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Authors: Jon Sharpe

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Hangtown Hellcat (12 page)

BOOK: Hangtown Hellcat
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“Everything in its own time.”

Cruz saw Fargo watching him and flashed him a lips-only smile. “With
this
one, Senorita Lavoy,” he advised, “the only good time is now.”

“Nonsense, Lupe. He’s stripped of his weapons and a prisoner in Hangtown. A man can’t be more helpless than that—or more hopeless.”

McDade grunted and shifted his glance to Buckshot. “Who’s this piece of half-breed shit?”

“Ask your mother,” Buckshot piped up. “She knows me real good.”

McDade snarled and crossed toward Buckshot’s chair, right hand balling into a fist. Fargo shot one long leg out and tripped him. McDade crashed heavily to the floor. He sprang up cursing, but as he reached for the walnut-gripped Remington in his tied-down holster, loud, menacing clicks stopped him. El Burro and Norton held all four of the Colts aimed at him.

“This is not the Bucket of Blood,” Jenny scolded him as if he were a rambunctious schoolboy. “There’ll be no clash-of-stags roughhousing in my home.”

“What is this shit?” McDade demanded. “You’re the one
said Fargo would dance on air if he was fool enough to enter Hangtown. Now here you are—putting
me
under the gun!”

“Miss Lavoy,” Fargo spoke up, “you must have dredged mighty deep to come up with this sweet outfit.”

Cruz grinned while McDade flushed with anger from his neck to his scalp. “You don’t come into this gulch swinging your eggs, buckskins!”

“Butch is right, Mr. Fargo,” Jenny warned. “Remember that power balance I warned you about. Right now your life is hanging by a thread.”

She looked at McDade again. “I’m not protecting Fargo, Butch. I’m protecting a valuable asset.”

“I don’t savvy.”

“Yes, you generally don’t. Did you yourself not call Fargo a newspaper darling?”

“Sure, on account he is. You’d think he was ten inches taller than God, the way they gush over him.”

Jenny nodded. “You’re making my argument for me. Wouldn’t you agree that Skye Fargo stories are good for newspaper circulation? And wouldn’t you also agree that the merchant capitalists who own the newspapers want to make money?”

“Hell, who don’t?”

“Exactly. Imagine millions of readers back east eagerly following the story about how a group of powerful, influential newspapers have agreed to pay a ransom to free their darling. A ransom of, say, ten thousand dollars—a paltry sum to them but a windfall for us.”

McDade pulled on the point of his chin as her point sank home. Waldo Tate—McDade’s missing brain, according to Jenny—spoke up for the first time. Fargo noticed that an ugly carbuncle bulged one side of his neck.

“Little Britches is right, Butch. That ten thousand would earn the crapsheets ten times that much in profits. It’s smart business for them.”

“Maybe it would be at that,” he admitted. “But they ain’t like the families we’re shaking down. They’ll want proof Fargo is alive so they don’t look like fools if they’re hornswoggled.”

“And we’ll give it to them,” Jenny said. “We invite a
photographer to meet us at someplace well away from here. He takes the photograph of Fargo back east and they deliver our money.”

“Now just hold your horses,” Butch said. “You mean we actually
give
them Fargo after we’re paid?”

“Don’t be dense. A dog returns to his own vomit, and Fargo will likewise come after us again. We’ll kill our bearded visitor
and
whoever delivers the ransom. There’s no effective law out here, and there’s a very nasty war on now—that means no military posse.”

Don’t believe what you hear me tell them—I’ll just be throwing a bone to the dogs.
Jenny’s words from just a few minutes ago, Fargo realized, were as reliable as a wildcat bank. She probably did want him and Buckshot to eventually kill this “unholy trinity” as she called them—she knew outlaw men well enough to know they would sull at some point, raping and killing her. And why risk the lives of her loyal bodyguards in the effort to stop them?

But clearly she was a master at working both sides of the fence, and Fargo suspected she also intended to go through with the ransom plan. And she would indeed kill Fargo rather than hand him over and have to tangle with him again.

