by Jon Sharpe
‘‘Oh, Skye,’’ Belinda whispered.
For long moments they stayed there like that, taking their time as they luxuriated in the caresses they bestowed on each other. Delicious sensations spilled through Fargo, surging through his veins and along his nerves, sensations hot as fire, cold as ice, thrilling in their promise, tantalizing in their delay. With the dangers that had faced them all the way in this journey, they never knew when each encounter might be their last, so Fargo wanted to make the most of this. He wanted it to be something that neither of them would ever forget.
At last he slipped his hands below the water, cupped her buttocks, and lifted her, bringing her closer to him. When he lowered her, the head of his member found her drenched opening with unerring aim. She slid down onto him, taking him deep inside her.
Belinda wrapped her arms around Fargo’s neck and kissed him. The slow writhing of her hips excited both of them and felt exquisite. Fargo suppressed the urge to drive into her fast and hard. This was a time for being deliberate. He embraced her so that her breasts flattened against his chest. She thrust her tongue into his mouth, invading his body as he was plundering hers.
The two of them were so close, joined so intimately, that they seemed more like one being than two. Fargo’s hips flexed, making him move deep inside her. A slow shudder that seemed to reach all the way to her core rolled through her, and as Fargo felt it he surrendered to his own culmination, which had been growing in urgency until he was ready to explode. Buried within her, holding her as tightly as he could, he allowed his climax to gush out, filling her.
Drained, he slumped against the sloping back of the tub. He let himself slide down until his head was under the water and took Belinda with him. When they came up a second later, they were both soaked and laughing. Belinda shook her head to get the wet hair out of her eyes.
‘‘I thought there would be room for me, too,’’ she said. ‘‘I’m glad there was.’’
‘‘So am I,’’ Fargo agreed. He was still hard, still buried to the hilt in her.
She couldn’t help but notice that. ‘‘Skye,’’ she said in amazement, ‘‘you can’t be ready to go again so soon!’’
‘‘No, but if you want to just sit here for a while and give me a chance to catch my breath, who knows? Maybe the water won’t get too cold while we’re waiting.’’
She laughed again. ‘‘I don’t care if it does!’’
Fargo cradled her in his arms as she rested her head on his shoulder. It felt so good holding her like that; he might have been happy just to stay that way for the rest of the night, no matter how much the water cooled off. It didn’t even matter that much whether they made love again or not.
There was no telling what might have happened if they had been undisturbed.
Unfortunately, as had happened before during this journey, the pleasant interlude was interrupted.
Interrupted by a cry in the night, a frightened scream.
Here we go again, Fargo thought.
12
He stood up, still holding on to Belinda, and set her out of the tub onto the floor as she gasped.
‘‘Skye, that sounded like Angie!’’
‘‘I know,’’ Fargo said as he reached for his trousers. He pulled them on as fast as he could, grabbed his Colt, and headed for the door in his bare feet. ‘‘Stay here!’’ he flung over his shoulder at Belinda.
He raced out into the corridor and turned toward Angie’s room. Another scream came from her as he reached her door. He grabbed the knob and twisted, and the door came open. Fargo was grateful for that. If the heavy panel had been locked, it would have taken him a while to break it down.
As Fargo lunged into the room, the light that spilled in with him from the hall showed Angie sitting up in bed, the covers pulled around her throat, eyes wide with fright and turned toward the window. She looked at Fargo and screamed again before she realized who he was. Then she cried, ‘‘Mr. Fargo! The window! The window!’’
Fargo had already figured out that was the most likely source of danger. He leaped toward the window. The night breeze billowed the curtains. Flame geyseredfrom the muzzle of a gun, like an orange flower in the darkness.
Fargo darted aside as the bullet whipped past his head. The muzzle flash had half blinded him, but not before he’d caught a glimpse of a face at the window. Father Tomás? he asked himself as he brought his Colt up.
Not hardly. Ghosts didn’t use hoglegs.
Fargo snapped a shot at the window, but the face had already dropped out of sight. Fargo put his back against the wall next to the window, knowing that if he stuck his head out, he would be offering it as a prime target.
