Read on for a sneak peek of Mean Pete's next short, mean and nasty western thriller:
I.
LOLA’S FATHER, THE SHERIFF, was dying hard
and fast.
“Lola,”
Dick Hammond said, lying on his bed in the little, frame house that he shared
with his only child, “you don’t spend no money on a pine casket, hear?”
The
sheriff rasped through gritted teeth as blood oozed out the hole that the gang
of Vernon “the Butcher” Belcher had drilled through his belly less than a half
hour ago, when they’d shot their way out of the Genesis Bank & Trust. “You just...bury me in that suit...that...I
married your ma in...an’ wrap me in my saddle blanket. That...that’s good enough--all right, Lola? Good enough for this old miscreant.”
He
smiled at that last, trying to make a joke even out of his dying. That’s the kind of man the sheriff was.
He
squeezed his daughter’s long, pale hand and looked up at her, sweat dribbling
through the two-day growth of beard on his ruddy cheeks.
“I
love you, Lola. After your mother,
you’re the only girl I ever loved.”
“I
love you, too, Pa,” Lola said through taut jaws, trying to be strong. She was dabbing a cool cloth at the sheriff’s
forehead.
“You
be good. Wouldn’t hurt ya none to act
like a lady now and then. And you marry
up right--you hear?”
“I
hear, Pa. I’ll do my best. For you.”
“I’ll
be lookin’ down on ya, so you behave yourself.
You make me smile, not frown--you hear me?”
He
chuckled at that. The laughter was too
much for him. He groaned, gasped, and
then he lay his head back on the pillow, and his pale eyes lost their focus.
“I
hear you, Pa,” Lola whispered, placing a tender hand on her father’s cheek.
“I
hear you, Pa,” she repeated, feeling grief well up like a large, dark and
snarling beast inside her.
She
sucked a sharp breath and pressed it down, down. All the way down until only a mere scrap of
it remained. She replaced it with a
bitter fury.
“Oh,
god!” sobbed the Hammonds’ neighbor, Dorothy Westenskow, who had come over to
help out when the sheriff had been carried back to the house by several
townsmen. The stout, gray-haired woman
stood back by the open bedroom door, still wearing the apron she’d been wearing
to cook lunch when the gunfire had erupted in the heart of Genesis.
Lola
bit her bottom lip and spun around to face the woman. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Dorothy! You’ve never known anyone to die before?”
Lola
strode past the woman and into the crudely, sparely furnished parlor around
which milled the somber townsmen who’d carried the sheriff home to die.
Lola
stopped and looked around at the five men, all middle-aged shop-keepers,
sitting on the horsehair sofa covered with a couple of ratty horse blankets, or
in the sheriff’s rocking chair, or the upholstered armchair. One, Matthew Kelly, the Wells Fargo agent,
was holding up the frame of the door leading to the kitchen.
The
cuckoo clock ticked woodenly, loudly.
Outside, birds in the lilac bush flitted shadows across the sunlit
parlor window.
“What
are you men doing here?” Lola asked crisply, scowling at each man in turn.
They
looked at each other skeptically.
Kelly
blinked behind his round, steel-framed spectacles. “Lola...is he dead, girl? Has the sheriff passed?”
“Yes,
he’s passed, as we knew he would.
What’re you doing here?”
“Why,
we were concerned, Lola,” said Silas Adams, the saddle maker, sitting on the
couch beside George Applegate, who owned the Applegate Hotel.
Lola
threw her shoulders back, drawing a heavy breath. “The sheriff and I both appreciate your
concern. The sheriff has passed. His killers are on the loose. Deputy Ulrich is forming a posse. Don’t you think you should join it?”
She
said this last as she strode across the room to the gun rack above the small, brick
fireplace in the corner. A pair of
revolvers lay on the fireplace mantle--both Smith & Wesson .44s. A holster hung by its shell belt from a
bottom corner of the gun rack.
“Lola,
we aren’t joining the posse,” said Applegate.
“Why, we’re old. We’d just hold
Ulrich up!”
Lola
was checking the loads in one of the .44s.
“Shade Ulrich is going to need every man he can get--able-bodied or
not. Your sheriff has been killed by Vernon
‘The Butcher’ Belcher and his coward cousin, Victor Bannack. On their way out of town, the gang kidnapped
the schoolteacher, and they’re heading for the border, Miss Clements in
tow.”
Lola
clicked the Smith & Wesson’s loading gate closed, spun the cylinder, and
shoved the revolver into the holster. As
she wrapped the shell belt around her slender waist, she added in a voice
quaking with pent up emotion, “Now, you owe it to the sheriff, to Miss
Clements, and to the entire town whose money they stole from the Genesis Bank
& Trust to get your sorry asses off
my sofa and out of my father’s rocking chair and throw in with Ulrich’s posse!”
