Luke Jensen, Bounty Hunter (3 page)

Whatever she wished, Luke probably would have said no, but he didn't get the chance to. At that moment, another step sounded in the corridor, along with the jingle of a spur, and the curtain was suddenly swept aside, causing Philomena to cry out and jerk back from Luke. The razor in her hand nicked his neck as she did so, but the sting of the little cut was the least of his worries at the moment.

The stranger's face twisted in hate and anger as he thrust the twin barrels of a shotgun at Luke and screamed, “Time for you to die, bounty hunter!”

Luke's reaction was instantaneous. His left hand shot out and grabbed Philomena's arm while his right flashed toward the basin of soapy water. He pulled Philomena into the tub with him as he grabbed the basin and sent it flying toward the would-be killer with a flick of his wrist.

Philomena's scream ended in a splash and a gurgle as she went face-first into the tub. Luke twisted aside and surged up from the water, partially shielding her body with his own.

The basin spinning toward the stranger's face caused him to flinch, pulling the shotgun's barrels out of direct line with Luke. But at that close range, the buckshot would spread enough to do considerable damage if the man triggered the weapon.

In the split second of grace that throwing the basin had given him, Luke snatched one of the Remingtons from its holster. He didn't aim, but fired from the hip, letting instinct guide his shot.

The bullet flew true, ripping into the man's left side and spinning him halfway around. Stubbornly, he stayed upright and tried to swing the shotgun back into line. Luke fired again, and put his shot right in the middle of the stranger's forehead. The slug bored on through the man's brain and exploded out the back of his skull in a grisly spray of blood and bone.

The man dropped the shotgun and fell to his knees, then toppled forward to land with his ruined head dangling over the edge of the tub. At that moment, Philomena emerged sputtering and choking from the water and found herself looking at the dead man's bullet-shattered skull from a distance of only a few inches. She started screaming again.

Felipe Ortiz rushed in brandishing an old cap-and-ball pistol and yelling in Spanish. Spotting his daughter in the tub and a naked Luke Jensen standing over her, he reacted normally and thrust the gun at Luke with both hands as he fired.

Luke didn't want to kill Ortiz. He dived to one side as the old pistol boomed. The ball missed him by several feet, hit the cubicle's rear wall, and blew a neat hole in it. He fell over the bench, rolled, and hooked a foot behind Ortiz's left ankle, sweeping the barber's legs out from under him.

Ortiz went over backward with an alarmed yell and bounced a little as his amply-padded rear end hit the floor.

“Papa, no!” Philomena cried. She kept shouting at her father in Spanish.

Luke understood the language fairly well, although the words flew out of her mouth so fast he missed some of them. But he knew she was telling Ortiz not to shoot anymore.

Finally she said in English, “The señor did nothing! It was this . . . this . . .” She looked down at the dead shotgunner again, and fainted dead away.

Luke grabbed her blouse to keep her face from sliding under the water.

The barber shop door slammed open and heavy footsteps charged back to the bathing area. Marshal Cyrus Dunbar came to a startled stop and looked around to see Ortiz sitting on the floor, a dead man draped over the edge of the bathtub with blood leaking from his head turning the water red, and a passed-out Philomena sagging in the tub while Luke, naked as a jaybird, held her up.

“Good Lord! I must be seein' things!” Dunbar squinted and looked away from Luke. “Things I don't want to be seein'.”

“I assure you, Marshal, there's a reasonable explanation for all of this,” Luke said.

“You mean besides me bein' loco?”

“Yes, and if you'll take Señor Ortiz and his daughter out of here and let me get dressed, I'll tell you all about it.”

“What about, uh . . .” Dunbar gestured vaguely at the dead man.

“He won't be going anywhere or bothering anyone else.”

“Fine, fine,” Dunbar muttered. “Felipe, go back out front and take that old horse pistol with you.”

Philomena started moaning and moving around as she came to, and the marshal added, “Señorita, let me give you a hand.”

While Dunbar helped the groggy and soaking wet Philomena climb out of the tub, Luke picked up his hat and held it in front of him so that he was no longer completely exposed.

