Slocum and the Three Fugitives (5 page)

The man glanced from Slocum to the woman. He almost leered when he said, “How appreciative would you be, Annabelle?”

“Not
that
grateful, Pete, you old horny toad.” She laughed, letting Slocum know this banter had gone on between her and the other saloon owner before.

“You having supply problems for your whiskey?” Slocum asked. He stood a little straighter when he saw the man's reaction. Even in the dark, he saw the man turn pale.

“No.”

The curt answer only spurred Slocum's curiosity.

“Annabelle said the whiskey peddlers stopped coming to town a few months back. Tom was on his way to Denver to buy his liquor. How are you supplying the booze for your customers?”

Pete stepped out and blocked their entry into the saloon. This put Slocum on his guard. He and Annabelle hadn't made a move to go inside. Pete even glanced over his shoulder as if someone crept up on him to listen to his answer.

“Tom was a hardheaded son of a buck, no offense, Annabelle. He wouldn't knuckle under to no man. Me, I seen enough trouble fighting the Navajo and Ute back in the day. I don't look for trouble.”

“What if it hunts you down?” Slocum asked. He separated himself a little from Annabelle so Pete had to turn slightly to look squarely at whichever of them was speaking.

“A man learns how to duck and dodge the older he gets.”

“Oh, Pete, you're not that old,” Annabelle said. She reached out and took the man's arm, forcing him to look her way.

Slocum caught a quick glance into the saloon and two men sitting near the door. They had a bottle on the table in front of them, but both nursed empty shot glasses. He had seen men intent on eavesdropping. Both of them worried more about what Pete said than filling their own glasses for one last drink.

“You running the Black Hole now, Annabelle, you'll find out what Tom already knew. Or you letting Pierre take charge?”

“If Pierre comes looking for work, think it over carefully before you hire him,” Annabelle said angrily.

Pete looked back at Slocum and said, “He your new barkeep?”

“The new owner,” Slocum said, to see what reaction this caused.

“Do tell. Didn't take you long to find a buyer.” Pete started to look over his shoulder at the two men, then forced himself to remain facing outward. “You'll find supply routes are different in Taos.”

“How different?”

“You'll find out. I got to close. Again, Annabelle, sorry about Tom. Damned shame him getting thrown from his horse and dying like that.”

Before either Slocum or Annabelle could correct him, Pete ducked into his saloon. The door grated shut and a locking bar fell inside.

“Who were the men in the bar?” Slocum asked.

“They never moved so I didn't get a good look at them. Why?”

Slocum said nothing more. He hadn't seen their faces either, but their clothing was heavily stained. As if they had spilled a lot of whiskey on their coats and pants.

“Do you have a place to stay, John?”

“No. I figured there must be a hotel or boardinghouse.”

“I . . . I have a big enough bed for the two of us.”

“That's the second best offer I've had all night,” he said.

“Second? What? Oh my, John, you are such a joker.”

Slocum led her to the plaza and the gazebo in the center. They sat so he could kiss her, hidden by shadows.

“This is nice, but my bed is much more private,” Annabelle said.

Slocum waited a few seconds longer until two men rode past, heading away. He craned his neck to get a better look at them, but they wore their hats low and had pulled up bandannas to cover their face against trail dust.

“Lead on,” he said. He hardly listened to everything Annabelle said as they walked to a small adobe house on the outskirts of town because he kept turning over everything that had happened.

And that the men who had smashed up the Black Hole whiskey likely had ridden from town on horses with X Bar X brands.

Slocum dropped the clawhammer on the bar with a loud bang. Annabelle looked up from the table where she was working on the saloon's books.

“All fixed?” she asked.

“Nobody's getting in the rear door without coming through the wall, and it's two feet thick,” Slocum said. He drew himself a beer, downed it, then drew another.

She looked at him in disdain.

He carefully drank another half mug before asking, “You want one?”

“Drinking up the profits is not helping. Water is perfectly good to quench your thirst.”

