New Mexico Madman (9781101612644) (5 page)

Fargo thanked him and sent a high sign to Booger, who flung open the doors of the coach. While the preacher and Ashton handed out the ladies, Fargo and Booger went ahead into the station master's home, Fargo knocking the riding thong off the hammer of his Colt.

The large front room was simple and clean, with a whitewashed clay floor and a long trestle table with two wooden benches.
Ristras
, bunches of dried red chili peppers, hung from the low ceiling. The place smelled wonderfully of beef and green-chili stew. In the far front corner was a short plank bar. A shelf on the wall behind it held a few bottles of whiskey and the milky cactus liquor called pulque.

But it was the lone figure slouched over the bar who focused Fargo's attention. His lean profile was handsome but mean, and his fancy star-roweled spurs of Mexican silver were mean, too—the rowels sharpened to vicious points for brutal domination of a horse. In this vast and lawless territory Fargo was used to encountering rough, unshaven fellows with poor manners. This man, however, was well groomed and nodded politely at the new arrivals.

“Glom his two-gun rig,” Booger muttered.

But Fargo already had. The hand-tooled holsters had been partly cut away, and the notches on the hammers of his wooden-gripped Colt Navy revolvers had been filed off to ensure the weapons wouldn't snag—a favorite trick of quick-draw artists. And rare was the honest man out West who wore two guns.

“Bad medicine,” Booger added, but just then the smiling station master hustled forward to greet the new arrivals.

“Senor Booger!” he exclaimed. “I did not expect you today. Shall I butcher a cow?”

“I'll just eat it on the hoof, Pablo,” the whip shot back.

A woman in a dark
rebozo
, who appeared to be Pablo's wife, fluttered about the passengers, getting them seated at the long table. Pottery cups and a pitcher of lemonade had already been set in place. The two Mexicans got a closer look at Kathleen Barton, and the
gringa
's astonishing beauty left both of them slack-jawed.

“Looks like you're being groped again, Miss Barton,” Fargo quipped.

She coolly ignored him, seating herself at some distance from the rest of the passengers. Fargo kept a careful, constant eye on the gunslick at the bar, who seemed to be carefully avoiding looking in their direction. Too carefully . . .

“Miss Barton,” Trixie spoke up while Pablo's wife hustled back toward the kitchen. “I'm proud to say that the two of us are sorta in the same profession. You see, I'm a singer. I've been hired to sing at the La Paloma in Santa Fe.”

“Oh? Is that a theater?”

“Well . . . it's a very fancy thirst parlor.”

The actress peeled off her long silk gloves. “I thought so. I hardly think that being pawed in barrel houses, dance halls and gin mills—and no doubt bordellos—places you in my profession,” she enunciated with punishing clarity.

Fargo watched Trixie flush deep to her earlobes. Booger grinned and winked at Fargo.
“R-r-r-i-i-n-n-n!”
he said in a bad imitation of a cat growling.

“I'm no scrubbed angel,” Trixie admitted. “But you needn't treat me like the town pump, neither! Leastways, I ain't so hateful that I buy extra tickets so's I won't have to sit next to nobody.”

“
Here's
a corset with starch in it,” Booger approved.

“I'm sure you'd have to raise your rates to afford extra tickets,” the disdainful thespian responded.

Trixie assumed a war face and started up from the bench, but Ashton gently tugged her back down. The preacher's watery nose made him sniff constantly. He did so now. “Ladies, this is unseemly in your gender. Such—”

“Pipe down, you jay, or I'll baste your bacon!” Booger snapped. “Every red-blooded man with a set on him dearly loves a good catfight. They may claw each other naked.”

This was all good entertainment, but Fargo paid it scant attention. The gun-thrower across the room, he was nearly convinced by now, was not there by happenchance. It was time to take the bull by the horns. He pushed away from the table and strolled over to the bar.

“Something's got me a mite curious,” Fargo greeted him without any polite preamble.

Ice-chip eyes raked quickly over Fargo. “Do tell? And just what might that be?”

