Blaze! Spanish Gold (Blaze! Western Series Book 18) Read online

  BLAZE!

  SPANISH GOLD

  Ben Boulden

  Blaze! Spanish Gold by Ben Boulden

  Text Copyright 2017 by Ben Boulden

  Series Concept and Characters Copyright 2015 by Stephen Mertz

  Cover Design by Livia Reasoner

  A Rough Edges Press Book

  www.roughedgespress.com

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For Kara and Sarah.

  The two best girls anywhere

  PROLOGUE

  Salt Lake City Trumpeter, March 28, 1875

  Itinerant man found mutilated on West Broadway. Playing children discovered the dead body of an adult Indian male in an alley between Bullard’s Meat Packing and Carson’s Tannery in Salt Lake City late yesterday. Police believe the man’s body was dumped in the alley. At current, there are no leads regarding the man’s name, or his killers.

  Salt Lake City Trumpeter, May 7, 1875

  Elder Gareth Davies found dead at his home at 35 E. So. Temple. Elder Davies, born in Cardiff, Wales, England, died May 6 of an accidental fall while repairing the roof of his stable. Elder Davies, member of the Quorum of the Seventy, is best known for his missionary work with the Uinta Valley Ute tribe in Utah’s Great Basin. Baptizing more than 50 Ute Indians, he was well-liked for his kindness and humanitarian work when the Ute reservation opened a decade ago. He is survived by his wives, Joanna, Mary, Clara, Alice, and Minnie. He leaves behind a legacy of sixteen children and seven grandchildren. Services to be at the Tabernacle, May 9, 10 a.m.

  CHAPTER 1

  J.D. Blaze stopped cold at the unusual sound. The night abandoned buildings huddled along the road were made sinister by the moon’s eerie glow. The street cast in whispery shadow.

  The gunfighter palmed the Colt .44-40 in its cross-draw rig, held his breath to listen. A summer breeze whistled across rough-hewn timber; sweetly scented by sage and juniper. Behind him, disappointed miners shouted when their dice went cold.

  J.D. jumped at the miners’ voices, his Colt cleared leather in a single smooth motion.

  He scowled, shook his head and replaced the big revolver in its holster.

  J.D. smiled at the teasing words he imagined Kate would say about his skittishness. When he thought about her, sitting alone in a saloon unfit for anything alive, especially a beautiful woman like Kate, he hustled toward the hotel to complete his task.

  But the sound bounced again.

  An open-handed slap, fleshy and hard. A wheezing gasp followed by a startled cry and an incomprehensible buzzing whisper.

  J.D. bristled, an icy cold awareness crawled up his spine. A yellow glow at an alley’s entrance between a lawyer’s shop and mercantile. Shadows wavered across the alley’s threshold, long and narrow.

  The whispers stopped, then started again before fading into the night’s warm breeze. J.D. withdrew the Colt from its holster and walked towards the alley. At its entrance, he stepped from the road to the boardwalk and peeked into the lighted passage.

  A man and woman. The woman’s back against the wall, her head forward, chin down. The blue gingham dress hitched above her knees to reveal the pale flesh beneath. The man held her chest with his left hand and with the right explored the darker regions below.

  The woman strained. Her back arched. Her hips twisted as she tried to escape the man’s searching hand. She clasped her fingers together in a fist and punched at her attacker. The blow went wild and skipped harmlessly off his shoulder.

  “Goddammit!” the man hissed before crashing a fist into the woman’s belly.

  Her eyes opened wide with pain, she leaned forward and gagged.

  A ghoulish smile crossed the man’s face in the light’s shadowy flicker. “You’re a real gentlelady, ain’t you? You ask me, that husband of yours is making a mistake.”

  The man giggled, tobacco juice dribbled down his chin.

  “Please, stop.”

  J.D. watched the chaos of man and woman for a few moments while he judged the situation.

  He moved into the alley, Colt raised and pointed at man’s head. “Let the woman go.”

  The tobacco man jerked at the words. His eyes wide with surprise.

  “Who—”

  J.D.’s voice rising, “Let her go now!”

