Beauty and the Bounty Hunter (30 page)

At least the woman wasn’t hanging from a rope on yonder tree. Cat might be able to rescue her yet.

“Why wait?”

Cat couldn’t think of a single reason.

She caught up to the Jepsum sheriff a few hours
before the next dawn. It wasn’t hard. He’d been bound hand and foot, gagged too.

Cat stared at the man as the light from the fire—he was lucky his captor had left one to keep the critters away—trickled over his furious face. She leaned down and removed the gag. “What happened?”

Cat didn’t bother to disguise her voice, and she’d shoved her arm back through her sleeve rather than leaving it concealed beneath the material. Made it easier to ride.

“Who the hell are you?”

“No one of any consequence.” Cat used the barrel of her gun to indicate he should go on, even though he hadn’t yet started.

“I never saw so many women pretending to be men in my life.”

“Bet not,” Cat agreed.

“Ain’t ya gonna untie me?”

“Depends on what you say.” Cat lowered herself to his saddle, which rested nearby. Unfortunately for him, his horse was gone.

Silence descended, broken only by the crackle of the fire and the snorts and shuffles of Cat’s mount.

“I can sit here all night,” Cat said. “I can leave you the same way I found you in the morning and follow the trail myself. Up to you.”

The sheriff’s lips tightened; then he cursed a long blue streak before he commenced. “I was takin’ Cat O’Banyon to Denver City.”

“Where is she?”

“Where the hell you think? She tied me up and went there herself.”

Cat frowned. As the woman he’d captured
wasn’t
Cat, why would she go to Denver City? “You sure?”

“Yes,” he snapped. “I’d tied her. Tied her good. Gone to sleep. Next thing I know, she’s got a knife to my throat askin’ where I aim to take her.” He made a disgusted sound. “I don’t know where she had that knife. I searched her right thorough for weapons.”

Cat, who’d been considering the woman might have been Alexi, narrowed her gaze. “How thorough?”

“Very.”

Which meant the woman had been a woman. Probably.

At her continued silence, the sheriff lifted his chin. “I didn’t do nothin’ wrong.”

“Didn’t do much right either,” Cat returned. “Or you wouldn’t be where you are.” His scowl deepened. “Why’d she care where you were taking her?”

“Said she was sick of bein’ hunted. Planned to end it once and for all.”

It made no sense—the woman
wasn’t
Cat O’Banyon—but Cat would worry about that later. “Where were you taking her?” He hesitated, and Cat cocked the Colt. “I don’t wanna kill you,” she said. “I will. But I don’t want to.”

“What’s to stop you from killing me after I tell you?”

“Not one damn thing,” she agreed.

He stared at her for several seconds, then sighed. “Deserted warehouse near the stage stop in Denver City.”

“Which deserted warehouse?”

The sheriff shrugged as best he could with his hands tied behind his back. “Suspect there’s only one.”

“Where’d you get your information?”

“Folks talk. At first the bounty was just rumor. Whispers here and there. But a few weeks ago, a wanted poster showed up.”

Cat wondered why Ben hadn’t mentioned that—although not every poster made it to every sheriff. What
she’d like to know was how there’d come to be a wanted poster at all. She still hadn’t done anything that warranted a bounty. Of course money talked, and whoever was after her appeared to have plenty.

“Picture?” she asked. “Description?”

“No picture. Description was pretty much what we already knew. Woman who dresses as a man. But she’s also real good at pretendin’ to be others just to catch whoever she’s after. So really…could be anyone.” Cat stifled a smile. “Taller than most gals.” As he continued, her urge to smile faded. “Dark hair. Green eyes.”

Green eyes were rare. But Cat knew from experience that people often lumped all those with light eyes together—gray, blue, green. She couldn’t count the times she’d been complimented on her
pretty blue eyes
. She doubted whoever the sheriff had captured in her place had possessed green eyes. She doubted he’d looked, or if he had, that he’d cared. The promise of money could make anyone color-blind.

The sheriff squinted at Cat’s face; she didn’t bother to retreat out off the range of the firelight. If he figured out who she was now, it didn’t really matter. By the time he could tell anyone, she’d either be dead or the one most interested in the knowledge would be.

“What else?” she asked.

