Nevada Vipers' Nest (8 page)

“What's not to like? You're pretty as four aces and you've got too many curves to brake for. A nice smile, too.”

“I hope this is going somewhere besides a dance, Deputy.”

The piano player finished his tune with a fast glissando of notes, and Fargo watched Belle Star step up onto a low stage near the piano.

“She sings, too,” Libby volunteered. “And I hate to admit it, but she does a fine job of it. Stick with me for this next dance, won't you? I'm just getting . . . warmed up.”

The piano player struck up “What Was Your Name in the States,” and Belle Star's silvery, melodic voice made it the best rendition he'd ever heard.

“Have you got your own place?” Libby murmured.

“Unfortunately, no. How 'bout you?”

“Well, I have a room at Ma Kunkle's boardinghouse, but I share it with two other girls. Seems like I'm never alone there. But there is a place we could meet. Have you seen the old Hartley place—that house just outside of town that was lightning struck and is half burned down?”

“I noticed it today.”

“Well, there's one room at the back that hasn't been damaged. There's a corn-shuck mattress in it. Some of the girls sort of, you know, use it now and then. There's a back door, too, so a person can get in without being seen. I could bring a blanket to cover the mattress so it won't be so rough.”

“You just name the day and time, pretty lady, and I'll be there.”

“My shift ends at eight tonight. I don't think I can wait another day.”

This was a hot little firecracker, just the kind Fargo liked. “I'll be there,” he promised. “Now quit pressing into me so tight, or I'm going to be embarrassed when I cross back to the bar.”

Libby gave him a teasing laugh. “One thing for sure—if it's as big as it feels, there's no way you're going to hide it.”

Belle's song ended to thunderous applause and cheers. As Fargo started back across the sawdust-covered floor, he sent a cross-shoulder glance toward the stage. Belle Star was watching him and quickly averted her gaze when he met her eyes.

Interesting, Fargo thought. Mighty damn interesting.

“That pretty little brunette,” Sitch remarked as the two men emerged from the Sawdust Corner onto the bustling boardwalk, “looked like she was climbing all over you.”

“We hit it off pretty good,” Fargo said absently, his crimped eyes carefully surveying the town. “Take a gander across the street at the fellow plastering up a broadsheet on the front of the dance hall. He look familiar to you?”

“He does at that,” Sitch replied. “Wasn't he one of the faces we saw a couple nights ago when the sashes had us prisoners?”

“That's all I needed to hear,” Fargo replied, strolling purposefully across the wide thoroughfare, dodging a big freight wagon.

But the man was apparently being more vigilant than Fargo realized. He was only halfway across the street when the stranger suddenly jerked back his handgun and opened fire at the Trailsman.

Fargo bent low and lunged to one side, shucking out his Colt. But as the would-be murderer escaped, Fargo cursed his luck—the opposite boardwalk, too, was bustling and crowded, and he couldn't risk a return shot.

The man ducked down a side street, Fargo doggedly pursuing at a full run. The moment he turned the corner, another shot snapped past his ear. This street was nearly empty of citizens and Fargo returned fire. For the next ten or fifteen seconds a running gun battle ensued until Fargo's last bullet sent the man crashing face-first to the ground. When Fargo caught up to him, the thug's toes were scratching the dirt in death agony. He was already dead when Fargo turned him around for a closer look.

“Damn it to hell,” Fargo muttered. He had been aiming to wound. But his slug had caught the man just left of his spine, tearing through the heart. There went any chance to beat some truth out of him.

By long habit Fargo thumbed reloads into the wheel of his six-gun before he did anything else. Then he leathered his shooter, tugged the body out of the street, and returned to look at the broadsheet, where a crowd had already gathered around Sitch. Sheriff Cyrus Vance, too, was reading the sheet.

“We're in a world of shit now,” Sitch muttered to Fargo. “Those jackals out at Rough and Ready worked mighty quick. They must've paid off the newspaper.”

The broadsheet was a summary of headlines from that day's
Territorial
Enterprise
, published in nearby Virginia City and the most widely circulated newspaper in the Nevada Territory. Fargo read the glaring, large-print headline:

SKYE FARGO RED-HANDED MURDERER???

The story ballyhooed the massacre of the Hightower family in the typical sensational writing of that era's newspapers, substituting “eyewitness” accounts for any verified facts without identifying those witnesses. The story did not outright accuse Fargo and “his nefarious companion” of murder. But it did note that the two men were stripping the corpses when “heroic champions of law and order captured them after a bloody frolic during which hundreds of rounds were expended.”

And in a touch sure to enflame frontier passions, it was broadly hinted that Sarah Hightower was “brutally outraged before being murdered,” outraged being the preferred substitute for the word “raped.”