“Well, it ain’t the worst plan I ever heard,” Butch finally conceded.

“Good,” Jenny said. “We’ll work out the fine details later.”

“On your feet,” McDade ordered Fargo. “And don’t get cute on me. You too, ’breed.”

“Just what are you doing?” Jenny demanded.

“Wha’d’ya think? Taking them over to the guardhouse with the rest of the prisoners.”

Jenny shook her pretty head. “Out of the question. You and your…men will get drunk and kill them. They will be kept under guard here. I have hidden their weapons, and El Burro and Norton are fully capable of controlling them.”

Butch’s jaw slacked open. “Lady, are you shittin’ me?”

“I told you he’s a valuable asset.”

Fargo watched Butch and Cruz exchange a long look, two curs watching the new dog in town mount their bitch. “I’ll just bet he is,” Butch replied, his voice heavy with sarcasm and jealous resentment.

But when El Burro parted the curtains for them, all three sullen-faced men filed out.

“Well, boys,” Jenny said to Fargo and Buckshot, rubbing her palms briskly together to express her exuberance, “it looks like the fun is just beginning.”

9

Fargo and Buckshot were fed bowls of stew and then led into a nearly empty, windowless room right across the hall from the room where Norton and Burro slept. Jasmine had prepared two sleeping pallets for them and left a squat candle and a greasy deck of cards on an upended packing crate, the only “furnishings.”

“Mr. Fargo,” Jenny said from the arched doorway, “your reputation for hairbreadth escapes has preceded you. But either Norton or El Burro will be sitting in the hallway at all times. You’ll catch a weasel asleep before you surprise them. If either one of you so much as pokes his nose into the hall, you will be shot dead and strung up on the gallows. I trust that’s clearly understood?”

Fargo glanced up into El Burro’s clay-mask face and implacable eyes. The mestizo’s left hand—the one not filled with blue steel—stroked the sisal scabbard of his machete.

“You have a knack for making your terms very clear,” Fargo replied diplomatically.

“Good. If you gents behave yourselves, we may come to terms more agreeable to you. Mr. Brady, are you familiar with mahjong?”

“Ma Jong? I ain’t never heard of the lady.”

Jenny tossed back her head and laughed, revealing a lovely throat smooth as ivory. “It’s not a person, you benighted savage. It’s a Chinese game. Usually four persons play it, but later tonight I’ll send for you and teach you the game.”

“Christmas crackers!” Buckshot exclaimed when the two men were alone. “She’s gonna send for me, Skye! You don’t think—”

“No, I don’t.” Fargo cut him off. “She’s up to something though.”

“Huh. You’re just jealous ’cause she picked me first for the old slap ’n’ tickle. You heard her say there was character in my face.”

“And rocks in your head. Keep your damn voice down, wouldja? Those ‘palace guards’ of hers can’t talk, but they can sure hear. And never mind the damn frippet—we gotta figure out how to wangle out of this deal without getting our wicks snuffed.”

Fargo was already examining the whitewashed side wall, but it seemed solid as a revetment. He sniffed the air. “You can still smell castor oil. This room was used to store packs of beaver pelts, all right.”

“Speaking of beaver—that Jenny is silky-satin, sure enough,” Buckshot said. “But holy Christ! She makes Tammany politics look like Sunday school. The hell’s she up to, Skye?”

“I’ve never learned to read sign on the breast of a normal woman let alone a scheming hellcat like her. One thing’s certain sure: we need to clap the stopper on her.”

Fargo’s tobacco hadn’t been taken. He lit one of his skinny Mexican cigars in the candle flame. “We can’t count on our horses staying put forever. And if we lose them, we lose our rifles—the only weapons we got left unless we find our short guns.”

“Them sons-a-bitches took Patsy,” Buckshot snarled. “Skye, the
hell
is that pert skirt doing? First she tells us she wants us to kill them three sage rats for her. Then she tells them we’re gonna be ransomed and kilt.”

