Cold Steel and Hot Lead [How the West Was Done 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (18 page)

Ivy swirled into Alameda’s bedroom, fully dressed as though for church, and pulled Alameda from the window. “How did they even know Rudy was here?” she asked. “Josefina let him in last night wearing some kind of oriental tracklayer’s disguise.”

“That was a Chinese pharmacist’s disguise,” Alameda told her sister. “And apparently it didn’t work very well.”

Now Montreal Jed entered, clutching someone’s dressing gown about his thin frame, his bulging eyes even rounder than usual. “What in the name of Sam Hill is going on? I thought
I
was the alleged murderer, not Remington Rudy.”

Alameda said, “I think you still might be—a sort of helpmate for the nefarious Remington Rudy—so stay out of sight. And Ivy, I don’t want you showing your face out front, not in your condition. You don’t need the additional distress on little Coraline.” Coraline was the name chosen for the daughter Ivy would birth, the daughter prophesied by another spirit who had helped Ivy a while back. Alameda continued buttoning up her bodice.

“We have to somehow send for Father,” Ivy insisted. “He’s the only one who can convince these irate brawlers that Rudy isn’t guilty of anything.”

In a way, Ivy was right. Simon Hudson was the biggest merchant in town, one of the railroad big bugs, and Bob Freund’s father was an associate of his. There was only one major thing lacking with this idea. “Father has never even met Rudy,” Alameda mentioned. “Damn it to hell, he hasn’t even met Derrick. I’m in love with them—him—and the first time he meets them is when a lynch mob is waiting for them? That’s not going to make Father more liable to approve of them—him—when he’s been pushing all those idiotic Freund boys on me all these months to no avail.”

Montreal Jed pointed out, “And it’s not more liable to make the Freund boys more fond of Rudy and Derrick, if you’ve been turning them down for months now.”

For lack of anything more constructive to do, Alameda retrieved her derringer from her white fur muff. To further complicate matters, two muscular naked men now entered Alameda’s bedroom but skidded to a stop when they saw Ivy and Montreal Jed.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Derrick, finally bothering to wrap the bedsheet he held around his waist.

Rudy didn’t have a bedsheet, so he snatched up something that turned out to be Alameda’s dressing gown and held it to his privates.

Ivy giggled and turned toward the wall as Montreal Jed pointed out, “And the Freund boys will become even more irate if they see two nude men at the window.”

Rudy stepped forward boldly. “Listen, Alameda. If we don’t arrest Castillo, I’m going to have to leave town, hopefully more than two steps ahead of that lynch mob. I’m more at home with strong-arm men and bear wrestlers than the blue bloods of this town anyway.”

“But you didn’t do it!” Alameda protested, waving her derringer about. “Rudy, I will shoot that dough-headed jackass Bob Freund myself before I will let you slink out of town!”

“Dressed like a Chinese pharmacist,” Jeremiah added.

“You be careful!” Alameda shrieked at the balloon-headed punch man. “You seem to forget everyone in town thinks you’re the one who kidnapped poor Kittie in the first place!”

“Not to mention,” Derrick pointed out, “how far can Rudy slink when the roads are all impassable and the train won’t run?” He sidled up to Alameda and forced her to lower the hand that held the derringer.

Ivy huffed angrily, “There’s only one person in this room who can safely leave this house and go get Father. Me!”

“Or the cook,” Montreal Jed said.

“No!” Alameda protested. “I will not let you set foot outside that door, Ivy! You never know when one of those pickled rummies will mistake you for an Indian and just plug you!”

“Or mistake you for Rudy and plug you,” Jeremiah added helpfully.

Peeking out the curtains, Alameda saw that a few Freund boys and their buddies were tearing up rosebushes that lined the walkway of Albuquerque House, bellowing things such as “Get out here, you cowardly snake!” and “Come out and act like a man, you yellow bastard!”

Twirling about, Alameda gripped Rudy’s bare shoulder. “Listen. Can you call upon Percy? Ask for his help?”

Rudy shrugged. “I suppose I can. He only seems to come when I’m performing animal magnetism, so I can try. What were you thinking?”

