The Sonora Noose Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  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

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Surrounded

  Barker got off the remaining two rounds and again worked to reload. There was no way he could wait for the twilight to deepen and hide his escape. The gang was circling him, waiting for him to make a run for it. He clicked the gate on his six-shooter closed, took a deep breath, and got his knees under him. With a surge, he came to his feet, stepped over the log, and let out a screech like a banshee as he ran forward toward his attackers.

  Rather than burn through his six rounds as fast as he could, he fired with measured speed, each discharge like a peal of doom. His unexpected frontal assault caused the gang to hesitate—that would afford him a few seconds more of life, and that was all he could hope for.

  Then the air filled with more whistling bullets than he could track. It took Barker a second to realize these were not heavy leaden pellets coming to kill him but carbine fire from behind.

  Sturgeon and his buffalo soldiers had heard the gunfire and had attacked.

  This buoyed Barker up but he kept running and firing. A distant grunt hinted that someone had been hit in the gang’s camp, but Barker ignored this small victory. Step after step carried him closer to the edge of the woods. He heard the road agents running away ahead of him and the pounding of horses’ hooves behind.

  “Get down, you fool. Take cover. We’ll get ’em!”

  Sergeant Sturgeon thundered past on his horse, his men flanking him in a precise battle line that quickly fell into disarray when they reached the edge of the woods. Barker slowed to a walk, reloading as he went and realizing he was out of bullets. What he had in the cylinder was it. Six rounds. He had to make them count.

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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. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  THE SONORA NOOSE

  A Berkley Book Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley edition / February 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Robert Vardeman.

  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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  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-48629-0

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  DEDICATION

  This one’s for that ole wrangler, Ken Hodgson

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For the many people who helped along the way, including Charles Vane, Alva Svoboda, Martha Martin, Nancy Holder, TJ Cardella, Amanda Capper, and of course, my ever capable, ever helpful editor, Faith Black

  1

  DEPUTY MARSHAL MASON BARKER WINCED IN PAIN, twisted from side to side without finding any relief, then ran his hand over the spot on his lower back causing him the distress. Riding for the last nine hours after serving process for Judge Terrence Donawell over in El Paso had taken its toll on his body. He was only thirty-eight years old but felt a hundred after such a long junket. Barker stretched in the stirrups to his full five-foot-eight height and then patted his bulging belly. His wife, Ruth, fed him too damn well the times he managed to sit down at the table with her. That gut dangling over his gun belt might be part of the problem with his back, but he wasn’t inclined to give up that second helping of Ruth’s peach cobbler whenever it came his way. It was too good, especially after living on cans of tomatoes and boiled beans on the trail.

  Still, he had to do something about the pain that lanced up and down his spine.

  He had been thrown from a captured horse while serving as a scout for Colonel Carson during the Navajo War. Barker couldn’t even claim he had come by his injury performing some heroic deed. It had been a danged fool thing to try to ride an Indian pony unaccustomed to a saddle, but no one else had stayed on it longer than a few seconds. He had been younger and cockier then, full of piss and vinegar, and up to any challenge. There had been enemies to stop and worlds to conquer and he had done his best, but he still wished he hadn’t taken that header off the feisty horse to land on a mighty hard rock at the mouth of Cañon de Chelly.

  “Good thing that sunfishin’ son of a gun didn’t toss me a few feet farther,” Barker said to himself as he stretched more of the kinks away, presenting his back to the afternoon sun for some heated comfort. He had missed a huge clump of prickly pear cactus that would have given him woe enough so that he’d still be picking broken spines out of his leathery hide twenty years later.

  And his back would still have been bent at a crazy angle.

  He drew rein outside the corral behind the town marshal’s office, then dismounted gingerly. Barker moved slowly, putting down his weight a little at a time, as if walking on eggshells instead of dusty New Mexico ground, but the back pain refused to abate. He knew what he had to do as he heaved a sigh and headed down Mesilla’s main street toward his favorite watering hole. There were fancier saloons in town than the hole-in-the-wall Plugged Nickel Saloon a
nd Gambling Euphorium, but he appreciated the misspelling of the name as well as the pun. He had pointed this out to Gus Phillips, the gin mill’s owner, but Gus hadn’t seen anything wrong, even after Barker explained the difference between an emporium and euphoria.

