Brotherhood of Evil

T
HE
F
AMILY
J
ENSEN
B
ROTHERHOOD
OF
E
VIL

PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

B
OOK
O
NE

Chapter 1

Bitter cold rain sluiced down from gray, leaden skies, turning the single street of Espantosa, New Mexico Territory, into a muddy bog. It was the middle of the afternoon, but the thick overcast made it seem more like twilight.

No one was out and about except one man, who muttered curses under his breath as he attempted to run up the street. The mud kept trying to suck the boots off his feet, so his run was more of a stumble.

Petey Tomlin was plumb miserable. He wore an old slicker, but it leaked in several places. Even if it hadn't, pounding rain always found a way to work itself inside a man's duds and make him wet and uncomfortable. In less than a block, Tomlin felt like he was soaked to the skin. Water ran in a steady stream from the brim of his battered old hat and made it difficult for him to see where he was going.

He kept his eyes on the yellow glow up ahead that marked the front windows of the Gilt-Edge Saloon. That was his destination. He carried important news for the men who waited there.

Espantosa didn't have boardwalks along the two blocks of its business district. Most of the establishments opened directly onto the street. A few, like the Gilt-Edge, had covered porches, but that didn't help Tomlin stay out of the rain.

He could dry off and warm up later, he told himself, once he'd let Jack Shawcross know what he had seen at the livery stable down the street.

Shawcross had sent him to the stable to check on the horses, or so he'd claimed. Tomlin thought Shawcross had done it mostly to make him miserable. He got mean like that sometimes, especially when he'd been putting away the booze. He and the rest of the bunch had been in the Gilt-Edge all afternoon, drinking and playing cards and taking turns going upstairs with the saloon's lone bar girl.

Tomlin hadn't been up there with her yet. He was usually one of the last for anything good and the first for any unpleasant job like going out in the rain.

He would have to wait even longer for female companionship. He knew his boss would want to deal right away with what he'd discovered at the livery stable.

Maybe Shawcross would be feeling generous after that. He might even toss Tomlin an extra double eagle in appreciation for what he'd done.

He reached the steps leading up to the saloon's porch and climbed them, stomping to knock some of the mud off his boots, but the blasted stuff was just too thick and sticky.

At that time of year, the batwings were fastened back on either side of closed double doors. He grasped the right-hand doorknob, opened it, and stepped into the welcome warmth coming from a potbellied stove in the corner.

“Stop right there!” bellowed Ben Gormley, the craggy-faced bartender and the saloon's owner. “Don't come trackin' all that mud in here. Go outside and take them boots off.”

The little outlaw ignored the man who stood behind the bar and scuttled across the room toward the round, baize-covered table where Jack Shawcross was playing poker with four members of the gang. Three more men were at the bar, nursing mugs of beer. The nine owlhoots were the only people in the Gilt-Edge's main room, other than the owner.

“Damn it!” Gormley said as he started out from behind the bar. “I told you—” He stopped instantly and shut up as Shawcross lifted a hand.

“Petey wouldn't be hurrying like that if he didn't have something important to tell us,” the outlaw boss said.

“Sorry, Jack,” Gormley muttered as he retreated behind the hardwood again.

The outlaws spent freely and generally behaved themselves in Espantosa, which they had adopted as their unofficial headquarters. Nobody wanted to get on their bad side—which, according to their reputation, was very bad indeed.

Tomlin took off his hat and tilted it so that water ran off and formed a puddle in the sawdust on the floor. The sawdust would soak it up, given time.

Shawcross turned his attention back to the cards in his hand but asked Tomlin, “How are the horses, Petey?” He snickered. “Staying dry?”

“I didn't check on 'em,” Tomlin answered.

Shawcross frowned and looked at Tomlin coldly. “That's what I told you to do, wasn't it?”

“Yeah, but some fellas rode into the livery stable just before I got there. I saw 'em goin' in, and somethin' about one of 'em struck me as familiar. So I snuck up to the door and watched while they talked to ol' Ramon. I got a good look at 'em then, and I recognized one of them, just like I thought.”

