Colorado Clash

by Jon Sharpe

  He thought again of O’Malley’s bragging. What if it hadn’t been empty boasting? What if he’d really figured out the identity of the killer? And what if he’d been murdered for just that reason? The likely suspect was Tom Cain. He’d been behind the robbery. And he’d killed the three boys, hadn’t he? And set up Lenihan? Logically, all those things were of a piece. The hell of it was that Tom Cain had been killed before Fargo had been able to question him at length. So there were still questions that would never be answered.

  Fargo lifted three blank pieces of paper and held them close to the light. The Pinkertons had taught him how to look for imprints on what appeared to be unused pages. If the writer had pressed hard enough while writing, the words could be seen on the pages below by shading a pencil over them. He could see that one of the pieces showed evidence of this kind of unintended encryption.

  He set the papers on the desk, picked up a pencil and began to shade over the one page that offered some possible usefulness. He felt excited without quite knowing why. Hadn’t everything been wrapped up with the death of Tom Cain? Hadn’t O’Malley made a lot of enemies in this town and wasn’t his murder probably just a coincidence?

  But no, that was the part that struck him as impossible. Somebody had killed O’Malley because he had in fact known something about the robbery and killings. Meaning that maybe Cain wasn’t the only person involved.

  But the Pinkerton trick didn’t reveal anything but gibberish. Apparently this page had been used as a second sheet under several pages. At a quick glance all Fargo could see were several layers of words that canceled each other out. He cursed out loud.

  There was a small wastebasket next to the desk. He reached down and picked it up. There were several balled-up pieces of paper in it. He went through them quickly. None of them contained anything useful; most seemed to be about other, lesser stories that O’Malley had been working on.

  Then Fargo remembered the notebook. The small one that had fit comfortably in the reporter’s back pocket. The one that looked as if a child would use it playing journalist. The one that O’Malley referred to as his “lucky” notebook.

  He was pretty certain that the killer had taken all the pages from the story O’Malley had been working on. The one that would name names in the robbery and killings. The killer no doubt thought that with O’Malley dead and the story destroyed he would be safe for sure.

  But had the killer remembered O’Malley’s notebook?

  Poor old O’Malley, Fargo thought as he bent down to turn the man on his side. This should have been his big day. The day when he got at least a little of his former self-respect back. The day when fine meals and fine liquor and fine women would have been his again, at least fleetingly. But the killer had put an end to all that.

  The notebook was in O’Malley’s back pocket. This close to his backside the odor of his befouled trousers was sharp in Fargo’s nostrils.

  But he had the book. He took it to the desk and dragged the lantern closer. He spent the next five minutes thumbing through the last fifteen pages. Easy to see how O’Malley’s interest had gone from suspicion to actually working toward making his case the way a good journalist—or detective—would. The suspicion had been simple enough. He’d started noticing how the suspect’s facial expressions changed whenever he was around Amy Peters. This ultimately led to O’Malley breaking into the suspect’s place and finding the things stolen from Amy Peters’ house during that break-in. The man had developed an obsession with her. He had deluded himself into believing—this was O’Malley’s conjecture, anyway—that if he eliminated Ned Lenihan from the picture she would be his. He would also eliminate Tom Cain. Cain actually had been behind the robbery. The suspect had known this from the beginning, having overheard it when Cain had mistakenly thought he was alone in the office talking to one of the boys. Cain might be able to talk himself out of the robbery. But three murders? If he was implicated in them, there was no way the town would let him be. So the suspect killed the boys, knowing he’d blame Tom Cain for the robberies. And would then be able to blame him for the killings, too.

  O’Malley had laid all this out neatly in his pocket-sized notebook. Fargo imagined that he had planned on confronting the suspect with this theory and watching the man’s face for confirmation. O’Malley made reference to the silver button several times in these pages. Proof that the suspect had indeed broken into Amy Peters’ home. And that he was in fact obsessed with her.

  But O’Malley was old and slow. It wouldn’t have taken much effort on the part of the suspect to realize that O’Mal ley was closing in on him. And so he’d tracked him here to his room where O’Malley had laid out the story on his desk. The suspect had killed O’Malley and taken the pages.

  And now Fargo was going after the suspect, planning to do the world and himself a favor—by killing the son of a bitch.

  19

  A haze of smoke lay over the interior of the Gold Mine, dirty yellow in the seamy light of the lanterns and Rochester lamps. The men drank and laughed and the saloon girls circulated, making up to men old enough to be their fathers and in some cases their grandfathers. The merry piano music seemed an insult to the cold, somber mountain darkness. Cards were dealt and slapped down. Men trekked out to the latrines dug in back and trekked back blowing into their hands for warmth. Fargo observed all this over the top of the batwings. He stood outside. If anybody had noticed him they hadn’t let on.

  But they would notice him very soon now.

  He pushed through the batwings, leaving the fresh air for the sour smells of beer and smoke and sweat and the stray stark jabs of windblown latrine odors carried on the winds.

  Nobody paid him any attention. Not when he was just standing there. Not even when he drew his Colt and pointed it directly at the back of Pete Rule who was standing at the bar having a good time with a couple of cronies. But when the colored piano player finished a song, Fargo spoke up loud enough for the girls and their customers upstairs to hear.

