Slocum and the Thunderbird (10 page)

Thinking on how these men likely had their way with Loretta and had sent the rest of Watson's family to the gold mines as slaves to die working for a crazy bastard helped that along.

“Gotta slow down,” gasped the man on his left. “Lungs are on fire.”

“Don't pant too much,” said the other. “That sounds like a dyin' animal. The thunderbird will come for you if it thinks you're dyin'.”

The men sounded too sincere to be joshing him. Whenever a new cowboy signed on to an outfit, the old wranglers told outrageous stories to scare him. Slocum had done it himself. But he didn't hear the joking with these two. They believed what they said about the thunderbird, just as Alicia Watson had.

“There,” panted one. “The boss is already there. How the little turd runs so fast on them bandy legs is a mystery.”

Slocum saw the lance of orange flame almost at the same time as the complaining guard gasped, stood upright, then twisted and collapsed.

On the hotel's front porch, Mackenzie stood with a rifle pulled snugly to his shoulder. He levered in another round and pointed it smack at Slocum.

“He didn't mean nuthin' by it, Mr. Mackenzie,” the guard to Slocum's right sputtered. “He was just funnin' . . . and I never agreed with him, no sir, never did.”

Slocum saw that Mackenzie's rifle remained trained on him, not the blubbering fool beside him. Mackenzie stood partially hidden in shadow, with the bright lights from inside the hotel spilling out beside the man. If he moved even a foot closer, he would be outlined so Slocum could get a good shot. The range favored the rifle, but Slocum knew he didn't have a chance otherwise.

“Now, tell me why I shouldn't just feed both you boys to the 'bird?”

“You'd lose two good men,” Slocum replied calmly.

“I been here fer a whole month, sir. I done ever'thing you ast. I—”

Mackenzie swung his rifle and fired. Whether he was a crack shot or damned lucky didn't matter to the man catching the slug in the middle of his face. He went down as surely as his partner.

“Can't stand a man who whines,” Mackenzie said. He did a tiny dance, then jumped and clicked his heels. Feathers fluttered down all around him as if he'd molted. When he lit back down with a sharp snap on the wood planking, he had the rifle aimed once more at Slocum. “You don't whine, do you?”

Slocum said nothing. This appealed to the ruler of Wilson's Creek. He lowered his rifle and waved one of his powerful arms for Slocum to come closer. As if walking amid newborn kittens, Slocum took several steps until Mackenzie was limned by the lamplight spilling from inside.

“You arm wrestle?”

The question took Slocum by surprise. He nodded and said, “Won a bet or two that way.”

“Come on inside. Let's arm wrestle.”

Mackenzie beat Slocum into the hotel lobby by half a minute.

The short man had already pushed up his sleeve to reveal his powerful biceps and had his elbow planted on a table.

“Come on, let's arm wrestle. You lose, you buy me a drink.”

“What if I win?” Slocum asked.

Anger flashed across Mackenzie's face and madness danced in his eyes, then he said in a perfectly level voice, “Not going to happen.”

From the way his arm and shoulder muscles rippled, Slocum considered that likely. He sat, planted his elbow on the table, and worked over possible tactics. Even if he proved stronger—or cagier since arm wrestling was as much about leverage and grip as strength—should he lose?

Mackenzie almost pinned him outright, his thick hand and bent fingers leaping out and engulfing Slocum's. Only a loud cry and incredible luck saved Slocum from immediate defeat. He shifted slightly and got a better grip, which allowed him to push Mackenzie's arm back to upright. Now Mackenzie's henchmen started catcalling and cheering on their boss.

Slocum gritted his teeth and tried to move the man's arm. Mackenzie budged a half inch. Then an inch. Slocum's back began aching from the strain. He thought every muscle in his arm would explode from the effort, but he pushed Mackenzie's hand down another inch. Only three or four to go.

Then it was as if he'd been shoved against a brick wall. Even rising in the chair and unfairly using his body weight failed to gain him an advantage.

With a cry of triumph, Mackenzie heaved and slammed Slocum's hand hard against the table. He held it there, crushing down until Slocum winced. He refused to cry out even if it meant breaking his gun hand. Just when Slocum was sure Mackenzie would rip off important body parts, the man relented.

Slocum rubbed his arm to get circulation back into it.

“I win,” Mackenzie crowed.

“You did, sir,” Slocum said, the words ash on his tongue.

“You owe me a drink. Go fetch it.”

