Utah Deadly Double (9781101558867) (12 page)

The Henry bucked into his shoulder when he nicked a pony's pastern, spooking the mount into throwing his rider. When another crazy-brave Ute rushed him, Fargo drilled his right shoulder and spun him onto the ground.

“Let's get thrashing back there!” he shouted to Old Billy. “These ain't licorice drops they're throwing at us, and I can't keep winging them much longer. They push any closer, I'll have to kiss the mistress.”

“Keep your pants on,” Old Billy shot back, but when Fargo glanced over his shoulder he saw that the Indian fighter wasn't following his own advice—he had stripped buck naked and was now applying charcoal to his face—black, the color for celebrating the death of an enemy.

“You goddamn fool!” Fargo snapped. “Has your brain fried in this sun?”

He fired several more rounds, starting to ratchet up from nervous to desperate. When he glanced back Old Billy had risen to his feet—and Fargo was shocked sick and silly, his jaw dropping open. For a full ten seconds, despite the rounds parting his hair, he was speechless. He didn't know whether to laugh or puke—or both.

“How you like him?” Billy demanded as he strutted forward. “It's made of that India rubber—had her special-made in St. Louis.”

Fargo had seen sights, during his wide travels, to make kings and queens marvel. He had seen streams in the Black Hills that actually ran uphill; grizzly bears so huge they could knock down a full-grown tree; prairie-dog towns in Texas that covered six hundred square miles; and buffalo herds so massive they took a full day to pass him. But
this
. . . it had no equal in his experience.

Old Billy's pale white body now sported a giant cod—huge in diameter, trailing almost to the ground, and quite realistic. It was trussed over his real sex with a flesh-colored band. To get the Utes' attention, Old Billy gyrated his hips and made the huge organ swing around like a tassel. As one, the braves stopped firing, stunned just like Fargo.

But Old Billy Williams wasn't content to shock them. He now pranced forward like a drunken madman, screaming Scripture.

“ ‘Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils!' ” he roared out.

Christ, they're going to shoot him
, Fargo thought.
Hell, I might beat them to it.

Old Billy gyrated his hips again, swinging the massive member as he hopped and pranced even closer. “ ‘Ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table and of the table of devils!' ”

Fargo braced for the volley of shots, but it never came. Instead, Spotted Pony unleashed a shrill cry and the entire group whirled their ponies around, racing toward the north at a two twenty clip.

Old Billy swaggered back toward the sand wallows. “This ain't no dick,” he declared proudly. “It's a Richard.”

“
Sir
Richard,” Fargo allowed, although he averted his eyes in disgust as he pushed to his feet.

“How's that for wit and wile?” Old Billy taunted him as he pulled Richard off and started dressing.

“It likely saved our lives,” Fargo said, “but, William, you are one strange and sick son of a bitch.”

Old Billy tossed back his head and howled like a wolf. “Hell yes I am! Always been, always be. But can any man say Billy Williams don't know his redskins?”

“Not around me,” Fargo said. “Not that I ever doubted it.”

Old Billy winked at Fargo. “I heard a couple sporting gals in Santa Fe talking you up, saying how you was ‘well-endowed.' Don't looking at Richard make you feel a mite humble?”

Fargo grinned. “He does tend to give a man a puny feeling.”

When he saddled his horse, Fargo sent a slanting glance toward Old Billy as he stuffed his giant rubber cod into a saddlebag.

“Old son,” Fargo said quietly, “I don't mind if I die now for I have
truly
seen the elephant.”

Deets Gramlich sat stunned in his saddle, still holding his telescope. He had acted in some wildly ribald skits in low theaters and barrelhouses from Manhattan to San Francisco. But what he had just witnessed was unsurpassed in his wide experience. He had been certain that Fargo and his partner were gone-up cases. Until . . . holy Jesus, until . . .

He suddenly burst into paroxysms of laughter that forced him to grip the horn. K.T. Christ! Those Indians had howled like dogs in the hot moons and fled quicker than scat. It wasn't just Fargo—this Old Billy Williams was savvy and cunning. Deets resolved yet again to exercise extreme caution. Otherwise he'd soon be playing checkers with the devil.

