by Jon Sharpe
“I did spot you.”
The sentry stood still for perhaps twenty seconds, unsure what to do and saying nothing more. Then he resumed his pacing.
But Fargo cursed his bad luck. These Spanish soldiers were as loyal as the Praetorian Guard, and this one would surely report this to Quintana and Salazar. Fargo knew the exaggerated pride and “honor” of these Spaniards. One way or another, this serious affront to their manliness—especially Salazar’s—would have to be answered.
“Yessir,” Fargo muttered to himself as he headed back to his bedroll, “there’s no such thing as easy money.”
• • •
Five days after Fargo’s pleasant tryst in the tent, the Quintana party rolled through El Paso del Norte and into the vast New Mexico Territory.
Fargo knew it as the land of bloodred suns and pale ghost moons, of winds that shrieked like souls in pain and a place where death was as swift as an eyeblink—the land of Kit Carson and Coronado and Montezuma, a beautiful, awful land of red and purple mesas and whitewater falls and bone-dry jornadas that dried a man to jerky. The land from out whose terrible depths men were seasoned or driven mad.
Fargo had searched out the farther reaches of the American West, knew every state and territory and mountain range and river. But New Mexico cast a spell over him like no other place he knew, for no other place was quite like it.
“Boys,” he announced to his companions during breakfast, “we’ll make Las Cruces before nightfall barring any trouble. That’s three days to resupply, recruit the animals, and live high on the hog at the Montezuma House.”
“Clean sheets,” McDade said.
“Good food and liquor,” Deke said.
“Smoke-eyed whores flirting from behind them fancy fans,” Booger chipped in. “Oh, Lulu girl!”
Fargo nodded. “Yeah, all that and the old viceroy pays the freight for everything ’cept maybe the sporting gals. But it won’t be all beer and skittles—I can almost guarandamntee the Skinny Wolf and his greasy-sack outfit will be waiting there, and he’ll likely make his play at the hotel.”
“Pull up your skirts, Nancy,” Booger scoffed. “Hell, he won’t be expectin’ us to flop at diggings that fancy. Why, the rooms alone is five dollars a night!”
“Yeah, but you’re forgetting—at the time old man Quintana told us about staying there, Rivera could still have been in cahoots with the Skinny Wolf. Besides, I think Quintana likely told the unholy trinity about it long before he told us.”
“And don’t forget, Booger,” McDade tossed in, “me and Fargo were attacked by El Lobo less than a week ago.”
Booger relented with a nod. “Aye, he’s plenty dangersome. But it’s mainly Fargo he’s thirsting to kill, so why do us three give a hoot? With Fargo feeding worms, there’ll be more quim for us.”
“Look on the bright side,” Fargo agreed sarcastically.
“Fargo, you got more on your plate’n just that Mex outlaw,” Deke said, nodding across the camp toward Captain Diego Salazar and his companions. “Used to was, it was only Rivera who kept givin’ you the hoodoo eye. But look at that son of a buck Salazar—God dawg! He’s fixin’ to catawumptiously chaw you up.”
Booger grinned maliciously. “That’s on account Fargo trimmed his woman. Got caught, too. I heard the guard challenge the randy bastard when he slipped outta the tent.”
“What’s the difference?” McDade said. “They mean to kill all of us. The prize for them is California, not Skye Fargo. We’d better all hope nobody kills him because he’s our only chance—and California’s, too.”
• • •
The Quintana party rolled into the outskirts of the dusty, sleepy adobe settlement of Las Cruces about two hours before sundown. Fargo made arrangements to park the conveyances behind the livery where the horses and mules were boarded. Quintana paid two stable boys generously to keep an eye on the coach night and day.
Yellow-brown desert surrounded the town, dotted with low mesas, with purple-tinged mountains to the northwest. The town had been long established because of its key location on the long trade route known as the King’s Highway, linking Santa Fe and points east to Chihuahua, Durango, and Aguascalientes in deep Mexico.
Quintana had paid an exorbitant price to reserve two entire floors of the Montezuma House for three days, telegraphing from El Paso to announce their imminent arrival. Fargo was astounded by such luxurious opulence this far west: marble-top tables, four-poster beds, velvet draperies, beveled-glass mirrors, and English china in the dining room.
