High and Wild (19 page)

“Just head north and follow the signs to the King Henry.”

Haskell had drunk half of his second beer. Now he lifted the glass and polished off the rest, thinking of one more thing he wanted to know about Malcolm Briar. He set the empty schooner down on the table, scrubbed his forearm across his mouth, and said, “Where's Malcolm's digs?”

“Huh?” The German seemed a little taken aback by the question.

“Where was Malcolm's freight yard? I'll take a look around that, too. Maybe I'll find some clue to who the bastard is who killed him.”

The German was finishing his own beer. Now he set his glass down and canted his head to the right. He grinned knowingly. “Well, you know Malcolm. He didn't like people too much. He liked to live way out, keep to himself, when he wasn't runnin' one of his teams down from the mines.”

“Sure, sure—that's Malcolm for you.” Haskell remembered seeing in the Pinkerton file he'd skimmed that Briar's sister had described Malcolm as a bit of a recluse. Also as a man who tended to drift from one occupation to another. A bit of a malcontent, a peaceful renegade. A man who'd never married and probably never would marry.

That's why the West had beckoned to him.

Schwartz said, “You know where Miss O'Brien lives?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Malcolm's place is a mile northeast. It's on the trail to the King Henry, before it winds up into the mountains.”

Haskell scribbled a mental note of the route. He'd check out the scene of Briar's wreck and his freight yard the next day, after a few badly needed hours of sleep. He doubted there was much left of the place, but he'd sift through what he did find in hopes of a clue to who the man's enemies were. Even recluses had enemies. After Briar's wreck, the yard had likely been looted and scavenged, the mules appropriated by other outfits.

This far out in the high and rocky, there were few rules. Even fewer rules that were actually obeyed.

Still, it was worth a look around.

“One final question, Emil.”

“Sure, sure, my friend, Bear.”

“Can you recommend a flop house? I'm feelin' the sandman tuggin' on my eyelids.”

Emil nodded. “I know a place. Let me find Gustav, and I'll lead you there.”

“Give me a couple minutes.” Haskell rose and donned his hat. “First, I got to pay a visit to the sheriff's office.”

He gave the bearded gent a sly wink and drifted off to retrieve his rifle and saddlebags.

21

R
aven slept well in
her room at the Sawatch House despite the fact that she'd left Jack Goodthunder lying dead in his room with a fist-sized hole in his head and his limp dong snuggling against the rug.

She'd never left a man's room in quite that fashion before, although she'd been tempted a time or two. However, she was confident that the sheriff of Wendigo had deserved the shabby treatment. After all, he'd tried to take advantage of her while she lay unconscious, and he would have raped her if she hadn't awakened to find him pawing her breasts like a dog digging up a bone.

No, she slept well. A long, dreamless sleep, although even when she didn't dream, at the bottom of the deep well of her unconsciousness, she was acutely aware of all the sounds around her, sorting them for anything suspicious, possibly dangerous.

It was a habit she'd picked up early, after she'd been taken out of her bed one night when she was nine and held for ransom. The two kidnappers, a man and a woman, had once worked at the York family mansion near Gramercy Park and Union Square, on Manhattan Island.

Raven's wealthy father, Alistair York, who, along with his own father, Tavish York, owned York Shipping, with headquarters in Scotland and New York, had not ended up having to part ways with even a cent of their money, since Alistair's daughter, cagey even at nine, had managed to give her captors the slip.

Before doing so, however, she'd tossed boiling water from a teapot into the man's face, leaving him howling.

The girl had nerves of steel, even then. They served her well here in Wendigo. She'd quickly decided not to immediately report the news of Goodthunder's death unless someone had heard the shot and suspected its intended victim. Apparently, since no one had come to the room, no one had.

She'd decided to let Goodthunder's body be discovered in its own good time, giving her time the next morning to try quietly to locate the spot from which the shot had come, to see if the sheriff's killer had left any clues. There was a good possibility that whoever had killed Goodthunder was responsible for the other killings, including the killing of Malcolm Briar, around the Ute Field of gold and silver mines.

