He thought she’d probably hesitate before shooting him, giving him a chance at the Winchester. He’d hoped she’d stand or sit a little closer to him, but she hadn’t. He had to play with the cards he’d been dealt.
To snag one of Hadley’s revolvers, he’d first have to pull the big man toward his side of the table, then make a long, fast reach. Long odds, but there they were. Sitting on the floor with his hands tied had been getting him nowhere but closer to the void.
He looked at his hand wrapped around the outlaw’s. His knuckles were white. He drove Hadley’s hand down to his left a ways. Hadley grunted, gritted his teeth, and smiled at Sartain as he funneled more strength into his arm, shoving The Revenger’s hand back up and over toward the table.
“Got me a feelin’ we’re almost done here tonight, Sartain,” Hadley spat through gritted teeth. He glanced toward Dixie. “Best start prettyin’ yourself up, sugar.”
“Like I said,” Dixie said, “talk is cheap.”
Sartain grunted and heaved his hand back up over the outlaw’s. “You can say that again,” he said, driving Hadley’s hand down toward the table, both hands jerking as they fought.
Sartain thought that when he had the outlaw’s hand down flat on the table, he’d punch him hard with his left fist, pull him toward him, and reach for his pistol. He could do it now, but his own consarned pride compelled him to beat the man first.
Hadley would be distracted enough by the loss that Sartain’s plan just might work.
Might...
Sartain drove Hadley’s hand farther...and farther...and farther down.
Hadley’s eyes were blazing and haunted as he stared at the two clenched fists, Sartain’s now shoving his within six inches of the oilcloth.
Sartain glanced at Dixie. She was smiling at him, her rifle aimed at his head. Hell, he thought. She’d read his mind. She knew what he was going to do, and she was ready for him.
Hadley cursed loudly. He drove his hand up, forcing Sartain’s back.
“Oh, hell.” The Cajun grunted, changing his strategy and easing the tension in his arm.
Hadley laughed and slammed The Revenger’s hand down on the table.
“There you go, you sonofabitch!”
Dixie lowered the rifle slightly, frowning, puzzled.
Sartain cursed sharply, holding onto Hadley’s hand.
Hadley looked at the two hands still locked together. Then he looked at Sartain.
Sartain drew Hadley’s hand toward him. The man’s head jerked toward him as well. Sartain slammed his left fist against the man’s nose, feeling the flesh give beneath his knuckles. Dixie had been caught off-guard. As Sartain released Hadley’s hand, he grabbed the table and slid it sideways, slamming it into Dixie as she leveled the rifle at Sartain’s belly.
The girl screamed. The Winchester roared, the slug plunking into the ceiling over Sartain’s head.
“Oh, you bastard!” Hadley roared.
Sartain threw himself across the table, bulling into Hadley and clawing for the pistol holstered on his right hip. He got to it too late. The gun was already in the man’s hand. Hadley was raising it, clicking the hammer back as the two fell together onto the floor by the range.
Sartain winced, steeling himself for the bullet that would likely blow his guts out.
But it didn’t come.
The pistol dropped from Hadley’s hand. Sartain felt a warm substance spurt against him. To his left, he saw Dixie gain her feet, screaming and racking another cartridge into her Winchester’s breach.
Automatically, Sartain kicked her legs out from under her.
She drilled another round into the ceiling a quarter-second before she hit the floor with a boom. The rifle clattered to the floor as well. Sartain crawled over to it, shoved the cursing Dixie away from it, grabbed it, and rose to his feet, racking a round into the chamber and turning toward where Hadley lay on the floor by the range.
Sartain frowned.
Hadley lay quivering, blood spurting from the paring knife sticking out of the left side of his neck. The outlaw cupped his hands over the wound and stared in shock and horror at the ceiling.
Celina stood with her back to the range, eyes wide as she gazed blankly toward Sartain, turning her head slightly to listen. Her cheeks were pale, lips trembling.
Sartain turned to Dixie. She was gaining her feet, looking at him through the mussed hair jostling about her flushed cheeks. She looked at the rifle in his hands but didn’t say anything. She just turned her mouth-corners down and shook her head.