“Men outnumber women about two hundred to one in these parts. Even a homely-lonely with buckteeth draws plenty of stares. Yet, right now at that table over there sit two prime specimens of female flesh. And you haven't craned your neck around once to look them over. Something's not jake with that.”

“Tell you what. If you graze near a point, feel free as all hell to make it.”

“It's been made.”

“So you're telling me you're offended on account I ain't eye-fucking your women?”

“If that's how you want to play it, all right. Yeah—I'm offended.”

Both men knew what it meant to “offend” a man in the Territories. The gunslick decided on a staring contest and soon regretted it. The carved-in-granite face staring back at him was as emotionless and lethal as a cocked rifle. The blue eyes that women found charming had the opposite effect on men: they bespoke implacable will and unshakable courage, and the wordless confidence of a man for whom killing was an instinct born of necessity.

The pale eyes slid away from his. “Look, mister, I got no dicker with you. I just come in here to have a couple quiet bracers and move on. You wonder why I ain't staring at them two beauties? Well, take a good gander at that mammoth ape sittin' with 'em. Just the sight of that big son of a bitch turns my liver white, and I admit it.
He
might be offended if I do look, and that's one farmer's bull I ain't looking to shake a red rag at.”

The answer surprised Fargo. He didn't believe it for a moment, but it was highly logical and gave Fargo no more room to push. He did take a gander at Booger and realized he'd rather offend a den of rattlesnakes. Fargo, despite his suspicion, decided to ease off.

He planked two bits on the bar. “Have one on me.”

He was on his way back to the table when the man said behind him, “Thank you, sir.”

That servile word “sir” tore it for Fargo. There wasn't an ounce of humility in that snake-eyed killer, and more than one human maggot had called Fargo “sir” before trying to perforate his liver. This gunman was on Zack Lomax's payroll, and he knew damn well he had to murder Fargo to get at the real prize.

“Well,” Kathleen Barton barbed as he arrived back at the table. “Do you feel better now that you've bullied a stranger who was only minding his own business?”

“And how do you feel,” Fargo retorted, “after calling a friendly young woman a whore without knowing one damn thing about her?”

The unexpected parry struck the actress full force. “I—” She faltered and took a deep breath, looking at Trixie. “It pains me to say it, but Mr. Fargo is right. Miss Belle, I apologize for my harsh remarks.”

Trixie, clearly not one to hold a grudge, smiled sweetly. “That's all right, Miss Barton. You're a great artist, and everybody knows great artists are temperamental. Heck, I
am
just a saloon singer.”

Pastor Brandenburg beamed. “
That's
the Christian spirit, ladies. To err is human, to forgive—”

“Oh, caulk up, you mealymouthed peckerwood!” Booger exploded. He turned his murderous stare on the Trailsman. “What's got into you, Fargo—religion? We had us a jim-dandy catfight brewing up, and
you
just put the kibosh on it. Damn your sanctimonious bones to hell!”

5

“Boys,” Russ Alcott declared solemnly, “I looked straight into that lanky son of a bitch's eyes. And I'm here to tell you—it was like staring right into the fiery pit. Skye Fargo is all he's cracked up to be and ten times more. I like to shit when I realized that buckskin bastard
knew
why I was there.”

Alcott, Cleo Hastings and Spider Winslowe sat their saddles in a little cottonwood thicket beside the Rio Grande. Behind them, a westering sun gold-leafed the normally muddy river. Due east, across the green valley floor, the Overland stagecoach sent up a yellow plume of dust.

“Really gave you the fantods, huh?” Spider pressed.

Alcott's lips formed a tight seam. “Look here . . . I've killed eleven men in Lincoln County alone, and the bullets was all in the front. A few of them men I done for was some of the hardest hard cases you ever seen—men like Juan Aragon, Red Mike Malone and Reno Sloan. I stared 'em all in the eye and sent them over the mountains without a lick of fear. But Fargo? Before I met him, the only thing that ever shriveled up my dick was cold weather. Staring into his eyes made my pecker curl up like a bacon rind on a hot stove.”

