New Mexico Madman (9781101612644)

by Sharpe, Jon

  “Interesting,” Fargo muttered, making sure his brass-framed Henry was conveniently to hand behind him. An express gun was formidable indeed, at close range, but Fargo suspected his sixteen-shot Henry might soon prove more useful.

  Booger was in high spirits at seeing his old battle companion again.

  “Ahh, the morning-crisp glory of the sun, eh, Fargo? Watch this.”

  Booger stared into the bright yellow ball of sun until he sneezed so violently the wheel team pricked up their ears.

  “Works every time! If I aim my ass at old Sol, might be I’ll cut a fart, hey?”

  “Let’s just go on wondering,” Fargo suggested as they rolled through the northern outskirts of El Paso, his eyes constantly scanning to all sides. “Booger, did anything I told you back at the depot sink in?”

  “What? About this Lomax wanting to kill the Ice Queen? Faugh! Can you blame him? That calico is all horns and rattles.”

  “Tell the truth and shame the devil. But don’t forget—it’s likely we’ll be the first targets. And I’d wager we’re being watched already. I think maybe I spotted one of the killers as we pulled out of the depot. It’s also highly likely they’ll wait until we’re deeper into New Mexico.”

  Booger snorted. “Ahh, go crap in your hat, malt worm. Why, this run will be like money for old rope. I’ve survived Comanches, Apaches, Kiowas, the French Pox and two years of bloody war down in Old Mex.”

  He gnawed off a corner of his plug, got it juicing good, then cheeked his cud and let out a dramatic sigh.

  “Yes, lad, the war. Blood, guts, senseless slaughter, terrible suffering and treachery, unmitigated human misery—oh, Skye, I do miss it! Life has gone to hell for old Booger, it has. Where the grapeshot is pouring in, that’s where I long to be. Hee-yah, you spavined whores!” he added, cracking his whip over the leaders.

  “Please, Mr. McTeague!” the preacher shouted through one of the windows. “The ladies can hear you!”

  Booger grinned malevolently. “That prissy holy man wears cologne in them droopy side whiskers. You get within four feet of that rake handle and your eyeballs mist.”

  “Never mind him. Wha’d’ya think about Lansford Ashton?”

  The mirth bled from Booger’s moon face. “Aye, there’s a weasel dick and an oily tongue. He spoke up for you to the actress, but it was only lip deep. Bad medicine. Are you thinking he’s hired by Lomax—that Lomax knows the very rig Her Nibs is riding?”

  “That’s two good questions,” Fargo pointed out, “but I’ve got no good answers. I think it’s smart to assume Lomax knows which coach and that he’s planted somebody on it. But consider all those passengers potential killers, not just Ashton.”

  “Even Trixie? She of the giant jahoobies?”

  “Even her.”

  Booger nodded and loosed a brown streamer that splatted on the withers of the offside wheeler. “All right, catfish. But if it’s her, let’s make damn sure we screw her before we kill her.”

  * * *

  The first stage of the journey into New Mexico Territory went off without a hitch. The stage rolled through the narrow but fertile Rio Grande Valley, green with well-cultivated fields of beans, squash and chili peppers.

  Fargo could see the river on his left, a wide, meandering brown ribbon still high with spring runoff from the northern mountains. On his right, the fertile fields gave way like a knife edge to yellow-brown desert. Beyond this desolate vista, the Organ Mountains cut dark silhouettes against a cloudless sky of bottomless blue. Mountains seldom seemed close in New Mexico, yet they always saw-toothed the horizons.

  The day heated up quickly as the morning advanced, and Fargo was soon mopping his forehead with his sleeve. They changed teams at the Berino swing station. When Fargo hopped down and glanced into the coach, he had to stifle a grin—Kathleen Barton alone occupied the leather-padded seat at the rear, cut off from the other four passengers.

  “Mr. Fargo,” Pastor Brandenburg complained out the window, “you really must speak to that driver! Those filthy songs he bellows out, and his coarse language—why, the ladies are positively scandalized!”

  “I think he’s funny,” Trixie contradicted, pouring out a smile for Fargo. “I liked that ditty about granny swinging on the outhouse door without her nightgown.”

  “Tell you what, Preacher,” Fargo said from a deadpan, pointing to the other side of the coach. “There’s Booger now—speak to him yourself.”

