Slocum and the Socorro Saloon Sirens (11 page)

“Ah, it was the fate, I think. We drive the wagon from Saint Louis and the dream was Oregon,
non
? So, the wagon, she break down here and we see how cheap to live and we buy the adobe and open the café. We see our countrymen pass through and they eat the food and we become very happy in this quiet place.”

“Your place is an oasis in this desert,” Linda said.

Pierre smiled. “
Merci, ma'amselle
,” he said. “You are very kind.”

When the small talk was finished, Pierre walked back inside. The waiter served the food and wine while Slocum and Linda gazed at each other between bites and sips.

“You asked Pierre how he and Giselle wound up in Socorro,” she said. “I'd like to know how it is that you are here at such a propitious time.”

“Propitious time?”

“Scroggs is up to no good. He's a mean tyrant and I know that he kidnapped that poor man, Jethro Swain, and fed him opium. He wants to find Obadiah's silver mine and hog it all for himself.”

“Jethro is why I'm here,” Slocum said, and told her the story of finding Penelope in need of help with her father.

“I like Penny. She seems a decent woman, and Jethro never harmed a soul here. But I was powerless to help him.”

“Maybe it was fate that brought me here, like Pierre said.”

“Do you believe in fate?” she asked.

Slocum shrugged. “I believe there are hidden reasons behind every turn in the road on the journey through life. It's not something I mull over too much, but when I look back, it seems there might have been unknown forces at work in my life.”

“I feel the same way,” she said. “I keep thinking that I have some purpose in life and that's why, when I saw the way women were treated out here in the West, I decided to do something about it.”

“And it seems to be working?”

“Slowly,” she said. “Very slowly. But I care about my girls and their lot in life. I call them girls, but of course, they are grown women. They just don't know how to stand up for themselves.”

Slocum reached in his pocket for a cheroot.

“Mind if I smoke?” he said.

“I'd like to try one of those,” she said. “I'll order us some brandy and we can let our meal digest.”

“The cheroot might be too strong for you,” he said. But he fished another cigar from his pocket and handed it to her.

“I'll risk it,” she said.

“Bite off the end and put the tip in the ashtray,” he said. “It will draw better.”

The waiter appeared as Slocum lit her cheroot.

“Bring us some cognac, will you?” she asked him as he began to clear their plates from the table and set them on a large pewter tray.

“But of course,” André said.

Linda choked on the smoke from the cheroot. Her eyes watered with tears and she gasped for a clean breath.

“My, it is a bit strong,” she said as she fanned the smoke away from her face.

“Don't pull the smoke into your lungs,” he said. “Just let it warm your mouth and then blow it out.”

She puffed on the cigar and then spewed a small cloud of smoke out. Some of it went up her nose and she made a face.

“Better?” he said.

“Much better, John.”

They sipped the cognac and smoked. Linda even inhaled some of the smoke and managed not to choke or cough.

“You're getting the hang of it,” Slocum said.

“I'll walk you to your rooming house,” she said as they finished their cognacs.

“Then you would have to walk home alone,” he said. “In the dark.”

“I'm not afraid, John. But I'm hoping you'll invite me into your room.”

A few patrons came and went inside the café. There was the clatter of dishes and silverware. Bats knifed the night sky, scooping up flying insects, their leathery wings beating the air in quiet whispers.

“You'd still have to walk home alone,” he said, testing the waters of her desire.

“Perhaps you will walk me home in the daylight,” she said, and her invitational tone was a silken purr, laden with promise.

“Gladly,” he said, and smiled.

She signed the check that André presented. “I didn't bring my purse,” she explained. “I will pay Pierre the next time I come in.”

“Thank you for supper,” Slocum said.

“It was my distinct pleasure, John.”

As they left the café, Slocum saw a shadowy figure across the street. A man flitted from one adobe building to another. Both Slocum and Linda saw the crouching, scuttling man. She stopped up short and Slocum's right hand floated downward to hover just above the butt of his pistol.