Dunbar put his arm around Philomena's shoulders and steered her toward her father, who had gotten to his feet but still looked completely confused. Dunbar looked back at Luke and snapped, “Is there gonna be a dead body involved every time I run into you, Jensen?”

“I hope not, Marshal. I sincerely hope not.”

 

 

Luke hadn't gotten the chance to scrub off all the trail dust, but the idea of getting back into the tub after so much of the dead man's blood and brains had leaked into it didn't hold any appeal. He used the rough towel hanging on a nail driven into the wall to dry off and then got dressed. At least some of his clothes were clean, he told himself.

He left the body where it was and went out into the barber shop. Night was settling down over Rio Rojo, he saw through the big window in the front of the shop.

Dunbar and Ortiz were waiting for him, but Philomena was gone. Luke supposed her father had sent her home. He said, “The first thing I want you to know, Señor Ortiz, is that I did nothing to dishonor your daughter. I give you my word.”

“What was she doing in there?” Ortiz asked with a glare.

“Shaving me.” Luke touched a finger to the little nick on his throat. The drop of blood from it had scabbed over. “She said you sent her in there to do it, that it was her job.”

“Dios mio!”
Ortiz threw his hands in the air. “That girl! I have told her such things are not decent, but she watches and when she sees a man who appeals to her—as so many do!—she sneaks in to flirt with them. She has the . . . the heat in her blood . . . like her mama. A good thing for a man when his wife is like that, but not so good when it is his daughter!”

“What about the dead hombre?” Dunbar asked heavily.

Luke shrugged. “He came in, pointed a shotgun at me, and yelled that it was time for me to die.”

“And you took exception to that.”

“It seemed like the appropriate reaction.”

Dunbar's eyes narrowed. “You must be pretty handy with a gun if you were able to stop him from killin' you when he already had a greener ready to cut loose.”

“I was lucky.” Luke explained about throwing the basin at the stranger. “That gave me just enough time to get my hand on a gun.”

“And that's all you needed, wasn't it?” Dunbar held up a hand. “Never mind. Who was he, and why did he want you dead?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, Marshal.”

“You mean you don't know him?” Dunbar sounded like he had a hard time believing that.

“I never saw him before,” Luke said. “He knew who I am, though. He called me a bounty hunter. He said it like an obscenity.”

“To some folks I reckon it is,” Dunbar muttered.

“Let's go take a better look at him.”

Ortiz crossed himself and said, “Not me. I just want him out of my place, Marshal.”

“As soon as I can, I'll tell Calvin to fetch his wagon “ Dunbar said. “Come on, Jensen.”

They trooped back to the cubicle. Dunbar took hold of the corpse's shoulders and pulled him away from the tub. The body rolled loosely onto its back. The man's face was set in a permanent grimace, etched there by the bullet that had left the black, red-rimmed hole in the center of his forehead. “You sure you don't know him?”

Luke studied the dead man for a long moment, mentally comparing the face to the drawings on hundreds of wanted posters he had memorized. It wasn't an unusual face, sort of foxlike and bordering on ugly, with a weak chin and straggly hair the color of straw. The man wore range clothes that had seen better days. In addition to the shotgun, he packed a .44 revolver in a holster strapped to his waist.

“He looks like a thousand other drifting hardcases, Marshal,” Luke finally said. “I don't know him, but I feel confident that he was wanted. He must have seen me come into town, recognized me as a bounty hunter, and figured it would be in his best interest to kill me before I recognized him and came after him.” Luke shook his head. “His high opinion of his own notoriety got him killed. I wouldn't have known him if I'd bumped into him on the street.”

“Well, I don't guess anybody can blame you for shootin' him. He was gunnin' for you, no matter what the reason, and if he'd pulled those triggers he likely would've killed poor Philomena, too. So I reckon you saved her life.” Dunbar paused. “You really weren't up to anything with the gal when this gent busted in?”

“I swear I wasn't, Marshal. She was giving me a shave, that's all.”

Dunbar grunted. “You're lucky ol' Felipe ain't a better shot. You can't blame him for jumpin' to the wrong conclusion when he went rushin' in.”

“Even with a dead man halfway in the tub, too?” Luke asked.