But he couldn’t just stay there and let whoever had been lurking outside get away again. He snapped at Angie, ‘‘Roll off the other side of the bed, get down on the floor, and stay there!’’
Then, as he heard running footsteps hammering the hard-packed dirt of the road outside, he dropped to a crouch and risked a look out the window.
A wrought-iron trellis reached up the wall nearly to the window. That was how the hombre had gotten there. Now he was running away as fast as he could through the darkness. Fargo caught a glimpse of the fleeing figure and fired without taking the time to aim.
The Trailsman’s instincts were good. The running man stumbled, fell, and rolled over before trying to struggle back to his feet. Fargo’s shot had hit him, but not hard enough to put him down and keep him down.
Fargo swung a leg over the windowsill and climbed out, using his feet, his free hand, and his natural agility to scramble halfway down the trellis. That put him low enough to let go and drop the rest of the way to the street.
As his feet hit the ground, he saw the man who had taken the shot at him running away again. Fargo wanted answers more than he wanted revenge for the attempt on his life, so he sprinted after the fleeing figure instead of squeezing off another shot or two.
The man was stumbling, obviously hurt. He twisted around as he ran. Fargo veered to the left as the man fired. The bullet screamed off into the night. Fargo held his fire, even though he had closed the gap now to a point where he could have downed the lurker with another shot.
Weaving to the right, Fargo avoided another slug. He heard his quarry panting with the effort of running. As Fargo drew closer, he gathered his muscles and then launched himself forward in a diving tackle.
He slammed into the back of the man’s legs, his arms wrapping around them and pulling him down. The man let out a muffled curse as he fell.
They landed heavily in the street. Fargo was up first, leaping to his feet and lashing out with a foot as the man tried to twist around and bring a gun to bear. Fargo’s foot connected with the man’s wrist and sent the revolver spinning off into the darkness. Fargo dropped to his knees, driving one of them into the man’s midsection. He jammed the barrel of the Colt under the man’s chin.
‘‘Settle down or I’ll blow your damn head off,’’ Fargo grated. He wanted the man alive, but the hombre didn’t have to know that.
The man stopped struggling and just lay there gasping in breathlessness and pain. After a moment, he groaned. ‘‘I’m shot,’’ he said. ‘‘Damn it, I’m shot.’’
‘‘You’re lucky you’re not dead,’’ Fargo told him. Keeping the gun trained on his prisoner, he stood up and took a step back. ‘‘Get up.’’
‘‘I’m hurt, I tell you! You put a bullet in my side, mister.’’
‘‘If you don’t want one in your head, you’ll get on your feet.’’
With a lot of cursing and complaining, the lurker managed to climb upright. Fargo marched him back toward the hotel. The man kept his right arm clamped to his side where Fargo’s bullet had torn through him.
Several men emerged from the hotel before Fargo and his prisoner got there, including Sandy and Jimmy, both of whom were armed and looking for somebody to shoot. One of the other men held a lantern, raising it over his head so that its light washed over the stree
t.
‘‘Fargo!’’ Sandy said. ‘‘Miss Angie said you took off after a bushwhacker. I figured you’d bring him back.’’
From the porch of the hotel, Belinda called, ‘‘That’s no bushwhacker! That’s our ghost!’’ She and Angie had come out of the hotel wrapped in thick robes, not like the thin, clinging one Belinda had been wearing earlier.
‘‘Ghost, hell!’’ Sandy said. ‘‘Don’t look like no padre to me.’’
‘‘What padre?’’ Angie asked. She hadn’t heard the story of Father Tomás yet.
Fargo didn’t want to confuse the issue with ghost stories. He said to one of the bystanders, ‘‘How about fetching the local law and the doctor? This fella’s wounded.’’
The man was reluctant to leave, probably afraid he would miss something exciting, but after a second he nodded and hurried off down the street.
Several wicker chairs were lined up on the hotel porch. Fargo sat the prisoner down in one of them and stood in front of him, gun in hand. ‘‘Who the hell are you, mister?’’ he demanded. ‘‘And why have you been sneaking around and spying on these ladies?’’