“Hell,” Spider said in a nervous voice, “you ain't no lily liver, Russ. But you say he's twigged our game—think we should just maybe butt out now?”

“Nix on that. I ain't telling you all this to put snow in your boots. I'm telling you Fargo
ain't
just no nickel-novel hero. That means we got to do just like Spider's old pap use to say: Measure it twice, then cut it once. Any play we make has got to be smart and we gotta cover our ampersands—we make sure that if we don't kill him the first time out, we stay alive to kill him the next time.”

Cleo frowned, not following all this. “That's too far north for me, Russ.”

“Cleo, the end of your nose is too far north for you. Me and Spider will handle the mentality part of it—you just be ready to follow orders.”

“What about the passengers?” Spider asked. “Did you figure out which one is on Lomax's payroll?”

“'Sides the actress—and, boys, she's a humdinger—there's a big-titted blonde I wouldn't mind drilling into. Way she looks at Fargo, he's prob'ly humping her already. But the three men—one's a bandy-legged preacher and one's a little butterball who flutters around like a nervous woman. But this third jasper, all togged out in a fancy white suit and a concho belt . . . he's one of them old boys who looks like he went to college but could lop your nuts off quick. I'd wager he's the one.”

“You can't know with Lomax,” Spider said. “He's tricky as a redheaded woman, and he just might find somebody Fargo wouldn't suspicion.”

Alcott mulled that and nodded. His pale eyes followed the progress of the coach. “He just might, at that. We got to plant Fargo before he does, that's the main mile. I been thinking on that. And I think I got a plan.”

Alcott pointed his chin toward the stagecoach. “I know that route good. The stage will roll until about ten tonight, then they'll lay over until sunrise at Hatch. Tomorrow night they'll rest at Caballo Lake. But if we kill Fargo at either place, that stage just might reverse its dust to El Paso. But two nights from now they'll lay over at San Marcial. That's too far north and no matter what happens, it makes more sense to just push on to Santa Fe. Lomax will shit a brick if it don't.”

“All right,” Spider said. “But I know that area around San Marcial. It
ain't
good ambush country—damn little cover. Cleo here is some pumpkins with his Sharps, but—”

“I got other plans for Fargo.” Alcott cut him off. “Won't nobody need to draw a bead on Fargo. The station at San Marcial is run by Raul Jimenez and his sister. They put women passengers up in a little lean-to off the back of the house.”

“Who gives a damn where the women sleep?” Cleo demanded.

“We do, knot head. See, they make male passengers sleep on shakedowns Jimenez puts in the hallway right next to the front door—the opposite end from the women. That's real providential 'cause we don't want to kill the actress when we blow Skye Fargo to hellangone.”

“Just how we gonna do that?” Spider asked.

Alcott's cruelly handsome face eased into a smile. He lit down from his roan and unbuckled the straps of a big pannier. He pulled out a small, sturdy cask.

“Boys, this here is blasting powder. That's thirty seconds of fuse poking out from the top. Enough powder to blow out a ton of solid rock. Lomax got it from one of his mining buddies. Two nights from now we're gonna sneak it up to the door of the San Marcial station and touch it off.”

The other two men looked at each other and grinned. Then Spider looked at Alcott again. “That should do it, but are you sure it won't kill the actress?”

“Not if we set it back from the door at least fifteen feet. That should blow out the front of the station but leave the back standing—it's a good-size house and built solid.”

“Yeah, but don't that mean we'll kill Lomax's mystery man?”

Alcott smiled as he tucked the cask away again. “If we're lucky. It'll kill all the men 'cept for Raul, and he's a gutless wonder we ain't gotta worry about. And then—who needs the motherlovin' stagecoach? Lomax just wants that bitch in his hands by June nineteenth, right? So we snatch her and take her north ourselves to Blood Mesa.”

“Oh,
hell
yeah,” Spider enthused. “We don't even gotta tell Lomax exactly when we get her there—we should have her all to ourself for at least a couple days.”