Shawcross slapped his cards on the table, facedown, and snapped, “Damn it. Spit it out already.”

“It was Luke Jensen, Jack. I'm as sure of it as the day I was born.”

Chapter 2

The name was loud in the saloon. Shawcross sat up straighter, as did the other men at the table. The three men drinking at the bar stiffened, set their drinks down, and turned around.

“You'd better not be trying to have a little sport with me, Petey.” Shawcross's voice was soft, but it held a steel-edged quality that made a shiver go through Tomlin.

“I'd never do that, Jack.”
Even though you might deserve it for all the times you've tormented me.
“It was Jensen, right enough. He didn't look exactly like he did in El Paso last year. He was a little skinny, like he'd been sick or something. But it was him, no doubt about it.”

Shawcross turned his head and said to the men at the bar, “One of you go get Clancy.” Then he got to his feet. The cards, the game, and the pile of greenbacks and coins in the middle of the table obviously were forgotten. He drew the heavy revolver from the holster at his hip, opened the cylinder, and took a cartridge from one of the loops on his shell belt. He thumbed it into the empty chamber and snapped the cylinder closed.

Around the table, the other men began doing likewise.

Shawcross pouched the iron and looked out the window at the falling rain. He was a lean, lantern-jawed man. His cheeks still bore the faint pockmarks of a childhood illness. His deep-set eyes burned with a fire that might be hate or insanity or both. “You said there were some other men with Jensen?”

Tomlin nodded. “Yeah, three more. A couple who looked younger than him, and one old-timer. I didn't recognize any of 'em.”

“Doesn't matter. It's their bad luck to be here today. And to be friends with that bounty-hunter.”

The man who had hurried upstairs in response to Shawcross's order reappeared with another outlaw following him. The second man was stocky and had a shaggy head of sandy hair, along with a ragged mustache of the same color. His hat was pushed to the back of his head, his gun belt was draped over his shoulder, and he was clumsily fastening his shirt buttons. His long red underwear was still visible through the gap.

“I don't understand what the dadblasted hurry is,” he complained.

Shawcross called up the stairs. “Luke Jensen is in town, Clancy.”

The shaggy-haired man stopped. His eyes widened for a second. “Why the all-fired hell didn't somebody say so? Let's go get him!”

“That's what we're doing.” Shawcross turned back to Tomlin. “Did you happen to hear Jensen and his friends say where they were headed?”

“No, I hustled back here quick as I could in all that mud. Not many places in Espantosa they could go, though. The saloon here and the hotel are just about it. Shoot, they might still be at the livery stable. You know how that old Mex likes to talk.”

Shawcross nodded slowly. “We'll find them. Grab your slickers, boys, and let's go.”

The outlaws pulled on slickers, tugged down their hats, and stepped out onto the porch. From behind the bar, Gormley shook his head as he watched them go, as if he felt sorry for the man who was the object of their wrath and his unfortunate companions.

The mud made sucking sounds as the men walked along the street toward the livery stable in the next block. Both of the stable's big front doors were open, allowing lantern light to spill out into the street, but Shawcross and his men couldn't see into the building from where they were.

As they drew near the hotel, Shawcross said, “Neal, Wilson, check in there.”

The two men hurried ahead, tracked mud into the hotel lobby, and returned to tell Shawcross that no strangers had arrived recently.

“And that slick-haired clerk was too scared not to be tellin' the truth, boss,” one of them added.

Shawcross nodded. “They have to still be at the stable, then.” He pointed to four of the men and went on. “You boys head around back and come in that way. The rest of us will take the front.”

The four outlaws drifted off into the rain, quickly vanishing into the gloom. That left six men to tramp the rest of the way down the street to the stable.

Tomlin scrambled up next to Shawcross. “You reckon Jensen will start shootin' as soon as he lays eyes on you, Jack?”

“He might. He probably heard that I swore to get him after he killed Trace last year.”