  More out of habit than any real need, before going inside he wiped the dust off his deputy’s badge hammered out of a Mexican silver peso. Although he was a federal deputy and spent more time tracking down outlaws throughout the rest of New Mexico Territory than he did bellying up to the bar at the Plugged Nickel, the folks here knew him well enough. He thought of Mesilla as his town, his home, the place he returned to after long weeks patrolling the rest of his district. It was as close to a home as he had been able to give Ruth and his son over the long years of being constantly on the move, and for the welcome the folks in Mesilla had given he was grateful.

  Barker winced as he stood in the doorway, as much from back pain as from the cacophony roiling from inside. Gus had hired a new piano player, who was even worse than the former one, if that was possible. It had been more than two weeks since Barker had been in town, and in the life of a saloon like this one, that amounted to an eternity. He paused and looked around, taking in the changes. Besides the weasely-looking piano player with his thinning, greased-back sandy hair and long fingers that played bonelessly, there was a new nude hanging behind the twenty-foot-long polished oak bar. It was about time that the old painting be replaced, Barker decided. The voluptuous red-haired woman in the old “masterpiece” had begun peeling in unseemly places, and the paint had faded so much from smoke there was almost no contrast left between acres of bare flesh and background. Worse, the yellowing had made the woman look Chinese, a curious contrast with her flowing red hair. The new painting was a real work of art.

  “She’s a real beauty, ain’t she, Marshal?” asked Gus, coming down the bar, his rag working feverishly to pick up beer spills and return the precious gleam to the wood. “The piano man over there, he painted her. Watched him do it in less than a day. The man’s a genius.”

  “Glad he’s got other talents to fall back on,” Barker said dryly as the piano player butchered Stephen Foster’s “Nelly Was a Lady.”

  “A man of many talents, yes, sir,” Gus said with some admiration. “Don’t know his real worth, neither. Got him singin’ ’n playin’ for only a dollar a day.”

  “A steal,” Barker said, not indicating whom he considered was being robbed. “I need a shot,” he said.

  Gus hesitated.

  “Trade whiskey’s fine,” Barker said, knowing the barkeep’s reluctance came from not knowing if he was going to get paid. Barker’s salary, even as a federal deputy marshal, was sporadic at best. He had heard that Marshal Dakes over in Arizona had never collected a dime of his salary and didn’t even know for certain what he was supposed to be paid. Barker was ahead of him in that respect, getting forty dollars a month, whenever the federal marshal’s office thought to send it. Mostly he made his money serving process for judges in El Paso, Texas, and several towns throughout southern New Mexico. Of the lot, he was glad he had settled in Mesilla. It had the feel of a real town to him, unlike Tularosa and other supposedly inhabited places sprouting up like vile weeds around the Chupadera to the north.

  He fished out a silver dollar and let it ring sonorously on the bar. Gus performed a sleight of hand and the coin vanished, replaced as if by magic with a brimming shot of the powerful antidote for what ailed Barker.

  “You want to pay off your tab, Marshal?” Gus asked. He grinned when Barker nodded once, then he passed over the glass so the marshal could knock back the potent concoction of grain alcohol, with gunpowder added for bite and a few rusty nails tossed in to give the proper color. Barker belched as the whiskey hit his belly, but the heat spread through him and centered on the stubborn pain in his back. In a minute the misery receded, and after a second drink, it was almost gone.

  The deputy wanted nothing more than to leave the Plugged Nickel and ride home to his Ruth. He had been on the circuit a tad longer than he had expected this time, but finding the miner hidden away in the Organ Mountains and serving him the foreclosure on his property had proven to be a real chore. For a heartbeat Barker had thought the old miner was going to shoot it out, but part of being a federal marshal was convincing men to do what they didn’t want to do without resorting to using the six-shooter hanging at your side.

  But he knew from the sounds rising behind him in the saloon that going home was out of the question for now. Barker turned slowly and took in the situation. Facing Manuelito and his entire clan of savage, clever Navajo warriors would have been more appealing at this instant. Mason Barker had seen too much sudden death come from situations like the one brewing to be easy about it. He had never killed a man, but that might change fast right now if he wanted to prevent a real bloodbath.

  “You cheated me!” shouted a sodbuster that Barker struggled to place. The name finally came to him. Sean Leary had put away one too many drinks—or maybe one too few. Another jolt of Gus’s tarantula juice might have caused him to pass out and would have relieved Barker of his duty to keep everyone concerned alive.

