by Sharpe, Jon
LAST CHANCE
Fargo knew they had reached the crisis point, and at first all seemed lost. Fargo had depleted his spare cylinder, too, and despite having killed or wounded more than half the attackers, he and Booger had no time to reload. A movement in the corner of his eye made Fargo glance toward the rear of the coach just in the nick of time to spot Red Sash with his knife cocked back to throw—in the desperate confusion, he had managed to ride around on the south flank and leap onto the coach.
Fargo rolled hard and fast as Red Sash threw his knife, grabbing the express gun and cocking both hammers. Sprawled on his back, Fargo fired both barrels almost point-blank. The twin load of buckshot lifted the Apache off the coach in a bloody spray. . . .
SIGNET
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The first chapter of this book previously appeared in Texas Swamp Fever, the three hundred seventy-fifth volume in this series.
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Contents
Last Chance
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
Excerpt from TRAILSMAN #377
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.
New Mexico Territory, 1860—where Fargo serves as bodyguard for “America’s Sweetheart” on a stagecoach bound straight for hell.
1
“When I was still just a lad 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 ev
er 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 traveling 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 informer 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 nineteenth, 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.”
2
“Mr. Fargo, this job will not be coffee-cooler’s furlough,” warned Addison Steele, Manager of the New Mexico Division of Overland Stage and Freighting. “If Mr. Jenkins here is correct in his surmise, you will most definitely be earning your ten dollars a day.”
Ten dollars a day, Fargo repeated to himself. Nobody paid that kind of money for anything short of a suicide mission. But at the moment, the fiddle-footed frontiersman didn’t have two half dimes to rub together. And even a man who preferred the emptiest corner of the canyon needed money now and then.
Fargo, Steele and a theatrical manager from back east named Ambrose Jenkins occupied a small back office of Overland’s El Paso depot. Jenkins cultivated a neat, waxed mustache and wore his hair parted in the middle, shiny with macassar oil. He had a brisk, take-charge manner that irritated Fargo.
“Addison is not being melodramatic, Fargo,” Jenkins said. “Kathleen Barton’s life is not only in danger—I suspect the man who intends to kill her is none other than Zack Lomax.”
Fargo, comfortably seated in a leather-upholstered wing chair, crossed his ankles and narrowed his eyes as he tried to recollect the name. His face was tanned hickory-nut brown above the darker brown of his close-cropped beard.
“Lomax . . . Lomax. Say, wasn’t he the jasper who died awhile back in an explosion out in San Francisco?”
“That’s the story his people put out, yes. But the body they supplied was burned beyond any recognition. Neither I nor my client, Miss Barton, ever quite believed it.”
“I read something about him,” Fargo said. “Owned half of San Francisco and crooked as cat shit.”
“He’s been painted as the blackest man in that corrupt city,” Addison Steele put in, “and that hellhole
has no dearth of scoundrels, as you well know.”
Enlightenment suddenly touched Fargo’s face and he straightened his long, buckskin-clad legs, leaning forward in the chair.
“Hell yes, I remember it now—it was a helluva stirring-and-to-do. Lomax got him a powerful yen for this actress and the damn knot head popped the question in a newspaper instead of privately. She turned him down in a letter to the same crap sheet, and Lomax looked like a bigger fool than God made him.”
“Turned him down?” Jenkins repeated, his tone mocking the phrase. “Fargo, she turned that rooster into a capon. He was not only forced to quit the mayoral race—which he practically had in the bag—but he became the butt of the biggest joke in the city.”
“All right,” Fargo said. “But what proof you got that he’s alive and means to kill your client?”
“As to actual proof, nothing the law deems probative. But this explosion happened only weeks after her letter, and as I said, the body could have been anyone. More to the point, the anonymous letter she recently received quoted the Old Testament: ‘Behold, the day cometh.’ And later this month—the nineteenth, to be exact—marks the first anniversary of her now famous letter.”
“Interesting,” was all Fargo said.
“Jenkins believes the scoundrel is somewhere in this area,” Steele added, “probably flourishing under a summer name. He almost certainly has deep reserves of capital. And he’s a highly resourceful man known for intricate planning.”
“Resourceful enough,” Fargo put in, “to know exactly which stagecoach she’ll be taking?”
“That seems unlikely,” Steele replied. “Her fellow passengers will certainly recognize her eventually. But she purchased her tickets in disguise under the name Roberta Davis. I wish she had let someone else purchase them for her, but she’s a very . . . self-sufficient woman.”
Fargo looked puzzled. “Tickets? You mean for her and Jenkins?”
“I’m not going,” Jenkins replied, looking injured.