  The man reached for the iron strapped to his leg. His motion self-conscious and slow.

  “You put a finger on that and I’ll cut you low!”

  Tobacco sputtered. His face blotched red in the alley’s syrupy light. Without releasing his grip on the woman, he spun and placed his terrified victim between himself and J.D. The revolver in his hand. Its barrel jabbed the soft flesh beneath the woman’s jaw.

  “You hold it right there, mister. Any closer and I’ll drop her where she stands. A pill in her brain, as certain as a dog’ll bark.”

  The woman stumbled forward.

  Tobacco caught her, pulled her against his chest.

  “Goddamn bitch!”

  J.D. eased his finger from the trigger. He moved to his right for a better angle at the man.

  “You hold it. Right now! God. Damnit!” Tobacco, with a herky-jerky wrist motion, swung the gun’s barrel from the woman to J.D. and back. His hand shaking so hard J.D. feared an accidental discharge.

  J.D. stopped. “No one’s going to hurt you. You put the hog leg down and kick it over here, release the woman. If you do that, we all walk away.”

  Tobacco’s eyes bulged. The whites stained yellow with fear, the pupils tiny and hard. His knuckles whitened on the revolver with a tightening grip. Then, surprising J.D., he hollered, “Gentry! Help! Anybody!”

  With Tobacco’s attention diverted J.D. moved smoothly to his right and opened an angle between the man and his hostage. He aimed the front sight on Tobacco’s forehead. He took a breath and pulled the trigger. The Colt bucked in his hand, flames stretched from its barrel. A red splotch appeared in the center of Tobacco’s forehead. A gray and red splatter danced on the aging pine boards behind.

  The woman fell to her knees, screaming. Her face covered with Tobacco’s splattered blood. Panic raged in her eyes as she looked at J.D. and screamed, “They’ll kill him!”

  She stood on wobbly knees and ran down the alley.

  J.D. holstered the Colt. He took three long strides and kicked the revolver from Tobacco’s dead hand. He looked up as the woman turned from the alley, but before he could follow a shotgun blast bellowed across the alley. It bounced off the walls and rang in J.D.’s ears.

  J.D. froze, one foot slightly in front of the other. He raised his hands above his head.

  “On your knees!”

  J.D. obeyed.

  “Turn around. Nice and slow.”

  J.D. followed the man’s instructions, hands in the air, knees scraping across hardpan, until he was face to face with a wiry-tough man. A shotgun in his hands. Its black bore unblinkingly stared at J.D. A bowler on his head and a bronze star on his chest shimmered the alley’s light.

  “I’m glad to see you, Sheriff.” A good-natured grin on his face.

  “I’m sure you are.” The man motionless as a snake, his lips hardly moved as he spoke.

  A red-faced round man scurried to the lawman’s side. “Is he dead?”

  “Go check, Randy,” the lawman said to the newcomer.

>   “Sure thing, Sheriff.” Randy rushed past J.D. He kneeled next to Tobacco and slapped his face.

  J.D. said, “I’m pretty sure he’s dead.”

  “He sure is,” Randy said.

  “Well,” the Sheriff said to J.D., “killing a deputy’s a hanging offense in my jurisdiction.”

  J.D. sighed. His grin disappeared and he cursed under his breath.

  CHAPTER 2

  The saloon wasn’t the sort of place Kate Blaze would choose to sit alone and the longer J.D. was gone the more uncomfortable she became. Unity’s male population, which accounted for nine out ten of its inhabitants, worked the silver and gold mines scattered across the plateaued landscape that surrounded the town. The better of the men would be at home on a Wednesday night, readying themselves for another hard day’s work. That left the scoundrels, deadbeats and drunkards in a dump like Petey’s Bucket of Blood.

  Kate was thinking all this as she sat at a corner table. Her back against the wall and waited for J.D. to return from his mysterious errand. But she was interrupted by the oddest man she had ever seen. His skin colored alabaster, no hair on his face—not even eyebrows over his pale pink eyes—with a smile as smarmy as any she had seen.

