The check cleared. Fargo added it to his poker winnings, depositing it all in the bank, thinking sardonically that he had made more in the past six weeks than many men saw in a lifetime of hard labor. A smart man would take that stake, buy himself a nice ranch or business somewhere, and be fixed for life—if the price of beef didn’t drop through the floor or another depression, manipulated by the financial barons in New York for their own gain, hit and wipe him out. No, thanks, he told himself.
With Lola in riding clothes astride a big gray gelding alongside him, they reached the Dane Ranch by three o’clock that afternoon. There were still a lot of questions in Fargo’s mind, but for the time being they could wait. She had given him a specific task, it met his requirements, and the price was right. Beyond that, it was not his business to inquire into her private life. Not unless she tried to double-cross him, and he would be constantly alert for that. He had met her kind before: if she’d been a man, as a gambler she would have cheated; as a gunman, she would have been a back-shooter. He meant to keep an eye on her, but one thing at a time.
The whole crew that he had seen on his first visit—minus Shannon, of course—was lolling around the place, a quartet of them holding a shooting contest behind the stables, more shooting craps on a blanket in the yard, the rest mostly drinking and telling tall tales while they roosted in the shade. Fargo’s lip curled as he and Lola rode into the yard. A man like Harrod could go through this gang like a hot knife through butter. Tinhorns, all of them, by their looks. “They’ve got to go,” he muttered to Lola as they swung down.
“You’ll need some of them, won’t you?” she asked apprehensively.
“No,” Fargo said. “I work better alone.” He looped reins around the hitch-rack, adjusted the sawed-off shotgun, which rode on its sling, muzzles down behind his left shoulder. It seemed an awkward way to carry the gun, as he walked across the yard, left thumb hooked beneath the sling.
His arrival seemed to charge the air with electricity. The men in the shade set aside their bottles, stood up. The others, around the blanket, let the dice fall. Then they got slowly to their feet. The quartet that had been shooting behind the barns came forward, one of them tucking his Colt into his waistband, the others with theirs holstered.
“All right,” Fargo called softly, but in a voice that carried. “My name’s Neal Fargo. You’ve seen me before. I want you all over here—now.”
They looked at one another, that hard-bitten, frowsy crew. Then one of them, mescal bottle in one hand, spat out a match he’d been chewing. “Where’s Luke Shannon?”
Fargo said, tonelessly, “He drew on me last night and I shot the hell out of him.”
Another one, with long black mustaches, stepped forward. His hand rested on the butt of the Colt in his waistband. “Luke’s dead?”
“Deader’n George Washington,” Fargo said easily. His eyes raked over them, cold and gray. No, he thought. Not a one worth keeping. “Now, I’ve got some news for you men. You’re fired. Pack your gear and ride.”
For a moment, there was silence, dead, profound, in the ranch yard. Then the man with the black mustaches growled: “Who says so?”
“Miss Dane says so. The gravy train’s off the track, boys. Head out.”
“We got money comin’,” the one with the mescal bottle said.
“That’s not so!” Lola Dane flared. “Fargo, they insisted on being paid every week. I paid them all yesterday. Up to date.”
“You heard the lady,” Fargo said. “Anybody want to argue with her?”
“Not with her,” black mustache said. “With you, big man. Sure, you’re Neal Fargo, I’ve heard about you. Tough, yeah. But you ain’t tough enough to take us all. You—” He broke off.
Fargo’s left thumb had twitched, only slightly. That practiced motion beneath the Fox’s sling, however, was enough to make the shotgun’s barrels suddenly swing up and forward beneath his left arm. At the same instant, his right hand moved across his chest, fingers sliding through the trigger guard. Black mustache found himself staring into the enormous open ten-gauge bores of the short, ugly weapon head-on.
“Ain’t I?” Fargo said. His voice had the clang of steel on steel. “Gentlemen, this gun is loaded with nine double-ought buckshot to the barrel, and don’t let the fact that it’s turned over fool you. That’s the beauty of a riot gun. You don’t hafta aim it. It’ll spray just as good with the trigger side up as the other way around. And at this range and the way you’re bunched, there won’t be many of you left standin’ if I push these triggers. Now: you still think I can’t take you all?”
