According to Hoyle (28 page)

“You can stay here.”

Flynn stared at the hat on top of Rose’s head. Flynn looked down and met the man’s eyes.

“No one would think less of you for protecting the government’s hard-earned rocks,” Rose drawled sarcastically. “Marshal Washington certainly wouldn’t.”

Flynn stared at him, blue eyes flashing dangerously. “I’m going after Wash,” he whispered.

“Good,” Rose responded happily as he picked up his shotgun and loaded three more shells into it. He closed it, the sound reverberating ominously throughout the large room. “Let’s burn the breeze, Marshal!” he said as he took several long strides toward the door and brushed past Flynn as he stepped out into the hall.

C
AGE
wondered, as he lay on the floor and peered at the few men left guarding the passengers, where the rest of Stringer’s boys were. If they were out looking for Gabriel and Flynn, then when the shooting had started down below they should have heard it and returned to investigate. That was, of course, unless Stringer’s plans called for there to be shooting down below and none of the men thought it odd.

Cage realized with a sickening, sinking feeling that the reason no one had returned was because they had all known to expect the gunfire. Those guards down in that hold with the gold had been slaughtered, and that had been the plan all along. The passengers, Cage knew, would be next.

“I swear, Cage, I think you were put on this ship just to vex me,” Stringer growled to him angrily.

Cage turned his head and watched him warily. It was odd to hear Stringer call him by the name few men had known him by in that life. Stringer had known it, but he’d preferred to merely call him Boss. And Cage couldn’t help but think to himself that he had done very little to vex anyone. He hadn’t really done anything but bleed, in fact.

Stringer stalked over to the bar where all the weapons from the passengers had been placed and he picked up two Colts. He checked them to make sure one cylinder was empty in each piece. Stringer had always sawed off the trigger guards of his guns to make his draw faster, but any man with a lick of sense knew that made your guns just that much more likely to shoot off your own toes. To guard against that, like so many men did, Stringer never loaded the cylinder that would have fired first. Even with the borrowed guns and their intact trigger guards, he didn’t seem willing to go around half-cocked.

He removed a bullet from each of the two guns as Cage watched him. Cage didn’t think it was the best idea, but he certainly wasn’t going to point out that Stringer might want all the ammunition he could get his hands on going up against Gabriel. Stringer stuffed the guns into his belt and turned around. He met Cage’s eyes from under the brim of his hat and Cage caught his breath involuntarily. Stringer had always been impressive to look at, to say the least, especially when he was riled.

Stringer stalked over to him and Cage instinctively shied away from him when he got closer, expecting another blow. It didn’t come, though, and instead Stringer knelt near him. Not close enough for Cage to reach him or do any damage to him, but close enough to speak in a low murmur that couldn’t be overheard. “Pick your side now, Cage,” he said, his voice hoarse and grave. “You can still come back to us.”

Cage’s heart was hammering in his chest as he maintained eye contact with a man he had once cared for. He breathed out slowly, trying to calm himself, and his eyes flickered uncertainly. Stringer nodded at him eagerly, seeing the indecision and trying to urge him into his choice.

Cage met his eyes for a long, tense moment of fighting within himself. He knew, deep down, that he could never go back. And he knew that he didn’t truly want to go back. The cold hard truth of the matter was that he’d risked his life to leave a year ago, and he’d forfeit his life tonight if he needed to. He wouldn’t go back. Stringer knew that too, whether he wanted to admit it or not. Cage looked at him with a hint of pity, and then he very deliberately looked away.

Chapter 14

F
LYNN
was trusting to Gabriel Rose’s instincts more than he wanted to as they crept through the lower levels of the ship. Rose was certain there would be men in the boiler room, stationed to set dynamite and then wait for the word from their boss to light it. Rose insisted they needed to be rid of them first to ensure that the boat didn’t catch fire.

Flynn wasn’t entirely convinced that there even was any dynamite, but he was smart enough to know when he was out of his element. He was a straight shooter; confronting trouble and standing it down, that was how he worked. This kind of thing, this guerilla warfare Rose had spoken of, was not something he knew how to do.

“How many men you think they got?” Flynn asked in a whisper as they moved.

“We’ve killed six already. We’ve seen five more. Taking into account that we may have seen one or two of them twice, that’s still at least ten they brought with them. An operation like this, with prisoners to keep in control and crates of fake gold to heft? I’d say they have twice that.”

“Twenty men?” Flynn hissed in disbelief.

“You know your maths, Marshal, consider me impressed,” Rose muttered in a sarcastic, flat tone.

Flynn ignored it. “How did they expect to split that little box twenty ways?” he wondered out loud.

“They didn’t,” Rose answered grimly. “If the expendable men didn’t get themselves killed in the act, then Stringer probably planned to kill them and dump them in the river in the end, anyway.”

“That’s cold.”

“That’s smart.”

Flynn glanced at the man warily and then returned his attention to the corridor they were following.

They came to a door with a wooden sign over it indicating the boiler room, and Rose pointed to it and then put his finger to his lips. Flynn nodded and removed one of his guns slowly, making no noise. They could clearly hear two voices coming from within the room. Flynn took a moment to wonder if these were innocent ship’s crew they were about to attack, but the conversation soon answered his question for him.

“So what’s these things supposed to do?” one high-pitched voice was asking as they listened in.

“It’s going to blow up the boat,” a bored, impatient voice answered amidst the distinctive sound of coal being shoveled.

“How?”

“It’s got black powder inside it. When a man shovels it into the boiler, there, it’ll catch fire and it’ll blow up.”

“But then won’t it blow up the man doing the shoveling too?”

“Most likely,” the second voice answered in a bored manner. “All we gotta do is leave ’em here. Would you put out your damn cigarette!”