  He removed his pristine cap to reveal a smooth and hairless scalp. He bowed at the waist in a practiced motion. “Good evening to you, ma’am.”

  Kate instinctively pulled her hand away as the man reached across the table for it. She palmed the revolver’s cool grip at her waist.

  The man’s smile widened as he straightened back to his full height, the bowler still in his hand. “I see you are as wary as you are beautiful. Given our surroundings,” he gestured to indicate the grubby saloon and its grubbier clientele, “it is wise for such beauty to be wary.”

  Kate wasn’t one to find fault in the appearance of others, but the man’s pasty skin, pink eyes and hairless head were unsettling. Even more so was his extreme self-confidence.

  “Who are you?” Kate said.

  The alabaster colored man performed a pirouette; spinning and straightening in a single poetic motion. “Marcus Guggenheim at your service. Marcus is my given name, but anyone as charming as you should most definitely call me Marc. If it pleases you, that is.”

  “Marc?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Well—”

  “May I sit with you?”

  Kate removed her hand from the holstered Colt. A suitor, even one as strange as Marcus Guggenheim, she could handle without violence. She smiled and leaned forward in her chair as though she was about to confer a secret. “I appreciate the offer of your company, but my husband is away on a short errand. What I mean is, I would hate for there to be any trouble.”

  “Trouble? I am troubled by the thought of a woman as stunning as you tied to a single man.”

  His smarmy smile made him look like a fish sucking air.

  “My apologies.” Kate looked at the saloon’s entrance, hoping J.D. would appear. “But I’m not interested.”

  Guggenheim took the seat next to her, where J.D. had sat only minutes earlier. “I’m sorry, but I seem to have misplaced your name.”

  Kate laughed. A genuine smile crossed her lips. “You are an odd man. You can’t misplace something you’ve never possessed.”

  “And you’re a wonderful woman.” Alabaster leaned closer to Kate, put his hand on her knee and squeezed. An ingratiating smile on his ugly face, pink flames in his eyes betrayed raw desire.

  Kate tilted her head girlishly, an affectation she had practiced for years. A breezy mischief in her eyes. She leaned closer to Alabaster and placed her right hand on his inner thigh. Her finger tips danced coyly across his cotton trousers.

  Guggenheim gasped. His smile relaxed into a feral grin. He leaned back in the creaky saloon chair, had the audacity to moan.

  “You like that?” Kate whispered.

  “Shall we—”

  Kate found Guggenheim’s soft balls and squeezed.

  Hard.

  Alabaster bucked, tried to stand, but fell back into the chair with a whimper when Kate refused his release. Moaning and squirming, face as purple as a ripened beet, Alabaster balled his left hand and punched at Kate’s midsection. Kate moved forward a few inches and Alabaster’s knuckles skidded harmlessly off her hip and smashed with a crack against Kate’s blackened pine chair.

  Alabaster squealed in pain. His face shaded darker. His lips moved silently.

  Kate adjusted her grip with a satisfying twist. She leaned forward and whispered plainly into Alabaster’s ear, “You ever touch me, talk to me, even look at me again and I’ll make sure your little soldiers lose their step.” She leaned back, still holding her captives, and glared at Alabaster. “You tracking me, Marc?”

  Guggenheim nodded. He gasped between pale lips and small teeth.

  “Did you say something?”

  Guggenheim opened his eyes. The pain visible in the chalky pink irises.

  “Yeah,” he whispered, “I understand.”

  “Good.” Kate released her grip. She good naturedly slapped Guggenheim’s cheek. She stood and straightened her clothing while she kept an eye on the still suffering man, patted his bald head.

  “I’m glad we have an understanding.”

  Kate turned and walked to the saloon’s exit. The place silent except for the click-clack of her boots on the timbered floor. The jangle of her spurs. Her only thought was the appropriate punishment to be meted out to J.D. for leaving her alone in a cesspool like Petey’s Bucket of Blood. A few ideas sparkled, but were lost in a pistol shot’s echoing rumble.

