Lake of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  “Laura,” he gasped, “just let me …”

  She got a hand free and jabbed the side of his neck with her nails. The sharp pain sent him into a rage.

  “You little whore.” He’d thought she knew the game. “You’ll let him, but …”

  She slashed up again and raked his cheek, coming close to his eyes.

  Forrest Fielding had told Hank about Laura’s willful ways. And that it took a firm hand to deal with her.

  Hank dodged her attempt to knee him in the groin and fumbled with the buttons of his flannel trousers. Grabbing one of Laura’s wrists, he collected the other and pinned both hands on the bed above her head.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  JUNE 28

  Cord listened to Yellowstone Lake lap at the pilings beneath the pier. He should be long away from here, but …

  Early this afternoon, after Laura and Constance had run from him in opposite directions, he’d struck off toward the stable to calm Dante through the latest storm. He’d not gotten halfway there before Captain Feddors blocked his path, his hand on the grip of his

  Colt.

  Cord tried to look around without being obvious. They were alone in the driving rain.

  “Heard you’ve been found out. No more thinkin’ you’ll buy the hotel and throw your weight around here.”

  Cord attempted to sidestep and was blocked again.

  “No more sniffin’ round those women from Chicago.” Feddors spit tobacco juice over the tops of Cord’s boots.

  Rage nearly blinded him. All he wanted was to get his hands around this asshole’s neck and squeeze until he saw his eyes go opaque.

  That was what the captain longed for, waiting with his gun at the ready.

  “Guess that old Injun took off to save his hide.” Feddors tried another tack. “Yer uncle.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Mebbe you oughta take a message and follow him.”

  If this was a contest in illiterate speech, Cord decided he’d win. “Reckon I oughta.”

  “You don’t, and you’ll wish you had,” Feddors finished. He pulled his weapon and gestured with it for Cord to get on with his getting on.

  He headed toward the stable, arriving soaked and dripping. As soon as the rain let up, he saddled Dante and rode him around to the front of the hotel. Then he cleared out his room.

  It only took a few minutes. His good black suit, a couple of white shirts, charcoal slacks, denims, and blue cotton shirts … all went into his leather saddlebag.

  When everything was in, he stood for a moment with a nagging sense of leaving something behind. Checking his bureau drawers and the shaving stand turned up nothing.

  In conspicuous view of anyone who might be taking note, he checked out, and loaded his saddlebag, his small pack, and his sealed rifle. Then he’d ridden into the woods, left Dante tied to a tree, and circled back on foot.

  Looking for Laura.

  She might have been the one who told Hank, but something in her stricken expression when he’d accused her on the porch had him risking his life to be sure, hiding out at the base of the bluff where the pier met the water. After full dark, he’d risk looking in the dining room and lobby windows and decide if the coast was clear to go inside.

  He shook his head. Feddors might have ordered his men to be on the lookout. The only one Cord believed he could trust not to turn him in was Larry Nevers … but even that wasn’t a given. Larry had stood by and let Cord rescue White Bird.

  Perhaps the answer lay in Laura visiting her father in the infirmary. If he lay in wait in the trees along the path, he’d be able to see if she went there, hopefully alone.

  He peeped out from under the pier. A couple walked along the edge of the Grand Loop above, the woman’s arm through the man’s.

  Cord waited until they passed, then looked again. Seeing no one, he started up the steep bank toward the road. When he was halfway to the top, he thought he heard something off toward Hank’s steamboat. Reaching the bank above, he saw a glow in one cabin window.

  The steamboat rocked, and a wash of wave slapped the dock. Cord turned toward the infirmary.

  A scream split the night, raising the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck. On instinct, his hand went to the horn-handled hunting knife he’d strapped to his belt after the encounter with Feddors.

  Another scream, this one choked off in the middle. Between the dark curtains of the steamboat’s cabin, a shaft of yellow lamplight penetrated the darkness. There was no other sign of light or life in the marina.

