The Trailsman #388

BORDERLAND BLOODBATH

Fargo leaped to his feet and lunged forward, driving the Arkansas toothpick deep into his assailant's torso and giving it the “Spanish twist.” The man emitted a high-pitched scream of pain and dropped to the ground like a sack of grain, flopping wildly for a few seconds until death closed his account. The leather-wrapped blackjack he had used to sap Fargo was still clutched in his right hand.

All this had taken only seconds. Scar Face started to bolt toward the nearby mouth of the alley, but one of Fargo's long legs managed to hook him and send him sprawling. With lightning speed Fargo pinned him facedown with a knee in his back.

He grabbed a handful of hair and jerked the downed man's head back far enough to slip the toothpick's razor-honed edge in front of his windpipe. . . .

SIGNET

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

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The first chapter of this book previously appeared in
Apache Vendetta
, the three hundred eighty-seventh volume in this series.

Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

ISBN 978-0-698-13715-8

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.

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.

Rio Grande borderland, 1860—where Skye Fargo witnesses an international land grab and ends up stalked by the most fearsome assassin on the frontier.

The Ovaro gave his low trouble whicker, jolting Skye Fargo out of an uneasy sleep.

In one fluid, continuous movement only a heartbeat after his eyes snapped open, Fargo rolled out of his blanket, rose to a low crouch, shucked his walnut-grip Colt from his holster and thumb-cocked it.

At first, as the last cobwebs of sleep cleared from his mind, all seemed calm enough. Cicadas gave off their metronomic, singsong rhythm; the nearby Rio Grande purled gently only ten yards away; a fat full moon had turned from the buttery color of early evening to the pale white that preceded dawn.

Then Fargo heard it: a man's authoritative voice snapping out an indistinct command from about fifty yards upriver.

The Ovaro snorted, not liking this mysterious human intrusion.

“Steady on, old campaigner,” Fargo said in a low voice, placing a hand on the stallion's neck to calm him. “Whoever they are, they don't know we're here.”

It was 1860, the middle of the blistering dog days in the American Southwest, and the man some called the Trailsman had just finished a three-month stint riding security for a merchant caravan between Santa Fe and Guadalajara, Mexico. He had collected his final pay earlier in El Paso and pitched camp for the night in this juniper thicket on the American side of the sleepy, muddy, meandering river Mexicans called Río Bravo del Norte, Americans Rio Grande.

Another voice rang out upriver and again Fargo couldn't make out the words. But for some inexplicable reason an ominous sense of foreboding prickled his scalp.

“You picked the wrong campsite, Fargo,” he muttered.

It wasn't just these voices now. Earlier, when Fargo was cleaning and oiling his brass-framed Henry rifle, a lone rider had moved in close, forcing Fargo to kick dirt over his small fire.

Still, such a level of activity was hardly surprising along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Contrabandistas
, slave-trading Comancheros, whiskey peddlers and gunrunners operated with impunity in this area, and they naturally preferred the cloak of darkness. Whoever they were, Fargo figured it was none of his mix.

Again the commanding voice and this time Fargo thought he had heard the English words “shore it up.”

He moved cautiously forward out of the thicket, unpleasantly aware once again of a vaguely foreboding premonition of danger. Despite the warm night his skin goose bumped, stiffening the hair on his forearms.

Something's wrong, Fargo,
insisted an urgent inner voice.
Something's dead wrong. Don't you notice what it is?

Fargo emerged silently from the thicket and saw the river reflecting glimmering points of color in the moonlight despite being at its muddiest by late summer. He glanced upriver and spotted torches burning. But he couldn't see much because the black velvet folds of darkness seemed to absorb the illumination before it reached his eyes.

More words reached him now, muffled by the distance and the constant chuckling of the river: “. . . Use plenty . . . not too deep . . . more past the bend . . .”

Occasionally he spotted ghostly figures moving in and out of the light. He listened carefully to a steady chunking sound and recognized it as several shovels digging. Men burying contraband, maybe, but why so close to the water?

What's wrong, Fargo?
that insistent inner voice demanded again from some layer of awareness located in survival reflex, not conscious thought.
Figure it out fast, man, before it's too late!

Fargo tucked at the knees beside the river growth and moved slowly closer to the men. Again he reminded himself it was none of his picnic, that he might be edging closer to something immensely dangerous, but intense curiosity had him in its grip.

Fargo realized the shoveling had stopped and suddenly the torches were snuffed. Moments later he heard the rataplan of iron-shod hooves as the men escaped to the north.

But escaping from whom?

Not who, Fargo,
urged that body voice deeper than thought.
Escaping from what? Snap into it, Trailsman! Don't you understand what's wrong?

Fargo halted as his mind, honed by years of deadly scrapes and narrow escapes, frantically assembled the baffling clues. The shovels, the sudden escape, the half-formed words he might or might not have heard correctly: “Shore it up . . . use plenty . . . not too deep . . . more past the bend . . .”