He sat his horse in the only concealed spot in sight, a narrow, shadowed declivity in the base of a mesa. Fargo and Williams were perhaps a mile north of his position, now bearing west toward Salt Lake City. This next attack, he mused, would have to be done with great precision and care. And this time he must toss a loop around Fargo, because Deets wanted nothing to do with the Great Salt Desert. His trail skills were top-notch, especially for a former thespian, but a trek across the Great Salt in search of suitable victims would be like searching for dictionaries in an Indian camp.

He turned the problem of Skye Fargo back and forth for a while. It disturbed his actor's vanity that Louise Tipton had doubted he was Fargo. By now Deets had come to believe that he
was
Fargo—believe it and like it. Before he had turned Fargo into a pariah, and it was safe to leave his Fargo disguise on, the power and pleasure had thrummed in his blood.

Beautiful women like Ginny Kreeger had sent him comehither glances; capable frontiersmen jostled to buy him drinks. A man could get to like being Skye Fargo, all right.

Deets thought about that cretin Butch Landry and his two mangy sidekicks. So long as they kept doling out the gold cartwheels, he would do their bidding—Judge Moneybag ruled all his decisions. But their dream of seeing Fargo bouncing along in a tumbleweed wagon, on his way to a Mormon prison, would never pan out if Deets could grab the reins. If not, and Fargo did end up facing the gallows, at least there was the payoff.

Either way, Deets reminded himself as he sank steel into the ribs of his stallion, Skye Fargo was in one world of shit.

 

“I expected the grain to hold out longer,” Fargo said as he and Old Billy broke camp on the fourth day after riding out from Fort Bridger. “Look at our mounts grazing saltbush.”

“Them's tough horses,” Old Billy reminded him. “Neither one of us coddles our mounts like them green-antlered fools who gives their horses names and feeds 'em sugar from their hands. Sugar—to a goddamn horse! I ain't had no sugar since Christ was a corporal.”

“You damn piker, you won't lay out a few Bungtown coppers to buy a sack, that's all.”

“Set it to music, why don'tcha? The hell you do with
your
money, bank it? Hell no! You piss it away on whiskey, whores, gambling, them fancy eating-houses where a Longhorn steak costs four bits. That time we run into each other in New Orleans, you had a hunnert dollars in your pocket. When I seen you two days later, you had to let a whore buy your breakfast.”

Fargo grinned, shaking his head. “Old son, you're a caution to screech owls. You strap on a rubber pecker the size of a sequoia, prance around like a man from Bedlam, then lecture me on my wanton ways.”

Old Billy joined the laughter. “Wa'n that the shits? Them damn Utes won't have the gumption to top their squaws for at least a moon.”

“Anyhow,” Fargo said, “that was yesterday. I have to plot down a couple more line stations today, and there's no way we'll make Salt Lake City before tomorrow. My Ovaro can get by on tree bark, but there's none to be had.”

“Hell, my Appaloosa will eat tar-paper shingles,” Old Billy boasted. “'Course, ain't none of them, neither. But, say! You ever heard tell of Kellar's Station?”

Fargo mulled it. “Well, once I knew a Junebug Kellar back in the Nebraska Territory. Big, pear-shaped fellow bald as a cue ball. He ran a ferry on the Niobrara.”

“Yeah, that's Kellar. They taxed him outta Nebraska and he started out for the Sierra goldfields. But his back started givin' him jip, so he opened up a little station on the freight road, mebbe five, six miles from here. You seen his daughter?”

“He spoke of a little girl,” Fargo replied. “I never saw her.”

Old Billy grinned wickedly. “She ain't no little girl no more. Got a set of catheads on her what could derail a train.”

Both men forked leather and gigged up their mounts.

“That's all real interesting,” Fargo said, for he had not spent enough time with the tempting Caroline Reed back in Echo Canyon and now he regretted it. “But does Junebug sell grain?”

“His station is poor shakes, f'sure. Just a little clapboard shebang with a plank bar—he even sells liquor to Injuns so they won't lift his hair. Ain't no feed stable, but I recollect he sells oats and parched corn.”

Fargo kept his head in constant motion, studying the bleak, parched terrain in the brassy morning sunlight.