  “Boys, you saw the cards,” said the card slick across the table from the farmer, to the others in the poker game. “I had two pair—little ladies and deuces. All he had was a pair of kings. Two pair beats one every time, no matter that they’re kings.”

  Barker saw the wild expression on Leary’s face. It was as much fear as it was anger and confusion, but he doubted the farmer was afraid of the right thing. The gambler must have rattled when he walked, hideout guns and knives never more than a few inches away from his nimble fingers no matter how he turned in his chair or how relaxed he looked. He sounded peaceable enough, but Barker saw the slight twitch under the gambler’s right eye showing the anticipation. It certainly wasn’t fear of a drunk pinto bean farmer.

  Two quick steps put the deputy behind the gambler. He rested his hand on the man’s shoulder and bore down hard enough to get his attention. Barker didn’t look at the gambler, but across the table at Leary.

  “What’s the ruckus, Sean?” he asked.

  “Marshal?” Sean Leary blinked as he tried to focus. “Marshal! He done stole from me! That was the mortgage money for my farm! He cheated!” Leary frantically pulled out a black-powder Remington and waved it around wildly. This was what Barker had feared when he had seen the sodbuster from across the room.

  “I never—” started the gambler, but Barker’s powerful grip tightened, silencing the man. Barker looked around the table and read the facts on the other players’ faces. Leary had joined the wrong game. The gambler didn’t have to cheat to beat a drunk farmer come to town for supplies and to pay his mortgage.

  “Put that hogleg down, Sean,” Barker said gently. “You don’t want to go shooting it off in here. The smoke from that ole blunderbuss would choke the lot of us till next Sunday.” He tightened his grip and found nerves that caused the gambler’s right arm to go numb, so he couldn’t reach for the derringer poking out from his vest pocket, not inches from the tips of his fingers.

  “He stole my money.” Leary’s anger was disappearing, replaced entirely by fear.

  “Your wife doesn’t know you were gambling with the mortgage money, does she, Sean?” Barker asked gently. He knew he had hit the nail on the head by the way Leary jerked, as if the accusation was a whip lash across the face. “Put that damned thing down for a moment. Keep it under the table so you don’t spook Gus’s other patrons, and let me and the gambling man talk about this.”

  “I want my money back, Marshal!”

  “You stay put, Sean,” Barker said sternly. “And you, outside.” He maintained his steely grip on the gambler’s shoulder. If he dug his fingers in harder, he could make the cardsharp’s entire right arm go numb for the rest of the day. Guiding the gambler outside onto the boardwalk, he spun him around.

  “I didn’t cheat him. I—” The gambler never got out another word. />
  Barker shoved him against the Plugged Nickel’s adobe wall, hard enough to cause a small dust cloud, and caught both the man’s forearms, squeezing tight as he hunted for mechanical devices. Nothing. A quick look assured the lawman that the gambler hadn’t been using cards pulled from his vest or waistband, either, but that didn’t mean a whole lot. From the man’s nimbleness, Barker reckoned he could deal seconds and stack a deck with the best of them. Maybe he had done that. Or maybe the game had been an oddity in Mesilla: honest.

  “A word of advice,” Barker said. “Leave Mesilla now.”

  “You don’t want his money back?” the gambler asked suspiciously.

  “From the look of it, you won fair and square. You deserve to make a living, like anyone else, but taking Sean Leary’s money is like stealing a dead man’s boots. There’s no challenge to it. Now, you clear out and I’ll settle matters with him.”

  “Thanks, Marshal.”

  “It’s Deputy Marshal Barker.” Mason Barker glared at the grateful gambler, who took his advice, mounted a swayback mule, and headed out of Mesilla fast amid a tiny cloud of gritty brown dust. Barker heaved a sigh of relief. A fight with that vulture would have been bloody. But he still had the other half of the battle to win. He wasn’t sure but that dealing with a man afraid of what he had done and not willing to fess up to his wife was more dangerous than tangling with an armed and agile gambler.

  Hell, Barker knew that it was.

  He went back in, a smile on his face in spite of the way Sean Leary waved his six-shooter around. The man had gone from blaming the gambler to claiming the others at the green-felt-covered card table had cheated him. Barker recognized two of the men and doubted they would be in cahoots with the gambler. The others were drifters passing through Mesilla on their way to God knew where, but their expressions told him they’d as soon be on the moon as here looking down the immense bore of Leary’s six-shooter. If they’d cheated Leary, they would already be forking the money across to him. Like as not, they had lost to the gambler, too.