Wellspring (Paskagankee, Book 3) (7 page)

Luke
shook his head. “I…what are you talking about?”

“How
the hell do I know this ain’t exactly the break you’re looking for? Maybe
you’ve grown tired of life with the ol’ ball and chain, and you see this here
scenario as the perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. So to
speak.”

“No,”
Luke protested weakly. “I love my wife; I’d never do anything to put her in
danger.”

“You
mean like letting her enter a sealed room with a man who just murdered a friend
of yours? Like that?”

Luke’s
face flushed red and he balled his hands into fists. He cocked his arm and
froze as the stranger lifted his Colt and placed the barrel between Luke’s
eyes.

“That’ll
be enough of that,” the man whispered. “Anyway, like I said: I
think
you won’t do anything stupid, but
I need to
know
you won’t do anything
stupid.”

“How
can I prove it to you?” Luke asked beseechingly.

The
stranger smiled. “Luckily for you, you don’t have to.” He pulled the gun away
from Luke’s face, drawing his arm out to the side. Then he pivoted his wrist
and whipped his hand forward, clubbing the butt of the .38 against Luke’s head,
just behind his ear.

Luke
heard a sound like a thunderclap and a bright light exploded behind his
eyeballs. Then everything went dark.

8

Jackson Healy was an expert at
inflicting deadly violence. Killing the deliveryman who had been foolish enough
to try sneaking up on him outside the Paskagankee Tavern was only the latest in
a long line of murders he had committed, a string that had begun when he was
just twelve years old on the Texas prairie.

But
inflicting
non
-lethal violence was a
different story. It turned out that injuring someone without putting him six
feet under was complicated. He had succeeded in hitting the tavern owner hard
enough to knock him out, as evidenced by the man dropping to the floor like an
empty whiskey bottle.

The
question was, had he killed him? Jackson hoped not, because he needed the guy
alive and at least functioning well enough to open the hidden basement door
after the Krupp brothers had given up looking for him and moved on.

From
the darkness of the corridor behind him, he heard a gasp of shock from the
man’s wife as her husband hit the floor. She rushed forward to tend to his
injuries, and Jackson pivoted and thrust his weapon in the woman’s direction,
not planning to shoot her, but assuming the sight of the Colt would be enough
to frighten her into reconsidering her actions.

It was.
The woman skidded to a stop. “Please,” she said, “please let me make sure he’s
alright.”

“I’ll
just handle that for you,” he said politely. “I’d hate to be considered
ungentlemanly, especially considering how kindly I’ve been treated by the two
of you.” Before he turned, he added, “And don’t even consider trying anything
stupid, or the first person I shoot will be your husband. He ain’t conscious,
so I’m not likely to miss.”

The
woman moaned, the sound high-pitched and squeaky, like what might come out of a
dying mouse. “You understand me?” Jackson said, and she nodded weakly.

He
turned and knelt next to the unmoving man. The side of the tavern owner’s head
had begun swelling and blood oozed out of an ugly gash. It flowed out from
under his hairline and dripped in roughly equal proportion under the collar of
his shirt and onto the floor.

Jackson
didn’t care about blood or where it was falling. His only concern was that he
hadn’t accidentally killed the man. He took a quick look into the passageway to
make sure the little woman wasn’t considering doing something
foolhardy—she wasn’t, luckily for her—and then he eased his head
down onto the unconscious man’s chest and listened for a heartbeat.

It was
strong and steady.

Then he
felt for a pulse.

Strong
as well.

The man
would be fine. His brains had been scrambled a bit, but he would awaken in a
little while, and when he did, he would find he was suffering from one hell of
a massive headache.

But
he’d live.

Jackson
smiled up at the man’s terrified wife. “Your husband’s got one high-quality
skull,” he said. “I’ll bet he barely even felt it when I hit him.”

The
woman shook her head and Jackson thought he could see tears rolling down her
cheeks in the semi-darkness. He knew he should feel guilty for what he was
putting these two innocent people through, but he didn’t. Didn’t feel anything
at all, in fact. His only emotion was worry, because if the Krupp brothers got
their hands on him after what he had done to them two years ago in Peru, he
knew he would suffer in ways he could not even begin to imagine.

Why he
hadn’t taken a few extra seconds to make sure Amos and Wesley were actually
dead before starting off across the plains, he didn’t know. He had asked
himself the question a thousand times. The answer, of course, was simple: he
had assumed they would simply crawl off somewhere and die. They were miles from
any civilization and suffering serious gunshot wounds. What other option had
they had?

But he
had underestimated their will to live, or perhaps their desire for revenge. The
brothers had somehow escaped Puerta de Hayu Marka, seemingly rising from the
dead and dragging their worthless carcasses out of the wilderness, and then
finding some sympathetic South American doctor to stitch them up and send them
on their way.

Jackson
had been utterly, blissfully unaware of their continued existence for nearly
eight months after sneaking back across the United States/Mexican border and making
his way north. The pair had caught up to him in a boarding house just outside
Wichita, bursting into his room one night with whiskey in their bellies and
vengeance in their wild eyes.

And
they should have gotten him, too. Jackson had erased his two former partners
almost completely from his memory by then. He figured—when he thought of
the Krupps at all, which was rarely—that their long-dead corpses were by
now moldering in a couple of unmarked shallow graves in the plains of Peru. And
that was assuming their bodies hadn’t been picked clean down to the bone by
scavenging wild animals.

He had
gotten lucky in Wichita, plain and simple. There was no other way to describe
it. Jackson Healy had survived that night only because he wasn’t asleep in his
bed at three a.m. as he should have been. He had bedded the wife of a local rancher
when the man departed on what was supposed to be a three-day trip to evaluate
and purchase cattle. The man had cut his trip short after losing most of his capital
in a poker game and nearly caught Jackson with his pants down, both
figuratively and literally, when he returned home early.

