The vaquero’s face reddening in chagrin, he slid his Schofield back snug in its holster, fastened the keeper thong over the hammer, and returned his hands as well as his eyes to the cards before him. The other two were chuckling.
“A pistolero, muchacho Rubio?” asked the thick-haired man with the red necktie. “Or you just fancy yourself one?”
“Me?” Colter feigned an innocent air. “I’m just a saddle tramp lookin’ for a bed. And since the ones here cost too much in the way of idle chatter, I’ll be—”
The thick-haired man laughed. “That’s the trouble with you gringos. You’re too serious!” He tapped Colter’s arm, then ambled around the bar. “I am Florentine Dominguez, and I make it a point of chewing the ears off all my customers. I am a curious man, as well as a cautious one. And an excellent judge of character. If you were a dangerous man, Rubio, you would not be so beat-up. Besides, only a greenhorn muchacho would carry such an old gun into Mexico. Does that thing even work?”
He laughed loudly as he looked down at Colter’s holster, winked condescendingly, then turned and grabbed a key off one of the rings beneath the pigeonholes. “Here is a key. Room eight on the second floor. All the way back. Nice and quiet. Behind the hotel is a stable for your horse. Parched corn and water will cost you five pesos extra.”
“I don’t have any Mexican dinero, Senor Dominguez.”
“Why did I know this?” Dominguez sighed. “In that case, one American dollar for both you and your horse. If you decide you’d like some company”—the hotelier shrugged his heavy shoulders—“fifty cents extra will buy you the romp of your wild, young life.” He grinned, eyelids drooping.
Colter flipped the man a silver dollar. “I reckon I ain’t feelin’ too wild tonight. Thanks just the same.” He held his hand out for the key, then headed for the front door and his horse.
Behind him, Dominguez said, “When you return, take the outside stairs to the second floor. Your room will be on the right.”
Colter pinched his hat brim to the man and closed the door behind him. He took Northwest’s reins, mounted up, and walked the horse around to the back of the hotel and the low-slung stable. A privy stood halfway between the hotel and the stable, and from inside came the singing of the balladeer that Colter had heard before. The man wasn’t singing as loudly as he’d been, and the song was punctuated with frequent grunts and snorts and several other rumblings that echoed around inside the wooden outhouse.
Colter led Northwest into the barn, where several other horses were stabled, including a big, snorting sorrel Arab with steam curling off its back. The magnificent-looking creature still wore a big black saddle adorned with red and green stitching and gold medallions, the stirrups trimmed with fighting, horn-locked bulls. A pair of stout bandoliers was draped over the horn. The horse was the mount of the privy-riding balladeer, most likely. Another vaquero who spent nearly all his monthly earnings making himself and his horse look good for the senoritas, Colter thought reprovingly.
The Arab and Northwest whinnied their greetings, and then the other horses chimed in, until Colter’s ears fairly rang.
“Ah, shut up, for chrissakes. You hosses’re gonna wake up every dead Catholic in Sonora!”
When Colter had given Northwest the attention the loyal mount deserved, including a long, thorough rubdown with a scrap of burlap, Colter hiked his saddlebags on his shoulder, took his rifle and scabbard under his arm, and headed on out of the stable and past the outhouse from which no more singing rose, only the grunts of a man finishing business and clanking a belt buckle against a wooden wall.
His feet feeling like lead, his saddle and saddlebags weighing as much as a wagonload of ore, Colter mounted the creaky wooden stairs that rose up the rear of the adobe hotel. He pushed through the sun-blistered door to find himself in a hall outfitted with a flowered green floor runner and wine red wallpaper trimmed with gilded palm leaves.
A couple of bracket lamps guttered and smoked, casting more shadows than light. The air smelled of coal oil and sweat and perfume as sweet as sugared cherries.
Colter had just found the door to room 6 to the right of the entrance when the latch of a door down the hall, toward the stairs rising from the main saloon hall below, clicked. Hinges squawked. The door was two rooms down from Colter, on the hall’s left side—too far away for him to see it clearly in the guttering lamplight, but he thought he could see the reflections of two dark eyes staring out at him.
