William Johnstone - Blood Bond - Deadly Road to Yuma

Ed spilled his guts, of course. What else was he going to do? Lie to this outlaw, this…demon? Run the risk of having Joshua Shade pursuing him like a hound from Hades for the rest of his life?

Hell, no!

And when he was done, Shade had squeezed his shoulders and said, “Good work, my friend. The Lord will be pleased that you’ve provided so much assistance to His humble servants.”

“Wh-what are you gonna do now?”

“Bring God’s message to Arrowhead, of course. Help the sinners to repent and put the things of this world aside.”

Ed bit back the groan of despair that tried to well up his throat. He knew good and well what Shade was going to do. He and the rest of the gang were going to raid the town, looting and raping and killing. They might even burn it down.

There was nothing Ed could do to stop them, so he might as well save his own life, he told himself. He clung to that thought as he sat down on a rock and waited. Shade didn’t want him to leave yet.

“You should stay, Brother Ed,” he’d said. “Stay and witness the fruits of your handiwork.”

That was just about the last thing Ed wanted to see right now, but Shade didn’t give him any choice.

A couple of men rode off toward Arrowhead, and after what seemed like forever to Ed, a light suddenly flared to life and moved back and forth three times. Somebody had lit a match and signaled with it.

Mere seconds later, the same sort of signal was repeated from the other end of the settlement. Shade put his hands on his hips and said, “Excellent! The sentries have been taken care of.”

Murdered, that was what he meant, Ed thought, and again he struggled to keep from groaning.

Shade turned toward him and motioned for him to get up. Ed stood and swallowed as the outlaw leader approached him.

“We’ll be going now,” Shade said. “Would you like to accompany us, Brother Ed, or would you rather receive your reward now?”

“R-reward?” Ed repeated. “You didn’t say nothin’ about no reward.”

“You didn’t think the Lord would allow your work to go unrewarded, did you?”

Ed rasped calloused fingertips over his beard-stubbled jaw. He felt bad about what was about to happen to the folks in Arrowhead, mighty bad, but…well, since there was nothing he could do about it…he might as well get something out of the deal, hadn’t he?

“If it’s all right with you, Rev’rend, I’ll, uh, take whatever you got for me and go on my way. I don’t care how much it is neither. I’ll take whatever you want to give me.”

Shade shook his head. “Oh, it’s not money, brother. It’s a heavenly reward.”

With that he brought his hand up and plunged a bowie knife into Ed’s belly. Ed cried out in agony as he felt the razor-sharp blade being tugged across his stomach, opening him up so that the coils of his guts spilled out through the wound as Shade stepped back. Ed tried to stuff them back inside, but failed. They slipped out of his hands and uncoiled onto the dirt at his feet. He staggered, fell, lay there gasping as his life ran out.

The last thing he was aware of was Joshua Shade’s voice.

The son of a bitch was praying.

Chapter 6

Matt Bodine’s eyes snapped open in the darkness. He didn’t know what had awakened him, but he had a feeling it couldn’t be anything good. His instincts wouldn’t have roused him from slumber otherwise.

He sat up in bed. A little moonlight filtered in around the curtain over the hotel room’s single window. The window was open to let in some fresh air, and the curtain swayed in and out with the currents of the night breeze.

Before turning in, Matt had hung both gunbelts over the back of the chair next to the bed, so that the holstered Colts were within easy reach. He swung his legs out of the bed and stood up, plucking one of the irons from leather at the same time.

In bare feet, wearing only the bottoms from a pair of long underwear, Matt padded over to the window and used the Colt’s barrel to ease the curtain aside so that he could look out.

His room was at the rear of the hotel, as was Sam’s next door. The windows looked out on an alley.

Nothing was moving in that alley, Matt saw as he peered down from his window. He judged that the hour was after midnight, and the town was quiet and peaceful.

Well, maybe not so quiet or peaceful, he thought a second later as he heard a gurgling sound from somewhere overhead. It was followed by a thump on the roof.

That wasn’t right. Matt stuck his head out the window.

To his right, no more than a couple of feet away, a ladder leaned against the hotel. That would be the ladder used by the lookout Sheriff Cyrus Flagg had posted up there.

Sam’s window was on the other side of the ladder, and at that moment, Sam poked his head out, too, and looked toward his blood brother.

“You hear something?” Sam asked in a half whisper.

Matt nodded and gestured with the thumb of his free hand toward the roof. Sam brought his right hand into view, holding a six-gun. He gestured with the barrel, pointing upward.

Matt nodded and swung a leg over the windowsill.

His brain was working swiftly. Given the fact that something was going on up there on the roof, it made sense that what he had heard that woke him up was somebody climbing the ladder, since it was right outside his window.

That in itself wasn’t suspicious; someone sent by the sheriff could have been going up there to relieve the man on duty and take over as lookout.

But coupled with the noises he had heard, the choked gurgle followed by a thump, the situation didn’t seem near that innocent.

In fact, it was downright ominous, Matt thought as he clung to the edge of the window with one hand and reached for the ladder with his foot.

With the lithe agility he’d been blessed with since birth, he swung over to the ladder. In absolute silence, he started climbing toward the roof. As he looked up, he saw a flare of light. Someone had just lit a match. He smelled the faint tang of brimstone from the lucifer.

Matt smelled something else, too, a metallic, coppery scent that he recognized.

That was the smell of freshly spilled blood—and a lot of it.

Matt’s head rose above the level of the short wall that ran around the roof. He saw a man standing several yards away with his back turned, holding a lit match over his head that he moved back and forth three times.

Between Matt and the hombre with the match lay another man, facedown in the middle of a dark, spreading pool.

Matt didn’t need anybody to explain to him what had happened here. The varmint with the match had cut the throat of the other man. That was the only thing that would have produced so much blood.

The dead man had to be the guard Sheriff Flagg had posted up here.

Which meant the killer, in all likelihood, was one of Joshua Shade’s men…

In the back of Matt’s brain, he realized that Shade must have managed to sneak some scouts into the settlement after all, or else he wouldn’t have known about the guard on top of the hotel.

That guess was confirmed a second later when, from the corner of his eye, he saw another match being waved back and forth at the far end of the next block, from the roof of the bank.

He didn’t stop to think about that consciously, though. Instead, he went into action, swarming up and over the wall and onto the roof. Almost noiselessly, he lunged past the dead man at the outlaw who had just sent that signal with the match.

Not quite noiselessly, though, because a bare foot scraped on the rooftop and warned the killer. He started to swing around as he dropped the now-burned-out match and clawed at the gun on his hip.

Matt’s arm was already raised, and he struck first before the man could drag iron. The Colt in Matt’s hand smashed down on the man’s head, crumpling his hat and maybe denting his skull.