‘‘I need a sawbones,’’ the man groaned. ‘‘I’m in terrible pain.’’
Fargo eared back the hammer of the Colt. ‘‘You’ll hurt worse if you don’t answer my questions.’’
‘‘All right, all right! Damn it. . . . My name’s Harry Keller.’’
He was a medium-sized man in his thirties, but despite his relatively young age his head was mostly bald, with only a fringe of hair around his ears. He wore a cowhide vest over a homespun shirt and corduroy trousers. His empty holster was attached to a gun belt strapped around his waist.
‘‘You work for Hiram Stoddard, don’t you, Keller?’’ Fargo asked.
Keller looked surprised. ‘‘Yeah. But he ain’t payin’ me enough to keep quiet when some loco bastard’s threatenin’ me with a gun!’’
Fargo let that ‘‘loco bastard’’ comment pass. He asked again, ‘‘Why have you been spying on the young ladies?’’
‘‘Stoddard told me to keep an eye on them and spook ’em if I could. He wanted them to think a ghost was after ’em so maybe the Grayson girl would get scared and try to talk her father into turnin’ back. That’s why—that’s why I got a little candle and held it inside a glass under my face, so the light would shine up on it and make me look scary.’’
‘‘It worked,’’ Belinda said. ‘‘At least the scary part.’’ She gave a defiant toss of her head. ‘‘But if Stoddard thought that would make me try to get my father to give up, he was dead wrong!’’
Fargo asked, ‘‘How did Stoddard find out about Father Tomás?’’
‘‘Who’s Father Tomás?’’ Angie said. ‘‘What’s going on here?’’
Keller said, ‘‘We talked to that old hostler down at San Buenaventura. We knew you’d spent the night there. The Mex didn’t want to tell us anything at first, but Stoddard had Elam rough him up.’’
Fargo’s jaw clenched in anger. He hoped the old-timer wasn’t hurt too bad. That was just one more score to settle with Stoddard.
‘‘He told us you’d seen their local ghost there at the mission and that he’d explained the whole story to you, Fargo,’’ Keller went on. ‘‘Stoddard figured you told Miss Grayson about it. He wanted to come up with some way to slow you down or maybe get you to turn back, so he decided to try this ghost business.’’ The hired gunman grimaced as a fresh wave of pain came from the bullet wound in his side. ‘‘I wish he’d picked somebody else to play the damn ghost, though!’’
‘‘You’re lucky I just winged you,’’ Fargo snapped. ‘‘Are you sure all you were doing was trying to scare them?’’
‘‘Yeah,’’ Keller insisted, but after a moment under Fargo’s steady glare, he shrugged. ‘‘Stoddard wanted me to keep track of which room Miss Grayson was in, too, just in case he decided to try to grab her.’’
Fargo nodded. ‘‘I thought so.’’
As several men hurried up, Fargo recognized Dr. Zapata among them. One of the other newcomers was a stocky gent with a scattergun in his hands and a lawman’s badge pinned to his coat. ‘‘What’s all this commotion about?’’ the star packer demanded. ‘‘Folks runnin’ around shootin’ off guns in the middle o’ the night! It ain’t decent!’’
‘‘Neither is what this hombre was doing,’’ Fargo said as he gestured toward Keller. While Zapata was patching up the hole in the gunman’s side as best he could under these conditions, Fargo explained to the sheriff what had happened.
When Fargo was finished, the lawman turned to Zapata and asked, ‘‘Is this fella in good enough shape I can lock him up, Doc?’’
‘‘He will be if I can take him over to my office for a while first,’’ Zapata replied. ‘‘This wound needs to be cleaned and bandaged better than I can do the job here.’’
‘‘All right.’’ The sheriff gestured with the twin barrels of his shotgun. ‘‘On your feet, mister, and march over to the doc’s office. Then you’re goin’ to jail.’’
Keller cast a baleful glance at Fargo and muttered a curse before he walked off with the sheriff, Zapata, and several of the citizens of Monterey who were going along to make sure that the gunman didn’t try to cause any more trouble.
‘‘Well, I reckon that answers one question,’’ Sandy said. ‘‘There ain’t no ghost trailin’ us.’’
