Mojave Read online

  “What’s your plan?” Jingfei asked.

  I took off my hat to wipe my brow, but I wasn’t sweating because I was afraid of Jingfei. I mean, the temperature had to be approaching a hundred degrees.

  “Well . . .” Even Peach Fuzz looked over the horses, waiting to hear my plan. “Need to see how they’ve set up their camp. How many sentries they got posted. Where the horses are picketed. Lay of the land. Where the girls are. Things like that.”

  Peach Fuzz moved to the other horse. Jingfei stepped out of the carriage and studied our back trail. Which was fine with me, as I now had to figure out just what in the hell we was going to do once we caught up with Candy Crutchfield—other than get ourselves killed. Jingfei’s joining our pursuit did give us an extra gun. Two revolvers—one of them an old cap-and-ball that was hard to cock and prone to misfires—a new Colt and a Winchester. Up against twenty, thirty, forty men.

  “What if they just keep riding?” Peach Fuzz put his waterlogged hat on his head, and moved around the team, back toward the carriage. “I mean what if they just ride all the way to Calico?”

  “Can’t,” I said. “It’s still too far.” Jingfei climbed aboard. “Especially hot as it is, dry as it is.”

  “What’s this?” Peach Fuzz asked as he crawled into his seat.

  I told him it was a .36-caliber Spiller & Burr and I was loaning it to him until all this was over.

  He said, “This thing’s apt to blow my hand off. Can’t I have the Colt?”

  Jingfei’s whipping of the horses choked down my cussing.

  Thirty minutes later, Jingfei was yanking hard on the lines, and as soon as the team stopped, she and I and Peach Fuzz was jumping to the dirt, and looking back.

  “Sounded like gunfire,” Peach Fuzz said, and he decided that now might not be a time to be too particular about what weapons he’d been loaned, so he buckled on my belt that I’d loaned him.

  “Because it was gunfire,” Jingfei said. She pushed her hair over her shoulder.

  Another cannonade reached us, muffled, pretty far back I’d reckon, but close enough so that we could hear. That didn’t please me none. I bit my bottom lip again, loosened my bandanna and used it to mop the sweat off my face, then I took off my hat, tossed it onto the seat, and combed my hair with my fingers.

  “We’d better go,” I said.

  Jingfei looked at me. “Who cut your hair?”

  I blinked. “Ma’am?”

  “You’re wearing new clothes, too. And that’s a new—well, it was a new—hat.”

  “Yes’m,” I said. “I bought new duds when I was in Calico.”

  We got back into the buggy, and the Percherons continued taking us down the trail.

  “You looked awful when Maud found you that night.” She set the whip back in its holder, kept the two grays at the right pace, though they was starting to tire.

  I said, “Maud?” I’d always figured it was Whip Watson who’d found me.

  “Yes.” Her voice was curt, sad, and she brought up two of those long, wonderful fingers and dabbed at the tear rolling down her perfect face.

  That’s when I recollected poor Maud Fenstermacher, she of the broken neck who’d gotten pitched out of the overturning Conestoga on account of that lying rapscallion Jürgen Baader who claimed to be a lawman drawing three hundred dollars a month in Calico. I ground my teeth, clenched my right fist.

  Maud, Jingfei told me, had gone out to answer nature’s call at night when she found my body lying against some rocks. She called out to the guards, but they figured me dead, and went through my pockets to see if I had anything of value. Then she started screaming at the two men, one of whom was the late Conrad and the other who, Jingfei announced, had gotten mortal shot through both lungs during Candy Crutchfield’s attack. Maud had called her guards vermin and fiends and ghouls, which they was. Those shouts had drawed Juan Pedro and Whip Watson out to the rocks. It had also drawed Jingfei.

  Thing like that causes a fellow to stop and ponder. My life had been saved because a gal had to go relieve herself.

  Then I asked, “They sent guards when you had to pee or—”

  She cut me off. “Always.”

