Boss was tired and hungry, as was Sartain.
But first, the hunchback . . .
The horse knew when to step lightly. He did so now as Sartain directed the buckskin along the hunchback’s scuffed tracks in the finely churned dirt of the side street.
When horse and rider gained the intersection, Sartain looked ahead and to his left. He thought he saw a shadow move in front of the Sonora Sun Saloon & Pleasure Parlor. Then he heard the clomp of a boot followed by the dragging scrape of another boot. The shadow jostled atop the porch, and then there was the raspy scrape of a door being opened and closed.
The movement fanned the flames of Sartain’s suspicion. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning. He knew Delbert O’Brien locked the saloon at midnight and went to bed in his shack out in back of the watering hole. The only light on in the two-story mud-brick affair was in the second story.
In Claudia’s room.
Sartain slid his Henry from its boot, and in one easy motion, despite the grief his left arm was giving him, he swung his right moccasin over the saddle horn, slipped his other foot free of its stirrup, and dropped straight down to the ground. He released the buckskin’s reins and quietly racked a live round into the Henry’s breech, off-cocking the hammer.
“Stay, boy,” the Cajun said softly as he began following the hunchback’s tracks across the street and to his left.
Behind him, the horse blew and shook his head testily.
Sartain kept an eye on the window over the shake-shingled roof of the Sonora Sun’s front gallery as he approached the gallery’s front steps. Claudia’s curtains were drawn over both of the windows he knew framed her bed. No shadows moved. He could hear no voices either, although the night was as quiet as an empty opera house.
Apprehension was a pack rat building a nest in the Cajun’s consciousness. He cast one more cautious glance at Claudia’s window and then mounted the steps, moving slowly because even in his moccasins, the rotting wood squawked beneath his weight. When he’d crossed the gallery, he opened one of the batwings and fingered the latch of the inside door.
Locked.
His heart thudded in frustration.
The hunchback had gone inside and locked the door behind him. And was no doubt headed for Claudia’s room . . .
Sartain slipped back across the gallery and down the steps. Running, he rounded the saloon’s front corner and sprinted along the side toward the rear. He froze when a woman’s muffled scream from inside the saloon sliced across the night.
“Mike! Mike! They’re coming, Mike!”
A man’s Spanish accented voice shouted angrily, “Shut up, puta bitch!”
Three quick, muffled rifle shots froze the blood in the Cajun’s veins.
“Claudia!” Sartain shouted at the top of his lungs.
Chapter Eighteen
The Cajun flung himself around the saloon’s rear corner, where a rickety-looking staircase rose to a second-story door.
He bolted up the stairs, the steps creaking and cracking beneath his moccasins. The railing swayed and threatened to fall away beneath his right hand. He barely noticed. His heart was thudding, blood sizzling in his veins as the echoes of the three rifle shots continued to bounce around inside his head.
Claudia . . .
He kicked the door open, leaned the rifle against the wall, and unholstered the LeMat. He cocked the pistol and ran down the hall lit by a single candle lamp bracketed to the wainscoting on his left. The candle was burned down to a nub, its light watery and uncertain. Shadows flickered.
Ahead, a crouched figure moved. Sartain stopped, extended the LeMat. He kept moving when he saw Delbert O’Brien down on all fours and dribbling blood as he crawled toward a long-barreled shotgun lying just beyond him.
“Stay down!” Sartain said.
The wounded barman glanced over his shoulder at Sartain.
The Cajun did not pause in front of Claudia’s bullet-pocked door. He cocked his leg and rammed his right moccasined heel against the door, just beneath the knob. The door slammed open with a thunderous boom, and Sartain stepped inside, extending the LeMat straight out from his right shoulder.
He tracked the gun from left to right and back again. The room, lit by a single lamp on the dresser to his right, was empty except for Claudia, lying naked and spread-eagle on the bed, wrists and ankles tied to the frame. Her face was cut and swollen, but she appeared otherwise unharmed.
Bullets had torn into the new mattress on each side of her. Bits of corn husk lay everywhere. The shots hadn’t struck the woman. They’d likely been intended misses. Apparently, not even Salvador de Castillo could kill such a splendid beauty.