He stared back, frowning.
The door widened a foot, and a girl with long dark brown hair poked her head out. She said something just above a whisper in Spanish. Colter just stared at her, frowning. She frowned then, too, impatiently, and said louder in broken English—“Is he still here? Did he ride on?”
Colter shook his head, so weary that his knees were nearly buckling. “Sorry, ma’am . . . er, senorita. I don’t know who you’re talkin’ about.”
“Santiago Machado!” she hissed. “He sings! I heard him just a . . .”
She let her voice trail off and shuttled her gaze to the outside door behind Colter. The balladeer was singing again, softly, and the singing was punctuated by heavy thumps on the outside stairs. The thumps were so heavy that Colter could feel the floor jounce beneath his boots.
“Oh, him,” Colter said. “Yeah, I heard him comin’ from a long way off!”
He chuckled and turned toward his door, poking his key in the lock. The girl came up behind him, dressed like some gaudy bird in a pink velvet corset with matching camisole, black stockings, and a silky black wrap that hung off her shoulders and probably didn’t weigh as much as a butterfly. She had black feathers in her hair, and they danced like antennae as she shouldered Colter aside and turned the key in his door.
“Quickly!” she hissed, reaching forward to pull him into the room before closing the door painstakingly quietly behind him.
Chapter 12
“Look, miss . . . er, senorita . . . I told Mr. Dominguez downstairs that I—”
The pretty, half-dressed whore pressed two fingers to her ruby red lips. “Shhh!”
She stared at the door. The thumps on the outside stairs continued, making nearly the entire building shake.
Colter stared at the terrified girl, absently musing that the man on the stairs must have been as big as those ape-men some folks claimed they saw in the western forests of a deep, dark night. If he didn’t always behave himself, the girl likely had reason to be afraid. But it wasn’t Colter’s job to give her sanctuary—not when he’d plopped down a whole dollar for the room and he was dead on his feet.
He wasn’t the bouncer of this establishment.
He was about to say as much to the girl when the outside doors opened. The balladeer stopped singing. Colter could hear his breath rasping in and out of strained lungs. It sounded like sandpaper worked against rough wood.
The man took a step, seemed to stagger, dragging what sounded like a spur the size of a cymbal. The girl gasped and clamped a hand over her mouth. Colter turned to the door, incredulous, as a gurgling sounded on the other side. It was followed by swallowing sounds, and then a raspy sigh. The man had taken a drink from a bottle. He snorted.
A rumbling voice said, “Alegria!” His voice boomed and echoed like a cannon, pronouncing the name, “Ally-gree—ahhh!”
Colter started, as did the girl, gasping again. Some Spanish followed. The girl placed a hand on Colter’s arm as she stared at the door, wide-eyed, digging her fingertips into his skin through his canvas jacket until he could feel the sharpness of her fingernails.
“Alegria!” the man fairly cried once more. And it did indeed sound like a cry, or something very close to a cry. Almost a plaintive, beseeching wail.
“Hell,” Colter said, regarding the girl critically. “That jake seems to be gone for you, Miss Alegria.”
“Now he seems—as you say—gone.” She drew her hair back behind her ear, exposing a long white line angling down the side of her face. “Later, when he starts seeing snakes and javelinas crawling over the walls and ceiling, he’ll think I’m a witch and try to cut off my head again. The man is loco!”
“All-ee-gree-ahhhhh!” the man’s deep voice thundered, making Colter’s tired bones rattle together.
The girl gave a clipped shriek and covered her mouth with both hands.
He yelled something else in Spanish, and then there was the booming crunch of a door being kicked open. He shouted for Alegria a few more times, and then footsteps hammered the stairs, and Colter recognized the voice of Dominguez pleading with Machado while Machado continued raging and demanding Alegria. Meanwhile, the girl sobbed and moved up close behind Colter, wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing her cheek against his back.