No one spoke. They knew the answer to that, knew that a single buckshot at this range could kill and that there was no escaping the spread of lead the Fox would throw.
“Lola,” Fargo said, “you go on in the house.”
She quickly backed away toward the veranda.
“Now, gentlemen,” Fargo said, “bet or fold.”
The silence held, almost tangible, vibrant, in the afternoon heat. Then Black Mustache’s hand slid away from his gun. He spat an obscenity. “Hell,” he said. “I got better things to do than stand here and argue. I ain’t been to town in damn near a month. Me, I’m glad to get shed of this stinkin’ place.”
“Me, too,” the man with the bottle said. “Come on, Jud.” He nudged a companion. They turned away.
Fargo stood there tensely, body rotating slightly from the waist, following them with the shotgun muzzles as they gradually swung around. When he had the opportunity, he deftly, in a maneuver that took barely a second, rolled the sling off his shoulder, and now he held the Fox in his left hand. The right rested on the butt of the .38, which rode in a hip-holster now. If they had the guts, shotgun or no, they could take him; he knew it and they knew it. But he also knew they had no reason to take the risk, knowing that many of them would be killed or maimed. The stakes were not worth it to them. He felt the tension dissolve, knew it would be all right now. Years of handling men, regular and irregular troops of all sorts, told him that he had dominated, enforced his will. Still, it was a long half hour before they had their gear packed, horses caught up, and were mounted. And during that time, he was everywhere, the shotgun always ready, menacing, reminding them of what a fight would cost them.
Presently, though, the last one had pounded out of the yard. Fargo watched the roil of dust settle, diminish, and was grateful that they had not been drunker. Just one loaded with Dutch courage could have triggered off a massacre.
When they were gone, he went into the house. Lola stared at him as if she’d never seen him before. “You did it,” she whispered. “One man alone, and you did it! Faced down that whole crew and sent ’em packing!”
“Yeah. But if somebody’d so much as cracked his knuckles, there’d have been hell to pay. I could use a drink.”
“So could I!” Her hand shook as she poured two. “Neal, I never saw anything like that. Now, for the first time, I feel safe!”
“Don’t count your chickens,” Fargo said. “They were coyotes. Harrod’s a lobo wolf.” He drank his bourbon. “Now, I want you to tell me everything about him that you know. What he’s been doing since the last time I heard about him, how he operates, who his friends are—everything.”
Lola’s hand froze, glass halfway to her lips. “I’ll tell you what I can. But I can’t tell you everything. There are some things you don’t need to know. None of your business.”
“Everything’s my business if I’m to keep you safe if he comes at you. But—” He read and understood the reluctance on her face. “All right. You were mixed up in something shady with him and you don’t want to spill anything to anybody that might incriminate you. But remember, part of my job’s to keep my mouth shut. Anyhow, go ahead and tell me what you can ...”
~*~
In the distance, coyotes howled. From the cottonwoods by the creek behind the ranch house, an owl hooted. The big man with the shotgun froze, concealed in shadows, cocked his head and listened.
The owl called again. Fargo relaxed, convinced now that it was genuine. His circuit of the area completed, he moved soundlessly toward the darkened ranch house. Ten yards from its back door, he halted, groped carefully, then stepped high over the line of wire strung there just at knee level. On stakes driven into the ground, it surrounded the entire house, and from it at intervals of about five feet dangled tin cans with a few rocks in each. A warning system, not foolproof, but symptomatic of the thoroughness with which he did whatever he undertook. Anyone stalking the house in darkness, blundering into that tripwire, would cause a lot of rattling. What Lola really needed, he thought, was a few fierce dogs; she’d had one, she said, but it had bitten Luke Shannon and he’d shot it.
Actually, though, there was no real need to worry for the moment. Rex Harrod was still in prison, a week had passed since Fargo had been hired, Harrod still had only three more weeks to live. For the moment, the only thing Lola had to fear was the possibility that Harrod had friends on the outside who might come at his bidding to take revenge on her. But Fargo knew from experience that men like Harrod had few friends. Swarms of admirers might follow them when they were up, but when they were down and out of luck, no one gave a damn about them. Still, there had been gaps in Lola’s story Fargo didn’t like; he still had that sense of everything not adding up. And there was likelihood that there was more at stake here than a hard case’s determination to get revenge on the woman who’d betrayed him to the law. There was money in this deal somewhere, big money, and Fargo could smell it. And the scent interested and aroused him, the way the smell of blood did a wolf. But for the moment, he was not pushing. He would find out what he wanted to know in his own way in his own time.
