Excerpt
BUSHWHACKED
“You should learn how to move through brush, Coles,” Decker said. “You picked the one place to meet me in this city where you’d be at a disadvantage instead of me.”
“You son of a bitch,” Coles said. “You challenged me.”
“And you lost,” Decker said. He pressed the shotgun into the small of Coles’s back and said, “Just stand still.” He patted the man down and removed a Colt .45 from a shoulder rig…He stepped forward and brought the butt of the .45 down hard on the point of Coles’s shoulder.
Decker grabbed Coles’s left wrist, twisted it behind him and brought the .45 down on it hard. The sound of the arm breaking was sharp and loud, and Coles screamed.
“Where’s the girl?”
“Jesus, my elbow—”
Decker grabbed the arm and pulled it back. Coles screamed again. “You’ve got one broken arm, Coles,” Decker said. “You want to try for two?”
“I don’t know—”
Decker put the .45 next to Coles’s left ear and fired it. Coles screamed.
“Jesus, I’m deaf!”
“OK,” Decker said, “you got a broken arm, a bad left knee, and you’re deaf in your left ear.” He grabbed Coles’s right arm, pulled it straight back and said, “Let’s start on the right side.”
Broadway Bounty Robert J. Randisi
Prologue
Decker turned the body over to look at the face. He already knew what he would see, but when the face came into view, he flinched, anyway.
Once Dover and Decker had been friends. That had been a long time ago, when they were younger—Jesus, when they were kids. People had commented on the similarity of their names—Dover and Decker—as if that made them brothers.
Then one day they went their separate ways. Decker ended up a bounty hunter.
So did Dover.
Now, more than fifteen years later, Dover was cold meat.
Decker let Dover’s body go, and it flopped onto its stomach again. The three gunshot wounds in his back had been cleaned and were now just pink, puckered holes. Decker felt cold, but not as cold as Dover.
“Who did it?” he asked the undertaker.
“You’ll have to ask the sheriff that.”
“You don’t know?”
“Why would I know?” the undertaker said. “That doesn’t matter to me. The who, the why, the where, none of that matters to me.”
“No,” Decker said, “I don’t guess it does.”
“Passing judgment on me, bounty hunter? You kill ‘em, and I plant ‘em. Which one of us is worse?”
“I don’t pass judgment,” Decker said. He headed for the door.
“I guess he was a friend of yours.”
Decker stopped and turned around.
“He was.”
“So then I guess you’d know if he had any kin?”
“He didn’t.”
“The sheriff has his personal stuff,” the undertaker said. “Don’t let him tell you different.”
Decker stood there for a few seconds. Then he said, “Thanks. I’ll be paying for his burial.”
“Anything special?”
“No, nothing special.”
“Come back after you talk to the sheriff, and we’ll settle up.”
Decker nodded and left.
“Sheriff?”
The sheriff of Harrison City, Iowa, looked up from behind his desk.
“Did you see your friend?”
“I did.”
“Nice, neat job.”
Decker gave the man a hard stare.
“Who did it?”
“How come you just happen to ride in the day it happened?”
“I was supposed to meet him today.”
“Got here a little late, didn’t you?”
“No,” Decker said, “I got here just in time.”
The lawman raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
“Who did it?”
“The Tyrone brothers.”
“Why?”
“You’ll have to ask them.”
“How many of them?”
“Three,” the sheriff said, “one for each hole.”
“Why aren’t they in jail?”
“Because, Decker,” the sheriff said, “there are three of them and one of me. I’m not a fool.”
“Where are they?”
“The saloon, I guess.”
Decker hesitated a moment, then said, “When I’ve finished with them, I’ll be back to talk to you.”
The look on the lawman’s face said he doubted that very much.
Decker turned and left.
Decker stopped right outside the only saloon in Harrison City and looked around. Apparently the shooting incident had driven many of the townspeople inside, for the streets were virtually empty.
Maybe they knew it wasn’t over yet.
Decker squared his shoulders and went into the saloon. There was only one man there, sitting at a table with a beer. Decker walked to the bar and ordered a whiskey. When the bartender put it in front of him, Decker put the money on the bar. As the man went to take it, he caught his wrist.
In a low voice he said, “The Tyrone brothers.”
When the man saw the look in Decker’s eyes, any thoughts he had of not answering immediately fled.
“That’s one of them over there,” he said. “That there’s Virgil.”
“And the other two?”
“Up-upstairs.”
“Good,” Decker said. “Now disappear.”
“Y-yessir.”
Decker downed the whiskey, and as it burned its way down his throat, he turned and faced Virgil Tyrone.
“Tyrone?”
The man looked up. He had the biggest ears Decker had ever seen.
“Who are you?”
“Decker.”
“I don’t know you.”
“But I know you. You killed a friend of mine.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“Dover.”
“Oh, yeah. The bounty hunter.”
“That’s right.”
“And you? Are you a bounty hunter?”
“Yes.”
“And now you wanna kill me?”
“I don’t have a choice,” Decker said. “This town doesn’t have any law to speak of.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed that myself,” Tyrone said. “You know there are two more of us, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you intend to kill them, too?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Tyrone said, standing, “I guess you’ll have to start somewhere.”
The man was a fool. While he was spreading his legs and readying himself for a fair draw, Decker pulled his sawed-off shotgun and killed him.
“Shit,” Decker said. “If I fought fair, I’d have been dead long ago.”
Decker went up the steps slowly, reloading his gun. He had no way of knowing if the bartender had told the truth, but he played it as if he had—figuring the other two Tyrone brothers were upstairs, doing what men did upstairs in a saloon.
On the second floor he paused to listen. What he heard gave him the impression that two men were having a good time.
He started down the hall, moving cautiously, on the lookout for creaking floorboards—not that anyone would have heard him. By this time a man was moaning loudly and a woman was making a high-pitched, keening sound. One of the brothers was real close to finishing his good time.
Decker found the door where most of the noise was coming from. He held his gun in his right hand and braced himself against the wall opposite the door with his left. He pushed off and kicked out at the door, hitting it right next to the doorknob with his heel. The door splintered and slammed open.
On the bed he could see a man’s naked ass and a woman’s legs. The man turned and stared at him, open-mouthed, and a girl leaned sideways to take a look.