McCoy's High Stakes: A Classic Western Novel: 3

He took the job for the money. He didn't know the railroad was bleeding. And he sure as hell didn't know the other guard was Doc Holliday.McCoy thought he was buying himself an easy ride out of town-cash in his pocket, feet up, cards in hand. But when the railroad hires him to guard a payroll shipment through no-man's-land, he finds himself stuck on a train with a crew of strangers, a dying boiler, and one too many men who don't talk about their past.Then he meets the other guard.A pale, soft-spoken gambler with a drawl like honey and eyes like a funeral. A man who knows too much, says too little, and never sits with his back to an open door. He's nobody McCoy recognizes-until the shooting starts.Sabotaged rails. Bullets in the dark. Riders in the hills.The first attack nearly derails the train. The second threatens to end it. By the time the smoke clears, McCoy understands the truth: this job wasn't hired clean-and somebody wants the payroll bad enough to kill them all to get it.The engine limps on, a patched-together iron coffin dragging them through miles of open prairie. The crew is green, the men behind the guns are hungry, and the enemy never lets them rest. In the chaos-beneath dust, blood, and boiling steam-McCoy tries to figure out the stranger at his side: A man who shoots like a surgeon, thinks like a wolf, and plays death like it's a card game he's already won.Doc Holliday is dying. But he ain't done yet.And between rail breaks, night assaults, and open-country pursuit, McCoy discovers there may be one fate worse than losing his life-losing it next to a man who doesn't fear his own.If McCoy wants to live long enough to see another game, he'll have to learn three things fast: how to fight from a moving train, how to hold men together when the rails fall apart, and how to gamble with death and not blink first.But the riders aren't done with them. And the prairie swallows the weak whole.

Pagina's: 206, Paperback, Independently published