Hanging Judge Read online

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The crowd scattered before Ryan and his friends as they rode up at a lope on the horses Jak had helped them steal.

  Ryan had already spotted sec men shooters on two roofs to their right, and as he looked that way again that changed to one roof. A body plummeted off the nearer, taller building to crash to the gutter. Jak gave his friends a big grin and a bloody thumbs-up as they went by.

  From the back of the mare to Ryan’s right, J.B. raked the other roofline one-handed with a burst from his Uzi. The horses tossed their heads and snorted but didn’t shy away.

  The sec men on the roof cried out in alarm and pulled back. A high-powered longblaster cracked from the other side of the street. Ryan heard a scream from an unseen marshal.

  “Mildred, I bet,” J.B. said in satisfaction, and ripped off another short burst at the now-untenanted roof edge.

  “Show-off,” Ryan said.

  “Ryan Cawdor,” a familiar voice boomed. “The very man I came all this way to see.”

  Another longblaster shot roared from the roof to the left.

  “Cutter Dan?” Ricky yelped from the horse to Ryan’s left, past Doc. “No es posible!”

  “Fireblast! J.B., Ricky, try to keep those bastards on the roof from back-shooting me, if any take a mind to,” Ryan said. “Doc, come with me and deal with the sec men under the gallows.”

  “Excelsior!” Doc shouted. He drew his rapier from its sheath, which he had stuck through his belt, and hauled out his LeMat with his left hand. Then he and Ryan booted their horses forward.

  Doc pulled out in front of Ryan’s big black gelding. He rode a huge pinto mare with a notched ear and an attitude.

  There were four sec men huddled under the scaffold, surrounded by bodies, some of which clearly weren’t their brothers in arms. They gaped wide-eyed at this fresh and unexpected attack.

  One of them went down flailing as Doc loosed the short-barreled shotgun at them. He reared his mount to a halt and slid off on its far side to use its big black and white body for temporary cover. He swatted the mare’s rump with his rapier. The horse neighed and bolted down the street. Doc waded into the stunned sec men, blasting and stabbing and chortling gleefully.

  Ryan slowed the horse enough to climb up on the saddle and launch himself at the gallows. He made it and didn’t die; that was the good part. But he was forcibly reminded that he wasn’t the expert horseman the companions believed him to be when he landed hard and rolled across the platform almost into range of the captive young woman’s wildly kicking boots.

  “Cawdor,” Cutter Dan said, gazing down at him from beside his hostage’s furious face. “You’d have made a much more impressive entrance if you’d stuck the landing.”

  “You should be dead, with half the mountain falling on your bastard head,” Ryan gritted.

  If the sec boss of Second Chance and Chief Marshal of Judge Santee’s phantom United States, hadn’t been upright with his knife held to the young woman’s face, Ryan wouldn’t have been able to swear the man wasn’t dead. He looked as if someone had upended a bucket of blood over his head and let it dry. His clothes were half torn from his rangy frame.

  “I’m no easier to kill than a cockroach,” Cutter Dan said. “Just like you, Cawdor. Now, put your hands up like a good little perp or the bitch dies.”

  “Chill her,” Ryan said from his back. “She’s nothing to me. I never saw her before.”

  “Wait!” the woman yelled. She had the remarkable presence of mind to jab a thumb backward at Cutter Dan’s eye.

  Ryan kicked the chief marshal’s left shin, hard. His boot slid back. The leg buckled, dropping him to a knee.

  Sharleez heaved her body frantically and broke loose. She fell sprawling to the scaffold.

  Ryan jumped to his feet, drawing his panga. Beat to hell as he was, Cutter Dan got up as rapidly. The two men faced each other, big knives in their hands, chests heaving to suck down air.

  Cutter Dan gave Ryan a big old grin. He was missing a top front tooth.

  “And now, coldheart,” the sec boss growled, “we settle it.”

  His brought up his Bowie and held out his left hand to ward off his opponent’s knife hand.

  “Right,” Ryan said, and kicked him in the balls.

  Breath exploded from Cutter Dan and he doubled over. Ryan straightened him with a jaw-cracking left uppercut.

  Then he buried the panga almost to the hilt in Cutter Dan’s belly.

  It had to have hurt like nuke fire, but Cutter Dan only grunted. He tried to stab Ryan.

