by Jon Sharpe
He gathered up everything, carried it to the house, and thonked on the door with the side of his fist.
“Skye, is that you?” Jasmine’s voice called out.
“Right down to the ground. Give me my instructions.”
“Just leave the pails outside. Miss Lavoy told me to tell you that I’m in the line of fire between you and El Burro.”
“I understand, hon. No parlor tricks.”
“I’ll crack the door open a few inches. You stick each rifle inside one at a time, stock first, so I can grab it.”
A wedge of light winked into view when the door meowed open. Fargo handed in first the Henry, then the North & Savage.
“All right,” she said. “Now put both your empty hands inside the door first, then leave them in view and come on in.”
As soon as Fargo was inside, Jasmine moved aside while Burro, jabbing the muzzle of one of his Colt Navy revolvers into Fargo’s gut, searched him thoroughly—so thoroughly that Fargo remarked, “Ease off—that ain’t a gun barrel you’re pinching, old son. Or have you forgotten?”
El Burro backhanded him so hard that Fargo bounced off the hallway wall. He tended to rile cool, a trait that increased longevity on the frontier. But Fargo made a mark in his ledger of accounts.
El Burro nodded to Jasmine, who called out, “All secure, Miss Lavoy!”
Jenny stepped through the nearest curtained archway. “Well, Mr. Fargo, are your horses still where you left them?”
“Yes, and now fed and watered. Thanks for letting me go, Miss Lavoy.”
“I hope you didn’t abuse my trust?”
“That would be a fool’s errand given the circumstances.”
“And you’re no fool, right?”
“Not tonight anyway.”
She gave him her tinkling, silver-smooth laugh. Then, abruptly, the stunning face hardened. “I suspect you’re lying, Mr. Fargo. Once again our minds are pitted one against the other. It’s a contest I rather enjoy.”
“Tell you the truth, I could do without it.”
“I’m sure. And may God have mercy on your soul if you lose.”
12
“How’d it go?” Buckshot whispered as Fargo pulled off his boots.
“The horses are all right. And the pinfire’s behind the crapper with a board in front of it loosened up. But Her Nibs is watching damn close for a fox play.”
Fargo stretched out on his pallet, realizing how bone-tired he was. His face still ached from that morning’s beating, and carrying two full pails of water for over a mile had left his shoulders feeling like they’d been hammered. He recalled the goading grin on El Burro’s face, the stun of his hard-hitting fists, and the anger seethed within him again.
“We best make our play damn fast,” Buckshot said. “That she-bitch has twigged our game, Skye.”
Something ominous in Buckshot’s tone made Fargo alert like a hound on point. “What’s your drift?”
“Plenty happened while you was gone. First she had Norton take me into the parlor so’s she could question me. She said she knew you was up to something, and she wanted to know what it was. She nagged me half haywire about it.”
“Yeah, so? You weren’t stupid enough to tell her?”
“Sell your ass, churn-brain,” Buckshot retorted. “But that pert skirt put the hoodoo eye on me. I ain’t as smooth a liar as you. I kept telling her you was only worried about our horses. But…hell ’n’ furies! She’s got this way of lookin’ right into a man’s thoughts.”
“She did it to me, too,” Fargo admitted. “Damn it, Buckshot, that woman gives me goose pimples. Jangles my nerves. I ain’t even sure I got the guts to try this play with the pinfire. I’ve whipped Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, won walking showdowns with lead-chuckers like Red Lassiter and Big Bat Landry, tracked down and killed that insane arsonist Blaze Weston. I’ve survived fire, flood, stampedes, and jealous husbands firing blue whistlers at me. And still that little cottontail gives me the jimmy leg.”
“You and me both, chappie. She’s a mighty potent force. I like to shit my pants when she put that hoodoo eye on me. Anyhow, that ain’t all. Butch McDade was here after you lit out.”
“You heard them?”
“I heard that bullhorn, yeah—leastways, part of what he said. I couldn’t make out nothing Jenny said. They musta been hobnobbing about that ransom plan she’s got for you. I heard him mention newspapers and somethin’ ’bout having a man take her letter to the Pony Express way station at Thunder Butte.”
