The Killing Breed

“Frank Leslie writes with leathery prose honed sharper than a buffalo skinner’s knife, with characters as explosive as forty-rod whiskey, and a plot that slams readers with the impact of a Winchester slug.
The Lonely Breed
is edgy, raw, and irresistible.”

—Johnny D. Boggs, Spur Award-winning author of
Camp Ford

“Explodes off the page in an enormously entertaining burst of stay-up-late, read-into-the-night, fast-moving flurry of page-turning action. Leslie spins a yarn that rivals the very best on Western shelves today.”

—J. Lee Butts, author of
Lawdog

“Hooks you instantly with sympathetic characters and sin-soaked villains. Yakima has a heart of gold and an Arkansas toothpick. If you prefer Peckinpah to Ang Lee, this one’s for you.”

—Mike Baron, creator of
Nexus
and
The Badger
comic book series

“Big, burly, brawling, and action-packed,
The Lonely Breed
is a testosterone-laced winner from the word ‘go,’ and Frank Leslie is an author to watch!”

—E. K. Recknor, author of
The Brothers of Junior Doyle

Also by Frank Leslie

The Lonely Breed
The Thunder Riders
The Wild Breed

SIGNET
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First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Printing, September 2008

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For Bob King,
teacher and friend

Chapter 1

The gnarled, bony hand grabbed the bottle around its neck and raised it to the dying light slanting through the dusty, west-facing window. The hand tipped the bottle back, and the man raised his head—an unshaven death’s-head of pale, gaunt, drunken misery—from the pillow.

About three inches of whiskey remained. Good.

Neither he nor the girl would have to go downstairs for more. Not for another hour or two, anyway. It was too cold for the man to go, and he didn’t want the girl to go and take with her the warmth of her young, supple body. Hours ago, he’d let the fire in the main saloon hall die. Too much work to split wood and haul it in from outside to feed the flames that, like the flame inside the man, seemed to be eternally dying.

“Got enough?” the girl asked, curled up against him, running a slender brown finger through the coarse gray hair on his chest.

She luxuriated in the feather mattress and the sheets that had been shipped from Denver when the saloon was still making money, and when there were more girls than only her, Ruby, a half-breed orphan from Montana Territory. She’d come from mining camps in Montana and Dakota where she’d plied her trade in drafty plank shacks with little more than straw pallets to work and sleep on, making so little that when she’d come here riding a stolen mule to the gold camps farther up the mountains, she hadn’t weighed a hundred pounds.

Bill Thornton nodded and lifted the bottle to his lips, his eyes rolling back at the soothing fire of the whiskey that plunged down his throat and into his belly.

Ruby smiled and lifted her head slightly, her coffee brown eyes peering into his. She slid her hand down his chest and belly, found him beneath the quilts, and gently squeezed. “Again?”

Anything to please him, so he’d have no thoughts against keeping her here in this run-down saloon on an abandoned freight trail on the eastern slopes of the Colorado Rockies. Here, where he’d get maybe thirty customers a month. He used to get more than that in a single weeknight, when the trail outside the saloon was still a main thoroughfare for miners, freighters, drummers, and stagecoaches. Then he’d easily make a hundred dollars on the whores alone, three or four times that on hooch and his deftly weighted roulette wheel.

Thornton chuckled and set the bottle beside him, running his free hand through the long black hair falling down the girl’s curving back. “You flatter me. I’m lucky to get it up once a week.”

For some reason, she found this funny, chuckling as she rested her head once more on the pillow, showing the gap where she’d lost an eyetooth. Thornton wasn’t offended. She wasn’t mocking him. Ruby was a little touched, and who wouldn’t be after the life she’d had? Besides, she took care of him, tending the saloon when his side ached too much for him to do anything but lie in bed or sit downstairs by the fire and kill the near-constant pain of the unhealed wound with rye.

Killing the pain and the memory of the girl who’d shot him.
Trying
to kill it, rather. Enough whiskey would soothe the raw ache in his side—a festering, stinging burn that he often imagined to be that of a rat trying to chew its way out from inside him. But it never took away the image of the girl who’d given it to him.

Faith . . .

The memory of the derringer slug drilling his side made him wince as though he’d been slapped—the wound had nearly healed once, then reopened when he’d taken a drunken fall. It had formed a couple of thin scabs but had never fully healed. Now it looked like raw meat greened by too much time in the sun, and it wept a thick yellow puss liberally laced with blood.

Thornton sucked a sharp breath against the old rage kindling inside him again. Beside him, the girl dozed, snoring softly, and he raised the bottle once more, blinking away the image of the blonde he’d once employed here—the beguiling Faith with her frank blue eyes, husky laugh, hourglass figure with firm, ripe breasts, a heart-shaped mole on her neck, and another nearly the same shape under her right breast.

She had a near-perfect body, but it was more than her body, Thornton knew, that had made her the main attraction of his roadhouse for nearly two years, and which had made him a wealthy and respected man. It was her earthy charm and wit as well as an aloofness that, although she gave her body, kept her spirit her own—inviolate, mysterious, and singularly alluring.

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