A Different Trade

by J. R. Roberts

  “The Howling Hound?” Clint asked as he read the flowing letters. Those words framed a black drawing resembling the wolf’s head on the label of the liquor that had brought him to Larga Noche in the first place. “Does Leo have a fondness for dogs?”

  “Yes, indeed. At least this dog has stopped digging and is setting its sights higher.”

  After taking a moment to study it, Clint nodded. “I like it.”

  “As do I.” Leaning in and nudging him with her elbow, Henrietta added, “And it beats the hell out of the other terrible names Leo came up with.”

  “Can we go now?” the boy on the ladder asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  The boy next to Clint spoke up as well. Handing over his fifty-cent piece, he asked, “Can I have some of that fancy liquor I heard about?”

  “You can’t afford it,” she said, “but please spread the word.”

  Clearly disappointed, the boy tightened his fist around his coin and started walking down the street. His brother jumped down from the ladder so both of them could cross Sharp Bend and run straight toward Miss Tasha’s.

  “Boys will be boys,” Clint said.

  “And men will be late. Especially,” Henrietta said, “men connected to this saloon.”

  “Why do you say that?” Clint asked.

  “Because Leo hasn’t shown up today.”

  “What?”

  Her face darkened. “He stood up to his brother last night, and now he’s at his house, Clint. You should go and see him.”

  Judging by the look in her eyes, it wasn’t going to be a pleasant visit.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Getting directions to Leo’s home near the outskirts of town wasn’t difficult. Following them, on the other hand, was a challenge. Clint may have had an easier time if Leo had lived just outside of town so he could leave Larga Noche’s boundaries and circle in from there. Since that wasn’t the case, he had to navigate the infuriating tangle of streets until he found the house he was after.

  Clint’s knuckles pounded on the door hard enough to rattle it in its frame. When the door was opened, Leo scowled out at him while saying, “Easy! If you intended on knocking the damn thing down, you would have at least saved me the trouble of getting up!”

  “Henrietta told me you stood up to Westin last night,” Clint said as he immediately looked down at Leo’s bandaged hand. “I take it that didn’t go well.”

  Leo stepped aside so Clint could enter, and then he shut the door. His house was barely larger than a cabin. Most of the entryway was taken up by a hat rack and a set of stairs leading to the second floor. Straight ahead was a kitchen and small table while to the right of the front door was a parlor with a fireplace, a rocker, and a small table with a few books stacked upon it.

  Making his way to the rocker, Leo sat down with a labored grunt. “What did she tell you?” he asked.

  “Just that Westin and one of his men came along last night and she asked you to show them the door. You had a word with them and the three of you took it outside.”

  “That’s it?”

  “She said she thought she heard gunshots.”

  “Yeah,” Leo said. “That’s the part where it would have been nice to have a little backup.”

  “I’m sorry. I should’ve been there.”

  “You’re doing enough. Henrietta may be small, but she knows how to handle that shotgun I keep below the bar.”

  “She wasn’t even certain she’d heard the shots,” Clint explained. “She told me as much. She also told me she went outside to look for you when you didn’t come back in and she found you passed out lying against a wall.”

  Leo stared down at the flickering light in his fireplace. “When I woke up, I was in my own bed with the doctor looking down at me. I thought I was dead.”

  “Something tells me you wouldn’t have needed a doctor if that was the case,” Clint said.

  “Well, I wasn’t thinking too straight at the time. I didn’t even think about how I got here.”

  “Henrietta found you, gathered whoever she could, and brought you back here. She sends her best, by the way.”

  “She’s a good woman. I’m glad she didn’t try to come out when Westin and that one-armed son of a bitch did this to me.”

  Clint looked down at Leo’s hand. “If you don’t mind me asking, what did they do to you?”

  “See for yourself,” Leo said as he unwrapped enough of the bandages for Clint to see the bloody little nubs where the two middle fingers of his right hand had been.

  Clint pulled in a sharp breath. “Damn! What the hell was that for?”

  “They was proving a point.” Leo wrapped up his hand again and set in gingerly across his lap. “I knew my brother had a mean streak and that he didn’t care for me too much, but I never thought he’d go so far as to maim me this way.”

  “It could have been a lot worse,” Clint said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means they could have killed you. Why didn’t they?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know?”

  Clint walked to the kitchen to get them both some water. The house was small enough that he didn’t have to raise his voice very much to be heard in the next room when he said, “I heard of a gunman out in Nebraska, I think, who got his hand hurt a lot worse than that. He needed a special gun made, but he was back out and raising hell before too long.”

  “What happened to him?” Leo asked.

  Walking into the parlor carrying two cups of water, Clint told him, “I’m not sure. I’ll have to ask around next time I’m out that way. All we need to worry about for the moment, though, is what happens to you. Where do you go from here, Leo?”

  “Hell if I know,” he sighed.

  “Why don’t you start by telling me what happened last night.”

