New Mexico Madman (9781101612644) (6 page)

Well, now,
Fargo thought, instantly recognizing the message those smoldering black eyes sent to him.

All the passengers except Kathleen Barton were already seated at the table.

“Mr. Jimenez,” she said in her imperious tone, “will you kindly show me to the ladies quarters? I'd like to freshen up before evening repast.”

“Pues, claro,
senorita
,”
Raul replied, hovering around the great lady like a paid toady. “This way,
por
favor
.”

She gazed at the Trailsman. “If you're done ogling that serving girl, Mr. Fargo, would you kindly bring my trunk?”

Booger grinned wickedly. “He'll need a moment before he can walk right, muffin.”

She stoically ignored this crudity, following Raul to the rear of the house. Fargo hoisted the trunk onto his back and trailed them.

“What is the meaning of
this
?” he heard her exclaim as he reached the slope-off room.

The Jimenezes had provided female passengers a small bedroom with a threadbare, rose-pattern carpet and a washstand with enameled pitcher and bowl.

“
Pues
, senorita, it is the best we can afford,” Raul apologized.

“I don't mean the room. I mean
that
.”

She pointed to one of the iron bedsteads, its legs set in bowls of coal oil.

“That keeps the bedbugs off, Princess,” Fargo informed her, struggling to keep a straight face. “Won't help much with the snakes, though.”

“The . . . ?” Her face suddenly drained of color. Like an Indian at a treaty ceremony, Fargo had perfected the silent “abdomen laugh.” By now, however, his belly ached.

“If one crawls in your bed during the night,” he advised her, “don't move a muscle. I'll get it out in the morning. However, it may require some
groping
under the blankets.”

“Oh, you'd love that!”

Fargo winked at her. “You'd love it even more. I'm . . . experienced in these matters.”

She was on the verge of throwing the pitcher at him, so Fargo beat a hasty retreat. By now Socorro had laid the table with a veritable feast in Fargo's eyes: hot beef, chili beans and sourdough biscuits and tortillas. Booger had devoured a biscuit in one bite before Pastor Brandenburg spoke up.

“Sir! We have not said grace.”

Booger quickly did the honors for him: “We thank the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—he who eats the fastest gets the most.”

Fargo tied into his meal with gusto, glancing up as Socorro returned to the kitchen for more biscuits. She shot him an inviting, cross-shoulder glance, the moist tip of her tongue quickly brushing her upper lip. Booger winked at Fargo. The human bear had already drained a half bottle of pulque, and Fargo sensed a hullabaloo coming.

The actress returned, clearly in a foul mood. She stared at the table as if it were piled with raw tripes.

“It ain't Delmonico's,” Booger boomed out with his mouth full, leering at her. “But a hungry dog must eat dirty pudding. These beans're delicious.”

“Beans?” Kathleen repeated in a horrified tone.
“Again?”

“'S'matter, cottontail,” Booger teased around his mouthful of food. “'Fraid you'll toot in front of us?”

She turned scarlet, which only egged the drunk reinsman on. Banging both fists on the table to keep the beat he bellowed out:

Beans! Beans! Good for your heart!

The more you eat, the more you fart!

The more you fart, the better you feel!

So eat your beans at every meal!

Like a professor proving a theorem, he suddenly tilted sideways on his chair, lifted one stout leg, and broke wind with resounding force.

“Did an angel speak?” he said innocently, staring at the petrified actress. Her face crumpled in disgust and revulsion and, as if spring-loaded, she stormed off in high dudgeon.

“Fox smells his own hole first!” he shouted to her retreating back.

Nonchalantly he reached across the table for her untouched plate.

“Ain't
she
silky-satin?” he barbed, scraping her supper onto his plate.

“Sir, you are a barbarian,” the preacher announced.

“Sheep dip, Bible thumper. I ain't never shaved a man in my life. 'Course, I
have
cut a few throats in my day,” he added with a menacing glower. “Ask Fargo.”

Fargo, however, was staring into the kitchen, where Socorro was hidden from everyone's view but his. One hand reached up to tug down her peasant blouse, baring two beautiful tits that suddenly gave him an appetite for something besides good cooking.

