Fargo 18

by John Benteen

“It’s the same thing. The only way to keep them from killing me is to kill them. If you don’t do it, they’ll come back. And then it will start all over again. Neal, you’ve got to kill them—now, while you’ve got the chance.”

  “Lola, calm down. You’re—”

  He broke off as a hoarse voice rang through the night. “Lola! Lola Dane! Damn you, do you know who’s out here? It’s Harrod, Lola—and, you bitch, I’ve come to keep my promise!”

  “You see?” Lola whispered. “I told you!”

  “Be quiet!” Fargo snarled. He went to a shutter, cracked it an inch. “Harrod!” he yelled. “It’s Neal Fargo talkin’!”

  For a moment there was silence. Then Harrod yelled back: “Fargo! I remember you! You’re there with Lola?”

  “I’m here with her! And I’ll smash you if you try to come after her! You and your sidekicks, Murphy, and the knife-man! You don’t have a chance of gettin’ to her!”

  Again silence. Then Harrod called, a sound of gloating in his voice, “You’re a big man, Fargo. Tough, the way I hear. But not even you’re tougher than nitroglycerin!”

  Fargo sucked in breath. That he had not counted on. Nitroglycerin, the most powerful and the most unstable explosive in the world! But where would an escaped convict get—?

  “You’re lyin’!” he shouted back, but there was a sinking feeling in his belly.

  “Not hardly!” Harrod laughed, a deep sound. “I figured Lola would have herself locked in. And when Flash and Jimmy met me north of here, they brought Sam Watkins with ’em. Ever hear of Sam? Likely not—but he’s the best safe and vault cracker on the Gulf Coast, and there’s nothin’ about nitro he don’t know. We’ve got half a dozen pint flasks of it here, enough to blow you and Lola all to hell. And there’s four of us and you and Lola can’t be everywhere at once! We’ll get that nitro against the walls and back off and put a bullet into it and—boom! You’re finished, Fargo. And so is she! But I’ll make a deal with you. Give her to us without a fight, and you can walk away! She’s the one we want, because she knows where the money is!”

  Fargo closed the shutter.

  He turned. “The money,” he said. “What money?”

  Lola stood there pale, silent.

  “I knew there had to be some,” Fargo rasped. “You’d better tell me, and in a hurry. What is it they want from you?”

  Before she could speak, Harrod’s voice sounded again. “Fargo, we’ll give you five minutes. I don’t know what kind of deal you got with her, but your life oughta be worth more than a half million dollars.”

  Fargo bit down hard on the cigar. “A half million dollars,” he said gustily. “My God, woman, no wonder they want you!”

  Lola licked her lips. “All right,” she whispered. “That’s really why I turned him in. He’d made a score, a big score. There was this crooked politician in New Orleans, kept his graft money in his house, in a wall safe. Rex really loved me, he didn’t have another woman. He said when we got that half million, we’d take off. And he and the others broke into the man’s house on the River Road and killed him and cracked the safe and Rex got it all, a half-million in big bills. But the man had powerful friends. They were on Rex’s trail, he gave me the money to keep for him until the heat died down. But ... all that money, the chance to be free the rest of my life …! I—”

  “You stole it!” Fargo rasped. “And then blew the whistle on Rex and sent him to prison so you could have it all—”

  “Yes. And that’s why the Rangers couldn’t come into it. Because I’m an accessory to the murder, I knew about it and I didn’t tell, and—Neal, I’ve still got the money! It’s hidden in a safe place! Now—” Her hand dug into his arm. “Go out there and kill Rex! Kill them all! Then you and I, we’ll share it! We’ll go away together! Neal—!”

  Fargo knocked her arm away. “Damn you, I halfway don’t blame Harrod. I—”

  “Fargo!” Harrod called. “You’ve got two minutes left!”

  “Neal!” she screamed, “don’t let them get me!”

  Fargo spat disgustedly. “I ought to. Damn you, I ought to. If I’d known it was money, I’d have had you and the money both out of here long ago. Where is it, why didn’t you take it and run?”

  “Because I couldn’t get to it. I—”

  “One minute, Fargo!”

  She stood there, staring at him. “Nothing’s changed. You took my cash. You promised to defend me. Now you’ve got to do it.”

