The Killing Breed Read Online Free

Thornton could punish the wayward whore in all the ways he’d been dreaming about for the past two years, it was these hard-eyed killers gathered before him now.
     
     
    “Well, that’s just damn insultin’,” Manley said, staring hard at Thornton as he leaned forward in his chair and dropped his right hand beneath the table.
     
     
    Temple, sitting to Manley’s right, grabbed the man’s arm. “Pull your horns in, Kooch. He’s playin’ us, tryin’ to keep his price down.”
     
     
    Thornton chuckled and let another brief silence fill the room beneath the warming stove’s creaks and sighs.
     
     
    “A thousand for each of you,” he said suddenly. “Half now, half when you’ve brought the whore back . . . alive.”
     
     
    “Alive?” Benny Freeze said, chuckling drunkenly. “Ain’t sure Temple can—”
     
     
    “Shut up!” the group’s ramrod said out the side of his mouth, keeping his gray eyes on Thornton. “Where is she?”
     
     
    “A drummer I know saw them in Arizona. A place called Saber Creek. They were filling a supply wagon, so my guess is they have a place in the sticks.”
     
     
    “That’s a fair lot o’ ground to cover.” Temple grinned and looked at Thornton from beneath his dark brows, the cross tattoo rising on his forehead. “Fifteen hundred apiece. Half now, half when we’ve brought the whore back fresh as a spring daisy.”
     
     
    Thornton opened his mouth to respond, but Temple cut him off by holding up his hand. “ And you forget this hog tripe about Wendell Myers. I’ll probably kill the son of a bitch because he’s a son of a bitch, but I don’t see how he’s worth a special trip up north in the wintertime.”
     
     
    Thornton kept his face calm as he stared back at the head bounty hunter. But his pulse squawked in his ears. He had a quick, flashing vision of slowly carving Faith up with a dull butcher knife, and he could already feel life, like a healing elixir, trickle back into his fetid, green-rotting soul, killing the razor-toothed rat in his belly.
     
     
    “Deal.”
     
     
    Before Thornton could drink to it, Kooch Manley leaped to his feet with surprising swiftness for a man of his middling years and size. “Holy shit!” In a blur of motion, the man grabbed his revolver from his thigh and leveled it just above Thornton’s head.
     
     
    “What the hell?” Thornton cried, ducking down in his chair and folding his arms over his head.
     
     
    Manley’s Remington roared three times in quick succession, sounding like a cannon echoing off the hall’s cold, silent walls.
     
     
    Thornton lowered an arm to peer at the back of the room. A cat-sized rat lay on its back at the base of the carpeted stairs. The varmint had been blown nearly in two. All four feet jerked as it died.
     
     
    A hushed silence fell over the room. Behind Thornton, Benny Freeze giggled like a girl.
     
     
    “I ain’t seen a rat that size in years,” Manley grumbled, slowly lowering his pistol and sinking back down in his chair.
     
     
    Thornton shuttled his gaze from the rat to the middle-aged bounty hunter, surprise and appreciation for a well-placed shot mixing with the indignation at having more bullet holes in his roadhouse. Frank Miller began chuckling then, too, and he opened his mouth to speak but stopped suddenly, his eyes rising to the ceiling over the bar.
     
     
    Upstairs, bedsprings sang as though suddenly released, and the patter of quick footsteps sounded. They grew louder until Ruby ran out onto the balcony, holding a buffalo robe around her shoulders.
     
     
    “Ruby!” Thornton barked.
     
     
    The girl stopped abruptly, casting her frightened gaze over the balcony rail and into the saloon hall below. She held the robe closed at her throat with one hand while holding the rail with the other. Her brown breasts poked out of the robe’s partially open front—heavy and brown nippled.
     
     
    “Mr. Bill?” the girl said softly, frowning curiously as