“Think I'll have a look outside,” he told the others, and Socorro smiled.

6

His Henry to hand, Fargo slipped out into the moonlit yard. Socorro's bold advances inside had lust throbbing in his blood, but even the rut need could not quell his gut conviction that serious trouble was about to erupt.

He circled the station, senses alert, Henry at the ready. For some reason he recalled his meeting in El Paso with Ambrose Jenkins and Addison Steele. Jenkins had quoted an anonymous letter sent to Kathleen:
Behold! The
day
cometh.

The day being promised, Jenkins surmised, was the nineteenth of this month—the one-year anniversary of Kathleen's public and scornful rejection of Zack Lomax's marriage proposal. If Jenkins was right, her day was coming in one week.

But for Lomax to succeed, Fargo's day had to come sooner. The stagecoach was deep into New Mexico Territory now. Maybe Fargo's day was tonight. Maybe—

A foot scraped in the sand behind him and Fargo whirled, jacking a round into the Henry's chamber.

“Do not shoot me,” a soft, heavily accented female voice called from the darkness. “There is something much nicer we both want,
verdad
?”

Socorro stopped in front of him, her eyes sheening in the moonlight. “I am shameless, I know. But I have no man, and always the fire burns inside me. Life here, Fargo—it is, how you say, boring. Men like you come to me only in dreams. The priest, he says that good girls always sleep with their hands outside the blankets. But I am bad—I dream of men like you and touch myself down below. Tonight I want to feel a real man inside me.”

“You're going to, girl,” Fargo promised. “Feel what your talk has done to me.”

He guided her slim hand to the hard furrow along his left thigh.

“
Cristo!
Like a rock it is, and so big. Now
you
feel.”

She guided his free hand under her blouse. Fargo was astounded—her breasts felt soft and hard at the same time, like trim muscles wrapped in smooth French wool. Instantly her nipples stiffened, poking hard into his palm. She moaned at his touch and began stroking the hard furrow until both of them were panting like overheated dogs.

Fargo grounded his Henry and opened his fly, freeing his straining, hungry manhood. He dropped his gun belt while she hitched her skirt high. Fargo knelt, gripped her hourglass hips, and pulled her down onto his lap. She gasped with eager pleasure as his curved saber parted the slick, pliant walls of her love nest.

“Hard and fast, Fargo!” she urged him. “Raul will soon miss me—oh! Yes, like
that
!”

Holding her firm ass tight, Fargo bucked hard, deep and fast, enjoying the mazy waltz after a dry spell of several weeks. Neither one showed the other mercy, driving each other to a frenzy of lust.

“Fargo, it goes so deep!” she panted in a hoarse whisper. “So deep, so
deep
!”

The angle was perfect for maximum stimulation of her magic button, and soon she was so galvanized with pleasure that each breath ended on a groan. Fargo felt the pin-prickling in his groin swell to a massive, explosive release just as she climaxed in a series of hard, uncontrollable shudders.

The two of them, weak and dazed, collapsed sideways to the ground while their ragged breathing slowly returned to normal. After uncounted moments Raul's voice called out:
“Socorro! Donde estas?”

With an effort she found her voice.
“Ya vengo, hermano!”

“He knows why I came outside,” she told Fargo as they untangled from each other. “And he will not be angry. But he does not want the others to know. Thank you, Fargo. I will always remember the stallion who took me under the stars. And it will be very much time before my hands are again outside the blankets.”

“Thank you, too, lady. This night's been a reg'lar tonic for me.”

She kissed his lips and hurried toward the station. Fargo rose to his knees again, closed his fly, and buckled on his shell belt. A moment later he flinched hard when a voice bellowed from the house: “Ha-ho, ha-ho! Fargo, you double-poxed hound! You'll smell like fish all night!”

* * *

Fargo debated sleeping outside. But Booger slept like a dead man, and Fargo's deepening suspicion of Lansford Ashton made him reluctant to leave the house—he was, after all, Kathleen Barton's bodyguard. So he compromised by sleeping right next to the raw plank door.

