Devil in Texas (Lady Law & The Gunslinger Series, Book 1) (5 page)

Gritting her teeth, she ignored the flames that roared ever closer. Perspiration made lock-picking tedious. Again and again, her slippery fingers lost their grip on the widdy. She wasted precious seconds, coughing from the smoke that burned her sinuses and stung her eyes.

Finally, the mechanism yielded. Nearly sobbing with relief, she wrenched open the door. A scene of mass hysteria greeted her. Shrieking whores, half-dressed Johns, and cursing waiters jostled each other, pushing and gouging in their efforts to escape the floor. Both stairwells were ablaze. Apparently, the murderer hadn't wanted any witnesses to survive.

Mace shoved his way to her side. "What the hell did you do? Light a cigarette?"

"You know damned well I don't smoke! Someone tossed Greek Fire through my window!"

The color drained from Mace's face. "You blew your cover," he growled, grabbing her arm and swinging her toward a darkened bedroom. "Follow evasion protocol, and get your tail out of here!"

She wrenched her elbow from the senior agent's grasp and dragged the scarf over her nose. A little sympathy from her colleague would have been appreciated, but then, Mace had never wanted her on "his" case. The only undercover work he did willingly with a Pinkie involved a bed.

As Sadie ducked into a street-side bedroom, Mace remained in the hall. He was shouting for folks to stay calm. To find an open window and take turns jumping into the flower bushes below. Wails of female protest greeted this suggestion, but Sadie didn't hesitate. The building was only two stories tall, and this bedroom, in particular, had a sturdy Mexican plum tree butting against its casement. She knew this fact because she'd cased every blessed inch of the casino to locate the best escape routes.

Pinkertons can't be too careful,
the manual had instructed.

Ripping her burn-blistered palm, she nevertheless managed to shimmy down the trunk and stumble into the shadows of the privy before the first of the hurtling bodies crashed into the oleander bushes.

"Sadie!
Has anyone seen Sadie?"

It was Cass's voice, adding to her cover problem. She shrank against the outhouse even as she recognized her ex-lover's pale gold hair in the casino's milling refugees on the lawn. He was turning his head every which way, shouting her name, searching the faces of the beerjerkers, who'd been ushered, along with the gamblers, from the building.

Surely, Cass wasn't part of the arson conspiracy.

Was he?

Suddenly, her casement blew out. Flames spewed triumphantly through the hole. Orange-red reflections flickered over Cass's face, illuminating his horror as the inferno devoured her bedroom. The building shuddered. The timbers groaned.

Cass was screaming for Cassandra McGuire now, shaking off Baron and Randie and knocking some lanky kid on his ass beside a raccoon. The Siren's bouncer entered the fray. Fists started swinging. Cass's .38 glinted in the firelight. Tito managed to wrestle the gun from Cass's fist before he knocked Cass out cold.

Sadie exhaled a shaky breath. She forced herself to be logical. To think like a Pinkerton, not a jilted lover. Cass had coyote cunning; he survived in the world because he was a consummate liar with a flair for the dramatic. If he'd been part of the arson conspiracy,
of course
he would have faked his concern for her, if he'd wanted her dead.

In any event, Tito had neutralized him. Now was her chance to flee.

Flipping up her coat collar, she turned her back on the soaring flames. She drove her leaden legs toward Harborside Drive and the fishing wharves. Her plan was to disappear while she still had time, while the brothel refugees were too confused to notice the flight of a sloppily dressed figure with a scarf-wrapped face. Let Cass—and everyone else in that building—think Cassandra McGuire had perished in the fire.

That way, Sadie Michelson could live to fight Baron Westerfield another day.

Chapter 3

Six Weeks Later

Rocking W Ranch

Burnett County, Texas

"Good God. Is that gun loaded?"

"Who wants to know?" Cass growled, but the question was rhetorical. About a minute before he'd heard a mincing stride crunch gravel on the drive, a morning breeze had blown the scent of licorice hair tonic through the open doors of the carriage house.

"You know very well it's Pendleton!" snapped Baron's secretary.

Cass grimaced. Pendleton Prouse was the last man he wanted to deal with while sober.

After the brothel debacle, Cass had hired out his guns to Baron and started living in the Rocking W's bunkhouse with Collie and a passel of cowboys. Needless to say, this move had reignited his feud with Pendleton—or rather, Pendleton's feud with him.

A fussy little man, who nursed lifelong grudges, Pendleton preferred bowties to bolos and spats to spurs. He rarely ventured into the sun, as his milky complexion could attest, and he shunned any activity more rigorous than climbing a ladder to reach the top shelf in the library. Perhaps because he huddled over Baron's ledgers from sunrise to sunset, or perhaps because Baron paid him better than all his cowpokes combined, Pendleton thought himself exceedingly important.

"I demand an explanation, Mr. Cassidy!"

"All right." Cass didn't bother to turn. He was too busy focusing on his task. "I'm juggling."

"I can see that!"

"Then why'd you ask?"

Wisecracks. Hair-raising risks. Death-defying feats.
These were Cass's salvation. Without them, he would have lost his mind—and not just because life as a regulator, with no bushwhackers to ventilate, was insanely boring. During the quieter moments on Baron's ranch, when Cass was watching the cattle graze or listening to a harmonica croon, memories of the brothel fire would inevitably creep in.

To distract himself from his latest bout of guilt, he'd started juggling an apple, a tequila bottle, and a .45. But he knew this reckless entertainment wouldn't spare him for long. He couldn't forget how he'd failed Sadie when she'd desperately needed someone to brave the inferno and carry her to safety. Self-loathing was like a burning blade, twisting in his gut.