The four men turned all their dirty clothing in at the hotel laundry, then stood guard in pairs when they visited the luxurious bathhouse, soaking off the layers of trail dust. They killed the half hour until dinner by strolling the wide streets of Las Cruces.
McDade goggled at the huge, unwieldy, high-sided carts pitching and heaving clumsily through the streets.
“Those are Mexican carts called wheeled tarantulas,” Fargo said, “because of those uneven wooden wheels. But don’t get caught up in the sights too much. I see plenty of Mexican men glomming us, and some of ’em could be the Skinny Wolf’s lunatic hyenas waiting for the first chance to burn us down.”
The center of the town was a big plaza used for a mercado or street market. Deke pointed to a group of six or seven Mexican girls sitting at one edge of the plaza. Huge ristras, strings of dried red peppers, were piled all around them. They were all using mortars and pestles to crush the pods into fine powder. Gunnysacks behind them were packed tight with the ground pepper.
“I’m gonna buy some of that before we leave town,” Deke said. “No cook should be without it. It’s the best chili powder in the world, and it’s growed only in New Mexico. Mighty potent stuff.”
The wind suddenly gusted just as Fargo was passing one of the girls. A small red puff of ground powder blew up from her mortar and pestle.
Intense heat suddenly invaded Fargo’s eyes, and immediately he suffered from tearing eyes and blurred vision.
Deke snorted. “Keep upwind from that shit. Them ’ere chili peps is murder on a feller’s eyes.”
“Damn,” Fargo said, still trying to clear his vision. “It priddy near blinded me, and it was only a little puff.”
“That stuff isn’t food—it’s a weapon,” McDade joked. “Good thing the Skinny Wolf didn’t jump you while you were blinded.”
Fargo started to reply. Abruptly he fell silent and looked thoughtful. A moment later, however, he pushed the foolish notion from his mind.
They were strolling back along the opposite side of the plaza when Fargo spotted a white-haired old woman selling a variety of odd-shaped gourds. He selected two that were large and nearly round.
“The hell you want with such truck?” Booger demanded.
“Humor me,” Fargo said. “I’m eccentric. Boys, let’s head back to the hotel and get outside some fancy grub. But first I want to stop by the livery where we left the horses and mules.”
“What for?” Deke asked.
“We’re going to clip some hair from the mules’ tails.”
“Catfish,” Booger said, “have you been visiting the peyote soldiers?”
“Nope,” Fargo replied. “I’m just getting ready for what will come.”
16
It was three a.m., and Juan Lopez, the night clerk at the Montezuma House, was dozing in a chair behind the broad mahogany counter in the lobby. Suddenly something hard and sharp pressed into his windpipe and he woke with a start.
The first thing the confused clerk saw was a skinny man with a face stretched tight against his skull and a lipless grin like a turtle’s. The man beside him had a face pitted with old smallpox scars. Someone standing behind Lopez held a huge knife tight against his neck.
“Madre de Dios,” the clerk whispered hoarsely. Piss suddenly squirted down his leg when he realized the grinning man w
as El Lobo Flaco, the notorious Skinny Wolf.
“Por favor,” the clerk begged, “no me mata. Tengo una marida y tres hijos.”
“I am not here to kill you,” the Skinny Wolf said. “And you will return safely to your wife and children if you do what you are told. Entiendes?”
Lopez swallowed the huge lump in his throat and nodded. “I understand.”
“Bueno. Skye Fargo is staying in this hotel. Give me the key to his room.”
When Lopez, too paralyzed with fear to move, hesitated, the Skinny Wolf nodded once to the man with the knife. The blade pressed harder.
“It is room 314,” the clerk hastened to say, pointing to the board loaded with keys on the wall beside him.
The Skinny Wolf snatched the key down. “Does he have his own room?”
Lopez shook his head. “No. Senor Quintana’s people are assigned two to a room. There is a giant gringo sharing Fargo’s room.”
El Lobo looked at Ramon Velasquez and both men grinned.