“That's strange,” Linda said. “We'd better be careful.”

“Get behind me,” he said. “Whoever that is, he's up to no good.”

“I know who it is,” she said as she moved behind Slocum.

“Who?” he whispered.

“Loomis,” she said. “Scroggs must have told him to follow us.”

“Why?” Slocum asked, but he knew why.

“You killed Thorson, and Scroggs wants you to pay.”

Slocum stepped into the shadows of another adobe, a closed shop that sold pottery and Indian blankets. He pressed Linda against the wall and drew his pistol.

“It's not me Loomis is after,” she whispered.

“Wait here,” he said. “I'm going after him. Maybe I can draw him out in the open.”

“John, he'll kill you. Loomis is a dead shot and he won't come out in the open to murder you.”

“Let's just see how bad the cat wants the mouse,” he said, and stepped into the center of the street. He began to walk where he had last seen Loomis. He held his pistol straight down at his side, his finger inside the trigger guard. He eased the hammer back, gently holding the trigger to muffle the sound of the action.

He saw a glint of starlight on metal between two buildings.

As he adjusted his eyes to the darkness and the dim light, he saw an arm move, and he thought he saw part of a man's leg sticking out.

He stopped and went into a semicrouch.

The arm moved and the reflected light surged along the barrel of a pistol.

The man was not coming out.

Slocum knew what he must do and he steeled himself to make the best of it. A few yards away, the jaws of death gaped open in the darkness. He could not see enough of Loomis to bring him down with a shot. There was only that arm and that leg, and the ugly snout of a pistol moving slowly to grab him in its sights.

Somehow, he thought, he must draw Loomis out in the open and still get the drop on him.

Slocum gritted his teeth and leaped from his crouch. He began to run on a parallel course to where Loomis was standing. Just as he started out, he heard the metallic snap of a pistol hammer as Loomis cocked his gun.

Perfect timing
, Slocum thought and started his run in a zigzag pattern down the center of the street.

Behind him, he heard Linda gasp, and it sounded like the panting of an animal in the stillness of the night.

Slocum knew that a man's vision changed during the night. If he was aiming a rifle or a pistol, the target would not be dead center in the gun sights. Instead, a shooter would have to aim higher or lower, depending upon distance and angle. He was counting on Loomis missing his first shot at a moving target and shooting either too high or too low.

His zigzag run would make him a harder target in the darkness.

Loomis cracked off a shot as soon as Slocum began his run.

There was a flash and a streak of orange fire that partially illuminated the shooter. The bullet whined as it caromed off a rock somewhere beyond Slocum.

Slocum fired at the flash as he headed toward it. He veered off after the pistol bucked and threw its lead. He heard it thunk into the dirt as he turned away. His boots thudded on the hard-packed dirt of the street and he crushed a wagon wheel rut into powder as Loomis fired off another shot. The lead whistled past him, a foot behind, and he heard it smack into an adobe storefront.

Slocum turned again and headed straight toward the ghostly cloud of smoke that rose above Loomis. He squeezed the trigger and felt the Colt come to life in his hand with its powerful explosion. A fiery lance spewed from the mouth of his pistol barrel, and the bullet hissed as it flew over three thousand feet per second.

Loomis stepped out from his hiding place. He held his pistol in two hands to steady his aim. But he swept the barrel over a running shadow, a black shadow that would not stand still. He cupped his left hand under his right, cradled his gun hand as he had practiced so many times firing at tin cans, paper targets, fence posts, and yucca trees. He spread his legs to steady himself and squinted his left eye as his right focused on the blade front sight and the running man who drew ever nearer, but dashed in a crooked line.

Slocum threw himself headlong into the dirt as Loomis squeezed off another shot. He heard the death whisper of the bullet as it passed above his head. He could not stop the thought that popped into his head, that if he had been standing, that lead pellet might have ripped into his balls, turning him into a gelding.