Raven gave herself a quick sponge bath, brushed her hair, and drew it up into a hasty French braid. Then she dressed in a simple riding skirt and white muslin blouse over a comfortable silk chemise that felt fine against her breasts. No corset today. She needed room to move around and breathe.

She shoved a derringer into the pocket of her waist-length leather jacket, donned a round-brimmed black felt hat, which sported a cord with an acorn tightener, and headed out of the still-quiet, semidark hotel to stand at the top of the veranda steps.

Finally, after what had sounded like an all-night shindig, Wendigo was quiet. One piano was still being played somewhere up the street on Raven's left, but the tune being tapped out she recognized as an old Scottish love ballad. A girl was singing along, although her raspy voice could only be heard now and then, when the piano strains weakened as though the player were momentarily nodding off.

A few drunks lay passed-out here and there about the street. The cool dawn air was rife with the smell of wood smoke from fledgling breakfast fires and urine from men relieving themselves on the boardwalks. Raven thought that she could also detect the faint odor of sex rising from the multitude of whorehouses and makeshift cribs. Maybe that was just her imagination. God, what perditions mining camps were.

And what did that say about her that she'd always found herself enjoying her time in them?

It was only a passing thought. What had taken the brunt of her attention was a hill rising on the other side of town nearly straight ahead of her, to the south. She'd already looked over the buildings on the other side of the street, finding none tall enough to have offered the shooter adequate vantage for the killing shot he'd made the night before.

Besides, the shot she'd heard hadn't been loud enough to have originated from only thirty or forty yards away.

If the gun that had been used to blow the sheriff's brains out had been a Big Fifty, then it had to have been fired from the other side of town. Otherwise, the shot would have been more noticeable, even with all the other shots that had been fired around the same time.

Raven had never heard such a gun triggered before, but she'd heard the report compared to that of a dynamite blast. And she'd heard plenty of dynamite blasts while growing up in New York, what with all the roads and canals being built.

The exit hole in Goodthunder's head had been larger than Raven's fist. And since Goodthunder himself had told her that a buffalo rifle had been used to kill mule skinners around the mines in the mountains, the gun that had killed him was likely one and the same.

A Big Fifty.

Raven would check out the hill on the south side of town. That was likely where the shot had been fired from.

With that in mind, she strode east along the main street, stepping over a drunk now and then, looking for a livery barn. She saw no need in wasting time walking when riding would be more efficient, despite its making her more conspicuous and possibly compromising her cover as a whore.

She'd known few whores to ride around on horseback.

She had to wake the hostler of the first livery she came to from a dead, drunken sleep and pay him double to prepare a horse for her at this early hour. The man thought it criminal that she wouldn't accept a sidesaddle like a proper lady, and when she told him that she was an improper lady, he just looked her dubiously up and down, scratched his chin whiskers, and tossed a traditional stock saddle onto the back of a steeldust gelding with one notched ear.

Raven stepped onto a stock trough and then toed a stirrup and swung up onto the steeldust's back.

“When you gonna bring ol' Dusty back?” the grizzled hostler called after her as she put Dusty into a trot to the east.

“You'll be the first to know!” Raven called behind her, and expertly turned the long-legged horse down a south-angling side street.

The street wasn't much, and the humble, age-silvered shacks and stock pens lining it had probably been the first in Wendigo, likely stemming from the time the town was little more than a ragged collection of down-at-heel prospectors who hadn't yet discovered the mother lode higher in the mountains.

The shacks, including a green frame-and-stone hovel whose sign outside a broken-down picket fence announced palm and tarot card readings by Mrs. Kordovskaya, wound along the side of a draw that angled northeast. Everything was shrouded in clinging night shadows that were gradually growing less substantial as the pearl light in the east grew brighter, seeped higher into the sky over Wendigo, and began turning blue.

Around the Kordovskaya place, the cloying smell of incense and opium lingered. A stout elderly woman in a gray dress split wood in the backyard, near a chicken pen.

Just beyond, Raven put ol' Dusty across a bridge traversing the
arroyo
and across a sage-stippled flat toward the hill that was actually two hills, partly forested and with a notch separating them. To Raven, who knew something of geology, the hill appeared to be a volcanic dyke, a spine of rock thrust up eons ago by volcanic activity in the area and which had partly resulted in the entire Sawatch Range itself.

