by Jon Sharpe
NEVADA VIPERS’ NEST
Even fully prepared for danger, Fargo flinched violently when a deafening racket of gunfire opened up only inches above his head. He fired two shots dead center on the shadowy form inside the room. Screams erupted from the rooms behind him as a body flopped heavily onto the floor beside him.
Fargo knocked the gun a few feet away from the man’s hand and tugged him over just in time to watch the would-be killer’s pig eyes lose their vital focus and then glaze over like glass when he gave up the ghost. Evidently one of Fargo’s bullets had struck a major artery. In the shocked silence that followed the sudden outburst of gunfire, he could hear the obscene liquid-slapping sound of blood splashing onto the floor.
“Nice try,” Fargo muttered.
SIGNET
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The first chapter of this book previously appeared in Thunderhead Trail, the three hundred eighty-fifth volume in this series.
Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2013
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ISBN 978-1-101-63261-1
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Excerpt from TRAILSMAN #387
The Trailsman
Beginnings . . . they bend the tree and they mark the man. Skye Fargo was born when he was eighteen. Terror was his midwife, vengeance his first cry. Killing spawned Skye Fargo, ruthless, cold-blooded murder. Out of the acrid smoke of gunpowder still hanging in the air, he rose, cried out a promise never forgotten.
The Trailsman they began to call him all across the West: searcher, scout, hunter, the man who could see where others only looked, his skills for hire but not his soul, the man who lived each day to the fullest, yet trailed each tomorrow. Skye Fargo, the Trailsman, the seeker who could take the wildness of a land and the wanting of a woman and make them his own.
Carson Valley, Nevada Territory, 1861—where Skye Fargo must track down an elusive, mysterious woman or be branded a murderer of women and children.
1
Skye Fargo’s stallion always showed a distinctive quiver in his nostrils when he whiffed death.
And they had begun that quivering now as Fargo started to ascend a low ridge overlooking the remote Carson Valley at the western edge of the newly formed Nevada Territory.
Fargo expelled a weary, fluming sigh as he reined in. “Steady on, old campaigner,” he told his nervous Ovaro. “You know that trouble never leaves us alone for very long.”
The buckskin-clad man some called the Trailsman sat tall in the saddle, his alert lake blue eyes watching his surroundings from a weather-bronzed, crop-bearded face. He was wide in the shoulders, slim in the hips, and a dusty white hat left half his face in shadow.
The deadly alkali flats of Nevada stretched out to infinity behind him; the majestic, ascending folds of the California Sierra rose before him. Fargo was currently employed by the army as an express messenger between Camp Floyd in the Utah Territory and Fort Churchill in Nevada.
Normally his route would not take him this far west into the silver-mining country. But the Paiutes, Bannocks and Shoshones in this region—no tribes to fool with—had recently made common cause to war on whiteskins. Fargo had been forced to flee in this direction to shake a war party determined to lift his dander.
And now this new trouble . . .
“Caught between a sawmill and a shootout,” Fargo muttered. “Story of my life.”
He clucked at his nervous stallion and gigged him up to a trot, sliding his brass-framed Henry rifle from its boot. The ridge he now ascended was strewn with boulders, and Fargo’s slitted eyes stayed in constant scanning motion, watching for dry-gulchers.
Near the top of the ridge he spotted buzzards wheeling in a cloudless sky of bottomless blue—merchants of death impatient to feast. But the fact that they were still circling told Fargo that someone, human or animal, was likely still alive below.
Just before he topped the long ridge, he detected motion in the corner of his left eye.
With the honed reflexes of a civet cat, Fargo threw the reins forward and rolled from the saddle, levering a round into the Henry’s chamber even before he landed on the ground. He peered cautiously past the Ovaro’s shoulder, eyes widening in surprised disbelief.
In this dreary and woman-scarce country, the woman he now clearly spotted fleeing between boulders stood out like a brass spittoon in a funeral parlor. Evidently Fargo had ridden too close and scared her out of hiding.
“Hey!” he called out. “No need to skedaddle, lady! Maybe I can help you.”
She paused for a moment, turning in his direction. Fargo drank in the thick tresses of copper-colored hair, flawless mother-of-pearl skin, a pretty, fine-boned face. But her sprigged-muslin dress was obscenely splotched with blood.
“What happened?” Fargo called to her, stepping out into the open.
By way of reply, the woman brought her right hand into view and fired a short iron at Fargo. The bullet came nowhere near him, but the surprised Trailsman leaped back behind his stallion.
“Christ, lady, lower the hammer! I want to help you. Are you hurt?”
“No, and I’m not going to be!” she shouted back. “If you even try to get any closer to me, I’m going to use every bullet but one in this gun to try to kill you. And if I miss, I’ll use the last bullet on myself! I swear to God I will!”
