by Sharpe, Jon
“I’m her bodyguard,” Fargo cut him off. “That’s Kathleen Barton, the actress. Her life’s been threatened, but right now I have to step out back. Would you go sit in that chair beside her until I get back?”
The deputy grinned and pushed away from the bar. “Does a whore take a quick bath? I just placed your name, Trailsman. Take your time outside, but make damn sure the bullet hole ain’t in the back—Sheriff Kinney don’t like that.”
Fargo hurried outside into the darkness. He rounded a corner of the depot and spotted a row of whores’ cribs—a half-dozen makeshift, clapboard huts with blankets for doors and no windows—down near the river. Moonlight was generous enough to show that no one was lurking out in front of them.
There . . . there was a wide chink in the back of the third crib through which oily yellow light spilled out. Enough light to show the outline of a man’s face peering inside. A moment later Fargo heard the faint, familiar click of a hammer being cocked.
Quicker than thought he filled his hand with blue steel. “Drop that thumb-buster, mister, now, or you’ll be shoveling coal in hell.”
That was more warning than a cold-blooded murderer deserved, but Fargo hoped to beat some information out of the scut. However, that plan went to hell when the man whirled and fired at him, the bullet passing so close to Fargo’s head that he felt the wind-rip from it.
His Colt bucked in his fist, there was a sound like a hammer hitting a watermelon, and the mystery assassin flumped to the ground. It took his nervous system a few seconds to accept the fact of death—by the time Fargo reached him, the dead man’s heels finally quit scratching at the ground like frantic claws.
Booger, who even in the throes of alcohol and lust reacted instantly to trouble, was at Fargo’s side when the Trailsman scratched a lucifer to life. Fargo’s bullet had punctured the left lung and possibly nicked the heart. The man died with the surprised, betrayed stare of death etched onto his face, pink froth speckling his lips. The last wisp of smoke still curled from his Remington muzzle like an undulating snake.
“Recognize him?” Fargo asked, staring at the bland, smooth-shaven face.
“Only as the Grim Reaper,” Booger replied. “Fargo, you saved old Booger’s life—give us a kiss.”
“No you don’t!” Fargo leaped a few feet to safety, in no mood to get the air crushed out of him.
“Conchita! That treacherous little whore,” Booger said, staring at the crib. “Why, I’ve a mind to—”
“Ease off,” Fargo said. “She likely did it for money, but you know a soiled dove is powerless if men threaten her. They can’t go to the law. Besides, if we treat her right we might get some information.”
Booger mulled this and then nodded. “Right as rain, Fargo. Old Booger will feel bad later if he beats the shit out of a woman.”
“Now you’re whistling. We’ll talk to her before we leave Albuquerque. Hey—where you going?”
“Back inside to finish what I started. The little bitch will never charge me now, and Mrs. McTeague’s boy Booger never passes up free poon.”
12
Jim Hargrove, the Albuquerque deputy Fargo had approached in the cantina, recognized the corpse instantly.
“Congratulations, Fargo, on a job well done. You just killed Spider Winslowe, one of the most wanted hombres in the territory. He’s a murderer and road agent. Had him his own gang up around Santa Fe.”
The match blew out and both men stood up.
“I recognize the name,” Fargo said. “Didn’t troops out of Fort Union bust up the gang?”
“Yeah, ’bout six months back. Two were killed, one’s in prison and will soon be dancing on air. But Winslowe escaped and hit the owlhoot trail. Nobody knows what the hell he’s been up to since then. Why’s he trying to kill you and McTeague?”
“Just clearing the path so he can get at the actress. I think I’ve also butted heads with one of the murdering jackals with him. Handsome, clean-cut type with a mean mouth. Rides a roan and wears fancy silver spurs. He’s got eyes that look like they were chipped off a block of ice.”
“Christ, that sounds like Russ Alcott. Gunslinger. Far as I know he’s not officially on the dodge, but that son of a bitch has depopulated half of Lincoln County. And he’s smart as a steel trap. If that lead-chucker is in the mix, you’re up against it, Fargo. Try to avoid a draw-shoot—he can clear leather today and kill a man yesterday.”