Baron, Randie, and Collie had all assured him that running inside the Satin Siren would have been a suicide mission. But how was he supposed to live with himself? He'd let Tito knock him on his ass. He'd let Sadie
die.

For days, Cass had camped out in the brothel's ruins. He'd worked as a volunteer beside the investigators, frantically combing the wreckage for some trace of Sadie's corpse, sweating out his terror that he might actually find it. After a week of fruitless searching, the Fire Marshal had pronounced Sadie missing and presumed dead. At that point, Cass had seriously considered killing someone. But who?

Dietrich?

Tito?

The Fire Marshal?

Who was responsible for Sadie's death?

"Mister
Cassidy!"

Cass struggled with his latent rage. He kept tossing the .45 into the air.

"Yeah, Mr. Prouse?"

Pendleton made one of his fussy, clucking noises. "That is
quite
enough of your hooliganism."

"Naw." Cass pasted on a smile. Even Pendleton didn't deserve to tangle with the demon lurking inside him today. "I'm just getting started."

Collie snickered somewhere near the tack room. Cass could hear the boy buckling a harness onto Mrs. Westerfield's mare so the lady could drive to her Suffragette meeting. Pendleton was scheduled to accompany her, which was fitting, since tea-sipping would be part of the program. In the eight years that Cass had known Baron's secretary and sparred with him over inconsequential improprieties, like eating cheese slices from a knife, Cass had never seen Pendleton drink anything harder than jamoka.

"Save your sass for the good citizens of the jury," Pendleton blustered. "Assuming you don't shoot your brains out
before
Baron can get you exonerated for killing that Ku Klux Klansman."

"You been listening at doors again, Pendleton?"

"How dare you!"

"Now don't get all red and blotchy and bloat up like a puffer fish," Cass drawled. "Everyone knows you peek through keyholes."

"I most certainly do not you... you
troglodyte!"

"What's a troglodyte?" Collie called.

"Beats me," Cass said cheerfully.

"I'm not surprised." Pendleton sniffed. "If it isn't a whiskey label, you haven't read it. Now holster that gun before you blow off somebody's head!"

"Quit being such a fuddy-duddy," Collie said. "The gun isn't even loaded. Right, Cass?"

"Reckon there's only one way to find out."

With the speed of a striking rattler, Cass snatched the .45 from the air, drilled a bullet through a knothole, spun the gun over his finger and holstered it. By comparison, the apple and bottle dropped like molasses into his hands.

"Nope." He took a bite of fruit. "No more beans in the wheel."

Pendleton was sputtering, his cheeks florid, his chest heaving. "Mr. Cassidy, you have an intellect rivaled only by doorknobs!"

Turning on his heel, Pendleton grabbed the mare's reins from Collie, booted Vandy out of the driver's seat, and "geed" the horse into the yard. Cass chuckled, watching the carriage round the corner of the Big House.

"What's the matter with you?" Collie growled, stomping across the straw like a rooster ready for a cock fight. "Pendleton was right! You could have blown off somebody's head!"

Cass took another bite of apple to swallow a fresh wave of guilt. "I was practicing a new trick shot. What's the big deal?"

"Me and Vandy don't have a hankering to meet the devil, that's what!"

Cass snorted. "As I recall, I had to wrestle a seven-foot gator to save your varmint from becoming a gulp and a memory."

"Oh, so now it's Vandy's fault Sadie's dead?"

"What does
Sadie
have to do with anything?"

"Everything, you lying sack of cow turds. 'Cause when you jumped into the bayou that day, and leaped onto that runaway stage coach a week later, and turned a cattle stampede all by your lonesome yesterday evening, you weren't doing it to save anybody's life. You were doing it to throw away your own!"

Cass scowled. Collie's insight was unsettling. It held a ring of truth.

"What would you know?"

"I know plenty!" Collie retorted. "You yak my ear off day and night. So if you don't quit bawling like a lost dogie and find yourself another redhead to fire up your pecker, I'm gonna wire Sera and tell her to sic the Thunderbolt Angels on your ass!"

Amusement vied with Cass's irritation. Sera, who'd been named after the Seraphim, had a warm personal relationship with angels. It came in handy when she was cussing out her exploded jars of blackberry preserves or sneaking out her bedroom window to rendezvous with Lynx. Sera was a preacher's daughter, but she'd married the Cherokee half-breed in a secret Indian ceremony in the woods long before her folks could host the official one in a church. Cass was expecting to hear any day now he was a godfather.

"You made up those Thunderbolt Angels."

"Did not." Collie hiked his chin.

"Now who's the lyin' sack of cow turds?"

Cass tossed his half-eaten apple to Vandy. The coon gleefully chased it into the sunshine, until a callous black boot crushed it under his snout.

"Hey!" Collie cried as Tito thumped into the carriage house on oversized feet. "Watch where you're walking!"

"Coons ain't got no business here."

"Says who? At least Vandy was born in this country!"

Tito dismissed the threat of Collie's fist with a baleful blink of his one good eye. But then, Collie weighed 20 pounds less than Cass, and the pirate had already proved he could deck a gunslinger.

Thanks to Tito's red kerchief, which peeked out from his Stetson, and the gold ring in his earlobe, which winked amidst wisps of coal-black hair, he didn't look anything like a cowpoke. Outfitting the whale-sized, Italian sailor with a horse had proven an amusing challenge for Baron's trail boss, partly because of Tito's size, and partly because Tito knew as much about prodding cattle as Cass knew about netting tuna.