John Henry knew the weighted tip could pop one of his eyes out if it landed right. He darted aside. Ross’s whip cracked, but it was a few inches away from his left ear, rather than in his face. He swung his arm up and then forward, sending his whip at Ross.
The man was ready for John Henry’s counterstrike. He leaned away from the whip and threw up his left arm. The whip coiled around Ross’s forearm, but before John Henry could jerk it back and cut the shirt sleeve, along with the flesh underneath, Ross grabbed the plaited leather strip and hauled hard on it.
The move pulled John Henry forward a couple of steps and threw him off balance. He caught himself, but just as he did Ross’s whip curled around his left calf. John Henry grunted in pain as Ross jerked it back. He immediately felt the warm trickle of blood down his leg where the lash had cut it.
Even though the wound hurt, John Henry could tell that it was superficial. He limped as he lunged to the side, but only slightly. Caught up in the heat of battle as he was, the injury didn’t even slow him down.
Ross still had hold of John Henry’s whip. John Henry circled rapidly, which meant Ross had to either let go or allow the whip to wrap around his body. He let go and slashed at John Henry again. The whip hit John Henry’s shoulder but slid off, not hurting him.
John Henry pulled his whip back and snapped it forward again. The tip caught Ross on the meaty part of his right thigh. Ross yelled and grimaced. He staggered back a step. In the torchlight, John Henry saw the dark stain on Ross’s trousers where blood welled from the wound.
This was ridiculous, John Henry thought. They could stand here slashing at each other all night, gradually cutting each other to ribbons. That would entertain the wildly shouting crowd, but it wouldn’t do anything to help John Henry’s mission. It would be better to end this as quickly as he could.
He pulled back his whip and got ready to strike again, but his movements were deliberately slow. Scowling furiously, Ross took the bait and tried to seize the advantage. He whirled the whip around his head once and then sent it speeding toward John Henry again.
John Henry lowered his head and charged.
He heard the lash whisper past his ear. It landed on his back and hurt, but he ignored the pain.
Ross stood there flat-footed, taken by surprise as John Henry crashed into him.
The two men went down hard, with John Henry landing on top. He rammed a knee into Ross’s belly and used the whip handle as a club to batter his opponent.
Ross recovered quickly, though, and drove the handle of his whip into John Henry’s belly. Gasping for breath, John Henry struck again, but Ross jerked his head aside so that the blow missed. Ross lifted a leg, hooked the calf in front of John Henry’s throat, and levered the lawman off him. John Henry rolled across the dirt.
Still on the ground himself, Ross brought the whip up and slashed down with it. The leather strands landed on John Henry’s back and cut through his coat and shirt, but they didn’t draw blood. The stroke just hurt like blazes.
John Henry rolled onto his side and struck out with the whip. It was an awkward position, and he didn’t really expect to do anything except distract Ross and maybe give himself a chance to get on his feet again.
But luck guided the blow, and the tip of John Henry’s whip raked across Ross’s cheek, opening up a bloody gash. Ross screamed and clapped a hand to the wound.
John Henry surged up and threw himself toward Ross in a diving tackle. He hammered the butt of the whip handle against Ross’s jaw, then looped the whip itself around Ross’s neck. While Ross was still stunned, he rolled the man onto his belly, planted a knee in the small of his back, and tightened the makeshift noose. Ross began to flail and writhe as the whip cut off his air, but he couldn’t free himself.
John Henry’s teeth clenched as he increased the pressure. He knew that if he wanted to, he could kill Ross. All he had to do was keep choking him with the whip.
Instead, he leaned over and brought his mouth close to Ross’s ear. The crowd shouted, many of them in dismay because they had wagered on Ross, others crying out for John Henry to go ahead and kill him in as bloodthirsty a display as any staged in the gladiatorial arenas of ancient Rome.
“Throw your whip away,” John Henry grated into Ross’s ear. The spectators couldn’t hear the words, but Ross could. “Throw it away or I’ll kill you.”
