Nest of Vipers (9781101613283)

by Sherman, Jory

  “‘The shooter left the premises before police arrived. Before he left, he told the observers that the two dead men were horse thieves and murderers. Calvin Bostwick, one of the bartenders, said that the killer came in earlier with another man and ordered one beer. The other man left before the shooting occurred.

  “‘When contacted by a reporter, Mr. Harry Pendergast of the Denver Detective Agency revealed that he was working on a case of horse stealing, but that he did not know who might have killed the two men.

  “‘Police are baffled and promise a further investigation into the incident.’”

  “Is that it?” Wilbur said.

  “There’s a drawing of a man with a six-gun shooting at two armed men. Smoke is coming out of the barrel, and the two men are clutching their chests,” Brad said.

  “Let me see,” Julio said.

  Brad handed the tabloid-sized newspaper to Julio. Julio looked at the picture, then handed it to Wilbur, who read the account again.

  Brad finished his coffee. On his plate there were smears of yellow and white from the eggs he had eaten, a portion of rind off a slice of ham, and granules of grits.

  “I’ve got a lot to do,” he said. “I’ll need you boys to pack some of the items I need. Then we’re off to Wild Horse Valley.”

  “What ’bout Curly Jimson?” Wilbur asked.

  “I expect he’ll turn up sooner or later,” Brad said. “Likely he’s wearin’ out leather on his way to Cheyenne about now.”

  “Did you really tell everybody that those two men you shot were horse thieves?” Wil asked.

  “And murderers,” Brad said. “Yes, I yelled it loud and clear just before I hightailed it out of there.”

  “Man, I’d liked to have seen that.”

  A few minutes later they were saddling their horses at the livery stable. They rode out into bright sunlight to a Larimer Street humming with activity. Brad led the way and gazed at the shops as they passed. He stopped first at a cabinet maker’s.

  Inside, they heard the sound of hammering. There was a bell on one of the counters. Displayed on shelves and around the floor were bookcases, small tables, chairs, cabinets, boxes, and various other items made out of wood.

  Brad lifted the bell and jiggled it.

  The hammering stopped and a man came out of the door leading to a workshop.

  “Good morning,” the man said. “Need something?”

  The man was wearing overalls and a striped railroad cap with a pair of goggles strapped around the crown. His work boots were flecked with sawdust.

  “I need a box,” Brad said. “A special box, about so big.”

  He held his arms wide to show the length of the box.

  “Special, eh? Well, I’m your man. Name’s Hank Chinaski.”

  “Brad Storm.”

  “What kind of special box?” he asked as he brushed a strand of gray hair from in front of one lens of his horn-rimmed spectacles.

  “I want a spring door that will snap shut after it’s opened. I want you to drill the nail holes so that I can pack it flat, and a supply of nails so I can nail it together later.”

  “That won’t be hard,” Chinaski said. “What kind of handle or latch do you want on the door?”

  “I think a round handle, one I can put a rope or strand of twine through to pull it open.”

  “One door at the front end?”

  “Yes,” Brad said as Wilbur and Julio looked at all the various wares in the store.

  “Take me about an hour. I’ll have the cabinet together so you can test the door and then I’ll pull the nails so you can pack it flat.”

  “You can make the box out of the lightest material,” Brad said.

  “Pine is what I’d use,” Hank said.

  “All right. How much?”

  “Oh, five dollars ought to do it. You can pay me when you pick it up.”

  Hank and Brad shook hands.

  “See you in about an hour,” Chinaski said.

  Brad nodded. He and his companions left the store.

  “Now where?” Wil asked.

  “A hardware store.”

  “You’re very mysterious, Brad,” Wil said.

  Julio laughed.

  At the hardware store, Brad purchased a roll of extra heavy twine, a hammer, and a box of twenty-penny nails.

  “That all?” Wil asked when they had packed the hardware items in their saddlebags.

  “Next to a feed store,” Brad said, and they found one on Curtis Street.

