Some of the customers watched the dancer and tapped their toes in time to the music, but most remained caught up in their own affairs to which the music and the lithely sensuous girl served as mere background.
All the tables were occupied, and Braddock didn’t see many open spaces at the bar.
“Come on,” Wilcox said, then added quietly enough that only Braddock could hear him over the hubbub in the room, “I don’t see Larkin, but his men are here, so he’s somewhere close by.”
“Which ones are they?”
“Hatchet-faced scarecrow and a redheaded tree stump at a table to your left.”
Braddock let his gaze roam around for a second so it seemed to come back naturally to the table and the men Wilcox indicated. As far as he recalled, he had never seen either of them before, but they looked like the sort of hardcases he had dealt with plenty of times in the past.
“Let’s get a drink,” Wilcox went on. “Hernandez has the best tequila you’ll find this side of Mexico City.”
Braddock wasn’t that fond of tequila, but he nodded and walked toward the bar at Wilcox’s side.
Three bartenders worked behind the hardwood. One of them, a little man with iron gray hair, came over to them and said, “Señores, what can I do for you?”
“Tequila for both of us,” Wilcox said. “Where’s Hernandez tonight?”
“Señor Hernandez pays my wages, señor. I do not inquire as to his comings and goings.”
Wilcox grunted and said, “You can say whether or not you’ve seen him, can’t you?”
“I see only my customers, Señor Wilcox,” the bartender said as he poured tequila from an unlabeled bottle into two glasses. The glasses appeared to be clean, Braddock noticed. He’d give Hernandez credit for that.
“All right, fine,” Wilcox said. He picked up his drink. So did Braddock.
Before either of them could down the tequila, a scream shrilled over the music and talk and laughter, and when Braddock glanced toward the source of the sound, he saw a young woman running along the second floor balcony, naked as a jaybird.
Chapter 10
Raucous laughter erupted from the place’s patrons, especially when a man stumbled out of an open door from one of the second floor rooms, pulling up his pants as he awkwardly gave chase to the girl.
In a place like this, such pursuits might be just part of the play between the soiled doves and their customers. It didn’t have to mean anything.
Braddock thought the scream sounded more serious than that, however, and his interest perked up even more when Wilcox said, “That’s Larkin.”
Braddock knew Wilcox meant the man chasing the whore. Larkin wore trousers and boots but was nude from the waist up, displaying a torso thick with both fat and muscles and covered with coarse black hair like the pelt of a bear. His drooping mustache and the shaggy hair on his head were the same shade.
He got the trousers fastened and loped after the girl. His long legs allowed him to catch her just as she reached the landing of the stairs to Braddock’s left. He grabbed her arm and jerked her to a halt, then swung her around and took hold of her other arm as well.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” he roared as he shook her. “I paid for your time. You’ll damned well do what I want you to do!”
“N-no, señor!” she gasped. Her head bobbed back and forth from the shaking. “You will injure me! I will die!”
“The hell you will! Even if you do, what’s it matter? You’re just a whore!”
Braddock saw a couple of hard-faced Mexicans moving toward the stairs. He figured they worked for Hernandez and planned to step in to calm Larkin down and persuade him to leave the girl alone. A whore she might be, but she made money for Hernandez, and that meant she was valuable to him.
Braddock was closer to the stairs than Hernandez’s men were. As he put down his untouched drink and stepped away from the bar, he heard Wilcox say, “Hey, what are you—” but then he didn’t pay any more attention.
Instead he called up the stairs, “Hey, you big shaggy ape! Let go of her.”
Larkin had been drinking. The slur in his voice made that obvious. The insult cut through any fog in his brain, though. His head snapped around toward Braddock.
“What the hell did you say to me, mister?”
“I called you a big shaggy ape and told you to let the girl go. Are you deaf as well as stupid?”
From the corner of his eye, Braddock saw the sly grin that appeared on Wilcox’s face. The gunman had figured out that he was baiting Larkin into a fight.