“It’s a stumper. My guess is she’s hedging her bets. It could be she does want us to kill those ‘lieutenants’ of hers because she’s smart enough to know that she’s dancing on dynamite if she lets them live much longer. But this ransom deal—it was worked out too careful in her mind to just be a spur-of-the-moment lie.”

“Yeah, that shines, don’t it?” Buckshot agreed. “That business just now about how her and us might come to ‘more agreeable terms’—you think mebbe she’s got us in mind to replace them other three as her top dirt workers?”

“Yeah, I thought about that. It could be. A woman that beautiful is used to turning men into her lap dogs. If that’s her drift, we need to play along.”

“What’s your size-up on McDade and them other two sidewinders?”

“Butch is a hothead and a bully, and according to Jenny he’s a quick-draw artist, which makes him dangerous. Waldo Tate is only a threat if you turn your back to him. But I’ll warn you right now, old son—
don’t
underrate that Mexer or he’ll cut you to trap bait in a heartbeat. His six-gun’s just for show. It’s his blade that kills.”

“Mister, we’re rowed
way
the hell up Salt River,” Buckshot said. “No horses, no guns or ammo, and it ain’t just these two bodyguards and them three snake-shits we gotta fret—this whole cockchafin’ gulch is filled with hard cases licking Jenny’s hand. And it’d be easier to tie down a bobcat with a piece of string than to figger her out.”

“’Fraid so,” Fargo agreed. “She’s holding a candle for the devil, all right. Matter fact, she might even be his mistress.”

*   *   *

The two men sat on their pallets and played five-card draw for the next hour or so while they tried—fruitlessly—to figure a plan of action. Now and then El Burro or Norton poked his head in to check on them.

“Both them dickless bastards give me the fidgets,” Buckshot said. “They’re itchin’ for a chance to point our toes to the sky.”

Fargo nodded, slapping down a card. “They’re more dangerous than Butch and those other two.”

The next time the curtains parted, however, Jasmine stepped into the room with El Burro behind her.

“Mr. Brady,” she said, “Miss Lavoy wants to play mahjong now.”

Buckshot sent Fargo a smug look as he scrambled to his feet. “If she wants to play, I’m her man. Looks like you gotta play solitaire now, Trailsman. Keep your chin up—might be your turn next.”

Fargo was pleasantly surprised when Jasmine remained behind after Buckshot was herded off at gunpoint.

She sent him a tentative smile. “I’m afraid your friend has the wrong idea.”

“Wrong ideas are his trademark,” Fargo replied, adding, “I didn’t know I was allowed visitors.”

“I’m not exactly a visitor,” she admitted. “I was ordered to come here.”

“Oh.” Fargo’s soaring expectations took a sudden nosedive. With him it was always the woman’s choice. “Why?” he added.

“She…well, she said she wants a ‘full report’ on you.”

Fargo studied the pretty girl in the dancing candlelight. She was barefoot and wore a yellow gingham dress that showcased her narrow waist and flaring hips. Her hair was a spun-gold waterfall tumbling in waves over her shoulders. Even in this soft lighting her eyes were a sparkling emerald green. It had been far too long since Fargo had been with a woman, and heat stirred in his loins like the tickling brush of wing tips.

“What kind of report?” he pressed her.

“Mainly, she told me, on your…‘prowess in the sack,’ I think she put it.”

“She should find out for herself instead of ordering you to do it. C’mon in and sit down.”

“That Jenny Lavoy is—well, she’s not quite right in her upper story,” Jasmine said as she folded down onto the pallet beside Fargo and smoothed her dress with both hands.

“You mean she’s insane?”

“No, not exactly that, I don’t s’pose. She’s very intelligent and she don’t seem to do crazy sorta things. But there’s stuff she tells me—you know, about men and bedroom matters?—that would make a horse blush. She’s not interested in doing things the normal way that men and women do them.”

BOOK: Hangtown Hellcat
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