Salvador . . .
He didn’t appear to be here. No one appeared to be here except Claudia, who continued to struggle and try to speak through a gag in her mouth.
Sartain strode quickly to the bed, sliding his Green River knife from its sheath. He flicked the blade through the cotton strips binding her ankles to the bottom of the frame. He crouched over Claudia, who stared up at him through swollen eyes, and cut her left wrist free, then the right one. She pulled the wad of sheeting out of her mouth and screamed, “Under the bed!”
She flung her arms around Sartain. The Cajun threw himself straight backward, the woman in his arms. At the same time, the muffled blasts of a pistol sounded once, twice, three times. More corn husks geysered straight up out of the bed through the fresh bullet holes in the mattress where Claudia had been lying one second before.
Ribald laughter accompanied the blasts.
Sartain fell back against the dresser, threw Claudia to his left, and raised the LeMat. He hammered three shots through the already-shredded mattress. A scream sounded beneath the crashes of the heavy pistol.
Sartain tripped the lever, engaging the shotgun barrel, and fired once more. The concussion filled the room as the sixteen-gauge buckshot punched a fist-sized hole in the dead center of the mattress.
In the silence that followed, there was a gurgling grunt.
And the click of a door latch on the other side of the hall.
Claudia rasped, “Coyon!”
The hunchback’s round, mustached face with one wandering eye peered through the two-foot crack between the door and the frame. A wide-eyed young woman, her belly bulging behind her thin cotton nightgown, stood in front of the hunchback, who peered over her left shoulder. His short arms were wrapped around the girl from behind, and in each hand was a cocked pistol.
The hunchback grinned, showing a mess of crooked grime-encrusted teeth. The girl, taller than Coyon, was sobbing, tears dribbling down her pale cheeks.
“Help me!” she screamed as Coyon, grinning, leveled both his pistols at Sartain.
Who leveled his own LeMat and sent a bullet hurtling an inch over the girl’s left shoulder, turning the hunchback’s unmoored eye to jelly before it punched on out the back of his head to clink into a wall hanging behind him.
Coyon’s lower jaw fell. His guns went straight down to the girl’s sides. He dropped back out of sight behind the pregnant whore. There was the solid thump of the hunchback hitting the floor.
The girl dropped to her knees with a weary sigh and turned to glance behind her at the dead Coyon. Then she turned to Sartain and buried her face in her hands, crying.
Claudia glanced at Sartain, tossed her hair back from her bruised face, and nodded. “Nice shooting, amigo.”
“Hope I wasn’t interrupting anything.”
“Nothing important.”
Sartain wrapped the woman’s calico shirt over her shoulders. Clutching the shirt closed across her breasts, the otherwise naked marshal of Sonora Gate rose to her feet and walked into the hall to comfort the crying whore.
Sartain moved to the foot of the bed. He reached down and pulled Salvador’s naked, bloody body out into the room. He turned the man over onto his back. Salvador had been hit in the chest and both shoulders, and part of his face was still under the bed.
Still, his
chest rose and fell.
His remaining eye found Sartain. It seemed to beg for help.
Sartain answered the plea with the one remaining .44 round from his LeMat.
“Say hey to your old man for me,” said the Cajun.
DEATH AND THE SALOON GIRL
Chapter 1
Mike Sartain, the Revenger, reined his big buckskin to a halt on the trail he’d been following for the past two days and squinted his cobalt-blue eyes against the howling wind and blowing nettles.
Before him lay a town that didn’t appear to be much more than a handful of shabby mud-brick and wood-frame buildings doing their humble best to keep from being overrun by the high-desert sage, cedars, piñons, rocks, cactus, and jouncing tumbleweeds.
The Wells Fargo office and San Juan Valley Stage Company building sat on the trace’s left side, about halfway down the street. It was by far the largest building in the settlement, and its signs were the brightest, the rest having been badly faded by the sun and blasted to gray splinters by the wind that often howled either over the San Juan Range to the west or the Sangre de Cristos to the northeast.