Ross stopped struggling. Feebly, he lifted his right arm and cast the bullwhip away from him. It didn’t go very far, but it fell out of reach.
“Now,” John Henry went on, “you’re going to tell me where you got those counterfeit bills.” Ross couldn’t say anything with the whip coiled so tightly around his throat, so John Henry added, “Nod if you understand me.”
A couple of heartbeats went by, then Ross jerked his head in a weak nod.
“I’m going to let off the pressure on the whip,” John Henry told him. “The first words I want to hear out of your mouth are the name of your source for the money.”
He eased off on the whip. Ross’s breath rasped in his throat as he desperately dragged air down his windpipe. John Henry kept the whip in place so he could tighten it again anytime he needed to.
“Tell me!” he prodded.
“P-Penelope!”
The name came out of Ross’s mouth in a gasp. John Henry grimaced angrily and said, “Don’t waste your breath calling for your lady friend, Ross. Tell me what I want to know, now!”
The air must have revitalized Ross. He reared up suddenly. The back of his head crashed into John Henry’s jaw. Ross arched his back and bucked up from the ground. The crowd roared with excitement as John Henry was thrown to the side.
Ross scrambled to his knees as John Henry landed on the ground a few feet away. John Henry was on his back, still holding on to the whip, which had come loose from Ross’s neck. In a darting move, Ross reached under his shirt, and when his hand emerged, it was clutching an over-and-under derringer. At this range even such a small gun could be deadly, and John Henry didn’t figure he was good enough with the whip to knock the weapon out of Ross’s hands.
Before Ross could fire, a shot blasted. Ross rocked backward as the bullet struck him in the chest. He caught himself and tried to raise the derringer again, but his strength failed him. The little gun slipped from his fingers and thudded to the ground, the sound clearly audible in the sudden shocked silence that gripped the crowd.
Ross pitched forward onto his face and didn’t move again.
John Henry looked in the direction the shot had come from and saw Wing Sun standing there with his own Colt gripped in both of her hands. The holster and shell belt lay at her feet where she had dropped them when she drew the revolver. The people around her edged away, clearly nervous about what she might do next.
Several of Campos’s men had drawn their guns and were covering Wing Sun. Campos barked an order at them in Spanish. With obvious reluctance, they pouched their irons.
“You can put the gun away, señorita,” Campos told Wing Sun. “You fired in defense of Señor Sixkiller’s life. Everyone here can bear witness to that, if need be.” He glanced at Ross’s body in disdain. “More important, Señor Ross broke the rules of the duel. Code duello demanded that he die for that. Had you not shot him down before he could fire, I would have.”
Wing Sun lowered the Colt as John Henry climbed to his feet, leaving the whip on the ground. He stepped over to her and took the weapon from her hand.
“You saved my life earlier tonight,” she said quietly. “I suppose that makes us even.”
“I suppose so,” John Henry agreed.
Even so, a part of him wished that Wing Sun hadn’t shot Ross. Now he was dead, and he hadn’t revealed his source for the counterfeit bills.
Or had he?
That thought burst in John Henry’s brain with enough force to make his breath catch in his throat. When Ross had said, “Penelope,” John Henry had assumed the man was calling for his fiancée, mistress, whatever she was.
> But what if he had been answering the question John Henry had asked?
What if Penelope Smith was the one who had been supplying him with the bogus bills?
The possibility made John Henry turn quickly and look through the crowd, searching for the blonde. He didn’t see her anywhere. Everyone else who had been involved in that private, high-stakes game was here, their faces revealed in the garish torchlight, but not Penelope.
“Where’s the girl who was with Ross?” John Henry asked.
Campos frowned in confusion and said, “Why do you care about her? Did you really attack her, Señor Sixkiller?”
“Good Lord, no. She came out onto the balcony and told Ross that you were looking for him, then ripped her own dress and started caterwauling about how I’d attacked her.”
“That bitch,” Wing Sun said, tight-lipped.
