.45-Caliber Widow Maker (26 page)

Her younger brothers were all dead—shot down by Texas Rangers. That’s why nearly a year ago she’d drifted north to find her older half brother, Bob, who was all the kin she had left.

As the other men gathered in a semicircle around him, Bob used a knife to pry up the floorboards nearest the back wall. Eagerly, he tossed each half-rotten board aside, shredding cobwebs as he did. When he’d tossed away the third board, his face clouded up, pewter brows knotting with consternation. He pried up a fourth board quickly, continuing to scowl into the hole.

When he’d thrown the board aside he hardened his jaws, muttered a curse, doffed his hat, and dropped low to study the hole, turning his head this way and that and up and down.

“What’s the matter?” There was a hitch in Blackburn’s voice.

Bob stopped moving his head. He kept it lowered, staring into the hole. He didn’t seem to be breathing.

Johnnie stepped forward, licking her lips. “What is it, Bob?”

Slowly, Colorado Bob lifted his head and looked around at the men staring down at him, blinking his eyes slowly. “It ain’t there.”

A silence descended so heavily that Johnnie thought she could hear the black widow spiders stirring under the floor and in the ceiling. The breeze brushed across the open doorway behind her.

“You lie.” Fuego backed up the low, taut accusation with his big Buntline, which he slipped from its holster and raised, rocking back the heavy hammer as he aimed the barrel at Bob’s face. “You double-crossin’ lobos!”

“Squeeze that trigger, Injun, and you’re wolf bait!” Blackburn’s ivory-gripped .45 was in his right hand in a blur, the quick ratcheting click of the hammer sounding inordinately loud in the close quarters.

“Nobody’s bein’ double-crossed here,” said Colorado Bob, straightening his back and raising his hands chest high, palms out. He chuckled mirthlessly. “At least, no one here’s doin’ any double crossin’. Frank, Brush, an’ me was all run down just seven miles north of here. None of us had time to double back for the loot. And, since we all been together since we was caught, we’d know if any of us
sent
someone back.”

Fuego stepped back, angling the long-barreled, silver-chased pistol to and fro before him, covering the other three men. “You’re liars. You think I’m a dumb half-breed. You keep me around in case Oldenberg comes and you need another gun, but you never intended to—”

“Oh, shut the fuck up, breed!” Johnnie fairly screamed. Her nerves were frayed and she just now realized that she’d drawn her own Colt .38 and was aiming at the big half-breed’s flat belly. “You either holster that hogleg or take a pill from me. I’m tired of all this mooncalf
bullshit
from you fellas!”

The half-breed looked at Johnnie as though he’d never seen her before and was vaguely surprised to see her there in the cabin with him. He looked down at the revolver aimed at his belly, an additional problem, then let the Buntline wilt.

Finally, easing the hammer back against the firing pin, a pensive look in his dark eyes, he slid the revolver back into its holster.

“Where money, then, goddamnit, King?” he barked, his anger flaming again but without the killing fury.

Brush Simms stared desperately into the hole, fingering a faint scar on his chin. “Oldenberg?” He looked at Bob still kneeling beside the hole from which the faint scent of cordite rose. “You think he . . . ?”

“How could he?” grunted Blackburn. “When we separated after the holdup, he and his boys swung south and we headed north with the pack mule and the loot. Karl knew the posse would go after whoever they figured had the gold. That’s why he didn’t balk when we rode off with it . . . an’ him bein’ the trustin’ sort, to boot.”

“No way he could have known where we buried it,” Bob said with a quietly confounded air. “The only ones behind us was the posse, but they weren’t that close when we buried the strongbox. We knew they was comin’—we glassed ’em when we left Miss Alva’s.”

That last hung in the air like an especially loud hum mingbird flickering around their faces. Colorado Bob glanced at Blackburn, who returned the meaningful look. Then both men turned to Brush Simms, who switched his gaze back and forth between them, the dawn of understanding growing in the wedge-nosed redhead’s auburn eyes.

Simms grinned savagely. “Miss Alva’s been fixin’ the place up.”

“Makin’ it look right respectable,” added Blackburn, turning again to Colorado Bob. He chuckled. “Where do you suppose she found the lucre to do all that?”

