James Axler – Cold Asylum

Success. Will stay around Seattle for three months. Come quick. Abe.

He was the one with the mustache. And a stainless-steel Colt Python on his hip. The older man, who didn’t seem to have any name at all, carried a beat-up Armalite that looked like it had seen better days.

The older man also looked like he’d seen better days. He had an occasional racking cough that doubled him over, and he seemed to live mainly on a diet of milk and eggs.

What was obvious to the locals of Everett was that these two outlanders weren’t short of jack, which made them extremely interesting.

Now, with the late-afternoon sun slipping away across the ocean a few miles west, that interest had finally reached its head in the gaudy. Its name, on a shingle that hung crookedly outside, was the Passion Pool.

On the landing of the crowded building, the slutsthose who weren’t in the tiny bedrooms actively earning their keepleaned on the scarred balustrade and watched the drama below them. Some were virtually naked, with only a stained wrap over their shoulders. Others wore skimpy underwear designed to reveal far more than it concealed.

Everett, like many frontier villes, didn’t have anything that you could call a baron. Just a loose assortment of men and women, holding various powers. Powers that waxed and wanedwaxed as they flourished, often briefly, and waned as they died, often unexpectedly.

Currently the leading force in the township was a family called the Byrnesthe Bloody Byrnes. The family had six sons, aged thirty down to eighteen. Their father had been hanged in Tupelo four years earlier for barn-burning, and their mother helped out in the Passion Pool, boasting openly that she could pick and choose which of her sons she could sleep with any night.

Now she watched proudly as her boys prepared to rob the two insignificant strangers.

All six of them stood around the table, which bore the greasy remnants of a recent mealstrips of limp bacon rind, a hunk of stale bread crust and two mugs containing the cold dregs of coffee sub.

A faded blond girl was with the brothers, showing the characteristic septic spots and rash around her mouth of the habitual jolt addict.

“I said that you insulted my sister,” said the oldest brother, Brandon, leaning and pushing his face between Abe and the Trader. “We don’t like fuckin’ outlanders who don’t show respect to our women. Understand?”

Trader nodded, his face quite without emotion. “I understand what you say. You can move away.”

“Why?”

“Your breath stinks worse than a pig’s shithole.”

“How’s that?” Brandon Byrne was genuinely bewildered, wondering whether he’d somehow misheard what the old man had said to him. “Say again.”

“Lousy fuckbag said you smelled like pig shit,” repeated Dermot, second youngest of the family, winking at Brandon.

“You don’t hear me, mister,” Brandon said, pressing manfully on, though his Neanderthal mind was trying to tell him something wasn’t right here. The little guy and the old-timer should have been messing their breeches by now.

“They said they wanted me to suck both their dicks at the same time and wouldn’t pay me nothing after I done it for them,” the whore squeaked.

“There.” Brandon nodded solemnly. “That’s why you got to hand us over all your jack for our sweet little sister and the wrong you done her.”

Abe was watching Trader carefully, hoping that there might be some sort of clue before the action began. Six triple-stupes against the two of them, in what might prove to be a hostile killing ground, weren’t good odds. But he knew, without a trace of a doubt, that Trader wasn’t going to give any of their jack to these peckerwood brain-dead bastards.

“You hear me, stranger?”

“I hear you,” Trader replied.

“So. Me and my brothers want to know what you intend to do for us?”

“Hurry it up, boys!” their mother shouted from the top of the stairs.

“Shut it, Ma. Speak to me, mister.”

Trader cleared his throat. “Your sister isn’t your sister. She’s a nickel-and-dime little slut from Norleans.” He glanced for a moment at Abe, giving him the clue he’d been waiting for. “And all I got to say is this.”