A Knife in the Heart. William W. Johnstone
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And that horse was too well-blooded for a thirty-a-month waddie to own.
Fallon reached the boardwalk, looked down the street from the bank. Empty. His mind raced. One man with the horses. Another near the bank door. A third across the street with a rifle. Five horses tethered to the rail. Three men outside. Three in the bank. The fellow across the street would have his horse closer, and Fallon spied a brown Thoroughbred at the end of the hitching rail in front of the saloon.
His eyes raced up and down both boardwalks. Naturally, there wasn’t one Cheyenne policeman to be seen.
You’re getting too damned suspicious in your old age, he told himself. Jesse James was dead. The two surviving Younger brothers were behind the iron in Minnesota. One Dalton was in Lansing, and his brothers and the other gang members were all buried in Coffeyville. And that Hole in the Wall Bunch would never even try to rob a bank in Cheyenne. It was too damned big.
He waited for a gray-haired woman to stop and enter the bakery. The boardwalk on this side now empty for two blocks, Fallon turned back and headed past the hitching rail. The fellow stopped fidgeting with the saddle and let his right hand disappear inside his duster. Fallon just noticed the buckle to a belt that undoubtedly held a holster, or likely more than one. He noticed the scabbards of three of the saddles to the mounts tethered to the rail were empty.
Then Fallon stepped into the alcove and reached for the handle to the door.
“Hey, pops,” the man in the frock coat said with a smile and holding out the cigar he held in his left hand. “Can I bother you for a light?”
The man at the hitching rail stepped away from the horse, one hand still underneath the duster.
“I don’t smoke,” Fallon said.
“I do.” The man clamped the cigar with his teeth, and held out a box of matches in the fingers of his left hand. His right hand remained underneath the heavy coat. “Light my cigar, old man.”
Old man? Fallon didn’t care for that. He might have been old enough to be this punk’s daddy, but that didn’t make Harry Fallon old.
“Light it, bub, or dance,” the man said. And he let his coattail slip back just enough to reveal the sawed-off shotgun in his right hand.
Fallon stepped close, took the tiny box, and pushed it open. The first match he dropped, feigning nervousness, and stuttered an apology.
“There’s plenty of matches, pops,” the kid said. “Take your time. And smile. Our business will be finished directly.”
“I wish,” said the man by the horses, “they’d hurry up and get her done.”
The match flared in Fallon’s hands. Cupping the match against the wind, he brought it toward the cheap cigar.
“That’s right,” the man with the shotgun said. Then he blew out the match as Fallon inched it to the stogie’s tip. “Oops. Try again.”
Fallon’s eyes hardened, but so did the kid’s.
“You ever seen what a body looks like after it’s took two loads of buckshot in the belly at point-blank range?” the punk asked with a malevolent grin.
More times than you have, pup, Fallon thought, but found another match.
His mind raced. Break the punk’s neck, take the shotgun, and cut loose on the man pretending he didn’t know one end of a cinch from another. The horses would be rearing, probably pulling loose. He’d have one barrel left if one of the three inside the bank came out, and the horses rearing would protect him from the lookout across the street. Pick up the pistols from one of the two men he had killed, maybe a rifle if the man with the duster hid one of those, too. He’d have a chance at least, and the ruckus would bring the policemen and everyone with a gun outside their businesses. Cheyenne, Wyoming, was a major city, but most of the entrepreneurs here were westerners to their bones, and they didn’t take kindly to men robbing them or their neighbors.
But . . .
Fallon struck the match.
That would leave citizens inside the bank with two, possibly three—if no one stepped outside to escape after the first bit of gunfire—hardened killers. Hardened. Fallon was sure of this. These weren’t boys on a whim. This had been well-planned and completely professional. Three men inside. Three outside. On a day when the bank’s vaults would be filled with cash and coin.
He had to wait until all the bank robbers were outside.
The match moved to the cigar. The punk grinned like a clown this time and let the flame come to the stinking cigar. The kid sucked, the flame grew, the tip began to smoke and glow. Fallon heard the door open.
“It ain’t lit yet,” the punk managed to say as he puffed and clenched his teeth. Fallon glimpsed a man in a bowler as he hurried by carrying grain sacks. Another, with a saddlebag over his shoulder. The third, last man, with a rifle pointing inside. He shot a glance at the punk and Fallon, and then warned the bank employees and any customers not to stick their heads outside.
The man held the door open.
“Throw him inside, Whit,” the one with the Winchester said, and looked at Fallon. “Once that door closes, buster, it better not open or we’ll riddle this building with so much lead, you’d think we had a Gatling gun.”
The man hurried to his horse.
Whit, the punk, said, “You heard Mabry. Inside.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Fallon brought the match down and stuck the tip against Whit’s throat.
The punk yelped, and Fallon slammed the palm of his left hand against the kid’s jaw, then slid the forearm past his neck to the crook of his arm. Twisting, Fallon pulled Whit against his body. The shotgun clopped onto the wooden planks, and Fallon used his right hand to reach down, found a belted revolver, and he pulled it, thumbed back the hammer, and saw Mabry turning around, cursing.
The .45 bucked in Fallon’s hand, and crimson exploded from the gray vest the outlaw wore, just above his waistband. Two of the men were already mounted, and as Mabry twisted from the impact of a lead slug in his belly, he triggered the Winchester, the bullet splintering the post of the hitching rail. That sent the horses screaming and the two already carrying riders bucking.
Mabry was down on a knee, head bent, blood pouring from his mouth. The one who had been pretending to cinch the horses ran toward Fallon, pulling a double-action Smith & Wesson from his holster and dropping his Winchester.
“Nooooo!” Whit tried to scream, and Fallon shoved him toward the duster-wearing horse holder as the .44 bucked three times, turning Whit around, and another slug shattered his spine. Fallon was diving now, triggering the Colt, hitting the horse holder in the shoulder and sending him stumbling into the street. Two of the horses had broken their tethers and stormed down the street. Fallon landed, came up to his knees, grabbed the shotgun, and eared back the hammers.
A bullet tore through the crown of his hat, knocking it off. Fallon caught a glimpse of one of the men shooting recklessly from the saddle of his bucking horse. He saw the other had managed to get his horse under control. That’s the one Fallon drew a bead on and touched one of the triggers to the scattergun. The man was blown out of the saddle, his arm slamming the other rider somehow in the face, and sending him crashing to the pavement. Then both men disappeared underneath horseflesh and the acrid, biting white smoke from the shotgun. The horses ran, the one belonging to the man Fallon had killed heading up the street, toward the courthouse, leaving a bloody corpse on the pavement. The other horse, a black Thoroughbred, galloped the other way, out of town, dragging its rider—his left foot hung up in the stirrup—behind him for two blocks, leaving a trail of blood and gore until the socked foot slipped out of the boot, and deposited another dead man in front of Blessingame’s Funeral Parlor.
Fallon sat up, bracing his back against the wall of the Stockgrowers’ bank. A bullet splintered the wood inches from Fallon,