“Anyone who captured Cat O’Banyon, dead or alive, was supposed to contact the telegraph office in Denver City for instructions. I got an answer in less than hour sayin’ where to take her.”

How many women had been dragged to that deserted warehouse in Denver City, and what had happened to them when they’d proved to be the wrong woman? For that matter, how many women had been killed before being dragged there just to make things easier on the one doing the dragging?

Cat stood. Time to make sure no one else paid for her mistakes with their lives.

“Hey!” the sheriff exclaimed. “You said you’d let me go if I told you.”

“No. I said I’d kill you if you didn’t. You’re still breathing.”

“I won’t be, if you leave me like this.”

As that was true, she drew her knife and cut the bonds on his hands. While he was busy unlacing his feet, Cat mounted her horse and galloped away.

Ten days later, Cat crossed Cherry Creek. Denver City sat between her and a mountainous horizon beyond which the sun had just begun to set. Many of the older structures had been fashioned of pine or cottonwood, but not as many as Cat would have expected. The majority were made of brick; several were two story, some even three stories high. Dust was everywhere, probably because the few trees in the city proper were spindly and small, doing nothing whatsoever to keep the prairie from blowing through the streets.

Cat walked her horse down roads ripe with rooming houses, dance halls, whorehouses, gambling halls and watering holes. A typical former gold-rush town turned railroad juncture; Cat had seen them all over Kansas.

She left her mount outside a saloon, went in, ordered a drink she didn’t touch, and asked about deserted warehouses nearby. There
was
only one.

The area near the stage stop boomed. Many of the local businesses had moved onto the lots surrounding it in order to service travelers. Though Denver had recently laid track of their own to connect with the Union Pacific, the majority of arrivals and departures still used the stage.

Cat left the saloon and followed directions. Moments later she stood on a silent, shadowed boardwalk of
stores, staring at the two-story brick building to which she’d been directed. Didn’t look abandoned to her. Too many lights.

She bit her lip, trying to come up with a plan to get inside. She wondered if the other Cat had.

“Surrender,” she mused. “Or—” Cat drew her Colt. “Not.”

She’d taken only a single step forward when the door she’d been staring at opened and two figures stepped out.

A
fter seeing the sheriff coming toward the hotel, Alexi had tossed on some clothes and stepped into the hall. He reached the head of the stairs in time to hear the lawman asking the clerk about them.

He cursed his unsteady hand, which had deposited a bullet in the stableman’s chest and not his head. Head shots ensured there would be no talking about who had shot you. Chest shots, on the other hand, allowed more leeway. Why hadn’t he made sure the man was dead?

He’d been too busy shaking and throwing up. Which had led to the sheriff learning their descriptions, then asking around. Someone had remembered the drunken singing and tattled.

Panicked, Alexi had searched desperately for a way to draw the sheriff away from town. Away from Cat. He’d glanced down, saw that he’d put on her shirt—or rather Ethan’s—and a plan had unfurled. By the time the sheriff found him, he was her.

The first night out of Jepsum, Alexi had slipped the sheriff’s bonds with ease. He’d once traveled with a man who could escape from anything. During rainy afternoons the Remarkable Rudolph had shared several tricks of his trade with Fedya, the sharpshooting boy.

The ties around Alexi’s hands and feet had not lasted five minutes after the sheriff began to snore. The man’s
resolve to keep their destination a secret had lasted even less time once he’d seen Alexi’s face.

And his knife.

Upon arriving in Denver City, Alexi had taken a moment to stand on the bank of the South Platte River and remember the last time he had been here, over ten years before.

Pikes Peak or Bust!
had been the rallying cry of the gold prospectors that had poured into the area. His father had been one of them.

Oh, Kazmir Kondrashchenko hadn’t come to pan for gold. He would never work so hard. But he’d followed the sparkle. Kaz always did. He wasn’t the only one.

The number of people that crossed the flat land of Kansas to stake claims on both sides of the river allowed Fedya and his father to make a good bit of money. They stayed on as the settlements grew and began to push, shove, and shoot at each other.

General Larimer controlled the collection of lean-tos, tents, log cabins, and tepees on the east side of the creek. Larimer, despite his imposing title, was a land speculator whose only military experience at the time was a stint in the Pennsylvania militia. He named the settlement Denver City, in hopes of currying favor with James Denver, the territorial governor of Kansas. By the time Larimer discovered that Denver was no longer the governor, the settlements on both sides of the water had become Denver City.