“That’s eighty or so miles from here,” Fargo said. “If she does send a letter, it’ll get to Saint Joe in about five days.”
“You think she’ll do it? Might be she’s just stringing Butch along—’member what she told him, how they’d work the details out later?”
Fargo expelled a sigh of frustration. “Hell, how can you know with her? I don’t trust one damn thing she says. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. It would be weeks, at least, before any ransom delivery could show up, and we sure’s hell can’t let this thing stretch on much longer. You think that sick baby we saw this morning can hang on for weeks?”
“Not even one week. And the rest of them folks don’t look too chirpy, neither.”
“One thing’s certain,” Fargo said. “When I brought that pinfire back, I set the clock ticking. We can’t fiddle around now. The longer it stays where I put it, the greater the chance of discovery. And one hard rain would soak those paper cartridges. But even if I manage to sneak it into this room, Jenny’s suspicious of us now. This room will be searched, count on it.”
“One of us could pull it inside and toss it down the crapper,” Buckshot suggested. “Leastways we’d be shut of it. Or we can draw lots, and one of us can come outta that shithouse a-smokin’. Both of them dickless bastards wait outside for us.”
Fargo mulled that. “It’d be dicey, old son. If the powder loads have clumped, sure as cats fighting they’ll burn both of us down before you can say Jack Robinson. Still, it might be our best chance, at that. But we won’t draw lots—you’ve never used that gun before.”
“It’s a goldang mess,” Buckshot muttered.
“It is,” Fargo said, confidence seeping back into his tone. “But a mess can be cleaned up.”
* * *
The next morning marked one full week since the raid up north on Ed Creighton’s work crew. To Fargo, nerves stretched drumhead tight on tenterhooks, it felt like a lifetime since he had been a free man riding under western skies.
He and Buckshot were awake before Jenny’s mute bodyguards came to fetch them.
“I’ve had my bellyful of that beautiful little bitch, old son,” Fargo told Buckshot in a low, grim tone as he yanked on his boots. “This morning we either win the horse or lose the saddle. That pinfire is small caliber, so when I bust out of that crapper I’m going for two head shots, savvy?”
“Naught else for it,” Buckshot agreed. “Only a head shot guarantees a one-bullet kill.”
“Now listen up. I’ll have the foldaway blade in place. If that shooter don’t fire, I’m going through El Burro’s ribs and into his heart with the blade. If that happens, you’ll have to jump Norton. Lock his gun hand up at the wrist long enough for me to get one of the Burro’s Colts and kill Norton.”
“Lotta ‘ifs’ and ‘ands,’” Buckshot fretted. “But it’s come down to the nut-cuttin’ now, I reckon. Don’t forget the she-bitch. She’ll hear the ruckus, and she’s heeled with that little hideout gun—not to mention all our weapons.”
“Yeah, it’s Patsy I’m most worried about. If she turns both those barrels on us, they’ll hafta bury us with a rake. So we get inside the house quick—I mean faster than a finger snap.”
“Do we kill her, Skye?”
Fargo tugged on his close-cropped beard. “She deserves it, all right, but I’ve never killed a woman and I’m not eager to do it. She just might force our hand—she’s a scrappy little vixen. If we can get to her fast enough, we’ll bind and gag her. We�
��ve got plenty of work ahead of us if we mean to get out of this gulch alive. Those prisoners have to go with us.”
It was a desperate plan, all right, but Fargo had faced long odds all his life. However, ten minutes later, one simple unforeseen act turned all of it into mere mental vapors: El Burro left the door wide open while Fargo and Buckshot took turns in the privy, never once taking his eyes off them.
Fargo had been right in his surmise of the night before: Jenny suspected him and Buckshot of treachery. Making matters worse—while El Burro held them under the gun, Norton scrambled up the back wall of the gulch and beat the bushes. If they thought to search behind the outhouse, Fargo realized, yesterday’s beating would seem like a lover’s caress compared to what was coming.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Jenny greeted them in the kitchen. “I trust you slept well?”
The constant ironic edge to her tone got on Fargo’s nerves. It implied she was one up on the rest of the world and any fools in fringed buckskins.
