California Crackdown

8

As Hank, Kip, Walt, and Jim watched, Fargo released Sarah Brant from the tarp, using his foot to roll her over and over on the stable floor.

She came out dazed and clearly hurting.

She froze, lying on her back, her eyes wide, panting through her nose and mouth.

Then Fargo roughly stood her up. “Now hold still.” She nodded and he cut the ties that held her feet, then the ropes around her wrists. She did as she was told and held still, so he didn’t nick her at all, which was a slight disappointment to him.

He spun her around and nudged her into the boarded-up stall that would be her prison for the near future.

“Perfect,” Fargo said, and slammed the door closed as the men behind him laughed. “Make sure that’s secure, and no matter how much she screams, don’t open it.”

Walt stepped forward and, with a smile, slammed down the bar that held the door tightly shut. “She’s going nowhere.”

They could hear her screaming, but the sound seemed faint as it came through the thick wood.

Right now, Fargo knew Cain would be laughing.

Kip shook his head. “You know, for the weeks that I worked for that bitch, I could only dream something like this would happen. Thank you.” He turned to the rest. “I’m a damn good shot. I’ll fight every step of the way with you for free just to repay you for that show.”

“Welcome aboard,” Hank said, stepping forward and shaking Kip’s hand. “We’re going to need you.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Fargo said. “We’ve cut off one head of the snake. One more head and this war just might fizzle before it really starts.”

“We can only hope,” Walt said.

Fargo pointed to the door. “Two men at all times on guard duty, and two outside on the other side of the stall wall.”

All four of them nodded and Fargo left, heading for his Ovaro. It was still early afternoon and the sun was beating down on the dirt and rocks. There was still time to take care of the next business, if he could do it. And if he could, this might end quickly. If not, a lot of men were going to die.

Twenty minutes later, he had his horse safely in a stable in town and was headed for the Benson Saloon. Fargo had been told that Brant spent his afternoons there drinking and playing poker.

Fargo planned on breaking that game up. He needed to get a read on Brant, to see if he was really the one in charge, or if his daughter had been pulling all the strings. And maybe, if Brant had only one or two guards with him, get Brant to pull a gun on him. Even though he wanted to, Fargo figured he couldn’t very well just kill the man in cold blood. It needed to be a fair fight. Otherwise, Brant was just going to have to live a few hours longer.

As Fargo walked through the batwings and into the slightly cooler air of the Benson Saloon, a silence fell over the room. A half dozen hands moved slowly closer to the butts of their guns.

In that instant, Fargo calculated his chances. He’d be an easy target for several professional gunfighters. The thing was to be bold. And to be quick. Gaze locked with gaze as he met the eyes of the gunnies watching him. A few of the men smirked, but most just tried to get a sense of him. How quick, how good. Sometimes reputations got inflated. A good number of so-called gunnies found themselves crumpling to the ground at the hand of some local laborer they’d pushed a little too far in a saloon just like this one.

Fargo knew that one of them was going to try him. As he took a couple of steps toward the man he assumed was Henry Brant, he kept his eyes fixed on the hands of the gunfighters watching him. The bartender, a thickset bald man, had a sneer for him.

And then it happened. He saw the move only peripherally but that was enough. He went into a crouch and when the short, swarthy man had managed to pull his Colt about halfway out of its holster, Fargo fired.

The man screamed. His gun fell to the floor with a heavy, dead sound. He held his good hand over his bad one, the way a man does when something has burned him. He knew a good number of curses.

“This is your lucky day,” Fargo said. “I probably should have killed you. But I’ll let somebody else do that for me. You won’t be doing any fast draws with that hand. Not again you won’t.”

A tall man with a fierce black beard looked as if he was about to draw down on Fargo. Fargo’s hand hovered above his own gun. “You won’t have the same luck your friend did. I’ll kill you on the spot. So you better think it over.”

The man didn’t like being cowed this way. But he obviously had only two choices. Take the humiliation that would come from backing down or fight Fargo. And he was wise enough to know that however many gunfights he’d survived in the past, his luck was about to run out. All of a sudden humiliation didn’t sound so bad. He pulled his hand away from his gun.

The saloon girl sitting nearby in a soiled red dress obviously liked what she saw. Her ruby lips quirked in an inviting smile. She couldn’t be sure if Fargo saw it.

It seemed everyone in the room knew who he was, and everyone in the room seemed to be on the other side. Ten men, plus the bartender.

He’d made it this far. Now he had to get down to business.

At a poker table in the corner, a silver-haired man looked up from his cards and laughed. He looked powerful and very much in control of the room.

Henry Brant. There could be no doubt. And by the looks of this room, it was clear that Henry Brant paid the wages of every man here. He was far more powerful than his daughter.

“Well, well, it seems we have a famous guest in our presence. Fargo, what task brings you to us this fine afternoon? I heard you had moved in with that bunch at Cain’s old mine.”

Fargo stayed close to the batwings. If more guns cleared leather, his only hope was to dive backward and out the door. But before he did, he’d make sure to put a shot or two into Brant.

