Hell's Jaw Pass Read online

  WESTERNS BY MAX O’HARA

  HELL’S JAW PASS

  WOLF STOCKBURN, RAILROAD DETECTIVE

  A WOLF STOCKBURN, RAILROAD DETECTIVE WESTERN

  HELL’S JAW PASS

  MAX O’HARA

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  Teaser chapter

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2021 by Max O’Hara

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-4711-6

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4715-4 (eBook)

  ISBN-10: 0-7860-4715-1 (eBook)

  CHAPTER 1

  Spotting trouble, Wolf Stockburn reached across his belly with his right hand and unsnapped the keeper thong from over the hammer of the .45 Colt Peacemaker holstered for the cross-draw on his left hip.

  He loosened the big popper in the oiled scabbard.

  Just as casually, riding along in the Union Pacific passenger coach at maybe twenty miles an hour through the desert scrub of central Wyoming, he unsnapped the thong from over the hammer of the Colt residing in the holster tied down on his right thigh. He glanced again at the source of his alarm—a man riding four rows ahead of him, facing the front of the car, on the right side of the aisle.

  He was in the aisle seat. An old couple in their late sixties, early seventies, sat beside him, the old man against the wall and idly reading a newspaper. The old woman, wearing a red scarf over her gray head, appeared to be knitting. Occasionally, Stockburn could see the tips of the needles as she tiredly toiled, sucking her dentures.

  Most folks would have seen nothing out of kilter about the man in the aisle seat. He was young and dressed in a cheap suit—maybe attire he’d purchased second-hand from a mercantile. The left shoulder seam was a little frayed and both shoulders were coppered from sunlight.

  The young man wore round, steel-framed spectacles and a soot-smudge mustache. Stockburn had gotten a good look at him when the kid had boarded at the last water stop, roughly fifteen minutes ago. Something had seemed a little off about the lad as soon as Stockburn had seen him. Wolf wasn’t sure exactly what that had been, but his seasoned rail detective’s suspicions had been activated.

  Maybe it was the pasty, nervous look in the kid’s eyes, the moistness of his pale forehead beneath the brim of his shabby bowler hat. He’d been nervous. Downright apprehensive. Scared.

  Now, the iron horse was still new to the frontier West. So the kid’s fear could be attributed to the mere fact that this was his first time riding on a big iron contraption powered by burning coal and boiling steam, and moving along two slender iron rails at an unheard-of clip—sometimes getting up to thirty, thirty-five miles an hour. Forty on a steep downgrade!

  That could have been what had the kid, who was somewhere in his early twenties, streaking his drawers. On the other hand, Stockburn had spotted a telltale bulge in the cracked leather valise the kid was carrying, pressed up taut against his chest, like a new mother holding her baby.

  Adding to Stockburn’s caution, a minute ago the young man had leaned forward over the valise he’d been riding with on his lap. The kid had reached a hand into the valise. At least, Stockburn thought he had, though of course he didn’t have a full-frontal view of the kid, since he was sitting behind him. But he had a modest view over the kid’s left shoulder, and he was sure the kid had shoved his hand into the grip.

  As the kid had done so, he’d turned his head to peer suspiciously over his left shoulder, his long, unattractive face pale, his eyes wide and moist. He’d looked like a kid who’d walked into a mercantile on a dare from his schoolyard pals to steal a pocketful of rock candy.

  He’d run his gaze across the dozen or so passengers riding in the car, the train’s sole passenger car for this stretch of rail, between the town of Buffalo Gap and Wild Horse. His eyes appeared so opaque with furtive anxiety that Stockburn doubted the lad would have noticed if he, Stockburn—a big man—had been standing in the aisle aiming both of his big Colts at the boy. Wolf didn’t think the kid even noticed him now, sitting four rows back, in an aisle seat, staring right at him.

  Stockburn’s imposing size wasn’t the only thing distinctive about him. He also had a distinct shock of prematurely gray hair, which he wore roached, like a horse’s mane. It stood out in sharp contrast to the deep bronze of his ruggedly chiseled face. He wore a carefully trimmed mustache of the same color. He wasn’t currently wearing his black sombrero; it sat to his left, atop his canvas war bag, which the barrel of his leaning .44-caliber Winchester Yellowboy repeating rifle rested against. His head was bare.

  When the kid’s quick survey of the coach was complete, he turned back around to face the front of the car, his shoulders a little too square, his back too straight, the back of his neck too red.

  He was up to something.

  Stockburn started to look away from the back of the kid’s head then slid his gaze forward and across the aisle to his more immediate right, frowning curiously. A pretty young woman was staring at him, smiling. She sat two rows up from Wolf, in a seat against the other side of the car. The two plush-covered seats beside her were empty.