  Then everybody noticed.

  “Rule, I want you to put your gun down on the bar and slide it up toward the door. Then I want you to turn around and face me while I tell everybody how you killed those three boys and how you killed O’Malley, too, because he figured out you were behind it.”

  “Hell, Skye, are you drunk? I thought we were friends.”

  Rule’s attempt to make light of the situation would have been more believable if his voice hadn’t been shaking so bad.

  “You heard what I said, Rule. Your gun on the bar and right now. Unless you want to try and draw on me.”

  “You sure you know what the hell you’re talking about, Mr. Fargo?” the bartender said. “Pete here was the one who figured out that Cain was behind the robbery.”

  “That’s right. Cain was behind the robbery. But not the killings. Rule did those so he could set up Ned Lenihan. He thought that if Lenihan was out of the way he could start courting Amy Peters.”

  The bartender wasn’t the only one who laughed. Half the drinkers joined in. It was harsh, contemptuous laughter. Laughter that said that the idea that Pete Rule would ever have a chance with Amy Peters was downright embarrassing.

  Rule still hadn’t turned around.

  “You hear that, Rule?” Fargo snapped. “You killed four people for nothing. Amy wouldn’t ever have anything to do with somebody like you. Especially if she ever found out that you broke into her house and stole some of her things. That’s pretty humiliating I’d think, Rule. But you did it.” Fargo wasn’t usually cruel but he knew what he wanted and cruelty was the quickest way to get it. “You want to tell everybody here what you did with her clothes? You built a little shrine to her, didn’t you? Sit there at night and stare at the photographs of her you stole? What kind of a man would do that? Not the kind of man Amy would ever have anything to do with.”

  His mind and his gun were ready to kill Rule. Eager to kill Rule. But the sound Rule made shocked Fargo and probably shocked everybody else in th
e saloon. A tortured sob. And hands not going to his gun but to his face. Covering up his shame. Fargo could see only his back but the way his shoulders seemed to collapse and the way Rule seemed to fold in half told the Trailsman that there would be no gunplay now. Fargo’s harsh words had destroyed Rule almost as effectively as bullets would have. In other circumstances Fargo might have felt sorry for the man. But no, not ever, not this man.

  The men Rule had been laughing with moved away from him as if they’d suddenly learned that he was a plague carrier. The bartender stared at him as if he had just seen the boogeyman he’d heard about all his life. A frozen silence lay on the air.

  “I need your gun on the bar, Rule. Now.”

  Slowly, Rule turned toward him. It was as if he hadn’t heard Fargo’s command. He didn’t make any move toward his gun at all. Even from this distance Fargo could see the tears that streaked the man’s face and the gaze that saw beyond Fargo, saw some other realm that only Pete Rule knew.

  “I loved her, Fargo.”

  And then he did it. Even in that instant, even as he fired, Fargo realized that he was helping Rule do what Rule didn’t have nerve enough to do alone. As Rule’s right hand dropped to his six-shooter and his fingers closed on the handle, Fargo shot him three times in the chest. The crack of the gun was louder than any piano music could ever be and the stench of gunfire stronger even than the stench of the latrine out back.

  There was no dramatic death. Rule was thoroughly dead by the time his head cracked against the floor. There was a brief spasm running down the legs and into the feet. Blood began seeping into Rule’s shirt.

  The bartender said, “Well, I guess we have a lot to thank you for, Mr. Fargo. You sure figured this out for us.”

  “O’Malley figured it out. Not me.” Fargo holstered his gun and started to turn back to the batwings.

  “What the hell’re we going to do for a sheriff now?” the bartender said.

  “That’s your problem,” Fargo said. “I was going to wait till dawn to get out of this town but I’m not going to wait any longer.”

  He pushed through the batwings and out into the clarity and beauty of the mountain-shadowed night.

  Ten minutes later he was saddling up his big Ovaro stallion. And five minutes after that he was passing the WELCOME TO CAWTHORNE sign.

  LOOKING FORWARD!

  The following is the opening

  section of the next novel in the exciting

  Trailsman series from Signet:

  THE TRAILSMAN #335 RIVERBOAT RAMPAGE

  The Missouri River, 1860—

  the Big Muddy will run red with blood

  when Skye Fargo rides a riverboat to Hell.

  Raucous shouting attracted the attention of the big man in buckskins. He looked toward the docks and saw a large group of people gathered around something, blocking his sight of whatever it was. Skye Fargo gave a mental shrug and pointed the big, black-and-white Ovaro stallion toward his destination, a waterfront tavern called Red Mike’s.

  Then somebody in the crowd behind him let out a whoop and yelled, “Kill him, Owen! Bash the dummy’s brains out!”

  That prompted a burst of laughter, and somebody else shouted, “He can’t do that! The dummy ain’t got no brains!”

  Fargo reined the Ovaro to a halt. His mouth quirked at the irony.

  Then he turned the stallion around and headed back toward the commotion at the docks.

