North Country Cutthroats

by Jon Sharpe

  “Ella finally found out about Walleye diddling the Injun girl, didn’t she?”

  “That’s right,” Fargo said.

  “I had a premonition,” the old woman said pensively. “She get him with an ax while he slept?”

  Beyond the old woman, Luther the coyote was lying on his side on the porch floor, yipping softly and pawing at a raccoon sitting nearby. Chittering like a clock run amok, the raccoon bolted past the coyote’s paws to wrap its front legs around Luther’s, then scrambled back to begin the game all over again.

  “Nope,” Fargo said, watching the animals’ game. “Shotgun through the back privy wall.”

  “Uh-huh,” the old woman said, as though that would have been her second guess. As she knocked the dottle from her pipe, she followed Fargo’s gaze to the critters. “This weather’s givin’ Luther and Lawrence spring fever. My girls over yonder got it, too. Real bad. They’ll be extry fun tonight, I assure you. I can have Bulldog run you over a supper plate later, if you’ve a mind to spend the rest of the evenin’ rompin’ in the corn shucks. Like I said, they’re pricey but no man’s ever said they wasn’t worth it.”

  The old woman chuckled as she rocked, Lawrence lunging forward to wrap himself around Luther’s neck. Luther gave a clipped, indignant yelp as Lawrence dug his claws in.

  “I reckon I’m too tired for a romp in the corn shucks,” Fargo said, starting toward the door with the steamer trunk. He stopped, glanced back at the old woman, slitting one eye skeptically. “Speakin’ of supper—what’s on the menu this evenin’?”

  “Pork tenderloin and fried potatoes,” the woman said, scratching a lucifer to life on her thumbnail.

  The Trailsman stifled a groan as he hauled the steamer trunk into the lodge.

  Fargo was so hungry that he devoured every ounce of his pork tenderloin and fried potatoes. He couldn’t help wondering if hogs fed on human remains would taste any different than hogs fed the usual corn and kitchen scraps, but he finally put it out of his mind as he cleaned his plate with a thick hunk of crusty, whole wheat bread and washed it all down with piping hot coffee.

  The trading post’s sitting room was strangely quiet, with the Dakota Kid and the two market hunters enjoying themselves at the whorehouse next door, from which occasional laughter rose amid the soft patter of an off-key piano. Mr. and Mrs. Tribble, thoroughly exhausted by the long, trying ride in the inclement weather, went to bed as soon as they’d finished their dried juneberry cobbler and coffee. Fargo whiled away the evening playing checkers with Irina Roskov, who played as passionately as a Missouri riverboat gambler, though they were playing for nothing more than matchsticks.

  His near-death experience the previous evening, when Homer Rinski had caught him coupling with his daughter, no doubt influenced Grizzly Olaffson’s decision to forgo a visit next door, remaining in the lodge instead, where he played three-handed poker with Bulldog Butts and his mother, Maybelline. The old woman was a talker—in fact, she could talk a blue streak around even Grizzly—while her son, Bulldog, hardly said a word. In fact, he issued mostly only spitting sounds as he leaned his bullet-shaped, small-eyed head down to angle a wad of plug tobacco into the sandbox positioned on the floor between his high-topped, manure-encrusted boots.

  Luther the coyote lay on a hemp rug before the popping hearth while Lawrence the raccoon lay atop the bar, chittering and gently flicking its tail, dreaming.

  The Trailsman had just spied Irina Roskov cheating at checkers by over-jumping when hoof thuds sounded on the road outside the trading post. A horse whinnied and shook its bridle. Deep, burly voices lifted, but Fargo couldn’t make out what the men were saying. Boots thumped on the porch of the brothel next door, and for a few seconds the piano grew louder until the brothel’s front door thudded closed once more, muffling the sounds.

  Fargo had turned his head to listen, and now, turning back toward Irina, he spied a look of relief wash across her brown-eyed, heart-shaped face as she fingered several checkers in her hand like worry beads.

  Fargo wanted to ask her whom she was so relieved not to see, but knew he wouldn’t get a straight answer. She was as slippery a fish as he’d ever landed.

  Since winning the games seemed to make her feel as though she’d single-handedly defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, Fargo didn’t call her on her cheating. They played two more games, Fargo letting her win both of those, as well, before the girl stretched her arms high above her head, thrust her firm, round breasts toward him and, eyeing him lustfully across the checker table, announced under her breath that she was going to bed.