It was lowest on the nearer side, and a short wall of sandstone, like a dinosaur spine, ran along the crest. Raven stopped at the bottom of the dyke and looked back past Mrs. Kordovskaya's place toward the heart of town. The Sawatch House was nearly straight north of the hill, although from here, she could see only the highest part of the steeply pitched roof and stone chimneys.

Raven rode the steeldust around behind the bluff, out of sight from town, and swung down from the saddle. Now she was between the dyke and a high, densely forested ridge rising about a hundred yards farther south. Morning birds were chirping and flitting about the brush and the
piñon
pines and sandstone boulders scattered along the side of the bluff.

Raven swung down from the saddle, tied Dusty to a gnarled
piñon
, and followed a meandering path up the side of the bluff. As she climbed, she looked around for boot prints but saw only deer and occasional coyote tracks and droppings and the bleached-out skull of some small mammal.

She followed the trail around several boulder snags, climbing higher into where the short, spindly pines grew denser near the top. At the top itself—a narrow ridge of near-grassless sand and rock littered with more deer sign—Raven stopped to catch her breath, fists on her hips.

She stared toward the heart of Wendigo.

The sky was lighter now, a pale blue, and the shadows had thinned considerably. The morning light was beginning to be reflected in some of the rooftops and on the eastern sides of canvas tent shacks. Gray smoke ribboned from chimneys. From her vantage atop the bluff, Raven was not surprised to see the third-story windows of the Sawatch House Hotel and Saloon.

Including the window of Sheriff Goodthunder's room, which had a large, jagged-edged hole in it.

The window was the size of her thumbnail from this distance. But a good shooter with a long-range rifle and a spyglass could make the shot. He'd have to be awfully good, though.

Raven, shivering a little as the morning air chilled the sweat she'd worked up climbing the hill, began to look around. She scoured the top of the ridge for nearly twenty minutes before she found what she was looking for: a long metallic cartridge casing lying in a hollow among large rocks about fifteen yards to the left of where she'd first gained the ridge.

On one knee, she picked up the cartridge and studied it. It was new, hadn't been there long. It was a fifty-caliber. In front of where Raven had found it was a root angling out of a nest of rocks. The root would have made a good rest for the barrel of the buffalo rifle as it was aimed at Goodthunder's window. The rocks would have been good cover, shielding the rifle's flash.

Raven closed her hand around the brass casing.

Shooters who could fire a long gun accurately from this distance at night were few and far between. He had to be a professional, one in a thousand.

Her thoughts drifted back to the previous evening and the man Goodthunder had spoken to in the saloon. The sheriff had been in a sour mood afterward.

Why?

Could the man the sheriff had spoken to, Kane, have come out here and killed him from long distance? If Kane was a regulator, like Goodthunder had said—and he'd certainly had the snake eyes of a cold-blooded killer for hire—Kane might very well be the man Raven and Haskell were looking for.

Goodthunder had said Kane was merely patrolling the freight trails, on the lookout for the killer or killers. But Goodthunder could very well have been lying. Kane might have been working for one of the local freight companies that Goodthunder himself was also conspiring with to run the others out of business.

It certainly wouldn't be the first time a local lawman had turned outlaw. And it certainly wouldn't be the first time an outlaw had locked horns with his comrades. Had Goodthunder gotten crossways with whoever was responsible for the killings, and was that why he was now dead?

Raven slipped the cartridge casing into her pocket and walked back to where the deer path rose to the top of the bluff. Deep in thought, she followed the switchbacking trail down the steep slope. As she passed between two rocky outcroppings forming a narrow corridor and came out on the other end, someone grabbed her right arm and swung her around.

A man laughed, and suddenly, a cold mouth ensconced in spiky beard stubble closed over hers, while a strong arm slithered around her shoulders. Before Raven had time to start fighting, something small, round, and hard was rammed into her belly.

There was the ratcheting click of a gun hammer being cocked as the man shoved his tongue between her lips, snickering through his nose.