“Por favor, senor,” she pleaded. “Don’t let him kill me.”
Fatigued and bewildered, Colter stared dumbly at the door. Shortly, four or five more men ran up the stairs, and there ensued what sounded like two grizzly bears fighting in the room from which Alegria had sought sanctuary. “The sheriff and his diputadoes!” the girl exclaimed, easing her grip on Colter’s pistol belt. He could feel the relief relax the tension in her warm, supple body still pressed against his. He could also feel, despite his fatigue, a warming in his young loins.
Suddenly, the commotion died down. Colter cracked the door to see four men wearing serapes and straw sombreros hauling what appeared a huge, shaggy bear with a gold stud earring and dressed in black leather and a bright red-and-white-striped poncho out of Alegria’s room, each carrying a limb. When they’d carried Senor Machado on down the stairs, Dominguez stepped wearily out of the girl’s room, smoothing his own shaggy hair back from his temples and looking as though he were about to faint. He saw Colter staring out at him, and spoke softly first in Spanish, forgetting himself, then quickly switched to English.
“The girl—Alegria. Have you seen her?”
Colter stepped back, and the girl poked her head out. She and Dominguez conversed in Spanish for a time, and then the girl pulled her head back into the room and closed the door. Colter looked at her, skeptically.
“They haul him off to jail?” he asked.
“Sí.”
“Well, then I reckon you’re safe now.” Colter opened the door. “Glad I could help, but I’m awful tired, and”—he couldn’t help letting his weary gaze rove across the girl’s body, the corset pushing up her breasts enticingly—“I could really use some shut-eye.”
“I am safe until he breaks out. He always breaks out. Why don’t I stay here tonight, Rubio?” She rose on the balls of her feet, slid his hair back from his left cheek, and planted a silky kiss on it. “You can keep me safe.”
“I’m awful tired. I doubt I could . . . you know . . . even if I’d paid for it, which I haven’t. Besides, there looks to be plenty of other rooms. Ain’t there other girls you could hole up with?”
“There are no other girls here at the Babylon. Just me. The others all went to Senora Matilda’s down the street. There is more business there. I was going to give you a free one, for helping me, but . . .” She flared her nostrils at him. “If you don’t want one, adelante!”
She started to step out into the hall. Colter grabbed her arm and pulled her back into the room. He closed the door behind her. “I didn’t mean to get your neck in a hump.”
She frowned, puzzled by the expression.
“This gonna be all right with Senor Dominguez?” he asked.
She hiked a shoulder, still looking indignant. “The hombres downstairs are more interested in cards . . . and heading over to Senora Matilda’s later . . . than me. She has two fat Apache girls, and a blond gringa.” She curled her lip in a jealous sneer. “So, why not?”
Unbuttoning his jacket, Colter turned toward the bed, whose brass headboard abutted the wall on his left. This had always been the hardest part for him—undressing in front of a girl. He wished he hadn’t lit the lamp.
Truth was he wasn’t all that experienced in the ways of love—he’d slept with only a few women, mostly girls—and when he found himself around one, even one he didn’t even intend to lie with, he felt shy and awkward. Especially now, with the brand on his cheek. Not too many girls would lie with a man so scarred, and he supposed he had to take his opportunities wherever they appeared. With a few more years on him, he supposed he’d lose out on even the pity pokes.
When he’d tossed his jacket on the floor, he removed his shell belt. The girl moved around to the other side of the bed, removing the gauzy black wrap and sitting on the edge of the bed, her back to Colter, then unlacing the corset and grunting softly with the effort.
Colter kicked out of his boots, peeled off his socks, then removed his jeans. He’d just started sliding his long-handles off his shoulders when he looked up and saw the girl rising, naked, from the edge of the bed. She was a pretty girl in a waifish way, with big brown eyes and thick, curly hair. Her body was smooth and brown, well proportioned, with small, firm breasts with budlike brown nipples. She pulled the bedcovers back, small breasts jostling, then crawled in, fluffed her pillow, and laid her head back on it, looking at him with vague impatience.