The sheer desperation in her voice told Fargo she had recently suffered some unspeakable horror. He believed she meant every word.
“All right, lady, it’s your call. But listen to me. If you turn to your right you’ll be headed due south. Carson City is only three miles from here in that direction. If you keep going east like you are now, you’ll die in the desert.”
She must have heard him because she did turn south, disappearing among a clutch of boulders.
Fargo turned the stirrup, took up the reins and stepped up and over. A minu
te later he topped the ridge and saw the whole bloody chronicle, laid out below like a tableau straight from hell.
“Shit-oh-dear,” he muttered, fighting to control his sidestepping stallion, who wanted nothing to do with the scene below.
A sudden squall of anger tightened Fargo’s lips and facial muscles. Despite everything he had seen during his many years yondering on the western frontier, there were some things he had never learned to stomach.
Especially the brutal murder of women and children.
A burned-out prairie schooner, still sending up curls of smoke, lay on its side, six dead Cleveland Bays tangled in the traces, all shot through their heads. A man, a woman and two small girls lay scattered about like ninepins, bodies riddled with bullet holes. The woman’s calico dress had been pulled up and her chemise and pantaloons ripped away—clearly she had been raped before she was murdered.
Fargo also saw why the buzzards were still wheeling instead of swooping in for the feast. A man stood beside a blaze-faced sorrel, his face ashen as he surveyed the grisly scene.
“Rider coming in!” Fargo called out, bringing his Henry down to the level.
The man scarcely seemed to hear or notice the new arrival, still staring around him in a state of shock.
“Mister, you’re either an innocent passerby or one damn fine actor,” Fargo greeted him as he dismounted.
The man said nothing to this, his unblinking eyes like two glazed marbles. Fargo gave him a quick size-up. He was of medium height and build with a homely, careworn face and an unruly shock of dark hair. With his usual abundance of caution, Fargo kept the Henry leveled on him, but he strongly doubted that the stranger had played a hand in this slaughter.
Fargo glanced at the unusual firearm tucked behind the man’s canvas belt.
“I see you play the harmonica,” Fargo said, meaning the harmonica pistol the man carried. “Mind if I take a look at it?”
Fargo knew damn well that a small-caliber pistol didn’t do the killing here. The dead man’s heart had practically been ripped out of his body by a large-bore weapon. But the Trailsman hadn’t survived so long by coming to quick conclusions.
“Snap out of your shit!” Fargo barked when the man failed to respond. “I said let me glom that harmonica.”
Fargo’s take-charge voice did rouse the man from his stupor. He handed the weapon over. It was an early attempt at a multishot pistol. A sliding bar held ten bullets with primer caps, the mechanism roughly resembling a harmonica. Each time the weapon was fired, the bar could be slid to the next round. The harmonica pistol had never caught on, though, because it was awkward and cumbersome.
“All right, mister,” Fargo said, handing the weapon back, “give.”
“Not much to give,” he replied. “I just got here about ten minutes before you did. I didn’t see or hear anything.”
“What brings you to these parts?”
“You might say I had to take the geographic cure, and in a puffin’ hurry. I was working as a trick-whip performer for Dr. Geary’s traveling medicine show. We were up north in Virginia City on the Comstock. I got into a poker game and somehow a fifth ace turned up.”
“Musta been a faulty deck,” Fargo said sarcastically. “Where you headed?”
“Just drifting through to Old Sac,” he replied, meaning Sacramento.
“What’s your name?”
“Mitt McDougall, but I prefer to be called Sitch.”
“Sitch . . . that’s an unusual handle,” Fargo remarked absently, beginning to study the ground around them for sign.
“It’s bobtail for troublesome ‘situations,’ which I always find myself in—just like this one. Katy Christ, mister, did Indians do this?”
“Not unless they’ve taken to riding iron-shod horses and rolling cigarettes. There’s several fresh butts here.”
“And they call the red men savages. If it was road agents or whatever, why in Sam Hill did they have to slaughter all these folks just to rob them?”
“That don’t cipher,” Fargo agreed. “I’ve never heard of road agents deliberately killing women and children. Even the hardest of the hard twists shy away from that. Well, we best try to find out who these folks were before we bury them.”
So far Fargo had avoided looking at the victims, but now he steeled himself for what must be done. He grounded his Henry, knelt beside the dead man and started searching through his pockets.
Suddenly, the Ovaro gave his trouble whicker.
Fargo started to reach for his rifle when a shot split the silence, a geyser of sand spuming up only inches from his feet.
“Both you murdering sons-a-bitches freeze!” shouted a gravelly voice that brooked no defiance. “Make one damn move and we’ll shoot you to rag tatters!”