And this sudden, throbbing silence . . .

Silence!

“God
damn
,” Fargo abruptly whispered as the important clue he had missed now slammed into him like a fist, something taught to him years ago by an old mountain man: “Watch out, boy, when the insects fall silent.”

Fargo realized what was coming and turned on his heel, bolting back toward the juniper thicket as his stomach turned into a ball of ice. Even as he was about to dive into the thicket the peaceful night was split by blinding light and a cracking boom like the promised doom clap of final reckoning.

The earth split open and heaved flames and dirt in a towering column into the sky. Fargo heard the terrified neighing of the Ovaro and felt a searing ripple of heat as the fire surge washed over him before lifting him into the night and flinging him like a child's toy.

You were too late, Fargo,
was his last thought before his world closed down to pain and darkness and oblivion.
You were just a few seconds too late!

At some point Fargo realized he wasn't dead. A dead man couldn't feel this much pain.

“Sun's up, Fargo. Rise and shine.”

Something kicked the sole of Fargo's boot. With a great effort of will he pried his eyelids open. He saw a blurred vision of bottomless blue sky and smelled the aroma of fried bacon and fresh-brewed coffee.

“You look like death warmed over,” said a man's voice beyond his field of vision.

Fargo felt stinging pain all over his body. Groaning at the effort, he rose up on one elbow. The man who had just spoken to him sat on a log nearby, sopping bacon grease off a tin plate with a hunk of saleratus bread.

“I made extra for you,” explained the stranger in good English with a Mexican accent. “Hope you don't mind that I helped myself to your eats.”

The day went even blurrier as Fargo forced himself to sit up. His white hat lay beside him, and Fargo noticed that it was singed. So were some of the fringes on his buckskin clothing. He also noticed that he was back in his original camp just behind the juniper thicket.

He glanced to his left and saw the Ovaro contentedly munching from a nose bag. Its mane and tail were slightly singed but otherwise the stallion appeared to be in fine fettle.

“I played hell trying to calm him down after the explosion,” the stranger said. “That's a magnificent stallion, Fargo. I was tempted to steal him.”

Fargo's vision cleared and he peered closer at the man. He was somewhere in his twenties, a mestizo of indeterminate mixed blood, copper-skinned, of medium height and build, with quick-darting, mistrustful eyes set deep behind prominent cheekbones. A black sombrero left half of his smooth-shaven face in shadow.

“So why didn't you steal him?” Fargo retorted.

“That's the kind of horse people notice. And I prefer not to be noticed.”

“How do you know my name?”

“I found an old army contract in one of your saddle pockets—something about scouting for a mapping party. I recognized your name right off. You've got a reputation in these parts. My name is Santiago Valdez, by the way.”

Santiago Valdez . . . Fargo had heard of him, too, but kept that to himself. He was a noted pistolero and said to possess excellent trailcraft. The son of a Kiowa mother and a Mexican father, there was talk that he was occasionally a hired gun and that he had escaped from jail several times in Mexico.

Fargo took in the man's gun belt trimmed with silver conchos. Two squat, odd-looking revolvers of a type Fargo had never seen rested in cutaway holsters. Both holsters were tied down low on Valdez's thighs.

“A professional, I see,” Fargo remarked as he rose unsteadily to his feet.

Valdez set the plate aside and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“If, by ‘professional' you mean that I kill for money, then you've got it wrong. But if you mean that I am very good at killing—yes, I'm a professional. Coffee?”

Fargo nodded even though his belly was stirring with nausea. Gingerly he felt his face. He winced when his fingers probed spots that had been burned.

“You'll have to trim your beard,” Valdez explained as he handed Fargo a tin cup. “Your eyebrows are singed, too. But your skin burns are minor—nothing a little bear grease won't soothe. You're very lucky—I watched that blast lift you twenty feet into the air.”

“You
watched
?” Fargo repeated.

Valdez's strong, perfect teeth flashed when he grinned. “I watched. You might say you were blown ‘Skye' high. I dragged you back behind the thicket.”

Fargo grunted to acknowledge the pun. “So you were the one I heard riding near here last night. Who are those jaspers who set off that explosion and what the hell for?”

“Never mind who they are. As to the ‘what for'—you'll see soon enough although you might not believe your eyes.”

Fargo's legs felt rubbery and he sat down, resting his back against his saddle and taking a hissing sip of coffee.

“Obviously you're watching these men,” Fargo said. “Are they gringos?”

Valdez nodded.

“What's your dicker with them?” Fargo added. “You a bounty hunter?”

“You ask too many questions.”

The Trailsman had seen Valdez's face harden at his query. He realized the man was nursing one hell of a grudge—a killing grudge that was bone deep and personal. This was way beyond money.

