Revenge at the Rodeo

by Gilbert, Morris

  Without meaning to, he moved his head forward and kissed her. The salt of her tears lay on her lips, and there was a fragile, vulnerable quality about her. It was like no kiss he had ever known, and he did not realize that it was because he was not seeking something from her. For the first time in his life he was reaching out to a woman, trying to give.

  She trembled, but there was in her very vulnerability a hunger for reassurance, and the strength of his arms and the gentleness of his kiss brought a sense of order to her.

  Then she moved back, and the weight suddenly went from his arms. She straightened and gave him a full, quick look in which he witnessed a self-willed pride now deliberately shutting out the softer things he had seen.

  She said only in a quiet voice under absolute control, “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For not taking advantage.” She came up with the bare minimum of a smile, and her eyes were brighter, no longer paralyzed by grief. “Most men would have.”

  Sixkiller felt embarrassed. It always embarrassed him to have someone mention any good quality they saw in him. He nodded shortly and trying to sound tough, warned, “Yeah—well, don’t count on any more chivalry. That’s all I had in stock.”

  “All right, Luke,” she said, but the smile grew broader, and she touched his arm in a trusting gesture. Then she took a deep breath, and spoke in a voice that was not yet quite steady, “Biscuit. A casualty.”

  Sixkiller nodded, then told her about what Clyde had offered to do about burying Biscuit. Dani listened, and when he was through, she quavered, “That’s good, isn’t it, Luke?”

  “It’s what I’d like for myself. Open plains, a creek murmuring, and the trees whispering over me.”

  She said quietly, “That’s poetry, isn’t it?”

  He looked at her with defiance. “I never read the stuff! Lef s go for a walk,” he suggested.

  They left the room and stopped at a convenience store for bread. Then Sixkiller led her to a small park with a pond. As they reached its banks, a flock of ducks fluttered toward them, greedily seeking the bread.

  “Had to bring you here,” Luke commented. “I found a duck that looks just like Handsome. Think he could have made it from Dallas?”

  Handsome II, as Dani called him, was built like a battleship and fought an eternal war against the horde of mallards. Dani smiled at him, saying, “He reminds me of a third-rate dictator for some reason.”

  The intense green heads of the male mallards almost hurt the eye when the sun brought out their color. The trees overhead put their green image on the blue water, and overhead fluffy clouds hung motionless. The smell of the water and the splashing and babbling of the ducks pleased Dani, and she said nothing more until all the bread was gone.

  They sat on the small bench under the trees, and after a time of restful silence, Dani began to tell Luke about Biscuit, from the time he was a long-legged awkward colt. She had slept with him in the barn, sneaking out of the house. She’d taught him to carry a saddle, then gone through all the steps of training him. Stories of her high-school rodeo days followed.

  Sixkiller sat watching her face until she finally ran down and said, “He was a fine horse, Luke. I’ll always remember him. Nobody can take those memories from me.”

  Sixkiller was very still, so still that he could hear the tiny gnat near his ear, buzzing like a miniature chain saw. Dani looked at him, wondering at his silence. Finally he shared, “I’ve got me a little room. The good things that happen to me, I keep them there. It’s kind of a secret art gallery.” He looked into her eyes and smiled. “When the bad times come, I go to that room and look at the pictures.” He hesitated, then turned to face her, putting one big hand on her shoulder. “And if I live to be an old, old man, stuck in a nursing home without a soul to care if I live or die—even then I can go to my gallery. And I’ll pull out a picture of a beautiful girl with auburn hair, throwing bread to green-headed ducks on a blue pond.”

  Dani stared at him for a long moment, then whispered, “That’s—very beautiful, Luke—like poetry!”

  He got to his feet, glared at her, and snapped angrily, “I never read the stuff!”

  14

  Waiting for Megan

  * * *

  Where’d you get that outfit—at a garage sale?” Sixkiller and Dani were drinking coffee in her motel room, early on Saturday morning. She was sitting on the bed, with her legs crossed, balancing a notebook and chewing on the end of a pencil. Sixkiller slumped in a chair, looking at her morosely.