“So close,” she said. “I was so close.” She looked at Hadley, scowling incredulously. “What the hell? Who…”
She let her voice trail off as she looked at Celina, on whose lips a slight smile grew.
Dixie turned to Miguel Otero, who smiled up at Sartain, the butt of his cigarette poking out from between his leathery lips.
“You were right, weren’t you, Miguel?” Dixie said. “You were right all along. That gold really was a curse.”
“Oh, it still is,” the Mexican said.
He drew the cigarette into his mouth, dousing it, and then spat it out onto the floor, still smiling.
Outside, hooves thundered. A mule brayed. It brayed again as the hoofbeats dwindled into the distance.
Sartain stepped outside. Dewey Dade was nowhere in sight.
In the distance, the mule brayed again, and then the hoofbeats fell silent.
Dixie came out to stand beside Sartain, looking in the direction in which Dewey Dade had ridden off with the gold. Celina came out a minute later, followed by her father. They all stood staring into the distance.
Sartain sighed as he pulled his makings sack out of his shirt pocket.
Dixie looked up at Sartain. “Can you forgive me, Mike?”
Sartain hiked a shoulder as he rolled a quirley in the light angling through the open door. “I reckon. Like you said, gold does strange things to people. I’m just glad we’re rid of it.”
He looked at Otero and Celina. “You two all right?”
“Sí,” said Otero, wrapping an arm around Celina’s shoulders, drawing his daughter against him. She turned to her old man and wrapped her arms tightly around him, kissing his cheek.
“Sí,” said Celina. “I am fine now, too. I am glad to have my papa back.”
“That was some neat trick,” Sartain told her. “You likely saved us all.”
Celina shrugged. “I honestly didn’t know I was going to do that until I did it.”
Otero sighed. “It is the boy I am worried about.”
Sartain folded his cigarette closed and stared once more into the night, alive now only with twinkling starlight and a single yammering coyote.
“Go with God, kid,” he said and poked the quirley into his mouth, sealing it. “But I got a strong hunch the devil’s gonna be the one doggin’ your heels.”
SILVER CITY WOLF PACK
Chapter 1
“I’ve summoned you here to Silver City, Mr. Sartain, because I’d like you to...uh...uh...dispatch a certain...uh...human entity.”
“You want me to kill a man, Mr. Mangham?”
“Yes, yes, whatever you’d like to call it. I prefer to think of it as removing a certain scourge from the face of our Earth, thus making this world a much better place for not only myself and my children, but for all of us.”
Mike Sartain, The Revenger, scratched a match to life on his boot heel. As he touched the flame to the end of the fat rum-infused cigar bestowed upon him by his host, he looked around the office of Mr. Brian Mangham, President of the Mangham Stage Line of southwestern New Mexico Territory.
He took in the heavy red-velvet drapes trimmed in gold, the Chinese rug beneath his boots, the large maps of the Western frontier, the game trophies, the glass bookcases, and the liquor cabinet upon which several bottles of labeled liquor shone behind two small, neat stacks of cut-glass goblets which also shone in the high-altitude sunlight angling between open curtains.
&nbs
p; The desk that stood between Sartain, who sat in a leather armchair, and the well-attired pasty-faced businessman sitting behind it was nearly as large as the beds of some prairie schooners The Revenger had seen. It was upholstered in leather secured by shiny brass tacks and appointed with a green-shaded Tiffany lamp and a carved cedar humidor. Mangham sat back in his high-backed leather chair, smoking a dynamite-sized Cuban stogie which he held in his beringed right hand, squinting expectantly at his guest through thick, round spectacles.
His brows resembled two large, gray moths taking wing above his eyes.
“What are you thinking, Mr. Sartain?” he asked, adjusting the black foulard tie knotted around his red turkey neck.
“I’m thinking I’m gonna have to turn you down, Mr. Mangham.” Puffing the smoke that tasted like cherries and molasses and that smelled like well-aged cedar, he added, “It looks to me like you have enough money to hire this kind of work done.”