The musicians had stopped playing, and the room was quiet now. The good-natured violence of a man chasing and probably slapping around a whore, which most of the men in here would have accepted without a second thought, had changed into something else, something that might turn deadly serious. Everyone watched to see what would happen next.
With a growl, Larkin shoved the girl away from him. Seizing the opportunity, she sprinted for the room from which she had fled. The door slammed behind her.
“Come up here and say that to me, you son of a bitch,” Larkin challenged.
“I’d be glad to,” Braddock said. He started up the stairs.
Larkin stood at the landing, grinning and flexing his long, sausage-like fingers. As Braddock neared the top of the stairs, Larkin backed off a little and said, “I ain’t armed.”
“That’s all right. I don’t need a gun to deal with gutter trash like you.”
Larkin’s mouth twisted in a snarl. As soon as Braddock set foot on the landing, Larkin lunged at him, long arms extended, hands reaching to grab and crush and destroy.
Chapter 11
Braddock expected the attack, of course, but Larkin’s speed still surprised him. When Larkin had been chasing the girl, he had seemed clumsy, and most men as big as him tended to lumber.
Not Larkin. He barreled at Braddock and crossed the few feet between them like a runaway freight.
Braddock barely had time to twist aside and throw an arm up to block Larkin’s intended bear hug. Larkin changed tactics in the blink of an eye, grabbed the arm Braddock used to fend him off, and threw him toward the railing along the edge of the balcony.
Most men would have hit the railing, flipped over it, and fallen. Braddock slapped a hand down on the polished wood and closed it with enough strength to catch himself.
Still, he was dangerously off balance, and if Larkin landed a solid punch on him now, he would go over.
Larkin intended to do just that. He swung a looping blow at Braddock’s head, again moving faster than it seemed like he ought to be able to. Braddock ducked it, pushed off the railing, and lowered his head. He drove forward and rammed a shoulder into Larkin’s chest.
Braddock’s rangy body contained a considerable amount of heft and power. The collision sent Larkin reeling back across the balcony to crash into the wall. He rebounded from it, and Braddock displayed his own quickness by darting in and snapping a punch to the bigger man’s face.
Blood spurted from Larkin’s lips as Braddock’s fist landed on them. Larkin grunted and swung his left arm in a backhanded blow. It caught Braddock on the shoulder and knocked him to the side.
Larkin’s right fist looped around and dug hard into Braddock’s ribs. Larkin followed it an instant later with a straight left that took Braddock just above the heart.
For a moment Braddock thought he was done for. The blow stunned him and left him unable to move.
Larkin sensed victory, too, and grinned.
“I think I’ll squeeze your neck hard enough to pop your head right off your shoulders,” he said.
The boast was a mistake. Even those few seconds gave Braddock the chance recover a little.
He tried to appear defenseless, though, so when Larkin lunged for Braddock’s throat again, he wasn’t prepared for his foe to spring out of the way.
Larkin stumbled past Braddock, who clubbed both hands together, lifted them high, and smashed them on the back of Lar
kin’s neck. Larkin doubled over. Braddock grabbed his shoulder, jerked him around, and brought a knee up into Larkin’s face. More blood flew as the impact flattened Larkin’s nose.
Braddock kicked the smuggler’s legs out from under him. Larkin landed in a bloody heap on the balcony. Air rasped through his ruined nose as he breathed heavily.
He wasn’t dead, though, and that was what Shadrach Palmer wanted. Braddock couldn’t just draw his gun and put a bullet in Larkin’s brain. That would be cold-blooded murder.
Luckily—if you could call it that—Larkin wasn’t through. He looked up at Braddock with sheer hatred blazing like bonfires in his eyes and reached down to his right boot. He came up with a dagger that had been hidden in the boot. He’d been lying about being unarmed, probably because he had believed he could break Braddock apart with his bare hands.
Now, hurt and on the verge of defeat, he just wanted to destroy his enemy any way he could.
