by Jon Sharpe
“I got a right to protect myself,” the Mexican protested in English. “These Tejanos around here hate my people.”
“Your language skills have improved dramatically,” Fargo pointed out.
“Burn him where he sits, Fargo,” Boomer urged. “The Skinny Wolf sent him to ventilate both of us.”
“I have never heard of this Skinny Wolf,” the Mexican insisted.
“That makes you the only swinging dick in these parts who hasn’t,” Fargo assured him.
He whipped the serape aside and patted the would-be assassin down, looking for a hideout gun.
By now Booger was wiggling in exasperation. “S’matter, Pretty Teeth? Have you been grazing loco weed? Burn him now or I will!”
“Ease off, Booger. He planned to plug us, all right. But this is an organized state, not a territory. You can’t just send a man over the mountains because of what he had planned. He has to make his play first.”
“Why, you damn Quaker!” Booger said in a disgusted tone.
“I prefer to send you back to El Lobo,” Fargo told the Mexican. “You tell him Skye Fargo is gonna leave him drawing flies just like he did to that Indian girl, savvy?”
The Mexican revolved halfway around in his chair and sent Fargo a surly glance. “I do not know—”
“Shut your filthy sewer and clear out of here while I’m still in a cheerful mood.”
“You cannot simply take a man’s gun. As you say, I did not try to kill you.”
Fargo dug into his pocket, then planked four gold quarter eagles on the table. “There’s ten bucks. You just sold that gun. Now light a shuck.”
“But my gun—”
The noise seemed obscenely loud when Fargo cocked his short iron. His smile—all lips, no mirth—goaded the Mexican to raise one more objection.
The man wisely accepted his fate and scooped up the gold cartwheels. He left without another word, ambling out slowly to save some face.
“Make sure he rides out of town, Deke,” Fargo called toward the door. “Bitch, come get your new firearm.”
“Mister,” one of the cowboys spoke up, “didn’t that big fellow call you Fargo? Would that be Skye Fargo, the hombre they call the Trailsman?”
“Pah!” Booger spat into the dust, still disgusted with the Quaker. “In a pig’s ass! The Trailsman has a set on him. This is Little Miss Pink Cheeks.”
“Little Miss Pink Cheeks,” the cowboy repeated, his face confused. “And he called that redheaded jasper Bitch? Pete, pour me another one, and less glass this time. I ain’t drunk enough to make sense of it.”
“The Mexer has skedaddled,” Deke reported from outside the batwings.
“C’mon in and bend your elbow,” Fargo said, leathering his shooter and heading toward the bar.
“What’s yours?” the barkeep asked him.
“His Muleishness here,” Fargo said, nodding toward Booger, “will have whiskey.”
“Forty-rod, Bottles,” Booger qualified. “And slop it over the brim. I drink nothing but Indian burner.”
“And I’ll have a beer,” Fargo said. “Draw it nappy.”
“Sorry. No barley pop today, Fargo.”
Fargo felt a stab of disappointment. His mouth felt as stale as the last cracker in the bottom of the barrel, and he’d been thinking about a beer all day.
“That’s a mite queer,” he said. “Victoria has always had plenty of beer, and I saw the brewing house when we rode in.”
The bartender shrugged indifferently. “Guess they ran out.”
“You wouldn’t think so,” Fargo remarked, “what with the Three Sisters burning down.”
Fargo felt a little prickle of alarm. The Three Sisters going up in flames, a killer lurking here, no beer in a town with its own brewery. . . . It was the Skinny Wolf’s way to hedge his bets, and something in this barkeep’s manner struck Fargo as off-kilter.
“Hold off on that forty-rod,” Fargo said as the bartender reached toward the bottom shelf. “I’ll take the rest of that bottle of Kentucky bourbon—the one you just poured out of for that waddie.”
“That’s top shelf. The bottle will cost you four dollars.”
Fargo planked a shiner. “Sold. We’ll need four jolt glasses, too.”
“Fargo,” Booger threatened, “p’r’aps a rap on the snoot will civilize you? You know I drink naught but popskull. That sissy piss don’t even give old Booger a glow.”
