The bullet stops here, p.1
The Bullet Stops Here, page 1
LOOK FOR THESE EXCITING WESTERN SERIES FROM BESTSELLING AUTHORS WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE AND J.A. JOHNSTONE
The Mountain Man
Luke Jensen: Bounty Hunter
Brannigan’s Land
The Jensen Brand
Smoke Jensen: The Beginning
Preacher and MacCallister
Fort Misery
The Fighting O’Neils
Perley Gates
MacCoole and Boone
Guns of the Vigilantes
Shotgun Johnny
The Chuckwagon Trail
The Jackals
The Slash and Pecos Westerns
The Texas Moonshiners
Stoneface Finnegan Westerns
Ben Savage: Saloon Ranger
The Buck Trammel Westerns
The Death and Texas Westerns
The Hunter Buchanon Westerns
Will Tanner, Deputy U.S. Marshal
Old Cowboys Never Die
Go West, Young Man
Published by Kensington Publishing Corp.
LUKE JENSEN BOUNTY HUNTER
THE BULLET STOPS HERE
WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE
AND J.A.JOHNSIHNE
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
Teaser chapter
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2023 by J.A. Johnstone
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
PINNACLE BOOKS, the Pinnacle logo, and the WWJ steer head logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7860-4988-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4988-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4995-0 (eBook)
CHAPTER 1
The Keating Saloon was considered one of the worst in El Paso, and El Paso was no shrinking violet of a town. The border community boasted numerous drinking establishments, gambling parlors, and whorehouses. Men dying in the street was far from uncommon. The town stockyards were often filled with stolen Mexican herds preparing for the profitable drive north. It was not an atmosphere for the faint of heart.
Keating’s Saloon fit right in, and its main claim to fame was cheaper-than-average alcohol. It was a place of brooding drunks, quick tempers, and low, back-shooting men. Its one and only claim to culture was Orville and Maddy.
Orville had been kicked in the head by a mule as a small boy. It was widely agreed that this kick knocked out what few brains he had, crossed his eyes, and somehow made him a piano player par excellence. In addition to that talent, for twenty-five cents, Orville would bite the head off a living chicken, a considerably less artistic endeavor.
Maddy was two hundred and fifty pounds of robust soiled dove. She had a ham-fisted right hook that had put more than one aggressive customer ass over teakettle. She held little compunction about using the straight razor or pepperbox derringer tucked into her garters, and this was as widely known as Orville’s talent at the piano. However, Maddy was a cheerful drunk for the most part and stayed drunk most of the time.
She held a monopoly on the clientele of the Keating Saloon.
At the moment she stood on a groaning table, skirt hiked up over her hips and showing colorful bloomers as large as ship sails as she shook her ample backside in time to Orville’s piano playing.
“Drink that rot gut, drink that rot gut!” she howled in a fair passing singing voice. “Drink that red eye, boys, it don’t make a damn wherever we land!”
A crowd of vagrants and petty crooks had gathered around the dancing mountain of a woman and were stomping their feet and clapping their hands in time to Maddy’s dancing. Orville finished banging out the tune and grabbed the half-empty mug of murky liquid next to him.
Tilting his head back, the sometime carnival geek drank in big, greedy swallows. He drank so fast the brownish liquor poured down the sides of his cheek and stained his shirt collar even more than it already was from the grime on his neck. Finishing the glass, he burped happily.
Besides piano playing and oral chicken decapitation, Orville had another job. He came to his feet, a short, scrawny man with greasy hair and a bum leg, and picked up a dirty pitcher from beside the piano and began searching the bar. Whenever he came upon the dregs of an unfinished drink, he would dump it into the pitcher. Behind the bar was a large bucket with the words Mule Piss scrawled on it.
The more adventurous or desperate of the Keating Saloon customers could purchase a glass of the recycled alcohol for pennies. Passing out at a table or the bar counted as finishing your drink and Orville always found enough beer, rotgut, tequila, and sour mash to add to the Mule Piss barrel.
As he worked, men loudly toasted Maddy as she continued to shake her bottom. They cheered louder when she turned and shook her overly ample bosom as well.
Not every customer was entertained by Maddy. There were several serious drinkers in the place. Men who sat down and steadily drank until they passed out. They went about it like a laborer going about his work, and some scowled at being distracted from their task.