  CHAPTER 3

  A group gathered at an alley’s entrance and covered the main street’s entire width. Kate slowed to a walk as she approached. Her hand firmly on the Colt holstered at her hip. A frenzied excitement filled the air as the men whispered, giggled, pointed and in a few cases, shouted hostilities.

  “Kill him!”

  “Gut the sumbitch!”

  Kate smoothly entered the gathering. She cut a path to the front where she saw J.D. on his knees. His arms stretched high. A nervous look in his eyes as the crowd threatened to become a mob. A fat man paced nervously around a corpse behind J.D. The dead man’s blood and brains fresh on the alley’s hardpan dirt.

  A timber straight man with a professional calm in the night’s chaos held a double-barrel scattergun pointed at J.D.

  “Kill him, Gentry!”

  Gentry, the man with the scattergun, said, “Shut the hell up. All of you! This is my town and any killing will be done in conformity with the law.”

  Gentry’s stillness, his focused concentration on the task, unsettled Kate. He was a professional and that would make him hard to distract. A man uneasily swayed once he had something in his mind. Like J.D. as a murderer. The dead man as a victim.

  Kate moved along the mob’s face until she stood near the darkened mercantile’s front corner. She eased forward a few feet until she caught J.D.’s attention. He looked at her without moving his head. His face expressionless, lips taut.

  With his left-hand Gentry retrieved manacles from his belt, held them towards J.D. and the fat man. The shotgun steady and still. Its bead never wavering from J.D.’s chest.

  “Okay, Randy. When I tell you, fasten these around his wrists.” Gentry tossed the handcuffs underhanded over J.D.’s head. The little man bobbled the handcuffs, dropped them with a clatter to the ground. He glanced at the onlookers with embarrassment, tried his best to ignore a few catcalls—“a chicken leg he’d catch,” and “bankers is known for slippery fingers”—and retrieved the irons with obvious self-consciousness.

  Gentry said to J.D., “You right handed?”

  J.D. nodded.

  “I want you to lower your left hand and stretch your arm as far back, behind you, as you can. Keep your right arm high.”

  “I can do that, Sheriff.” J.D. glanced at Kate, shook his head with a nearly imperceptible motion.

  Kate understood he was asking her
to stand down, to let the scene play out. She moved her hand from the Colt and watched the crowd threaten to burst its seams. She’d seen crowds like this before and it scared her. On a Sunday in Santa Fe when a lookout for a burglary was beaten and hanged by church going folks. Another time in Denver when a little girl was found murdered in a livery stall. The suspect, a slow-witted sixteen-year-old boy, was caught in a copse of trees a few miles from the murder site. Barking dogs treed him like a possum and the townspeople—mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters—pulled him down and tore him to pieces.

  J.D. followed Sheriff Gentry’s instructions with slow, deliberate movements. His right arm straight in the air, his left stretched behind him, his shoulder dipping. A slight tremor in his arms from the effort.

  “Okay, Randy,” Sheriff Gentry said when J.D. was in the requested position. “Walk up on him slow and place the iron on his wrist. Make sure you lock it.”

  Randy’s nervous tension was obvious. His hands shook. His breath whistled from his mouth. His eyes wide, pupils bounced. A few feet shy of J.D., Randy stopped and reached for J.D.’s wrist. It took a moment, but finally the handcuff clacked closed. Randy turned the key.

  “Okay. It’s locked,” Randy said.

  The crowd watched the procedure. Its anxious demeanor calmed by the activity.

  “Now, mister. I want you to. And damn slowly,” Sheriff Gentry said to J.D. “Reach back with your other hand so Randy can finish the job.”

  “Yes, sir.” J.D. lowered his right arm. He put it behind his back.

  Randy, steadier now that J.D. hadn’t made a fuss, snapped the right cuff closed and locked it with a single quick movement. The little man wiped sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his fancy boiled shirt. A smile tremored his face. He whispered something, to himself or J.D., Kate couldn’t tell, and took a step back.

  The Sheriff lowered his shotgun. He glared at J.D. for a long moment before he turned his attention to the crowd. His eyes stopped on Kate for a beat before moving on.