Jasmine served up plates of pandowdy and bacon while Jenny sipped tea and watched the two men like a cat on a rat.
“Jasmine,” she said casually, “please put on more water to boil.” Then she looked at Fargo.
“Mr. Fargo,” she said, “it’s often said that one can’t hitch a horse with a coyote. But isn’t it true that a horse and a coyote will cooperate for their mutual survival?”
Fargo chewed, swallowed, and looked at her, trying to figure her angle. “Well, I’ve seen animals that usually attack each other share a small spit of land in a flood, if that’s what you mean.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of such things. I’m getting very close to a critical juncture—whether to go with the status quo here in the gulch or trust you two to help me establish a new order, so to speak.”
“The hell’s a status quo?” Buckshot interjected.
She ignored him, still watching Fargo closely. “I have very little time to make that decision.”
“I don’t follow you,” Fargo said. “Yesterday you had your two lickspittles here”—El Burro scowled darkly—“beat hell out of our faces. You figured it would buy you some time after you paraded us around so the rest could see us.”
“That was the general idea, yes, and it would have worked. But I didn’t anticipate your rather impressive killing of Lem Aldritch. Yes, it fascinated those baboons in the saloon. By now, however, it has begun to rankle in their craws, as the idiom goes. In the main they are a pack of cowardly curs. But even a toothless dog will bite if kicked hard enough.”
“Miss Lavoy,” Buckshot spoke up again, “I don’t cotton none to being a prisoner here. But I ain’t never knowed a woman who can figure out men like you can.”
“It requires no great skill,” she dismissed him. “Most men think with their cods. Not until a man grows so old he is no longer piss-proud in the morning does he develop any wisdom.”
Fargo was astounded yet again. This woman looked every inch the great lady, but her brutal frankness was unnerving.
“But as I was saying,” she resumed, her intensely probing eyes pinning Fargo by his soul, “the issue with you two is trust.”
“Here’s the way of it,” Fargo said. “If we just come out and tell you that you can trust us, that we want to throw in with you, you’ll just figure we’re lying to you in hopes of escaping. So where does that leave us?”
“It leaves us with your actions. As the line goes, I can’t hear what you say because what you are speaks too loudly. So far you appear to have been good little boys. But Jasmine has certainly been a bad little girl.”
Jasmine, standing at the cookstove waiting for the tea kettle to boil, paled at these words. “Ma’am?”
“Don’t play the ingenue with me, you treacherous little whore. The next time you write a note to Mr. Fargo, make sure you tear the page off the pad first. That way you’ll avoid leaving a faint imprint on the next page.”
Jasmine flinched as if struck by a bolt out of the blue. Her legs suddenly went so weak she had to clutch the soapstone sink beside her. Fargo felt his blood seem to stop and flow backward as the words from that one-line note he had eaten now sparked in his memory: Guns under Jenny’s bed…
Jenny Lavoy’s face was a mask of sadistic purpose. “Is that water boiling?”
“Yes,” Jasmine managed in a breathless whisper.
“Fine. Norton, place one gun behind each man’s head, full cock. If either one so much as twitches, paper the wall with their brains. Burro, pin the blond whore’s arms behind her and bend her over the sink—yes, like that.”
Jenny rose to the stove and grasped the kettle. “Jasmine, you have a pretty face although you’re a bit bucktoothed. Before I pour this boiling water on it and make you a hideous monster forever, I have one question: did Mr. Fargo ask you to look for those guns, or did you volunteer the information?”
“I…” Words failed her, and if Burro hadn’t been holding her up, Jasmine would have collapsed to the floor.
“I told her to look for them,” Fargo volunteered. “Your dicker is with me, not her.”
“Then I will give you a choice: her pretty face or your handsome one?”
Buckshot was chewing on his lip so hard it was bleeding. But by now Fargo was filled with a quiet rage and had no more fear in him than a rifle.
“Tell you what, lady. Before you pour that water on either of us, you’re gonna have to kill me.”
“Kill us,” Buckshot amended.
“And once you kill us,” Fargo said, “what then? You know damn good and well you’re scared spitless of that bunch of filthy hyenas in the gulch. Power is a two-way street; the same ones who give it to you will take it away. And once they do, El Burro and Norton won’t be able to stop those filthy, lice-ridden mongrels from mounting you until they rape you to death.”