Shawcross and Trace Bennett had been closer than brothers. Best friends and partners in leading the gang, they had been responsible for spreading outlawry across a wide swath of West Texas and New Mexico Territory.

The notorious bounty hunter Luke Jensen had trapped Bennett in a café in El Paso, gunning him down so that Trace had died in a welter of broken crockery, tangled in a checked tablecloth. Dying was bad enough; to do it in such undignified circumstances was an unforgivable insult.

Shawcross would have gone after Jensen then and there, as soon as he'd heard about what had happened, but a bunch of Rangers had ridden into town just then and the gang had to light a shuck to avoid being captured. By the time they'd made it back a couple weeks later, Jensen had already collected his blood money and was long gone.

Shawcross had insisted that he would cross trails with Luke Jensen again someday, and when he did, Jensen would die.

In the squalid little New Mexico settlement, it looked like that day had come.

“Clancy, Wilson, with me,” Shawcross said softly. “You other three spread out a little as we go in. Wait for Jensen to start the ball. I want him to know who's gonna kill him and why he's fixing to die.”

The others nodded in understanding. Usually, it was best not to give an enemy any more chance than you had to, but the outlaws outnumbered Jensen and his pards more than two to one, and they would be caught in a crossfire, to boot. They wouldn't stand a chance.

As the outlaws moved into the broad, open doorway, they unfastened their slickers and swept them back so they could get to their guns in a hurry. The hard rain drummed on the roof, and the four men standing inside the stable, talking to old Ramon while the hostler tended to their horses, didn't seem to hear the newcomers enter.

Shawcross's nostrils flared as he took a deep breath at the sight of one of them. Tomlin was right. The tall man with the craggy, unhandsome but compelling face and curly dark hair was Luke Jensen, no doubt about that. He looked like he had lost some weight and his face was a little pale in the lantern light, but it was him.

A man a few years younger and a couple inches shorter than Jensen stood with him. He had sandy hair under a thumbed-back hat, and his shoulders seemed incredibly broad in the slicker he wore. The third man was a little taller than Luke, fair-haired, powerfully built, and younger still.

That left the grizzled, whip-thin old-timer who wore a buckskin shirt and an old, steeple-crowned hat that had seen much better days. Sitting next to him was a big, shaggy dog of some sort, looking miserable with its wet fur matted to its body. Somebody as ancient as the old man probably didn't represent any threat, but they would gun him down anyway.

There was no law in Espantosa to say they couldn't.

It was the dog who noticed them first. His big head swung toward them, and he bared his teeth in a snarl that suddenly made him look more wolf than dog.

That got the old man's attention. He turned to look and said in a voice cracked with years, “Looks like we got comp'ny, boys.”

“Yeah,” Jensen said, turning slowly to face Shawcross and the other outlaws. Recognition showed on his face. “Jack Shawcross. I didn't expect to run into you here.”

“I'll just bet you didn't,” Shawcross grated.

“You got some idea of settling the score for Trace Bennett?”

“You killed him!”

Jensen shrugged. “The reward posters said dead or alive. I took them at their word, especially when he drew on me first.”

Quietly, the broad-shouldered man told old Ramon, “Drift on into the tack room,
tio
, and keep your head down.”

Ramon swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing. “
Sí, Señor Jensen
.”

Shawcross caught that and said quickly to Luke, “Jensen, eh? Your brother?”

A faint smile touched Luke's lips under his thin mustache. “That's right. This is my brother Smoke, and this is my other brother Matt. They call the old-timer Preacher.”

As Petey Tomlin stood a couple yards to the right of Shawcross, Clancy, and Wilson, he felt his guts turn to water. Everybody had heard of Smoke Jensen, who was quite possibly the fastest, deadliest gunfighter in the entire West, and Matt Jensen's fame as a pistoleer was growing rapidly, too. And as for Preacher . . . well, that old man was a living legend, no two ways about it.

Tomlin wondered if he could turn around and run back out into the downpour before they killed him.

Too late. Jack Shawcross yelled a curse, and his hand stabbed toward the gun on his hip.