Slocum and the Terrors of White Pine County Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  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

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  SLOCUM AND THE LADY DETECTIVE

  Warning Shot

  Leanne hollered something, but her words were swallowed up amid the thunder of her shotgun. Jack yelped in pain and spun around. Pete straightened his gun arm to fire at the man in front of him.

  Since he was that man, Slocum squeezed his trigger and put a round through Pete’s chest. Slocum’s lead punched through Pete’s heart and sent him straight back to hit the ground in a heap. Pete was gone midway through his fall, leaving his eyes wide open to stare straight up into the Great Beyond.

  Cursing to himself, Slocum walked over to where Jack was standing. The rancher’s eyes were still on Leanne and his left arm was a bloody mess.

  “I only meant to scare him,” she insisted.

  “Looks pretty scared to me,” Slocum chuckled.

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  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.

  SLOCUM AND THE TERRORS OF WHITE PINE COUNTY

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Jove edition / February 2011

  All rights reserved.

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-47695-6

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  1

  MCCORD, NEVADA

  The sign nailed to the front of the building marked it as the Fifth Bank of White Pine. Slocum didn’t have the foggiest notion what separated the place from the Fourth or Sixth Banks in the county, but it couldn’t have been much. It was a run-down little storefront in the middle of a run-down town. If nothing else, McCord had some damn good scenery for a man to take in. The Butte Mountains were off to the northwest and the Cherry Creek Mountains stretched out like a wrinkle in the earth to the northeast. A dry wind blew up from the south, laden with plenty of desert sand and grit to rattle against the dirty buildings lining Second Street and shake the windows of houses belonging to folks who were too lazy to move on to somewhere better.

  When Slocum rode into McCord, he swore he’d been there before. He may or may not have been. It was the sort of town that looked like any other when it was being raised or just about to fall down. He didn’t waste a lot of time taking in the sights, though. There were other things to do and the men riding into town with him weren’t about to let him fall away from the plan. Slocum looked up at second-floor windows without paying attention to what may have been on display or how pretty the faces were that stared out through them. He passed his gaze up along the rooftops and then shifted it back down to the street.

  There was a livery stable, a hotel, a few dry goods stores, a surveyor’s office, a couple of saloons, and of course, the bank. Once he’d taken stock of the town to that degree, Slocum flicked his reins and moved with a small procession to a lonely rail along the corner of Second and Wilson Streets.

  There were four men accompanying Slocum into town. Few words had passed between them since they’d gotten close enough to smell the first bit of smoke from McCord’s cooking fires. Even so, they’d communicated plenty through a series of nods toward open windows or subtle turns of their heads in the general direction of a few specific storefronts they’d passed along the way. Now, all eyes were fixed upon the bank. Once they were all off their horses, the men waited for Slocum to start walking before fanning out and falling into step around or behind him.

  As Slocum walked, he allowed his hand to settle upon the grip of his holstered Colt Navy. His eyes were colder than the iron at his hip as he watched every single person who crossed the street or so much as glanced in his direction from any other vantage point. McCord was built on the gold or silver found by miners who wore their hands to nubs chipping away at any of the mountains in the distance. Plenty of strangers came to town looking for a place to hang their hat for a night or a good sourc
e of whiskey to wash away the dust that had been kicked up at the back of some godforsaken cave. Most of those men came to the bank first, which was why they often arrived in groups and wore their guns in plain sight.

  In nearby sections of town, Slocum was certain that another sort of resident was being informed of the new arrivals. Working girls, saloon owners, and gamblers alike had plenty of ways to part a man from his money, and strangers who rode in from the mountains often had plenty to spend. There was something about gold money that made a man happier than the regular kind. It was similar to found money, but a little closer to winnings taken away from a poker game. There was luck involved with mining, mixed in with some educated guesswork and plenty of backbreaking labor. The fruits of those labors were sweet indeed and it was never too soon to trade in a filthy campsite inhabited by stinking men for a soft bed and a lily-scented woman to share it with.

  Slocum crossed the street and stepped aside to allow a woman and her child to open the front door of the bank and get outside. “Ma’am,” he said curtly.

  Although she returned his nod and showed him a quick smile, the woman was anxious to move along and dragged her boy by the hand to make sure he kept up with her.

  Without turning around, Slocum said, “Stay put. You don’t want to spook the others in there.”

  The man who was closest to Slocum was a wide-shouldered fellow whose hair looked like dead, yellowed grass that had been hastily glued to his scalp. Scowling from beneath a squat, narrow-brimmed hat, he replied, “You do your job and don’t worry about us.”

  “That’s right,” a shorter fellow with a thick crop of red hair added. “If anything, it’ll spook folks to have all of us hanging around here like we’re about to shoot up the place.”

  Until then, the man who was wrapped up in coils of rope and draped over the back of the blond man’s horse was easy to overlook. He’d lain quietly in place like a bedroll and had been covered by a blanket so only his boots stuck out. The redhead pulled the blanket off, unloaded the passenger from the horse, draped the blanket around his shoulders, and shoved him toward the blond fellow.

  Slocum let out a weary breath and opened the door. Knowing it wouldn’t do any good to keep talking, he simply stepped inside and let the door go. Sure enough, it knocked against the hands of the blond man, who refused to stay put.

  The front of the bank was barely large enough to accommodate half a dozen people. It was separated from the other portion of the lobby by a counter that stretched from one wall to another topped by a series of grated teller windows encased within sturdy steel frames. The bars in front of each window weren’t rusty, but were coated in chipped gray paint that had flaked off to collect on the small open area where the bars met with the wooden counter like the doorway of a poorly maintained jailhouse. Of the three windows, only one of them was manned by a teller. He was a chunky young man who’d sweated through his white shirt despite a relatively cool breeze that rolled through town. “What can I do for you gentlemen?” he asked.

