Texas Swamp Fever (9781101611890)

by Sharpe, Jon

  Quickly, Fargo gripped the stakes and slid the trimmed ends into the holes. He pushed each in as far as it would go and lay exactly as Bodean and Judson had left him. They were still a good ways out and didn’t appear to notice.

  “What do we do?” Clementine asked.

  “We kill the sons of bitches.”

  “I can’t do a thing to help. It will have to all be you.”

  Fargo didn’t expect otherwise. “Hush now.”

  The water rippled and the canoe swished through the lilies. Momentum carried it onto dry land and Bodean hopped over the side and held it while Judson climbed out.

  “I don’t believe it,” Bodean said, facing them. “I saw it with my own eyes and I goddamn don’t believe it. That stupid cat.”

  Judson came over to Fargo. “You’re the luckiest bastard who ever lived.”

  “I guess there’s a reason painters don’t attack people much,” Bodean said. “I thought for sure the blood would do the trick.”

  “I ever see that cat again, I’ll shoot it dead,” Judson said. He squatted. “But there’s a sayin’. If you want somethin’ done right—”

  “Do it your own self,” Bodean finished for him.

  “There are plenty of other ways to kill you,” Judson said. “We can feed you to a gator in bits and pieces.”

  “Or drown you,” Bodean said. “Or toss you into quicksand.” He came closer, holding his rifle with the barrel pointed down.

  “Or maybe just shoot you and bury you,” Judson said. “No one will ever find your bodies anyhow.”

  “I like that idea,” Bodean said. “I want this over with. I want to get drunk and screw a woman and sleep for a week.”

  “You and me, both,” Judson said. He fingered the hilt of his knife. “Any last words, mister, before we do what we should have done in the first place?”

  “How does it feel?” Fargo asked.

  Judson paused in the act of unsheathing his blade. “How does what feel?”

  “Losing an eye?”

  “We’re about to turn you into worm food and you want to know a thing like that?”

  “I couldn’t see out of one of mine for a while and it bothered the hell out of me,” Fargo said, firming his grip on the stakes. “It must have been a lot worse for you when that boy stabbed you.”

  “You miserable bastard.”

  “How will you feel about losing both?”

  “Both?” Judson said.

  With a powerful heave, Fargo tore the two stakes free. Sweeping upward, he stabbed Judson in his good eye, driving the stake into the socket as far as it would go. Judson shrieked and threw himself back, on top of Clementine. She screamed and bucked to get him off.

  Bodean was riveted in astonishment. Belatedly, he tried to bring his rifle into play.

  Fargo lunged and thrust the other stake into Bodean’s left thigh. The tip penetrated several inches, and scarlet spurted.

  Bodean cried out and staggered. Dropping his rifle, he clutched his leg and lurched toward the canoe.

  Judson was thrashing and shrieking, “I’m blind! I’m blind!”

  Fargo tried to grab the rifle but it was just out of reach. He tore at the knots to the rope binding his ankle and loosened it enough to slip his hand into his boot. A few slashes of the toothpick and he was free. He scooped the rifle up and snapped it to his shoulder but the canoe was ten yards out and Bodean was lying on the bottom. All he could see was an elbow.

  “Help me!” Clementine screeched. “Get him off! Get him off!”

  Judson had gone limp, blood and gore oozing from his ruptured eye, the stake in his socket jutting at the sky.

  “Don’t just sit there!” Clementine pleaded.

  Setting the rifle down, Fargo gripped Judson’s ankles and slid him off her. Judson’s head flopped and blood smeared her cheek and neck and her dress. She shuddered and grimaced.

  “Is he dead?” she asked. “Please tell me he’s dead and get him off me.”

  Fargo didn’t have time to spare. Bodean was getting away. Quickly, he cut the ropes binding her to the stakes.

  “At last,” Clementine cried, and wiped at her neck with her sleeve. “I think some of his blood got into my mouth.”

  “Look at the bright side,” Fargo said, sliding the toothpick into its sheath. “You could have cougar spit on your face.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  Fargo didn’t answer. He was running toward the cabin. Neither of the swamp men had had his Colt or the Henry. The guns could only be one place.

