The Killing Breed (16 page)
Authors: Frank Leslie
“Ho-ho,” the young man said, squinting at the pad and scribbling. “Steak . . . potato. Ho-ho. Good!”
Then he shuffled quickly off toward the old woman in the kitchen, and Miller said, “Ho-Ho,” and the others chuckled.
The young man returned with stone mugs of coffee, and set them in front of the outlaws and Faith. When he’d scampered off once more, in answer to the old woman’s ordering bark for clean plates, Garza spiced his coffee from a small, hide-covered flask. Before he could slip the flask back into his coat, Miller grabbed it out of his hand. The thick-necked blond grinned as he tipped the liquor into his own coffee, then handed the flask across the table to Temple, his cobalt blue eyes flashing crazily.
“Chrissakes, Chulo,” the lead bounty hunter said, shaking his head with mock disgust. “Ain’t I taught you no manners at all?”
Garza cursed, frowning at the flask, which Temple held out to Faith, cocking a brow. “Shot?”
Holding her mug in both hands in front of her chin, Faith blew on the hot, coal black belly wash. “No, thanks. I’ll wait till I’m shut of you boys. Then I’ll celebrate.”
Temple and Miller chuckled, and Garza cursed, narrowing those dark, deep-set eyes at her as he took the flask back from Temple and tucked it back into his coat.
Faith sneered at the Mexican and, sipping her coffee, glanced casually around the dim room. Plumes of tobacco smoke rose from the freighters’ table and from that of the Arizona Rangers. A loud conversational din filled the room, echoing off the log walls.
Faith glanced around casually, her mind racing, squeezing her stone coffee mug between her sweat-slick hands.
Behind her, the fire in the cookstove snapped and wheezed, and the old woman hummed softly to herself while the young Chinaman busily scrubbed plates in a tin dishpan. The beans bubbled and a coffeepot chugged. Outside, one of the mules brayed and another answered.
“Ah, shit,” groaned one of the freighters, raking his chair back from his table. “Sounds like Bennie and Jim are gettin’ into it again!”
He rose heavily from his chair—a heavy, bald gent with broad hips and shoulders—and, shrugging into his knee-length buffalo coat and donning his felt sombrero, sauntered through the door and outside.
“What do you suppose he’s gonna do to her?” Garza said, grinning at Faith from across the table. He was turned sideways in his chair, a boot hiked on a knee, twin plumes of blue cigar smoke jetting from both pitted nostrils.
“Who?” Miller asked, his voice just audible above the room’s low, conversational roar.
“Thornton—who do you think?” Garza grunted. “Santa Claus?”
“I think he’s gonna have some fun with her,” Miller rasped, dipping his chin to his chest and regarding Faith from beneath his thin white brows. He raked his weird blue eyes across her amply filled blouse showing through the unbuttoned flaps of her mackinaw. “A whole lot of fun . . . before”— he ran a finger across his neck, a quick slashing motion just above his knotted green neckerchief—“he cuts her throat from ear to ear!”
Garza laughed. Lounging back in his chair and chewing as much as smoking a cheap cigar, Temple scowled and looked around to make sure no one had seen or heard.
Faith suppressed a shudder as she set her coffee mug down—chilled as much by the prospect of meeting Thornton again as by Temple realizing he was sitting ten feet away from Arizona Rangers.
She took her slightly shaking hands away from the coffee mug. “While you boys think about it,” she said, “I think I’ll use the privy.”
“Now look what you did, Miller!” Garza slapped the blond hardcase’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “You got her so frightened she has dampened her drawers!”
As Faith slid her chair back and rose, Temple casually turned to her, grabbing her wrist and tipping his head back to smile up at her through the smoke wafting from his cigar. “Now, honey, do you really think I’d let you tramp around alone back there? This is Apache and cutthroat country. No tellin’ what might happen.”
He winked at her mockingly, then glanced at Miller. Keeping his voice low and mild, he said, “Go with her. But leave her alone or I’ll cut your nuts off.”
“Why do I have to go?” Miller complained, canting his head toward Garza. “Why not him?”
“’Cause I’m sendin’ you,” Temple growled.
When Miller had gained his feet, cursing under his breath and taking a long sip of his whiskey-laced coffee, Temple released Faith’s hand. She turned and headed toward the door to the left of the kitchen counter and the stove, hearing Miller’s thudding heels and chinking spurs behind her.
As she neared the back counter, she spied the young Chinaman’s notepad and pencil, which she had seen a minute ago, when she’d raked her gaze casually behind her. The pad and pencil lay at the left end of the counter, about four feet to the right of Faith’s path to the back door.
Her pulse sang in her ears as she eyed the stubby brown pencil, its lead dulled to a round nub. That’s all she needed. She could find something to write on in the privy. But how could she grab the pencil with Miller right behind her?
Chapter 13
When Faith was about three feet from the counter, she saw the chair angled out from the table just ahead and to the right of her. She angled toward it while turning her head as if to inspect a small heliograph on the wall to her left.
She caught a leg of the chair with the toe of her right boot, and stumbled forward, pushing slightly off her left foot and throwing herself up against the counter. She gave a mock-startled groan and closed her hand over the pencil.
“Jesus,” she grunted.
“Christ, girl,” Miller chuckled behind her. “I guess beauty and grace don’t necessarily go together.”
She pushed off the counter, palming the pencil and furtively poking it into her hip pocket, scowling up at Miller while blowing a wisp of hair from her eye.