  “Well, I reckon Miss Maybelline showed you where it was,” Fargo muttered, sitting back in his chair and digging his makings sack from his shirt pocket.

  She loosed an indignant chuff, glanced over to see if Grizzly, Miss Maybelline, or Bulldog were listening, then muttered, “That is all right. It is much warmer tonight, anyway, and a Russian woman doesn’t mind sleeping alone if her only choices are lazy coyotes and mange-infested wolves.”

  She wheeled haughtily, then disappeared up the short stairs on the left side of the room. She could be heard creaking and stomping around in the loft for several minutes as Fargo built his quirley and then scratched a match to life on his pistol butt. He chuckled as he lifted the match to the quirley.

  Puffing smoke, he turned his head toward the post’s east wall. He’d heard something—it had sounded like a clipped scream. When the burning match singed his thumb, he winced and dropped it on the table, hearing a muffled but angry voice rise from next door.

  A quick glance at the poker table told him that Grizzly, Miss Maybelline, and Bulldog hadn’t heard the commotion beneath their ceaseless chatter and clinking coins. Setting his quirley so that the burning end jutted over the edge of the table, Fargo raked his chair back, stood, and sauntered toward the door.

  “If you’re gonna partake of my lovelies, Mister Tall and Handsome,” said Maybelline from the poker table, “leave your money with me. I love those girls—truly I do—but I don’t trust ‘em farther than I could throw all three of ‘em up hill against a stiff wind.”

  There was no point in interrupting their poker game, as the raised voices might have been those of the Dakota Kid and the market hunters having a drunken but harmless row over their own card game. “Just steppin’ out to see how the night’s shaping up.”

  “Don’t you get you no free quickies over there, Skye!” Grizzly laughed, puffing a cigar the size of an ax handle and slapping down a couple of pasteboards in front of Maybelline. “Read ‘em and weep, May!”

  Fargo stepped out and closed the door on Miss Maybelline’s incredulous bellows. He hadn’t donned a coat, and he shivered against the chill breeze, which was a good ten or fifteen degrees above what it had been the night before. But even at that, it was chill as a knife blade laid against his spine.

  Hearing the raised voices once more—it sounded like the Dakota Kid and several others talking at the same time—the Trailsman walked to the end of the porch and peered across the twenty-yard gap between the buildings. Through a filmy-curtained window on his side of the brothel, he saw the Dakota Kid leaning far back in his chair while another man—a big man in a high-crowned fur hat—stood over him aiming a long-barreled pistol at the Kid’s head.

  Palming his Colt, Fargo stepped off the porch, tramped through the packed snow, and mounted the brothel’s porch. He tripped the latch on the heavy, timbered door and stepped into the small front room, which was decorated like a backwoods smoking parlor, just as the kid screamed and squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Don’t shoot me, Mister! Honest to God, I wasn’t cheatin’, and that’s a fact!“

  The big man bellowed in what to the Trailsman’s untrained ears sounded like Russian, and jerked his cocked Remington angrily while the Kid quivered in his chair as though he’d already been shot. One of the market hunters, R. J. Boone, sat beside him, hands raised, staring in one-eyed terror at the big gun’s jerking barrel.

  Two o
ther men—with dark hair, mustaches and goatees similar to those of the first—stood around the table. The one behind R. J. Boone had seen the Trailsman when he came in, and now as Fargo raised his Colt, the man behind Boone touched the grips of his own .44 and spat out some Russian at the same time Fargo snarled, “Hold it, friend. Lower that hogleg pronto then ease the hammer down against the firing pin. And I mean ease it.”

  The man stiffened. His dung-brown eyes rolled toward the Trailsman flanking his left. He must have seen the .44 aimed at his sable hat shaped like a giant sewing thimble tipped back on his head, for he dropped the butt of his Remington, raising the barrel, and depressed the hammer with a resolute click. The man behind R. J. Boone left his hand on the butt of his own sidearm, but the gun remained in its hand-tooled, black-leather holster.

  The man to Fargo’s right half turned. He, too, slid a hand to his silver-plated Colt positioned for the cross-draw on his left hip, but he made no move to draw. All three were as tall as the Trailsman, with oily dark hair and eyes, and the ruddy skin of men who’d grown up in the fresh air and sunshine. Their hard eyes were set deep beneath heavy black brows.

