The Wages of Sin Read online

  “I’m gonna cut your hands off, mister. And you’re going to watch the whole thing.”

  “He’ll do it too!” someone in the crowd whispered.

  But before the whispering onlooker had said three of his four words, Tallman kicked at Morton’s hand and sent the knife sailing. While the stunned woman beater was looking at his empty hand, Tallman kicked the still kneeling hulk square in his jaw. A mist of blood and several teeth erupted from Morton’s mouth and he fell back.

  To be sure, Tallman walked forward and dug the heel of his boot into Morton’s face until the thug stopped moving.

  That’s when he heard the hammer on a revolver . . .

  “Matt Braun is one of the best!”

  —Don Coldsmith, author of The Spanish Bit series

  “He tells it straight—and he tells it well.”

  —Jory Sherman, author of Grass Kingdom

  “Braun blends historical fact and ingenious

  fiction . . . A top-drawer Western novelist!”

  —Robert L. Gale, Western Biographer

  ST. MARTIN’S PAPERBACKS TITLES

  BY MATT BRAUN

  Black Fox

  Outlaw Kingdom

  Lords of the Land

  Cimarron Jordan

  Bloody Hand

  Noble Outlaw

  Texas Empire

  The Savage Land

  Rio Hondo

  The Gamblers

  Doc Holliday

  You Know My Name

  The Brannocks

  The Last Stand

  Rio Grande

  Gentleman Rogue

  The Kincaids

  El Paso

  Indian Territory

  Bloodsport

  Shadow Killers

  Buck Colter

  Kinch Riley

  Deathwalk

  Hickok & Cody

  The Wild Ones

  Hangman’s Creek

  Jury of Six

  The Spoilers

  Manhunter

  The Warlords

  Deadwood

  The Judas Tree

  Black Gold

  The Highbinders

  Crossfire

  The Wages of Sin

  THE

  WAGES OF SIN

  MATT BRAUN

  NOTE: 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.”

  Previously published as Ash Tallman: The Wages of Sin by Tom Lord (a pseudonym for Matt Braun).

  THE WAGES OF SIN

  Copyright © 1984 by Avon Books.

  Cover photo courtesy Comstock.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 84-90803

  ISBN: 0-312-99786-8

  EAN: 80312-99786-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Avon Books edition / May 1984

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / November 2004

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  THE

  WAGES OF SIN

  ONE

  Four armed men rode the worn, dusty trail along Sandies Creek. Though it was dark, the land was still hot from the August sun, which had driven the temperature to a hundred and two in the shade during the day. The clear sky, sounds of water burbling, the peaceful rhythmic noise made by the steady trot of the horses, and the bright half-moon made a setting for romance, not for cold-blooded murder.

  The three riders moved with determination behind their leader, jabbering about their Civil War exploits or some recent drinking bout. Before the evening was over, each would have two twenty-dollar gold pieces, enough to keep them in popskull whiskey and fifty-cent whores for a week at the outside. And for that they were about to trade a life.

  The man who had lured them out on the forty-dollar mission smiled inwardly as he listened to the three drifters. It never ceased to surprise him how easy it was in Reconstruction Texas to line up a few hardcases who’d do anything for a few dollars or to get back at a Yankee. During the War, they’d gone off to maintain the honor of the South and returned to dead and broken families, burnt-out farmhouses, and the corrupt and vicious occupation government. It was a festering sore that still burned in their hearts.

  “Buck!” one of the riders shouted at him. He almost failed to answer since he’d made up the name only three days before.

  “Buck!”

  “Yeah,” he finally responded.

  “How much farther?”

  “I figure two or three more miles. House is right where Sandies Creek flows into the Guadalupe.”

  That satisfied the grubby rider and he went back to jawing with his two sidekicks. Buck had told them that their target was a Yankee sympathizer who had turned his back on the South by selling cattle to the Union Army during the War. He’d lied, and the thought of it caused him to chuckle out loud.

  Pitkin Taylor sat down to a late Sunday evening supper, a proud but troubled man. His son, Jim, sat at the other end of the rectangular table and chatted playfully with his mother.

  Taylor was pleased with his boy’s achievements. Jim had built one of the biggest cattle spreads in DeWitt County. But, as he looked on his wife and son, he cursed under his breath. Things had a way of going sour sooner or later and it was happening again.

  Earlier that summer the long-running feud with the Sutton family had been rekindled by the killing of Jake Hawkins, a large DeWitt County landowner, rancher, and brother-in-law to Bill Sutton. The fire had raged out of control ever since.

  “Get the steak movin’, Daddy,” Jim said to his father, noting his momentary aloofness and eyeing the pile of chicken-fried tenderloin in front of the rugged Texan.

  “What?”

  “The meat’s gettin’ cold, Daddy. Move it on if you ain’t gonna have any.”

  “Oh . . . yeah,” the elder Taylor grunted as he stabbed at a piece of the rare, tender beef with his fork and then passed the platter.

  The two had argued for two hours before dinner over what course of action they should take. The feud was on the verge of becoming a county war.