  The man of God followed Fargo’s finger, his face contorting into a horrified mask: Booger McTeague stood in open view, pissing into the sand.

  “God preserve us,” the preacher muttered.

  Booger saw the rest staring. “Why, a man must drain his snake, hey? It’s two more hours before we reach the station at Vado. If anyone needs to piss, best let ’er rip now!”

  Lansford Ashton met Fargo’s gaze. “Earthy fellow, isn’t he?”

  Kathleen Barton deigned to break her demure silence, those bewitching amber-brown eyes staring at Fargo as she spoke. “You mustn’t confuse earth with dirt, Mr. Lansford.”

  Fargo grinned, touched his hat, then lent the stock-tender a hand with the new relay before they rolled on again. The open, cultivated terrain so far set Fargo somewhat at ease. Occasionally they encountered serape-draped indios and Mexicans, afoot, on burros or riding in carts pulled by donkeys, and Fargo kept a wary eye on them until they were out of sight.

  “Money for old rope,” Booger insisted again after tipping his flask and passing it to Fargo. “The Ice Queen is safe as sassafras. We may have to kill a few stray road agents or Apaches is all.”

  Booger’s North & Savage rifle protruded from a leather boot at the corner of the box, and his old cap-and-ball dragoon pistol from the Mexican War was tucked behind his red sash. Fargo knew firsthand that he was a dead shot with both weapons.

  “Like I said,” Fargo reminded him, “the trouble is likely to come farther north where it’s good ambush country.”

  “Fargo, you’ve become a reg’lar calamity howler. You eat too much pussy—such a diet renders a man feminine. Say, here’s a lulu! There’s this jasper riding a train from Cincinnati to Chicago, you see, and all of a sudden like he’s got to take him a powerful shit. Just then the train whooshes into a tunnel, and in the dark he drops his britches and hangs his ass out a window.

  “Well, sir, there’s these two bummers camped in the tunnel beside the tracks. One of ’em looks up, all excited like: ‘Look-a-there, Pete, see that? Quick, man! You slap his face and I’ll grab the cigar!’”

  Booger found his own joke so amusing he laughed himself into a coughing fit, shaking the entire coach. “Ain’t that the berries, Skye? See, he thought—”

  “Yeah, I grasp it,” Fargo punned, and when Booger got his play on words he almost rolled off the box in new paroxysms of mirth.

  “But if it was dark inside the tunnel,” Trixie’s voice called up to them, “how could they see the—”

  “Ignore them, young lady,” the preacher’s voice snapped, raised for Booger’s enlightenment. “You must resist corrupting influences, not encourage them.”

  Booger winked at Fargo. “The game’s afoot, lad. The witch doctor is my favorite boy now. Oh, great larks ahead!”

  Early in the afternoon they rolled into the Overland station house at Vado, a low cottonwood structure chinked with mud. A fresh relay team waited in the hoof-packed side yard.

  Many way stations also sold food and liquor to passersby. Fargo spotted a lone roan gelding, still saddled, hitched to the snorting post out front.

  “That’s fine horseflesh,” he remarked as Booger kicked the brake handle. “But sore-used. See the scars where it’s been spurred in the shoulders? Spurred hard.”

  “Outlaw horse,” Booger said. “Sure as cats fighting.”

  Fargo
nodded. “Hold the passengers out here a minute while I talk to the mozo. I want me and you stepping inside first.”

  Fargo instructed the yard boy to untie the three horses from the back of the Concord and let them tank up at the stone water trough.

  “Any trouble inside?” he asked the Mexican kid.

  The lad shrugged and removed his straw Chihuahua hat in a mark of respect. “No hable ingles, senor.”

  “Hay un hombre malo dentro de la casa?”

  “There is one stranger,” the kid replied in Spanish. “He ate a bowl of pozole and now he is drinking whiskey. He has been very quiet. There has been no trouble.”

  Fargo thanked him and sent a high sign to Booger, who flung open the doors of the coach. While the preacher and Ashton handed out the ladies, Fargo and Booger went ahead into the station master’s home, Fargo knocking the riding thong off the hammer of his Colt.