“I’m not exactly sure, but Percy is resourceful. Ask him to scare them away or something! I’m going down there to talk some sense into Bob.” She whisked her way around Ivy and Rudy so that Derrick could not grab her.

He shouted, “I’m coming with you, Alameda! I’m not hiding in here like a lowdown culprit. I can deal with irate crowds—I’m a senator!”

Alameda was halfway down the stairs. “Derrick, you’re a
naked
senator!”

When her hand touched the front doorknob, she heard a shot. Upstairs, everyone fell silent, and Alameda peered through the curtains of a side window.

Her father Simon had arrived on horseback through the melting snow, still holding his smoking rifle aloft. “Any more of you boys want to tear up my daughter’s landscaping?”
Oh, dear.
He had probably had a late night at the Frontier Hotel slamming beers with business associates. Maybe that’s how he had gotten wind of the lynch mob.

But it seemed to do the trick, temporarily. Buffoons dropped the rosebushes they had torn from the ground and lowered their rifle barrels, giving Simon a chance to slush through the snow up the front walkway and make his stand in front of the porch. Alameda now dared to gently open the front door and reveal herself, one part of her body at a time, with the shield of Simon and his horse emboldening her. Simon continued to yell, “This is the home of my daughter Liberty and her husband Levi Colter, agent at Fort Sanders and gold mining tycoon! Liberty opened the first schoolhouse in Laramie, and many of your children are her charges! Now you come storming down here claiming they are harboring some fugitive charlatan named Remington Rudy?”

“Father,” Alameda said insistently, standing by his stirrup. “Liberty and Levi are in South Pass at their mine. And Remington—Rudy Dunraven
is
staying here. He is my guest. But he’s no charlatan.”

Simon looked down at his daughter as though he’d never seen her before. “Please don’t tell me this Remington Rudy
did
actually kidnap and kill Kittie Wells.”

“Of course not! Father, we know who did it. They just have to give us more time to get more evidence. Neil is on his way back from Serendipity Ranch—”

Simon cut her off by hollering at the crowd, “And here is my other daughter Alameda, who has served all of you many meals at the Cactus Club! It is unthinkable that Allie would harbor this master of illusions and mind control if he truly had harmed poor Kittie Wells!”

Anger again clouded Bob Freund’s face, and he took a few steps forward. “But Mr. Hudson. We are not doubting your daughters or any of their husbands. We are doubting Remington Rudy, a newcomer to town who is so secretive he hadn’t performed in public until last night!”

“Yeah!” another fellow roared. “And we found
this
in his room at the Union Pacific Hotel!”

Alameda gasped when the beefy fellow yanked what looked like a naked woman from the depths of his saddle blankets. But the woman was oddly stiff, missing a head, hands, and feet, and had no nipples or pubic hair. The guy was able to wave her around freely as though she only weighed five pounds, and Alameda knew it was a dressmaker’s mannequin, often used by magicians and other artists to practice acts.

Bob Freund shouted, red-faced, “What kind of perverted degenerate would keep that in his room unless he was practicing for the sort of perversions he later committed upon the body of Miss Kittie Wells?”

Alameda now stepped forward. “Oh, now you’ve gone loco, Bob! Would the real murderer be so stupid as to reveal Kittie’s body
during their own act?
It’s obvious someone else put Kittie into the cabinet. Boy, if your brains were dynamite, you wouldn’t have enough to blow your nose, Bob.”

Bob pointed an accusatory finger at Alameda and opened his mouth to speak, but just then the mannequin went flying out of his friend’s hands. A crystalline spray of snow exploded from the mannequin’s neck as it sailed headlong into a snowdrift.

Alameda turned around to find out who had thrown the snowball. Everyone else seemed to be doing the same. She even looked at the second-story bedroom window but saw only Montreal Jed’s round eyes peering out, the window still closed.

Simon laughed. “I see what our friend here thinks of your ludicrous assertions!”

Another snowball went flying, this time hitting Bob Freund smack in the face. This time Simon was joined by some of Bob’s friends in his laughter. Alameda walked around the horse’s hindquarters to discover who Simon referred to.