  “Yeah,” Fargo said. “I’ve got to do it. But after this is over, if we’re both still alive—”

  He turned away, went to a window. He knew what Harrod would do now—the same thing he would in a similar situation. Create diversions on several sides of the house. And under cover of that, one man would run up with a flask of nitro, plant it by the wall, scuttle away. Then a well-placed rifle shot in this damned killer moonlight, from a safe distance, and that whole side of the house would go. All the same—

  He cracked the shutter. “Harrod!” he yelled. “You go to hell!”

  A hoarse laugh rang through the night. “Your funeral, Fargo! You’ll beat me there!”

  Fargo wasted no time on an answer. “Around the house,” he snarled at Lola. “Open all the shutters! Wide!”

  “But they can shoot at us!”

  “Dammit, do what I say!” He was already in action, making a circuit of the house, in this room, another, flinging open the shutters. He heard others bang as Lola followed suit. He slung the shotgun, picked up the rifle, waited. The moonlight fell plainly on the southern and eastern sides of the house; the other two were in shadow. That was some help, anyhow. On the south side of the house, by a window, he waited.

  A minute passed, two, five ... ten. Outside, the night was wholly silent. They were, Fargo knew, getting into position.

  Nitro. He knew all about it from working in the oil fields. Okay if you handled it slowly, easily, like a baby sleeping. Deadly dangerous if you dropped it, subjected it to any sudden impact. Its flasks had to be housed in layers of padding to be carried safely. Well, padding would not stop a bullet.

  Twelve minutes now. Lola was making a whimpering sound in her throat. Then, suddenly, from the northern and western sides of the house there was the roar of gunfire. Lead whined through the open windows. Fargo at his post on the south side waited. Out there across the ranch yard were the stables, dark bulks in the silver light. He rolled his cigar across his mouth. Harrod might be a city racketeer, but he was no soldier. He expected Fargo instinctively to return the fire, be drawn away from the vital area. But Fargo knew all about diversions and—

  Then he saw it, a flicker of motion in the shadows around the stables. The gunfire from the other flanks increased. Lola had crouched behind a chair. Lead chunked into the walls, spraying plaster. A vase smashed, with a crash of glass. Fargo waited, rifle up.

  Then the figure emerged from shadow. Bent low, it trotted easily across the ranch yard, cradling something tightly against its belly. Unhurriedly, smoothly, the man came, and from the way he traveled, Fargo knew that this was Watkins, the peterman, the safecracker and nitro expert. And what he hugged against his belt buckle was a flask of high explosive, heavily padded in felt and cotton.

  Fargo let him make it halfway across the ranch yard. When he was seventy yards away, clearly visible in the brilliant moonlight, Fargo raised the rifle, tucked its butt to his shoulder, lined it. A second more and he pulled the trigger.

  Even he was awed by what happened next.

  The man didn’t even have time to scream. One second he was there. The next, the night was lit by a gigantic flash of orange flame and jarred by deafening thunder.

  And when, once again, the moonlight was all that lit the ranch yard, there was a scarred place on the dirt and no sign that any human being had ever existed there. Watkins had literally and completely been blown to atoms.

  And almost as if in awe, the gunfire out there died.

  Fargo chewed on the unlit cigar. “Harrod!” he yelled
. “One down! And you’re gonna have to do better than that! The next man tries to bring a flask of nitro this way gets the same!”

  There was no answer.

  Harrod, he thought, might be tough, but he was none too bright. First, he’d tipped his hand. Second, he should have used dynamite, not nitro. Dynamite could be thrown from a safe distance, but the very jar of throwing nitro could set it off, and it had to be delivered in person, so to speak. Harrod and his men would think twice about trying that after seeing what had happened to Watkins.

  And yet, Fargo thought—a half million dollars! Men would take risks for that kind of money that they would not for simple vengeance!

  In the following silence, he made a quick circuit of the house, checking every window. Nothing moved out there in the darkness. Minutes passed, but Fargo knew better than to think they’d given up. “Lola!” he rasped. “On your feet! Help me cover these windows! You see anything outside, you holler!”