Sartain knew about the wind in these parts. When he wasn’t hunting men who needed killing, he often holed up in an old mountain prospector’s shack in the nearby Sawatch Range. It was one of several hidey-holes The Revenger maintained on the frontier, to which he repaired when he was tired of hunting and being hunted.
The big buckskin shook its head and blew, shifting its weight beneath Sartain.
The big blue-eyed man clad in denims and a pinto vest leaned forward and ran his left hand down the stallion’s long, sleek neck. “I see it, Boss.” His right hand slid to the big silver-chased and pearl-gripped LeMat residing in a holster thonged to his right thigh and released the keeper thong from over the hammer.
What both horse and rider had seen was the man who’d been standing under a porch awning on the street’s right side, across from a mercantile. The man had just turned away from the awning support post he’d been leaning against, his brown hat tipped against the wind, and disappeared down an alley mouth. He’d moved with his chin dipped as though to hide his face beneath his hat, and his shoulders were furtively hunched.
If he’d had a tail, he would have tucked it between his legs like a wildcat slipping into cover.
Just before he’d ducked into the alley on the far side of Logan’s Tonsorial Parlor, he’d cast a quick over-the-shoulder glance toward Sartain. Warning bells rang, not only in The Revenger’s ears, but obviously in Boss’s ears as well. The buckskin and Sartain had ridden the vengeance trail for some time now, and they themselves had been hunted for long enough that they were most often in perfect harmony with one another.
“Yeah, I see him,” Sartain said, giving the horse’s neck another pat and quickly scanning of the rest of the street, looking for more trouble signs.
Where there was one man gunning for Sartain, there were usually two or more, The Revenger’s reputation generally preceded him.
But the street, save for the occasional bouncing tumbleweed and a ranch supply wagon sitting in front of the mercantile, was deserted. The wind was obviously keeping everyone indoors. There weren’t even any saddled horses on the street in front of either of the town’s two saloons.
Sartain reached into the inside pocket of his pinto vest, where his pearl-gripped over-and-under derringer resided and pulled out a small piece of notepaper, which he let the wind unfold. His eyes scanned the two short lines scrawled in pencil by a crude female hand:
Mr. Sartain, please come to the Belle of the Ball Saloon in Silverthorne, Colorado Teritory. Pleese do hurry! An inosent girl needs your help bad!
It was signed simply and without ornament, “Belle Hendricks, Belle of the Ball Saloon.”
“Belle of the Ball,” Sartain said, stuffing the note, which someone had slipped under the door of his hotel room in Alamosa, where he’d gone to cool his heels by drinking and gambling after his last hunt. A young widow from a small ranch had wanted him to kill the crooked deputy sheriff who’d hanged her husband at the behest of a rich rancher and, discovering how cold-blooded and cowardly the deputy was, Sartain had had no qualms about honoring the woman’s wishes.
He’d killed the man and left him to the coyotes and the wildcats. He’d left the rancher living in fear of a visit from The Revenger, which Sartain might just give the man one of these days. After the man had pissed down his leg for a good long time.
Sartain touched spurs to his buckskin’s flanks and said beneath the wind in his slow, Cajun-accented drawl, “All right, Boss, let’s pay us a visit to the Belle of the Ball, shall we? See what’s got Miss Belle’s drawers in such a twist. Keep your eyes and ears skinned, though, amigo. I didn’t like the looks of that lurkin’ hombre any more than you did.”
The horse gave an uneasy snort and started forward. Sartain kept Boss to a walk, holding the reins up high against his chest in his left hand, leaving the right one free for the LeMat. He scoured every nook and cranny of the dusty, windblown street, on both sides of which shingle chains squawked in the howling wind. Boss started every now and then at windblown trash and tumbleweeds bounding out of alley mouths.
The Revenger’s cobalt-blues scoured the rooftops, as well, wary of a rifleman possibly snaking a Winchester around from behind a false facade.