The Phenomenal Percy Tibbles stood there in all his two-dimensional cardboard splendor, a gleeful smile pasted to his face!

“Percy!” she cried.

“Miss Hudson!” Percy greeted her with upraised arm. “These clowns are the worst sort of rubes loathed by everyone in the show business. Hecklers and bummers, all of them! I’ll show them what happens when they doubt the honesty of a clean-living showman!”

Percy seemed more human now, more fluid in his movements. He was no longer a figure in a waxworks show when he stooped to grab another handful of snow, packing it between both palms. He showed the powerful arm of the bear wrestler when he pasted another mob member smack in the face, knocking the fellow to his ass.

“Where are those snowballs coming from?” Bob demanded. “What friend are you referring to, Mr. Hudson?”

Simon chuckled. “Why, our extremely agile friend right down here.” Simon tipped his beaver top hat to Percy. “And who might you be, sir? Remington Rudy?”

Packing another monumental ball of snow, Percy said, “I am the Phenomenal Percy Tibbles, the bear wrestler! And I am tired of seeing honest and scrupulous performers being made fools of!” This ball hit one of the Freund boys in the groin, and he doubled over, toppling into the snow. Some of the mob members were starting to back away from the house.

“Gentlemen!”

Suddenly Derrick was behind them, having dressed himself splendidly in record time, even wearing a high go-to-meeting collar. He spread his hands and called, “Mr. Simon Hudson has spoken his piece. If you could please give us another couple of days, we will have this Kittie Wells business all sorted out. We can hardly go about revealing the true murderer if we’re forced to cower here in Albuquerque House while you wave rifles outside and pillage the hotel room of Rudy Dunraven.”

All Bob Freund wanted to know was, “Who’s throwing those damned snowballs? Where are they coming from?”

So Percy pasted Bob with one more snowball then proceeded to run down the front yard’s pathway, gleeful in his mortal freedom. Percy fairly cavorted, shrieking, “Look! Look what I can do! Senator Spiro, watch me!” And he picked up one of the unearthed rosebushes and tossed it on a vigilante’s head, raining down snow, thorns, and frozen earth.

“Agh!”
the fellow cried, a high-pitched, strangled sound, beating off the bush. True terror was in his eyes when he turned tail and sloshed down the pathway away from the house.

Derrick resembled the commanding legislator that he was when he raised a hand and called, “All right, Percy. Calm down. Let’s use reason and not pranks to get rid of this mob.”

“Derrick,” Alameda whispered, clutching her lover’s arm. “They can’t see Percy. It appears that only you, Father, and I can.”

In fact, Simon was chortling with mirth. “Is this one of your amusing circus friends, Allie?”

Percy was having none of Derrick’s suggestions, anyway. He seemed to be having too much fun now that he’d apparently learned how to manipulate matter. Grabbing another uprooted rosebush, Percy raced over to Bob Freund and rattled the bush over his head, crying, “I, who used to summon spirits, now return as one myself!”

Bob appeared truly terrified when the bush rained debris on him. His arms flailed and he knocked the bush around, but only more clods of icy dirt and thorns fell into his eyes. “What’s doing that? You people are evil with magic!”

Percy cried, “Robert Freund! For all your scoffing at the power of magic, I am foretelling that you will die in a bizarre baseball accident!”

Bob thankfully couldn’t hear this prophecy. But just the strangeness of a rosebush held by an unseen hand and snowballs being shot out of nowhere must have finally gotten to him, for he, too, staggered back down the pathway, thrashing his arms at the bush that now scratched bloody creases in his face and neck. On the street, he turned around long enough to yell, “If you people don’t produce the murderer by Monday, this entire town is coming to string up Remington Rudy!”

Derrick shaped his hand into a cone and shouted through it, “Mr. Freund! I can guarantee you we will have the true killer apprehended by Mon—”

With all the energy of a wronged spirit from beyond the veil, Percy tore over to a cast-iron hitching post and wrapped his arms around it as if to uproot it. The few remaining vigilantes must have seen the post quaking and rocking, for they all stumbled down the road or mounted their horses and lit out. Bob managed to make his own snowball and hurl it at the hitching post, but of course it went right through Percy.