Despite his torrid session out back with Socorro, sleep eluded Fargo long past the time the other three men nodded out—Booger snoring like a leaky bellows. He listened to the night sounds outside the door: the gentle soughing of the wind in the valley, the mournful howl of prowling coyotes, the monotonous rise and fall of insects. All of it eventually reassured him and gradually he floated down a deep tunnel into sleep.

Dream images danced across his sleeping mind, half formed, jumbled: Kathleen Barton's beautiful face, transforming into a mask of terror; pale-ice eyes promising hard death; a silver concho belt turning and twisting like a writhing snake and growing bloody fangs; a Concord swift wagon hurtling out of control into a black maw of hellish death.

And dream sounds, echoing a warning: the whinny of an agitated horse, then the almost comforting sound like meat sizzling in hot grease.

Meat sizzling louder and louder (
this
is
no
dream,
Fargo!
), but not meat, something else, something deadly, something he knew all too well (
the
readiness
is
all
,
Fargo!
) . . .

Fargo's eyes blinked open and some inner urgency, the vital force to live, chased the cobwebs of sleep from his mind. Now he heard the Ovaro, nickering insistently to warn him, and realized: the insect noise was gone.

And that “meat sizzling”—there was a half-inch gap under the door, and Fargo saw faint, flickering orange flashes of light, and he felt the cold sweat of dread break out in his armpits when he realized exactly how Death had come calling for him.

For a frozen moment his muscles seemed severed from his will, but it passed in a blink as a frontiersman's well-honed instinct to survive took over. Fargo catapulted to his feet, clawed at the latchstring, flung open the plank door. Clouds had mottled the bright yellow moon, and he squinted to see better in the stingy light.

There! Perhaps fifteen feet in front of the doorway—a dark shape spitting sparks!

Expecting his next breath to be his last, Fargo bound forward in several long strides. He could not risk trying to snuff the fuse, and instinct warned him the object was too heavy to kick safely away from the house.

Leaning far forward while still on the run, he scooped it up in both hands—a keg of blasting powder, he realized—and took three more giant strides while he brought it to his chest, then heaved with all the considerable strength of his arms, chest and shoulders.

As soon as he released it, Fargo dropped to the ground face-first like a dead weight. Even before he landed, hell turned itself inside out.

A crack-boom like the last ding-dong of doom threatened to shatter his eardrums. A blinding flash of white light was followed by a searing wall of heat. A giant, violent, invisible hand flung him back toward the house, which he slammed into before slumping to the ground.

The last thing Fargo was aware of was dirt and grass and stones slapping down hard all around him and a woman's bansheelike scream of terror from inside the station.

And his last thought:
the
Great
Thing
at
last
. . . .

* * *

“Is he dead?” Trixie said anxiously.

“I think he is breathing,” Socorro said, holding a lantern over the unconscious Trailsman.

“He has a terrible bruise swelling on his forehead,” Kathleen chimed in.

“Perhaps this will help him,” Raul suggested, splashing a pail of water on Fargo's face.

“I fear he has departed this world,” the preacher said. “May his soul—”

“One world at a time, witch doctor!” Booger snapped. “A conk on the
cabeza
will not kill Skye goldang Fargo. Don't get your bowels in an uproar, ladies—he'll come sassy.”

The acrid stench of spent black powder hung heavy around the station house, and patches of wiry
palomilla
grass still snapped and sparked in the yard. Kathleen rushed into the house and returned with her silk reticule, extracting a small vial of sal volatile.

“Smelling salts should revive him,” she said, uncapping the vial and passing it under his nostrils.

Fargo lay as inert as a stone slab.

“He
is
dead,” Malachi Feldman asserted, his pudgy hands fluttering like nervous birds. “The Eighth House has claimed him.”

“Pah!” Booger exclaimed. “You feckless ass. Only one thing can bring Fargo back from death's door: the scent of a woman's perfume. Give him your best toilet water, muffin.”

Kathleen bristled like a feist. “
Stop
calling me muffin, you uncouth mudsill!”

“Beg pardon, cupcake. Give him a whiff of your finest aromatic—the stuff that gives men bedroom notions.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” she snapped, but she did extract a small bottle labeled Eau de Ciel and pull off the silver stopper. She held the bottle under his nose. “This couldn't possibly—”

A smile eased Fargo's lips apart as his eyes snapped open. For a moment he wondered if there was, after all, a heaven to which he had mistakenly been sent. Three pretty female faces hovered over his and—miracle to behold—Kathleen Barton's actually deigned to show some concern.