“You folks clear the hell out of here,” Sheriff Vance snapped at the crowd. “This is all hogwash— G'wan, clear out.”

He looked at Fargo. “Let me see your toothpick.”

Fargo handed him his knife and the sheriff made short work of scraping the broadsheet off.

“Go check around and make sure there's no more,” Vance told Sitch. “Fargo, c'mon over to my office.”

Fargo felt hostile stares following him.

“Should I send for the undertaker?” Vance asked as the two men retreated.

“Why waste the money?” Fargo replied. “I'd just feed him to the hogs.”

“That would be my preference, too, but city ordinance don't allow it.”

Back in the office, the sheriff dropped into the chair behind his desk and let out a long, fluming sigh. “This is bad, Fargo. We can take the broadsheets down, but now word is out all over the territory that you're a woman and child killer—and a damn rapist. Too many of these rubes believe anything that's printed in black and white.”

Fargo had already figured out that much. “Yeah. They accused me of everything except roasting and eating the corpses.”

“That might be coming. Those poncy men in the newspaper racket will milk this for every drop. Somehow you're going to have to clear your name before these yahoos get liquored up and fit you with a necktie.”

“They've got this new Associated Press for sharing telegraphic dispatches,” Fargo said. “This could spread all over the country. I've got to find that woman who escaped the attack—she's my only witness.”

“Had any luck on that score?”

Fargo shook his head. “You heard of a woman named Belle Star? She was just hired on as a singer and dancer at the Sawdust Corner.”

“With my pesticatin' gut, I don't spend much time in the saloons—they don't serve milk. First I've heard of her though. What, you think she might be the woman you're looking for?”

Fargo folded into a ladder-back chair, shaking his head. “Nope. The only thing I got to go on is that she was just hired. Other than the fact that she's a beauty, there's not even any resemblance. The woman I saw had copper-colored hair, this gal's a light blonde. Besides, I only got a brief squint of the woman who was running away.”

“Women are scarce as hen's teeth out west,” Vance pointed out, “but not in boomtowns like Carson City. They come and go all the time looking for rich husbands.”

“What I still can't figure,” said a frustrated Fargo, “is why this vigilante bunch has so damn much interest in me. Sure, I gave them the slip, and likely that pissed them off. But they don't care two jackstraws about avenging that family, and besides, I don't think they really believe I killed those folks. Matter fact, I think they did it.”

“That's not too low for Iron Mike Scully,” the sheriff agreed. “But why would they kill the goose that lays the golden egg? Hell, they sent for Clement Hightower so he could find that supposed vein of silver for them.”

“Does
any
damn thing about this deal make sense?”

The door opened and Sitch came in.

“Find any more?” Vance asked him.

“One. It was plastered up in front of the Three Sisters Saloon. There was already a crowd around it. I scraped it off with my clasp knife. There was this hombre the size of a farmer's bull that tried to stop me.”

Vance cast a skeptical eye at McDougall's light frame. “And you were able to stop him?”

Sitch touched the fancy handle of the whip in his belt. “I didn't exactly stop him. I put on a little show, and the whole damn crowd was so entertained, they forgot they were mad. In fact—”

Sitch pulled a handful of coins from his pocket. “One of them passed the hat when I was done and I made almost three dollars.”

The sheriff looked askance at Fargo. “He's stretching the blanket, right?”

Fargo shook his head. “He's a trick-whip expert. I've seen him in action. Sheriff, if you tied a quill on the end of that lash, he could write a book just by snapping that whip.”

“Be damned. Well, whip tricks won't pull your bacon out of the fire, boys. The word's out now, and this deal is gonna get nasty.”

“Yeah,” Fargo agreed. “Right now, Sitch, we're down to bedrock and showing damn little color. And if we don't strike a lode mighty quick, we're gonna be getting our mail delivered by moles.”

•   •   •

Fargo spent the remainder of that day endlessly trying to locate the mysterious copper-haired woman or at least to pry information about her out of anyone who would talk to him. But now that word of the broadsheets had swept through town like a comber, many of the residents of Carson City were openly hostile to him—a hostility that Fargo feared would soon bubble over into a lynching or at least attempts on his life.

With danger now pressing in from all sides, Fargo did not pick a new campsite until after dark, this time on the opposite side of town in a little draw ringed by juniper trees. The two men retrieved their horses from the feed stable and put them on long tethers to graze the nutritious autumn grass.

“You know, Fargo,” Sitch remarked, “I don't mind sleeping on the ground and taking the risk of rattlesnakes. But this town is getting bad for our health. They say discretion is the better part of valor—why don't we just vamoose while we're still above the ground?”