  “We need to speak to the manager,” Slocum said. “Is he in?”

  “Mr. Emberson is occupied at the moment,” he said while looking at the man wrapped in the blanket. “What can I do for you?”

  The blond man stepped forward until he was close enough to place his hands flat upon the counter and lean down hard enough to make the polished planks creak beneath his weight. “You can get the manager. It’s important.”

  Slocum could see the panic starting to brew behind the teller’s eyes as the front door was pushed open again. Before the sweaty man behind the bars could get too worked up, Slocum turned and motioned to the others. “Just stay outside,” he said. “No need to ruffle any feathers here. We’ve got things well in hand.”

  The teller relaxed a bit once the other men backed out.

  “Now,” Slocum continued, “about an appointment with Mr. Emberson. Any chance we could get in to see him today?”

  “What’s this regarding?”

  “My partners and I have uncovered a vein of silver in the Buttes that’s thicker than a baby’s arm. Soon as we find a fair man to buy it off us, we’ll be of a mind to make a deposit. Any suggestions on where we can find a fair man around here?”

  Having drifted back into more familiar territory, the clerk replied, “I can go back and see when he can spare a moment.”

  “That’d be just fine,” Slocum said with a forced smile that was smeared with the sludge that had passed for coffee back at the camp they’d left behind.

  It had been a long stretch since the last time he’d been in any town. Slocum was no stranger to sleeping under the stars or fending for himself on the open trail, but it still took a little while to adjust to having walls on either side of him and a level floor beneath his feet. Even lowering his voice to keep it from rattling the windows in their frames took some effort after spending so much time either in silence or shouting to be heard over the constant thunder of hooves beating against the ground and the roar of wind battering his face and chest. He kept that in mind while shoving the man bound by the ropes to a seated position so his back was against the bottom of the teller window and he was out of sight from anyone behind it.

  The man accompanying the clerk from the back room a few seconds later would have been hard-pressed to fit into any surroundings. He was tall enough to fill up most of the doorway leading to the manager’s office and wore a dark suit that had obviously been pulled off a rack without the first bit of tailoring. It hung off his shoulders just fine, but the sleeves were too short to cover the bony wrists extending from them. The shirt beneath it was too tight, and even though Slocum couldn’t quite make out the lower portion of his trousers, he was sure they hung just as poorly on him.

  “Mr. Emberson,” the clerk said, “these men would like to have a word with you. They say it’s urgent.”

  Emberson approached the counter, placed two small hands upon the wooden surface, and leaned down so he could look through the bars at Slocum and the blond man next to him. “What can I do for you?” he asked in a grating rasp.

  Seeing the manager up close was a little jarring. His skin was transparent enough to show the veins that formed an intricate web beneath it. Now that Emberson’s head was angled forward, Slocum could see the silver-dollar-sized bald spot within his white hair that was positioned slightly off-center on his scalp. A pug nose and naturally frowning mouth put him somewhere between stern and comical. Judging by the harsh impatience written in the bank manager’s eyes, Slocum would have placed his bet on the former rather than the latter.

  “We’re checking on the whereabouts of a courier that passed through here,” Slocum said. “Had to have been within the last few days.”

  Emberson’s eyes shifted slowly back and forth between both men in front of him. “That’s not what I was told your business was about.”

  “I know.”

  “And you are?”

  “We’re the ones askin’ about the courier,” the blond man said. “You seen him or not?”

  “Nobody mentioned anything about there being another party coming after the courier,” Emberson said in his voice that still sounded like rocks being dragged across dry slate.

  Slocum’s expression brightened. “Ah, so he was here.”

  The letters on his door marked Emberson as a manager and everything else about him made him look like an undertaker, but he sure as hell wasn’t a poker player. Slocum’s words struck a nerve, which was reflected in a series of little twitches that ran up and down the length of his sunken face. “If you don’t have any more business, I’ll be getting back to my own.”

  Slocum leaned closer to the bars and prepared to speak. Before he could get a single word out, the blond man next to him shouldered him aside and drew his .44. “We told you our business, you damn ghoul,” he said while thumbing back the .44’s hammer. “Fetch what that courier brung you and be quick about it.”

  Slocum didn’t take his eyes off Emberson, but made sure to foll
ow the blond man’s movements from the corner of his eye. “No need to get jumpy, Darrel. These are businessmen. Men of reason.” Since he knew trying to get Darrel to lower his gun was hopeless, Slocum tried to use its presence in his favor. The clerk was petrified to the point of being stiffer than Emberson’s starched shirt, so he wouldn’t be a problem for the moment. Locking eyes with the bank manager, Slocum said, “They’re the sort of men who work things out to their advantage. Isn’t that right?”

  Muffled voices drifted in from outside, followed by a response from one of the men that had ridden into town with Slocum. There was a brief exchange, followed by hurried footsteps moving down the boardwalk and away from the bank.

  “I don’t even know what the courier brought,” Emberson said.

  Slocum shrugged ever so slightly. “But I’m sure you know where it’s at.”

  “My guess is the safe,” Darrel said while raising his gun even higher. When the barrel tapped against one of the bars of the teller’s cage, the clerk jumped as if the .44 had gone off. “Go get it!”

  Emberson took half a step back and allowed his hands to drift beneath the counter. Thanks to his short sleeves, the movement was tough to miss and Slocum responded by resting his Colt Navy on the wooden surface to aim through the little opening meant for transactions. “Unless you’re reaching for the safe, I suggest you keep your hands where I can see ’em.”

  Slowly, the manager straightened up and brought his hands to chest level. “Do you know who sent that courier?”

  “Does it matter?”

  When Emberson smiled, it was akin to watching a smirk drift onto the face of a freshly unearthed corpse. “It most certainly does.”