  “Wait for me!” Clementine hollered.

  Fargo ran faster. His hunch was rewarded when he burst into the cabin and saw his pistol and rifle on the table. Scooping them up, he raced out the door.

  The canoe had disappeared into the reeds.

  “Hold on, will you?” Clementine yelled, moving to intercept him.

  Without slowing Fargo said, “I’m going after Bodean.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “Like hell.”

  Fargo reached the boat, set the Henry in, and pushed.

  Clementine caught up, saying, “You’re not leaving me here alone and that’s final.”

  “It’s too dangerous,” Fargo said.

  “He dropped his rifle,” Clementine said. “You should be able to capture him easy.”

  “Capture, hell,” Fargo said. The boat slid clear of the shore and he jumped in. He grabbed a paddle, intending to push off before Clementine could clamber on, but she was too quick for him. “Get out.”

  “Where you go, I go.”

  “Damn it, woman.”

  “You’ll have to tie me to keep me here and he’ll escape.” Clementine grasped his arm. “Please, Skye. I’m afraid to be by myself.”

  Swearing, Fargo dipped his paddle into the water. “Lend a hand, then. But you’re to do as I tell you.”

  “When don’t I?”

  They flew to the reeds. Fargo entered them at about the same spot the canoe had. The stems rustled and crackled. Bent reeds told him which direction Bodean had gone.

  “I just saw a snake,” Clementine whispered.

  “In a swamp?” Fargo said.

  “How can you joke at a time like this? For all you know he might be waiting to kill us.”

  “No ‘might’ about it.”

  “Then why are we going in after him?”

  “We finish it here and now.”

  The reeds buckled with every stroke of a paddle. A frog croaked, and something big moved noisily away.

  “If I never see a swamp again,” Clementine said, “it’ll be too soon.”

  More reeds parted—and there was the canoe.

  Fargo brought the boat alongside it. Blood smeared the bottom.

  “Where can he have got to?”

  The water exploded. Gripping the side of their boat, Bodean levered himself up and over even as he lanced his knife at Fargo’s throat. Jerking back, Fargo grabbed Bodean’s wrist, twisted, and shoved. Bodean grabbed his other arm. The next he knew, they were over the side and hitting the reeds with a splash.

  Clementine bawled his name.

  Fargo lost his hold. He braced for the searing sensation of the blade but Bodean placed both hands on his head to hold him under. The bastard intended to drown him.

  Groping at his boot, Fargo resorted to the toothpick.

  He drove it up and in and felt it shear flesh. The pressure on his head eased and he rolled and broke the surface.

  Bodean had a hand to his side. His other hand was empty. Evidently he’d dropped his knife when they fell in.

  “No,” he bleated. “I beg you. You wouldn’t kill an unarmed man.”

  “Not usually,” Fargo said.


  Bodean exhaled in relief.

  “But in your case,” Fargo went on, drawing his Colt, “I’ll make an exception.”

  “No! Don’t!”

  Fargo shot him in the forehead. The body smacked the water, convulsed once, and was still. “I should have skinned him alive first,” he said.

  “I can’t believe it’s over,” Clementine said. “You saved my life.” She reached out to help him climb in. “How can I ever repay you?”

  Fargo stared at her breasts and her thighs and the junction in between. “Three guesses,” he said.

  LOOKING FORWARD!

  The following is the opening

  section of the next novel in the exciting

  Trailsman series from Signet:

  TRAILSMAN #376

  NEW MEXICO MADMAN

  New Mexico Territory, 1860—where Fargo serves as bodyguard for “America’s Sweetheart” on a stagecoach bound straight for hell.

  “When I was still just a tad wearing short pants, Olney, I found a sparrow with a broken wing. I picked it up and held it trapped in one hand. Have you ever held a small bird captive in your fist?”

  While he spoke, Zack Lomax stood in the embrasure of a bay window looking out upon Santa Fe’s fashionable College Street. When no answer was forthcoming, he spun around suddenly to stare at his subordinate.

