LITMIR.BIZ

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mind . . . once I see the money. It’s enough to buy us all whiskey and girls for a coupla nights, anyway. We haven’t had neither in several days now.

      “Throw it down, Slash,” the limey ordered.

      Pecos turned to his partner, his eyes wide with fear. “Oh, hell—throw it down, Slash. Don’t give ’em a reason to kill us.” He glanced at Donny. “You wouldn’t kill two old codgers in cold blood, would you, boy? Throw it down, Slash. Throw it down, an’ let’s go home!”

      “Yeah,” Cord said, moving slowly toward the wagon, stepping around the mules and striding toward Slash’s side of the driver’s box. The Mexican was sidling around toward Pecos. “Throw the money down, Slash . . . so you old cutthroats can go on home. Looks like one of you has lost his nerve in his old age.”

      He stopped and blinked once, smiling.

      “Oh, lordy,” Pecos said, throatily.

      Slash glanced at him. “What is it, Pecos?”

      “My ticker.”

      “What?”

      “My ticker. It’s . . . it’s actin’ up again.” Sweat dribbled down the middle-aged cutthroat’s cheeks.

      “Ah, Jesus, Pecos—not now!”

      “What the hell’s happening?” Donny said.

      “Ah, hell,” Pecos said, leaning forward, dropping a knee onto the driver’s boot’s splintered wooden floor. “I can’t . . . I can’t breathe, Slash!”

      “What the hell is going on?” asked the limey, striding down the slope, letting his rifle hang nearly straight down along his right leg.

      “Can’t you see the poor man’s havin’ ticker trouble?” Slash said, dropping to a knee beside his partner.

      “He’s fakin’ it,” said the kid. “He ain’t havin’ ticker trouble.”

      Slash shot an angry look at him. “Yes, he is. It started a couple months back. We were hefting heavy freight down from the wagon box, and his chest tightened up on him and his arm went numb. He said he felt like a mule kicked him.” He turned back to Pecos, who was really sweating now, face mottled both red and gray. “Fight it, Pecos. Fight it off . . . just like last time!”

      “I’ll be damned,” said the limey, leaning forward over the wagon’s left front wheel and tipping his head to one side to stare up into Pecos’s face. “I think he really is having ticker complaints.” He chuckled and glanced at the kid. “I think we done made the Pecos River Kid so nervous, his heart is givin’ out on him!”

      They all had a good laugh at that.

      Meanwhile, Slash patted his partner’s back and said, “We need to get him down from here. We need to get him off the wagon and into some shade. Anybody got any whiskey? The sawbones told him he should have a few swigs of who-hit-John when he feels a spell comin’ on.”

      “Yeah, I got whiskey,” the limey said. “But I sure as hell ain’t sharin’ it with him.”

      They all had another good round of laughs.

      “Just hand the money down, you old mossyhorn,” the kid said, extending his hand up toward Slash, who’d stuffed the envelope into his coat pocket. “Then you can be on your way and get that poor old broken-down excuse for the Pecos River Kid to a pill roller . . . if he lives that long.” He snapped his fingers impatiently. “Come on, hand it down, Slash. I ain’t gonna ask you again!”

      “Oh, hell!” Slash said, drawing the envelope out of his coat pocket. “Here, take the blasted money!” He threw the envelope down. In doing so, he revealed the small, silver-chased, pearl-gripped over-and-under derringer he’d also pulled out of his pocket and that was residing in the palm of his right hand.

      He flipped the gun upright. He closed his right index finger over one of the two eyelash triggers housed inside the brass guard. He shoved the pretty little popper down toward the kid, who blinked up at him, slow to comprehend what he’d just spied in Slash’s hand, his mind still on the money beside his right boot.

      There was a pop like a stout branch snapping under a heavy foot.

      The kid flinched as though he’d been pestered by a fly. His eyes snapped wide. Instantly, the rifle tumbled from his hands as he lifted them toward the ragged hole in the right side of his slender, lightly freckled neck.

      A half an eye wink after the derringer spoke, Pecos, recovering miraculously from his near-death experience, shoved his right hand beneath the driver’s seat just off his right shoulder. He closed his hand around the neck of the twelve-gauge sawed-off shotgun housed there in the strap-iron cage he’d rigged for it, constructed to resemble part of the seat’s spring frame.

      He pulled the short, savage-looking gut-shredder out from beneath the seat and swung it in a broad arc toward the limey, who’d just turned to stare in shock toward where the kid’s precious bodily fluids were geysering out of the hole in his neck. As the Brit’s eyes flicked toward Pecos, dropping his lower jaw in sudden exasperation as he began raising his rifle once more, Pecos tripped one of the double-bore’s two triggers.

      The limey’s head turned tomato-red and bounded backward off the man’s shoulders. Even as the limey was still raising the Spencer in his hands, his head bounced into the brush and rocks beside the trail.

      As the head continued rolling and bouncing, like a child’s bright-red rubber ball, Slash slid the smoking derringer toward Cord, who shouted, “Hey!” and lunged forward, raising his Henry repeater. The gray-eyed Cord didn’t quite get the butt plate snugged against his shoulder before Slash squeezed the pretty little popper’s second eyelash trigger.

      Having only one more round with which to save himself from St. Pete’s bitter judgment, Slash decided to play the odds. He aimed for the redheaded mongrel’s broad chest and curled his upper lip in satisfaction as the bullet nipped the end off the man’s string tie as it plowed through his shirt into his breastbone and then probably into his heart.

      “Oh!” the redhead said through a grunt, looking down at his chest in shock as he staggered backward, the Henry wilting in his arms.

      At least, it appeared to Slash that “Oh!” is what the man said as the bullet shredded his ticker. He didn’t know for sure, for the man’s exclamation, whatever it was, was resolutely drowned out by the second, dynamite-like blast of Pecos’s twelve-gauge on the other side of the wagon.

      That fist-sized round of double-ought buck punched through the chest of the Mexican, who, just like his cohort on the other side of the mules from him, was bounding forward as he realized he and his brethren had just found themselves in dire straits. He didn’t get his rifle raised even halfway before the buckshot picked him two feet off the ground and hurled him straight back into the brush already bloodied by the limey’s disembodied head.

      Meanwhile, Slash looked at the redheaded mongrel who’d stumbled backward to sit down against a boulder a few feet off the trail. He sat there against the rock, his chest rising and falling sharply as blood continued to well out of his chest and turn his shirt dark red.

      He stared at Slash in slack-jawed, wide-eyed shock and said, “I’ll be damned if you didn’t kill me.”

      “If I hit your ticker, then you’d be correct,” Slash said. “Do you think I hit your ticker? There’s a chance it might have ricocheted off your brisket and missed your heart. If so, I’d better reload.”

      Cord shook his head once, his gray eyes glazed with deepening shock and exasperation. “No, no. You got my ticker, all right.” He paused, staring at Slash, then added simply, “Hell,” because in his shock and mind-numbing realization that he was teetering on the lip of the cosmos, he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

      Slash couldn’t blame him. He didn’t know from personal experience, of course, but he was sure that the place where Cord was just now entering was hard for

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