  The one-eyed man caught his wrist. For a moment they stood locked together, straining, arm to arm, strength against strength.

  But it was a one-way fight. The agony and rapid bleeding out meant Cutter Dan could only weaken. Slowly Ryan forced up the fist that held the Bowie knife.

  The chief marshal’s eyes blazed defiance. His broad jaw was set. The muscles stood out on his neck like steel cables.

  Then Ryan forced him to cut his own throat with his own knife.

  * * *

  “WAIT!” THE OLD MAN’S voice screeched. “Unhand me you insurgent traitor scum!”

  The final battle of Second Chance was brief, bloody and entirely one-sided. At least as far as Ryan’s band was concerned.

  With the sec men on the streets either running away or rounded up and beaten bloody by the mob, it was easy for Ryan and Ricky to take up position in a building across from the reinforced courthouse. They had quickly sniped down the armed sec men who dared show themselves. J.B.’s Uzi had ripped the thrown-together barricade of sandbags and office furniture to make sure the marshals behind it kept their heads down. The vengeful mob had swarmed over it and done the rest, despite the fact they lost a good dozen of their own to marshals fighting like the trapped rats that they were.

  Now, proudly escorted by Ricky with his DeLisle longblaster at the ready, Mildred and Krysty emerged from the courthouse with their backpacks on. The barricades had been mostly kicked to the side, but the women had to step carefully between the bodies still heaped around it.

  “No! This is anarchy! You can’t!”

  Dozens of hands held a wildly struggling Judge Santee over the heads of the crowd gathered around the gallows. His hands were bound behind his back. His long black coattails flew as he thrashed and raved.

  Other ville folk were waiting on the scaffold. Some were hauling up the body of a sec man, hanging from his distended neck, using the pulley system Santee had thoughtfully built into the gallows. They left two others dangling for the moment, along with the stocky body of a red-bearded guy in what had once been a very nice suit by ville standards. He’d been one of the rich men who’d helped Santee run Second Chance.

  If Ryan had heard his name, he didn’t remember it. There wasn’t much point in learning it now.

  Another of Santee’s ruling partners lay dead in the viewing box behind the gallows. The woman Ryan had rescued—quite incidentally—from Cutter Dan had apparently shot him. And good for her.

  The last remaining cohort of Judge Santee, the fat and dumpy mayor, stood off to one side, watching. He was the one who’d shown the howling, vengeful mob where his fellow plutocrat was hiding. They’d either forgiven him or forgotten him in their zeal to string up the red-bearded man.

  Krysty joined Ryan and wrapped him in a warm embrace. The one-eyed man grinned at her but didn’t return the hug. He had both hands on his Steyr and meant to keep them that way. He didn’t like a lynch mob, even when he was its hero of the moment.

  If there was any monster in the Deathlands whose gratitude could be relied on less than a baron’s, it was a mob with its bloodlust up. He didn’t intend the companions to become its victims.

  The Judge was passed up onto the scaffold. He was forced to stand upright a
s the recently vacated noose was settled over his scrawny neck. Then he was marched a couple of steps back onto the reset trapdoor.

  “You can’t do this, you animals!” he screeched, spittle flying from his mouth. “This is treason! I am the law! You are in rebellion against the United States of Am—”

  The trap snapped open beneath his feet. As Judge Santee reached the end of his rope, his words died abruptly.

  So did he.

  Standing on a front corner of the scaffold, the woman Krysty had told Ryan was called Sharleez shook a longblaster in the air.

  “Justice!” she cried.

  “Justice!” the mob screamed back.

  The helpers on the gallows began to reel up the bodies of the two sec men. A group of captured sec men, around a dozen, knelt on the street nearby. Their arms were bound behind their backs. They had been beaten bloody. A couple had been so battered that they lay on their sides, though they were clearly still alive by the piteous way they moaned.

  “Bring more of the bastards to face justice!” Sharleez commanded.

  “Justice!” the mob shrieked.

  “Girl’s got a knack for this sort of thing, you gotta admit,” J.B. said, rubbing his jaw. He stood at Ryan’s side, his shotgun in hand and his Uzi slung. Doc, Ricky and Jak stood behind them. They were all eyeing the crowd warily and not being subtle about it.

  “John!” Mildred exclaimed in outrage.