Slocum stood and almost cried out in pain. Across his back and shoulders and all the way down his right arm burned as if he had thrust them into a blacksmith's forge. He shook his hand and flexed it. Nothing broken, but he found it hard to close his hand into a fist. The muscles simply wouldn't obey.

He went to the bar and wondered how the hell he would pay for a drink. He was flat broke. Whatever money he had counted on had been snatched away by Rawhide Rawlins.

“Here,” the woman behind the bar said, sliding a shot of some green liquor across it to him. She moved so Slocum's body blocked Mackenzie's view and pulled a gold coin from her ample cleavage. Then acting as if he'd just given it to her, she held the coin up so her boss and the others in the room could see it.

“Thanks, mister,” she said, then turned and tossed the coin into a cup with a loud ring.

“I owe you one,” Slocum whispered, and smiled.

“Get me out of here the way you did Loretta and we're more than even,” she whispered back.

Slocum hesitated. He hadn't thought anyone saw him rescuing Loretta Watson.

“There's not much in Wilson's Creek that doesn't get seen by somebody,” the woman said in a low voice. She pushed back a strand of coppery hair and her green eyes fixed on Slocum's. “Be glad it was me spying on you and not one of them owlhoots.”

He turned with the drink balanced on his right palm, and holding it with his left to keep it from spilling. He heard the woman say behind him, “I'm Erika. Don't forget me.”

He returned to Mackenzie's table and set the drink down gingerly.

“To the winner!” Slocum managed to raise his right arm to lead the others in three cheers.

Mackenzie beamed at the attention. Slocum considered his chances for dragging out his smoke wagon and removing this muscled freak from the face of the earth. He might get some help from Erika and maybe a couple of the men in the room. That was all it would take, if he could only wrap his fingers around the ebony handle of his Colt Navy.

If only.

“Great drink,” Mackenzie said, running a thick finger around the rim of the empty glass to snare the last drop. He lifted it to his lips as he appraised Slocum. “You've done good. Get on back to the mine and keep those lazy bastards working.”

“Right away,” Slocum said. He headed for the door, wondering if Mackenzie would shoot him in the back. Instead the man said something that quieted the low murmur from the others in the room.

“Don't let the thunderbird get you.” Mackenzie's cruel laughter followed Slocum out of the hotel and partway to the mines.

In spite of himself, he looked over his shoulder at the empty sky. No moon, no clouds, only sharp, hard points of stars. But if there had been the slightest hint of a bird diving on him, Slocum knew his heart would have exploded.

He walked a little faster, damning Mackenzie for planting the idea that the thunderbird existed. It was only the way the man kept the others in line, what with his fake feathers sewed onto his shirt and hideous cawing and curious birdlike movements. Slocum couldn't tell if the man was crazy as shit or using his brain to keep the town under his thumb. If Mackenzie was smart, Slocum had to worry more than if he was crazy. Sane, the man might be playing with him in a way a loco hombre never could.

Whatever the state of the man's sanity, he was dangerous.

By the time Slocum reached the mine, he had rubbed the soreness from his right arm and could close his right hand, though his grip remained weak. He started into the mine, but the three guards he had run into before arrayed themselves across the mouth. Even if he broke Linc Watson free of his chains, there wasn't any way they could sneak out past the guards.

Slocum veered away toward the shed where he had left Loretta, only to keep walking when one of the guards saw him and waved. To talk to her now would cause problems he didn't want to solve. Instead, he waved back and went to the amalgam plant, where bright fumes rose from a boiler, curling into the crisp nighttime air.

If he couldn't get Watson free, he could find his wife and get her and her daughter to safety.

He pressed his back against a brick wall and looked around for guards. The distant horizon glowed with the promise of dawn. Slocum knew he had to hurry. Walking around with two women, neither in chains, would draw attention in Mackenzie's town.

Edging along the wall, he chanced a quick look into the building. If a door had ever been hung there, it was long gone along with its hinges and part of the frame. Slocum drew his pistol and stepped into the room where a half-dozen men and women worked with pans, rolling beads of mercury around in rock dust taken from crushed ore. When they accumulated enough gold in the bright beads, they tipped the pan and let the mercury-gold amalgam roll off into a trough. At the far end of the trough two men worked to get the mercury into a vat, where it was heated. One man stoked the fire under the vat and the other scraped the gold left behind into a sack.

It didn't surprise Slocum to see an armed guard standing behind the man with the bag of gold dust. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to imagine the man skimming dust from the sack for his own use before taking it to Mackenzie. As that thought hit Slocum, he considered demanding to carry the current bag to Mackenzie and seeing what the reaction was. Revealing the number of guards here would help get Alicia's mother free.