Campos shook his head and said, “I did not send her to find Ross, señor. This is the first I’ve heard of it. She must have had her own reasons for that deception.”
“Maybe it was just a distraction to get everyone outside,” John Henry suggested. “And that left her . . .”
Campos’s eyes widened with alarm.
“Come! We should get back in.”
Everything looked fine in the courtyard, but as they started up the stairs toward the balcony, John Henry spotted a man lying sprawled on the floor near the landing. He and Campos rushed the rest of the way up with Wing Sun trailing closely behind them.
The man lying facedown was one of the guards. A large, bloody lump was visible on the back of his head where someone had hit him, probably with a gun or some other sort of blunt instrument. Campos rolled him over and found that he was still breathing.
John Henry stood in the doorway of the room where the high-stakes game had been held and said grimly, “Looks like she cleaned off the table. Chances are she stole a horse and is long gone by now.”
Campos cursed in Spanish and paced back and forth, agitated and furious.
“So she was a thief,” Wing Sun said.
“Maybe,” John Henry said as the wheels of his brain turned over rapidly. “Maybe more than that.”
He was thinking about Ross’s admission that Penelope was supplying the counterfeit money. Maybe she had wanted to recover the fake bills and staged the distraction in order to do so. It was possible, too, that she had been trying to get John Henry killed because she’d figured out somehow that he was a lawman and might be on the trail of the counterfeit money.
The only way to get any real answers, he realized, was to find Penelope Smith.
While he was mulling over that, Wing Sun asked, “Are you going to turn me over to the law for shooting Ross, John Henry?”
“Like Señor Campos said, you shot Ross to save my life. That makes killing him justified as far as I’m concerned. I suppose there’ll have to be a report, but saving the life of a deputy U.S. marshal ought to count for something.”
Campos’s eyes got wide with alarm again.
“A deputy marshal?” he echoed. “You are a lawman, Señor Sixkiller?”
“That’s right. But don’t worry, Campos, I don’t care about this gambling operation you’re running. My interest in Ross is part of something else entirely. If you want to help me out, though, you can tell me if he had a place here in town.”
“He always stayed in a hotel,” Campos said. “I had to send one of my men there once to pick up some money when Ross made good on a marker.”
“When was this?”
“A couple of months ago,” Campos replied with a shrug.
Before Ross was involved with the counterfeiting ring, thought John Henry. And he was convinced now that it was a ring. More than just Ignatius O’Reilly were involved. O’Reilly had to have at least one confederate . . .
A beautiful blond-haired she-devil named Penelope.
And the next step was finding her.
Chapter Seventeen
Campos told John Henry how to find the hotel where Ross had been staying in Los Angeles, then said, “I’ll send one of my men for the police, Marshal, and report Ross’s death.”
“Talk to Captain Sawyer,” John Henry suggested, “and when you do, tell him that I’ll check in with him later and explain the whole story to him.”
“I may have to close down for a while until all this blows over,” Campos said glumly. “But I suppose that would be better than going to jail.”
“I’ll put in as much of a good word for you as I can,” John Henry promised.
“What about me?” Wing Sun asked. “I’m the one who shot him, after all.”
“And I’ll testify that you did it to keep Ross from shooting me. The word of a federal lawman ought to be enough. They shouldn’t press any charges against you.”
“I hope you’re right. In the meantime, I’m coming with you to Ross’s hotel, John Henry.”
He frowned and said, “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
Depending on how big the counterfeiting gang was, he might wind up involved in yet another shoot-out on this night when trouble seemed never-ending.
“I’m coming along anyway,” Wing Sun insisted. “If you run into that blond woman, you might need help with the treacherous witch. After the way she tried to get you killed, I’d like to settle that score with her.”
Obviously, Wing Sun was a good shot, John Henry thought. He had seen evidence of that twice already tonight. It might be handy to have her around.
On the other hand, she was a civilian, and he didn’t want her to come to any harm. It would be on his conscience if she did. So he said, “You can come with me to the hotel, but you’ll have to stay in the carriage.”