“This could be a tricky piece of work,” Fargo pointed out. “There's usually men lounging around these places, and Junebug knows both of us. And he's likely heard all the lies about my rape-and-killing spree.”

Old Billy waved this aside. “Junebug won't credit the lies, not by a jugful. He knows how you saved all them orphans in the Dakota country.”

“Maybe, but if he recognizes me even without my whiskers, he'll likely greet me by name. And even if he doesn't recognize me, he'll greet you by name. By now everybody knows that Old Billy Williams is siding me.”

“You're a cheerful son of a bitch, Fargo,” Billy said sarcastically. “We oughter get you a plug hat and a hearse.”

“Just trying to wangle out of a bloodbath, old campaigner. I haven't killed a soul since we took on this leg of the route, and I'd like to keep it that way.”

Old Billy spat, again just missing the Ovaro's ear. “Why, you goddamn Quaker! Plenty of men require killing, and by God, I'm just the jasper to send 'em under.”

“When you put it that way,” Fargo replied, “I see the light. Hell, let's just chop wood and let the chips fall where they may.”

“
Now
you're whistling! That first note you found called you death's second self.”

That first note . . . now there, Fargo thought, was one pig's afterbirth who definitely required killing. But could he be stopped before it was too late? Fargo had confidence in his ability to square off against any man. But how could he cut sign on a man who lived in the shadows—or draw down on a man who was only
odjib
, a thing of smoke?

Once a man mates with despair, he's worthless
. An old mountain man had told Fargo that many years ago, and the Trailsman had rallied himself many times with those words. But this evil preying on him now was different. A soulless coward was turning Fargo against himself, turning a roughhewn but decent frontiersman into a despicable pariah in the eyes of the world.

“Keep up the strut,” he muttered. “Straight ahead.”

“What's that?” Old Billy demanded. “Speak out like a man or go braid your pigtails.”

“I said, I think I'll find out where you hide your money and steal it.”

Even Old Billy's purple birthmark turned pale. In a flash he drew his fancy Brasher of London six-gun.

“Long Shanks, don't you
even
joke about my money. You ever touch it, I'll kill you deader than last Christmas.”

Five seconds of silence except for the
ching
ing bit rings. Then both men broke into raucous laughter.

“Kellar's Station dead ahead,” Old Billy said a minute later. “Knock that riding thong off your hammer, Quaker, and let's commence to killing.”

 

Across the dust-hazed sage, shimmering like a heat mirage in the metallic sun, Fargo spotted a typical frontier shebang leaning under the weight of shoddy construction and too much wind. Jagged pieces of flock board had been cobbled together to make walls, and a stovepipe chimney rose through a roof of flattened vegetable cans. Fargo counted four horses at the mesquite tie-rail out front.

Old Billy spat a brown streamer, this one so close to the Ovaro's right ear that the stallion whinnied in warning.

“You'll regret that reckless spitting,” Fargo assured him. “That pinto is mighty touchy about his ears.”

“The hell! He's fine horseflesh, but the
rider
is the master. Consarn you, Fargo, flush out your headpiece. Ain't no mother-ruttin' horse lays down the law to Old Billy Williams.”

Fargo bit his lip to keep a straight face. “All right, then. I've brought it up twice and I won't harp on it anymore.”

“Huh. You just watch me—
you
might have this animal lipping salt from your hand, but by God he'll dance when I pipe.”

“Four horses tied off ahead,” Fargo remarked. “Let's reconnoiter soon as we go inside just in case they're hungry for a frolic. I like to know what kind of artillery might open up on me.”

Old Billy grinned. “Say! Why don't we just go in a-smokin' like we done in that cantina in El Paso? Brother, them Mexican slavers didn't know whether to piss or go blind. Lead was flying ever which-way before you even slapped the batwings.”

Fargo laughed at the memory. “Yeah, and you singing ‘
La Paloma
' in Spanish. But this is different—we might kill Junebug or his girl. And from what you said about her tits—”

Fargo stopped in midsentence, watching four heavily armed men who had just emerged into the glaring sun. They stood only twenty yards away, rifles and scatterguns trained on the new arrivals.