“It might soon come down to the nut-cuttin',” Fargo conceded. “But like I already told you—we have to locate that damn woman. Sure, we can hightail it, and maybe this deal will just blow over. There's not one shred of legal evidence against us. Then again, that newspaper claptrap could swell up so big that we'll spend the rest of our born days south of the border wearing them foolish disguises of yours.”

“I believe you're worried about clearing yourself, all right. No honest man wants a stain on his name. But I also think the massacre of the Hightower family, and what Scully and his rabid curs did to you, has got under your skin and is making you stubborn.”

“What if it is?” Fargo demanded. “You helped bury those folks. And you were sentenced to drag-hang right alongside me. It doesn't stick in your craw, too?”

“I s'pose it does—killing the family, I mean. Hell, when I think of those two innocent little girls . . . those images will be painted on my eyeballs for life. And I confess I'm curious to know what's behind all this. As far as the other—I already got plenty of stains on my name, and I've escaped a lynching or two. All I feel afterward is relief, not a thirst for revenge.”

“Of course not because you were guilty every time. But like I told you, you're free to cut your picket pin anytime you've a mind to. Me, I'm sticking. Anybody drunk or stupid enough to try freeing me from my soul will soon be playing checkers with Satan.”

“Well, you're in the right. I just—
Katy Christ!
”

Sitch was abruptly interrupted by a hair-raising shriek that froze Fargo for a few seconds, his pulse suddenly exploding in his ears. Fargo had heard about banshees, and this long, attenuated cry sounded exactly like the unearthly sound he imagined they might make. It sounded again, and Fargo was forced to walk out and calm the horses.

“Was that an animal?” Sitch demanded when it was silent again and he found his voice.

“Not a four-legged one,” Fargo replied grimly. “A Puma sends out a fearsome cry, but this one had too much warble in it. It came from the direction of Rough and Ready. More of this ‘haunted valley' horseshit.”

“Now see, that's one of the things I'm curious about. Who's trying to drive those miners off, and why?”

“You might's well ask me what causes the wind because I sure's hell can't tell you. If I had to guess, I'd say it's Scully and his lickspittles, but I'm damned if I can figure the why of it. I do know this—we're gonna have to start riding out to that area after dark and try to figure out what they're up to.”

“Hookey Walker! Fargo, we just barely got out of that place alive!”

Fargo grinned in the generous moonwash. “Yeah. That'll give it a little more savor, huh? But no need to piss yourself—it's best if I do the nighttime spying alone. Even in broad daylight I doubt if you could locate your own reflection in a hall of mirrors.”

“I'm getting smarter just watching you. But I'm damned if I'm riding back to that camp.”

Fargo removed a comb from a saddle pocket and began combing his hair and beard. He had an appointment in just a few minutes with a mighty shapely brunette, and he could still feel her curves pressing into him—that familiar feminine pressure that said
I want
. Sitch had used part of his whip-trick earnings that day to purchase a bag of licorice drops and now he began chewing one.

“Here's a good one for you, Fargo. This fancy society woman goes into a Chinese laundry and demands, ‘I want these clothes washed and lickety-split.' The Chinese laundryman replies, ‘I washee the clothes, lady, but I no lickee the split.'”

Fargo groaned. “That one's so old, it's got dinosaur shit on it. Look, I'm heading into town for a bit. Keep your eyes and ears open, and pay close attention to my stallion. He's a good sentry. If he gets agitated, shuck out that Remington and lay low. I'll give you the hail when I return so you don't shoot me full of holes.”

“I
knew
you were fussing with your hair for some good reason. You're gonna play slap 'n tickle with that brunette, are'n'cha?”

“So what? I happen to know you went upstairs at the Sawdust Corner this afternoon and got your bell rope pulled. Ain't my fault you're so damn homely you have to pay for it.”

“Yeah, but say, she was worth it.”

“Don't tell me,” Fargo said sarcastically. “She said you were the best she ever had, right?”

“Nah. She didn't even pretend to come like most of them do. But she did laugh at my jokes—laughed real hard.”

“Fine. Give me eight bits and I'll laugh at 'em too.”

Fargo shucked out his Colt and palmed the wheel. Then he set off on foot in the moonlit darkness.

“You know,” Sitch called out behind him, “they say it's easiest to kill a man when he's in the rut or taking a crap.”

“You have definitely learned a few things,” Fargo called back.

“Yeah, but have you thought about something else? I know that women flock to you like flies to syrup. But it sure seems to me that little brunette didn't waste any time getting you all het up. You told me men make stupid mistakes when they get too angry—what about men who get too horny? And what if Iron Mike has got her on his payroll to lure you into a trap?”