There was another kind of customer in the Keating as well. Men who were uncomfortable in more law-abiding or upscale establishments. Establishments that, say, kept a good working relationship with the marshal.
Two such men stood at one end of the bar, backs to the celebrating crowd cheering as Maddy produced one plump breast from her shirt. These two men were talking to each other and clearly didn’t want to be interrupted. They had the hard eyes of veteran gunhawks and big irons rode on their hips, tied down and within easy reach of their hands.
The Whatley brothers, Timothy and Eli, mostly made their living from wet stock: rustled Mexican cattle or horses driven across the Rio Grande into Texas. Darker rumors circulated around them, as well. Whispers about stagecoach robberies where no witnesses were left behind. Back shootings of men who’d crossed them or beaten them too handily in cards.
So far their luck had held and there was never enough proof for them to be brought in by the law, much less brought up on charges and hanged as they surely deserved.
Tim Whatley was a gangly skeleton of a man with one wandering eye where his father had brained him with a piece of firewood as a boy. He carried a grudge about his looks because other than the eye he would have been considered handsome in a rough, frontier way. Men who happened to stare at the wandering eye were apt to find themselves struck with the butt of Timothy’s revolver. Men who made jokes about it sometimes went missing.
Eli was lean as well, with bowlegs and a Texas handlebar mustache of such epic proportions it looked like an opossum was hibernating on his upper lip. Tim was the talker; Eli was a brooder with a reputation for back shooting.
“Gotta take a leak,” Tim said.
Eli grunted in response.
Tim, his mind on his business, turned to walk out the back door to the stinking outhous
The noxious liquid inside spilled out like a river overflowing its banks and splashed across Tim’s boots. Maddy, who’d seen the whole thing, stopped dancing. An expression of frightened horror gripped her face. It took a moment for the drunken crowd cheering her to realize something was wrong. The clapping died out and the men turned, taking in the scene immediately.
Those who felt they were too directly behind the shaking Orville backed out of the way. Silence settled over the boisterous saloon in a dark cloud. All eyes went to the rigid and silent Tim Whatley as he looked down at his soaked boots. The smell of cheap beer and rotgut rose up, filling Tim’s nose.
“Ah, jeez, mister.” Orville breathed. “I sh-sh-sure am s-s-sorry!”
With a sound of groaning wood and several deep gasps for breath, Maddy climbed down off the table. Behind Tim, Eli Whatley reached into a brine-filled jar and pulled a hard-boiled egg from it. The sound of the shell cracking as he busted it against the bar seemed very loud in the pregnant silence following Orville’s stuttered apology.
“Orville didn’t mean nothing, Tim!” Maddy protested as she came up. “Don’t you hurt that boy!”
Tim looked down at his pants. They were wet from the knee down and reeking. His boots gleamed with the noxious liquid. He looked back up at the trembling young man. His hand came to rest on the butt of his pistol.
“I said don’t you hurt that boy—” Maddy started yelling.
Tim’s hand left the butt of his pistol in a blur and streaked toward the whore. His knuckles struck her in the heavily rouged bow of her lips and rocked her head back. The blow landed with a sound like a drover’s whip popping. Maddy stumbled, hands flying to her mouth where a trickle of blood began flowing.
Tim’s hand returned to his gun butt in the same blur of motion, and this time he filled his hand with the big iron. It came out of the holster like a snake striking and the metallic click of the hammer cocking sounded loud as the slap to the nervous onlookers.
Still looking at shaking Orville, Tim leveled the pistol at the big woman. Her eyes crossed slightly in an unfortunate parody of Orville’s as she regarded the cavernous muzzle.
“Oh, lordy,” she whispered hoarsely. “Please don’t kill me, mister. I’ll give you a freebie if you like.”
Maddy was fierce and given her druthers she would have dealt with some cowpuncher pointing a gun at her in an entirely different manner. But the Whatleys weren’t cowpunchers. They were legitimate hardcases. Tim Whatley was too fast and too ruthless to try.
“Stop talking, Maddy,” Eli advised.
He bit into his egg and began chewing noisily. His chin was shiny with the dribbling liquid from inside the egg jar. He was an open mouth chewer and bits of egg stuck in clumps to his crooked yellow teeth.
Maddy slowly backed away, hands up. Once she was safely away, Tim, still regarding Orville with an unreadable face, lowered the hammer and reholstered the gun. His hand remained resting on the pistol.
“That was stupid,” Tim said. “I’m wet, dammit.”
