Slocum and the Santa Fe Sisters Read online

  Am I Clear Now?

  In the room’s dim light, Slocum checked the loads in his.44 and then holstered it. Better go face these devils, whoever they are. When the door opened, they all went for their gun butts.

  “Hold your fire,” McKee said. “This is my partner, Slocum. Slocum, meet John King and his associates.”

  King, a portly man in a dark oilskin duster, pulled the coat back and exposed an ivory-handled Colt with a steer head carved on it. Nickel plated, too.

  “Maybe you know where that slinking Wolf Ripley’s at?”

  “He may be going to sprout daisies come the spring thaw.”

  “How is that?”

  “I found his woman about two months or so back in a dust storm. I brought her here and she had no idea where he ended up. They’d come under attack and she lit out.”

  “She’s lying to cover for the sumbitch,” King swore.

  Slocum shook his head. “She doesn’t know where he’s at. Am I clear enough?”

  “You covering for some red whore?”

  “Listen, King, you call her nothing but ‘ma’am’ or I’ll blow you to kingdom come.”

  King sniffed out his nose.

  That was all it took. Slocum drew and fired at him. King’s left hand shot to his ear, and he screamed, “You shot me.”

  “You want the other one notched?”

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  SLOCUM AND THE SANTA FE SISTERS

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2013 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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  ISBN: 978-1-101-62202-5

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Jove mass-market edition / April 2013

  Cover illustration by Sergio Giovine.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Contents

  Am I Clear Now?

  MORE ALL-ACTION WESTERN SERIES

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  1

  The wind hollered without a break for his ears. There was no escaping its screaming whine. In the blurry brown daylight, hard-driving grit slashed at his eyes and the exposed facial features above his tightly tied kerchief mask. Even with his mouth covered by the thick cloth, he still tasted diamond-like grains of grit riding on the surface of his teeth. With his spurs constantly gouging the bay horse to wade on into the force of the Texas dry hurricane, John Slocum huddled in his saddle under a flapping wool blanket he used for warmth. He knew the bay and his packhorse had made little progress in his day-long attempt to reach Colonel Gill McKee’s Fort Contention out on Cap Rock.

  He spotted, in the storm, a small huddled procession heading toward him. Two heavily loaded burros and a small figure leaning into the wind pulling them to follow. They had to be lost. He reined the bay in their direction. When he reached them, the person doing the leading turned her head away from the wind, and he could make out the face of a young Indian woman.

  He dismounted and used the downwind side of his horse to block some of the force.

  “Are you lost?” he shouted over the howling wind.

  She nodded. “Look for Wolf,” she called back.

  “Who’s he?”

  “Sells whiskey.”

  “Your man?” Even his horse as a defense didn’t break much of the entire strength of the blast they were under. She nodded to his question.

  “This crazy weather will settle in a day or so. We need to get under a bluff.”

  “Where?” She shook her head like that was impossible.

  Her short-cut hair kept blowing around on her face and into her eyes, forcing her to push it back with both hands. Sometime in the past, her thin nose had been broken and had healed with a slight, but not unattractive, crookedness. The thin copper lips were straight, serious lines, and she did not crack even a small smile. But the round dark brown pupils showed the fear she held inside for the situation that they were in as well as her wariness toward the tall stranger.

  “How long has he been gone?” />
  She held up two fingers.

  “Two days?”

  She nodded.

  He pulled the brim of his hat down to better secure it. “You have any water?”

  “Not much.”

  He took the large canteen from his saddle horn and took the lid off it. She gave him the burros’ lead ropes to hold, held the canteen up with both hands, and sipped from it slowly, then gave it back.

  “Muchas gracias, señor.” One-handed, she brought the blanket back over her head and tried to fix her hair to see again. “Where can we go?”

  “If I knew that, I’d be there. This wind is driving me crazy. Would you like some jerky?” Hell, if she hadn’t had any water, she’d probably not eaten anything either.