  “Like I told you before supper. Don’t worry none about them Suttons. We’ll soon be ending this matter once and for all if my plan works out.”

  The old man cocked his head back without taking his eyes off his son and then reached around and kneaded his leathery neck. He didn’t have his son’s enthusiasm for a fight. He knew the price would be too high. The feud had its roots in the War between the States and Pitkin Taylor had been one of the principal hotheads. But the War had been over for more than six years and he was tired of the killing, cattle rustling, and barn burning. Though his hatred for Bill Sutton remained hard and fast in his gut, he saw that the recent renewal of the family vendetta could only lead to disaster. The productivity of their cattle operations was declining, their families were being killed off, their property was being destroyed, and the bankers wouldn’t remain understanding forever.

  “I’m tellin’ you not to worry none, Daddy! Cousin John Wesley and the Clements boys are comin’ in this week. I wired them two weeks back.”

  The table fell silent. It was the first anyone had heard about the arrival of Hardin and the Clements. The elder Taylor fixed his eyes on his son. “I ain’t none too pleased to hear that, son.”
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  “Goddamn it, Daddy! This ain’t no church picnic we’re involved in here. We’ve put headstones on three of our kin this summer!”

  “Jimmy!” his mother snapped. “You’ll not be usin’ God’s name in vain at my table!”

  “Don’t know, son,” Pitkin said calmly, showing no recognition of his wife’s reprimand. “Hardin and the Clements brothers. Almost guaranteed to court trouble. Hell, Wes is wanted, ain’t he?”

  Jim set his eyes in two thin slits as if squinting into a bright afternoon sun and looked hard at his father. “This here business with them murderin’ Suttons has become pretty rough, Pa. Trouble is what they been courtin’.”

  The elder Taylor nodded his head, his sun-baked features showing that he understood his son’s position. But his eyes seemed to transmit a sense of sadness, dull and fatalistic.

  With a look that would have diverted a tornado, Mary Taylor halted the dinner table talk. When she had their attention, she said gently, “Now there’s got to be something better to talk about than this godforsaken feudin’.”

  Father and son looked at each other, smiled sheepishly, and attacked their dinner. Mary Taylor had a way about her.

  The man called Buck hauled his three men up under a stand of live oaks on the northwest side of the well-lit ranch house and proceeded to outline his plan. Once he was sure that they understood, he sent off the dumbest of the trio with a jar of paint and a brush. He had the others circle the house and take up a position in the cornrows on the edge of the large garden. Buck moved in on foot, carefully making his way toward the barn and breeding pens. He heard what he was looking for and made his way toward the sound. After dashing twenty yards, he climbed over the rail fence, unsheathed his knife and cut the leather collar which secured the brass bell to the placid cow.

  Pitkin had just carved off a chunk of red meat when he heard the bell and the faint crunching sound.

  “Damn,” he muttered as he thunked his silverware on the table. “Sounds like one of them cows has got loose again. I’d better fetch her before she tears up the garden.”

  “I’ll tend to it, Daddy,” Jim said. “Stay put.”

  Pitkin put up his hand, palm toward his son. “I’ll just be a minute. You and Florence don’t get to dinner that often. Sit still and enjoy your Mamma’s cookin’.” Jim didn’t argue. Pitkin Taylor was small but no man to argue with.

  When he stepped into the humid night air, he heard the commotion in the cornrows of the family vegetable garden to his left. “Damn,” he grunted as he stepped off the porch and paced toward the dull sound of the bell and the noise of the breaking cornstalks.

  He hadn’t taken ten steps from the porch steps when he saw the flash. A fraction of a second elapsed before he felt the blow. It was as if he’d been kicked in the side by an angry bull. Instinctively he tried to dive for the ground as the air suddenly became permeated with the staccato thumping of rapid-fire gunshots. But he was spinning from a second slug in his shoulder. Then his legs were knocked from beneath him as if he had taken a full-swing blow from an ax handle. The gunfire stopped as quickly as it had started and the damp air was perfectly silent. One leg folded under his body, the old man felt oddly peaceful as he stared at the haze around the moon. Blood seeped from his side, his shoulder, and the gaping rip in his lower leg.

  Jim Taylor bolted through the door, nearly unhinging it. His long-barrel Colt .45 drawn, he stopped momentarily and then bounded off the porch in one step and ran to the heap in the earth next to the cornrows. The others streamed out behind him as men began to pour from the bunkhouse.

  “God in Heaven!” Jim’s mother said as she reached her husband and dropped to her knees. “Why! Why!” she moaned as she looked into his glassy eyes and saw him silently pleading for help.

  “What happened?” Jim commanded as he fell to one knee after holstering his Colt.

  The old man moved his lips but nothing came out.

  “God’s sake, son! Get a wagon so we can get him to Cuero.”

  He jumped up and headed for the barn. It was then that he saw four fast-moving riders cresting the ridge to the northwest. He stopped and shouted at two half-dressed hands who’d run up to him, “There!” He pointed. “Ride those bastards into the earth and bring them back to me.” His mother’s sobbing caused him to lurch again into a run toward the barn. When he reached the big door he saw the crudely painted sign which sloped downward. The dripping, childlike red letters sent him into a rage.

