Utah Deadly Double (9781101558867) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Teaser chapter

  KILLER FAKE

  Deets realized they were both suspicious, and Mitt’s hand was creeping toward his sidearm. Time to show his hole card, Deets decided.

  “Well, Mitt,” he remarked casually, “you picked a lonely grave.”

  It took less than two seconds to shuck out his Colt and spray Mitt’s blood and brains all over the rocks behind him. The body flopped forward, toes scratching the dirt a few times. Deets swung the still-smoking muzzle toward Louise. She had frozen in place, still lifting the coffeepot off the flames. She was too shocked to scream, staring at her husband’s body in horrified disbelief.

  “Set that pot down, beauty,” he told her in a voice that brooked no defiance. “Then shuck out of them clothes. You’re about to meet Skye Fargo in the flesh.”

  SIGNET

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, November 2011

  The first chapter of this book previously appeared in Texas Lead Slingers, the three hundred sixtieth volume in this series.

  Copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2011 All rights reserved

  ISBN : 978-1-101-55886-7

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  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.

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  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.

  Utah Territory, 1859—

  where a ruthless master of disguise turns Fargo

  into the most wanted man in the West.

  1

  “Gentlemen,” announced the young drummer from Pennsylvania, “there seems to be something a mite queer about this game.”

  An ominous silence followed his remark. The other four poker players, including Skye Fargo, swiveled their heads to stare at him.

  “No offense intended,” the salesman hastened to add.

  “Well, plenty taken, you mouthy jackanapes,” growled Billy Williams, who was assisting Fargo on a scouting mission for the much-ballyhooed Pony Express, due to be launched next year. He scowled darkly and scraped his chair back to clear his gun hand.

  “H’ar now!” cautioned Red Robinson from behind the crude plank bar. The burly, redheaded Irishman owned the only saloon—actually just a primitive grog shop—permitted at Fort Bridger by the Mormon Council in Salt Lake City. “Stay your hand, Old Billy. This ain’t Laredo. These soldiers in the Mormon Battalion are no boys to mess with. The last gentile who cracked a cap in this puke-hole spent three months in the stockade.”

  “Come down off your hind legs, Old Billy,” Fargo threw in, strong white teeth flashing through his neatly cropped beard as he grinned. “Mr. Brubaker here didn’t accuse any of us. He simply pointed out there’s something a mite queer about the game.”

  “That’s what the lawyers call tantamount to an accusation,” chimed in Lemuel Atkins, a Mormon doctor at Fort Bridger who often violated the social order to indulge his love of pasteboard thrills with gentiles, the Mormon word for anyone outside their religion.

  “Tanny mount, my hinder,” the hotheaded Billy fumed. “Let’s kill the young pup with a knife, then, and go snooks on his money. He’s called all of us cheaters, ain’t he?”

  “Not quite,” said the fifth player at the table, Sy Munro, an outfitter for pilgrims passing through Fort Bridger on their way to the Sierra goldfields and coast settlements. He wore new range clothes and a clean neckerchief. “I’d say he just implied it.”

  “Imply a cat’s tail!” protested Old Billy. “You heard the doc—it was tanny mount! The snivelin’ little scrote called every last one of us cheaters.”

  “If he did,” put in Fargo calmly, shifting a skinny Mexican cigar to the other side of his mouth, “he spoke straight-arrow. Matter of fact, he’s the only one at the table who ain’t cheating. It’s him ought to shoot us.”

  Every jaw at the table dropped, including Lonny Brubaker’s.

  “Fargo,” warned Old Billy, “you had teeth when you got here.”

  Fargo ignored his blustering partner, looking at the dumbfounded drummer. “Mr. Brubaker, have you ever heard of the cheater’s table?”

  “The . . . no, sir.”

  “
It’s a custom that started on the Mississippi riverboats. When trade is slow for the professional gamblers, they get up a game among themselves to hone their cheating skills.”

  “You mean I just happened along when one of those games was going on here?”

  “We’re not professionals,” Fargo conceded, “but we figured to have a little fun. Old Billy has been crimping cards, Sy smudging them with his cigar, and Doc Atkins has been dealing from every place except the top of the deck.”

  “How ’bout you?”

  Fargo grinned. “Every time the doc blew cigar smoke in your face, you turned in my direction and showed me your cards—which ain’t cheating, by the way. Learn to cover your cards, son.”

  Brubaker’s smooth-shaven face looked astounded. “Well, I’m clemmed!”