  “You can wait out here, boys,” Brad said. “I won’t be long.”

  There were wagons and drays parked at the loading dock out front and steps leading up to the warehouse. There was a strong smell of various feeds and dust motes. Brad could smell corn, wheat, rye, sorghum, and hay when he entered the gloomy depths of the store. There was a counter at the back, and it was laden with scales and knives, rolls of twine and, on the shelves, stacks of flour and feed bags.

  There, he bought four heavy burlap bags. He paid for them without answering any questions from the curious clerk, a young man with rust-red hair and a bandanna around his neck that he slipped up over his nose to keep from breathing the dust in the store.

  Brad handed the bags to Julio.

  “Stick these in your saddlebags,” he said.

  Julio put two sacks in one bag, and one in the other.

  “Now, where?” Wil asked.

  “Grocery store,” Brad said.

  At a grocery Brad bought dried beef jerky, cans of apricots, dried prunes and pears, bread, hardtack, ham, coffee, a small bag of salt, and some sugar.

  They divided up the foodstuffs and packed the items in their saddlebags.

  They rode back to Chinaski’s Woodworks and went inside.

  Hank had the box on a counter.

  Brad could smell the scent of pinewood and there was a black ring screwed into the door. The heavy spring hinges looked brand-new.

  “Try it,” Hank said.

  Brad pulled on the ring. The door opened wide. He looked inside and then released the ring. The door slammed shut so fast, he jumped back. The door made a loud sound.

  “Perfect,” Brad said.

  “I left the heads of the nails out a little, so I’ll just pull ’em for you,” Chinaski said.

  When he was finished, the box folded up flat and was not too heavy.

  “Need something to hold it together?” Chinaski asked.

  “We’ll pack the pieces under our bedrolls,” Brad said.

  “Where you going with it? Going to catch rabbits or birds?” Chinaski asked.

  “Snakes,” Brad said and paid the carpenter five dollars.

  They divided up the box panels and secured them under their bedrolls.

  “Tighten them down good,” Brad said.

  “Snakes?” Wilbur said as they rode out of Denver and headed toward Lookout Mountain.

  “First, we have to catch ’em,” Brad said.

  Wilbur’s facial features twisted as he grimaced. His mouth opened as if to protest.

  “Don’t say a word, Wil,” Brad said. “I’m not going to explain until the time comes.”

  “What kind of snakes?” Wilbur asked after a few minutes.

  “Rattlers,” Brad said.

  And they rode on, leaving Denver behind them and heading toward the mountains as if they were on a Sunday ride or a picnic in the country.

  Brad fingered the swatch of blue cloth in his pocket and thought about Felicity. He could feel her in the crisp air, in the scent of wildflowers and the columbines.

  She was gone, but she was never far away.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Dan Jimson was boiling mad when he rode out of Denver before dawn the morning after his friends had been killed. He had brooded all night in a cheap ho
tel on Curtis Street. It had not taken long for his blind anger to develop into a towering rage. And with that rage came a feral cunning as he thought about how he might kill the object of his rage, the Sidewinder.

  During the long night in the Curtis Hotel, Curly had worked out a way to kill the Sidewinder and get away with it. Curly had heard that the day before, Gene had visited his brother Jack in the Denver jail. Word had gotten around about his imprisonment. It had been an interesting meeting.

  “Jack was captured up in Wild Horse Valley,” Gene had told him and Canby. “It was Brad Storm, the man they call the Sidewinder, and two other men, Joe Blaine, and a Mex named Julio. Blaine hauled Jack down here to Denver and filed charges against him. Jack overheard this Blaine feller sayin’ he was meetin’ up with Storm somewhere up in the mountains.”

  There was that, Curly thought, and something else. The night before, when he had fled from Guy’s, he had seen a familiar face when he mounted his horse. Two familiar faces, in fact. One was the Mex, the one named Julio, who had been with Storm at their first encounter up in Arapaho Gulch, and Wilbur Campbell, who had been working with Jack Trask up in Wild Horse Valley.