  She agreed with a nod and he got some out of his saddlebags. With her back against the bay’s side, she nodded her approval and began to chew on the small dark slab of dried beef.

  “Where are you going?” she asked between bites.

  “McKee’s Fort Contention.”

  “Is it close?” Her look at him turned serious.

  “It should be, but I’m afraid I might have ridden by it.”

  Pushing her hair aside, she wearily agreed. “You might have.”

  “What’s on the burros?”

  She shook her head in disgust. “Only whiskey.”

  “This damn wind has to go down—sometime. Let’s stay here and maybe it will let up.”

  “I only have this blanket.” She indicated the one flapping over her head.

  He nodded. “I have a small canvas tent and some stakes. We can hobble the animals. Stake the tent down and get under it. It won’t make much of a shelter, but we can be out of the damn wind.”

  She nodded again, as if anything was better than being out in that infernal blast. Slocum left her to hold the horses and unloaded the tent. The wind nearly tore it away from him. With a short-handled farrier hammer, he drove the stakes down and then undid the tent. The wind’s force would not let him tie it on those pegs. He used the two upright short poles and then the gale wouldn’t let him hold down the other side and drive in those pegs, but eventually he managed to get it set up.

  They hobbled the animals with their tails turned into the wind and also tied their leads together. He brought in the canteen, his saddlebags, and his bedroll. The woman quickly rolled it out to sit on while gale forces worked hard on the small tent sides. Slocum crawled in to join her. The ends were tied down securely, and as he lay down on the bedroll, he thought he had escaped to a new land.

  He removed his boots and gun belt, but with no appetite for food, he told the woman to help herself. She did so in the darkness. He crawled under the blankets, spreading his cover blanket over the others. Finally on his back under the covers, he thanked God for this small sanctuary.

  “When you get through eating, crawl in.”

  She nodded, and he soon was asleep. Sometime in the night, he awoke. What was wrong? No wind. But his breath came out in big steamy clouds in the near darkness. He got up carefully after feeling for the woman’s small body, not under his covers but wrapped in her own blanket close by. He untied the tent end by feel. Open at last, he stared out at a blanket of ghostly white carpeting the ground. Large flakes were falling so he went back inside and pulled his boots on.

  He came outside again and emptied his bladder behind a rock. The flakes settled and melted on his face as he buttoned his fly and returned to the tent. What next?

  “Plenty of snow,” she said, peering out of the tent at the new sight.

  “Plenty, but the wind’s died down, thank God.”

  “Sí.” She nodded her head, and he crawled past her to get inside. Then she went out, for the same purpose, he figured.

  What was her name? He would ask her when she came back. The name “Wolf” meant nothing to him. There were lots of whiskey traders out there in vacant West Texas. They had to avoid local law and rangers as well as some U.S. marshals who wanted to collect federal taxes on their wares of snake bite medicine. Most of these peddlers were more Injun than white and lived on the border of civilization, making money selling arms and firewater to the renegades. Tougher than most, they lived on a thin line the savages walked beyond the arm of the law.

  The woman crawled back inside the dark tent on her hands and knees.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “What does he call me?”

  He nodded. “That or what you like to be called.”

  “He calls me Bitch.”

  “What do your people call you?”

  “Puta.”

  “Let’s try again.” He discovered by bowing his head, he could sit up on the bedroll in the darkness. “What were you called as a girl?”

  “My name was Julie Henry on the reservation registration. The government gave me that name.”

  “Will I call you Julie?” He saw her smile for the first time in the faint light. “How old are you?”

  “Maybe twenty.” She turned up her palms, sitting facing him in the dim starlight.

  “I was born on the reservation in the mountains. When I was put on the rolls, I was, they said, five. I did not understand the white man’s way of such things. Later I was married to a Navajo man and he was murdered by his enemies. Because he died, the leader said I had encouraged them to kill him.” She shook her head to deny that. “So they sold me to a trader as a slave. He beat me. I ran away and lived like an animal in a cave. Wolf found me and took me along.”