  After taking a sip of water, Leo steeled himself and then began speaking in a steady voice to describe what happened the last time he’d seen his stepbrother. Every so often, his voice wavered but another deep breath and drink of cool water put him back on track. “When the first shot was fired,” he said, “I thought I was dead. The second one came and I don’t recall much from there.”

  “Understandable,” Clint said. “Must’ve hurt like a bastard.”

  “Still does.”

  “So they want you to piece together some sort of contract so you can legally hand over Madeline?”

  “That’s right,” Leo said. “Most likely, I’d say she’s going to be the first girl in a long line. If I hand her over, there’ll just be more.”

  “You mentioned something about another business they wanted to start?” Clint asked.

  Leo nodded. “Opium.”

  “They want to turn your saloon into an opium den?”

  “No. They want to sell opium and some other things like that from my place. They also want to use my saloon to store boxes while they’re being shipped across the country. Kind of like a depot.”

  “Could be guns,” Clint said. “Or stolen property.”

  “Or any number of illegal things,” Leo said as he jumped to his feet. “Otherwise, they could just ship the damn things like normal folks! What gets under my skin is what they want to do to Madeline and the other girls they intend on bringing to my place. I can’t even imagine . . .”

  Clint could imagine it just fine. Doing so lit a fire deep in his gullet. “They’re scared,” he said.

  “Funny,” Leo replied as he held up his bandaged hand, “they didn’t seem that way to me.”

  “They’re nervous about something, which is why they’ve stepped up their game.”

  “I still doubt they’re scared of anything.”

  Clint grinned. “Then we’ll just have to see what we can do to remedy that.”

  TWENTY-SIX

 
It hadn’t taken much to find someone who recognized Clint’s description of Westin’s men. In fact, one of the first people he’d asked was the desk clerk at the hotel where he was staying. Clint had just been finishing breakfast when he’d noticed the front desk of his hotel faced a window that looked directly out to Linden Street.

  “I don’t know about any one-armed man,” the clerk had told him, “but that big bald fellow sounds familiar. He spends a lot of time at Mackie’s.”

  Mackie’s was another one of Larga Noche’s saloons. Clint had been there a handful of times when he’d been scouting such places in town. Also, it was just down the street from his hotel so he’d stopped in there for a drink when he wasn’t of a mind to go all the way to Leo’s place. “When was the last time he was there?” Clint asked.

  “He’s there every morning for biscuits and gravy.”

  “You know what he eats?”

  The clerk shrugged. “Lots of folks go there for biscuits and gravy. Mackie’s serves ’em up almost every morning. They taste like bricks and mortar, but they’re cheap and there’s always plenty of them.”

  Clint had figured someone like Westin and those other two couldn’t be too hard to miss in a town the size of Larga Noche, but he thought he’d have to look a bit harder than that. Without questioning his bit of good luck, he thanked the clerk and headed out the door.

  Thanks to the rest he’d had over the last day or two, Clint was able to move without feeling a stabbing jolt of pain from his ribs. What hurt even more was the jab he felt to his pride whenever he thought about how his ribs had gotten that sore in the first place. He felt a whole lot better once he caught sight of Kurt sitting at a table in the little saloon down the street.

  Mackie’s was half the size of Leo’s place. Its main room contained only a bar and seven tables situated near a stage that was just big enough to hold three dancing girls as long as they didn’t move around very much. At the moment, the only thing on that stage was a table stacked high with breakfast so the few paying customers there could help themselves. Since there was only one door in or out of the main room, Clint picked a spot across the street where he could wait without being easily seen.

  Before too long, Kurt stepped outside wearing a big smile on his face and gravy stains on the front of his shirt. He didn’t cast a second glance in Clint’s direction before heading up Linden Street and turning onto Third Avenue.

  By this time, Clint could have walked to Larga Noche’s largest collection of saloons in his sleep. He had no trouble whatsoever following Kurt through town all the way to Sharp Bend. When the big bald man drew closer to Leo’s place, Clint rested his hand upon his holstered Colt in anticipation of putting it to use. Instead of barging in to pay Leo a visit, Kurt took a few moments to gaze up at the new sign before moving along.

  Kurt’s next stop was Miss Tasha’s. When he got there, he did a lot more than just look at the sign over the door. He stepped up onto the porch and was immediately greeted by a dark-haired girl wearing a slip of a dress with a neckline that was cut low enough to expose a generous portion of her small breasts. She went to work on him right away by rubbing his chest and pressing herself against him. Although Clint couldn’t hear what the two of them were saying, Kurt’s leering smile was easy enough to read from afar. It seemed the two of them had just about bartered an agreeable price as Clint crossed the street and prepared to step inside the cathouse in Kurt’s wake. With any luck, he’d be able to talk to one of the girls long enough for Kurt to get nice and comfortable in his room before Clint cut his visit short.

  As Clint opened the door, he could see Kurt inside being led upstairs by the skinny girl who’d set her sights on him. Even closer, however, was a young man with a very familiar face. That young man recognized Clint right away and ruined Clint’s hopes of following Kurt unseen when he said, “Mr. Adams!”