  The large front room was simple and clean, with a whitewashed clay floor and a long trestle table with two wooden benches. Ristras, bunches of dried red chili peppers, hung from the low ceiling. The place smelled wonderfully of beef and green-chili stew. In the far front corner was a short plank bar. A shelf on the wall behind it held a few bottles of whiskey and the milky cactus liquor called pulque.

  But it was the lone figure slouched over the bar who focused Fargo’s attention. His lean profile was handsome but mean, and his fancy star-roweled spurs of Mexican silver were mean, too—the rowels sharpened to vicious points for brutal domination of a horse. In this vast and lawless territory Fargo was used to encountering rough, unshaven fellows with poor manners. This man, however, was well groomed and nodded politely at the new arrivals.

  “Glom his two-gun rig,” Booger muttered.

  But Fargo already had. The hand-tooled holsters had been partly cut away, and the notches on the hammers of his wooden-gripped Colt Navy revolvers had been filed off to ensure the weapons wouldn’t snag—a favorite trick of quick-draw artists. And rare was the honest man out West who wore two guns.

  “Bad medicine,” Booger added, but just then the smiling station master hustled forward to greet the new arrivals.

  “Senor Booger!” he exclaimed. “I did not expect you today. Shall I butcher a cow?”

  “I’ll just eat it on the hoof, Pablo,” the whip shot back.

  A woman in a dark rebozo, who appeared to be Pablo’s wife, fluttered about the passengers, getting them seated at the long table. Pottery cups and a pitcher of lemonade had already been set in place. The two Mexicans got a closer look at Kathleen Barton, and the gringa’s astonishing beauty left both of them slack-jawed.

  “Looks like you’re being groped again, Miss Barton,” Fargo quipped.

  She coolly ignored him, seating herself at some distance from the rest of the passengers. Fargo kept a careful, constant eye on the gunslick at the bar, who seemed to be carefully avoiding looking in their direction. Too carefully . . .

  “Miss Barton,” Trixie spoke up while Pablo’s wife hustled back toward the kitchen. “I’m proud to say that the two of us are sorta in the same profession. You see, I’m a singer. I’ve been hired to sing at the La Paloma in Santa Fe.”

  “Oh? Is that a theater?”

  “Well . . . it’s a very fancy thirst parlor.”

  The actress peeled off her long silk gloves. “I thought so. I hardly think that being pawed in barrel houses, dance halls and gin mills—and no doubt bordellos—places you in my profession,” she enunciated with punishing clarity.

  Fargo watched Trixie flush deep to her earlobes. Booger grinned and winked at Fargo. “R-r-r-i-i-n-n-n!” he said in a bad imitation of a cat growling.

  “I’m no scrubbed angel,” Trixie admitted. “But you needn’t treat me like the town pump, neither! Leastways, I ain’t so hateful that I buy extra tickets so’s I won’t have to sit next to nobody.”

  “Here’s a corset with starch in it,” Booger approved.

  “I’m sure you’d have to raise your rates to afford extra tickets,” the disdainful thespian responded.

  Trixie assumed a war face and started up from the bench, but Ashton gently tugged her back down. The preacher’s watery nose made him sniff constantly. He did so now. “Ladies, this is unseemly in your gender. Such—”

  “Pipe down, you jay, or I’ll baste your bacon!” Booger snapped. “Every red-blooded man with a set on him dearly loves a good catfight. They may claw each other naked.”

  This was all good entertainment, but Fargo paid it scant attention. The gun-thrower across the room, he was nearly convinced by now, was not there by happenchance. It was time to take the bull by the horns. He pushed away from the table and strolled over to the bar.

  “Something’s got me a mite curious,” Fargo greeted him without any polite preamble.

  Ice-chip eyes raked quickly over Fargo. “Do tell? And just what might that be?”

  “Men outnumber women about two hundred to one in these parts. Even a homely-lonely with buckteeth draws plenty of stares. Yet, right now at that table over there sit two prime specimens of female flesh. And you haven’t craned your neck around once to look them over. Something’s not jake with that.”

  “Tell you what. If you graze near a point, feel free as all hell to make it.”

  “It’s been made.”

  “So you’re telling me you’re offended on account I ain’t eye-fucking your women?”

  “If that’s how you want to play it, all right. Yeah—I’m offended.”