“Wha'd'ya mean I might not believe my eyes?” Fargo pressed.

Valdez grinned again. “Quiet down and listen. You notice anything missing?”

For a full minute Fargo did listen. He heard jays scolding, vagrant breezes stirring the nearby cottonwood leaves, the chattering of squirrels. And, yes, something was definitely missing.

“The river current,” he finally said, his tone puzzled. “The Rio is close enough to spit in from here, but I can't hear it. That explosion . . . did they dam up the river?”

Again the strong teeth flashed. “Can you walk yet?”

“I'll make myself,” Fargo assured him grimly. He set his cup aside and pushed to his feet.

The two men worked their way through the tangle of growth and emerged from the thicket. Fargo's jaw slacked open and he stared upriver—or what
should
have been upriver. There was no dam.

But there was also no Rio Grande. It had simply disappeared.

•   •   •

Fargo stood rooted in numb shock until Valdez's voice jogged him back to awareness.

“It's not really gone, Fargo. That explosion last night, and some careful digging before it, changed the river's course.”

Fargo knew the Rio Grande was notorious for jumping its channel. For most of its course—except around the rugged Big Bend region of south-central Texas—it was shallow and slow moving. Natural cycles of drought and flooding had created new channels it sometimes shifted into. But this time it was artificial and purposeful.

Fargo stared across the former riverbed, a slough of mud with countless little pools of water pockmarking it, at a low, rocky ridge.

“After the Mexican War the international boundary,” he said, thinking out loud, “was officially established as the exact center of the Rio. That means the long ridge in front of us is now on the American side. And this area is known for having rich veins of silver ore buried under ridges like that.”

Valdez nodded. “
Tienes
razón.
I see that you know plenty about
la
frontera
,” he said, using the Spanish name for the border region. “You'll now find that Río Bravo takes a sharp bend around that ridge in an old channel. It flows back into its natural course about two miles downriver from where we're standing.”

Fargo swiveled his head to stare at Valdez. “And I see that you know plenty more than I do about what's going on. What is this deal to you?”

“Nothing. They can steal half of Mexico for all I care.”

“Nothing, huh? So watching these men so close is just a hobby?”

“As I said, you ask too many questions.”

“Yeah,” Fargo replied, “and I get too damn few answers.”

Valdez's lips firmed. “Then perhaps you should stop asking the questions.”

“Would you call that advice or a warning?”

“Is there a difference?” Valdez demanded.

“Plenty. Advice doesn't bother me, and I usually just ignore it. But I don't cotton to warnings—not the kind that shade over into threats.”

Valdez stared into those remarkably blue, implacable eyes. Even with his singed beard and eyebrows, his face blistering with burns, Skye Fargo was clearly a man with no more fear in him than a rifle. Santiago Valdez was not easily intimidated, and he wasn't intimidated now. But he respected strength because he believed that strength was the first virtue from which all other virtues sprang.

“I consider it advice,” he finally replied. “Which means you will ignore it.”

Fargo grinned. “Prob'ly. But right now I'm going to tack my horse and take a closer squint at the blast site.”

“Why?” Valdez challenged.

“Now
you're
asking too many questions,” Fargo said as the two men headed back to Fargo's camp.

“But what does it matter to you?” Valdez persisted. “You are not the law.”

“Neither are you, but you're obviously dogging these men. Let's just say I'm the curious type—especially when I'm blown halfway to the moon.”

“Curiosity? That is not a wise thing in
la
frontera
.”

“Now there we agree,” Fargo conceded. “But wisdom isn't my strong suit.”

La
frontera
, Fargo knew from long experience, was far more than simply a border demarcation. It was actually a unique “third country,” neither quite Mexican nor quite American. It extended for approximately twenty miles on either side of the long border and featured its own foods, customs and harsh, unwritten laws—even its own hybrid language known as Spanglish. But most of all, as Valdez had just hinted, it was fraught with its own unique dangers.

Valdez drank a second cup of coffee while Fargo packed up his gear and tacked the Ovaro. The mestizo knocked the rawhide hobbles off his sturdy roan gelding and lithely forked leather. Fargo, however, was a bit slower swinging up onto the hurricane deck.

“If I were you, gringo,” Valdez said, “I would rest here for a few hours. And that is friendly advice,” he hastened to add.

Fargo grinned weakly. “I've been in worse shape. Where you headed?”

“Wherever it is best for me to be,” Valdez replied from a deadpan.

Fargo shook his head in wonder as both men cleared the thicket. “You are the world-beatingest man, Valdez. But I thank you for dragging me back into cover. And good hunting.”

Valdez opened his mouth to reply. But all that came out was a harsh grunt of pain when a fire-hardened arrow punched into his left thigh with a sickening sound like a cleaver slicing into a side of raw beef.