“Beer tastes better,” he said, finishing the second mug. He dipped it into the water bucket and it came out brimming with water.

He rounded the bar and sat beside her, looking at the columns of figures.

“You want me to explain these to you?”

“I know how to cipher,” he said. “We made a decent profit this past week. Must be the new owner.”

“Or his attentive assistant keeping track of how much liquor goes out in every shot and keeping the beer just cool enough so it'll foam just right and fill the mug but not make the customer think he's being cheated.”

“We could use a piano player,” Slocum said. “Might bring in more customers.”

“Not likely we could cover the expense of the piano, the musician, and however much he would steal from us. Any dollar that goes into the piano player's pocket doesn't come to ours.”

“What about a faro table? You'd look mighty fine dealing faro,” he said, catching the joking tone to her voice. “You'd only have to bend forward a mite—just like you're doing now—and show off those fine teats of yours. Gamblers would completely forget the odds.”

“The odds of me doing that are zero,” she said.

“What are my odds with you?”

“One hundred percent,” Annabelle said, bending over to flash more of her fine breasts as she kissed him.

“I'll sign over the Black Hole to you anytime you want,” Slocum said. “You and your brother built this place. I just happened along at a bad time for him and a good one for me.”

“No need. Our partnership is working out fine,” she said.

“So far. One of these days you're going to kick me out. It'd be to your benefit if you owned the saloon outright.”

“You mean you're getting tired of being tied down so long and want to drift on?”

Slocum laughed, but the sound rang hollow in his ears. There was a touch of truth in what Annabelle said. Just a touch. He enjoyed her company, both in bed and out. Just seeing her made him think about settling down. Running a saloon wasn't a bad way to make a living. He had found the more he worked there, both behind the bar and out among the patrons, the less he drank. Part of it was that he no longer needed the liquor to dull the pain of spending long lonely hours on the trail. Another was that he needed his wits sharp and now the beer dulled them.

Putting down roots in Taos was not something he had considered, but he was increasingly amenable to the notion. The people in the pueblo were decent, and Annabelle was enough to make any man forget about riding to the horizon just to see what lay beyond. It wasn't always necessary to ride past the sunset if he shared it with a willing woman as lovely as Annabelle Harris.

“This is a different life for me. I grew up working a farm. The war changed the way I lived.”

“You shouldn't feel guilty that you survived and others around you didn't,” she said.

“I don't feel guilty. I barely survived.”

Unconsciously, his hand pressed into his belly, where Bloody Bill Anderson had gut-shot him after William Quantrill had taken offense. Slocum had said powerful things to Quantrill about how he had ordered his guerrillas to kill every male in Lawrence, Kansas, over the age of eight. Slocum was sure some under that young age had been gunned down just to feed the rebel leader's anger at losing his sister in a federal prison.

It had taken Slocum months to recover. He felt no guilt about the struggle that he'd won and that so many others had lost. A small smile curled his lips. He had heard Quantrill had been killed and his skull sent back to Ohio, where it had been lost. He had kept his head; Quantrill hadn't.

No guilt about that at all.

“We are making money,” she said, turning back to the ledger, “but we need to restock. Our whiskey supply is distressingly low.”

“That's why Tom was heading up to Denver, to get new shipments.”

She nodded somberly.

“What happened to the whiskey peddlers? A town like Taos ought to have them fighting their way through Raton Pass to supply you.”

“I don't know. As I said, Tom always handled that part of the business. I was more a numbers wrangler. This and tending bar.” She thumped the ledger.

“You hear anything about Pierre?” he asked suddenly. “He thought he was entitled to the money. Nobody walks away from a pie when he expects to get at least one piece.”

“I haven't heard anything more of him. I think he left town,” she said.

Slocum doubted that. The former barkeep had been too furious to ride off and not look back. He decided he needed to track the man down and settle the score before considering other saloon business. He downed his water and started to stand when a half-dozen men came in. Slocum sank back into the chair and reached across for the gun butt hanging on his left side.