  She was maybe nineteen or twenty, wearing a burnt-orange traveling frock with a ruffled shirtwaist and burnt-orange waist coat and a matching felt hat, a little larger than Wolf’s open hand, pinned to the top of her piled, chestnut hair. Jade stones encased in gold dangled from her small, porcelain pale ears.

  She was as lovely as a Victorian maiden cameo pin carved in ivory. Her deep brown eyes glitter
ed in the bright, lens-clear western light angling through the passenger coach’s soot-streaked windows.

  Stockburn smiled and looked away, the way you do when you first notice someone staring at you. It makes you at first uncomfortable, self-conscious, wondering if you’re really the one being stared at so frankly. Certainly, you’re mistaken. Wolf’s gaze compelled him to look the girl’s way again.

  Her gaze did not waver. She remained staring at him, arousing his curiosity even further.

  Did she know, or think she knew, him?

  Or, possibly, she did know him but he didn’t recognize her . . . ?

  He smiled more broadly, holding her gaze now with a frank one of his own, one that was tempered ever so slightly with an incredulous wrinkle of the skin above his long, broad nose. That made her blush as she turned timid. Cheeks coloring slightly, she looked down and then turned her head back forward.

  But the smile remained on her rich, full lips, which were the color of ripe peaches . . . and probably just as cool and soft, Stockburn couldn’t help imagining. They probably tasted like peaches, as well.

  He chuckled ironically to himself. Get your mind out of the gutter, you old dog, he admonished himself. This girl probably still wears her hair in pigtails at home, and you’re old enough to be her father—a disquieting notion despite its being more and more true of late.

  Stockburn returned his attention to the back of the shabby-suited lad’s head. He looked around the car—a quick, furtive glance. He thought he probably saw more in that second and a half gander than the suited lad had in his prolonged one.

  Wolf counted fifteen other passengers. Five were women, all older than the chestnut-haired cameo pin gal. A young woman, likely a farmer’s wife, sat directly in front of Wolf, rocking a baby he guessed wasn’t more than a few months old. She and the child were likely enroute to their young husband and father who’d maybe staked a mining or homesteading claim somewhere farther west.

  A couple of men dressed like cow punchers sat nearly directly behind Stockburn, three rows back, at the very rear of the car. An old gent with a gray bib beard was nodding off on the other side of the aisle to his right. The rest of the men included a preacher and several men dressed in the checked suits of drummers.

  One could have been a card sharp, because he was dressed a little more nattily than the drummers, but he probably wasn’t much good with the pasteboards. You could tell the good ones by the way they carried themselves—straight and proud, usually smiling like they knew a secret about you and wouldn’t you just love to know what it was?

  This fellow, around Stockburn’s age, with some gray in his sideburns, was turned sideways and laying out a game of cards, furling his brow and moving his lips, counseling himself, as though he were still learning the trade. Like his suit, his pinky ring had likely come from a Montgomery Ward wish book.

  He wasn’t a train robber. Stockburn knew his own trade, and he could usually pick a train robber out of a crowd. At least, seven times out of ten he could.

  The two men behind him might be in with the lad near the front. He couldn’t tell about the others, including the old couple. Just being an old, harmless-looking married pair didn’t disqualify them from holding up a train. Stockburn had arrested Jed and Ella Parker, married fifty-three years, who’d preyed on passenger coaches for two and a half years before Wolf had finally run them down.

  They’d enlisted the help of their forty-three-year-old son, Kenny. Kenny had been soft in his thinker box, as the saying went, but he, Ma, and Pa had gotten the job done, stealing time pieces and jewelry and gold pokes as well as pocket jingle from innocent pilgrims.

  The Parkers had lost their Kansas farm to a railroad and had decided to exact revenge while entrepreneuring an alternative family business. Jed and Kenny had been as polite as church deacons. Ella, on the other hand, had cursed a blue streak, jumping up and down and hissing like a devil, as Stockburn had locked the bracelets around her wrists.

  If the detective business did one thing for you, it taught you that you never really knew about people. Even when you thought you did.

  Hell, the cameo pin gal might even be in cahoots with the lad with the lumpy valise. Maybe she’d smiled at Wolf earlier because she suspected what line of work he was in, and she’d been trying to disarm him, so to speak. Stockburn didn’t think she was a train robber, but he’d been surprised before, and it had nearly gotten him a bullet for his carelessness. He wasn’t going to turn his back on this pretty little gal, which wouldn’t be hard, as easy on the eyes as she was.

