by Jake Logan
“You don’t deny they tried?”
“Why, if you say they did, it must be so. You are an impudent man, one willing to gaze at a poor young girl’s bare body as she bathes, but a liar? I don’t think so.”
“I might be mistaken.”
“That’s not likely either. No, you are undoubtedly right they tried to burn you out. You might retaliate by burning down my pa’s barn. That would send the proper message that you’re not to be trifled with.”
“I had something else in mind.”
“Oh, killing them. You are both truthful and direct. How refreshing.”
Slocum’s hand flew to his six-shooter when he heard horses approaching. A second later came the call, “Marta, you up here?”
“My brothers. They are so protective of me.” She stood, turned in a full circle so Slocum got a good look at every part of her naked body, then she screamed.
“Marta, we’re a’comin’!”
She faced Slocum, smiled, shrugged her shapely shoulders, and mouthed, “Sorry.”
Slocum slid off the rock and headed back into the aspen stand when a bullet ripped past his head. He ducked, dodged to the left, and put a few trees between him and the approaching brothers. They slung lead in his direction, but all Slocum could think of was the woman’s name.
Marta. Marta Deutsch.
7
“He went that way, Lucas. Be careful now. He’s got a gun!” Marta Deutsch tried to cover her nakedness and at the same time point. The way she waved her hand around in the air was more distracting than informative.
Slocum had to smile at the warning. The woman said nothing that shouldn’t have been obvious. If the Deutsch brothers stopped to ask their sister what she was doing up in the pool, letting a stranger ogle her, that would slow them down a mite. Not much, but enough.
He cut back and went directly to where he had left his Appaloosa. The horse gave him an angry look. He patted the animal’s neck, then vaulted into the saddle. He landed hard and jolted the burned side of his torso enough to remind him why he had come out there.
The men he had come to settle the score with rode after him. Slocum eased his horse around and resisted the urge to gallop off. That would have the two men on his trail in nothing flat. Instead, he moved as quietly through the forest as he could, looking for a spot to ambush the pair. The sparse copse provided little cover, forcing Slocum to ride farther upstream than he’d intended. If he crossed the stream, he could follow the Deutsch brothers’ back trail.
“There he is! I kin git him, Lucas!”
Timothy Deutsch opened fire. Slocum fought to keep his horse from rearing. The bullets tore through the forest so far away from him that he knew the men only sought to flush him out if he had hidden. He kept riding until he came to the muddy stream bank and looked downstream. The woman was stretched out on a large rock, sunning herself dry as she had told him she would. She propped herself up on one elbow and waved.
Slocum tipped his hat, waiting to see if she alerted her brothers. This time she only sank back to the warm rock. She had made certain they never blamed her for not giving the warning. If they lost Slocum in the woods, that was their problem.
As he rode down the sloping trail, cutting back and forth to the meadow below, he wondered what might have happened if Lucas and Timothy hadn’t ridden up when they did. Somehow, that idea bothered him. The woman was beautiful, alluring, and obviously not in the least bit modest. She might have paddled over to him and invited him join her in the pool.
What bothered him the most was Annabelle Harris. He felt he owed her something for not saving her brother, yet what more could he have done? He had not asked to be given the Black Hole. Signing it over to Annabelle would take little more than the stroke of a pen. Dr. Zamora could witness the exchange, as he had the one from Tom to him. But what more did Slocum feel for the woman?
He had had his share of women, but none appealed to him the way Annabelle did. She was feisty and took no guff off him or anyone else. She was certainly pretty and as good in bed as any woman he had come across in years.
It bothered him that if he had gone further with the Deutsches’ sister in that pool, he would have been cheating on Annabelle. He wasn’t married. But some bonds grew stronger than legal ones. Slocum thought on this as he rode across the X Bar X land, cutting close to the ranch house again.
He puzzled over Marta Deutsch’s easy recommendation for taking revenge on her brothers. Burn down the barn? The idea had come quickly to her, as if she would do that without a second thought. Or had she only been baiting him? Her banter had shown she was an unusual woman. In her way she was as unique as Annabelle.
Slocum heard hooves pounding behind him. A quick look back showed a single rider coming after him as fast as his horse could gallop. Squinting, shielding his eyes, Slocum saw that Timothy Deutsch was pushing his horse to the limits of its endurance. As hard as he rode now, the horse would die under him within a mile. The man’s bulk taxed any saddle horse.
Rather than trying to elude him, Slocum sat and watched. Because of his size, Deutsch ought to be astride a Morgan or a Clydesdale instead of a quarter horse. Neither of those draft horses showed the speed a quarter horse did, but neither would they flag and begin to stumble. Foolishly, Deutsch kept whipping the horse with the ends of the reins.
“I’ll skin you alive! You’re gonna pay!” The words carried across the meadow.
Slocum remained silent and stationary. He began counting backward from ten and found a small satisfaction in reaching two when Timothy Deutsch’s horse died under him. The man flew over the horse’s sagging head, and he landed flat on his back. The horse stumbled a few strides more and keeled over.