  Cord ran to the stairs, down them, and along the dock. There was no outer door to the lighted cabin, and the portal to the passenger cabin was locked. He rattled the knob and another cry came from inside.

  He butted his shoulder against the water-swollen wood and bounced off. Moving to the curtained window with its tantalizing wedge of light, he found the sash lifted. Raising it higher, he parted the velvet drapes.

  On the opposite side of the opulent cabin, half-hidden behind an elaborate Chinese screen, a man and woman lay entwined on the rumpled bed. Hank was recognizable by his thin shoulders and blond hair. He was coatless, his starched white shirt half off, pulled down over one arm. His round white buttocks were bare, his suit pants around his knees.

  Sandalwood incense played a light note. The woman’s dark hair spread over brocade pillows shot with gilt thread.

  Cord felt a twinge in his groin. He hesitated, wondering if he had imagined the frightened tenor of the scream, or whether it had merely been exuberant love play.

  “No, damn you!” The woman beat her fists against Hank’s chest and heaved her body beneath his.

  Cord put together the voice and the small ravaged face. “Laura!”

  He leaped through the window and knocked over the dinner cart. Silver covers clattered and bounced. Lavender china shattered.

  Staggering, Cord stumbled over a champagne cooler. It tipped and the bottle landed on its side. Effervescent gold pooled on the carpet.

  Hank rolled off Laura and leaped up. His pants hobbled him; his thin penis shriveled. Laura pulled her skirt down, but the torn sides of her blouse hung open.

  Cord crouched and kept his weight on the balls of his feet, hoping to God Hank didn’t have a tiny derringer secreted somewhere.

  Hank curled his thin lips into a sneer. Silver flashed in the dimly lit room as he pulled a stiletto from a sheath on his calf.

  Reaching for his knife, Cord shouted, “Get out of here, Laura!”

  Hank thrust forward.

  Cord leaped aside, but the blade’s tip slit his sleeve. Laura scrambled off the bed and ran toward the door.

  Cord circled warily, then swiveled and kicked up between Hank’s legs.

  Hank managed to grab Cord’s foot. Both men went down, swearing.

  Cord landed on his face and heard the clatter of his knife on the deck beyond the Oriental carpet.

  He strained to reach it.

  Hank flung himself onto his back. Expecting the sharp pain of the stiletto between his shoulder blades, Cord rolled and twisted in Hank’s grasp.

  Hank emerged on top, straddling Cord’s thighs with long legs. He raised his blade.

  Cord intercepted the knife hand on the descending stroke.

  The stiletto slashed his forearm. His muscles trembled as he worked through the pain and strained to hold the knife away from his chest.

  Hank smiled.

  Cord brought his free hand up in a slashing blow. Hank fell back with a scream, his nose dripping blood. His hands came up to clutch his face, and he lost his grip on the knife handle.

  Snatching the weapon, Cord reversed their positions, pinning Hank to the carpet. Both men gasped for breath.

  With the stiletto in his hand, Cord lowered it until the tip of the blade rested a quarter inch from Hank’s bare chest, just above his heart.

  Hank’s bloody hands dropped to his sides and he watched, breathing shallowly so as not to contact the steel.
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br />   “As you and others have so succinctly pointed out,” Cord said softly, “I am a savage.” He let the blade touch flesh. Hank’s chest rose. A spot of blood appeared. “Easy,” Cord cautioned. “I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.”

  He barely raised the blade off skin. “You see, if anyone is going to hurt you for what you were doing to Laura …” he lowered his voice to a whisper, “I’d like for it to be me.”

  “What in the name of God is going on?” growled a deep voice.

  Norman Hagen lifted Cord off Hank with strong hands and dropped him onto the deck. “I was having a cigarette by the water …”

  Hank curled into a fetal position, his arms and legs protruding awkwardly. He held his hands over his rapidly swelling face.

  Cord half-crawled to the nearby bed, still holding the knife. His cheekbone throbbed where he’d impacted the deck, right on the cut Constance had inflicted with the gemstone. He pulled himself up to sit on the edge, feeling himself start to shake while the pulse-pounding rush of the fight ebbed.