By now Cleo was thoroughly confused. “Why would we want an actress?”

Spider and Alcott exchanged a mirthful glance.

“Don't worry, Cleo,” Alcott assured him. “You'll figure it out.”

* * *

By June twelfth, the third day of the stagecoach journey to Santa Fe, Fargo suffered a combination of sheer boredom and nerve-racking expectation. His hair-trigger alertness never wavered, a fact that tickled Booger no end.

“Look out, Fargo!” he shouted toward the end of the morning. “Oh, Jesus, Joseph and Mary! There's a big turtle up on the right. Could be an assassin.”

“Just cut the capers and keep a weather eye out. That gun-thrower back at Vado was no turtle.”

“Ahh, you quivering old crone, that was two days ago. Did he show at Hatch or Caballo Lake? Just a drifter headed down to Old Mex. Son, you're building pimples into peaks.”

“The fandango's coming,” Fargo assured him. He removed his hat and whipped the dust from it. “Christ, not even noon and it's hot enough to peel the hide off a Gila monster.”

“It'll be hotter when we meet in hell,” Booger opined. He pulled his flask out of his shirt. “Kickapoo Jubilee will perk you up. Let's dip our beaks.”

Fargo downed a jolt of the powerful Taos Lightning and shuddered as it mule-kicked him. He hadn't had a beer since his arrival in El Paso. And he missed his saddle after long hours on a hard seat.

Booger eyed the flask thoughtfully before he tucked it away. He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Catfish, I'm horny as a brass band. When we bed down at San Marcial tonight, let's get them two dolly birds snockered and see can we play hide-the-sausage with 'em.”

“Some knight of the ribbons you are. With me it's always the lady's choice.”

Booger snapped the reins and splashed an amber streamer off the rump of the nearside wheeler. “Pah! Easy for you to say. You never get woman hungry like the rest of us poor, ugly bastards. They flock to you like flies to syrup. But I'm fearful, Skye, truly fearful. A man can explode into a thousand little pieces if he don't relieve the pressure.”

Fargo shook his head in disbelieving wonder. “Booger, you're so full of shit your feet are sliding. You can't explode from being horny.”

“Why, you soft-brain! It's been proved by them professors at them colleges in France and England. Proved by them as knows! See, a man is just like a volcano. He's got to have him a woman now and agin; got to relieve the pressure inside him, or else he'll explode like a steam boiler. Look it up in the almanac.”

“If you ever explode, you big galoot, you'll exterminate the buffalo. Well, you've always got Rosy Palm and her four daughters.”

“True, thank God. The poor man's harem. It comforts a man to know he can hold his own.”

Fargo used his army binoculars to scan the terrain all around them, cultivated fields to his left, arid flats and distant mountains on his right. All looked peaceful nor could he spot any good ambush points. Nonetheless, his inward eye kept seeing that two-gun trouble-seeker back at Vado with the shifty, bone-button eyes. Fargo's instincts told him an attack was soon coming and that he must be ready for it.

The readiness was all . . .

They reached the swing station at Lago Seco, and while the stock-tender switched out the teams the weary passengers climbed out to stretch out the kinks. Fargo handed Kathleen Barton out, astonished again at the woman's beauty. She wore her hair tucked up under a wide-brimmed straw hat with gay “follow-me-boys” ribbons streaming behind it in the hot breeze.

She surprised him by meeting his gaze frankly. “I place most men into three categories, Mr. Fargo: heroes, villains or fools. Our driver definitely fits that last category. But I'm not certain yet about you.”

Fargo was about to reply to that unexpected comment when he was interrupted by Malachi Feldman. “Mr. Fargo, may I inquire as to which sign you were born under? I'd dearly love to work up your chart—for a nominal fee, of course.”

Booger leaped down and almost squashed the little man. “Emigrate, you half-faced goat!” He brandished a fist as solid as a cedar mallet. “Or would you like a taste of the knuckle dusting?”