  Dani glanced down at the faded top, which had once been red but was now a rather sickly shade of pink. It had always been too large, but it was comfortable, so she had used it as a lounging outfit, along with a pair of patched shorts worn thin by many washings. She responded, “You don’t like my outfit, go to Neiman-Marcus.” Then she looked up, took in his relaxed figure, and snorted, “As for that, you look like a bum. Don’t you have another outfit, Luke? Or are you just trying to get sympathy so you can go on welfare?”

  He ignored her jibe, only excusing himself with, “I’m not given to foppish attire.” Then he came out of his chair and went over to the coffeepot and poured a cup of very black coffee into the small paper cup furnished by the motel. It was held in a brown plastic holder, and he glared at it, complaining, “What a thing to put coffee in!” Going back to his chair he grunted, “All right, let’s go over it again.”

  Dani looked down at the white sheet before her, then shook her head. “All we’ve got in the way of physical evidence is the two blackjacks. Identical. Made by a firm in Cleveland. They sold over ten thousand of them last year, mostly through catalog sales.”

  “That’s a lot of busted heads,” Sixkiller pointed out. “But they don’t have any serial numbers, and anyone can buy one without a permit.” He sipped the coffee, then suggested, “Maybe I ought to ask Ruby about it.”

  Dani shook her head. “Not yet. She may have done the job herself.”

  “She’d be capable of giving Clint a rap on the head. But I don’t see her breaking the horse’s legs.”

  “Because she’s a woman?”

  He gave her an amused look. “After arresting as many women as I have for murder one, I’m never surprised at what a woman would do.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him, then bit the eraser again, looking down at the sheet of paper. “All right, we’ve got the phone calls. But the voice wasn’t one I could recognize. It sounded disguised, and Ruth and the rest of them agree. Nobody came close to recognizing it.”

  “I think we better have your phone rigged,” Luke replied. “Someday we might be in court, and they can get a pretty good reading on voices these days. Not as definite as fingerprints, but they can scan them somehow and tell if the voice is the same.”

  “Okay. It’s a long shot but long shots are all we’ve got. Now, Tom Leathers has come closer to this man than anyone else.”

  Sixkiller leaned over and pulled a doughnut from a box. “This is the last one,” he remarked. Holding it up, he thought about it, then gave her a critical look. “You’re getting fat,” he teased. “I’d better eat it.”

  “I am not getting fat!” Dani rapped out. “You’re just greedy. You ate four of those six doughnuts.”

  “Only to keep you trim,” he excused himself. “I read the other day that women your age start going downhill pretty fast. You need me to look after you.”

  He grinned at her, and Dani thought suddenly that he had looked after her. Since Biscuit had been killed, he had been by her side almost constantly. Not that he was obvious about it. He was too clever for that she thought. But he had simply been there. Always with his easy talk, always taking the light tone. Thinking of it now, she saw how well he had handled her.

  Handled me, she thought with a wry stab of insight. He’s not as rough as he wants people to think. Most men would have rushed around patting my shoulder and telling me not to cry. But since that moment when I broke down—when he kissed me—he’
s been looking out for me. She thought about that kiss—had thought about it often—but could not decide what she really felt.

  Looking at him, she saw what a masculine figure he was. It was not just the powerful frame, the arching chest, and the smoothly corded arms. Body builders had never attracted her. They seemed like freaks, with their small waists and absurdly pumped up arms and shoulders, and their absurd posturings made her feel slightly ill. They were, in Dani’s opinion, no better than strippers in their ridiculous attempts to strut and pose.

  No, there was none of that about Luke Sixkiller. He did pump iron, she knew, because he saw his body as a tool to use in his profession, much like the .44 he carried. Both of them were necessary in dealing with his clientele—the criminals of New Orleans—so he kept them both in good condition.

  He’s the most physical person I’ve ever seen, Dani thought, studying him overtly as he ate the doughnut. He makes other men seem small. And it’s not just his size, either. It’s something inside him—that determination that won’t let him quit.