  With his buckskins, close-cropped dark beard, and broad-brimmed Stetson, Fargo looked like the veteran frontiersman he was. A long-barreled Colt .44 rode in a holster at his hip, and tucked into a sheath strapped to his right calf was a heavy-bladed Arkansas Toothpick. The butt of a Henry repeater stuck up from a saddle boot. Plenty of men out here went armed. With Skye Fargo, it was like the weapons were part of his body.

  He reined in again. Now that he was closer, he could see over the heads of the crowd. The shouting men formed a circle around a couple of hombres who were fighting.

  Or rather, one of the men was fighting. The other had his thick, muscular arms raised and his head hunched down as far as it would go between his massive shoulders. He just stood there, absorbing the punishment that his opponent dealt out. The look on his face was one of dull confusion, as if he couldn’t understand why the other man was hitting him.

  The man doing the punching was big, too, and dressed like one of the dockworkers. He had a thatch of dark hair and a mustache that curled up on the ends. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up over brawny forearms. The hamlike fists at the ends of those arms shot out again and again, thudding into the body of the younger man.

  The spectators kept up their whooping and hollering as they made bets on the outcome. Fargo watched and saw that most of the action seemed to be going through a slender young man who stood to one side, a bowler hat pushed back on his curly, light brown hair. Fargo’s lake blue eyes narrowed as his gaze went back and forth between that young man and the one the dockworker was thrashing.

  Fargo thought he saw a family resemblance between the two youngsters. Unless he missed his guess, they were brothers.

  The massacre—you couldn’t really call it a fight—continued for long minutes. The dockworker’s fists had opened up several cuts around his opponent’s eyes. Blood smeared the young man’s face.

  One of the spectators cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Finish him off, Owen! This is gettin’ boring!”

  Grinning, Owen cocked his fists and angled in, poised for the knockout.

  The youngster in the bowler hat reached up and tugged on the brim.

  The young man who’d been getting pounded finally threw a punch, a slow, ponderous roundhouse right. At least, the blow appeared slow and ponderous at first. But somehow it made its way past Owen’s suddenly frantic attempt to block it and exploded on the dockworker’s jaw. A collective “Oh!” of shock came from the crowd as Owen went up in the air, his feet rising several inches off the ground before he came crashing back down on the ground. He twitched a couple of times and then lay still, with his eyes rolled back in their sockets.

  Silence reigned over the crowd now.

  The youngster in the bowler hat rushed over to his brother. “Are you all right, Denny?” he asked anxiously. “Did he hurt you?”

  “Nuh . . . no, I reckon I’m all right, Cord,” Denny said. “Did I hurt that fella? I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just wanted him to stop whalin’ on me.”

  Tears began to run from Denny’s eyes and down his moon face.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt him!” he wailed.

  One of the spectators stepped forward and said, “Uh, that’s all right, young fella. Don’t worry about it. Owen’s kind of a mean son of a bitch anyway. He’s the one who picked a fight with you.”

  Denny kept blubbering. Cord reached around his shoulders, or tried to, anyway, and started to lead him away. The crowd parted to let them through.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Cord murmured to his brother. “Everybody knows you didn’t mean to hurt anybody, Denny.”

  That just made Denny cry harder. Cord patted him on the back, which was as wide and sturdy as a stone wall.

  “Hey, young fella!” one of the spectators called. “You forgot about your money.”

  Cord looked back, evidently confused. “Money? Oh!” His expression cleared. “The bets.”

  “Yeah.” The man stepped forward and crammed some greenbacks in Cord’s hand. “I don’t welsh on my bets. That brother o’ yours got damned lucky when he landed that punch, but that don’t matter. He still won, so I’m payin’ off.”

  “Me, too,” another man said. One by one, all the members of the crowd who had bet against Denny gathered around Cord and handed money to him.

  “I feel bad about taking this,” Cord protested. “Like that fella said, Denny just got lucky. I never dreamed he’d win. The only reason I backed him was family pride, you know. A man can’t bet against his own brother.”

  “No, sir
, he sure can’t,” one of the men agreed. “You should take that brother of yours and get him a good meal. Maybe some licorice candy. That’ll make him feel better.”

  “You know, I think it just might,” Cord said. “Thank you.”

  One of the spectators nudged another and said, “Let’s drag Owen over to the water trough and dunk his head. That ought to wake him up.”

  “Yeah,” agreed the other man. He turned to Cord and Denny. “Mister, you and your brother best get on out of here. Owen ain’t gonna be happy when he wakes up. He can be a real son of a bitch when he’s mad.”

  “Just like an old grizzly bear,” another man said.

  Cord nodded. “Thanks. We’ll do that. Come on, Denny.”

  He led Denny down the street, away from the docks. Still seated on the Ovaro at the edge of the crowd, Fargo watched them go.

  Then, after a moment, he walked the stallion after them.

  Cord and Denny turned a corner, and as soon as they were out of sight of the docks, Cord tugged on his brother’s sleeve and started moving faster. Fargo trailed them until they reached a run-down saloon several blocks from the waterfront. They went inside.

  Fargo started to turn and ride away, but his curiosity got the better of him. He swung down from the saddle, looped the Ovaro’s reins around the hitch rail in front of the saloon, and followed the two youngsters inside. . . .