New Mexico Madman (9781101612644)

LAST CHANCE

Fargo knew they had reached the crisis point, and at first all seemed lost. Fargo had depleted his spare cylinder, too, and despite having killed or wounded more than half the attackers, he and Booger had no time to reload. A movement in the corner of his eye made Fargo glance toward the rear of the coach just in the nick of time to spot Red Sash with his knife cocked back to throw—in the desperate confusion, he had managed to ride around on the south flank and leap onto the coach.

Fargo rolled hard and fast as Red Sash threw his knife, grabbing the express gun and cocking both hammers. Sprawled on his back, Fargo fired both barrels almost point-blank. The twin load of buckshot lifted the Apache off the coach in a bloody spray. . . .

SIGNET

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First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

The first chapter of this book previously appeared in
Texas Swamp Fever
, the three hundred seventy-fifth volume in this series.

Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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The Trailsman

Beginnings . . . they bend the tree and they mark the man. Skye Fargo was born when he was eighteen. Terror was his midwife, vengeance his first cry. Killing spawned Skye Fargo, ruthless, cold-blooded murder. Out of the acrid smoke of gunpowder still hanging in the air, he rose, cried out a promise never forgotten.

The Trailsman they began to call him all across the West: searcher, scout, hunter, the man who could see where others only looked, his skills for hire but not his soul, the man who lived each day to the fullest, yet trailed each tomorrow. Skye Fargo, the Trailsman, the seeker who could take the wildness of a land and the wanting of a woman and make them his own.

New Mexico Territory, 1860—where Fargo serves as bodyguard for “America's Sweetheart” on a stagecoach bound straight for hell.

1

“When I was still just a lad wearing short pants, Olney, I found a sparrow with a broken wing. I picked it up and held it trapped in one hand. Have you ever held a small bird captive in your fist?”

While he spoke, Zack Lomax stood in the embrasure of a bay window looking out upon Santa Fe's fashionable College Street. When no answer was forthcoming, he spun around suddenly to stare at his subordinate.

“Well?
Have
you, man?”

Olney Lucas glanced quickly away from those intense, burning-coal eyes. “No, boss, I never done that.”

“Well, you should try it sometime because it's an immense thrill of power. Even as a kid I felt it—like I was God in the universe, see? I could feel its tiny heart racing like the mechanism of a fine Swiss watch. And suddenly I realized I was the master of life and death. One good squeeze and I could cancel that sparrow's existence forever. The thrill it gave me . . . later, as a man, not even the glory of the rut can match that thrill.”

Lomax laced his fingers behind his back and began pacing the fancy Persian carpet in his study. He was of middle height, built solid as a meetinghouse, and well turned out in a dark wool suit with satin facings on the lapels. His hard, angular, shrewdly intelligent face featured fiercely burning eyes of limitless ambition and brooding obsession. Eyes few men could meet for more than a second or two without being unnerved and looking away.

“I'm a man now, Olney, not a lad in short pants. And the new sparrow in my hand is a vicious, supercilious bitch named Kathleen Barton. ‘America's Sweetheart.' In a pig's ass! Do you have
any
idea what that self-loving, stuck-up thespian bitch cost me?”

Olney had worked for Lomax long enough to know which questions required answers. Lomax would answer this one himself, just as he had hundreds of times since that fateful day, almost one year ago, in San Francisco.

“That goddamn election was
mine
!” Lomax fumed. “Bought and paid for. I had the Barbary Coast Hounds on my payroll and half the aldermen blackmailed. Think of it, Olney—Mayor of San Francisco! California itself was the next prize, and with slavery legalized there I would have run an empire. That ball-breaking twat cost me all of it.
All
of it! Turned me into a national laughingstock afraid to show my face in public.”

For Lomax, who had never brooked a slight in his life, this was no old wound, but a fresh scab being torn off every day. He felt rage and shame searing into him anew. Plenty of men had proposed marriage to beautiful women and been given the mitten. But he had made the fatally overconfident mistake of proposing to Kathleen Barton on the front page of
The Californian
—a grandiose gesture he was sure would sweep the alluring actress off her feet.

Instead, she had ruined him every way but financially. Her scathing letter of rejection—also front-page newspaper fare—had described him as “a criminal beast who deserves public flogging” and assured her adoring public she “would rather kiss a toad than let that despicable, corrupt scoundrel ever touch me.”

With one devastating letter his hopes for controlling the Bear Flag Republic were reduced to mere mental vapors. And thanks to this new Associated Press for the sharing of telegraphic dispatches, his shame and ruin had become a national—eventually even international—cause célèbre. Too humiliated to even face the society he once dominated, he'd pulled his hat from the political ring to avoid a landslide defeat.

“Well, the fancy bitch had her fun,” Lomax declared now, still furiously pacing. “But you know my anthem, Olney: Whoever does not submit to the rudder must submit to the rock.”

“Sure, boss. But is it such a good idea to kill her on the first anniversary of her letter? I mean, Christ! It's a fingerboard pointing right at you.”