“The fat man,” El Lobo said. “Better and better. Pedro told me he is the blowhard who threatened to kill him at the Alibi Saloon in Victoria.”
“Check the book, jefe,” Velasquez suggested. “Perhaps this one gave us the wrong key.”
El Lobo grinned. “Look . . . this soft-handed coward has pissed himself. He gave us the right key. Matalo, Paco.”
With one deep, hard slice the blade expert opened the clerk’s throat and then threw him onto the floor, leaving him to choke to death on his own blood.
“Now we end it for good with Fargo,” the Skinny Wolf told his men, drawing the .41-caliber magazine pistol from the canvas holster under his left armpit. “He has made his vow to kill me, and so long as he is above the horizon we will never be safe.”
The three men moved swiftly to the stairs at the back of the lobby and ascended to the third floor. Lamps in brass wall sconces softly lighted the hallway.
They stopped at the door of room 314. For a long time the Skinny Wolf stood with his ear pressed to the door, lis- tening.
Finally he looked at his companions and nodded.
Working with infinite care and patience, the Skinny Wolf stood to one side and inserted the key, slowly turning it. When it finally clicked softly, he waited a full two minutes.
“Wait here,” he whispered to Paco.
Slowly, one cautious inch at a time, he eased the door open. Enough light seeped into the room to illuminate two beds. He could see the two sleeping men clearly outlined under crisp white sheets, the mound on the right huge.
Their heads lay against the pillows. Paco already had his instructions. In just moments one of those heads would be severed, later to be preserved in brine and displayed all over the Southwest and Mexico. No man would be more famous—and feared—than the one who could prove he killed the famous Trailsman.
The Skinny Wolf felt elation rising within him like a tight bubble. It would be easier than plucking two birds’ nests off the ground.
He caught Velasquez’s eyes and nodded toward the sleeping giant. Velasquez nodded back.
The two men cat-footed a few paces into the room.
Why, a voice from the depths of El Lobo’s mind whispered, can you not hear either of them snoring? But in his heady elation the voice did not quite rise to the level of suspicion.
“Ahora, Ramon!”
They opened fire simultaneously, their pistols obscenely loud and shocking in the stillness and peace of the sleeping hotel. Taking no chances, both men emptied their guns into the men in the beds.
“De prisa, Paco!” the Skinny Wolf ordered. “Hurry! Take his head! This hotel is filled with armed soldiers.”
The moment Paco spurted into the room, the double doors of a large closet banged open.
“I’m not the type to lose my head, Lobo,” Fargo greeted the startled Mexican before his Colt barked in his fist.
The top of the Skinny Wolf’s skull lifted off as neatly as the lid of a tobacco jar, releasing a pebbly spray of blood and brains. The Mexican outlaw’s knees buckled like an empty sack and the body flopped into a twitching heap.
Booger didn’t need to bother with a head shot. The Colt Dragoon’s huge, conical ball ripped through Ramon Velasquez’s chest and knocked him backward with the force of an iron fist, dead before he hit the floor.
Paco turned to bolt for the door. Fargo shot him in the left side. When the force of the slug spun him around, Fargo drilled him through the heart.
“I hate to shoot a man in the back,” he explained to Booger as he turned up a lamp on the dresser.
The extra illumination revealed that the “heads” on the pillows were the two gourds Fargo had purchased earlier, mule-tail hair glued to the top of them. Quilts and blankets had been stuffed under the sheets in the rough outline of human bodies.
Fargo heard a commotion of rapid footsteps and confused voices in the hallway. The first two faces that peered cautiously into the smoke-hazed room were Deke Lafferty and Bitch Creek McDade, who were staying in the adjacent room. The heavy, acrid stench of spent powder made them wrinkle their noses.
McDade stared at the three men lying on the floor, their blood soaking the Persian rugs. “Are they . . . ?”
“Dead as they come,” Fargo assured him.
“The Skinny Wolf?” Deke asked, still buttoning his suspender loops to his trousers.
Fargo nodded. “And that plug-ugly cuss with the pockmarks is Ramon Velasquez, his segundo. Can’t tell you who the third one is, but it was his job to lop off my head for a souvenir.”