“Not that one,” Fargo said when the barkeep reached for another bottle. “The one you just poured out of.”
“You paid for a full bottle.”
“I’m partial to the one you poured from,” Fargo said.
“Mister, what’s your dicker with me? It’s all one.”
“Humor me,” Fargo said. “I’m eccentric.”
Scowling, the bartender thumped down the bottle and four glasses.
“Tell you what,” Fargo said amiably, “that bottle you were about to give me—have a jolt from it on me.”
“I never touch the stuff except to pour it.”
“Have a jolt from that bottle and I’ll give you ten dollars.”
“I never touch the—”
“Twenty dollars,” Fargo said, his tone hardening.
By now tension again marked the air, and every man and soiled dove in the saloon was watching and listening expectantly. Booger suddenly caught on.
“Ha-ho,” he said softly, “this one’s coy as a French tart, ain’t he?”
“Take a jolt from that bottle,” Fargo repeated.
“I’ve had enough of your high-handed shit,” the bartender said.
He pulled aside one half of his rawhide vest, revealing a star pinned to his shirt. “I’m a sheriff’s deputy in Victoria, and nobody gives me orders except the sheriff and the judge. I let you run that Mexican out, but you’re not pushing white men around.”
Fargo looked at the cowboy who had spoken to him earlier. “Is he really a star packer or just flashing one?”
“He’s sworn in, Mr. Fargo. But mainly he’s just the tax collector, and he collects a lot more than he turns in.”
“You ever seen him drink whiskey?”
“Can’t say that I have. But I’m here to tell you—for twenty dollars I’d drink a cup of hot piss and demand seconds.”
“All right, Deputy,” Fargo surrendered, grabbing the bottle and handing the glasses to his companions. “I don’t push when a thing won’t move.”
Fargo selected a table in the middle of the saloon. “Deke, watch that front door close. Bitch, you cover the back. Me and Booger will keep an eye on that bar dog.”
“Hell, Fargo,” Deke said, “you think that hatchet-faced son of a buck tried to poison us?”
“No bout adoubt it, Deke. The Skinny Wolf struck terms with him. Ain’t squat we can do about it, though. The law is crooked here, and I don’t plan to push this deal any further. Hanging rope is cheap in Texas.”
Booger poured a drink, knocked it back, and loosed a string of curses. “Faugh! Fargo, you just got screwed with your pants on! Four dollars? This whiskey has been baptized.”
McDade tasted it. “It’s not watered down, Booger. You’re just not used to the smooth stuff.”
“Speaking of gettin’ screwed, Booger,” Deke said, leering toward the sporting girls at the rear of the saloon, “which one of them hoors catches your fancy?”
Booger, still in a stew over being forced to drink mild whiskey, scowled darkly.
“Stand ’em on their heads naked and they all look like sisters. The catfish here screws the Quality, and look at the dishrags old Booger gets. Well, a hungry dog must eat dirty pudding.”
“Sorry, boys. No pudding tonight,” Fargo said. “Not while the Skinny—”
“Watch it, Fargo!” a female voice shouted.
Fargo
had carelessly taken his eye off the bartender. As he instantly dived for the floor, he glanced toward the bar just as two barrels of a sawed-off Greener belched smoke and flame.
Fargo felt a burning sting like rattlesnake fangs. But the soiled dove’s warning had come in the nick of time to avoid the brunt of the pellets. Fargo’s empty chair splintered. He hit the floor hard on his left shoulder, shucking out his Colt.
The gun jumped in his fist, and the bullet caught the deputy dead-center in the forehead. A pebbly clot of brain matter erupted from the back of his skull and sprayed the back-bar mirror. The would-be murderer folded dead over the bar before the corpse slid to the floor.
When the smoke cleared, the stink of saltpeter mixed with the sweet, coppery smell of blood.
“Jesus Christ with a wooden dick!” one of the cow nurses exclaimed. “Did you see that shot, boys?”
A delighted Booger slammed the table with a fist as solid as a cedar mallet. “Hell, I ain’t had this much fun since the hogs ate Maw-maw! Fargo the Trailsman is back!”