Later, as he sat guard outside Kathleen Barton’s door, Fargo sent Booger to fetch Conchita. As Fargo expected, she neither could nor would tell him anything Deputy Hargrove hadn’t already told him. However, after he slipped her a quarter-eagle gold piece, she confirmed having seen Winslowe and Alcott together recently.
“There’s at least one other man in on it,” Fargo told Booger after the soiled dove had gone. “That face watching me from the hotel window in El Paso had a big, droopy teamster’s mustache. But that’s all I noticed, and it’s worthless—that kind of lip whisker is common on the frontier.”
“To me,” Booger scoffed, “my enemy is any needle-dick bug fucker who tries to shoot me. Who gives two hoots in hell what his name is? Hell, we ain’t serving warrants.”
“True, you ugly flea-hive, but I’m worried about Zack Lomax, assuming he’s the ramrod of this plot to kill Kathleen. If I only get her safely to Santa Fe, then drop it like it’s none of my business, her life is forfeit. So what if he misses the June nineteenth deadline? He likely figures it’s better to kill her late than never. I need all the proof I can get that he’s tied to Alcott and the others.”
“Proof! Faugh! If you’re talking help from the law, Fargo, you’re searching for a will-o’-the-wisp. America’s Sweetheart or no, Lomax is likely a rich toff—them bastards spread money around like manure, and a lawman is easy bought. Happens you want that highfalutin bitch to be safe, we’ll hafta kill Lomax.”
Fargo nodded. “Even more reason why I require proof. I don’t kill any man until I’m convinced he requires killing.”
“Why, you squeamish little Quaker! I say kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.”
Booger relieved Fargo at two a.m. and the Trailsman caught a few hours of uneasy sleep in the bunkhouse for male passengers. Because they had lost time farther south, Fargo insisted on pulling out as soon as the sun cleared the horizon.
Malachi Feldman was about to step into the coach when he abruptly exclaimed, “Saints preserve us!”
“What’s your grift now?” Ashton snapped.
“Sir, it has nothing to do with me. There’s no mistaking the celestial signs. Look at the sky, all of you! See it? The sun and a full moon, both visible in the sky simultaneously. A bloodred sun and a pale-ghost moon. The Eighth House is ascendant and we are all doomed! This is a death coach!”
“Give over with such balderdash,” Pastor Brandenburg said impatiently. “Man proposes but God disposes.”
“Then may He dispose of both of you,” Booger scoffed from up on the box. “Neither one of you yahoos knows beans from buckshot.”
“Malachi knows plaster of paris from pebbles,” Fargo taunted and Booger shook a fist under his nose. A moment later, however, both men broke out laughing.
“Aye, that little pip-squeak made a monkey of me,” Booger admitted. “The cunning bastard—if he had a set on him he’d be a good horse thief. Gerlong there, boys! G’long!”
However, as they rolled out of the big yard, Booger cracking his blacksnake, Fargo wasn’t all that convinced that Malachi’s “celestial sign” was pure balderdash. Fargo had never been a big believer in “portents,” but just before Lansford Ashton boarded the Concord he had met Fargo’s eyes and held them for a long moment. And again Fargo had recalled his strange dream just before the explosion at San Marcial: a silver concho belt turning into a snake with bloody fangs.
No, Fargo placed no gre
at importance on portents. But sometimes, he reminded himself, it was wise to heed the signs, whether on a trail or in a dream.
* * *
When he was particularly agitated, Zack Lomax would retire to a back room of his College Street mansion and vigorously lift sandbags to work off his nervous tension. By late in the forenoon of June seventeenth he was indeed agitated—his special messenger had just left after delivering the latest mirror-relay report from Russ Alcott.
“Spider’s been killed,” he reported to his lackey Olney Lucas. “Gunned down last night by Fargo. Only three days left, Olney, and my careful plan is in danger of unraveling.”
Lomax lay on a folded quilt, repeatedly pressing a sandbag out to arm’s length from his chest. “Three goddamn days, Olney, and no progress!”
“You have to stay frosty, boss,” Olney soothed him. He had seen Lomax like this before, when the “controlled madness” of his personality threatened to shade over into sheer, unpredictable insanity. “Remember, these past few days that stagecoach has been in wide-open country. But they’re north of Albuquerque now. The route veers out of the river valley and bends east toward Santa Fe. Timbered ridges, red rock canyons—prime ambush country.”