He pulled up to the Belle of the Ball, which sat across from the Wells Fargo office on the right-hand side of the street. It was a two-story mud-brick building with a large wooden facade jutting over its roofed front gallery. The sign over the facade was dark red, with Belle of the Ball painted on it in large, ornate green letters, every one of which was so badly faded it was hard to make out against the silver-weathered red.
An olla and a tin dipper swung from a rope beneath the gallery’s roof, and two wicker rocking chairs rocked as though fidgety ghosts were sitting in them.
Both hitch racks fronting the place were empty.
Sartain rode around to the building’s north side and found another hitch rack, to which he tied Boss out of the wind. He loosened the horse’s girth and slipped the bit from his teeth so the mount could drink freely from the half-filled stock trough.
He slapped his sand-colored Stetson against his thigh and ran a gloved hand through his thick mop of dark-brown curls. Setting the hat, adorned with a concho-studded snakeskin band back atop his head, letting the chin thong swing free against his chest, he walked around to the saloon’s front and mounted the porch steps.
He crossed the porch slowly, sort of kicking his heels out with his usual, southern-bred flair, ringing his spurs, thumbs hooked behind his cartridge belt. He might have appeared to a passerby just another carefree, raggedy-heeled cowpuncher happy to pass the time drinking whiskey and playing faro on this windy afternoon, but he was watching everything around him and keenly listening, his senses sharp from the several years he’d spent staying just ahead of the law.
His lips quirked a good-natured smile as he pushed through the wind-jostled batwings and he took one long step to his left, putting his back to the wall, not wanting to be backlit too long in case someone inside decided he needed a pill he couldn’t digest.
Moving from the washed-out stormy sunlight to the dinginess of the saloon, his eyes took a moment to adjust. But only a moment. He blinked once, twice, and then they were all laid out before him—four men standing in a row along the bar to his right, and two more sitting at a round table about halfway down the deep room, which was flanked by a wooden red-carpeted staircase that rose to a balcony running around three sides of the main drinking hall.
None of the men was moving or holding a weapon, and those were the two things Sartain always looked for first. What he saw next was the pretty girl—she was too young to be called a woman, even a young one—standing behind the bar in a black and burgundy corset and bustier. Young, yes, but not so young that she didn’t fill the corset very well indeed. Sartain would have to gently remind himself not to lose focus.
Now, with a second look, he didn’t like the way the four men were standing at the bar with uniform gaps between them of about six feet. As though they were synchronized players on an opera stage, they all turned slowly toward Sartain at the same time, resting their left elbows on the edge of the bar and letting their right hands dangle down over their holstered pistols.
They all wore their revolvers low, in the manner of men accustomed to using them not just for shooting coyotes. All four men had already unsnapped the leather keeper thongs from over their gun hammers. They all gazed at The Revenger, lips quirked in either faint smirks or with shrewd cunning.
One of the two at the table halfway down the room and about ten feet out from the bar was the man who’d been holding up the awning support post earlier. Sartain recognized him by his brown Stetson and unshaven jaws. Now he sat with his boots atop the table, arms crossed on his chest, a delighted grin flashing his large pale-white teeth, the edges of which were crusted with chewing tobacco, some of which he just now turned his head to spit onto the scarred, dusty floor beneath him with a liquid plop.
“Use the damn sandbox,” the well-set-up girl in the corset and bustier said tightly, keeping her brown-eyed gaze on Sartain. She’d hardly moved her lips. “That’s what it’s for.”
“Uh . . . sorry, Belle,” said the man in the brown hat, also keeping his gaze riveted on Sartain.
The Revenger broadened his smile, pinched the brim of his own hat to the room, and turned to the girl. “Belle of the Ball?”
“That’s right,” the girl said in nearly the same toneless voice she’d used when addressing the man who’d spat on her floor. “You The Revenger?”
“I am indeed. Your note sounded”—he raked his gaze across the hard faces of the men along the bar and the two at the table—“urgent.”
“Oh, it was. Very urgent.” The girl took one step back, her large dark-brown eyes flashing excitedly, her pretty heart-shaped face flushing as she snapped a look at the men before her. “This here’s The Revenger, boys. Told you he’d come!”
The Revenger Page 13