“Sell your ass. All the world knows that Zack Lomax was supposedly killed in an explosion at one of his own San Francisco breweries. Here in Santa Fe I'm Cort Bergman, mining investor. No one will even make the connection. And everyone knows that beautiful, popular theater actresses are magnets for unstable admirers. Her death will never be traced to me—except that
she
will know. I'll make damn sure of that.”

Shaking off his familiar, acid-bitter rage, Lomax suddenly became all business. “You've followed my instructions to the letter?”

Olney nodded. “Russ Alcott swears by all things holy that we can trust this informer. He's high up in Overland's New Mexico Division. Kathleen Barton used a fake name and wore a veil, but she's too famous and he recognized her. She's booked passage for the El Paso to Santa Fe run day after tomorrow.”

A hard-lipped smile straight as a seam divided Lomax's face. “That rings right. Her performance at El Paso's Palacio Theater has just closed, and she's opening here in town at the Bella Union in just twelve days. Have you set up the mirror-relay system?”

“All set. Just like the army uses out here. As long as the sun's shining, you and Alcott can communicate quick as a finger snap.”

Lomax looked pleased. “Any new word on special security arrangements for her?”

Olney Lucas fortified himself with a deep breath.
Stand
by
for
the
blast
, he warned himself.

“Well, you were right, boss. There'll be no military escort. Overland's Division Manager, and the bitch's agent, don't want no attention drawn to the run. Soldiers usually escort bullion runs, and they don't want to lure Mexican freebooters.”

He hesitated, and Lomax alerted like a hound on point. “What is it?” he demanded sharply.

“Well, the thing of it is—according to Alcott's report, this theater agent won't be traveling with her. He's hired on Skye Fargo as the shotgun rider. Actually, as Barton's bodyguard.”

For a moment Lomax looked as if he'd been slugged hard but not quite dropped. He stopped pacing, and for a full thirty seconds stood as still as a pillar of salt, his face going pale as fresh linen.

“Fargo!” He spat the word out like a bad taste. “The ‘savage angel' as the fawning newspaper scribblers call him. The ‘man whom bees will not sting.'”

“Maybe bees
can
sting him, but it's a hard-cash fact that he's left a trail of graves all over the West. He's hell on two sticks.”

Lomax seemed to gather himself, squaring his shoulders and regaining some color in his face. “No question about it, Olney, he's no man to take lightly. In fact, if we are not meticulously careful, Skye Fargo is the rock we'll split on. But I planned for something like this. For
one
full
year
I've worked this out.”

Lomax resumed pacing like a caged tiger. “Fargo is famous for his prowess as a killer, certainly. But often he wins the day by a simple strategy: always mystify, mislead and surprise your enemies. By a happy coincidence, that's
our
strategy, too.”

Olney perked up at this reminder. “By God, it is, ain't it?”

“We're attacking our opponent at his greatest strength. And don't forget, neither Fargo nor anyone else knows we have an informer inside Overland. And wouldn't you agree that Russ, Cleo and Spider are first-rate killers?”

“Just like Fargo—no men to fool with, boss. In Lincoln County they call Russ Alcott the Widow Maker. I've seen him light matches with a pistol at twenty feet. And he handpicked those two siding him.”

Lomax nodded. “Fargo can't possibly know we'll have a paid killer on that coach, too, as our ace in the hole. Or even that we know exactly
which
run Kathleen will be on. If they switch runs at the last minute, we'll know that also.”

“The way you say, boss. But no matter how you slice it, there's no killing the woman until we put the quietus on Fargo. And slick plan or no, when it comes to
that
job, it'd be easier to put socks on a rooster.”

Again Lomax nodded. “Never underrate your enemy. The road to hell is paved with the bones of fools who made that mistake. I won't.
One
year
, Olney. Night and day, planning even for something as formidable as Skye Fargo. But the suspense clock has been set ticking: exactly eleven days from now, on June nineteenth, 1860, Kathleen Suzanne Barton will draw her ultimate breath in this world.”

He crossed to a huge mahogany desk and picked up a Spanish dagger featuring a jewel-encrusted, hammered-silver hilt.

“Fargo first, of course, and I don't give a damn who kills him or how. And then, ten miles west of this City of Holy Faith . . . at a spot appropriately named Blood Mesa. First, I'll watch the terror ignite in her eyes—make that proud, haughty beauty beg and grovel, perhaps even piss herself. Next, I'll shred that breathtakingly beautiful face, and then I'll carve her goddamn stone heart out of her chest. Just the way she cut mine out back in San Francisco.”

By now Lomax was breathing so hard his breath whistled faintly in his nostrils.

“Boss?” Olney said quietly.

It took Lomax a long moment to realize his lackey had spoken. “Yes?”

“Just curious. That bird you caught when you was a kid—what happened to it?”

Lomax's lips twitched. He held one open hand out, then suddenly squeezed it into a tight fist. “Master of life and death, Olney. Just like God in the universe.”