  “Well? Have you, man?”

  Olney Lucas glanced quickly away from those intense, burning-coal eyes. “No, boss, I never done that.”

  “Well, you should try it sometime because it’s an immense thrill of power. Even as a kid I felt it—like I was God in the universe, see? I could feel its tiny heart racing like the mechanism of a fine Swiss watch. And suddenly I realized I was the master of life and death. One good squeeze and I could cancel that sparrow’s existence forever. The thrill it gave me . . . later, as a man, not even the glory of the rut can match that thrill.”

  Lomax laced his fingers behind his back and began pacing the fancy Persian carpet in his study. He was of middle height, built solid as a meetinghouse, and well turned out in a dark wool suit with satin facings on the lapels. His hard, angular, shrewdly intelligent face featured fiercely burning eyes of limitless ambition and brooding obsession. Eyes few men could meet for more than a second or two without being unnerved and looking away.

  “I’m a man now, Olney, not a lad in short pants. And the new sparrow in my hand is a vicious, supercilious bitch named Kathleen Barton. ‘America’s Sweetheart.’ In a pig’s ass! Do you have any idea what that self-loving, stuck-up thespian bitch cost me?”

  Olney had worked for Lomax long enough to know which questions required answers. Lomax would answer this one himself, just as he had hundreds of times since that fateful day, almost one year ago, in San Francisco.

  “That goddamn election was mine!” Lomax fumed. “Bought and paid for. I had the Barbary Coast Hounds on my payroll and half the aldermen blackmailed. Think of it, Olney—Mayor of San Francisco! California itself was the next prize, and with slavery legalized there I would have run an empire. That ball-breaking twat cost me all of it. All of it! Turned me into a national laughingstock afraid to show my face in public.”

  For Lomax, who had never brooked a slight in his life, this was no old wound, but a fresh scab being torn off every day. He felt rage and shame searing into him anew. Plenty of men had proposed marriage to beautiful women and been given the mitten. But he had made the fatally overconfident mistake of proposing to Kathleen Barton on the front page of The Californian—a grandiose gesture he was sure would sweep the alluring actress off her feet.

  Instead, she had ruined him every way but financially. Her scathing letter of rejection—also front-page newspaper fare—had described him as “a criminal beast who deserves public flogging” and assured her adoring public she “would rather kiss a toad than let that despicable, corrupt scoundrel ever touch me.”

  With one devastating letter his hopes for controlling the Bear Flag Republic were reduced to mere mental vapors. And thanks to this new Associated Press for the sharing of telegraphic dispatches, his shame and ruin had become a national—eventually even international—cause célèbre. Too humiliated to even face the society he once dominated, he’d pulled his hat from the political ring to avoid a landslide defeat.

  “Well, the fancy bitch had her fun,” Lomax declared now, still furiously pacing. “But you know my anthem, Olney: Whoever does not submit to the rudder must submit to the rock.”

  “Sure, boss. But is it such a good idea to kill her on the first anniversary of her letter? I mean, Christ! It’s a fingerboard pointing right at you.”

  “Sell your ass. All the world knows that Zack Lomax was supposedly killed in an explosion at one of his own San Francisco breweries. Here in Santa Fe I’m Cort Bergman, mining investor. No one will even make the connection. And everyone knows that beautiful, popular theater actresses are magnets for unstable admirers. Her death will never be traced to me—except that she will know. I’ll make damn sure of that.”

  Shaking off his familiar, acid-bitter rage, Lomax suddenly became all business. “You’ve followed my instructions to the letter?”

  Olney nodded. “Russ Alcott swears by all things holy that we can trust this informer. He’s high up in Overland’s New Mexico Division. Kathleen Barton used a fake name and wore a veil, but she’s too famous and he recognized her. She’s booked passage for the El Paso to Santa Fe run day after tomorrow.”

  A hard-lipped smile straight as a seam divided Lomax’s face. “That rings right. Her performance at El Paso’s Palacio Theater has just closed, and she’s opening here in town at the Bella Union in just twelve days. Have you set up the mirror-relay system?”