“I just wanted to meet the man who ordered the killing of my friend Cain Parker and his son.”

A number of hands around the room edged even closer to their guns, but Brant just laughed, holding his hands up in the air in front of him to calm the men. “I had nothing to do with those unfortunate deaths, I can assure you.”

Fargo said nothing in return. He just let Brant’s laugh die off into silence.

Finally, Brant sat a little more upright in his chair and glanced at the cards in front of him. “Now that we have that cleared up, do you mind? You’re interrupting my afternoon poker game.”

“Not at all,” Fargo said, moving one step closer to the door without turning his back on the room. “I just like to know what a man’s face looks like before I kill him. You’ll never know when I’ll be there, Brant. Cain Parker was a good man. He didn’t deserve to die. But you do. Very soon.”

With that, Fargo stepped backward out of the door and to one side just in case anyone got the bright idea to shoot out the batwings at him.

Fargo walked down the street and around the block. He quickly ducked into a hotel lobby and up the staircase to the second floor. He knew that a window at the end of the upstairs hall looked out over the street in front of the Benson Saloon, and that’s exactly where he wanted to be to see what happened next. He figured he wasn’t going to have long to wait.

He was right. Ten minutes later, Brant came out, surrounded by six men.

The white-haired man looked nervous, glancing constantly up and down the busy street as they moved to their horses tied at the hitching posts in front of the saloon. A moment later, Brant and his men were headed out of town at full gallop. More than likely, there wouldn’t be another poker game in the Benson real soon. And that was just fine by Fargo.

And Fargo had delivered the message to Brant that he had wanted to deliver. A man like him, afraid for his life, often made poor decisions. Fargo was counting on Brant to make more than his share of bad ones. And when he learned his daughter was missing, all hell was going to break loose.

But before that happened, it was time for Fargo to let loose a little hell of his own on Brant and his mine.

And with some luck, chase off anyone who really didn’t want to work and die for the man.

The next morning, after a good night’s rest in the guest room of Cain’s big house, Fargo went to visit Sarah Brant. He carried a loaf of bread and a canteen full of water. He didn’t want her dying in there just yet. But the longer she suffered, the happier he would be. You don’t kill a good friend of the Trailsman and not live to regret it.

Walt and another man Fargo didn’t recognize were on guard duty inside the stable. “Has the door been opened?”

“Nope,” Walt said. “They tell me she stopped shouting sometime around midnight.”

“Open it,” Fargo said, “and keep a rifle trained on her.”

Walt removed the board and pushed open the thick door.

The smell coming from the room flooded out and washed over Fargo, making him smile at how she was suffering. She deserved it, every minute of it.

The light from the stable filled the cell and Fargo could see Sarah Brant sitting in one corner, her legs pulled up against her chest.

She looked up at him and blinked. Then she asked softly, “Why did you do this to me?”

“Why did you kill Cain, those other men, and finally Daniel? You know, don’t you, that your boyfriend, Daniel, died sitting in an outhouse, afraid of you, afraid you were coming after him to kill him? And it seems he was right.”

She looked up at Fargo and blinked. “I didn’t know that. I honestly didn’t.”

Fargo laughed. “All the men I’ve talked to said you hired them, you gave the orders.”

“I hired the men,” she said. “My father said I was good at getting the right type of men to work for him. But I didn’t hire them to kill Daniel.” Her voice sounded more like a little girl’s every moment. “I actually loved him. He was like a big puppy around me, and I adored that about him. I hoped to marry him. Why would I kill him?”

With that she broke down crying.

“So you’re saying your father ordered Daniel’s death?” Fargo asked, doubting that the show of tears was real.

“I don’t know,” she said between sobs. “Maybe. Or maybe Kip. I honestly don’t know.”

“Kip? Your driver?”

“My father’s main foreman,” she said, holding back the sobbing a little. “Kip was in love with me too and he hated Daniel, hated him with a passion, and hated me for loving Daniel. My father made Kip go everywhere with me as my personal bodyguard, and more than once I caught him spying on me and Daniel in a private moment.”

Fargo’s stomach twisted hard. Could she actually be telling the truth? More than likely, she was just playinghim to get back at a man who had betrayed her. He glanced at Walt, who just shrugged.

“Thanks for the information, Miss Brant,” Fargo said as he tossed in the loaf of bread. Then he tossed in the canteen and she caught that.

He motioned for Walt to close the door and bar it again.

The door slammed on her scream, muffling it like someone had put a pillow over her face.

Fargo turned to Walt. “Find Kip and bring him to me in the house.”

Thirty minutes later, Walt came back, shaking his head. “No one has seen him since sunrise.”

Fargo wanted to break something. He sure hoped he hadn’t been taken in by Kip. If he had been, Kip would have told Henry Brant where his daughter was and how she was being held. And he would be getting ready to come after her.

“Get Hank and Jim in here as fast as you can. We’ve got to make some defense plans.”

Walt turned and headed out the door at a run. Fargo dropped into a chair in Cain’s dining room. The war was about to start, and it was going to get deadly very fast.

And he didn’t have any idea how to stop it now.