“Grace and beauty—I reckon that’s your department, Miller.”
She looked behind the stocky blond to see the three Rangers glancing at her out the corner of their eyes and chuckling bemusedly. Apparently, her own gang hadn’t seen the maneuver, because Temple and Garza were conversing with Manley and Benny Freeze at the table behind them.
The burly freighter had just entered the roadhouse again, and his bulky hobnailed boots pounded the floorboards, and his deep voice boomed as he announced, “I think Bennie was tryin’ to get into Jim’s feed sack again—the pigheaded devil! Sneakier’n a reservation ’Pache!”
Faith gave Miller a caustic snort and continued past the end of the counter.
Feeling the slim, solid pencil nestled inside her pocket, she pushed through the back door and into the sunny, dusty lot behind the roadhouse. She strode past a pile of split wood, frightening a coyote that had been scavenging a trash pile farther out in the shrubs, and headed for the single-hole privy standing beneath a leafless gray cottonwood.
“Need any help?” Miller asked, moseying along behind her, kicking a rusty can.
“Don’t get your hopes up.”
Swallowing the dry knot in her throat, Faith opened the squeaky privy door. Inside, the smell of human waste was almost suffocating. She closed the door and punched the locking nail home, then looked around quickly. A pile of time-yellowed dime novels lay on the warped boards to the left of the hole.
Faith reached for one of the paper-covered books, which the large black letters on the front announced as THE ADVENTURES OF PISTOL PETE AND ARIZONA KATE. Below the title was a sketch of a man and a woman leaning out from their horses to kiss each other on the lips.
There was a sharp
crack
, almost as loud as a pistol shot, and Faith jerked with a gasp. For a second she thought that Miller had fired a shot at the privy. But then, hearing him chuckle, she realized he’d thrown a rock at the door.
crack
, almost as loud as a pistol shot, and Faith jerked with a gasp. For a second she thought that Miller had fired a shot at the privy. But then, hearing him chuckle, she realized he’d thrown a rock at the door.
“Sorry,” the thick-necked blond said in a mocking, nasal twang. “Hope I didn’t scare ya.”
“Your pa must have spared the rod, Miller,” Faith said, swallowing again and taking a deep breath to quell her hammering heart.
“That he shore did,” Miller said. “I reckon he was too busy with girls like you to much care what his boy was doin’. Yessir, I had the run of the town!”
Another rock barked against the privy door. Faith’s hand jerked away from the book once more, and she bit back a curse as she glared through the cracks between the privy’s vertical boards at the stocky figure milling about the wood pile, kicking rocks, and chuckling.
“Quite the idyllic childhood,” Faith said, leaning forward once more to pluck the book from the top of the stack.
“You could say that,” Miller allowed.
She quickly sat back over the hole, laid the book in her lap, and threw back the cover to the title page. Beneath the title, the ink bleeding from copper-colored water stains, there were a good three inches of white space. As Miller continued yammering out in the yard, his voice rising and falling as he turned this way and that, bored and owly as a schoolyard bully, Faith pulled the pencil out of her pocket.
Trying in vain to keep her hand from shaking, she touched the nub to her tongue, then pressed the lead to the rough pulp paper, scribbling quickly. She kept the note short and simple, merely telling the Rangers who she was and that she’d been abducted and she’d appreciate their help.
She signed her name at the bottom, having barely made room for it. She’d no sooner finished before she quickly jerked her head up with a soft gasp.
Outside rose the soft ring of a boot spur, and then Miller said something too low for her to hear. Another man said something in a raspy, slightly high-pitched voice.
Faith leaned forward from the throne and turned her head this way and that, peering through the cracks between the boards. Miller leaned against the wood pile, muscular arms crossed on his chest, talking to someone—a man several inches taller than he—standing to one side, thumbs hooked in his back pockets.
“The girl’s in there now,” Miller said. “Should be done in a minute, but I ain’t heard from her. She mighta fallen in.”
He and the other man chuckled. Faith squinted through a crack just right of the door. As the taller man turned slightly toward the privy, tobacco smoke puffing around his gray-mustached face, the brassy sunlight flashed off something shiny on his chest.
A badge.
Faith cursed softly. It was one of the Rangers. Now Miller and the others would know about the lawmen.
Faith swallowed quickly and looked around, wondering what to do. Then she stared calmly through the crack once more. Miller and the Ranger conversed in a desultory way, the Ranger yawning and lifting his hat to run a hand through his thick silver hair.
What was she worried about? The man was about to use the privy. That took care of the problem of how to get him the note!
Faith looked around for a place to put the note so the Ranger wouldn’t miss it. She could set it to either side of the hole, but there was a chance the breeze sifting through the tracks might blow it onto the floor and he’d mistake it for trash.
She looked at the door’s latching nail. Her chest fluttered as though butterflies had just hatched in her belly. Leaning forward, she gently lifted the nail from the eye and impaled the note over the nail’s sharp end.
Other books
Nothin' But Trouble by Jenika Snow
I Waxed My Legs for This? by Holly Jacobs
WhatLiesBeneath by Margo Diamond
Spellbound Falls by Janet Chapman
Chump Change by Dan Fante
Reverence by Angelica Chase
Indentured by Lacey Kane
The Secret of the Chalisa by Subhanand, Dr. Runjhun Saxena
Relentless (Elisabeth Reinhardt Book 1) by Nancy Alexander