At the back door, he whistled softly, twice, the call of a desert quail. In a moment, there was the sound of a bolt being drawn and the door swung open. Lola was there, a sheer robe covering an even sheerer nightgown. “Anything?” she asked tensely.
“Nothing,” Fargo said.
She relaxed a little, but she shook her head. “Three more weeks. I don’t know whether I can take it or not.”
Fargo grinned. “How do you think Harrod feels? What about some coffee?”
“Yes, I’ll make some.” She went into the kitchen.
Fargo closed the door, checked the bolt. The house had shutters on the windows, and these were closed, too, and bolted. Breaking, but not unloading, the shotgun, he laid it on a table, then lit a cigar.
While Lola made the coffee in the kitchen, he mentally reviewed everything he’d learned about Rex Harrod and her relationship with him. And, Fargo admitted, she had good reason to be frightened.
In the five years since Harrod had been barred from the ring, he had drifted down into the New Orleans underworld, which was the most extensive and the toughest south of New York. It swarmed with criminals, racketeers, safecrackers, killers, and thugs of every sort, and Harrod’s cold-blooded brutality, plus his sledgehammer fists, had soon made him one of its leaders. He had a finger in every crooked pie, and he made payoffs to and took them from important Louisiana politicians. Everywhere he went, two bodyguards went with him.
“Flash Murphy,” Lola had said, “and a man they call Jimmy-the-Blade. Murphy’s a gunman and a killer—the fastest draw on the Gulf Coast, they say. I never could stand him—he reminded me of ... of a rattlesnake. And Jimmy-the-Blade was even worse. He carried a half-dozen different kinds of knives with him everywhere he went, in his pockets, on his belt, strapped on his ankle—some the size of butcher-knives, some little daggers he could slip into a man without even being seen. He was a tall, thin man with the longest arms …”
“Harrod and a pair like that,” Fargo said. “Nice people you got mixed up with.”
“But you don’t understand. Look,” Lola said, “all my life, I’ve felt out of place. Stuck out here on this ranch, no action, no excitement—with my looks. I’m my mother’s daughter, not my father’s, and my mother was a ... a kind of wild thing trapped into marriage when she was too young to know what she was doing. She wasn’t meant for this sort of life, either, or marriage to a steady, upright dull-as-dishwater type like my father. And besides, he was a doctor and gone all the time. She got lonesome and ... she couldn’t help herself, she played around and he caught her at it and ... after that she was even more unhappy, and it killed her while she was still young. Then he married Rose’s mother who was more his type—and, of the two of us, she was always his favorite. Okay, let that ride. All I’m saying is that when I finally got out of here, to New Orleans, and met Rex Harrod one night at Antoine’s, it was like a whole new world opening up. There was the biggest, handsomest, wildest man I had ever met and—I fell for him like a ton of bricks. I couldn’t leave him; we ran together for a long time. And he took me down into his world and it was a world that fascinated me, I liked it. It might have been mean, but it was exciting. You knew every day that you were alive. You understand?”
“Yeah,” Fargo said. “I understand.”
“We even talked about getting married. Rex said to put it off until he made one last deal—it would make him rich for life and then we could take off and go to Cuba, Europe, anywhere I wanted to.”
“What kind of deal?”
“I don’t know,” Lola answered, and Fargo knew that she was lying. Again, he did not press it.
“But then,” she said, eyes flaring, “I caught him cheating on me. It turned out he had a whole string of other women on the side—and he’d promised most of them the same thing. And when I found that out, I just went crazy. By then, he’d talked too much, I knew too much about his business. And I knew he had committed a triple murder in Texas, in Galveston—he’d tried to kidnap a rich businessman’s daughter and things went sour and instead he killed her and her parents. Beat the old man to death with his bare hands ... And so I wrote a letter to the Rangers, turned him in, told them where they could find proof. They had the New Orleans police take him, two Rangers brought him back to Texas, he killed one of them trying to escape; the other knocked him out—and they didn’t even try him for the triple murder. Just killing the Ranger was enough.”