“You're a dead man if you throw down, Slocum.” The owlhoot gestured to the men flanking him. Both leveled shotguns. “I'm Lucas Deutsch and this is my little brother, Timothy.”

“Little brother” meant the same as calling a fat man “Skinny.” Timothy Deutsch's hat brushed the ceiling. His shoulders were the span of a bull's horns. He opened and closed hands the size of quart jars, as if fantasizing about wrapping them around someone's neck and squeezing out the life.

Slocum's sharp eyes picked out the liquor stains on Lucas Deutsch's vest, a silent testimony to his sloppiness in breaking bottles in the Black Hole's back room a week ago. Which of the other men had been with Deutsch hardly mattered. It hadn't been his “little” brother. Slocum would have identified a hulking giant like him in a flash.

He scowled, pursued his lips, then asked, “I've seen you boys before, haven't I? On the road to Denver?” From the way Timothy Deutsch surged forward, he knew he had hit a nerve.

Slocum gauged his distance and the attack perfectly. He shoved out his foot, caught Deutsch's boot toe, causing him to stumble. Moving fast, Slocum slammed his fist into the back of Timothy Deutsch's skull, stunning him. He knocked away the ten-gallon hat, grabbed the man's greasy hair, and pulled straight back so his throat was taut.

“Kill him,” Lucas Deutsch snapped to his henchmen.

“Do that and your brother's blood will make a mighty big puddle on the floor.”

Slocum shifted his weight but kept his knee in the center of Deutsch's broad back to show that he had a knife blade pressed against his windpipe.

Lucas Deutsch waved off his gunmen. He stepped around, hand resting on the six-shooter he carried slung low on his hip. Some men merely pretended to be shootists. Slocum saw nothing in this Deutsch's behavior to make him think any part of it was a bluff. The butt of his six-gun was well worn. From what Slocum could see, the pistol was well tended so it wouldn't fail when Deutsch needed it most.

“Don't cut his throat. If you do, she'll be the first to catch a pound of lead.” Lucas Deutsch pointed to Annabelle.

“Go to hell,” she flared. “I'll—”

“Quiet, Annabelle,” Slocum said. “Lower the guns and I won't spray his blood on my nice clean floor.”

For some reason Deutsch found this funny. He laughed until tears came to his eyes. He wiped them away with his bandanna, then ordered his men outside.

Only when they had left the saloon did Slocum let the giant off the floor. Timothy Deutsch growled like an animal and started to grab Slocum with his bare hands.

“Heel, boy. We got business. Go outside with the others.”

“Luke, I—”

“Do it.”

There wasn't any question as to which of the Deutsch brothers called the shots. Timothy lumbered out, ducking to keep from banging his head on the low doorway.

“You just made yourself a terrible enemy,” Lucas Deutsch warned.

“Don't care. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

“Timothy? I didn't mean him. I meant
me
. You made me look dumb in front of my boys. I need to do something to get back my good name.” Deutsch hooked a toe around a chair leg and pulled it around, where he could sit facing Slocum and Annabelle. “I was going to offer you all the whiskey you wanted at ten dollars a bottle, but now I can't do that. I do that and the boys think I'm going soft.”

“Ten dollars?” Annabelle cried. “Even shipping it from Denver, we wouldn't pay five!” She half stood, then saw Slocum shaking his head, and subsided with ill grace.

He sat beside her as much to keep her in check as to watch Deutsch's reactions. He dropped his knife on the table. It clattered and then silence filled the saloon. Outside Deutsch's men laughed and joked. A team in the street clattered by. From the sound it made, a wheel was close to falling off. Children played a game but soon quieted, probably because of the small gang outside the saloon door.

Inside the Black Hole, the silence became oppressive. Slocum waited. Deutsch had to fill it with words. When he did, they would be more honest than anything he'd said so far.

“Nobody in Taos buys whiskey that's not distilled by the Deutsch family,” he said.

“You stopped the whiskey peddlers from coming!” Annabelle sounded outraged.