Even identifying her would be hard since there were a dozen withered women here, too used up for even a whorehouse. One moved with a crippled leg. Another cackled as she pushed the mercury around in the pan in front of her. Slocum had seen how quickly mercury fumes addled brains when he worked at a mill in California. He had been responsible for crushing the ore, not the separation of gold from dross.

Mackenzie took the gold, but the dross here was all human.

Coughing from the fumes drew attention to him. The guard watching the gold dust being raked off to the bag looked up. Then he pointed his rifle in Slocum's direction, not aiming but alert.

“What you want?” the guard called.

“Came for one of the workers,” Slocum said. “Name of Watson. The boss wants to see her.”

“Back there. She's the one working on the ledger.”

Slocum nodded, as much to acknowledge the information as to hide his face. He wanted to spirit Mrs. Watson away without gunfire. Dead bodies drew unwanted attention. More than this, Slocum doubted the guard stood watch alone. There had to be someone watching him.

He made his way through the equipment strewn around. Containers of mercury heavier than Slocum could pick up alone made him wonder if Mackenzie had once lugged such bottles around. The man was immensely strong, and being near the mercury too long would discombobulate him.

A woman bent over a table, pen in hand as she worked on a ledger, caught his attention. Slocum ducked into the room. The woman's gray hair hung in dirty strings. A bit of drool trickled from the corner of her mouth to the desktop. She never noticed as she toiled to move figures from scraps of paper to the ledger.

“Mrs. Watson? Your husband told me you were here.” He waited for a response that would confirm she was the woman he sought.

“Linc? Where is he?” She looked around. Her bloodshot eyes failed to focus properly.

“I'll take you to Loretta. Your daughter. And then I'll see to getting Alicia out of here, too.”

“My girls?” This perked her up. Then she slumped. “My boy died. The thunderbird killed him.” She wiped her mouth with her sleeve, then turned back to her work lining up numbers for Mackenzie.

Even if Mackenzie was as crazy as a loon, he wanted an accounting of the gold taken from the mine. Slocum wished he could take the ledger with him to turn over to the law as evidence of what Mackenzie did here. Then he realized how dangerous that would be for him, a bank robber. More than this, dealing with the Watson women required his full attention.

He flexed his hand again. It still ached and lacked strength, but it was close enough to normal for him to have confidence in his gun-handling abilities.

“How many guards are here?”

“Two. He pays them well.” She began leafing through the ledger and stopped at a page with names and amounts. Her finger stabbed down. “See? A hundred dollars a month. And sanctuary. That's worth another hundred a month.”

Slocum didn't know how much they had taken from the Halliday bank, but it had to be enough for Rawlins to buy at least a few months' asylum from Mackenzie.

He walked around the woman and examined her chains. These were simpler than the irons used on the miners. Instead of a lock, a simple rivet had been used to hold shut the shackles. Breaking the links did nothing to relieve the weight of the heavy iron clamps around her ankle. He looked around and found a discarded iron rod in the corner, dropped to the floor, and inserted the shaft between the flanges on her shackle. With a jerk, he popped the rivet holding it to her flesh.

The shackle and chain clattered to the floor. Slocum peered around the table to see if the noise had alerted either of the guards. He knew one hovered near the gold dust. The other might be asleep or prowling about, checking solitary workers like Mrs. Watson. He waited a full minute, then stood and took the woman by the arm.

“We're leaving now.”

“My work's not done.” She tried to grab her ledger.

“He wants you to see your daughter. Loretta. And do you know where Alicia is?”

“Alicia's always been a handful. Willful, feisty. Full of piss and vinegar.” She stared at him, eyes wide. “Shouldn't say things like that. Linc doesn't like it when I do.”

“I'll get you and your girls together, then you can ask your husband to forgive you.” He gripped her arm and steered her to the door. There, he decided stealth gained him nothing and openness did. He waved to the gold dust guard and called, “Thanks. Got her. See you at the, uh, nest.”

He shoved her along because Mrs. Watson wanted to return for her ledger book. One errant comment and she would bring down a hail of bullets. In the main room Slocum again felt woozy from the fumes rising from the amalgam tables and the vat where the mercury was cooked off.

Slocum kept her stumbling along, her gait uncertain, and into the first light of dawn. Barely had they left the amalgam separation factory when Slocum saw the three mine guards coming straight for them.