  A pair of the captives were booted to their feet and prodded with pitchforks. They stumbled toward the gallows.

  Eager hands reached out to grab them.

  J.B. shrugged.

  “Well,” he said, “you know I like to see a thing well done. Leaving aside what that thing may be.”

  The nooses were removed from the most recent two dead sec men. Their bodies were unceremoniously rolled off the back of the platform to join the pile growing there. The next pair was put into the nooses in their place.

  Mildred turned away shaking her head. “I’m ready to go,” she said. “Anybody else feel like we ought to just maybe slide on out of here?”

  “Brought horses,” Jak said, nodding to Krysty and Mildred. He jerked his thumb to where their mounts, as well as the ones the men had ridden to town, were tethered a couple of blocks down the street.

  “Yeah,” Ryan said, “that sounds like an ace idea. Nobody’s paying us any mind, anyhow.”

  “Shouldn’t we at least say goodbye to Sharleez?” asked Krysty, as Ryan began walking west.

  He just looked at her.

  “You’re right,” she said, and followed.

  They’d barely gone a block—and only Ricky had looked back at the sound of two traps being sprung simultaneously—when a new voice rang out through streets.

  “People of Second Chance.” The ringing, deep baritone echoed between the shabby buildings. “A bright new day has dawned for all of us today. The mad tyrant’s reign of terror has ended! We are delivered!”

  Ryan glanced back. To his surprise, the fat mayor had gotten up on the scaffold, where he stood up front at the opposite corner from Sharleez. She was looking at him as if she had no idea what to do about him. Though his hair was standing up all any which way, his coat was torn and his collar hung open, he was addressing the crowd calmly and authoritatively.

  To Ryan’s amazement, they were actually listening to him.

  “Isn’t he the one used to do the ringside announcing at Santee’s hanging bees?” J.B. asked. “Why aren’t they stringing him up?”

  Jak made a nasty feral sound, like a cornered wildcat.

  “Agreed,” Mildred said. “Mayor freaking Toogood. We got an earful about him when we were hiding out with the resistance. They say he’s a silver-tongued devil and could talk a bear sow away from her cubs.”

  Ryan grunted. He turned his head forward again. He had never stopped walking toward the horses.

  The man’s mellifluous harangue continued to follow them, though. He was getting his say.

  When they reached the horses Ricky and J.B. helped tie Krysty’s and Mildred’s packs behind their saddles. Ryan stopped and turned back.

  Toogood was still standing there, waving his arms. Ryan could still hear his voice, but he couldn’t make out the words.

  Mebbe it didn’t matter, he thought. The crowd wasn’t just listening to him. More kept coming, as if his voice was soothing and enticing those who’d hidden through the battle out into the open.

  “It appears our erstwhile plutocrat is securing himself a leading role in this bright new day he preaches of,” Doc said. “At this rate, he will not be ‘erstwhile’ at all.”

  “Looks like,” Ryan agreed. He stuck his left arm through the loop of his sling.

  “Krysty and Mildred’s young friend Sharleez should learn to sleep with one eye open, I fear,” Doc said.

  Ryan raised the longblaster to his shoulder. The sling drew taut, snugging the steel buttplate of his Scout against his shoulder and giving him a stable firing platform. He aimed through the scope, inhaled, partially exhaled, caught his breath. Gently but firmly he squeezed the trigger.

  When the longblaster came back down from recoil, Mayor Toogood was toppling straight over backward, with his arms flung theatrically out to his sides.

  “That is...symbolic,” Doc said in a small voice.

  “Mebbe she will have to watch her back,” Ryan said, “but it won’t be on account of him.”

  Faces were turned their way; arms began to point.

  Ryan turned his back and slung his longblaster. The others were already mounted. Krysty held the reins of his horse for him.

  “Reckon I owed your little friend one,” he said to her as he swung aboard his black gelding. “For helping you and Mildred out.”

  He accepted the reins and a quick kiss.

  “You think they’ll be better off now?” Ricky asked.

  “Who cares?” Ryan said. “Let’s ride.”

  The companions kicked their heels into the flanks of their horses and rode out of the ville.

  * * * * *

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  ISBN-13: 9781460327784

  First edition March 2014

  HANGING JUDGE

  Copyright © 2014 by Worldwide Library

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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