Larkin uncoiled from the floor and came at Braddock, slashing back and forth with the dagger. He didn’t even seem to consider that Braddock could have gunned him down, probably because he was so full of rage.
Braddock gave ground until he had retreated about halfway along the balcony as it ran across the back of the room. He took a risk then, letting Larkin close in on him. The dagger flashed right in front of his eyes, mere inches away. Braddock’s hands shot up, closed around Larkin’s wrist, twisted and shoved.
Larkin wasn’t expecting the move and couldn’t stop the dagger in time. The razor-sharp point went in under his chin. Braddock threw his weight against Larkin’s wrist and drove the blade deep. He felt it scrape against the spine in Larkin’s neck.
Larkin’s eyes widened and bulged out. He tried to speak, but only a grotesque gurgle came out. Braddock crowded against him, forcing him back against the railing. Larkin’s now nerveless fingers slid loosely off the dagger’s handle.
Braddock put both hands against Larkin’s chest and pushed.
Larkin went up and over, falling like a stone to land on his back on the bar. Men who had been standing down there craning their necks to watch the fight yelled angry curses and jumped back out of the way. Bottles and glasses and liquor flew. A woman screamed at the sight of Larkin’s lifeless body lying there with his arms stretched out on either side of him, the dagger still buried up to the hilt in his throat.
More men scrambled aside, but this time to get out of the line of fire. Braddock glanced toward the hatchet-faced man and the stumpy redhead and saw their gun barrels coming up at him.
Chapter 12
Braddock wasn’t in top-notch shape after the battle, and the two gunmen had beaten him to the draw already.
But his hand stabbed down to the gun on his hip, and thankfully it hadn’t fallen out during the fracas with Larkin.
The Colt came out of leather with smooth, blinding speed and started roaring a fraction of a second before the shots from below. The redhead had barely pulled his trigger when Braddock’s first bullet hammered into his chest and knocked him back over the chair where he’d been sitting.
Hatchet-face got two shots off. The first whipped past Braddock’s right ear. The second missed him wide to the left because the gunman had slewed halfway around from the impact of Braddock’s second shot. He staggered and pressed his free hand to his chest but couldn’t stop the blood bubbling between his fingers. As he tried to lift his gun again for a third shot, Braddock put a round through his head. That dumped him onto the sawdust, dead before he hit.
The redhead was still alive, though. He grabbed hold of the overturned chair and tried to pull himself up. Braddock shot him in the head, too.
That left him with one round in the Colt in case anybody else wanted trouble, but no one seemed to.
The room had cleared out around Larkin’s friends. Everybody in the place, customers and employees alike, had pulled back along the walls. Some stared at the carnage, others just seemed annoyed that their night’s entertainment had been interrupted.
Braddock heard a little noise to his left and turned. One of the doors stood open a few inches, and a brown face peered out anxiously. The girl said, “Señor Larkin is...is...”
“Muerto,” Braddock said.
She closed her eyes, sighed, and crossed herself, which might have seemed more reverent if her bare breasts hadn’t been peeking out through the open door, too.
The two men who had been getting ready to step in and deal with Larkin moved over to the dead gunmen and checked on them. The pools of blood around their heads left no doubt they were dead. The two men then turned toward the stairs.
Braddock opened the Colt’s cylinder, reached to his shell belt, and started thumbing fresh rounds into the gun. He didn’t think Hernandez’s men figured on trying anything, but he wanted to be ready if they did.
A glance told him Dex Wilcox was standing off to one side of the room, the glass of tequila still in his hand. He saw Braddock looking at him, grinned, and lifted the glass in a toast of sorts before taking a sip of the fiery liquor.
Down below, the bartenders and a couple of swampers started to gather up the bodies and haul them out. It would take a while to clean up the blood and the other mess, but things would be back to normal in the place fairly quickly.
Assuming no more gunplay erupted. Braddock didn’t holster the Colt as the two men reached the top of the stairs and approached him.
“No trouble, señor,” one of them said as he raised a hand slightly in a placating gesture. “Señor Larkin brought his fate upon himself, as did his men.”