  The way things worked, Jingfei said, was that the women in the train were allowed to do their business only one at a time. With one or two guards. For their own protection, Whip Watson said, but Jingfei knew better. It was so they couldn’t escape. That’s where Jingfei had been and what she’d been doing when I’d first seen her and she come and finished cooking our supper that night at Whip’s camp.

  Sudden-like, it struck me that I hadn’t seen Jingfei wash her hands or nothing like that before she went to them pots.

  My stomach churned about, but that food was long gone, and I hadn’t gotten sick, so I said, “Do you think Whip was expecting Crutchfield to attack?”

  “No,” she answered. “He was making sure we didn’t run off.”

  “But you’ve got a contract,” I said. “You’re betrothed to Lucky Ben Wong.”

  She turned, her eyes hard, boring right through me, and I realized I’d done blown any bluff I might have been able to try. “How did you know that?” she demanded.

  I took off my hat, pointed to my hair.

  She grinned. Honest to goodness, she grinned, and shook her head, and slowed the horses down a mite because she knowed something about horses herself, and those Percherons needed another breather. A couple minutes later, we found a shady spot, protected by some peaks of red spires, and she reined in, set the brake. She wanted to rest the horses.

  And talk.

  “Is he a good man?” she asked.

  Hell, I’d only knowed him for a few hours. I know in a lot of towns, the barber knows everyone and everybody knows him, but that was my first visit to Calico and my first meeting with Lucky Ben Wong.

  “Seems like,” I said, and I meant it, too. I wondered if Jingfei partook of opium.

  Then I realized that I had actually met Lucky Ben Wong in the flesh. He had cut my hair. Fixed my bath. Jingfei hadn’t even met the guy in person, and she was gonna wed him.

  I nodded. Made up my mind. Some folks, you know almost instantly. “Yeah,” I said softly. “Lucky Ben Wong’s a good man. A real good man.”

  “Tell me,” she said, “about Rogers Canfield.”

  Who wasn’t good at all. A dark, black-hearted son of a bitch, but all I told Jingfei was, “He’s dead.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You said that already. Killed by Whip Watson.”

  After my head nodded again, I told her everything I knowed.

  “Canfield hired Candy Crutchfield,” I said, and felt Peach Fuzz lean forward and rest his arms on the backs of our seats so he could hear better. “She’s bringing in twenty-four brides herself. She and Canfield worked out some deal where Canfield was supposed to make sure Whip and me and Guttersnipe Gary—”

  “Where is Guttersnipe Gary?” Peach Fuzz interrupted. “Y’all leave him back in Calico?”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “Dead.”

  “Guttersnipe Gary?” Peach Fuzz’s head shook. “I can’t believe he could get kilt.”

  “Shut up,” Jingfei said, and, damn right, she was Quiet Not. Peach Fuzz got quiet. Jingfei told me to keep on talking.

  So I told her what had happened. How two men had tried to gun me down in her betrothed’s bath house, but that I had outshot both of them, and saved Lucky Ben Wong’s life. I didn’t tell her that Lucky Ben Wong lived in a house made of empty cans of coal oil, and found it hard to picture a goddess like Jingfei living in such filth. Then I told her, and Peach Fuzz, how Guttersnipe Gary had sent one of his two killers to the bad place, and how I had avenged Guttersnipe Gary’s death with a pistol shot at seventy-seven yards. I told her how Whip Watson had dispatched his two killers, and then how we’d caught up with Rogers Canfield. I mentioned how Whip had gotten Canfield to confess his arrangement with Candy Crutchfield, and then how Whip Watson had shot him dead.

  Then we was all silent.
Peach Fuzz passed one of Whip’s canteens. We each taken a drink, then that canteen was dry. I handed it back to Peach Fuzz. “How we doing on water?”

  He picked up Whip’s other canteen. “This one’s ’bout empty, too,” he said. “That pot’s empty. Got the bladder, though, and a gourd.” He steered us back to our original conversation. “But I don’t get all this. If Candy Crutchfield was a-bringin’ in her own brides, they’d have their own menfolk. Ain’t like that Lucky Ben fellow wants to marry some other girl, and it ain’t that that peckerwood of a drummer. . . .” He stopped talking.

