William Johnstone - Winter Kill

THE LAST GUNFIGHTER Winter Kill

THE LAST GUNFIGHTER Winter Kill William W. Johnstone with J. A. Johnstone

PINNACLE BOOKS

Kensington Publishing Corp.

www.kensingtonbooks.com

Chapter 1

Frank Morgan dropped to one knee and fired twice. Muzzle flame spurted from the thick shadows in the alley across the street, and Frank felt the wind-rip of a bullet going past his head. He triggered again, aiming just above the muzzle flash he had seen, and this time he was rewarded by a yell of pain.

The bushwhacker in the alley wasn’t the only one yelling. The street had been rather crowded when the shooting started, and men shouted curses and questions as they tried to scurry out of the line of fire.

Frank lunged to his feet and darted behind a parked wagon. He crouched low and took off his high-crowned hat so that he could risk a look past the end of the wagon’s sideboards. A man stumbled out of the alley, gun in hand. His other hand was pressed to his belly, where Frank’s slug must have caught him.

“Damn you!” he screamed. “You’ve killed me!”

The man jerked his gun up and fired again. Frank drew a bead and put a bullet through the bushwhacker’s head, knocking him off his feet. Gut-shot like that, the varmint might have lived long enough to empty his revolver, and innocent folks might get hit by the stray bullets flying around. Frank didn’t want that. The citizens of Seattle, and visitors to the town, had already been endangered enough by this fracas.

Frank stepped out from behind the wagon and clapped his hat back on his head. He still had one round left in the Colt. He kept the gun trained on the fallen man as he approached. Light spilling through the open doors and windows of buildings along the street showed him that the bushwhacker wasn’t moving, but Frank hadn’t survived all those long, dangerous years on the frontier by taking unnecessary chances.

Frank Morgan was a gunfighter. He was known as The Drifter, because ever since leaving his home in Texas not long after the Civil War, he had never stayed in one place for very long. A little more than three decades had passed since then, and he was still as fiddle-footed as ever.

He had to be. Every time he attempted to settle down, somebody tried to kill him. That was part and parcel of the reputation he had as maybe the fastest gun alive. Of all the famous gunfighters who had lived in the West during its wild and woolly days—Smoke and Matt Jensen, John Wesley Hardin, Matt Bodine, Ben Thompson, Falcon McAllister—Frank Morgan was the last one who hadn’t either crossed the divide or hung up his guns. The only shootist remaining in his league was the mysterious Kid Morgan, who had taken to roaming the Southwest in recent months. People might have remarked on the two of them having the same last name and wondered if they were related, but nobody knew for sure.

No one but a handful of people were aware that Kid Morgan was really Conrad Browning, Frank’s son.

Frank was a long way from The Kid’s stomping ground at the moment. Seattle, Washington, to be precise. He had no real reason for being here, but everybody had to be somewhere. He had drifted up the coast from San Francisco, living up to the nickname that had been given to him many years earlier.

Now he stood over yet another hombre he had shot, the latest in a long line of men who had fallen to The Drifter’s gun. Frank saw the neat black hole in the man’s forehead, just above the right eye, and knew that he wasn’t a threat anymore. Taking cartridges from the loops on his shell belt, Frank began thumbing them into the Colt’s cylinder to replace the rounds he had fired.

“You killed that fella, mister,” one of the bystanders said as they began to crowd curiously around Frank and the corpse.

“Seemed like the thing to do at the time,” Frank said. Even after all these years, his voice still held a trace of a Texas drawl.

Another man spoke up. “Yeah, he fired at you first. I saw the whole thing. Self-defense, sure as hell.”

“You know him, mister?” the first man asked. “He have a grudge against you?”

“Must have,” Frank said, “but I don’t know him.” He snapped the revolver’s cylinder closed. “I never saw this hombre in my life until just now.”

A burly, blue-uniformed policeman shouldered his way through the crowd. “All right, all right, step aside,” he ordered. “What the devil’s goin’ on—”

He stopped short as he caught sight of the Colt in Frank’s hand and the dead man at his feet. Reaching for his own pistol, he went on excitedly. “Drop that gun, mister!”

“You don’t drop guns,” Frank said. “That can damage them, or make them go off.” He pouched the iron. “But I’ll put it away while we talk, friend.”

The policeman glared at him. “I ain’t your friend. What the hell happened here?”

The man who claimed to have witnessed the shooting said, “I saw the whole thing. That fella”—he pointed toward the dead man—“ambushed this other fella. He shot at him from the alley. And all he got for his trouble was a bullet in the gut and one in the head.”

The policeman looked around at the crowd. “Anybody else see anything? Is that what happened?”

Several other men spoke up, agreeing with the first witness. The policeman turned back to Frank and said, “I guess maybe you didn’t do anything wrong after all, mister. But you’ll still have to sign a statement and give testimony at the inquest.”

Frank shrugged. “Fine by me.”

“And we’ll need to know why this man tried to kill you,” the policeman added.

“Now, there, you’re out of luck,” Frank said. “I don’t have any earthly idea.”

The policeman frowned again. “A man tries to shoot you, and you don’t have any idea why?”

“Afraid not.”

“I suppose this happens to you all the time,” the policeman said with a snort.

“More than you’d think,” Frank said with a note of dry humor in his voice. “And more than I’d like.”

The policeman stared at Frank, obviously confused, until one of the bystanders said abruptly, “Hey, I recognize that fella. He’s Frank Morgan!”

That caused a stir in the crowd. “The gunfighter?” one man asked, while another added, “The one they wrote all those dime novels about?”

Those dime novels were one of the banes of Frank’s existence. The gaudy, yellow-backed, luridly overwritten stories wildly exaggerated a reputation that didn’t need any exaggeration. Judging by them, Frank had killed more men than all the other infamous shootists put together. That just made even more would-be fast guns eager to test their speed against him. Sometimes he was able to just wound them, but mostly he had to kill the young, stupid firebrands.

“Are you him?” the policeman demanded. “Are you the notorious gunfighter Frank Morgan? The one they call The Drifter?”

Frank didn’t see any point in denying it. He nodded wearily and said, “That’s right.”

The policeman gestured toward the corpse. “Then this fella probably just wanted to be known as the man who killed Frank Morgan. He didn’t care that he had to do it from a dark alley.”

That theory was probably correct. Similar things happened all too often.

“I’ll have the undertaker fetch the body and then I’ll file a report. Where are you stayin’, Mr. Morgan?”

“I don’t have a hotel room yet,” Frank replied with a shake of his head. “I just rode in and found a stable for my horses.” He had left Stormy and Goldy down the street at Jessup’s Livery, along with Dog, the big, wolflike cur who was also one of Frank’s trail partners.