But this was not paradise—his head felt as if he'd been mule-kicked.

“Don't move yet,” Ashton advised when Fargo groaned trying to sit up. “You may have a serious injury.”

“Buncha damn mollycoddlers,” Booger muttered. “Fargo, quitcher damn malingering.”

He reached a brawny arm down and tugged Fargo roughly to his feet. “Come inside if you're feeling puny—a ration of who-shot-John will brace you.”

Doctor Booger was right—a pony glass of whiskey did indeed perk up Fargo although his head still throbbed like a war drum. He sat at the trestle table, the rest crowding around him.

“Why, his eyebrows are singed!” Trixie said. “What happened out there, Skye?”

Fargo related what little he could about the powder cask.

“Perhaps a chunk of the wood did that to your head,” Ashton surmised. “It was good work, Fargo. You saved the rest of us.”

“No,” Fargo corrected him, his eyes cutting to the actress. “I saved the men sleeping in the hallway at the front of the house. That powder charge was deliberately placed to spare anyone at the rear of the house—such as you, Miss Barton.”

“I do not take your meaning, Mr. Fargo.”

“Then I'll chew it a little finer—it was meant to kill me, your bodyguard, but keep you alive—until June nineteenth.”

Fargo let silence underscore his point. Now she did take his meaning and the strength deserted her legs. She fell into one of the chairs.

Ashton watched her closely. “Notice how the lily chases the rose from the cheeks of our proud beauty.”

She glanced at him sharply. “That's one of my lines from the romantic play
Fair
Is
the
Rose
. I've noticed you are a cultured man, Mr. Ashton, but I wouldn't take you for an enthusiast of ladies' romances.”

He bowed slightly. “Like the bee, I sample many flowers.”

Interesting, Fargo thought. For a moment he recalled an image from his dream: a silver concho belt that turned into a snake with bloody fangs.

Kathleen aimed her bewitching eyes at the Trailsman again. “You mean, of course, Zack Lomax?”

“The very man, wouldn't you agree?”

After a few heartbeats she nodded. “My agent was right after all. And I dismissed that letter as hollow melodrama.”

“We were both dunderheads, lass,” Booger said in a rare admission of guilt. “I called long-shanks here a nervous old woman for fretting constantly about danger. Now I see he is right, and this run will be no trip to Santa's lap.”

“I understand your point about Fate,” Kathleen said contritely. “Fate placed that powder keg outside the door—the cards you were dealt. But you ‘played your hand' skillfully and saved many lives.”

“Not Fate, Miss Barton,” the preacher cut in, clutching his Bible in both hands and raising it for emphasis. “That is merely a roll of the dice. It is God's will that determines each man's destiny.”

“Pious piffle,” the astrological doctor protested. “Our destiny is determined by the alignment of stars and planets.”

Booger brought one fist down on the table so hard that the whiskey bottle leaped two inches into the air. “Faugh!
Both
you chowderheads can chuck the gasworks and loop your buttons! It's almost sunrise and that swift wagon rolls with or without you weak sisters.”

“But, Booger,” Trixie protested. “Skye needs to rest. He—”

“He needs my boot up his hinder, is all. I promised to get him killed, and by the Lord Harry I will! He's damn lucky he wasn't bucked out while he was doing the deed outside with this hot little senyoreeter.”

Socorro flushed and hurried out of the room. Raul threw his hands up toward the ceiling.
“Ay, dios!”
Booger watched Kathleen Barton stare at Fargo and grinned with pure malice.

“Well, that didn't take you long, did it?” she said snidely. “My noble bodyguard.”

She returned to her room. Fargo stared at Booger. Abruptly, the two men burst out laughing like schoolboys.

“Scandalous,” the horse-faced preacher said.

“If you say so, Rev,” Ashton remarked. “As for me, I admire and envy Fargo for the conquest.”

“Of course you do, slyboots,” Booger said, narrowing his eyes. “You admire Fargo to death, eh?”