  It took Curly a while to figure it out, but now he was certain that Storm was going to return to Wild Horse Valley. It made sense. He had been hired, evidently, to track down the men involved in stealing horses, and he probably meant to return the stolen horses to their rightful owners.

  Yes, it all made sense. When Blaine said he was meeting up with Storm in the mountains, that could only mean one thing. Storm and the other detectives were going back to the valley. And they had Wil Campbell with them. He had seen him plain as day outside Guy’s Saloon.

  Curly was sure, pretty sure, that Storm was still in Denver. If he could reach Wild Horse Valley before Storm returned, he would have time to scout the valley and pick a perfect spot to pick Storm off when he returned. Maybe, he thought, he could get all three detectives and then Jordan Killdeer would still be in business. There were a lot of horses still up there, money on the hoof. Jordan might even put a little sugar in his pay and give him a bonus for killing three private detectives.

  Curly was satisfied that it was a good plan. He rode in the predawn darkness, headed for the foothills. By his reckoning, he should be in Wild Horse Valley before nightfall.

  Then all he had to do was find a good place to hide, probably above the bluffs, and wait for Storm and the others to return.

  He’d like to kill that traitor, Wil Campbell, too, while he was at it.

  The valley was big, and if the men he sought to shoot were scattered, he might be able to take all four of them out with his lever-action Winchester. He could picture it in his mind. Four shots. Four men. No more investigations. No more detectives.

  But most of all, he wanted to kill Brad Storm. He hated him as he had hated few men before now. Storm had killed three of his friends, and that made him a permanent enemy. Permanent until he died from a bullet.

  Curly made good time, following game trails he knew well. He arrived at the tabletop above Wild Horse Valley late that same afternoon. He circled past the road leading down into the valley and picked his way through the timber above the bluffs. He could hear the horses neighing and snorting down below. The jays squawked at his intrusion, and chipmunks piped their warnings, but otherwise he had the escarpment to himself.

  He found a place well beyond the rim and ground-tied his horse to some alder bushes. He slipped his rifle from its scabbard, just in case, and retrieved a pair of binoculars from his saddlebag. He walked to a spot near the top of the bluffs, then crawled the rest of the way until he came to the rim. There, he looked down into the valley. He saw all the horses, including the pintos that were left there long ago by Indians. Some of them had foals they had dropped in the early spring. They cavorted and gamboled through the tall grass.

  He raised the binoculars to his eyes and scanned up and down the long valley. He saw no humans and grunted with satisfaction. He also gazed at the road and saw no sign of anyone. No recent horse tracks.

  Satisfied, he scooted back away from the rim and stood up, the binoculars dangling from a strap around his neck. He walked back to where he had tied his horse and put the rifle back into the leather sheath. Then he returned to the edge of the timber and walked the length of the bluff and back to the edge nearest the road.

  He stepped a few paces from the rim and determined that he could sit on his horse and look down into the valley and see anyone who rode there. He could not see the lean-tos or the wagons or the tack hut from anywhere atop the bluff. But he could see almost all of the entire valley. He recognized some of the horses he, Canby, and Avery had stolen, including those he knew had belonged to Brad Storm.

  All he had to do now, he thought, was wait. Sooner or later, Storm would return, along with the Mexican and that traitor, Wilbur.

  He would be ready for them.

  Curly walked back to where his horse was tied and walked him closer to the rimrock. He saw wolf tracks and cougar tracks in the soft soil, plus some rabbit and squirrel, bird tracks, and one that looked as if it had been made by a crawling snake.

  He tied his horse in a copse of pines where there was enough grass. He took off his hat and poured water from his canteen and held the hat up to the horse’s nose. The horse dipped into the water and snuffled as it drank.

  “That ought to hold you, boy,” he said in a low voice.

  He left the horse saddled, took out his rifle again and checked it. He jacked a fresh cartridge into the firing chamber and left the hammer on half cock. He walked through the timber and found a game trail leading away from the bluff. Beyond were more hills and beyond them, the high country.