  All three wore tailored twill trousers gaudily stitched similar to the Mexican style, and heavy flannel shirts and bright neckerchiefs. The one behind R. J. Boone, Fargo noticed with a fleeting glance, sported a bloody bandage around his upper left arm. It was a rough country, and men injured themselves out here in any number of ways, but Fargo couldn’t help wondering if he was the one Fargo had shot behind the outhouse in Brule City.

  Shuttling his gaze between the big Russian before him and the Dakota Kid who was still sitting with his hands raised but his eyes now only half-closed, he said, “What’s got you boys’ shorts all in a twist?”

  The Dakota Kid’s eyes snapped wide. “This big bastard…uh, excuse me…this big Russian gent thinks I was cheatin’, but I swear on my dear mother’s grave, nothin’ could be further from the truth.” His gaze rose to the Russian glowering down on him, and an indignant pitch creeped into his voice. “Why, I pride myself, sir, on my ability to win without cheatin’! Perhaps you’re just not as good at the old pasteboards as you think!”

  The Russian dropped his revolver to his side but leaned forward, jaw hinges dimpling as he loosed a string of incomprehensible vowels and syllables delivered with a steady spray of spit. The words must have been comprehendible to his buddies, one of whom chuckled while the other gained a wry, self-satisfied expression, but to Fargo they sounded like little more than loud farts and belches.

  The Russian punctuated the tirade by poking a sharp finger at the Kid’s chest. He expelled what Fargo took to be one last Russian expletive before wheeling, grabbing a long coat fashioned from the hide of a silver-tipped grizzly off a wall hook.

  Beckoning to his buddies and donning the coat, huffing and puffing as though sprinting up hill in front of a raging wildfire, he stomped to the brothel’s front door and outside. The other two men stepped gingerly around Fargo, hands on their pistols, sliding their hard, brown eyes cautiously about the room, then donned their own bearskin coats and followed their friend outside, leaving the door hanging wide behind them.

  Fargo watched through the door as the three men buttoned their coats on the porch, conversing in angry tones, then clomped down the steps, ripped their reins from the hitchrack, and swung into the leather. When they disappeared up the trail beyond the trading post, their hoof thuds dwindling in the silent night, Fargo turned back to the room. The Dakota Kid’s hands shook as he poured whiskey into a shot glass, then threw back the entire shot.

  Beside him, R. J. Boone loosed a relieved sigh as he sat back in his chair, color washing back into his cheeks beneath the black eye patch. At the back of the small room, Fargo saw Boone’s partner, Charley Mays, standing in the open doorway at the bottom of a narrow stairs, the French girl, Sonja, standing beside him. Mays wore only his hat, a long thin cigar, and the Colt revolver hanging low in his right hand. Not one other stitch. The French girl had thrown a peachcolored wrapper around her shoulders, but the wrapper was so sheer that she might as well have spared herself the effort. Her breasts appeared behind the gossamer garment like plump baby pigs with docked tails.

  “Those big Russians are damn lucky they got the drop on me,” said the Dakota Kid, breathless, straightening his bowler hat on his straw-colored hair. “I was so busy pitchin’ the pasteboards I didn’t see the hombre across from me slap leather!”

  He chuckled nervously and wagged his head.

  “I’m sure they’re right now countin’ their blessings,” Fargo grumbled, holstering his six-shooter and fixing the Kid with a hard stare. “Were you cheating?”

  The Kid blinked his pale blue eyes as though he couldn’t believe he’d been asked such an absurd question. “Like I told him…”

  “I know—you don’t have to cheat.” Fargo glanced at R. J. Boone, who splashed whiskey into his own empty glass, and canted his head to the Kid who was sleeving sweat from his brow. “Was he cheating?”

  “I didn’t see nothin’.”

  Fargo glanced at Charley Mays, who stood looking ridiculous in the doorway at the back of the room, naked as a jaybird beside the French whore, pensively chewing his cigar. “I didn’t see nothin’,” the pale, lanky market hunter intoned with an indignant air. “I was upstairs with sweet Sonja here.”

  Sonja’s eyes roved lustily across Fargo’s frame. She chewed her lower lip, batted her eyes, and canted her head to one side. “You wanna come upstairs, big man?”