Bob rose slowly, breathing through his nostrils, his chest rising and falling heavily. He donned his hat, pushed between Blackburn and Simms, and didn’t give Johnnie, standing in front of the door, so much as a glance. Fists balled at his sides, he headed back out into the sunlight and looked toward Miss Alva’s place.

Johnnie followed him, her heart thudding dully. She’d had a bad feeling about all this for the past couple of hours. But that bad feeling was nothing compared to the new bad feeling she was feeling now.

There was going to be blood here. Not just a little blood, either. Things were gonna start getting nasty bloody real soon.

The other men including Fuego tramped out of the cabin behind her, moving slowly and with an air of barely restrained fury.

“Looked to me like Miss Alva done bought her girls some nice, new, colorful dress pretties.” Running his hand under his nose, Blackburn turned to Simms. “Did you notice that, Brush?”

“I noticed,” Simms said, nodding, as he stared toward the knoll separating the old miner’s shack from the whorehouse. They could all see the house’s roof peeking up from the top of the knoll. “Them girls . . . Wynona and Trinity and Sarah . . . they looked right nice in ’em, too.”

“ ’Nough talk, boys,” said Colorado Bob, grunting as he swung up onto his horse’s back. “Time to see about our money.”

“Bob,” Johnnie said, shielding her eyes against the climbing morning sun. She didn’t bother continuing, for Bob had just raked his heels against his horse’s flanks, and the horse was lunging up the knoll, galloping toward the whorehouse.

The other men followed suit, grimly silent, their eyes hard as rocks. Only Fuego showed any emotion. The half-breed gave a rebel-like howl as he hazed his horse up the knoll alongside Blackburn and Simms.

The prospect of doing violence to working girls seemed to sit well with the big, bald, earless breed.

25

COLORADO BOB SPURRED his horse down the knoll, toward the backyard of the pink whorehouse in which bedding and ladies’ unmentionables of every color imaginable—all looking fresh and bright and new—snapped and tossed in the light wind under a clear, blue Wyoming sky.

As Bob pulled around the stable he saw that the scantily clad girls had disappeared. He glanced at the whorehouse’s back wall as the door closed with a dull bang but not before he’d caught a glimpse of a bulky figure clad in billowy white underwear and a night sock.

“Alva, that you?” Bob called as, about twenty feet from the door and surrounded by the buffeting frillies and silk sheets, he and the other men and his sister, Johnnie Wade, swung down from their saddles.

Bob poked his hat brim off his forehead and, flanked by the men and Johnnie, tramped to the door, which was of crude Z-frame construction, with its whipsawed planks freshly painted the same pink as the rest of the house and trimmed in white.

Bob stopped, turned an ear to listen through the planks before glancing at the other men forming a half circle around him. He tried the metal latch but the door had been barred from inside. Muttering an oath and hardening his jaws, he rapped his knuckles against the pink planks.

“Alva? Bob King here. Colorado Bob. Got something we need to talk over, you an’ me.”

A woman’s deep voice rose on the other side of the door. “Go away, Bob. I’ve taken sick.”

“Sick?”

“Believe it might be the influenza. Right catching, it is. Several of the girls are down with it.”

“Alva, I know you found the dynamite hole in the old shack back yonder.”

“Dynamite hole?”

“The one some old prospector musta dug out of the floor.”

“What on earth are you talkin’ about, Bob King?”

“Alva!” Bob rammed the back of his hand against the door. “I’m missin’ a passel of
dinero
,
comprende
? Me and the boys and my li’l sis have come for it, and we aim to get every penny that you ain’t yet spent”—Bob’s voice rose sharply, cracking with exasperation—
“and take the rest out of your ugly, rancid, fat hide!”

“I’m warnin’ you, Bob!” came the bugling retort from behind the door.

There was a faint, metallic click.

Colorado Bob stepped to one side, waving the others back. “Careful, now. Old Alva’s rumored to keep an old Liverwright barn blaster on the—”

A squash-sized dogget of wood was blown through the door from the other side, throwing wood splinters straight out into the yard, peppering the wiry brown grass and sage tufts.

“There’s the first barrel.”

Bob stepped in front of the door, shielding his eyes as he peeked through the ragged, smoking hole.

“Alva, I ain’t gonna ask ya again!”

He bolted to the other side of the door.

“There’s two.”