“Yeah, I know,” Fargo said. The first law of survival in Texas was Never kill a Ranger.
“But he guessed who’d turned him in,” Lola went on. “And one day an ex-con showed up here with a note from him, smuggled out of prison.” She’d handed it to Fargo. He’d read it quickly. You bitch, it said. You’d better pray and pray hard. These walls will never hold me and I’ll never hang. And when I get out I’ll come for you and what I’ll do to you then will make you wish you’d never been born. You know me. I always keep my promises. Rex.
“The law,” Fargo had asked. “It never took Flash Murphy or Jimmy-the-Blade?”
“No. That’s what scares me.”
“He’s not a gunman himself.”
“Flash was his gun, Jimmy his knife.”
“And if what you’ve told me’s the truth, all of it, they may have written Harrod off. By now, somebody else will have taken his place—somebody who can pay ’em. A man in prison slated to hang’s not a profitable sort of friend.” Fargo had looked at her keenly. “Lola, tell me all of it.”
“I have,” she said and turned away, and again he knew that she lied.
“And yet you say that after Harrod’s hanged, you’re going to leave here, deed Rose your half of the ranch, just clear out forever. Where to? And using what for money?”
Lola’d whirled on him. “Goddamn you, Neal Fargo, what difference does it make to you? You’re getting paid, and damned well, and I’ll keep my promise about Rose! The rest of it’s none of your blasted business! Maybe I’d rather make my living flat on my back, maybe I’d rather whore in some cat-house in Paris, France, than live out here on this dusty ranch the rest of my life! Maybe—You mind your business and let me mind mine!”
And so, Fargo thought, he had done that. It was not always easy, shut up here alone in this house with a woman like Lola Dane. She was a woman who liked men and needed them, and his big, rangy, ugly masculinity had its effect on her, just as her blatant beauty had on him. But this was business, and he did not mix it with pleasure. Despite some pretty spectacular efforts to get him into her bed, he held himself aloof. A woman who was hiding something was bad medicine in a deal like this ... And maybe Flash Murphy and Jimmy-the-Blade had found another boss and maybe they had not. All he knew for now was that every day he rang up Templeton on the telephone Lola had had installed at great expense, and Templeton knew everything that went on—and so far, Templeton had no word of Rex Harrod.
Lola returned with the coffee. When she set down the tray, the robe and nightgown fell away as she bent over, revealing lush, dangling breasts. “Neal,” she said, “I’m awfully jumpy tonight.” She came to him, pressed her body close. “It’s not the kind of night I want to sleep alone—”
“Lola,” Fargo began, “I told you—”
Then he broke off. The telephone on the wall was ringing. One ring, two, then one again. It was a call for the Dane Ranch.
He and Lola looked at one another. “You answer it,” she whispered as it rang again.
Fargo pushed her away, went to the telephone. “Dane Ranch.”
Central in El Paso said, “Go ahead.”
“Fargo.” It was the voice of Templeton. “I just got word from Brownsville. Rex Harrod busted out four days ago.”
Neal Fargo drew in a deep breath. “Four days ago? What the hell?”
“I know. But he had confederates and they opened up that prison like a sardine can. It was so easy, they tried to cover it up. It made them all look like fools. That’s not the point right now. He’s out and on the loose. And four days is plenty of time to get from Brownsville to El Paso. Anyhow, I just found out and I thought you ought to know.”
“Yeah,” said Fargo. “Thanks, Templeton.”
“Por nada. But, look, what about Rose—”
But Fargo had already hung up the receiver. When he turned, Lola was staring at him with eyes that were enormous.
“He’s out,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” Fargo said, and told her what Templeton had said.
“My God,” she breathed.
Fargo said, “Lola. All you have to do is pick up that phone and call the Rangers in El Paso. They’ll have this place staked out in no time.”
Her face went pale. “Rangers! No! No Rangers! It’s what I paid you for, Neal Fargo! But you’re not to call the Rangers! Do you understand?”
Fargo nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “I understand. Well, you’d better get some clothes on. It’s going to be a long night. We’ve got a lot of long nights ahead.” And then he poured himself a cup of coffee.