LITMIR.BIZ

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man dropped to the floor near the fainting couch and lay quivering as he died.

      Slash turned to his left, toward Jay’s large, canopied, four-poster bed. Through the thick, wafting smoke he saw Jay lying on her side, hog-tied, bound wrists tied to her bound ankles behind her back. She lay diagonally across the bed with its thick red silk, down-filled comforter, and she was staring in wide-eyed terror toward Slash and Pecos.

      “Oh, God!” Jay cried, her thick copper tresses lying in tangles across her shoulders and down her back, the top of which was exposed by her low-cut velveteen gown. “Oh, God—I thought for sure they were gonna kill my boys. I just knew they were gonna kill you!”

      She lifted her chin, sobbing.

      “Oh, fer chrissakes!”

      Slash hurried over to her. He saw a thick, wadded stocking on the bed near her head. They must have gagged her with the sock, but she’d managed to spit it out when Slash had knocked on the door. If she hadn’t warned them, “her boys,” as she called Slash and Pecos in her typically endearing way, would indeed be wolf bait.

      “Jay, are you all right?” Slash asked, sliding a lock of copper hair back from her left cheek with his hand, raking his gaze up and down her body, looking for injuries. “Did they hurt you?”

      Jay stifled another sob and shook her head, tears rolling down her lovely, finely sculpted cheeks. “I’m all right, Slash!”

      Slash dropped to a knee beside the bed and slid his face up close to hers, keeping his hand on her cheek. “What the hell happened? Who were they?”

      Pecos answered for her. “Jack Penny.”

      Slash turned to him. “What?”

      Pecos stood over one of the men sprawled in death on the floor several feet from the foot of Jay’s bed. He glanced over his shoulder at Slash. “Our old friend Jack Penny. Remember him?”

      “How could I forget?” Slash straightened and walked over to stare down at the bounty hunter, who lay on his back, slack in death. Jack Penny was a tall, long-limbed, bearded man with one unmoored blue eye, which had rolled to the outside of its socket while the other one stared straight up as though back at the two living men staring down. Penny wore a mismatched suit, badly worn, and his long, brown-gray hair stood out in patches around his hatless head. His brown Stetson lay on the floor beside him.

      He stank of stale whiskey and tobacco smoke.

      Blood oozed from two bullet holes in his chest.

      Slash said, “How do you suppose he found us here? And . . . why? Since he was in cahoots with ole Bleed-Em-So, he must’ve known those bounties on our heads aren’t good anymore.”

      “Uh, fellas?”

      Slash and Pecos turned to Jay, who still lay hog-tied on the bed. “I hate to interrupt your serious discussion, but do you suppose . . . ?” With a taut smile, she jerked her eyes to indicate the ropes binding her wrists and ankles behind her.

      “Ah, Jesus—sorry about that, darlin’!” Slash hurried over to the bed.

      By now, thunder rose from the hall as men ran up from downstairs to see what all the shooting had been about. As Slash pulled his bowie knife from his sheath and cut the ropes binding Jay, a big, mustached gent poked his head through the ruined door, looking around.

      This was Charlie Lattimore, one of the three bouncers, all the size of small mountains, Jay had hired to keep peace about the Thousand Delights. The beefy gent with thick, curly, dark-brown hair beneath his crisp bowler was holding a sawed-off, double-barrel shotgun in both his ham-sized hands.

      Lattimore was a street tough from back east. He spoke with a thick Boston brogue. He wasn’t very smart, nor much to look at—his face was badly scarred, and one ear was cauliflowered almost beyond recognition—but his very presence alone usually served to keep the clientele on their best behavior.

      Usually.

      “Bloody hell!” he cried, hardening his jaws as he looked at the dead men, at Slash and Pecos, and then at Jay on the bed. He glanced at the loud, milling crowd that had gathered behind him, said, “Stay back, you men!” then pushed through the door and into the room. “What in the name of Jesus, Joseph, an’ me dear sweet Mary happened here, Miss Breck—”

      “Long story,” Jay said, sitting up now and rubbing the circulation back into her hands. “All is well now, Charlie. Just please send someone for the marshal, will you?”

      “Will do, ma’am!” Lattimore retreated through the door, admonished the crowd once more, and then stomped off to fetch the local law.

      Slash sat on the edge of the bed beside Jay. “You sure you’re all right? They didn’t hit you or anything?” He looked her over carefully, again finding no obvious sign of injury. Her body was just how Slash remembered—splendid in every curve and plane. Even in her forties, Jaycee Breckenridge was still a heartbreaker.

      “I’m all right, Slash,” Jay said, smiling sweetly up at him, her jade eyes glowing in the light of a nearby lamp. “Really.” The smile disappeared, replaced by a deep frown as she glanced from Slash to Pecos and back again. “It’s you boys I was worried about. I thought for sure he was going to make good on his promise and turn you under with that ugly shotgun of his.”

      “How did he get in here, Jay?” Pecos asked, standing off the end of the bed and wrapping a hand around a canopy post.

      “He must have picked the lock.” Jay drew her left leg under her right one and massaged the ankle over the high top of her stylish, lace-up, doeskin shoe. “I came up to get ready for the night, and Penny jumped me.” She glanced at the other two dead men. “Those two are . . . were . . . Willie and Clyde. Don’t know their last names or where they came from, but they must have thrown in with Penny somewhere down the line. They weren’t here until about a half hour ago.”

      “Those were the two we seen back along the creek, Slash,” Pecos said. “My hearin’ might not be too good anymore, but my peepers are still those of a young man.”

      “Well, it’s good one last thing on you is,” Slash dryly quipped. He raked a thumbnail down his jawline, in bad need of a shave, frowning thoughtfully. “Penny must have sent those two out to scout for us, to give him some idea when we’d be back to town. He must have been around Fort Collins awhile, scopin’ out our habits. He knew that soon after we got back to town, we’d head this way.”

      “To pay a visit to the purtiest gal in the Territory,” Pecos said, smiling down at Jay with several insinuating glances at Slash.

      Slash flushed.

      Jay shook her head darkly. “Yeah, well, this time your visit was almost your last.”

      “It would’ve been if you hadn’t warned us.” Slash gave her forearm an affectionate squeeze. “What was Penny’s beef with us, anyway?”

      “Oh, you know what it is.”

      “Hell, he had us outnumbered!” Slash said. “The odds were in his favor that day!”

      He was talking about the ambush Penny had affected, with the help of a dozen other bounty hunters, on Jay’s hideout cabin in the San Juan Mountains. Around a year ago, Slash and Pecos had holed up there with Pistol Pete’s widow, in the cabin Jay and Pete had shared for many years up in the high and rocky.

      None other than Chief Marshal Luther T. Bledsoe had sicced those bounty hunters on Slash and Pecos, intending to assassinate them. When Slash, Pecos, and Jay got the better of the dozen, after they’d used an escape tunnel to work their way around the ragged group of killers, and killed them all save Penny and one other man, Bledsoe was so impressed by Slash and Pecos’s gun work, even at the pair’s advanced age, that he put the two cutthroats on his payroll and gave Penny the shaft.

      “Still, I can see how he was a mite chafed,” Pecos put in, glancing down at the dead bounty hunter with the roaming eye. “He was

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