Mangham scowled. “Mr. Sartain, I’ve been told you exact revenge for others. I summoned you here to Silver City to hire you to exact revenge for me. I don’t expect you to work for free.”
“I do work for free,” said the tall, broad, curly-haired Cajun, who sat with his knees spread, his sand-colored Stetson with snakeskin band hooked on a knee. His big LeMat revolver was strapped to his right thigh. “That’s what I do. I exact revenge for those who don’t have the means or the ability to exact it for themselves. After I’ve confirmed the bona fide need, of course. I’m not just an attack dog.”
“I think we’re mincing words and parsing sentences here, Mr. Sartain,” said Mangham, frustration lines cutting deeper across his liver-spotted forehead. “I have a bona fide need to see a man terminated. Or...killed, as you more simply and frankly put it.”
“Who’s the man?”
Mangham rolled the stogie between his pink, chapped lips, blowing smoke out the side of his mouth. “I’m not going to tell you that until you agree to take the job.”
Sartain picked up his glass from the edge of the desk and threw back the last of his bourbon. He rose from his chair and jerked down the bottom of his pinto vest. “I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time, Mr. Mangham. But if you go over to one of Silver City’s rowdier saloons, I’m sure you’ll find just the sort of gunnie you’re looking for.”
“I need a sure hand, Mr. Sartain. The man I need...killed...is a devil. He recently killed two close friends of mine, both of whom were also station managers for my line. He also killed one of my drivers from a bushwhack. I should say he hired them killed...by men like you. Sure hands. He has many such attack dogs and he’s sicced them on me.”
“Why did this man have your managers and your driver killed?”
“He’s trying to force me out of business. He’s opened his own line. He has backing from several gold mines in the Piños Altos Mountains as well as the Organ Range, mines that stopped shipping their gold with me because of several holdups I incurred over the past couple of years. He’s taking full advantage of my misfortune as well as contributing to it.”
Mangham sank back in his chair. His parchment-like cheeks were sallow, gaunt. “And he’s threatened my life and the lives of my son and daughter.”
Sartain worked his hands around the brim of his hat, which he held before him, pondering the proposal. He shook his head.
“Mr. Mangham, what you have here is a business problem. I only deal in personal problems. I don’t get involved in land wars or mine wars or any kind of business war, including wars between railroads or stage lines. I go to work, for free, for little guys...and women...who’ve been kicked when they’re down and have no other recourse except for someone like me.
“Since you obviously have enough money to hire your killing done for you”—he cast his gaze around the well-appointed office—“and since there is only one Mike Sartain on the frontier, I’ll be moving on until needed by some little guy...or gal...caught in a whipsaw. That likely won’t be long. There are plenty of little guys caught in whipsaws on the frontier, some of them by well-to-do men like you.”
He donned his hat. “Uh...no offense.”
“You’re a strange one,” Mangham growled as the big Cajun walked to the door.
Sartain glanced over his shoulder, lifting a wan smile. “So I’ve been told.”
“You work for free?”
“That’s right.”
Mangham rose from his chair. His black suitcoat hung from his spindly shoulders. His body quivered slightly as though from a palsy. He mashed his, livers-potted, beringed left fist against his desk, scowling at the man who’d turned down his proposition. He obviously wasn’t a man accustomed to being said no to.
“Why would you do that?” he inquired, squinting his befuddlement behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “How do you make your living? You must have some wealthy family back East...or maybe you’re a remittance man? Plenty of them out here, though most of them talk funny.”
Sartain chuckled. “I’m not a remittance man. Dirt poor, in fact. But I live simple and travel light. When I need money, I ain’t above taking a few dollars from a man I’ve justifiably killed, since he won’t be needing them anymore. Or I’ll sink a shallow root somewhere and punch cows for a month or two. Or, hell, I’ll even swamp out a saloon or a whorehouse. Such jobs don’t pay much, but whorehouse employment has its perks.”
Sartain winked, opened the door, and stepped out into the mercantile that housed Mangham’s stage line office. Mangham also owned the mercantile, the shelves of which appeared fully stocked. No, he didn’t need a man like Sartain. He needed a John Wesley Hardin—a man who killed for a living.