  AN EYE FOR AN EYE. W.S.

  “I’ll wash my hands in old Bill Sutton’s blood!” he snarled as he violently swung the door aside.

  TWO

  In a rented carriage, Vivian Valentine and Ashley Tallman headed northwest on the Plumb Creek Road. They could have been a banker and his wife out for a morning ride. But they weren’t. They were two of Allan Pinkerton’s best undercover agents. And they were in Lockhart, Texas, on business.

  The morning air was cooler than usual for the last week in August. Violent thunderstorms had moved through during the night, leaving dry, cool air in their wake. Puffy white clouds scooted across the deep blue sky on a stiff breeze. It was almost noon and yet it was only eighty-five in the shade.

  Tallman pulled up the single horse when he saw the abandoned settler’s cabin two hundred yards to his right. “Looks like the place,” he said to Vivian. “Some squatter’s dream gone to hell.”

  Vivian raised her eyebrows at his blatant cynicism but added nothing.

  Tallman snapped the reins and turned the dappled gray toward the ramshackle building which seemed to lean toward Plumb Creek as if drawn to the rushing water.

  After he’d climbed down and secured reins to a fence post which supported a single broken rail, he helped his partner down. Her scent, her soft hand and long fingers, and his intimate knowledge of what was under her teal blue dress stirred his desire. Vivian was truly one of the most fascinating women he had ever met. As his eye caught the beauty of her flowing auburn hair he sighed and shook his head slowly from side to side.

  “What?” she asked, her hazel eyes glistening under the bright sun.

  He faked a harsh look and got a chuckle out of her. They both knew what. There was an uncommon bond between the two detectives, though it was nothing that resembled the usual man-woman relationship. Truth be known, both were dedicated to personal independence with an intensity that most might have considered a form of madness. But that didn’t mean that they would shy from a turn in the hay whenever the occasion arose. Both considered the pleasures of the flesh to be one of Mother Nature’s finest inventions. But they understood the boundaries of their personal involvement. And they both had the utmost professional respect for each other.

  Tallman had been with Pinkerton since the early days of the Civil War, when he had operated as an undercover agent for the Union Army. Vivian had only joined the agency earlier that spring after Tallman discovered her to be part of a con game he’d been investigating. It was only Tallman’s mercy, to hear him tell it, that saved her from a long sentence in the New York State Women’s Prison. The truth was, and they both knew it, he was fascinated with her approach to life and her fierce independence, not to mention her beauty, grace, elegance, and voracious appetite for sexual pleasure.

  “Pretty spot,” she said as she started toward the rain-swollen creek. “I wonder what happened to the settlers who built the little house.”

  Tallman shrugged.

  “Are we early?” she asked as she swept away hair that the stiff breeze had blown in her face.

  “A few minutes.”

  “Do you know much about him?”

  “Just that he’s the governor of Texas. The first elected since the end of the war.”

  “I wonder when the Yankees will leave the South to the southerners again?” she asked aloud. Her Virginia heritage made her a partisan of sorts, though she generally wrote off politics as the lowest form of human skulduggery. She had often noted that politics was the art of robbery throu
gh deception. “Sherman’s troops have been here for more than six years now.”

  “Probably be here for another six.”

  “Did Trowbridge go with the South?”

  “Don’t know,” Tallman said as he jammed a thin cigar into the corner of his mouth and went fishing in his vest pocket for a match. “They’ll probably stay until the greedy carpetbaggers have sucked the state dry.”

  Vivian laughed when she saw what Tallman had pulled from his pocket. He fell into a throaty chuckle as he held the one-inch sphere aloft like a magician about to make something disappear.

  Their laughter stemmed from a demonstration they’d been given two weeks back by the inventor of the deadly device. Aaron Wagner, Tallman’s Chicago gunsmith, had prepared the tiny device with the hope of selling it to the military. It was designed to startle and wound its victim. When tossed against a hard surface, the little ball would erupt in a blast of fire, smoke and metal shards.

  “Don’t drop that. Remember what happened to Aaron’s paper target,” Vivian said, pointing toward Tallman’s crotch. The target had taken a metal sliver right where the family jewels would normally rest.

  Tallman allowed a wry smile, put the dull silver ball away, and pulled out a cheroot.

  Vivian watched him fire up his cigar and begin pacing. Her mind soon became cluttered with a desire to strip him naked and ravage his lean, muscular body under the bright sun. No man had ever responded to her unabashed longing for the pleasures of the flesh as had the six-foot-tall, sandy-haired man pacing the creek bank. Though she held the word love to be meaningless when employed in its common usage, she had begun to wonder what word might describe her feelings about the man who had crashed in on her bank scam in New York. Whatever it was, it felt good, good for the soul and good for the flesh. She brushed aside the reddish-blond hair the wind had swept in her face and smiled at her own impish designs as she walked toward the cabin.

  “This must have been a quaint little home at one time,” she said as she stood in the crooked doorway. “But nothing ever stays the same, does it?”