  He saw her looking at him and cocked his heavy, black brow. “Well, what else we got?”

  She ducked her head to look at the sheet of paper. “Your list,” she said. “You want to go over it again?”

  “I don’t know.” It was a list of names that he had given her after she had left the party to go out and plant the money in the pickup. “We don’t know that the Creep is one of the rodeo people.”

  “I think he has to be, Luke,” she argued. “He knows too much about his victims—like he knows about the picture hanging over Hank Lowe’s couch, things like that. Ruth told me he even knew her maiden name, and she swears she never told anyone.”

  “He knew her name was Savage?” Luke questioned sharply. “Then we don’t have to wonder how Ben got suckered.”

  “Ruth says she never told a soul.”

  “She’s a woman, sweetheart. She could have told it and not even noticed.” He ignored her angry look at his statement, adding, “Probably told Clint, at least.”

  “She swears she didn’t.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t remember.” He gave her a sly grin, then said, “I know something about you. You’ve got a fishhook-shaped scar.”

  Dani’s face turned a fiery red, and her mouth dropped open. “You’ve never seen that scar!”

  “No, worse luck!” Sixkiller grinned. “You told me about getting thrown into that barbed-wire fence, when you were talking about Biscuit the other day by the lake. You said you had to have six stitches, and it left a crooked scar.”

  “I don’t remember saying that!”

  “How else would I know?” He shrugged. “We all do that, Dani. We let our hair down with those we trust. Ruth must have let it slip. But I guess you’re right. We’ll have to say that it’s somebody in the inner ring. Still, it couldn’t have been anybody who was in the room that night.”

  “I wish you’d been looking around while he was talking to me on the phone. That’s the only sure thing.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that whoever it was must have slipped out of the room while I was taking the money outside to the truck. He saw Tom and me, Luke. I think he must have seen me holding a gun on Tom. That’s why he killed Biscuit.”

  “You’re guessing.”

  “Not altogether,” she told him slowly. “I talked with Tom. He felt so bad about Biscuit! And he said that when the Creep called him to get the money, he was different.”

  “How different?”

  “He was angry—very angry, Tom said. And it had to be because I’d messed up his plan. I had a gun and was dangerous. That’s why he killed Biscuit. But he had to have seen Tom and me. So he couldn’t have been in the room after I left. So here’s a list of people you saw after I left the room:

  1. Clay Dixon

  2. Boone Hardin

  3. J. D. Pillow

  4. Wash Foster

  5. Ruby Costner

  6. Clyde Lockyear

  7. Hank Lowe”

  Sixkiller commented doubtfully, “I saw all those, sure, but it was packed in that room. There could have been others in the back, where I couldn’t see them.” He closed his eyes, trying to remember. “I didn’t see Clint or Bill Baker or Rocky James. Didn’t see Ruth, for that matter.”

  “I asked her about it.” Dani nodded. “She and Clint were dancing a lot. She thinks they were out in the larger room when I got the call.”

  “She with him all the time?”

  Dani hesitated, then explained, “Not exactly. She went to the bathroom, and when she came out, he was gone. But he found her later.” Dani looked a little embarrassed. “He’d gone to the other bathroom. Except for that, they were together all the time.”

  “Well, it’s not much help, is it? Even someone in the room could have had somebody else working with him. Say he’s hired Rocky James to keep an eye on Tom Leathers. Rocky sees you two, then comes back and gives the report to his boss.”

  “It could be,” Dani agreed slowly. “But if this man is as smart as I think he is, he’ll want as few people as possible in on the scheme.” Then she shook her head. “The only sure thing is, anyone who was in the room when I was talking to the Creep can’t be our man.”

  “I can’t help you with that,” Sixkiller admitted. “Guess I slipped up. I wasn’t counting noses—not until you left the room.”

  Dani smiled ruefully. “I was pretty wound up myself, Luke. All I can be sure of is the people at my table—Megan and Bake. Clyde was still performing, and Fran had left. That’s how it was when Tom came to tell me there was a call. And I could see them at the table while I was talking to the Creep.”

