wanted to send him charging out the door told him that Scratch was right in the middle of all that flying lead.
The shooting had stopped now, Bo realized grimly. But what that meant, he didn’t know.
“Hey! Hey, Creel! You hear them shots?”
That was Thad Devery’s voice coming from the cell block, through the barred window in the door between the two parts of the building. Bo’s head turned in that direction. His lips pulled back from his teeth in a savage snarl.
“That was the other old fool dyin’! You know that, don’t you, Creel? Why don’t you go and try to help him? See what that gets you! Haw haw haw!”
The donkeylike bray of laughter was all Bo could stand. He strode across the room, grabbing the key ring along the way, and unlocked the cell block door. The other two Deverys were laughing now, too, but Bo didn’t pay any attention to them.
Instead he stopped and swung the shotgun up, leveling the twin barrels as he aimed through the bars at Thad’s face. The laughter stopped like it had been chopped off by an ax. Thad’s eyes widened so much the whites showed all the way around the pupils. He had been standing beside the bunk. Now, he collapsed onto it as all the color washed from his face. His wounded arm bumped the wall and it must have hurt like blazes, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Bo squinted over the barrels and slowly cocked both hammers on the weapon, one and then the other. Thad panted in terror. A dark stain began to spread over the crotch of his jeans.
“Please,” he moaned. “Please don’t.”
“Damn it, deputy, no!” one of the other Deverys said behind Bo. “You can’t just shoot him down like adog!”
“Yeah,” Bo said through gritted teeth. “Yeah, I could. It’d be easy.”
“You…you’d n-never forgive yourself!” Thad stammered in desperation.
A smile as cold as a blue norther blowing through the Texas Panhandle spread across Bo’s face. “You stupid little chickenshit,” he said. “I could blow your brains out and never lose a minute’s sleep over it the rest of my life.”
Thad must have known that Bo was telling the truth. He covered his eyes with a trembling hand and sat there shaking as he started to cry. Neither of the other prisoners said anything now, as if they were afraid that the slightest sound would cause Bo’s finger to tighten just a little more on those triggers. That was all it would take. Just a little squeeze…
A fist pounded on the office door. “Bo! Bo, it’s me! Lemme in!”
Bo dragged a deep breath into his lungs, slowly as if a great weight was pressing against his chest. Then he lowered the shotgun and carefully put the hammers back down.
“You’re a lucky man, Thad,” he said.
Thad continued to cry. The stink in the room was ample evidence that he had done more than piss himself in his terror.
Bo swung around, glanced at the other prisoners. They drew back like they’d unexpectedly found themselves standing on the brink of a long drop. Bo walked out of the cell block and slammed the door behind him.
“Hang on,” he called through the door to Scratch as he set the Greener on the desk. “I’ll take the bar off the door. Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” Scratch replied. “Open up and I’ll tell you about it.”
Bo grunted as he lifted the bar from its brackets and set it aside. He unlocked the door and swung it open. Scratch came in, not wasting any time in doing it. He knew as well as Bo did what a good target a man made when he was standing in a lighted doorway.
Bo shut the door, turned the key in the lock, and set the bar back in place. Scratch said, “I reckon you heard the shots?”
“I did. I knew you had to be right in the middle of them, too.”
“Damn straight. There were bushwhackers waitin’ in the alley outside the window of my hotel room. They made a mess of the place, but the only thing that got me was a piece of flyin’ glass when the window broke.” Scratch touched a small smear of dried blood on his tanned, leathery cheek. “Reckon I made things hot enough for ’em that they gave up and lit a shuck.”
“Did you get a look at them?”
Scratch shook his head. “Nope. Never saw anything except muzzle flashes.”
“Bound to have been the Deverys, though.”
“Bound to,” the silver-haired Texan agreed. “Unless it was friends of that fella Murdock and those other hombres we had to shoot.”
Bo ran a thumbnail along his jawline as he frowned in thought. “Yeah, I suppose it could’ve been something like that. My money’s on the Deverys, though.”
“Yeah, mine, too. When you heard the shootin’, your first impulse was go chargin’ out there, wasn’t it?”
Bo grunted. “Well, sure. I figured you were in trouble.”
“And that old man Devery’s cunnin’ enough to know that. You done the right thing by stayin’ forted up in here, Bo.”
“Yeah,” Bo said with a hint of bitterness in his voice. “I know that, but it wouldn’t have helped much if it turned out you were dead.”
Scratch grinned. “But I ain’t. I’m hale and hearty as ever. So don’t lose no sleep over it.”