“Come down off your hind legs, Booger,” Fargo snapped. “The doctor is harmless.”

“Pah! He's a load in my pants.”

Malachi backed discreetly away but stared spitefully at Booger. “You, sir, have stars lined up in the Eighth House of the Zodiac. Your days are numbered.”

The preacher had climbed out behind Lansford Ashton. He, too, glowered at Booger. “Repent, Mr. McTeague, before it is too late. Do not wait until you are on your deathbed, for there is no sudden leap from Delilah's lap to Abraham's bosom. You are bound for a fiery hell!”

“Turn off the tap, you spineless psalm singer. I will not leap from Delilah's lap until I've had full use of it.
You
may have Abraham's bosom to yourself, for you strike me as a sniveling sodomite. As for your fiery hell, I druther play checkers with Satan than a harp in heaven, for a man should be with his kin.”

“I'm curious, friend,” Ashton addressed Booger. “It strikes me as unusual that a man of your evident size and strength—and I might add rough-hewn intelligence—should bullyrag everyone around him, even women.”

“Bullyrag, is it?” Booger narrowed his eyes. “Aye, you're a sly one. Spouting Latin and dressed like a peacock, yet I've glommed that pepperbox pistol in your valise. You've had it factory-rigged to fire all the barrels as one. How poor can a man's aim be that he needs to fire six bullets at once to hit his man?”

“A man who pauses to aim a handgun is likely to die, isn't that right, Fargo?”

“That's how I see it,” Fargo answered calmly, holding Ashton's eyes until the man walked off to join the actress.

“Bad medicine,” Booger muttered, watching him.

“I don't like him,” Trixie said. “He looks like a gentleman, but he leaves a smear like a snail.”

“A gentleman,” Booger scoffed, “is a fool who gets out of the bathtub to piss.”

“Did you really spot a pepperbox in his valise?” Fargo asked Booger.

“Did I speak Chinee, Trailsman? Aye, it was a pepperbox—with six beans loaded.”

“Interesting,” Fargo said.

* * *

As darkness settled over the Rio Grande Valley like a black cloak, Fargo lighted the coach's four oil-burning lamps, equipped with reflectors, for night driving. Almost three hours later they reached the station at San Marcial, their final destination until morning.

Fargo untied the Ovaro and the two team replacements and watered them before turning them out into the large paddock. All three horses were holding up well with the slow pace and lack of any weight to pull or carry. But the Ovaro, eager for a run, repeatedly bumped his nose into Fargo's shoulder.

“I know, old campaigner,” Fargo soothed him, giving his withers a good scratch. “You ain't cut out for plodding along and neither am I. But we'll stretch out your legs soon.”

Before he joined the others inside, Fargo grabbed his Henry and made a quiet search around the station in the buttery moonlight. He found no sign of human tracks or intruders, and the singsong cadence of insects suggested no one lurked nearby. Still, that uneasy prickle on the back of his neck had returned—the “truth goose” that often warned him of danger.

The surrounding, shape-shifting shadows hid trouble, and Fargo felt sure it would hit before sunrise.

He washed up at the pump out back, stood quietly listening to the night for a few minutes, then went inside.

This station, run by Raul Jimenez and his younger sister, Socorro, was one of the best on the line. The moment he stepped inside he saw the straw shakedowns in the short entrance hall, provided for male passengers. One of the men had lugged in a trunk for the actress and Fargo veered around it into the large main room.

The usual long trestle table dominated the room, but ladder-back chairs, scarred from spurs, replaced the benches. A big, doorless archway led into the kitchen, and Fargo spotted a roasting range of mud brick and mortar with a tin canopy over it to channel smoke and smells into a flue in the chimney.

Just then, Socorro Jimenez turned from the range to bring in a platter of biscuits and spotted Fargo. The pretty, shapely Mexican gave Fargo a welcome-big-boy smile as big as Texas—a smile he suddenly felt throbbing in his hip pocket. She wore a peasant blouse, baring one light brown shoulder, and a wild cascade of dark hair framed her face with wanton appeal.