As The Revenger pulled the office door closed behind him, he glanced across the store to see a pretty young woman with dark-blonde hair gazing toward him expectantly from behind the counter. She wore an apron over a gingham dress, and she was counting out change to an old woman in a poke bonnet.
She’d paused in counting the coins when she’d seen the Cajun. Now, apparently having sized up what had transpired behind the now-closed office door, she returned her attention to the business at hand and resumed counting back the old lady’s change.
Sartain had read faint caution and befuddlement in that brief glance of the pretty girl’s, who wore a red ribbon in her hair.
Mangham’s daughter? The one whose life had been threatened along with Mangham’s own as well as the businessman’s son, perhaps.
No matter. Mangham’s problem was a business problem, not a personal problem. It was personal problems The Revenger specialized in. Mangham was obviously flush enough to tend to such issues by other means than Mike Sartain.
The Cajun turned away from the girl, stepped around shelves filled with miners’ denims and cork-heeled boots, and headed for the front door. The bell jangled over the door as he stepped outside and stood on the boardwalk fronting Silver City’s bustling main street.
Horseback riders clomped past, their mounts blowing and shaking the bits in their teeth. Ranch and mine wagons jerked through the mud left by the recent late-summer rain that had rushed in from over the Piños Altos Mountains, making frothing torrents of the creeks threading the hills in and around the town. Planks had been laid across the street to keep folks from drowning in mud, but most had sunk in and all but disappeared.
Up and down the street, blue wood smoke issued from stone or tin chimneys rising from the roofs of the log and adobe dwellings, some of which were combinations of both wood and adobe or wood and stone or brick. The smoke hung heavy over the street, rife with the aromatic aroma of pinion and cedar, which managed to only partly disguise the stench from privies and trash heaps.
Sartain cast his gaze around, pondering his next move. He’d ridden down from Albuquerque in response to Mangham’s desperate summons by letter. The Revenger had started keeping a post office box in Albuquerque, where folks who needed him could get ahold of him. He advertised his services every now and then in newspapers.
GOT AN ITCH YOU CAN’T SCR
ATCH? SEND YOUR PROBLEM TO THE REVENGER, ALBUQUERQUE, NM.
Word about his special services had gotten around over the past several years, so that was all he needed to say about what he did. He often found himself with more requests than he could attend to. That’s why he accepted only the direst. He had to hand it to Mangham; the man wrote well. He’d made his problem seem dire indeed. The tone had been desperate.
Oh, well. Sartain had several more dire-sounding missives stuffed down into his saddlebags, which he’d stowed with his horse in the Piños Altos Livery and Feed barn just down the street to the south.
As he looked around, his gaze landed on a comely figure standing atop a balcony hanging kitty-corner from a three-story adobe and log-frame whorehouse on the other side of the muddy street. She was the only one out there.
She was leaning back against the wall near an open, red-painted wooden door. She was dressed—or half-dressed, rather—in a red corset and bustier, with a gauzy black wrap hanging off her shoulders. Her long, thick, dark-brown hair was pulled back and secured with two gold clips.
From his distance of fifty yards from the girl, Sartain thought her eyes were brown. Her skin was olive-toned, her bosoms secured and pushed up by the corset had a deep, beguiling V between them. She was just now removing a long, brown cheroot from between her wine-red lips to exhale smoke through her mouth and nostrils.
The chill breeze tore the smoke away to mingle it with the smoke exuding from the chimney on the roof above her head.
She turned her head slightly toward Sartain. She held it there. She gazed down at him expressionlessly with those dark eyes framed by her dark, pulled-back hair, slightly pooching out her plump, wine red lips.
The Cajun pinched his hat brim to the girl. She pushed off the wall and came forward.
Under the balcony’s wrought-iron rail, he saw that her legs were bare. They were firm, beautifully shaped. The long, lacy wrap billowed against them. She stopped at the rail, planted one bare foot straight out in front of the other, and canted her head slightly to one side, critically studying the man staring up at her, as though he were a horse she was pondering buying.
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