  I pulled my now ruined six-dollar hat back on my head. “I ain’t figured everything out yet myself,” I said, and looked back at Jingfei. “But you know something.”

  She stared. Quiet Not got suddenly quiet.

  “Back outside that canyon passage,” I reminded her, “you said, ‘This isn’t what we agreed to. ’” She’d make a savvy card player herself, because her porcelain face remained stone. Didn’t even blink. “My guess is that you realized Rogers Canfield and Whip Watson wasn’t exactly honest about your arrangements.”

  “We have signed contracts,” she said.

  “I warrant so do the girls Candy Crutchfield’s hauling to Calico.”

  “If she has mail-order brides,” Jingfei said. “She could be lying.”

  She wasn’t. I knowed that because Candy Crutchfield stepped from behind a one of them tall red rocks, armed with a new Marlin repeater, and she said, “Oh, I ain’t lyin’, girl. And I reckon I gots me one other wench to bring to Calico.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  She appeared to be on the short side, maybe five-foot tall, and that’s in them big stovepipe boots with two-inch heels that she wore. Certainly, she didn’t dress like Jingfei, and I’d hate to picture her in a gold-trimmed changyi. What she wore was patched Army-issue blue trousers that was too big, and she wasn’t exactly on the skinny side, neither, held up by the dirty canvas suspenders and the gun belt around her waist that holstered an ivory-handled Schofield. A six-button bib-front shirt, red and black checked, one nasty-looking bandanna, and a linen duster that blowed behind her because the wind had started blowing. Her black slouch hat looked worser than the one I’d left behind in Calico.

  At first, I thought she had some giant boil or cyst on her cheek, but then she turned her head a mite and spit, and the wind blowed brown tobacco juice all over the tan vest of the fellow who stood behind her. He didn’t complain none, and I couldn’t blame him.

  I’d knowed some whores who dipped snuff, but never a lady who chawed Starr Navy tobacco by the crate-load. Not that I’d ever mistook Candy Crutchfield for a lady.

  That’s ’cause Candy Crutchfield was one mean-looking woman. Her dark eyes was too close together, her face scarred and dirty, her nose swole up and crooked from having been punched too many times. She had greasy brown hair, streaked with gray, that touched her dirty bandanna.

  “So you’re the Celestial queen Canfield spoke ’bout so much.” Candy Crutchfield stopped to chew her tobacco some more. Tan Vest moved to the other side of her. “Reckon I see why. You’s real purty. Be a fine addition to The Palace of Calico.”

  While she was admiring Jingfei’s beauty, I counted the men who stood behind her. Seven of them, a hard lot of hard rocks. Heard some laughter behind me that I knowed wasn’t coming from Peach Fuzz, and I figured there’d be two or four men back of us, too. Too many for me to take, so I kept my hands so Candy Crutchfield would see that I wasn’t planning on trying nothing. Trying nothing but staying alive.

  “Real purty rig you got there, too.” Crutchfield spit tobacco juice that didn’t hit nobody. She trained them beady eyes of hers on me. “Last I saw, we had commanded two of Whip’s wagons. One didn’t make it up the hill.”

  I guessed she was asking me what had happened. I said, “It wrecked.”

  “And Mal?”

  My expression must have told her I was trying to say, Who the hell is Mal?

  “One of my boys. Bragged how he could ride an ox and get that prairie schooner movin’ like the Pony Express.”

  Last I’d seen of Mal he’d been rolling down that hill.

  “He lied,” I said.

  She nodded matter-of-factly. “Figured. The girls in that prairie schooner all right?”

  “They’re all dead,” Jingfei answered. “Thanks to you.”