  “Hey, girl,” Charley Mays admonished, grabbing the girl’s hand. “I haven’t got my two dollars’ worth!”

  “That is not my fault!” the girl yelled as Mays jerked her back up the narrow stairs and out of sight.

  As the Dakota Kid, chuckling, swiped the gold and silver coins off the table and into a small, burlap money sack, Fargo turned and went out. He moved to the top step and peered in the direction in which the Russians had disappeared, the buttes and scraggly trees absolutely silent in the starry night.

  A nettling prick at the base of his spine told him he hadn’t seen the last of the angry threesome from the Russian steppe.

  12

  Fargo stood peering after the three Russians for several minutes. Hearing or seeing nothing to indicate they were returning, he headed back inside the trading post, stomping his boots on the hemp rug in front of the door.

  “Didn’t steal ya a quick one, did ya, Tall and Handsome?” asked Maybelline, tossing coins into the poker pile before her as Bulldog lowered his head to dribble chaw between his knees.

  “If I did, it would have been too fast to be worth two dollars.”

  “Who was them riders I heard?” asked Grizzly, relighting his cigar.

  “Russians damn near big as you. One of ‘em was about to drill the Kid for cheating.”

  Grizzly chuckled. “The Kid needs drillin’, you ask me. But if the drillin’ keeps up, we ain’t gonna have no one left to deliver to Devil’s Lake.” He tossed coins into the kitty. “I’ll see your dollar, Bulldog, and raise you three.”

  Maybelline hooked an arm around her chair back to eye Fargo suspiciously, her unlit pipe drooping from a corner of her knife-slash mouth. “They didn’t steal ‘em a poke, did they?”

  “Looked to me like they were more interested in poker than pokin’.” Fargo crossed the room, heading for the stairs. “I’m beat, and I’m headin’ to bed.”

  “I’ll be along shortly,” Grizzly said. “Soon as I’m done turnin’ ole Bulldog’s pockets inside out.”

  As Fargo climbed the narrow stairs, he heard Bulldog mutter a curse and follow it up with another long, juicy chaw dribble. At the top of the stairs, the Trailsman moved down the narrow, low-ceilinged hall lit by two guttering candles, between walls of rough, whipsawed lumber and Z-framed doors, most of which were open. He passed one closed door behind which two sets of resounding snores sounded—the Tribbles’ door—and stopped at the other closed one at the far en
d of the hall. Tripping the lever latch, he stepped into a room not much bigger than a broom closet, in which a candle burned on a tin-topped washstand.

  A fire burned in a small, charcoal brazier beside a crude dresser. Irina Roskov’s steamer trunk sat on the floor in front of the dresser, with the clothes she’d been wearing earlier piled on the closed lid. A wood-frame bed lay in the far left corner, and the light from the flickering candle revealed a spray of dark-brown hair on a flour-sack pillow and a body curled beneath several deer and antelope hides. In spite of the brazier, Irina’s breath puffed around the pillow.

  From next door rose a man’s jubilant laugh and a girl’s mock-fearful cry. It sounded like the Dakota Kid was following up his near-fatal tangle with the Russians with a game of slap ‘n’ tickle.

  Fargo stepped toward the bed. A board creaked under his left boot. The girl gave a startled yelp and lifted her head quickly, brown eyes flashing fear above the deerskins.

  “Oh, it is you,” she said, her voice thick with revulsion though her eyes softened with relief. “I thought I told you before, a Russian woman—”

  “Yeah, you told me.” Fargo dragged a hide-bottom chair away from the corner behind the door and angled it before the bed. “I just thought I’d let you know I met a few of your friends tonight. They were askin’ about you. Seemed mighty concerned about your welfare. I told ‘em—”

  “You did not.…” She bolted straight up, letting the deerskins drop down below her round, pale breasts. She ground her right hand into his knee as though she were about to be swept away by a raging millrace. “You did not tell them about me, did you? Oh, please tell me you did not!”

  Fargo studied her, let a grim smile shape his lips as he settled back in his chair. “I didn’t tell them a thing. They didn’t tell me a thing, either. Would have been kind of hard to communicate, since none of ‘em knows a lick of English and I know even less Russian.”

  She leaned back against the wall, slowly pulling the deerskins up over her breasts. “You tricked me.”