of a chair he had just smashed against the floor. A glance around the room revealed furniture overturned and broken, paintings ripped down from the walls and torn to pieces, and shards of glass scattered across the floor where glasses had been shattered. It looked almost like a cyclone had hit the place.
In addition to the man holding the busted chair, two more men were in the room. They had hold of a piano, and from the looks of it, they were about to try to tip it over. Bo leveled his gun at them while Scratch covered the other man.
“Hold it!” Bo snapped. He recognized one of the men at the piano as Thad Devery. The other two shared a family resemblance. They would be Luke’s brothers Reuben and Simeon.
“Drop those chair legs,” Scratch ordered the man he was covering.
“Go to hell!” the man yelled. “Nobody tells a Devery what to do!”
“You better listen to me, boy,” Scratch warned. “I’ll blow your legs right out from under you if I have to, and you’ll never walk right again.”
Thad took his hands off the piano and stepped back from the instrument. “Do what he says, Sim,” he told his cousin. “That old bastard’s crazy enough to do it.”
Glaring murderously at Scratch, Simeon Devery dropped the chair legs.
“What in blazes is going on here?” Bo asked.
“That’s none of your business,” Thad snapped at him.
“I reckon it is. You fellas are disturbing the peace if I ever saw it. This is wanton destruction of property, too. If you don’t have a mighty good explanation for all this, I’d say you’re facing some serious charges, Thad.”
“We had a right,” Reuben Devery said. “We paid our money, and then the gal said no. A whore can’t say no. It ain’t fittin’.”
“Yeah, it’s Bella you ought be threatenin’ to arrest,” Simeon added. “She tried to cheat us. Said she wasn’t gonna make the gal do what we wanted, and she wasn’t gonna give us our money back, neither!”
“Wait a minute,” Bo said as his eyes narrowed. “Are you talking about one girl?”
“One whore, you mean,” Thad said with his customary sneer that made his almost deformed face even uglier.
“And the three of you…”
“That’s right. You got a problem with that, lawman?”
“I do, you damned degenerate,” Scratch said. “I ought to do the world a favor and just gun down the three of you here and now.”
“Take it easy,” Bo told his old friend. “We’ll do this according to the law.” He motioned with his Colt. “The three of you take out your guns, nice and easy, and put them on the floor. Don’t make any sudden moves, and don’t try anything funny.”
“Reckon they already did that with the whore,” Scratch muttered.
“You got no right,” Thad insisted. “Deverys don’t answer to the law. Deverys
“Not anymore,” Bo said. “Not after today.”
A groan came from behind an overturned sofa. A husky figure started to rise into view. Bo glanced in that direction and saw a bald-headed black man with blood dripping down his face from an ugly cut on his forehead. He recalled Bella’s comment about the Deverys killing somebody called George and figured this man was the house’s bouncer and bodyguard. One of the troublemakers must have walloped him and knocked him out, and now he had come to.
Taking his attention off Thad Devery was a mistake. Scratch shouted, “Watch it, Bo!”
Bo’s eyes flicked back to Thad and saw the young man dragging his gun from its holster. Thad was reasonably fast, although no one was ever going to mistake him for a real shootist like Smoke Jensen or Matt Bodine.
That was the kind of speed it would have taken to outdraw an already drawn gun. Bo didn’t have to hurry his shot. Thad had barely cleared leather when Bo’s Colt roared.
Because he’d had a chance to take aim, Bo didn’t have to kill Thad. He drilled Thad’s gun arm instead, the bullet breaking the bone about halfway between elbow and shoulder. Thad dropped his revolver, screamed in pain, and grabbed his arm as he slumped against the piano.
Bo switched his aim to Reuben while Scratch kept Simeon covered. “Either of you boys want to take cards in this game?” Bo asked in a hard, dangerous voice.
They shook their heads, eyes wide with shock as they looked at their cousin, who had slipped down to a sitting position on the floor. Thad whimpered and rocked back and forth as he clutched his wounded arm.
“You’re damned lucky you ain’t dead,” Scratch told him. “Bo could’ve put that round right through your ticker.”
Bo wiggled the barrel of his .44. “Guns, gents. On the floor.”
Reuben and Simeon hastened to follow the order this time. When they had put their irons on the floor and kicked them away, Bo said, “All right, give your cousin a hand. We’ll take him over to the jail and let the doctor have a look at him there.”
“You’re really arrestin’ us?” Reuben asked. “But we’re
“Get used to it,” Scratch said.
CHAPTER 17