  Both men knew what it meant to “offend” a man in the Territories. The gunslick decided on a staring contest and soon regretted it. The carved-in-granite face staring back at him was as emotionless and lethal as a cocked rifle. The blue eyes that women found charming had the opposite effect on men: they bespoke implacable will and unshakable courage, and the wordless confidence of a man for whom killing was an instinct born of necessity.

  The pale eyes slid away from his. “Look, mister, I got no dicker with you. I just come in here to have a couple quiet bracers and move on. You wonder why I ain’t staring at them two beauties? Well, take a good gander at that mammoth ape sittin’ with ’em. Just the sight of that big son of a bitch turns my liver white, and I admit it. He might be offended if I do look, and that’s one farmer’s bull I ain’t looking to shake a red rag at.”

  The answer surprised Fargo. He didn’t believe it for a moment, but it was highly logical and gave Fargo no more room to push. He did take a gander at Booger and realized he’d rather offend a den of rattlesnakes. Fargo, despite his suspicion, decided to ease off.

  He planked two bits on the bar. “Have one on me.”

  He was on his way back to the table when the man said behind him, “Thank you, sir.”

  That servile word “sir” tore it for Fargo. There wasn’t an ounce of humility in that snake-eyed killer, and more than one human maggot had called Fargo “sir” before trying to perforate his liver. This gunman was on Zack Lomax’s payroll, and he knew damn well he had to murder Fargo to get at the real prize.

  “Well,” Kathleen Barton barbed as he arrived back at the table. “Do you feel better now that you’ve bullied a stranger who was only minding his own business?”

  “And how do you feel,” Fargo retorted, “after calling a friendly young woman a whore without knowing one damn thing about her?”

  The unexpected parry struck the actress full force. “I—” She faltered and took a deep breath, looking at Trixie. “It pains me to say it, but Mr. Fargo is right. Miss Belle, I apologize for my harsh remarks.”

  Trixie, clearly not one to hold a grudge, smiled sweetly. “That’s all right, Miss Barton. You’re a great artist, and everybody knows great artists are temperamental. Heck, I am just a saloon singer.”

  Pastor Brandenburg beamed. “That’s the Christian spirit, ladies. To err is
human, to forgive—”

  “Oh, caulk up, you mealymouthed peckerwood!” Booger exploded. He turned his murderous stare on the Trailsman. “What’s got into you, Fargo—religion? We had us a jim-dandy catfight brewing up, and you just put the kibosh on it. Damn your sanctimonious bones to hell!”

  5

  “Boys,” Russ Alcott declared solemnly, “I looked straight into that lanky son of a bitch’s eyes. And I’m here to tell you—it was like staring right into the fiery pit. Skye Fargo is all he’s cracked up to be and ten times more. I like to shit when I realized that buckskin bastard knew why I was there.”

  Alcott, Cleo Hastings and Spider Winslowe sat their saddles in a little cottonwood thicket beside the Rio Grande. Behind them, a westering sun gold-leafed the normally muddy river. Due east, across the green valley floor, the Overland stagecoach sent up a yellow plume of dust.

  “Really gave you the fantods, huh?” Spider pressed.

  Alcott’s lips formed a tight seam. “Look here . . . I’ve killed eleven men in Lincoln County alone, and the bullets was all in the front. A few of them men I done for was some of the hardest hard cases you ever seen—men like Juan Aragon, Red Mike Malone and Reno Sloan. I stared ’em all in the eye and sent them over the mountains without a lick of fear. But Fargo? Before I met him, the only thing that ever shriveled up my dick was cold weather. Staring into his eyes made my pecker curl up like a bacon rind on a hot stove.”

  “Hell,” Spider said in a nervous voice, “you ain’t no lily liver, Russ. But you say he’s twigged our game—think we should just maybe butt out now?”

  “Nix on that. I ain’t telling you all this to put snow in your boots. I’m telling you Fargo ain’t just no nickel-novel hero. That means we got to do just like Spider’s old pap use to say: Measure it twice, then cut it once. Any play we make has got to be smart and we gotta cover our ampersands—we make sure that if we don’t kill him the first time out, we stay alive to kill him the next time.”

  Cleo frowned, not following all this. “That’s too far north for me, Russ.”

  “Cleo, the end of your nose is too far north for you. Me and Spider will handle the mentality part of it—you just be ready to follow orders.”