The place nearly turned into one of the many ghost towns in the territory when gold was discovered in the mountain settlement of Central City. Thousands of residents scurried there only to scurry right back after a taste of the mountain winter.

Bummers arrived—prostitutes, gamblers, and shopkeepers—to reap the rewards of the prospectors’ earnings,
then stayed on as Denver City continued to grow, a supply hub for those mountain gold camps.

Alexi marveled, as he always had, at the contrast between the land on the east side of Denver City and the west. It was as if God had used his hand to flatten Kansas, then dug deep to create a river before plopping what had been gouged out on the other side and producing the Rockies.

The last time Alexi had been in Denver City, it had still been part of Kansas Territory and he’d still been Fedya. How they had both changed. Yet in many ways they were quite the same. He might now be Alexi Romanov—suave and always clean, able to pretend he was anyone, at any time, anywhere—but he continued to make his living in the way his father had taught him—not the shooting, but the show. And while the city was still a ramshackle boomtown in certain areas, it was also the capital of the Territory of Colorado.

Before heading to the spot revealed to him by the Jepsum sheriff, Alexi rented a hotel room. He used it for only an hour while he shaved and performed a few other necessary ablutions.

When he tapped on the appointed door a short while later, a young man with blond hair and one lazy eye peered out. “What?”

“I was told Cat O’Banyon should be delivered here.”

The boy squinted, first at Alexi, then at the street, obviously confused.

Alexi reached for the sky, and his shirt tightened over the breasts he’d recently put back on. “I surrender.”

“Surrender?” the kid repeated. “Huh?”

“Just take me to him,” Alexi said in his best Cat O’Banyon voice. “I wouldn’t want to be you if I got away.”

The youth blinked, frowned, then motioned him inside. “I gotta search ya.”

Alexi was once again glad he’d stopped to shave his beard, apply makeup, as well as his breasts, not to mention pad his ass as the boy groped him everywhere.

Or almost. If he’d grabbed Alexi in the crotch he’d have found a big surprise. As he believed Alexi a woman, he didn’t bother. Which was why Alexi had concealed a knife in that general vicinity.

The kid took his guns—useless, as they were still unloaded—and the extra knife Alexi had stashed in his coat pocket. Best to give folks what they expected—a visible gun, a hidden knife—then they didn’t look very hard for anything else.

The youth shoved him between the shoulder blades. “You first.”

Alexi went up the steps and into a large, seemingly empty room. No lights, the only illumination came from the lantern still swaying in the hall.

“She says she’s her.” The boy spoke to the far gloomy corner. “She surrendered.” No response. “Took her guns. A knife.” At the continued silence, the kid shrugged and went downstairs. The door opened and closed.

Someone moved in the darkness. “I suppose you want me to say
you or her?
”

Alexi didn’t answer, keeping his eyes cast down. He could dress like Cat, walk and talk like her too, but he couldn’t change blue eyes to green no matter how good he was at make-believe.

“You don’t recognize my voice?”

Alexi’s ears crackled. He kind of did.

“Turn around.”

Alexi turned. Shoes scuffled; the air stirred. When warm breath hit his neck, Alexi whirled, grabbing the
man’s wrist and twisting with one hand, snatching his throat and slamming him into the wall with the other.

The gun clattered away. The fool’s skull thumped against the plank. Their eyes met.

“You,” the fellow exclaimed at the same time Alexi said, “Ben?”

For an instant Alexi stilled, the surprise was so great. Then he rapped Sheriff Ben’s head against the wall again, just for the hell of it. “Start talking.”

Chase tried, but Alexi had also increased the pressure on his throat—he couldn’t help it; Cat had
trusted
the man—and the sheriff couldn’t force a word past the fingers digging into his skin.

Alexi retrieved his knife, eased up on his grip, and lifted both the weapon and his brow before stepping back. “What have you done?”

“I told her to stop.” Chase rubbed his neck as he trained a wary eye on both Alexi and the knife. “That if she kept going the way she was, she’d get killed. But she wouldn’t leave it be.”