  Just past the young man, Kurt stopped on the stairs and began turning around.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Clint reached out to grab the front of the boy’s shirt and pull him outside with the same speed he would use to draw his Colt. Like many of the men who’d found themselves on the wrong end of that Colt, the boy who’d been on his way out of the cathouse gaped in surprise and struggled to catch his next breath.

  After dragging the kid outside, Clint kept moving until he could duck around a corner and throw the boy against a wall. When the young man tried to speak again, Clint slapped his hand against the boy’s mouth. The teenage boy stared at him with wide, petrified eyes without making another move.

  Around the corner, Clint could hear the front door open and a few heavy footsteps knock against Miss Tasha’s front porch. A pair of working girls were sitting out there, but they knew better than to get involved with other folks’ business.

  The door creaked open again and a woman said, “What are you doing, sweetie? Come back inside.”

  “Who was just out here?” Kurt asked.

  When he heard Kurt’s voice, Clint reflexively pressed his hand tighter against the young man’s face. Now that he’d had a moment to think, he recognized the boy as one of the teens who’d helped hang the new sign in front of Leo’s saloon. When he wasn’t on top of a ladder, the boy turned out to be a bit shorter than Clint had guessed.

  “You,” Kurt grunted. “Who just walked through that door?”

  One of the women on the porch answered the question in a slow, lazy voice. “Wasn’t that just you?”

  “Before me, you stupid bitch!”

  “I guess there were some men walking out,” she said. “Imagine that. Men leaving a place like this.”

  One heavy boot thumped against the porch. Even though he couldn’t see anyone on there from his spot around the corner, Clint could hear a definite shift in the woman’s voice when she said, “Take one more step and I’ll start screaming. Then Armand will come out to check on me.”

  Whoever Armand was, Kurt must not have wanted to draw his attention, because the next sound Clint heard was the creak of the front door again. “So you didn’t see anyone?” Kurt asked.

  “Just the sweet little thing that was with Sally.”

  Clint glanced over at the young man in front of him and felt a smirk form beneath his restrictive hand.

  After a few seconds, the dark-haired woman with Kurt purred something to him and the door was shut. Clint waited for a spell before risking a quick look around the corner. Miss Tasha’s front porch was once again occupied by just the two working girls who rested there. The closest lady saw Clint right away and gave him a nod.

  Taking his hand away from the young man’s face, Clint pushed him farther down the alleyway. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “W-Will.”

  “First of all, I apologize for dragging you out here like this.”

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “Not at all,” Clint said. “You know that man who was walking in right ahead of me?”

  “Yes. He’s one of the men that comes to the Dig Dog sometimes. Or . . . I mean the Howling Hound.”

  “Right. Have you seen him very much?”

  “Not really, but I know he’s not the sort of man I’d like to see very often.”

  Clint smiled. “You’re a smart kid, Will.” Seeing the twitch on Will’s face, Clint added, “Sorry. Not a kid. Do you frequent this place very often?”

  Will shrugged as if he’d been caught at something. “I come around every now and then to talk to the ladies. I been saving up for . . . well . . . you know.”

  “Sure I do. And that bit of money that Miss Henrietta gave you put you over the top.”

  “That’s right. Since it was my first time . . .” Will stopped himself and flushed in the cheeks.

  “We all have a first time, Will,” Clint said as he took a look around. So far, nobody was taking much of an interest in their conversation. “Nothing to be
ashamed of. Did she take care of you?”

  “Oh yeah,” Will said through a grin that stretched nearly every muscle in his face. “Twice. She even let me sleep there and gave me a bath in the morning.”

  It sounded to Clint like she’d overcharged him and then decided to make up for it. Still, he doubted any young man would be too angry about such a thing. That didn’t happen until his fifth or sixth time.

  “Sounds like a hell of a deal,” Clint said. “I’ve got another deal for you.”

  Will scowled and recoiled a bit as he looked Clint up and down.

  “Not that kind of deal!” Clint said. “I’ve got a job for you to earn some extra money. Might not be enough for another all-night party, but it should get you back in one of those ladies’ good graces.”

  “I’m just interested in one of them,” Will sighed.

  “Of course you are.” Clint dug some money from his pocket and slapped it against Will’s chest. “Here’s half up front. I want you to go back in there and see if you can find out what that fellow is up to. The bald one. I’d go in, but he’d recognize me.”

  “That’s why you didn’t want me to say your name when he was right there!”

  “Smart lad. See if you can find out where he is in there and who he’s with. Ask the girls, not anyone else. They’re used to keeping secrets, and we don’t need this one kept for more than a few minutes. If you have to, slip one of them a bit of this money and they’ll give you something at least.”

  “What if I can find out more?” Will asked.

  “Then you’ll get more when you come back. Just watch yourself. That man’s a killer, so don’t get too close.”

  “Okay. I’ll just ask around.”

  “I’m not kidding here. Being stupid will only force me into something I want to avoid,” he explained while patting the gun on his hip. “If you get nervous or if he seems suspicious, come right back out here and find me. Got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Since Will seemed nervous enough to be cautious but not jittery, Clint sent him on his way.