He swung around to blow out the lamp.
“Leave it,” she said, wrinkling the skin above the bridge of her nose, incredulous. She quirked her mouth corners in a faint smile. “I like to see what I am doing.”
Colter shrugged, feigning nonchalance, then quickly crawled beneath the covers, and laid his head back on his pillow. A few minutes before, he’d been so sleepy he thought he’d pass out on his feet. Now he could feel his heart throbbing in his chest. He stared at the ceiling, listening to her breathing beside him, wondering how he should get started and knowing he had to roll toward her soon and do something decisive. He didn’t want her to know how inexperienced he was, but he was inexperienced, and he was damned nervous though he was also as randy as those stallions in Trace Cassidy’s holding corral.
He drew a breath and rolled toward her quickly and flung a leg over hers. She lay beneath him, staring up at him curiously. He lowered his lips to hers, but suddenly she pushed him back down on his side of the bed, and rolled onto her side, giving him a knowing little smile, curling her bottom lip wistfully beneath the upper one.
“What’s the matter?” he said. “You change your mind?”
She shook her head. Strands of her curly hair snaked across her smooth brown cheeks. Her brown eyes, flecked with tiny bits of gold, caressed him as she said, “There is no rush, Rubio.” She placed a hand on his chest and smiled. “And there is no need to be nervous.”
“Hell, I ain’t nervous.”
“No? Well . . . I guess it is me that is nervous, then. Machado. If we rush, it will be over so soon, and you will fall asleep and leave me alone, listening for his singing and his spurs.”
“Dominguez oughta put a bullet in that big bastard, next time he comes around, pestering you.”
Her eyes brightened fearfully. “No, no. Machado is the leader of a notorious gang. His gang would avenge his death most severely. And they will likely be in town soon, as they always split up after they rob a bank or a stage, then gather again here in Corazon.”
She half closed her eyes, slowly lowered her face to his, and kissed a small scab on his chin. “What is your name, Rubio?”
“Colter Farrow.”
“Colter Farrow,” she whispered, as though testing the words out on her own tongue. With the back of her hand, she slid a lock of his long, straight red hair away from his cheek. “How did that happen?”
“Ah, don’t look at that.”
“You saw mine,” she said, motioning to her own cheek. “How did it happen?”
Annoyance bit him. As well as impati
ence. “We gonna tell each other our stories now, or we gonna get down to business?”
She frowned reprovingly. “What is your hurry?”
He studied her angry eyes for a moment. “Sorry.” He rested his head back against his pillow. “You’re right. I am nervous. And if I get all in a hurry, it’ll be done before it even gets started, and I reckon I’m nervous about that, too.” He blew a raspy whistle at the ceiling. “Jeepers—I sound like an old woman!”
The wrinkles in her forehead smoothed out. “I like that you are nervous.”
He rolled his eyes down to regard her seriously. “I just want you to know—this won’t be my first time.”
Gently, she traced the S on his cheek with the index finger of her right hand, her eyes crossing slightly as she followed her finger with her gaze.
“A law dog up in Colorado gave me that.”
“I have never known a lawman any better than the men they lock in their jails.”
Colter thought of old Spurr Morgan, the deputy U.S. marshal whom Colter had teamed up with to run his friend Cimarron Padilla’s killers down in Wyoming. “Oh, there’s a few out there.” His eyes acquired a hard, pensive cast. “But not Bill Rondo.”
“Did you kill him?”
Colter shook his head. “I left him wishin’ he was dead.”
“Ahh,” Alegria said with a sly smile. “That is better yet. That is how we do it in Mexico!”
She slid her hand down his chest and he drew a painful breath when she touched his ribs. “That hurts?”
“Some. It’s gettin’ better now.”
“In the morning, I will wrap your ribs with a poultice. An old Mexican remedy. Tornillo beans and mescal. It will feel good on your lips, too.” She slid her hand lower and grinned, slitting her eyes, as she whispered alluringly, “For now, though, I will make you feel better down here, uh?”
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