Flynn met Rose’s eyes and saw the shootist point at the door and roll his eyes.

“Expendable,” Rose mouthed.

Flynn nodded and breathed out slowly. These men had obviously been sent to replace the engineer and his crew to keep the steamer moving.

Rose held up his hand and got Flynn’s attention. “Ready?” he whispered as he held a large hunting knife up. Flynn nodded. “Quiet first. Then the guns if they’re necessary,” Rose whispered, the words barely audible as he spoke. “We don’t want anyone alerted to the fact we’ve taken this room.”

“Or setting off the gun powder with guns?”

“That too.”

Flynn nodded again and licked his lips, holstering his gun and drawing his hunting knife from its sheath. He was decent at a knife toss. Dusty Rose, he had heard, was better. After what he’d seen up above, Flynn was willing to believe it. But he had never seen anyone throw a knife as large as the one Rose had lifted from one of the dead guards, not with any accuracy or effectiveness anyway. It would just become a large, ungainly projectile as soon as it left his hand. It would be akin to throwing a boot at someone and hoping the hard edge hit them.

Throwing knives were usually small, and the balance had to be perfect. Flynn knew how to throw his own knife because he’d handled it for years and knew it as well as he did his guns. He knew how far away he had to be and how he had to grip it in order to keep it from rotating more than twice before it hit its target. He wouldn’t know how to begin with the pig sticker Rose now clutched by the handle like a spear.

Rose moved to the half-open door and kicked it open. From behind him, Flynn saw two men within the room, bent near the opening to the coal bunker, working to spread coal through the chute. They both lunged to their feet, coal and powder scattering on the ground in front of them, and reached for their guns as Rose entered the room. Rose stepped to the side and tossed the large knife as he moved; throwing it underhanded with a flick of his wrist.

The knife sailed through the air with just one spin and sank into the chest of one of the men. The other man drew his gun as Rose ducked out of the way. Flynn followed directly behind him, tossing his own knife over Rose’s shoulder at the man who’d remained standing. The knife gave four smooth whooshing sounds and then hit home, striking the man in the shoulder before he could get off a shot. He dropped his gun and clutched at the knife sticking out of his arm, looking at Flynn and Rose in a mixture of horror and anger.

Flynn drew his gun, but Rose moved in front of him before he could fire. He tackled the injured man and sent them both sprawling into the stack of loose coal spilling out of the chute to the coal bunker next door. Flynn kept his gun trained on them, just in case, but Rose seemed to know how to handle himself just fine without Flynn’s help. He yanked the knife from the man’s shoulder, slapping his free hand over the unfortunate man’s mouth so he couldn’t scream. He then jammed the knife under the man’s sternum, twisting it and driving it deeper as the man bucked and writhed under him.

Flynn watched in stunned horror as blood began to gurgle up under the hand Rose kept clasped over the dying man’s mouth. He found his boots rooted to the floor, his voice gone from his throat. It wasn’t just that Rose knew
how
to kill people. It seemed to Flynn that he almost enjoyed it, during the act, anyway.

The struggling slowed as Rose held the man down, and finally he was still. Rose waited several more long, tortuous moments before he slowly pushed himself up and off the dead man. He wiped his hand gingerly on the man’s shoulder and then sniffed daintily in distaste as he looked down at the body.

“Nice toss, Marshal,” he remarked calmly as he stood once more and stepped over to peer down at the other man he had killed.

Flynn blinked at him several times, wondering if he would ever get the scene he had just witnessed out of his mind’s eye. He’d seen a lot of violence and brutality in his life, and he hoped that would just fade in with all the rest of it. He told himself that it had been necessary.

“Nice toss yourself,” he finally replied in a slightly shocked, grudging voice for lack of anything else to say.

Rose bent and yanked the large knife out of the first man’s chest after making certain both of them were dead. He wiped the knife on the dead man’s pants leg and stood, looking around thoughtfully.

“Never seen something like that,” Flynn ventured hoarsely, referring to the knife toss rather than the brutal killing. He pointed at the knife to let Rose know.

“Not as accurate,” the Englishman replied thoughtfully with a shrug as he lifted the knife and turned it over, examining it with a frown. “But it does the trick in a pinch.”

Flynn stared at him with a slight frown, trying to figure the man out. He was deadly, that much was obvious, but so were many men in this country. Rose didn’t flaunt his abilities until he was required to use them, but that wasn’t anything special either. What was unusual about Rose was that he didn’t seem to want anyone to know what sorts of things he was capable of, but he took pride in them, all the same. He was an odd duck.

Flynn was beginning to piece together bits and pieces of him. He was well-bred, and he had to have been naturally inclined toward handling a gun to be as good as he reportedly was. But he had obviously been taught by the Santee and probably others to perform a variety of violent actions on top of the gunfighting. He had sought out the know-how in addition to being to the manner born and Flynn found himself, against his will, wondering why.

Why would a well-bred Englishman turn to a life of gambling and gunfighting? Why would he want to know how to kill with his hands? He didn’t revel in the fame like some did. He didn’t flaunt his prowess. Flynn just couldn’t figure him out. He did find himself beginning to grudgingly respect the man, though, and not just for his abilities.

“What do you make of this?” Rose asked him, disturbing his thoughts.

Flynn cleared his throat self-consciously and stepped closer. He looked down at the black object Rose was gently nudging out of the dead man’s hand with the toe of his boot.

“Looks like a lump of coal,” he answered drolly.

“Thank you, Marshal, again your powers of observation astound me.”

Flynn smirked at him, enjoying the fact that he wasn’t the only one who could be annoyed so easily. He then knelt and picked up the piece of coal carefully. It was heavier than a piece of coal should have been. He put it to his nose and inhaled deeply.