Jackson
had barely had time to throw his clothes on and scramble out a bedroom window
before skulking back to his room, angry and humiliated.

And
horny.

He had
hunkered down at the small writing desk in his room, whiskey bottle in one hand
and glass in the other, prepared to drink his anger away, when down the street
staggered the Krupp brothers, both drunker than skunks and brandishing their
revolvers.

How
they had located him Jackson had no idea, but Wesley and Amos burst into the
rooming house and marched directly to Jackson’s room. They smashed the door in
and proceeded to empty their guns into his bed, too drunk to notice it was
empty.

By this
time Jackson was gone. For the second time in less than two hours he departed a
residence via a back window, and as shaken as he was to discover the Krupp
brothers alive and well – and gunning for him – he decided he was
getting damned tired of running away from people.

But run
he did, with the Krupp brothers hot on his trail. They were relentless,
single-mindedly chasing him around the United States. Memphis, Chicago,
Detroit. Atlanta, Boston, Louisville. No matter where Jackson went, the Krupp
brothers were never far behind. It was exhausting.

Now,
though, Jackson thought he might have gotten his first bit of good luck since
appropriating the golden disk and tube of life-juice from those crazy shamans
two years ago in Peru. His plan up until a few hours ago had been to keep
running, to cross the border into Canada—just a pistol-shot from here in
Nowhereville, USA—and then head to Vancouver, hopefully shaking the
damned Krupps along the way once and for all.

But
finding the secret room in the basement of this dumpy small-town tavern had
changed everything. He would never be discovered in here, not even by the
Krupps, with their hound-dog noses, and once his former partners reached the only
conclusion they could – that Jackson had continued north into Canada
– he would bolt from his hiding place and reverse course. Backtrack.
Maybe head to California’s Gold Coast. That was where he belonged, anyway, he
figured.

But
everything depended on the Krupps not finding him. Holding the tavern owner’s
wife captive in the secret room was a good plan for keeping the man from
talking; immobilizing the tavern owner so there was
no way
he could give up Jackson to the Krupps or the local law was
an even better plan.

And he
was executing his plan perfectly. The tavern owner was injured but would live.
He would awaken in a little while and let Jackson and his precious wife out
after Amos and Wesley Krupp had come and gone, and with a little luck, Jackson
could finally get on with his life. He had yet to find a buyer for the massive
golden disk that would make him rich beyond his wildest dreams; he had been too
busy trying to stay alive with the goddamned Krupp brothers on his tail for the
past year-plus.

The
Gold Coast was the answer. He would find a buyer for the disk there, Jackson
was sure of it, and now that he stood a reasonable chance of putting some
distance between himself and the vengeful bastards chasing him, he might
actually be able to begin living the lifestyle he had earned.

A
greasy smile slid across Jackson Healy’s face as he stood and brushed dust from
the basement’s hard-packed dirt floor off his trousers. He froze, though, and
the smile vanished, as one floor above, he heard an insistent banging on the
tavern’s front door, followed by a loud
crash
as the door was smashed back against the wall. A moment later, the sound of
boots clomped across the barroom floor and a pair of booming voices echoed
through the empty building, shouting curses and threats.

The
Krupp brothers had arrived.

Jackson
backed into the entrance leading to the secret room. He fumbled around in the hidden
gap between the stones, finally locating the lever that would close the big
slab of granite and seal him in. The door closed smoothly and quietly, and in
seconds, a blackness unlike anything Jackson had ever experienced enveloped him
and the tavern owner’s wife.

All he
could now was wait.

9

Wesley Krupp stalked into the
Paskagankee Tavern two steps ahead of his brother, gun drawn and ready to rain
lead on anything that remotely resembled that devil, Jackson Healy. The place
appeared deserted but Wesley knew otherwise. The Healy stink was all over the
place.

Since
being gut shot two years ago by the lying, cheating sack of horse manure who
had then opened fire on Amos, Wesley had devoted his every waking moment to the
extraction of revenge. The quest for vengeance was the one thing that had kept
him and his brother going over the long days and weeks spent recuperating under
circumstances he could now barely believe, despite having lived through them.

The
quest for vengeance had kept them going through fever and infection, through
choices made that were more difficult than any others they would ever face, no
matter how long they lived.

The
quest for vengeance was everything. It defined their lives and gave them a
focus and single-mindedness of purpose greater than that exhibited by the
greatest outlaws – or the greatest lawmen – who had ever lived. It
had kept them going through their painful rehabilitation, followed by months
trekking north back into the states and picking up Healy’s trail.

It had
kept them going through disappointment after disappointment, the frustration
peaking in Wichita, where they nearly caught the traitor, only to have the
trail go cold again for three long weeks.

But
Wesley Krupp never wavered. He never doubted they would eventually run Healy
down like the cowardly dog he was. And when they finally found the yellow
bastard, he would die slowly. Painfully. Wesley would make sure of that. Every
moment of the brothers’ agony over the past two years would be repaid with
interest, of that Wesely Krupp was certain.

And now
they had found him.

The lame-brained
coward—he had never been quite as clever as he gave himself credit
for—had hidden his horse in the forest less than a quarter-mile south of
here, fifteen feet off the rutted path that served as a road in this piece of
shit little village. The saddlebags were still slung over the horse’s ass, and
although a quick check of the contents didn’t turn up anything specific that
would identify the beast as belonging to Jackson Healy, Wesley nevertheless had
known it was his.