Lomax appeared not to have heard him. He continued furiously pumping the sandbag up and down, sweat pouring off his face.
“Fargo!” Lomax’s mouth twisted bitterly around the word. “A true-blue, blown-in-the-bottle legend. The trouble with a legend, Olney, is that the legend eventually becomes the man. Russ isn’t afraid of Fargo—his nerves are unstrung by the power of the legend.”
“It’s not just legend, boss. They’ve made three attempts on Fargo and failed each time—and now Spider’s dead. It was Fargo who killed him, not the legend.”
“Yes, Spider. That’s bad for me, too. By now Fargo no doubt knows who Spider Winslowe was. That brings him one step closer to finding out that Cort Bergman, respectable Santa Fe mining consultant, is actually Zack Lomax.”
This was true and Olney knew it also brought Skye Fargo one step closer to finding out about him—the man who was assisting Lomax in a plot to kill the most popular woman in America. And any woman killer, in the West, would never even live to be hanged. Olney screwed up his courage to speak.
“Boss? What boots it to lick old wounds?”
“What’s that?” Lomax said absently, finally setting the sandbag aside and sitting up.
“This plan of yours, I mean. All right, the bitch gelded you in public. But, hell, you’re a rainmaker. You got a good deal going here in Santa Fe. Fine house and money to toss at the birds. Why risk losing all that? You can kill her easy once she gets here and Fargo leaves town—it doesn’t have to be on the nineteenth while he’s still around.”
He steeled himself for an explosion of rage. But Lomax only sat stone still, his normally incandescent eyes now gloomy with speculation.
“No, Olney,” he replied in a tone of quiet menace, “it must be done my way. You can’t understand that because you are merely a practical man with the usual motivations. Kathleen Barton has a blood reckoning coming. I must have my way in this or else that vicious bitch’s victory over me will plague me to my deathbed like a bastard child.”
Again he fell into brooding reverie, his face tightening and contorting as memory replayed that unspeakable humiliation of nearly a year ago. Finally:
“Olney,” he said energetically, stirring himself back to the problem at hand, “I still have an ace up my sleeve, and it’s riding on that coach right now. Tomorrow we flash the signal to Russ: he’s going to join forces, if necessary, with my passenger. The key will be a well-coordinated move during the last legs from Domingo to Santa Fe. Toward that end I’ll be sending you on another errand. In the meantime, however, Russ and Cleo must keep trying on their own. Time is a bird and the bird is on the wing.”
Lomax stood up, those intense, burning eyes forcing Olney to avert his gaze. “Living legends, like everyone else, have to die. I will kill that ball-breaking slut on June nineteenth, and that means Fargo dies first. We’ve got three whole days, and death takes less than a second.”
* * *
By late afternoon of June seventeenth the Concord coach had reached the rolling timberland north of Bernalillo. To the west the Rio Grande was still visible through breaks in the towering pines, but the Overland Stage road was gradually meandering farther out of the safety of the valley and into blue, spruce-covered hills. A westering sun threw long, flat shadows to the east.
“Stay sharp now,” Fargo warned Booger. “Alcott and whoever’s siding him could dry-gulch us anytime now.”
“You see any green on my antlers?” Booger shot back. “You think old Booger ain’t never been up against it before?”
Fargo noted the snappish irritation in his friend’s tone—not his usual gait. Fargo also noticed the slack, glazed look to his face and felt a quick stab of guilt. He had insisted, in El Paso, that Booger make the entire run to Santa Fe. Now Fargo regretted that demand—exhaustion was clearly exacting a high toll from the driver.
“Hell, Booger, that’s why I wouldn’t make this run without you. I knew I couldn’t do it without a stout lad like you. I can’t think of a better man to ride the river with. You’re all grit and a yard wide.”
“No need to slop over,” Booger grumped, looking highly pleased. “And I’m a bit over a yard wide, catfish.”
Fargo grinned even as his weather-tanned face turned again to the prime ambush country east of the trail. His Henry lay across his thighs now, and he kept his sun-crimped eyes in constant motion. He lowered his voice.