Killing Deutsch would be easy enough. All he had to do was ride over to the supine man and put a round or two into his bulging gut. Slocum rode off, whistling the same song Deutsch’s sister had as she bathed. Some of her needling had infected him. Tormenting the brothers before seeking justice appealed to him.
But all the way back to Taos, he wondered how his life would have been different if he had joined Marta in the pool.
• • •
He rode into Taos just as the sun’s daily death turned the land freezing cold. A wind whipped through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and sent shivers up and down his spine. Slocum dismounted in front of the Black Hole Saloon and went inside. The heavy smoke had thinned because of the doors being open and the wind blowing through. For a moment he only stood and stared.
Annabelle called out, “You came back. What a surprise. Are you going to make yourself useful or do you think standing there isn’t scaring off customers?”
He grinned. It was good seeing her again. It felt as if he had come home, and that thought was both comforting and frightening.
“Did a scout out west.”
“I figured you were after the owlhoots who tried to torch the place. You should leave that to the law.”
“The marshal won’t go that far,” Slocum said. He reached behind the bar and drew himself a beer. Annabelle looked disapproving, but he drank it anyway to cut the trail dust.
“Heard tell there’s a federal deputy marshal on his way.”
“Making a circuit or is he setting up an office here?”
“Nobody knows. Nobody knows for sure if it’s even true, but rumors have a way of growing.”
He bent closer and said to her, “I tangled with the Deutsches. They shot at me a few times but missed.”
“And what did you do to them?”
Slocum started to reply, but the words tangled in his throat. The image of their sister naked in the pond discombobulated him for a moment.
“The big one, Timothy, chased me but his horse was too spindly and he was too big. He ran it into the ground. It took all my willpower not to go to where he was thrown and put a bullet in him.”
“Wh
y didn’t you? I would have—for trying to burn the place down.” Annabelle’s face flushed. “He was one that shot Tom, wasn’t he? You never said, but if you had horses from the X Bar X, who else could it have been? Him and Lucas and their pa killed my Tom. You should have filled him full of holes.”
“I want them to know retribution’s on the way before I do anything like that,” Slocum said.
“I don’t care. Putting them in a grave’s all I care about. They killed my brother.” She ground her teeth together, grabbed a damp rag, and started scrubbing invisible stains down the bar.
“Slocum?”
He turned to see a smallish man with a beer belly dangling over his gun belt. A five-pointed star was pinned on his coat.
“Marshal Donnelly,” Slocum greeted him. “You come to do something about the men that killed Tom Harris?”
“Done tole you that it ain’t none of my concern. I only worry about lawbreakin’ in the pueblo, not out on the road.”
“Miss Harris told me you’d say that.”
“She’s real purty, but she can be a pain in the ass with all her demands.”
“Demands?”
“She wants me to go arrest Rory Deutsch and his boys.”
“You’re not going to do it,” Slocum said flatly. “Why are you here?”
“To warn you off goin’ after them boys yourself, Slocum. Mr. Deutsch, he’s a real respected man in these parts. A rancher with a big herd.”
“Do tell,” Slocum said. He had seen scant evidence of cattle on the X Bar X. This time of year there ought to be a couple hundred head grazing up close to the ranch house and ten times that scattered through the mountain meadows.
“Real rich fellow.”
“Who can buy whatever he wants,” Slocum said.
“He—”
“He can even buy himself a town marshal, if he sees fit.”
The lawman got red in the face and puffed himself up. He still stood five inches shorter than Slocum’s six feet.
“Thass the kinda talk I came to warn you about. You can’t go spreadin’ falsehoods ’bout Mr. Deutsch.”
“Or his boys?”
“There’re back? They been gone a spell,” the marshal said. Then he hitched up his gun belt. “Them, too.”
“Do appreciate your warning, Marshal,” Slocum said. “Can I get you a drink?”
“Drink? Why, that sounds real good. Whiskey.”
“Set up the marshal with a shot, Annabelle. Since he’s the law, he only has to pay the regular rate.”
“What?” The lawman bristled. “You said—”
“If we’re forced to buy Taos Lightning from the Deutsch boys, the price will be ten times what it is now. So enjoy the cheap whiskey while you can.”
The marshal shoved the shot glass away, sloshing liquor onto the bar. He glared at Slocum, then stormed out.
“That’s one thing I like about you, John. Your winning ways,” Annabelle said. “You know how to make friends quick-like.”
“You’d think with what Rory Deutsch pays him to look the other way, he wouldn’t mind paying a dime for whiskey.” Slocum took the shot and downed it.
“Marshal Donnelly came by his nickname honestly,” Annabelle said.
“What’s that?”
“Donkey Donnelly because he’s such an ass.” She slid the empty glass off the bar and dumped it in a bucket to be cleaned later.
Slocum moved away from the bar and spent the next couple hours glad-handing patrons and joshing with them to coax an extra sale or two from them. He found it easier to rope, throw, and brand calves all day long than to make small talk with the customers. When Annabelle finally threw out the last customer past midnight, he was ready to collapse.