Bob jerked back in front of the door. Taking his pistol in his left hand, he thrust his right hand through the single, pumpkin-sized hole in the middle of the door. He pulled the wooden locking bar up out of its brackets, and tossed it aside.

A scream rose from the other side of the door, and through the gaping hole he saw a white-clad figure move.

“I’m gonna blow this place to hell and back, Alva!” Bob kicked what was left of the door open and bolted inside. “The devil’s come a-callin’, Alva. What’d you do with my money?”

The whorehouse madam was built like a rain barrel with short, curly blonde hair and a mottled fleshy face with little, colorless pig eyes. She wore a corset and pantaloons and a low-cut camisole over her two-hundred pounds of sagging suet that the skimpy clothes covered all too little of.

She sat on the floor against the kitchen’s back wall, just left of the hallway leading to the front of the house, her fat, dimpled knees drawn up to her chest. The smoking, empty shotgun lay near her feet. Staring at Bob in horror, she was reaching through a slit in her pantaloons.

“Bob, you leave me be. I had no idea that money was yours!”

“You were prowlin’ around out back when we done hid it, and we was too worried about the posse to figure on a fat little whorehouse madam stealin’ us blind!”

Alva rose to her knees and thrust a six-inch blade toward Bob. Her lusterless eyes were pinched down to the size of buckshot pellets. “You come near me, I’ll gut you like a fish, Bob King!”

Bob ground his teeth audibly and stepped toward her. “You stick me with that blade, whore, and I’ll cut your head off, dry it, and hang it from my vest for a watch fob!”

In the doorway behind Colorado Bob, Blackburn shouted, “Where’s the money, bitch?”

With a shrill scream, Alva tossed the knife. It careened over Bob’s left shoulder and plunked hilt deep in the door frame, six inches right of Blackburn’s fury-red face. With unusual agility for a woman her size, Alva bounded to her pink-slippered feet, the slippers decorated with small pink balls on each velvet toe, and bounded off down the dark hall, throwing her head back on her shoulders and bellowing like a calf in a panhandle thunderstorm.

“Goddamnit!” Colorado Bob railed as he lunged after the woman, taking long strides down the dim hall and bunching his cheeks with fury. “You can run, Alva, but you couldn’t hide if you was no bigger than a dung beetle! Not from me!”

As he stomped out of the hall and into a large, well-appointed parlor—a room he had frequented several times on his journey through this part of the territory—he could hear the terrified peeps and hushed screams of the girls cowering upstairs in their rooms.

Ahead, Alva was fumbling with the front-door handle, casting wide-eyed looks over her shoulder at Colorado Bob marching toward her, fury sparking in his slanted, Viking eyes.

A single glance around the red-papered room told him that the madam had added a new piano to the premises, as well as a gilt-edged mirror and a brocade-upholstered fainting couch shoved against the wall beneath the carpeted stairs.

“Really deckin’ the place out on ole Bob an’ the boys, ain’t ya, Alva?” As the woman fumbled the door open and lurched onto the porch with a continuous cry rumbling up from deep in her well-padded belly, Bob shouted, “Where’s the rest of it, bitch? I know you ain’t had time to spend the whole twenty-five grand!”

He bolted out the front door and tramped down the porch steps to the dusty little yard spotted with sage and yucca. Ahead, Alva ran out of the yard and into the street, lifting her knees and arms high, the balls on her pink slippers bouncing bizarrely around her toes.

“I just took half!” she screamed.

Halfway across the yard, Bob stopped and raised his octagonal-barreled Navy .44. He slitted one eye as he aimed.

The gun leapt and roared.

Alva loosed a shrill yowl and flew straight forward, hitting the street on her face and chest, then rolling in a churning cloud of tan dust, straw, and horse manure. On her belly, facedown in the dust, Alva moaned and reached back with one hand toward the blood staining her pantaloons over her large, round left butt cheek.

“Oh,” she sobbed. “Oh, you bastard, Bob . . .”

Bob lowered the smoking Colt and continued striding purposefully forward. The men who’d been hammering new shingles on the roof of the livery barn on the other side of the street had stopped their work to stare slack-jawed into the street where the fat whore lay sprawled and bleeding.

Colorado Bob strode grimly toward the butt-shot madam, his chin lowered, coarse silver hair buffeting out behind him in the breeze, his slanted yellow eyes pinched down to slits.