Page 132 of Backtrack

“Get on your belly!” Johnson barked.

Lola crossed behind Cutter and took up a position ten feet to his left.

Pink started again, ignoring the others to focus solely on Cutter. “This is bullshit! Your granddad—”

“Nope,” Johnson barked. “We’re not in the listening business. You heard the man. Get your ass on the ground!”

“He’s the one—”

“I said on the ground!” Johnson took a step forward.

Cutter and Lola followed his lead, all three of them closing the distance a step at a time. All three of them aimed in.

“Drop the weapon, Ricky!” Cutter yelled.

Pink cocked his head and stared at Johnson.

“Who are you?”

“I’m with the Marshals,” Johnson said.

“I’ve been waiting forty years—”

“Face in the dirt!” Johnson said. “I’m sure you have some grand speech planned. Life don’t work that way. Put down the gun!”

Rather than closing directly on Pink, Cutter had edged slightly to his right with each step, giving himself and Lola clear lines of fire almost directly down Broadway. Outlaws didn’t much care about pesky details like overpenetration or innocent bystanders. Anyonestupid enough to get in the way of their flying bullets, well, that was just too damned bad.

“Wayne Cutter murdered the only friend I ever had!” Pink screamed now. Spittle flew from parched lips. “You hear me!”

Both Teariki and Johnson were already aimed in. Cutter’s hand gripped his Colt, but he’d yet to draw it, knowing that when he did, it would instigate a reaction from Pink.

“Ricky,” Cutter said. “Take a breath—”

“You … son of a bitch! You … gunned him down like a dog!”

Action is quicker than reaction. Ricky Pink might have gotten off a shot if Cutter and the others had waited for him to point the gun at them. Instead, Johnson and Teariki fired at the movement of the outlaw’s shoulder, just as he started to raise his revolver. Cutter’s Colt Python spoke a half a breath later, sending two rounds into Pink’s chest along with the four that were already there.

The revolver slipped from the outlaw’s fingers. He teetered for a moment like a massive tree, croaked a short, gasping breath, and then pitched forward face-first into the middle of Broadway.

Cutter strode forward, securing Pink’s gun before glaring at Lola. “How about you find some cover next time! You’ll get yourself shot standing in the open like that.”

Lafayette Johnson put a hand on Cutter’s shoulder and smiled at Lola. “You’ll have to excuse him. He’s just like his grandpa. What he means to say isthank you.”

A woman in a red windbreaker stood and stared at Pink’s prone body for a long moment, then, seemingly bored when he just lay there, turned to study some Tanzanite in a jewelry store window behind her. “That seemed awfully real,” she said.

“Not sure why they had to use the profanity,” another woman said. “I mean, there are kids here.”

A maniacal scream, like the wail of a damned soul, erupted from the direction of the Red Onion. All eyes turned toward the saloon as a crazed Shayna Hanford staggered out the door, her face and hair covered with a slurry of blood and nacho cheese. Her screams rose in pitch and then began to fall off, ending when she collapsed headlong into the street.

“Disgusting,” the woman in the red windbreaker said.

Officer Minor’s partner, a big Swede named Jorgen, returned from his dental appointment to find a town full of freaked-out tourists, three dead bodies, and a prisoner with a concussion. The other three officers on the Skagway payroll and a US Forest Service law enforcement officer came in to assist as well.

Rather than returning to their ships, as Cutter thought they would, most of the cruisers continued with their vacation. No one who’d witnessed Shayna Hanford’s cheese-covered exit from the Red Onion felt like having Naughty Nelly Nachos for lunch.

Joellen made it back from her White Pass-Yukon Route train ride, hangdog and glum that she’d missed seeing Cutter in action.

“Guess there’s no reason for you to stay around and protect me anymore,” she said.