He yawned widely. She tapped her foot and said, “That better not mean we’re going home so you can crawl into bed and fall asleep right away.”
“That’s what a bed’s for.”
“That and other things. You lit out the other day and ruined a perfectly good ledger page with your note. You could have waited for me to wake up and told me what damn fool thing you were going to try.”
“You’d have talked me out of it.”
“Think so?” Annabelle arched an eyebrows as she studied him. “You’re right. I can talk you into anything. So when we get home, I’m on top.”
They locked up and walked to her house, Slocum leading his Appaloosa rather than riding. All the way, they bantered about small things, building a sexual tension that had him hopping by the time the front door closed.
She came into his arms. He kissed her, at first thinking of the naked woman in the pool and then coming around to thinking of nothing but Annabelle, slowly stripping off her clothing as she shivered in the cold. He pulled off his gun belt and dropped it on the kitchen table and began shedding his own clothes as he followed her into the bedroom.
She slipped naked between the covers. He was only a second behind her.
“On top,” she insisted.
“Then we switch.”
“As if you have the stamina,” she said. “You’ve been in the saddle all day—for a couple days. You don’t have it in you.”
“That’s because it’s in you now.”
Annabelle arched her back and braced her hands on his knees.
“This is going to be a hell of a night,” she said.
“I’ll do my best.”
She straightened again, hips wiggling around the thickness hidden away inside her. Then Annabelle twisted around and called out, “Who’s there?”
The doorway to the bedroom was filled with a dark figure. Slocum tried to sit up, but the woman’s weight held him down at the hips. He threw his arms around her and heaved with all his strength so they both tumbled from the bed and crashed onto the floor.
But as he lay on top of Annabelle, he knew he’d been too late. There’d been a sharp pop! an instant before. Slocum reached around her. His hand came away sticky with her blood.
She had been shot in the back. Shot dead.
8
Slocum eased Annabelle over and got to his feet. He stared at her lifeless body. He knew he should feel something but shock robbed him of any emotion. He simply stared.
Only when he heard a six-gun cocking behind him did he turn. He balled his hands into rock-hard fists. After he finished beating the killer to death, he would mourn.
“Don’t move a muscle. You do, you die.”
The sawed-off shotgun never wavered. He looked from the steady weapon to the badge on the man’s coat.
“Who’re you?” Slocum asked.
“Federal Deputy Marshal Byron Locke. You’re under arrest for murder.”
“I didn’t kill her. We were just in bed and—”
“This your smoke wagon?” The deputy held up Slocum’s Colt Navy.
“It was on the kitchen table.” Slocum’s mind suddenly pulled free of shock from Annabelle’s death. He knew how bad this looked. Whoever had killed her had used his pistol. All the murderer had to do was slide it out of the holster and fire. The six-shooter had been dropped back on the table for the lawman to find.
“Been fired. ’Less I miss my guess, you shot her.”
“Why take it back into the kitchen, then return to the body?”
“No telling how a killer thinks. Just happened to be coming by when I heard the gunshot.”
“You see a masked man running from the house?”
“No man, wearing a mask or not.” The deputy stepped into the room and motioned Slocum away from the body. The lawman knelt and checked to be sure Annabelle was dead.
“The killer is getting away.”
“You take one step and I’ll make damned sure the killer doesn’t get away. I’ll cut you in half with this here scattergun.” The deputy stood, pursed his lips, then said, “You
get your pants on. I can’t take you to jail naked.”
Slocum began dressing. It looked bad for him. The frame was about perfect.
“Why were you coming by this time of night?”
“I got word that some fugitives I’m hunting were in town and one of them was over at the Black Hole Saloon.”
“I own that saloon. We closed at midnight.”
“Might be you’re the one I’ve been tracking for almost a month. Where’d you come from?”
“I was up in Denver,” Slocum said, pulling on his boots. He considered his chances of escape and didn’t like the odds. The deputy showed himself to be too attentive.
“That was where the gang I’m tracking held up a couple banks. The trio worked their way south, stole the payroll from an iron mill in Pueblo, then disappeared until I got word of a man killed outside town.”
“Tom Harris,” Slocum said. “This woman was his sister.”
“So you killed him, you and your two partners, then bedded his sister. You’re a cold customer. If the letter of the law wasn’t drilled into me so, I’d cut you down where you stand and save everyone the cost of a trial. But then, that would rob the judge of his pleasure. He wants to sentence you and the other two more ’n anything I ever did see.”
“You travel with a judge?”
“The judge is a federal magistrate, so his jurisdiction is about anywhere he says it is.”
Slocum got a better look at the deputy’s badge. It matched what the man had claimed about being a federal deputy marshal.
“You two travel together, crushing crime?”
“That’s one way of putting it. Get out of here. March. I got a cell waiting for you down the street.”
Slocum let himself be herded along to the Taos jailhouse. The marshal was nowhere to be seen. The deputy had taken over law enforcement from the local lawman. From what Slocum had seen of “Donkey” Donnelly, it hadn’t taken any argument to turn over the cell keys to the traveling federal deputy.