  Reluctantly she arose. Around and around they went, in and out of rooms, checking every window. The moon was going down, now. Daybreak not too far away, Fargo thought. If they could stand them off till then ... A man like Harrod would have to hide from daylight. It wasn’t, anyhow, his natural element—and besides, war in the daytime would attract attention. The sound of gunfire carried, and with the Rangers on his trail, he couldn’t linger. Whatever he did would have to be done tonight.

  Fargo met Lola back in the living room.

  “All clear?”

  “All clear,” she said. “Nothing out there except a stray horse. I guess one got loose—”

  Fargo tensed. “Stray horse? Where?”

  “Outside the kitchen window. Just wandering in the yard. Fargo, there was nobody on him—”

  “And you didn’t call me? Damn it, woman—” But he was already running for the kitchen.

  He was too late. A man couldn’t deliver nitro without risking destruction, but—

  The saddled horse, reins thrown over the horn, was only fifty feet from the back wall of the house. Even as Fargo watched, it shied, and he heard the thunk of a thrown rock striking its neck. Turned back from wandering to one side, it trotted toward the kitchen steps. Fargo raised his rifle, but already he knew he was too late. The horse was only a couple of yards away now, and—

  Fargo turned and ran. Lola, standing in the kitchen door, stared. “What—?”

  “Down!” Fargo bellowed, smashed into her, and she screamed as his body bore her backwards, she hit the floor, and he sprawled over her.

  Then the whole world blew up, as someone out there put a rifle bullet into the flask of nitroglycerin tied to the horse’s saddle.

  The thunder of the explosion was ear-numbing. The entire back end of the house blew in. In the dining room, where Fargo had slammed Lola flat, the floor danced, and overhead beams groaned, and then, with a vast rumble, the ceiling gave way.

  “Fargo!” Lola screamed. Her body twisted under him.

  And he rolled, looked up, just in time to see a great weight of tile and plaster cascading toward him.

  He raised one arm to shield his face. Then it hit him, with crushing force, maybe a half ton of rubble. He saw it coming. Something smashed into his head.

  Then, for a time he could not measure, there was only blackness ...

  ~*~

  He awakened feeling pain, and the vast weight of rubble still on his body. He did not move, kept his eyes tightly closed, waiting for full consciousness to return. Gradually he was aware of the sound of voices.

  “I told you.” Rex Harrod’s was cold, metallic, devoid of mercy. “I told you I’d be back, you slut.”

  “Rex, for God’s sake—” That was Lola’s, frightened, whimpering.

  “Where is it? Damn you, you’d better tell me. Is it here?”

  “No. It—” Then Lola screamed. “Rex, please—”

  “I’ll hurt you worse than that if you don’t talk. A half million dollars—the half million I took out of Girdler’s safe. Goddamn you, you took it and ran and turned me in to the Rangers, and ... If you don’t talk, I’ll turn Jimmy loose on you. You know what he’ll do to you.”

  Carefully, Fargo cracked his eyes, opening them only slit-wide. This end of the house was nothing but a pile of rubble. Lola lay sprawled on the shattered floor, a huge man with enormous shoulders standing over her. His face, in candlelight, was harshly handsome, like something out of a collar ad, despite his years of fighting in the ring. He was proud of those good looks, boasted that no opponent had ever touched them. But somewhere on that face must be scars that Fargo had given him in their one bout.

  He wore range clothes. So did the two men beside him, but no one would ever have mistaken them for cowpunchers. One, short and squat, with strange eyes, like a snake’s, wore a low-slung Colt, and that would be Flash Murphy. The other, angular, his head strangely small, almost freakishly so, squatted like a collapsed scarecrow near where Lola lay, and Fargo saw how he ran the rough part of his thumb over the shining blade of a ten-inch Bowie. And that would be Jimmy-the-Blade.

  “Gimme two minutes with her, Rex,” Jimmy said. “She’ll talk, then.”

  “No,” Lola whimpered. “No, please don’t. I’ll talk, I’ll tell you. It’s not here on the ranch, it’s not anywhere near here at all. It’s forty miles from here.”

  “Forty—Where?”