  That, he decided, would be his escape path after he had shot Storm and maybe the three other men that might be with him. If he couldn’t kill them all, he’d have to get out of there in a hurry, before they chased him down.

  He leaned the rifle against a pine when he got back to where his horse was tethered. He sat down at the base of another tree and listened to the sound of birds and the nicker of the horses down in the valley.

  He had grub and his bedroll, and he set those out before dusk.

  In the morning, he would take another look down into the valley. If necessary, he would wait a week or more to catch sight of Brad Storm.

  The thought of killing the Sidewinder warmed his innards, and he dozed with his daydreams until the shadows began to stretch like shadowy fingers across the rimrock. The sun was setting and he buttoned up his jacket and loosened his pistol in its holster.

  “Come on, you bastard,” he whispered to himself. “I’m ready for you, Sidewinder.”

  Gradually, the shadows filled up the bare spots among the trees. Curly buttoned up his jacket and laid out his bedroll between two spruce trees and opened a sack with a sandwich. He got his canteen and sat down again. He looked up at the sky and watched the clouds change colors until they finally turned ashen in the twilight.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Joe Blaine had been camped up in the timber bordering the tabletop and road for three days. He had built a crude lean-to in case it rained. It was well away from the road. He had brought some magazines and books to read since he had no idea when Brad would return. Each day, he moved his horse to another location near his makeshift hut and walked the fringe of the timber, stopping often to listen for the sound of hoofbeats or the voices of men.

  Harry had been pleased when he brought Jack Trask in and told him of the witnesses they had located at the mining and logging camps. He had helped Blaine when he made his depositions and the charge against Jack Trask. Now, Trask was in jail and they had all those horses as evidence along with Felicity’s horse, Rose, whose brand plainly showed that it had been altered.

  He had also met with Cliff Jameson and reported on the progress against the ring of horse thieves. He did not tell Cliff that they
had located a large number of the stolen horses. If he had, he was sure that Cliff would get together with the other breeders and ride up to Wild Horse Valley to retrieve their stock. Cliff was happy about the arrest of Jack Trask but demanded that all the others in the ring be arrested and brought to trial.

  Joe was careful not to mention any names, including that of Jordan Killdeer. The anger among the breeders had risen to such a pitch that Joe was sure that they would all turn into vigilantes and hunt down the thieves and hang them on the spot. So he had walked a tightrope with Jameson who kept trying to pry information out of him. All Joe said, “We’re very close to solving this case, Cliff. You just have to be a little more patient.”

  Now, as the sun was setting, Joe braced himself for another night alone in his lean-to. Just before dusk, he lit a lantern and set it firmly in the ground outside his shelter. Then he took a candle, like the ones he had used every night, walked to the road, and lit it. He set it between two rocks that he had used before. From these two rocks, he had constructed an arrow of other, smaller rocks, that pointed to his shelter.

  If Brad and Julio rode up to the road, they would see the lit candle and the arrow.

  He chewed on some dried beef and a piece of moldy hardtack and downed the meager meal with water from his canteen. He could hear the neighing of the horses down in the valley, the howls of a timber wolf, and the yapping yodel of a coyote every night before he went to sleep. One night he saw a herd of elk pass nearby on their trek to the high country, and a few times, he had seen mule deer come near his lean-to and stare at him out of curiosity.

  And the night before, Joe had killed a pygmy rattler with the butt of his rifle. It had crawled onto his bedroll for warmth, never given him a warning rattle. He was still shivery over that incident and resolved to check every inch of the shelter floor, his bedroll, and his saddle blanket.

  He thought about building a fire. He had arranged stones in a circle around a pit for just such an act, but decided against it for the third night in a row. The candle was enough of an indication where he was camped, and the lantern gave off a little heat. It was not that cold during the early evening hours. Toward morning it would get pretty nippy, but he had his blanket and his jacket.