“Could this be love?” Fargo said sarcastically as he unfolded to his feet and leathered his shooter.
“You all right?” McDade said.
“I’ll have to dig some buckshot outta my leg when we get back,” Fargo replied. “But it’s a long way from my heart.”
“Fargo,” Deke admired, “you got the nervous system of an oyster. Man alive! The Skinny Wolf musta promised that crooked deputy plenty of money for killing you.”
“Ladies,” Fargo addressed the soiled doves, “I don’t know which one of you warned me, but I’m sure beholden. Trouble is, I just killed a deputy in a Texas town. ‘Self-defense’ won’t cut much ice around here.”
“Long-tall, you’ve got it all wrong,” a buxom redhead wearing an ostrich-feather boa assured him. “A Mexican just waltzed in here and gunned Pete down in cold blood, ain’t that right, girls?”
“Right as rain,” answered a blonde with a garishly painted face. “A big, mean Mexican with a pox-scarred face. Besides, Sheriff Waldo rode out this afternoon to serve a warrant over in Puma Springs, and he won’t be back before midnight.”
“As for us,” one of the cowboys said, “we weren’t even here tonight.”
And ten seconds later they weren’t.
Fargo had been prepared to spend twenty dollars earlier to find out if that whiskey was poisoned. Before he and his companions forked leather, he gave it to the women. Deke added five for the undertaker.
“Boys,” Fargo said after they’d pointed their bridles back toward camp, “we jumped over a snake tonight—two snakes, actually. But I know El Lobo—somehow he found out Quintana is hauling a fortune in that coach, and he’s determined to get it come hell or high water.”
“I think we got other problems, too,” Deke said. “Problems closer to home, if you take my drift?”
“I take it,” Fargo assured him, eyes scouring the moon-bleached terrain. “Old man Quintana is a sly old bird, all right, and something ain’t jake about these Spaniards with him. I can’t puzzle it out yet, but we have to find out without tipping our hand.”
“Maybe they’re planning a big heist,” McDade suggested. “Or maybe they already pulled one—it’s not just Booger weighting that coach down.”
“I’d say that’s not too likely,” Fargo replied. “There’s too many of them and they don’t act like men on the dodge. Besides, most of Quintana’s story about his past is true—I got it from a colonel at Fort Smith who knows him and said he’s wealthy.”
“All of you shut your fish traps!” Booger snarled, rolling side to side on Ambrose as the ox lumbered along. “T’hell with Skinny Wolf and the garlics—old Booger got no pussy tonight, and it’s still a long haul to San Antone. But you can bet your bucket the catfish here will get a stinky finger any damn time he wants it, the piker!”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” Fargo retorted. “But there’s more than one way to pump a woman. I got a hunch Katrina Robles might know something we don’t, and the first chance I get I’m gonna try to find out.”
11
Fargo’s plan to get Katrina Robles aside and question her ran into unexpected difficulties.
Evidently Viceroy Hernando Quintana now harbored suspicions about the two women—or more likely, about his womanizing scout. They were still allowed the luxury of a hot bath every other night, and the old man still gave them their privacy by joining his men around their separate campfire.
But now a walking sentry circled the tent on bath nights, and Fargo couldn’t risk trying to elude him. And every chance he did get to speak with either of the women, Quintana or Salazar was within earshot.
“The old man is nervous,” Fargo told Booger and Cherokee Bob. “I’d say he suspects we’re starting to snap wise to the fact that he’s up to something besides traveling west for his health.”
It was late afternoon on day nineteen of the California journey, one week exactly since Fargo’s double brush with death back in Victoria. Earlier that day they had wisely bypassed San Antonio, the last place Quintana and his men wanted to pass through in force.
The Alamo battle had been fought and lost twenty-five years earlier, but feelings still ran high and Texans were not all that disposed to distinguish between Mexicans and Spaniards—especially Spaniards hauling along a cannon and artillery rifle. Booger had once again missed a chance to consort with sporting girls, and his foul mood lingered.
“Damn your red hide!” he snapped at All Behind Him. “Must you make such an infernal racket when you eat?”
The perpetually hungry Delaware had managed to filch a bag of parched corn from a supply wagon. Now he sat grinding it up with his toothless, machine-press mouth, ignoring the conversation.