  Lola licked her lips, sat up. Her face was smudged and bruised, her blouse torn, her hair full of dust. “An old mine. Called the J & D. A mercury mine my father had an interest in one time. It’s all played out, now, deserted. It’s in the Sierra Diablo Mountains southeast of here, north of Van Horn. I hid the money there, down in a shaft ... drove up there in Dad’s old Packard. But then a week later there was a flash flood. It wiped out the old mine road, caused avalanches, washouts. You can’t get up there in a car any more, and it would have attracted too much attention for me to have tried to ride up there with a pack animal alone ... So I left it there. Later, after I was sure it was safe, after I was sure you were—”

  She broke off.

  “Dead,” Harrod said.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “After I was sure you were dead, I was going to make up a story about an inspection trip of the property, hire packers to take me up there, get the money and—”

  “Dance on my grave,” Harrod said fiercely. “Well, now I’ll dance on yours. How long does it take to get from here to there?”

  “You’d have to go on horseback. Two days the way the road is now.”

  “Forty miles and two damn days?” Flash Murphy swore.

  “Before the road washed out, I made it there and back in six hours in the car. But horses are the only way …”

  “Then we’ll go on horses,” Harrod said. “On your feet, Lola.”

  “You’re not going to—?”

  “Not yet. You live long enough to lead us to the money. We don’t know this country. You’re to take us straight there and put it in your hands. And if you’ve lied, if it’s not there—then Jimmy gets you ... to play with all he wants to.”

  “I’ll take you to it,” Lola husked. “I’ll give it to you—”

  “Okay. Flash, you get some horses from the stable. See if you can find some grub. I saw canteens hanging in the feed room out there, fill all you can find. There’s a well out back.”

  “Right. But horses—Two more days in the saddle. Chee!” Flash shambled out.

  Jimmy-the-Blade stood up. “One more thing, Rex. That big bastard over yonder. What about him?”

  Fargo quickly closed his eyes. Pinned by the rubble, he could not move, reach either Colt or knife, and the shotgun had disappeared.

  “He still alive?” asked Harrod.

  A hand touched Fargo’s cheek. “Yeah. Still warm, anyhow.”

  There was silence. Then rough hands shoved away some of the rubble, seized Fargo’s shirt. He was nearly pulled in two, and as an arm came free, he tried to reach for the Colt, but it was whisked from its holster. The kni
fe followed. Then the same massive strength yanked him to his feet, pinned him against a fragment of wall still standing. A big hand slapped his face, rocking his head from side to side. Involuntarily his eyes came open. Harrod’s strongly-chiseled, handsome face looked down at him. Its eyes were cold, gray, opaque.

  “I remember you, all right,” Harrod said. “The only man I never put down in the ring. Tried everything I knew, and you still stayed up. I’ve waited a long time for a rematch.”

  He swung Fargo around. “Watch her, Jimmy ...” Then, as Fargo, still dazed, tried to raise his hands, Harrod’s fist slammed into his face with mule-kick force.

  Fargo went sprawling over rubble. His head rang, his vision blurred. He tried to scramble to his feet and Harrod hit him again, and the force of the blow lifted him and knocked him back across more ruined masonry. Harrod came at him inexorably, and Fargo rolled, and then he was out of the blasted remnants of the house, in the yard, and he staggered up, a chunk of adobe brick in his hand. Harrod laughed and came for him, big fists clubbed, and Fargo threw the brick.

  It was a farce. His strength was gone. The missile bounced harmlessly off Harrod’s shoulder and Harrod laughed and came at him in a rush, and Fargo staggered back, hands raised to protect his head, and Harrod hit him in the belly and then in the chest and then in the belly again, and drove him back across the yard.

  “Hey, watch out!” Flash Murphy yelled, turning away from the well with full canteens.

  Now there were only blows and pain. Fargo slammed back against something hard, cold and solid: the masonry edge of the ranch well. Better than waist high, it caught him just below the shoulder blades. Harrod’s laugh rasped again, and through a red haze Fargo saw a big fist cocked back for a punch that would surely smash his nose and jaw and cost him all his teeth and maybe kill him.

  His action was instinctive. He brought up a knee, blocked Harrod, and kicked out. Harrod rocked back a little and that gave Fargo room, and his hands went behind him, braced on the well’s rim. Then, with the last of his strength, as Harrod’s fist whizzed by his head, grazed his cheek, he jerked up, rolled backwards—and then, head-first, he was hurtling down the well.