Jenny surprised everyone present by laughing like a gay little school girl who had tricked the class.
“You needn’t be so melodramatic, Mr. Fargo. I’ve grown quite fond of Jasmine and I have no intention of scalding her face. Nor yours. And for your information, your weapons will remain under my bed—I’m not willing yet to place them back in your hands. Norton, lower your guns, please. Jasmine dear, have a seat for a few minutes until you quit shaking.”
Jenny removed the kettle from the stove and poured another pot of tea to brew. “Skye,” she said, using his front name for the first time, “I’m growing something akin to fond of you, too. But your assessment of my danger is too dire—you underestimate my control over Butch McDade and Lupe Cruz, and overestimate your importance to my survival. The blunt truth is this: either you two are going to die or those three are, depending which decision will make me a richer woman. It’s purely business.”
She turned those direct-as-searchlight eyes first on Buckshot, then Fargo, as she added, “I’ll let the situation with the note go—it’s harmless enough since you’ll never get at those guns. Besides, Skye, you and I have an erotic tryst coming up soon. But try my patience just once more, and I’ll cast my lot with Butch McDade. Lacking your cunning mind, he’s easier to control.”
Fargo thought about that gun lying behind the outhouse and told himself again, scalp sweating: She’s mad as a March hare.
* * *
“Boys, for a time there I was sittin’ on the anxious seat,” Butch McDade announced. “But what I seen yesterday sets my mind at ease. Little Britches had Fargo and his pard worked over pretty good. She sure’s hell ain’t lipping salt from his hand, hey? Don’t look to me like she’s got any big idea about dealing him in and us out.”
He passed a bottle of red-eye across the table to Lupe Cruz. Cruz knocked back a slug and wiped his mouth on his sleeve before passing the bottle to Waldo Tate. Night was settling over Hangtown and the three men could hear a raucous din from the nearby Bucket of Blood.
“I saw something yesterday,” Cruz said, “that did not set my mind at ease. Maldita! Even with his manos tied behind him, this Fargo killed a man. Bu
tch, even if he has not—how you say—beguiled Jenny, Fargo is a dangerous man.”
“You ain’t birding there,” Butch agreed. “Give Fargo just that much chance”—he snapped his fingers—“and he’ll sink us six feet closer to hell. All I’m saying is that Jenny wouldn’t have her geldings play thump-thump with him if her and him was chummy.”
Waldo shook his head. “I got the fantods, Butch. I still think Jenny means to buck us three out, and it’s Fargo she’ll use to do it.”
“You best do a pecker check,” Butch scoffed, “and make sure you’re a man.”
“I’m telling you,” Waldo insisted, “Jenny’s caught a spark for that bastard, and now us three will get the hind tit—or worse.”
McDade’s insolent lips twisted in scorn. “What, a little bird told you all this? Or maybe you got one of them crystal balls?”
“No, I heard it with my own ears.”
McDade had started to raise the bottle to his lips. Now he set it down, staring at Waldo. “Spell that out.”
“I was in the Temple yesterday when she came in with Fargo and the ’breed. And I’m telling you those two were palsy-walsy. She thought I was too stoned to make sense of anything, but I heard everything she said to him.”
“Like what, f’rinstance?”
“Stuff you wouldn’t be saying to some jasper who was just a prisoner you wanted to ransom. She told him how she allowed the Temple because the drugs control us men—‘a brake on men’s wilder impulses’ she called it. She asked Fargo if he ever used the pipe, and when he said no, she looked satisfied as all hell—said that was good because a man had to be ready at all times or some shit. Now you tell me: why would she be talking that way to a man she planned to ransom off and kill? You ask me, they were talking like they were closing a deal.”
“Hell, Waldo, you was smoking tar balls. That stuff addles a man’s brains.”
“Tar balls ain’t like peyote,” Waldo insisted. “It makes me feel like I’m floating, sort of, and gives me strange dreams. But it actually makes my hearing sharper. I heard every damn word. And, Butch, I’m telling you straight from the shoulder—they were talking chummy.”