“I don't imagine he saw much of anything just then except his daughter and a naked gringo old enough to be her daddy.”

“No, I suppose not,” Luke said with a sigh. “Don't worry, Marshal, I don't bear any ill will toward Señor Ortiz for taking a shot at me. These things happen.”

Dunbar gave him a skeptical look. “It seems like they do around you, anyway.”

 

 

Since Luke's shave had gotten interrupted, Ortiz finished it in the barber chair once Calvin the undertaker had shown up to haul away the corpse. Ortiz tried to apologize for the misunderstanding, but Luke assured him that everything was all right. Ortiz told him that the bath and the shave were on the house, considering the circumstances, but Luke insisted on paying and added a nice tip to the sum.

With that taken care of, he took his Winchester and saddlebags and walked across to the Rio Rojo Hotel, newly owned by the Widow Vanderslice. It was a two-story adobe building with a red tile roof and a balcony with decorative wrought iron railings along the second floor. Plants in pots hung from chains attached to that balcony where it formed a roof over the first floor gallery. The warm yellow glow of lamplight filled many of the windows.

As Luke signed the registration book for the clerk at the desk in the lobby, he commented, “I was sorry to hear about the owner's passing.”

The young man nodded and pushed up the pair of spectacles that had slid down his nose. “Yes, Mr. Vanderslice was a good man to work for. He was one of the first American settlers in Rio Rojo, you know. But he's been sick for quite a while, so his death came as no surprise. Still, it's a sad day, Mr. . . . Jensen, is it?”

“That's right,” Luke said.

The clerk's eyes narrowed in thought. “You're the man who brought in that dead outlaw earlier.”

Luke nodded. “I am.”

“I heard some shots a little while ago. Did you have anything to do with that?”

Luke didn't see any point in lying. The whole story would be all over town in no time, anyway. He knew how quickly gossip spread in little settlements like Rio Rojo. “A fellow tried to kill me. I discouraged him—permanently.”

“There won't be anything like that happening here in the hotel, will there?” the clerk asked nervously.

“I doubt it.”

“But you're not sure?”

“Nothing is certain in this life,” Luke said. “If you'd prefer, I can seek other accommodations.”

“No, that won't be necessary,” the clerk said with a wan smile. “We'll just hope for the best.”

“I always do.”

The clerk gave him the key to room eight. “To your left at the top of the stairs.”

Luke carried up his gear. It was a good enough room, clean and with a bed that looked comfortable, along with a woven rug on the floor. The single window opened onto the balcony and overlooked the street. He didn't care much for that. People had climbed onto balconies and taken shots at him through windows in other towns. But he figured the odds of somebody else in Rio Rojo being after him were pretty small, so he decided not to do anything about it at the moment.

He thought he might make a pallet on the floor on the other side of the bed when he got back from supper and heap some pillows and blankets under the covers to make it look like a man was sleeping there, just in case.

Marshal Dunbar had recommended Slade's Restaurant in the next block. Luke was there eating a decent steak a little while later when the lawman came in, looked around the room, spotted him, and started toward him.

“Avery at the hotel said you got a room and then left again but didn't take your things with you, so I figured you'd gone to eat,” Dunbar said without any preamble. “I went through all the wanted posters in my desk, but I didn't find that hombre with the shotgun. If he really is wanted, I don't have paper on him, so I don't reckon you can claim a reward on him.”

“I'll kill a man for free any time he's trying to blast me with a shotgun,” Luke said dryly.

Dunbar grunted. “Yeah, I reckon that makes sense.” He pulled out one of the vacant chairs at the table and sat down without being invited. “I sent that telegram to the Rangers in Texas. Don't really expect to hear back from 'em until in the mornin', though. How much of a reward did you say you was due for that fella Epps?”

“Five thousand.”

“Our bank ought to be able to cover that. I'm sure you've noticed that Rio Rojo ain't very big. But we're sittin' right between some prime ranchin' country to the north and some good producin' silver mines to the south, so the bank does pretty well for itself. Has to keep considerable cash on hand for payrolls and such-like. Not to mention the occasional bounty.”

“Have you ever had to pay one out before?” Luke asked in idle curiosity.