  Laura stood just inside the door beneath a bronze lantern. She held her torn blouse together at the neck with one slender hand, her lamp-lit taffy hair spilling over her shoulders in tangled waves.

  Hank groaned and pushed himself up on trembling arms. His knife-thin nose canted to the side and dripped blood on the fine carpet. “This savage,” he told Norman, pointing dramatically, “came through the window while I was entertaining Laura Fielding and attacked me.”

  Norman’s sharp eyes took in the remains of dinner and the champagne bottle, lying on its side with a few precious inches of liquid still inside. Two glasses, half-full, sat on a table beside the bed. Norman raised his blond brows at Laura.

  Hank looked quickly at Cord. “You saw her. She was begging for it.”

  “I screamed bloody murder,” Laura said flatly. She spoke to Cord, her eyes enormous in the lamplight.

  “Look what he did.” Hank brushed back his hair that had fallen over his bruised and swollen face. “My nose is broken.”

  Cord grimaced and rolled his own bloody sleeve back to reveal the stab wound in his muscular forearm. “If I’d lost the fight, I’d be lying on your deck in a pool of blood.”

  “That’s enough.” Norman took Cord by his uninjured arm and pointed him toward the doorway. “I’ll walk with you back to the hotel so everyone can calm down.”

  Cord looked for Laura, but she was gone.

  “I’m not sure what happened tonight,” Norman told Cord as they walked away from the dock. “There’s bad blood soiling this whole deal.”

  Cord looked Norman in the eye. “The fight happened because I thought Hank was raping Laura. I still believe it.”

  Norman looked as though he were gathering his thoughts; he reached into his breast pocket for his Richmond Straight Cuts. “I think most people would find that difficult to believe of Hank.”

  “You saw her blouse was torn.”

  “Still, it boils down to ‘he said’ and ‘she said.’”

  “And what I saw.”

  “You’re not what anyone would call a disinterested observer. And you seemed a bit more interested in the situation than prudence might dictate.”

  “What’s your point, Norm?” Cord asked tersely.

  Bending, Norman struck a match on the heel of his shoe. Cupping the cigarette in his hands, he put the flame to it, inhaling the smoke. “I have no problem with you or who your parents were, but perhaps this is not the time or place for you to publicly fight for Laura Fielding’s hand.”

  Cord winced as he involuntarily clenched his fist.

  “That’s a nasty cut.” Norman checked out the bloody forearm. Then he looked toward the steamboat. “My advice to you is to leave here tonight, before Falls comes after you again.”

  Sound advice, for more than one reason; he didn’t tell Norman that Captain Feddors had a place earmarked for him in the Mammoth stockade.

  “What happened to you?” From the cabin doorway, Alexandra took in Hank’s bruised and swollen face, his torn shirt, and the blood he hadn’t wiped from the decking.

  It was approaching midnight. He’d mourned the loss of the Veuve Cliquot with a Napoleon cognac. His broken nose still swelling, it throbbed unmercifully even after he’d drunk the liquor.

  “I had a fight,” he said.

  “I see that.” Alexandra tossed her cape onto the damask sofa. Advancing into the opulent room she had decorated, she set one of the bronze incense lamps swinging with a flick of her finger. Coming to the bed, she peered at Hank’s wounded face. “Did you go after Danny?”

  “You mean, did your brother go after me?”

  “Danny is your brother, too. Is he all right?”

  “How should I know?” He stretched for his glass of cognac on the bedside table. It was empty. “I was fighting Cord Sutton.”

  Alex slumped down on the satin covers piled at the foot of the bed. “Don’t you know how much Danny would give for just one moment of your precious time?”

  “I went looking for you both this morning at that old cabin. That would have been a moment of my time, enough to settle the score.”

  “Not to fight each other,” Alex pleaded. “For an hour when you would share a meal with him without thinking he’s some kind of monster.”

  “He is a monster, a thieving, conniving cheat. He’s been here in the park, not to visit you, as you seem to think, but hatching a plot to destroy my hopes of owning the Lake Hotel.”