  “How much did you drop tonight?” Fargo added.

  “Well, twelve dollars.”

  Fargo counted out three silver dollars from his pile and slid them to Brubaker. “C’mon, boys,” he called to the others. “Time to post the pony.”

  Old Billy loosed a string of epithets worthy of a stable sergeant. Fargo’s partner on this Pony Express assignment was a homely cuss with a twice-broken nose and a large birthmark coloring the left side of his face reddish purple. He was still in his thirties but had earned the moniker Old Billy because of his full mane of white-streaked hair—a legacy of nearly twenty years spent fighting some of the most bellicose tribes of the Southwest and Far West. His widespread reputation as an Indian fighter convinced Fargo to get him on the payroll.

  “Fargo,” he said in a tone heavy with disgust, “the hell’s got into you—religion?”

  “No, Fargo’s right,” Doc Atkins said as he counted out three dollars. “I never intended to keep the lad’s money. Besides, though it’s my own people, Red is correct—scratch a Mormon and you’ll find a jailer. Best to take the peace road.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you weak sisters do,” Old Billy said stubbornly. “A man shouldn’t step in something he can’t wipe off, and that’s what this clabber-lipped greenhorn done. What’s next? We powder his butt and tuck him in? I ain’t paying back one red cent.”

  Fargo watched Old Billy with speculative eyes. “Yeah, I’ve noticed something peculiar about you. You won’t spend money except to gamble and make more. Won’t even pony up a dime for a beer. I’ve never seen a bachelor behave like that.”

  Old Billy averted his eyes. “So I’m a damn miser. No law agin it.”

  Fargo shook his head and counted another three dollars out of his own money. “Satan won’t allow you into hell, Old Billy—afraid you’ll take over.”

  During this exchange no one had noticed when the cowhide flap that served as a door was suddenly thrust aside. The woman who stepped inside the smoky, dimly lit hovel had a pretty face that was creased from worry and suffering—a familiar sight on the frontier. No one noticed her in the murky shadows until the loud click of a mule-ear hammer being thumbed back seized their attention.

  Suddenly all eyes were riveted on the steel-eyed woman with a German fowling piece in her hands. No great threat at a distance, up close like this it could shred a man’s face—or his sex gear, Fargo thought, noticing she was aiming it right at him and below the belt. Sweat trickled out of his hairline.

  “Why, Dot,” Lemuel Atkins said, “what in the—?”

  “Put a stopper on your gob, Doc,” she snapped, never taking her fiery eyes off Fargo. “You with the buckskins and beard—is that your black-and-white pinto tethered outside?”

  “It is, ma’am.”

  “And be your name Fargo?”

  The Trailsman nodded, not liking the determined set of her face nor the dangerous turn this trail was taking.

  “Then I’m here to kill you, mister.”

  Old Billy snickered. “See? Like I warned you, Fargo, never tell ’em you’ll be right back. Some believe you.”

  The woman swung the muzzle toward Old Billy. “Shut your filthy sewer, you prairie rat. This is an over-and-under gun, and both barrels shoot. All of you keep that in mind before you play the hero.”

  “Hero?” Old Billy repeated. “Lady, it’s none of my mix. Fargo stepped into this and he can wipe it off.”

  “Ma’am, I don’t even know you,” Fargo said, his voice calmer than he felt.

  Lemuel spoke up quickly. “Skye Fargo, this is Dorothy Kreeger. Her husband died of snakebite a hundred miles west of South Pass on their way to settle in San Francisco. She has a seventeen-year-old daughter, Ginny, and—”

  “Oh, this randy stallion knows Ginny, all right,” Dot cut in. “In fact, he raped her not two hours ago in the hayfields just south of here. And then he beat her bloody and sliced up her limbs with that vicious knife in his boot.”

  Dead silence followed her remark. All eyes turned to Fargo. On the frontier a woman’s accusation carried more force than a man’s.

  “Ma’am,” Fargo said, “I don’t call women liars, but I do call them mistaken. I’m sorry about your daughter, but I didn’t have thing one to do with it. I’ve not met the lady.”

  “I’d hardly expect you to sign a confession. That’s why I’m going to shoot you. You men sitting close to Fargo—spread out. I’ve no call to shoot anyone but him.”

  Red Robinson spoke up. “Dot, you’re mighty mistaken. Two hours ago, you say? Couldn’t a been Fargo—he’s been right here playing poker for the past four hours.”