  “Still leaves lots of suspects,” Sixkiller pointed out. He looked at his watch, got to his feet, and stretched. “We better get to the Dome. I’ve got a date with a bull named Tombstone.”

  “And I’ve got my first ride on Big Boy,” Dani agreed. She came off the bed, stretched her legs, then said, “I’ve got to get dressed.”

  Thirty minutes later they were pulling into the parking lot at the Astrodome. “Rodeo’s over tomorrow,” Sixkiller remarked, getting out of the Silverado. “We going to Fort Smith?”

  “That’s where most of the contestants are headed.” Dani nodded.

  “Well, if I don’t make more money there than I have here, you’ll have to take me to raise.” Luke grinned. He moved away, and Dani went at once to saddle up.

  She had been practicing on Big Boy for two days and was not yet sure of herself. He was a much taller horse than Biscuit—a rangy, iron-gray gelding. He was not, in her judgment as good as Biscuit, but Fran had won top money on him before she gave up barrel racing, so Dani knew that the fault lay in her.

  After saddling up, she rode slowly around the open space reserved for the contestants, putting everything out of her mind except the race. Finally, Ruth came up on her horse to say, “Come on, Dani. Team roping’s almost over. Time for us to do our stuff.”

  The two rode slowly toward the entrance, and Ruth reluctantly shared, “I got a phone call this morning—from you-know-who.”

  Dani shot a glance at Ruth. “When do you pass the money to him?”

  Ruth hesitated, then admitted, “He didn’t say, Dani. Just told me to get it ready. Only a hundred dollars.” Ruth’s squarish face had a puzzled look and something more than that. “Dani, he’s never before cut his price.”

  “Was that all he said?”

  “N-no,” Ruth stammered. She gave Dani a quick glance. “He said that Clint was cheating on me.”

  “Ruth! You don’t believe that?”

  “I don’t want to,” Ruth confessed. “But Clint’s always been a man to chase women. Up until now he’s been faithful, but lately he’s been acting strangely.” They passed into the building, but Ruth didn’t ride to where the other girls were getting in place. Pulling her horse up, she explained in a sad tone, “He’s worried, Dani. I think he’s lost a lot of money gambling. He never talks t
o me about it, but Clyde says he’s in pretty deep.”

  “How does Clyde know? I thought he had no use for Clint.”

  “He doesn’t—but Clyde’s a big plunger himself. Didn’t you know that?” Ruth shook her head, her dark eyes bitter. “The difference is that Clyde’s got the money to lose, and Clint hasn’t. It’s scary, Dani! Clint makes a lot of money, but he doesn’t have a dime saved. If he got hurt, I don’t know what would happen!”

  “What about the rest of it?” Dani asked. Big Boy was moving nervously, but she pulled him up shortly. “About the woman.”

  “He asked me if I knew where Clint was last night. But I lied about that, Dani.”

  Dani gave her a quick look. “He was with Megan. We both knew that, Ruth. He’s helping her with her book.”

  Ruth sat there silently, her head bowed, and finally she admitted quietly, “He says it’s more than that, Dani. He says they’re having an affair.”

  “That’s not true, Ruth!”

  “Oh, I know you think she’s got religion, Dani,” Ruth said bitterly. “But I don’t know, Clint knows women. If he wants her, he’ll go after her.”

  “Don’t believe it, Ruth. It’s not fair to Clint or to Megan. Talk to him about it.”

  “I—I’m afraid to,” Ruth replied. She lifted her dark eyes, which were filled with misery, to meet Dani’s. “I can’t lose him, Dani! I can’t!”

  The announcer called for the first barrel racer, and Dani pointed out, “You’re next. We’ll talk later, Ruth.”

  Dani’s mind was on what Ruth had just said, and she did poorly when her turn came. Ruth took second place, but when Dani tried to talk to her, she seemed tired and withdrawn. “Talk to Clint,” Dani advised her. “It’s just some slimy trick the Creep has come up with.” Then a thought came to her. “Come on to church with Megan and me tomorrow, Ruth. Luke’s going, too.”