  Alex’s back straightened. “All right. He hates you. Because you’ve been against him forever.”

  The pain in Hank’s face grew worse. “It’s not just me he hates. He hates everything and everyone who’s decent.” He shouldn’t go on, but … “I’ve reason to believe he murdered a woman who ran him off a job for stealing …”

  Alex’s pupils dilated.

  “And I’ve learned he attacked the stagecoach down in Jackson’s Hole last week.”

  “That’s not possible.” She sprang up, her hands over her heart.

  “He was identified.”

  “He would never …” Her beautiful face turned ugly. “Danny’s right. He’s been right all along. You’d say anything to turn me against him.”

  She was so young; Hank tried to protect her. She might cross Danny in some innocent blundering way and end up like Garnet Houlihan.

  “You tell your brother …” his voice was flat, “if he comes near you again, I’ll kill him.”

  Almost midnight and the musicians had packed away their instruments. The sounds of guests walking the hotel porch and talking on the lawn had died away. Hank was still aboard his boat, unless he’d swum away; Cord had seen no sign of him from his hideout. From the shadows, he’d watched Captain Feddors lock the front door of the soldier station and retire to the sleeping barracks.

  With the wound in his arm burning, he mounted the short stairs to the hotel’s rear porch. Across the boards and inside the darkened lobby, he walked quietly but with purpose, so as not to look suspicious to the night clerk. A glance assured him the young man was absorbed in his dime novel.

  Three flights and Cord was in the hall, looking up at the light square of the transom over a room in the Absaroka Suite.

  His hand went automatically to his pants pocket where his obsidian usually rested. It wasn’t there.

  His heartbeat accelerated, for in the last few days he’d come to believe it was far more than a lucky piece. Rather, it was a talisman, some piece of the planet that Cord Sutton was meant to shelter while it guarded him in turn.

  A quick mental inventory said he’d not seen it in his room this afternoon when he packed.

  With a creeping dread, he thought what an awful day it had been. Had he brought on this chain of events by misplacing the symbol of his guardian spirit?

  Cord almost turned away and went down the stairs, but he’d come for answers. He’d almost been ready to believe Laura’s story about coming to the meeting with Hank because her injured
father asked it.

  He stepped up to the only room with a light burning, took the faceted doorknob in his hand, and made a mental inventory. According to the hotel plans, there were three bedrooms in the suite. Forrest was in the infirmary, so Cord was either about to try Laura’s door or the one Constance shared with her mother. The knob turned smoothly.

  Inside, Laura stood naked beside the china washbasin, scrubbing herself with a washrag.

  Cord closed the door behind him and leaned against it. “Could we finish our conversation?” His voice was hard.

  She turned to him with a disbelieving expression and flung the wet cloth at him, hitting him squarely in the face. “That’s my answer to your thinking I was on Hank’s side.”

  Retrieving the rag with the arm Hank had stabbed, Cord winced. Despite that, he pitched the rag accurately back into the white china bowl.

  “If you’re not on his side, how did you manage to end up in his bed? Sure, you screamed when things got too rough, but he could scarcely have dragged you to his pleasure nook.”

  Her glare said she wished she had another cloth to throw. Instead, she reached for a rose silk wrapper and knotted it firmly around her. “How dare you? You checked out of the hotel, and I had every reason to believe you’d left without saying good-bye.”

  “So you went straight to him.”

  “Yes, I went onboard Hank’s boat with him, but I was trying to get some answers, not to … not to …”

  Cord’s knife wound had begun to bleed again. The sight of it made him queasy, the way he felt when he recalled the sight of Laura’s hair spread over Hank’s fancy pillow.

  “If I thought Captain Feddors would believe me and not Hank, I’d try to get him brought up on charges for attacking me,” Laura despaired.

  Blood splattered the shining wood floor. Cord collapsed on the bed. This was wrong, baiting her when he should have known from the fright in her screams that she didn’t want Hank.