“Is that what the law’s going to think?”
A faint smile curved the man’s lips. “In this part of Juarez, señor, my employer is the law.”
“Well, that’s good to know, I reckon,” Braddock said. “You fellas aren’t upset that I horned in? I just can’t stand to see an hombre mistreating a woman, even a whore.”
“If Señor Hernandez had been here, he would have told us to stop Larkin from hurting the señorita. Larkin might have backed down, or he might have forced us to kill him, too.” The man’s shoulders rose and fell in an eloquent shrug. “We will never know. But I am sure Señor Hernandez would like to speak with you when he returns. In the meantime, you can drink or gamble or avail yourselves of the other pleasures we have to offer.”
An edge of steel under the polite words made it clear Braddock wasn’t free to leave here until Hernandez gave the word. That was all right, he decided. Hernandez was tied in with Shadrach Palmer, and Braddock was convinced Palmer had those Krags. Maybe talking to the man was a good idea.
He slid his Colt into its holster and said, “I’ll take you up on that, fellas. I—”
“Señor...” a soft voice said behind him.
Braddock looked over his shoulder and saw the girl standing there. She wore a low-on-the-shoulder blouse and long skirt now. Her fingers knotted together nervously in front of her.
“Do not interrupt, Carmen,” the man who had been talking to Braddock snapped at her.
“I...I am sorry. I just wanted to thank the señor...”
Acting on impulse, Braddock grinned and said, “I think I know how I want to pass the time until Señor Hernandez gets back.”
Again the man shrugged. “As you wish.”
“Tell my friend I’ll see him later, if he wants to hang around, would you?”
“You mean Señor Wilcox?”
“Yeah.”
“You work for Señor Palmer, too?”
“That’s right,” Braddock said, not bothering to explain that he’d been sent over here on a provisional basis, with his assignment being to kill Larkin for double-crossing Palmer. Let them think the deaths of Larkin and his men had been just an unfortunate turn of events.
“Very well. Enjoy your time with Carmen. We will let you know when Señor Hernandez arrives. Would you like a bottle of tequila sent up?”
“I think that’s a mighty good idea,” Braddock said.
After eve
rything that had happened, poor little Carmen looked like she could use a drink.
Chapter 13
When the two of them were alone in Carmen’s room, the girl looked down at the threadbare rug on the floor next to the bed and said, “Anything you want to do with me, señor, it is all right. I owe you my life.”
“I don’t know about that,” Braddock said. “Hernandez’s men would stepped in and done something about Larkin.”
Carmen shook her head. “Even if they made him leave me alone tonight, Señor Larkin would have caught me some other night. He would not have forgotten. He is like a dog. Once he has gotten his jaws on something, he will not let go.”
“Yeah, he was a son of a bitch, all right,” Braddock said with a smile.
“He has hurt other girls in the past, very badly. I have heard stories about him...”
“Well, he won’t hurt anybody else.” Braddock put a couple of fingers under her chin. “Why won’t you look at me?”
He urged her head up. When she blinked at him, he saw tears shining in her dark eyes.
“I am so...so ashamed!” she burst out. She stepped back, put her hands over her face, and sobbed.
Braddock frowned. Like most men, crying women made him distinctly uncomfortable. He didn’t know if it would be better to put his arms around Carmen or keep his distance.
A soft knock sounded on the door. Braddock said, “Why don’t you sit down on the bed?” and turned to answer it. He rested his right hand on the butt of the Colt and used his left to open the door.
The gray-haired bartender from downstairs stood there holding a tray with a bottle of tequila and two glasses on it.
“Perhaps this time you will actually get to enjoy your drink, señor,” he said. He ignored Carmen crying quietly as she perched on the edge of the bed.
“Here’s hoping.” Braddock slipped a silver dollar from his pocket, handed it to the bartender, and took the tray.
Gun Devils of the Rio Grande (Outlaw Ranger Book 5) Page 4