  When the train slowed suddenly—so suddenly that Stockburn and everybody else in the passenger coach became human jackknives, collapsing forward—Stockburn was not surprised. His heart didn’t even start beating much faster than it had been when he’d just been riding along, staring out at the sage and prickly pear, going over the assignment he had ahead of him—running down the killers who’d massacred a crew of track layers working for a spur line near the Wind River Mountains.

  Wolf could tell by the violent abruptness of the stop that the engineer must have locked up the brakes. That meant there was trouble ahead. Maybe blown rails or an obstacle of some kind—a tree or a telegraph pole felled across the tracks.

  The brakes kicked up a shrill shrieking that caused Stockburn to grind his teeth against it. Gravity pushed him up hard against the forward seat in which the young mother had slipped out of her own seat and fallen to the floor.

  The baby was red-faced, wailing, and the mother was sobbing, staring up at Wolf with holy terror in her eyes.

  The train continued slowing, bucking, shuddering, squealing, throwing Wolf forward and partway over the seat before him. He felt as though a big man were pressing down hard against him from behind, one arm rammed down taut against his shoulders, the other clamped across the back of his neck. He wanted like hell to reach for one of his Colts in preparation for what he knew was coming, but at the moment gravity overwhelmed him.

  “Oh, my God—what’s happening?” the young mother screamed.

  The young mother and the child were a nettling distraction. Stockburn’s attention was torn between them and the young lad near the front of the train. That danger was bored home a moment later as the train finally stopped, and the big bully, gravity, finally released its iron-like grip on Wolf’s back and shoulders. While Wolf stepped into the aisle, moving around the seat before him to help the young mother and the baby, the lad whom Wolf suspected of chicanery bounded up out of his own seat.

  He, too, stepped into the aisle but without chivalrous intent.

  He raised an old Schofield revolver and tossed away the valise he’d carried it in. He fired a round into the ceiling and bellowed in a high, reedy voice, “This is a holdup! Do what you’re told and you won’t be sent to hell in a hail of hot lead!”

  At the same time his words reverberated around the car, evoking screams from the ladies and curses from the male passengers, another man—this one sitting at the front of the coach and on the same side of the aisle as Wolf—leaped to his feet and swung around, giving a coyote yell as he pumped a round into his old-model Winchester rifle. He was a scrawny coyote of a kid with a pinched-up face and devilishly slitted eyes.

  Stockburn hadn’t seen him before because he was so short that Wolf hadn’t been able to see him over the other passengers. He doubted the kid was much taller than your average ten-year-old. He wore a badger coat and a bowler hat, and between his thin, stretched-back lips shone one nearly black, badly crooked front tooth.

  “Do what he says and shut that baby up back there!” the human coyote caterwauled at Stockburn. He couldn’t see the baby nor the mother, but the baby’s screams no doubt assailed the ears of everyone on the coach, because they sure were assailing Stockburn’s. “Shut that kid up or I’ll blow its head off!”

  Instantly, Stockburn’s twin Colts were in his hands. He aimed one at the coyote-faced younker and one at the taller, bespectacled youth with the Schofield. “Drop t
hose guns, you devils! Wolf Stockburn, Wells Fargo!”

  Both youths flinched and shuffled backward a bit. They hadn’t been expecting such brash resistance.

  “S-Stockburn?” said the bespectacled younker in the shabby suit. He was aiming the Schofield at the rail detective but Wolf saw the hesitation in the kid’s eyes. That same hesitation was in the coyote-faced kid’s eyes, as well. They might have leveled their sights on him, but he had the upper hand.

  For now . . .

  “Wells . . . Wells Fargo . . . ?” continued the bespectacled youth, incredulous, crest-fallen. One of his clear blue eyes twitched behind his glasses, and his long, pale face was mottled red.

  The coyote-faced youth swallowed down his own apprehension and glowered down the barrel of his cocked carbine at the big rail detective. “I don’t give a good two cents who you are, Mister Stockburn, sir. If you don’t drop them two purty hoglegs of your’n, we’re gonna kill you and ever’body else aboard this consarned train—includin’ the screamin’ sprout!”

  CHAPTER 2

  The passengers had settled down. Most had, anyway.

  A few women sobbed, and the baby, still on the floor with the mother to Stockburn’s left, was still wailing. The other passengers were in their seats and merely casting frightened glances between the two gunmen at the front of the coach and Stockburn standing near the feet of the mother with the crying baby, in roughly the center of the car.

  Stockburn kept his two silver-chased Colts aimed at the two firebrands bearing down on him with a rifle and a hogleg, respectively.

  “Children,” Stockburn said tightly but loudly enough to be heard above the baby’s wails, “you got three seconds to live . . . less’n you lower those guns and raise your hands shoulder-high, palms out.”