  “All set. Just like the army uses out here. As long as the sun’s shining, you and Alcott can communicate quick as a finger snap.”

  Lomax looked pleased. “Any new word on special security arrangements for her?”

  Olney Lucas fortified himself with a deep breath. Stand by for the blast, he warned himself.

  “Well, you were right, boss. There’ll be no military escort. Overland’s Division Manager, and the bitch’s agent, don’t want no attention drawn to the run. Soldiers usually escort bullion runs, and they don’t want to lure Mexican freebooters.”

  He hesitated, and Lomax alerted like a hound on point. “What is it?” he demanded sharply.

  “Well, the thing of it is—according to Alcott’s report, this theater agent won’t be travelling with her. He’s hired on Skye Fargo as the shotgun rider. Actually, as Barton’s bodyguard.”

  For a moment Lomax looked as if he’d been slugged hard but not quite dropped. He stopped pacing, and for a full thirty seconds stood as still as a pillar of salt, his face going pale as fresh linen.

  “Fargo!” He spat the word out like a bad taste. “The ‘savage angel’ as the fawning newspaper scribblers call him. The ‘man whom bees will not sting.’”

  “Maybe bees can sting him, but it’s a hard-cash fact that he’s left a trail of graves all over the West. He’s hell on two sticks.”

  Lomax seemed to gather himself, squaring his shoulders and regaining some color in his face. “No question about it, Olney, he’s no man to take lightly. In fact, if we are not meticulously careful Skye Fargo is the rock we’ll split on. But I planned for something like this. For one full year I’ve worked this out.”

  Lomax resumed pacing like a caged tiger. “Fargo is famous for his prowess as a killer, certainly. But often he wins the day by a simple strategy: always mystify, mislead, and surprise your enemies. By a happy coincidence, that’s our strategy, too.”

  Olney perked up at this reminder. “By God, it is, ain’t it?”

  “We’re attacking our opponent at his greatest strength. And don’t forget, neither Fargo nor anyone else knows we have an in
former inside Overland. And wouldn’t you agree that Russ, Cleo and Spider are first-rate killers?”

  “Just like Fargo—no men to fool with, boss. In Lincoln County they call Russ Alcott the Widow Maker. I’ve seen him light matches with a pistol at twenty feet. And he handpicked those two siding him.”

  Lomax nodded. “Fargo can’t possibly know we’ll have a paid killer on that coach, too, as our ace in the hole. Or even that we know exactly which run Kathleen will be on. If they switch runs at the last minute, we’ll know that also.”

  “The way you say, boss. But no matter how you slice it, there’s no killing the woman until we put the quietus on Fargo. And slick plan or no, when it comes to that job, it’d be easier to put socks on a rooster.”

  Again Lomax nodded. “Never underrate your enemy. The road to hell is paved with the bones of fools who made that mistake. I won’t. One year, Olney. Night and day, planning even for something as formidable as Skye Fargo. But the suspense clock has been set ticking: exactly eleven days from now, on June 19, 1860, Kathleen Suzanne Barton will draw her ultimate breath in this world.”

  He crossed to a huge mahogany desk and picked up a Spanish dagger featuring a jewel-encrusted, hammered-silver hilt.

  “Fargo first, of course, and I don’t give a damn who kills him or how. And then, ten miles west of this City of Holy Faith . . . at a spot appropriately named Blood Mesa. First, I’ll watch the terror ignite in her eyes—make that proud, haughty beauty beg and grovel, perhaps even piss herself. Next, I’ll shred that breathtakingly beautiful face, and then I’ll carve her goddamn stone heart out of her chest. Just the way she cut mine out back in San Francisco.”

  By now Lomax was breathing so hard his breath whistled faintly in his nostrils.

  “Boss?” Olney said quietly.

  It took Lomax a long moment to realize his lackey had spoken. “Yes?”

  “Just curious. That bird you caught when you was a kid—what happened to it?”

  Lomax’s lips twitched. He held one open hand out, then suddenly squeezed it into a tight fist. “Master of life and death, Olney. Just like God in the universe.”