“Fine,” she said with a smile, and he warned himself that she might be agreeing just to placate him, with no intention of keeping her promise.
By now just about everyone who had been at the villa for a night of gambling and other assorted vices had scattered. A shooting tended to have that effect. Nobody wanted to be questioned by the authorities, especially when they’d been patronizing a place such as this.
John Henry said good night to Campos and helped Wing Sun into the carriage that had brought them there. Her driver slapped the reins against the backs of the team, and the vehicle rolled through the trees and back down the steep trails to the valley.
Twenty minutes later the driver brought the carriage to a stop in front of a hotel in downtown Los Angeles. It was a two-story adobe building, either one of the older structures in town or at least made to look like one. John Henry got out and told Wing Sun, “Wait here.”
“Of course,” she said.
Again, he wasn’t sure just how sincere she was, but he had to trust her for the moment.
He went into the quiet, well-appointed hotel lobby, which was empty at the moment, and approached the desk, limping a little from that cut on his calf the whip had inflicted. He knew the cuts on his clothes from the whip and the grime from rolling around on the ground made him look pretty disheveled, so he wasn’t surprised when the clerk gave him a frown of disapproval.
That frown turned into a worried look when John Henry took out the folder with his badge in it, slapped it down on the desk, and said, “Quentin Ross. Which room is his?”
“It . . . it’s Number 7, second floor front, Marshal,” the man said. “Mr. Ross isn’t in, though.”
“I know that,” John Henry said. “He won’t be coming back, either. What about Miss Penelope Smith? Has she been staying with Ross?”
Despite being worried, the clerk drew himself up slightly and said, “This isn’t that sort of establishment, Marshal. Miss Smith has her own accommodations.”
“Adjoining?” John Henry asked, cocking his head to the side.
“Well . . . yes. But there’s nothing improper about that, I assure you.”
“Uh-huh. She in Room Five or Nine?”
“Nine,” the clerk said. As John Henry turned away from the desk to start toward the staircase, the man went on,
“But she’s not there now, either.”
John Henry looked back over his shoulder at the clerk.
“You know that for a fact?”
“Yes, sir. I had a bellboy help her with her luggage. She left rather hurriedly, about half an hour ago.”
John Henry bit back a curse and settled for a groan. He said, “You didn’t find anything unusual about that?”
“Well . . . I just assumed that since Mr. Ross wasn’t with her, that the two of them had had some sort of, well, falling-out. Such things happen, you know.”
“Yeah. She took all her bags?”
“I assume so.”
“Was anybody with her?”
The clerk shook his head and said, “I didn’t see anyone. She had hired a buggy and driver. I saw the bellboy loading her bags into the back.”
“You got any idea where she was going?”
“No, but Tom might.”
“Tom?” John Henry said.
“The bellboy.”
“Is he around?”
“Of course.” The clerk hit a bell on the desk with his palm and called, “Tom!”
The summons made a middle-aged, balding man with a close-cropped brown beard appear in a doorway at the side of the lobby. As usual in most hotels, the bellboy wasn’t an actual boy. This one moved like his feet were stuck in molasses as he shuffled toward the desk.
“What . . . is . . . it . . . Mr. . . . Chambers?” he asked in the slowest drawl John Henry had ever heard.
“This man is a deputy U.S. marshal,” the clerk said with a nod toward John Henry. “He has some questions about Miss Smith. You know, Mr. Ross’s, ah, friend.”
“Oh . . . her,” Tom said. “Howdy . . . Marshal . . . What is it . . . you . . . want to know?”
With an effort, John Henry reined in the impatience he felt. Losing his temper with this old-timer would probably just delay things that much more. He said, “You loaded Miss Smith’s things into that buggy. Did you hear her tell the driver where she was going?”
“Matter of fact . . . I did.”
John Henry waited, and when Tom didn’t go on, he asked, “What did she tell him?”
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