  “That’s right,” Doc Atkins chipped in. “Besides, I’ve known Fargo for years. He’s the last man to commit a crime like that.”

  “Oh, I’d expect all of you to take his part. He’s the famous Trailsman and all men look up to him. You men are pack animals—what’s my girl compared to the high-and-mighty Trailsman?”

  “Dot, you got that bass ackwards,” Sy cut in. “This is the West. Why, President Buchanan himself would be draghanged for treating a female that way.”

  “Lady,” spoke up Billy, barely suppressing a smirk, “Skye Fargo is a skunk-bit coyote, all right. Rotten as they come. I’d shoot the son of a buck.”

  “Heathens and Mormons,” she said with bitter contempt. “Thinking this is all a big joke for your pleasure. My girl described her attacker, and this tall galoot fits the description right down to the ground. You—the young fellow closest to Fargo—get clear, I said, or you’ll get the balance of these pellets.”

  Fargo could see that Lonny Brubaker was so scared he’d turned fish-belly white. But he stubbornly shook his head.

  “No, ma’am. Mr. Fargo is innocent. He was right here when you say your daughter was accosted.”

  “Scootch over, Lonny,” Fargo said in a take-charge voice. “If Mrs. Kreeger is bound and determined to cut me down in cold blood, no use you getting plugged, too.”

  “Hold off, Dot,” Doc Atkins implored. “Take a good long look at Fargo. Does he really look like the kind of man who’d need to . . . ravish a woman?”

  Dorothy did look at Fargo, long and hard. For the first time, a look of uncertainty crossed her features. “He’s mighty rugged and handsome,” she admitted. “Well-knit, too. I ’spect women flock to him like flies to sugar.”

  Old Billy didn’t like the turn this trail was taking. “Sure, lady, but you know, some men prefer to make it rough with a woman—gets ’em more het up. I’d shoot him.”

  “I ’spect a man as ugly as you has to be rough,” she replied. “Only way you can get it.”

  She looked speculatively at Fargo. “It’s no secret that my Ginny likes men. I’ve heard all the jokes about how she’s ‘secondhand’ and her sheets are always wrinkled. And the Lord knows there’s precious few males at Fort Bridger to catch a young girl’s eye. A man like you wouldn’t have to attack her—unless he was sick in the brain.”

  “I don’t dally with girls,” Fargo told her. “Only women. Mrs. Kreeger, I don’t doubt Ginny’s word. But I’m not the only man on the frontier who wears buckskins. And the black-and-white pinto is no rare horse.”

/>   “No, but it is rare to see a white man riding a stallion. Mostly it’s only Indians who don’t cut their horses.”

  Fargo nodded. “I can’t gainsay that.”

  “Can you gainsay that Arkansas toothpick in your boot or that brass-frame rifle in your saddle scabbard? What about the close-cropped beard and your black plainsman’s hat? Ginny described all of it.”

  Fargo shrugged helplessly. “All I can tell you, ma’am, is that I’m innocent. Shouldn’t we at least go talk to your daughter before you shoot me?”

  She considered this for a few moments, and Fargo thought she was wavering. Then her face set itself hard and she shook her head no.

  Her finger slipped inside the trigger guard and curled around the trigger. “No,” she said, her voice implacable. “I’m going to kill you now before I go weak-kneed.”

  2

  Fargo had not been fooled by Old Billy’s remarks egging Dorothy on to kill the Trailsman. He had sided the veteran Indian fighter long enough to know how his mind worked. Those remarks were intended to make her think Old Billy would be the last man to try saving Fargo. In fact, he was the first.

  Even as the distraught woman weighed the decision to pull the trigger, Old Billy slid the bolos from his sash unseen. Made of two small lead balls with a short stretch of rope melted into the lead to connect them, bolos were excellent for silently dropping men or animals.

  Billy’s arm shot out swift as a snake’s tongue, and the bolos wrapped hard around Dorothy’s ankles, upending her like a ninepin. The fowling piece went off straight up in the air, blowing a hole in the thatch roof. Fargo rocketed out of his chair and caught the woman in both arms before she hit the rammed-earth floor.

  He kicked the gun away and started to help her to her feet. She surprised him by breaking into hard, wracking sobs, clinging tight to him. Fargo knew she had hit her breaking point. The recent loss of her husband, this vicious attack on her daughter, and now the two of them alone in a hard, unforgiving land—even a strong man could break in this pitiless country of sterile mountains and jagged canyons and endless purple sage, not to mention some of the most warlike Indians in America.