  “He did not beat you.”

  She held one finger up. “He beat me one time. That night I woke him up and held his manhood in one hand and his sharp skinning knife in my other. I told him, ‘You beat me again, I will cut it off while you sleep.’ He never beat me again.”

  “Julie, I damn sure won’t beat you.”

  She giggled. Indian women did not laugh but they giggled over funny things. She was no inexperienced teenager; she had learned survival.

  He needed to figure out some things at first light. How far away were they from McKee’s Fort? That, in this traceless land, would be hard to figure out, but otherwise they’d come to some road that wagon trains took heading west. Be hard to miss those tracks. The Comanche were in winter quarters in Palo Duro Canyon, no doubt hiding from the Army.

  He’d been there once. Best-kept secret in the world. The well-watered canyon was several hundred feet below the rim of the rest of the high plains country. Had lots of cedars for firewood, grass for their ponies, a free-flowing creek, plenty of game, and a much better climate than up on Cap Rock. It was only a matter of time until the Army found them there and ended that paradise for the tough horsemen. The Cheyenne also wintered there and had a peace agreement with the Comanche.

  Strange how the two of them could be a few or a hundred miles from McKee’s place. Slocum thought his course had been right until the dust storm came. Where was her man? How did they get separated? Was she running away from him? No way to know. She might tell him later. Then again, she might not.

  2

  They rode north for two days, their only source of water some puddles of melted snow. Then Slocum spotted McKee’s tall flagstaff on a far rise. Riding double behind Slocum, Julie leaned forward as he pointed it out to her.

  “Who is he?”

  “A crazy old mountain man who trapped beavers fifty years ago in the Rockies. He hates civilization and calls this his land. He has several common-law Indian wives and some Mexicans who work for him.”

  She leaned forward and made a face at him. “Why you go there?”

  “No one bothers me there.”

  He saw her nod to indicate that she understood.

  She’d proved to be his near-silent companion the entire trip. At times she’d grasped his canvas coat to catch her balance or sh
e’d stretched a stiff leg forward and lightly bumped one of his. They’d had only some jerky and dry cheese with crackers to eat. Even the occasional jackrabbits that popped up looked too skinny to shoot for meat, and the cold had driven the snakes into hibernation. He had not missed eating them, even though snake wasn’t half bad when you were hungry enough.

  He settled down riding toward his goal at last. With a firm grip, he clasped Julie’s thin leg. “We can sleep together in a bed tonight.”

  “If you wish me to.”

  “Of course, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to.”

  She put her hand over his. “I thought after two days together that you didn’t like Indian women.”

  “Whoa, horse!” he shouted. The horse stopped, dropped his head, and pulled up the sparse snow-clogged brown vegetation for a few bites.

  Twisting around in the saddle, he looked her directly in the eye. “Did I say that?”

  She giggled. “Two nights I waited but you never touched me.”

  He reined up the horse again. “I was trying to get us up here.”

  “You did a fine job of that.”

  “Thanks. Then we can celebrate tonight?”

  She hugged him. “I will take a bath.”

  “Let’s both get cleaned up.”

  “Does McKee have enough water for that?”

  “I believe he does. Let’s go, horse. We’ve got a big night planned. She and I are going to celebrate tonight.” He let out a rebel yell that shattered the silence of the open country. Then he said over his shoulder to her, “We better watch Wolf’s liquor at this place. Desperate dry men who come by are always looking for free whiskey.”

  She leaned forward and asked, “Do you drink?”

  “Not much, darling.”

  “He would be mad when he finds me and it is all gone.”

  “Figure he’s alive?”

  She laughed. “Wolf is still alive. He has just not found us yet.”

  “Well, he owes me for finding you.”

  She poked him in the back. “I found you.”

  “Whatever you say, darlin’.”