“A month back. The last one met an unfortunate accident trying to sneak into New Mexico Territory over La Veta Pass.” Deutsch shook his head in mock sadness. “Wagon, team, and driver toppled over a cliff. Must have fallen five hundred feet. Never heard such pitiful cries in all my life. All the way down.”

“From the team?” Annabelle asked in a low voice.

“From the damned fool whiskey peddler who thought he could cut into my market. You buy at twenty dollars a bottle or you don't buy at all.” Deutsch stood so quickly the chair crashed to the floor. “How much you want? We call it Taos Lightning because it's got that kind of a kick.”

“We can't afford that much!” Annabelle looked at Slocum, fire in her eyes.

“If you'd played nice, I'd've sold it to you for ten.”

“You better leave before you regret it,” Slocum said. He fought to keep his own anger in check.

Deutsch laughed harshly, then followed his brother and the rest into the bright afternoon sun. The sound of their boots faded until only normal noises came through the door.

“Tom never told me. That's why he went to Denver.”

“The horses I took from the road agents all had X Bar X brands. The Deutsch family controlling all the whiskey in town explains why Rory Deutsch was all upset over seeing the horses. He thought his boys had been killed.”

Slocum thought on this. Lucas Deutsch had been one of those waylaying Tom Harris, but the identity of the other two was up in the air. He had been at a distance. One could have been the giant Timothy Deutsch. The other he had the distinct impression of being smaller, small like Rory Deutsch himself, but he could have compared that man with the giant and assumed no one was possibly so big.

“How many sons does Rory Deutsch have?”

Annabelle said, “I don't know. Word was they were on the trail and only got back a month or two ago.”

“About the time the whiskey drought hit town,” Slocum said. “The boys came home and immediately went into business other than raising cattle.”

“We can't afford that much for a bottle, John. We get thirty-five shots from a bottle and charge a dime. We're making three-fifty and paying twenty for a bottle? We'd lose sixteen-fifty for every bottle we sold!”

“Can't see cowboys forking over sixty cents for a shot of whiskey, even if it is good. You ever hear of this Taos Lighting before?” He saw she hadn't. “We need to talk with other owners.”

“To unite! We all present a unified front to the Deutsches and we can get our business back to normal!”

Slocum wasn't sure what normal meant, but Annabelle had the right idea.

They closed up the saloon and went to talk with the owner of the Santa Fe Drinking Emporium. Pete sat out front, feet propped up on a nail keg, noisily napping in the sun. It was about siesta time, but Slocum would disturb the sleep of the dead to get back at the Deutsch family. He knew in his gut Lucas and his gang had killed Tom Harris and then tried to extort money from his sister. Nothing about that set well with Slocum.

“Pete, wake up, you lazy bones,” Annabelle said, shaking the man's shoulder. He snorted, started, and pushed his hat up to see who'd interrupted his sleep.

“I musta died and gone straight to Heaven 'cuz I'm seein' an angel. Ain't nobody else who'd disturb my siesta.”

“Lucas Deutsch and his brother just came by to sell me—us—whiskey at an exorbitant price.”

Slocum watched how Pete reacted to Annabelle's news. Earlier she had accused him of feeling guilty about living through the war when so many others hadn't. If she wanted a display of guilt on a man's face, she need only look at Pete. He couldn't even meet her gaze.

“Doin' that to all of us.”

“You buy that Taos Lightning from him?” Slocum asked.

“Real fiery shit, that stuff. Liquid death.” Even as he said it, he looked around as if he might have been overheard. “Not that. Nobody'd die from it.”

“Who's died drinking it? The Taos Lightning?” Slocum demanded.

“Rumors, that's all. Not more 'n a dozen folks,” Pete said reluctantly when he saw Slocum wasn't falling for such a quick lie. “And the ones what went blind, don't know how many of them. Folks only care about gettin' knee-walkin' drunk. This whiskey's so strong ain't many that can swill enough to actually die. Or go blind.”