‘‘No,’’ Fargo said, ‘‘just another of Stoddard’s troublemakers.’’
‘‘And we ain’t seen the last o’ them, have we?’’
Fargo shook his head. ‘‘I’m afraid not.’’
Arthur Grayson had heard the shooting but had been reluctant to leave his post guarding the stagecoach and the horses, for fear that someone was trying to lure him away so the horses could be stolen or the stagecoach damaged. That meant he didn’t know what had happened until Sandy relieved him and explained about the ‘‘ghost.’’
‘‘Is there anything at all Stoddard won’t stoop to in order to get what he wants?’’ Grayson asked at breakfast the next morning.
‘‘I reckon we’ll find out today,’’ Fargo said.
A grim silence greeted his comment. They all knew what he meant. Since it was possible they would reach San Francisco by the end of the day, this would be Stoddard’s last chance to stop them.
A narrow trail ran along the top of the cliffs around Monterey Bay, Fargo recalled from previous visits to the area. A man on horseback could negotiate the path without too much trouble, but a stagecoach was a different matter. Sandy would have to use great care in handling the reins, especially on some of the hairpin turns.
As the coach pulled out after breakfast, Fargo couldn’t shake the feeling that they had been herded into taking this route. Maybe the ambush on the road to San Juan Bautista hadn’t been meant to stop them. Maybe Stoddard’s goal had been to force them onto this trail instead, where he would have an even easier time getting rid of them.
Fargo didn’t know what Stoddard’s plans were, but he rode with the Sharps across the saddle in front of him, ready for trouble.
If anything, the scenery was even more spectacular here than farther south. To Fargo’s left, the cliffs plunged a couple of hundred feet to jagged rocks where the waves crashed and foamed. To his right rose a steep, rocky slope dotted with pine trees. A brisk updraft blew from the sea, bringing with it the smell of brine. God had done some mighty fine work here along the coast of California. Fargo would have enjoyed riding through these parts, if he hadn’t known that it was only a matter of time before Stoddard struck again. He was afraid that today, with Stoddard still on the loose, God’s back might be turned.
They were halfway around the bay when a low rumbling sound made Fargo stiffen in the saddle. He twisted and looked up at the hillside, where a plume of dust was beginning to rise. Instantly, he realized what was going on and knew that they were all in deadly danger.
‘‘Avalanche!’’ he shouted at Sandy as he wheeled th
e Ovaro around. ‘‘Avalanche!’’
The coach was about a hundred yards behind him. Sandy had heard the rumble and knew what it meant, too. The trail was too narrow for the coach to turn around, at least not without taking a lot of time to do it. Sandy’s only option was to whip up the horses to their top speed and try to outrace the rocks now tumbling down the face of the hill toward the trail.
If he failed, the avalanche would sweep the coach right off the top of the cliff into the ocean. No one on board would survive the fall.
Fargo watched, every muscle in his body tense, as Sandy sent the coach careening along the narrow trail. A single misstep by one of the horses would pile up the team, and that would probably result in the coach going over the edge, too. Behind the racing vehicle came Jimmy with the lead rope attached to the extra horses gripped in his hand. He couldn’t get past the coach on the trail so he followed it.
Fargo didn’t think the youngster would abandon Angie anyway, even if it had been possible. The girl was inside the coach with Belinda and Grayson. By now they had to have realized what was going on, and they were probably terrified. They were trapped there, unable to do anything to save their own lives.
The rumble had turned into a roar, and the plume of dust was now a rolling cloud. Fargo saw trees snap and go down under the power of the avalanche. The stagecoach seemed to be traveling in slow motion as it came toward Fargo with the rockslide closing in from above.
A small rock about the size of a carpetbag bounded through the air and struck the roof of the coach a glancing blow. It bounced off and kept going. That was the vanguard of the avalanche. That was how close it came to destroying the vehicle.
Then the rest of the hellish storm of stone swept on past, mere yards behind the stagecoach.
‘‘Jimmy,’’ Fargo grated. He couldn’t see past the coach because of the boiling dust cloud, but Jimmy had been behind it, and now there was nothing back there but the avalanche.