“I notice you ain’t too sweet on Lansford Ashton,” he remarked. “What’s your size-up on him?”
Booger shook his head and spat a brown streamer, his usual gesture of contempt for all the world’s fools, knaves and villains.
“He’s got the Latin look, Skye—pig Latin. That spade-bearded bastard would steal a hot stove and come back for the smoke. He’s one a them sons-a-bitches who sits in front of a warm fire all winter, profiting off another man’s hunger and toil and blood.”
“You’re a pretty good judge of human nature, old son, but I don’t think he spends much time sitting in front of fires. He’s got go muscles on him and hard hands—I’d say he’s a profiteer, right enough, but he don’t hire out the risky work.”
Booger mulled that. “Mayhap you’ve struck a lode there. But you’re takin’ the long way around the barn, Trailsman. What you really wunner is if old Booger thinks he was hired to kill you?”
“Yeah—which of course means killing you, too.”
“Of course,” Booger repeated sarcastically. “Fargo, you are a filthy hyena! You share none o’ the pussy with old Booger, but you’ll push him right up front when the lead’s a-flyin’! Anyhow, if this bastard Lomax has put a man on the coach, I’d bet my flap hat it’s Ashton. Hell, them other two ‘men’ ain’t naught but female boys.”
“He seems most likely,” Fargo agreed. “But I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t always go by what seems most obvious. A killer needn’t look like a killer.”
“Well, there’s the holy man. I cannot abide them perfumed whiskers! And that little piss squirt Malachi—all his gibberish about the Eighth House and moon pebbles could just be eyewash.”
“I went through their pokes while they were asleep,” Fargo admitted. “Unless they have hideout guns, neither man is heeled.”
“Aye, and Ashton is. But does a pepperbox seem right for a hired killer? Why, it will ensure a kill at close range. But it fires all six loads at once, and once fired it’s a hell-buster to reload—whichever one of us he didn’t kill could burn him down before he even cleared the chambers.”
“Yeah, I thought about that, too. Maybe he’s got a hideout gun up his sleeve. Well . . . what about Trixie?”
Booger qui
ckly turned his head to stare at Fargo. “Has your brain come unhinged? Send a woman to kill Skye Far—”
Booger suddenly caught himself. “Why, hell yes! Send a woman. They all get the tormentin’ itch around Skye goldang Fargo, and that’s all he expects of ’em. Why, if it’s Trixie, old Booger’s hat is off to her. The black-handed treachery of it brings tears to my eyes! Screw the very man you mean to kill just to put him off guard. Yessir, it’s a capital hit and I admire it. But you don’t truly suspect her, hey?”
“Tell you the truth, old son, I ain’t got one shred of proof any of them passengers plan to kill me—us, I mean. So maybe we best worry about the cockroaches who do mean to plant us.”
Fargo shifted his shell belt and resumed his close scrutiny of the surrounding terrain. During the next hour a Chinook brought in the rapid onset of dark, boiling thunderheads. Just north of the swing station at Alameda the heavens opened up with a vengeance, and a savage downpour reduced visibility to just a few feet. The rain tapered to a drizzle, but soon the coach began to lug from mud-caked wheels. Several times Fargo was forced to swing down and clear them.
On one of these occasions Kathleen poked her head outside. “Mr. Fargo? Do you think we’ll reach Santa Fe on schedule?”
“I just can’t say, lady. Booger tells me we’re back on schedule now. But we’re hitting the rough patch, and to tell you the truth, I expect hard sledding.”
“Yes, that makes sense. I’ve never missed an opening date before.”
“I know the show must go on and all that. But it’s not just a play that’s in danger here. My job is to protect you, not some theater’s profits.”
She nodded. “I take your meaning, and I confess I’m frightened for myself. Especially since you’re only being paid to assure my safe arrival in Santa Fe. What happens when you leave?”
Fargo knew the rest were listening. He lowered his voice. “It’s not my way to leave a woman in the lurch. I got no idea how this deal is going to play out. With luck, Zack Lomax won’t live to ever threaten you again. All I know is that I’m not going to quit this job—pay or no pay—until I know you’re safe.”
