietly, his eyes cold as steel. ‘After all, as you so rightly say, this is your place.’

  ‘Put it down,’ said the barman, his tone altering. ‘Alright, alright, just put it away I’ll go get you your glass. Dammit! You didn’t have to do that.’ Sucking his bruised hand, the barman went to do Slade’s bidding.

  ‘I do declare,’ said a calm voice from the darkness behind. ‘That’s the neatest order for service I’ve seen in a long while. Allow me to buy you a drink, sir.’

  Slade turned unsure of whether to holster the gun or keep it in his hand. He could see a darker shadow amongst the others at the rear of the room. The shadow moved, leaning forward over a round-topped table and into a pool of light.

  ‘Who’re you?’ asked Slade.

  ‘Oh, just a passing stranger. Come on over, I can’t abide hollering across a room for want of civilized conversation.’

  Slade decided there was no danger here and holstered his pistol. Catching up a chair, he crossed the room to where the man sat.

  As he approached, the fellow leant back comfortably, resting his chair against the wall behind him and took a cigar case from his inside jacket pocket. Slade could see he was a tall, well-dressed man, with even features, a clipped moustache over his upper lip much as his own had once been.

  ‘You care for one?’ the man offered Slade a cheroot. Slade shook his head as the bartender came up with sparklingly clean glasses on a tray, one full of beer and a bottle, which he placed on the table between them.

  ‘Obliged,’ said the stranger, then, as the barman hovered he said dismissively, ‘You can get along now, afore that chicken gets cold.’ His eyes ignored the bartender but stayed fixed on Slade, striking a match in one stroke across the tabletop he lit his cheroot and waved the flame at Slade. ‘Go ahead, help yourself.’

  Slade uncorked the bottle and poured himself a glass. He savored the smell of decent whiskey for a moment before taking a draught. The warming glow settled his curious insides as he watched the man puff a few moments contentedly on his cigar.

  ‘Touch proddy today aren’t you?’ said the stranger with a grin.

  ‘Scratchy, is all,’ said Slade. ‘Little too much of this rotgut last night, I guess.’

  The man poured himself a shot and raised his glass. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘This here is a toast for me that I’d be obliged if you’d join me in. Today’s my birthday, June fifth, 1880. I’m thirty years old this day and I never thought I’d get this far, so that’s cause for some celebration wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Sure,’ Slade said raising his own glass. ‘Happy days to you.’

  ‘Thank you. I like your style, by the way. Dealing with that grotesque behind the bar as you did. May I ask your name, sir?’

  ‘Jack Slade’ Slade held his hand out across the table. The stranger took it and shook firmly. ‘Pat Garrett,’ he said.

  ‘Garrett? You the Deputy Marshal for the Territory I been hearing about?’

  Garrett smiled slightly and shrugged. ‘Probably.’

  Thirstily, Slade lifted his beer and drained it in one draught as Garrett studied him through his cheroot smoke.

  ‘What are you doing in this asshole of a place, Jack?’ he asked it with the open curiosity that a lawman feels able to do without embarrassment.

  ‘Me? Just waiting on the stage. Hoping to hitch a ride up to Lincoln. Try my luck there.’

  ‘On your uppers then?’

  ‘A tad,’ agreed Slade. ‘Lost my pony to a card game the other night.’

  ‘Been hitting it hard on the good times, partner?’

  Slade refilled his shot glass and studied the amber glow in the liquor a moment, he nodded, ‘that’s the truth. How about you, what’re you down here for?’

  ‘Same as you,’ said Garrett. ‘Waiting on the stage. Got my best pony shot from under me chasing down some felons. Shame it is too, I liked that nag.’

  ‘You catch them?’

  Garrett brought his chair away from the wall and leant forward, lowering his gaze and looking at Slade from under lowered eyebrows.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said quietly. He paused, and then said, ‘Right now though, I need to make it poste haste back to Lincoln, there’s a position waiting on me up there. The Marshal just resigned two months short of his term; they want me to take over. They say there’s this fellow called Henry McCarty that needs catching. I think I knew him one time when I was running a saloon a while back. Not that it matters, just another no account due for some cell time as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘That the one they call The Kid?’

  ‘That’s him, he goes by all sorts of names but McCarty’s his given, or at least so I’m told.’

  ‘Well, good luck with it,’ Slade started to rise. ‘I’d best be getting along. Thanks for the drink.’

  ‘Hold on there, Jack.’ Garrett waved a hand indicating the chair. ‘Set a minute. I have a proposition I’d like to put to you.’

  Slade paused, then sat down again.

  ‘You’ve been a law officer at some time, I’d guess?’ Garrett said shrewdly as he eyed Slade closely.

  Slade nodded. ‘Town Marshal up in Julesville, Wisconsin.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I remember that affair. Brought in quite a gang up there didn’t you?’

  ‘A bunch,’ Slade said dismissively, not really wanting to go into it.

  ‘Didn’t they blow the town apart, I seem to recall?’

  ‘They did.’ Slade was curt, trying to avoid further talk on the subject. ‘The place is dying now.’

  ‘A
nd that’s how you’re out of employment. Still, you did a good job there, way I heard it.’

  Slade looked at the table and reached over and poured himself another shot. ‘Some say that,’ he answered wryly.

  ‘Look here, Jack. I’ve an offer to make to you. Thing is, I’m bound off to the County Seat at Lincoln, as I said. There’ll be all kinds of town duties, legalities and all that nonsense to take care of and my time will pretty much consumed with it. I need some deputies to handle things whilst I fulfill my civic duties. This Territory is a big place to police and I want good men. They’ll give me warrant to swear in deputies when I take office, I can’t do it right now but can when I get up there and in my position. So how about it? You interested? I can offer you three hundred a month, which ain’t bad I think you’ll agree.’

  Slade raised his eyebrows. In his present situation it was a small fortune he was being offered. ‘I could do that I guess,’ he said hesitantly, underplaying his eagerness to accept the offer.

  ‘Good enough,’ Garrett smiled, obviously well pleased. ‘We’re agreed then, you’ll come along with me to Lincoln to make it all legal.’ He turned and fumbled in the saddlebags that lay next to him in the corner along with his saddle and rifle. ‘Here,’ he said, tossing a tin star at Slade. ‘There’s your badge of office.’

  Slade caught the star and turned it over in his hand, rubbing a thumb thoughtfully over the shining surface. Garrett nodded at his silence.

  ‘You’ll need an advance, I’ll be thinking. Can’t have a deputy of mine running around the Territory on foot and looking like a scarecrow.’ He began counting out bills on the tabletop. ‘Get yourself mounted and looking like one of my deputies. This comes off your first month’s money. You okay with this, Jack?’

  ‘Mighty decent of you, Mister Garrett. Thanks for the chance.’

  ‘It’s Pat,’ said Garrett. ‘You’ll do fine I’m sure of it. Any deviations, then you know I’ll come looking for you.’

  Jack lowered his eyes, he had no intention of running foul of the marshal-elect but he did fear his own errant ways of late and where they might lead him.