“S-s-sorry, Mr. Whatley,” Orville repeated.
His eyes were wet with unspilled tears of fear. He swallowed once, hard enough that his large Adam’s apple made a dry clicking sound. He was so frightened his knees began shaking.
“You made the mess,” Tim Whatley said. “You clean ’em.”
“Yessir!” Orville replied.
He was obviously relieved. Cleaning the boots was a better outcome than he had any right to hope for.
“I’ll just get the bar rag!” Orville said, eager to please.
There was the blur, too fast for onlookers to see fully, and then the pistol was out and the hammer cocked, muzzle pushed into a startled Orville’s belly. The slow-witted piano player looked down in confusion.
“Mister—” he began.
Tim cut him off, voice hard. “You ain’t touching my boots with no nasty old bar rag, idjit.”
“Sir?”
“You’re going to use your tongue.”
The words hung between them for a moment as Orville tried to work out the meaning.
“My tongue?” he finally asked.
The gun moved as Tim Whatley punched it into Orville like a spear. The barrel rammed into Orville’s gut and the air escaped him in a rush. Fighting to breathe, the gasping Orville fell to his knees.
“Yes, your tongue, idjit!” Tim snarled. “You’re going to lick my boots so clean you can see your damned stupid face in ’em.” His grin was savage. “Get to licking, or I’m gonna gut shoot you right here and now.”
“Gut shot is a painful way to go,” Eli observed, nodding solemnly as if he had just uttered something profound.
Eli had finished the egg and was leaning against the bar like a spectator at a burlesque show. His hand now rested on his own pistol and he casually eyed the bar patrons, daring someone to try and stop the show.
Tears spilled down Orville’s face as he lowered himself to his knees before the smirking Tim Whatley. The Mule Piss had mixed with the grimy sawdust and dust on the saloon floor to form a disgusting mud. Orville’s pants were instantly soaked in the muck as he knelt.
“That’s it,” Tim said, voice low and hard and utterly devoid of mercy. “You lick them boots like your life depended on it, idjit.”
“’Cause it does,” Eli added.
He was grinning, in obvious high humor. He’d seen a similar situation play out before. They’d swung down into Mexico looking for Apache scalps to sell in Ciudad where the bounty was high following some raids.
Apaches had proven difficult to track and were known to be dangerous. To save themselves time and unnecessary peril they found an isolated granja, or homestead, out in the flat lands.
The family had been poor and armed with a muzzle-loaded rifle that proved unreliable. Tim had made each family member—father, mother, teenage sister, and young brother—lick their boots. They’d done it because they believed it would save their lives. The Whatley brothers had found this comically stupid of them.
They tied the father to a fence post next to the goat pen and forced him to watch as they beat his wife and daughter repeatedly. When they were done they shot each one in the chest, starting with the boy and working up to the sobbing father. Then they took their scalps, pulled them into the pitiful dwelling that served them as shelter, and lit the place on fire.
When they tried selling the scalps to the Mexican authorities, the military officer in charge of the bounty program had instantly realized the scalps belonged to Mexican citizens and not wild Apache raiders. This had instigated a race for the border that they had just barely won.
All in all, it had proven a less than profitable endeavor. Nevertheless Eli had never forgotten the intense pleasure of making another human being lick his boots. He’d felt like a king. He missed that feeling.
“You lick these boots real good, idjit,” Tim urged. “Go on!”
Trembling and crying, Orville leaned forward, head cocked to one side so he could locate Tim Whatley’s boot with his crossed eyes, his tongue poking out like a strip of uncooked pork. Satisfied, Tim uncocked and reholstered his pistol.
“That’s about enough of that,” a new voice said.
The voice was unhurried, calm. It could have been commenting on the weather.
As one, both brothers turned with incredulous looks at the man who’d just entered the saloon. The batwings still swung a little, slowly, behind him.
Neither Whatley brother liked what he saw. The stranger was tall, with the lean build of a man built for endurance, and dressed all in black, although the layer of trail dust on his shirt and trousers gave them a gray cast. Two gleaming Remington revolvers rode on his flat hips. He stood easily, casually even, thumbs hooked behind the buckle of his gun belt, Stetson cocked back on his head. With the light behind him, it was difficult to make out any details about his face.
“I don’t know who you are,” Tim Whatley snarled, “but you picked the wrong saloon to stick your nose in.”