Slocum fired another shot at Loomis, then rolled to another position. He steadied the pistol barrel on Loomis, what he could see of him, and held his breath as he flexed his right index finger, depressing the trigger with a smooth gentle tug.

Loomis screamed as the first bullet tore a bloody chunk out of his left arm. He screamed again when Slocum's second bullet slammed into his gut with the force of a sixteen-pound iron maul, a sledgehammer blow that caved in his stomach and drove him backward a half foot. He felt the warm rush of blood as it flowed down his arm and out over his belt buckle. There was no pain at first, but his eyes blurred as he tried to strike back, to shoot the man lying facedown in the street, a puddle of ink on starlit dirt.

Slocum counted his shots. He had not reloaded after he shot Thorson, and he had fired three shots there in the street. Four cartridges. He had two left in the cylinder and one was under the hammer, lurking there like a demon of death, waiting for the hammer to strike its thin metal dome and explode it into being.

Loomis staggered out into the open, out of that space between hardened clay brick buildings. His legs wobbled and pain now seethed through to his brain like a fiery poison, a malevolent fluid that robbed him of his reflexes and his senses.

“Christ,” Loomis gasped and tried to aim a pistol that floated back and forth in front of his eyes like something possessed of its own erratic will.

Slocum watched as Loomis lurched toward him. His jaw line hardened into steel and his eyes narrowed as he held the pistol steady, braced by his bipodal elbows. He aimed for a point in the middle of Loomis's chest and fired the Colt. Just a gentle steady squeeze. That was all that it took and the projectile was on its way, faster than the speed of sound, a whistling death that traveled faster than a thought.

Smack
, the bullet crashed through Loomis's fragile breastplate, turning bone into splinters, ripping through an artery and gouging out a chunk of heart muscle, chewing it to a bloody pulp as it surged past, nipping off a portion of spine before blowing a hole the size of a man's folded fist in the center of Loomis's back.

His voice was gone, and in that last split second of consciousness, Loomis felt the light in his brain being snuffed out like a candle in a high wind. The light diminished to a pinpoint and then there was only blackness and a bottomless pit that was darker than the darkest night, deeper than the universe itself, and all feeling was gone. He toppled forward, a lifeless bag of useless bones and mortifying flesh. His body struck the ground with a thud, and his pistol twisted from his hand at a crazy angle.

There was the smell of burnt powder and wisps of smoke afloat like a fleeting mist that became part of the air, part of the night. Slocum's ears reverberated with the sounds of explosions and made him temporarily deaf. He got to his feet, with one bullet left in its cylinder, and walked over to Loomis's corpse. He towered above it as he pushed the slide and swung the cylinder out like a gate. He pushed the ramrod as he turned it from one click to another and each empty hull fell to the ground and made a brassy
tink
in the dirt.

He pushed fresh cartridges into the empty sleeves until his pistol's round magazine was full, then snapped the cylinder back into its niche between the barrel and the slot where the hammer fell. He looked around and listened.

Was there another shooter? Had Loomis been the only man sent to kill him?

He stepped away and melted into the shadows where Loomis had stood in ambush, that place of concealment that now felt like the hollowed-out earth of an open grave.

Curious people began to step onto the street on both sides of where he stood. Patrons from Chez Soleil cautiously stood in front of the café and peered up the street.

Slocum brushed the dirt off the front of his clothes and stepped out. He headed for where he had left Linda. He found her leaning in an empty doorway.

“Did you kill him?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“It was Loomis, wasn't it?”

“Yes.”

“I never did like that little toady,” she said. “You know he won't quit. He'll send Morgan Sombra after you, and Gustav Adler, another gunman in Willie's employ. Gustav is pure mean and Sombra is as snaky as they come.”

“Obadiah told me about Adler and I've met Sombra.”

“John, let's get out of here,” she said. “Do you have something to drink in your saddlebags?”