2
Fargo watched three men emerge from behind the huge granite boulders that rimmed Carson Valley, their horses walking slowly closer.
“What’s those red sashes tied to their belts?” McDougall muttered. “Are they lawmen?”
“Jackleg lawmen,” Fargo replied in a low voice. “They call themselves regulators—most are vigilante trash. Likely they rule the roost at the silver-mining camp near here, place called Rough and Ready.”
“Shut your damn fish traps,” ordered the man who had just spoken. “It’s too late now for you murdering shit heels to get your story straight. We caught you red-handed.”
The speaker was a muscular, big-framed man with long greasy hair tied into a knot. He wore a necklace made of grizzly claws. More ominously, he also wore a pair of ivory-handled Navy Colts, one aimed at Fargo. He swung down and approached closer on foot. Fargo noticed how his eyes seemed to trap a man like lance points.
“Listen up real good, buckskins. Real slow like, unbuckle that gun belt. And even slower, shuck that Arkansas toothpick from your boot and lay it next to the gun. Soon as you got that done, move away from the weapons. Before you try any fox play, you best take a good gander at the hardware aimed at you.”
Fargo already had. One of the regulators siding the leader held an old Hawken rifle. Although now considered a relic of the mountain-man era, the formidable weapon was capable of dropping a buffalo at a thousand yards. Fargo had once seen a half-ounce ball fired from a Hawken remove half of a man’s head.
The other regulator held a Sharps fifty in the crook of his left arm.
The leader’s head swiveled toward Sitch McDougall. “And you with the hangdog face—toss down that harmonica gun or you’ll be sucking wind.”
Both men complied.
“Romer,” the leader ordered the man with the Sharps fifty, “ground your long gun and search both these murdering bastards for hideout guns.”
Fargo pegged the man called Romer as the sneakiest of the trio. He was ferret-faced with swift-as-minnow eyes, coarse-grained skin and broken teeth stained the color of licorice spit.
“They’re both clean, Iron Mike,” he said a minute later after patting both men down.
“Well, believe you me, assholes,” Iron Mike told his prisoners, “both of you murderers will soon stretch hemp.”
“I ain’t never seen anything to equal it, Mike,” said the third man, a skinny rake with green-rimmed teeth and gums the color of raw liver. He spoke in a hillman’s twang. “May I be eternally damned if I have. Let’s burn ’em where they stand.”
Now Fargo spoke up for the first time since the trio had arrived. “You boys are mighty mistaken. Check our weapons—they ain’t been fired recently. And look how tacky that blood is. These folks were killed sometime during the night.”
“Don’t blow smoke up my ass, woman killer,” Iron Mike shot back. “You two killed them last night, all right. And you raped that woman and done for both the kids. But you couldn’t see good enough to rob ’em thorough-like in the dark. So you come back this morning to finish the job.”
“Yeah,” green teeth pitched in, “and you cleaned your weapons afore you come back. Innocent as scrubbed angels, huh?”
“You boys seem to have it all worked out,” Fargo said. “Real convenient-like. But you still got one big problem. Look at those bullet holes, and look at how that man’s heart is practically blown clear out of his chest. Neither one of us has weapons with that large a caliber. But I notice you three have.”
Iron Mike moved with surprising speed for such a big man. He stepped closer and brought a vicious backhand across Fargo’s lips, splitting them open.
“Iron Mike Scully takes no sass but sarsaparilla, mister. Who the hell are you?”
Fargo was not in the habit of giving information, only eliciting it from others.
“Look it up in the almanac,” he replied.
“Every deck has its joker,” Scully replied. This time he shot his ham-sized fist hard into Fargo’s gut, doubling him up for at least ten seconds as he struggled to get his breath back.
“You got starch in your collar,” Scully said. “I’ll give you that much. Leroy,” he called to Green Teeth, “this one rides the stallion. Go through his saddlebags and see if there’s anything to identify him.”
Iron Mike Scully tipped his head in McDougall’s direction. “Why would a hard case like you be pards with a damn pasty-faced barber’s clerk like him? Or is he your gal-boy?”
“According to your big idea, I raped the woman. So why would I need a gal-boy?”
“Christ Jesus!” Leroy called out from beside the Ovaro. “I found an army contract, boys. Buckskins here is an express rider for the army.”
“You sure don’t set up like no army messenger rider to me,” Scully told Fargo. “I say both you jaspers are on the dodge. Fess up, mister. You two’re range bums turned killer, uh?”
“Holy mother-lovin’ shit!” Leroy added. “If you believe this here piece of paper, his name is Skye Fargo!”
“That s’pose to mean something?” Scully demanded. “I ain’t never heard the name.”