Booger moved upwind of the Delaware, wrinkling his moon face in disgust.
“Don’t that glutton son of a bitch never take a bath? Christ, he stinks like a four-holer in the dog days.”
“Fox smells his own hole first,” Cherokee Bob replied.
Fargo and Booger had walked beyond the main camp to join the Indians in their own rustic camp. The terrain had changed dramatically during the past week. On his scouting loops earlier that day, Fargo was forced to slap at buffalo gnats while watching dusty coyotes slink away through jagged seams and gullies—all beneath a Western sky so blue and bottomless it roared inside a man’s skull.
“Say, you Shawnee heathen.” Booger addressed Cherokee Bob. “You palaver Espanish—the hell does tonto mean? Fargo knows but he won’t tell me.”
“It means ‘stupid.’”
“Hell, is that all? I figured Rivera was insulting me. And speaking on things old Booger is too stupid to know . . . what’s this ‘crick-crack’ foolishness Fargo warned me and the rest about?”
“Never mind that,” Fargo cut in impatiently. “We didn’t come out here to discuss the causes of the wind.”
He looked at Cherokee Bob, who sat on a flat rock picking his teeth with a twig.
“I’ve tried to listen in on the Spaniards,” Fargo said, “but I just can’t pick up all that much. I can understand some Spanish, but it’s like you said, Bob—these Spaniards don’t use the lingo like Mexers do.”
“I say we just kill all the men, divvy up the gold or silver, and screw both the women till they limp,” Booger said. “I don’t mind eating off Fargo’s plate.”
“I like fuck,” All Behind Him agreed, corn falling from his mouth.
Fargo waved their foolishness aside.
“Have you heard anything suspicious at all?” he asked the Shawnee.
“You ’member last night how the wind was howling like mating wolves?”
Fargo nodded. A fierce wind had polished the knolls bare and turned sand and grit into buckshot.
“Well, there was two men in a picket post priddy near where me and Toothless here holed up. No
w and again the wind would blow in a snatch of their talk just as clear as if they was right beside us. Twice I heard one of them say ‘los otros al Benicia—the others at Benicia.’ You ever heard of a place by that name?”
Fargo started to shake his head no. Then suddenly he alerted like a hound on point.
“You sure that’s what you heard—Benicia?”
“Sounded like it.”
“So what?” Booger said. “What’s Benicia?”
“There’s a naval armory by that name in California,” Fargo replied, slowly pondering this new information. “The only military armory in California, matter of fact. Small arms, black powder, pig lead, and bullet moulds, a few bigger guns, mortars, and such.”
“That don’t make no sense,” Booger scoffed. “A naval armory? You ain’t saying these dagos—”
“I’m not saying a damn thing except there’s a naval armory by that name in the very state we’re headed to. Hell, maybe they’re talking about a place by that name in Spain.”
“The armory,” Cherokee Bob said. “Huh. It must be well guarded.”
“There’s a small contingent of American marines there. Maybe fifty or so last I heard of it. Not a big force, but marines are tough scrappers and excellent marksmen. And it’s on a little island, not an easy place to seize.”
“It would take a lot bigger force than this bunch,” Cherokee Bob opined, “to whip them marines. And they’re in a battle fortification, right?”
Fargo nodded. “Even those two guns Quintana’s hauling would be next to useless.”
“Both you two are jackasses,” Booger scoffed. “This bunch is pee doodles. The hell you tryin’ to say—that they’re fixin’ to take California back for Spain? Eighteen garlics led by an old man? Christmas crackers!”
“You’re forgetting los otros,” Fargo pointed out. “The others. What if there’s a bunch out there waiting to join them?”
“A bunch,” Cherokee Bob added, “just waiting on the money Quintana is hauling in that coach.”
Booger snorted. “Hookey Walker! You don’t just waltz in—”
“I didn’t say anything like that is going on,” Fargo snapped. “But they always talk who never think. You don’t know one damn thing about California. You’ve never been there, but I have plenty of times. The idea’s not as far-fetched as you think. There’s damn little law in California and even less military.”