“The outlaws get the headlines,” McDade said, “and the working man gets the outlaws. Good work, gents.”
“Yeah, but I guess we’ll hafta drag them out,” Deke said reluctantly. “And from the third floor.”
“Nix on that, Catfish,” Booger said. “Old Booger has not been asleep all night and needs his rest. They have trash collection in this fine city, and there’s a big, empty lot next door.”
He lumbered over to the window casement and swung the panes open. As effortlessly as if he were picking up sacks of rags, he tossed all three corpses outside.
By now a crowd had gathered outside the door. Diego Salazar, wearing only his gold-braided trousers, pushed his way into the room.
“What is going on here?” he demanded as if he had a right to know.
Fargo wagged his Colt at him. “I expect you’ll read about it tomorrow in the newspaper. Now clear out, all of you, so me and this ugly knight of the ribbons can grab some sleep.”
Salazar, who had been seething with brooding hatred since the night Fargo was spotted near the tent, tightened his lips grimly. “You will regret pointing that weapon at me.”
“Oh, we’ll be hugging,” Fargo agreed. He thumbed back the hammer. “Now clear out before I buck you out.”
• • •
Fargo’s victory over the Skinny Wolf was not without consequences.
The discovery of the murdered hotel clerk and the damage caused to Fargo’s room by the flurry of bullets did not endear the Quintana party to the manager of the highly respectable Montezuma House.
The final straw came when it was learned that the lurid tale of frontier violence, wildly “colored up” by a local ink slinger, had been released to the Associated Press, established a decade earlier for the sharing of telegraphic dispatches. Skye Fargo’s shooting scrapes were popular newspaper fare back in the land of steady habits, and now the staid Montezuma House was depicted as yet another Wild West hellhole.
“Quintana is fit to be tied,” Bitch Creek McDade reported on their second night in Las Cruces. “He was ordered to pull up stakes and move everyone out by tomorrow morning.”
“Pah! Me’n Skye should just let ourselves be killed in our beds?” Booger protested. “And why not make us eat shit and go naked, too?”
He sighed tragically. “By the Lord Harry! One less night of whoring for old Booger.”
“In a town with a right smart chance of pretty girls,” Deke added. “These twirling chiquitas in Las Cruces could make a dead man come.”
Fargo paid scant attention to this piffle. The four men shared a table in the hotel saloon, a fancy watering hole with a long, S-shaped bar and two bartenders in octagonal ties and gaitered sleeves. But it was the table next to them that held his attention.
Salazar, Aragon, and Rivera had just entered, deliberately ignoring the many other empty tables to sit close by. Their grim, humorless faces told him they were spoiling for a fight.
Booger suddenly grabbed Fargo’s beer. He took a sweeping-deep slug, then wiped the white foam off his upper lip with the back of his hand.
“Faugh! It’s naught but warm piss with bubbles. Why’n’t you drink whiskey like a man?”
Fargo glanced at the half-empty bottle of rye in front of Booger. “You’d better rein in, old son. It’s not even dark yet, and you’ll soon be walking on your knees.”
“Say—look at Rivera,” McDade cut in, keeping his voice low.
The Spanish sergeant made a big show of slipping a bracelet of curved horseshoe nails over his knuckles—“drinking jewelry” as they were called by American soldiers. He spoke in a loud voice intended for the four men at the next table, fixing his small, piglike eyes on Fargo as he spoke.
“There are two places, Capitan Salazar, where a hard, well-aimed punch with these almost always kills: at the hollow between a man’s eyes and at the little bone ridge in front of each ear just below the temples.”
“Let it go, Booger,” Fargo muttered urgently when the big man started to scrape his chair back. “They’re deliberately goading us. If we kill them now, those soldiers will execute us before we can break up Quintana’s plot.”
“Crikes! How’m I spozed to sit still for that shit?”
“Don’t rise to his bait,” Deke scoffed. “That beat-down Fargo give him a while back is still ranklin’ in his craw. He’s alla time a-puffin’ and a-blowin’.”