  Crutchfield’s eyes left me and sized up Jingfei. “Whip Watson’s a wonder with a whip,” Crutchfield said, “but I skin with somethin’ better.” She braced the Marlin’s stock against her belly, kept the barrel in our general direction, and moved her left hand toward the blowing tails of the duster, so I could see that big, bone-handled knife sticking out of a sheath that I hadn’t seen before. If the blade was anywhere near the size of the handle, I’d hate to get cut by it.

  “I skint buffalo. Skint bloatin’ cow carcasses. Skunks. Beavers. Coyot’s. Wolves. Fish. Dogs. Cats. An’ I skint men and women, black, white, red, brown. Skinnin’ an uppity yellow-skinned bitch with a big mouth wouldn’t bother me at all.”

  Brave man that I am, I turned Candy Crutchfield’s attention back to me. Hooked my thumb back toward the south and said, “Whip Watson’ll be coming this way right soon.”

  She laughed. Spit. Brought her left hand back to the Marlin. “Nah,” she said. “He can’t. He’s dead.”

  Reckon me and Peach Fuzz and Jingfei all blinked at the same time. Which got Candy Crutchfield cackling so hard she liked to have swallowed her tobacco, which would have made her sicker than the dirty dog she was. But she didn’t, just turned her head the other way and spit more brown juice that this time landed on Tan Vest’s right pants leg. Some of the boys sniggered at Tan Vest’s luck, and I might have too had I any saliva in my mouth to do any sniggering.

  Jingfei whispered, “The gunshots we heard.”

  “That’s right.” Candy Crutchfield had a good set of ears. I’d barely heard Jingfei myself, and Crutchfield stood about ten yards in front of us. “I left a dozen of the boys back at that pass.”

  The pass! The one I’d warned Jingfei and Peach Fuzz about. “I told you!” I exclaimed. “Said that was a perfect place to set up an ambush.”

  “And you was right, iffen it’s the same place I’m talkin’ ’bout.”

  Had to be. I was about to describe the canyon, but Peach Fuzz said, “But how come we got through?”

  With a snort, Crutchfield turned around, and Tan Vest backed up and over quite a ways, but this time the woman didn’t spit. Started to, but stopped, and wiped her mouth with the back of her left hand, keeping her right on that big rifle. “I ain’t no fool,” she said. Had to stop, to spit, but the juice just went down in front of her own boots on account that the wind had died down. “And my boys ain’t idiots, neither.” She turned, looked at some of her boys, reconsidered her thought as she spotted Tan Vest, and added, a bit softer and with less boast. “Most of ’em, anyhow. Nah, the boys had orders to kill Whip Watson and his men. Not a China princess and her two servants on a little picnic ride. They let y’all pass. Good thing, too. I’da shot ’em all dead iffen they was to harm a hair on her precious head. So Whip and his lot is feedin’ buzzards. Verne should be bringin’ word to me shortly. Told the rest of the boys to head out to Calico, get things ready for us. No idiots ride with me. I ain’t like the late Whip Watson.”

  The wind picked up again. Crutchfield stepped back. She motioned at me and Peach Fuzz.

  “Speaking of idiots, step down off that buggy.”

  “What for?” Peach Fuzz said.

  I whispered to Peach Fuzz, “Idiot.”

  Candy said, “So I can kill you.”

  Peach Fuzz gasped and sank back into his chair. My stomach did some teetering and some tottering. Jingfei just stared real hard, her porcelain face granite, her hands still on that Winchester in her lap, which, to my reckoning, Candy and her idiot boys hadn’t spotted yet.

  “I don’t wants to get blood and brains on ’em l
eather seats,” Crutchfield said. “Step off. Act like men.”

  Peach Fuzz was about to stutter, or, since I couldn’t see him, was about to pull that Spiller & Burr and likely get hisself and Jingfei and me killed. So I leaned forward, smiling my best, warmest smile, and said, “You don’t want to kill us. You have need of men like me.” Even jerked my thumb toward Peach Fuzz. “And him.”

  “I don’t need no fools,” she said. “That’s why I let Mal try that damned fool stunt.”

  “How many men do you have?” I asked.

  “Enough.”

  “You lost more than Mal back at Whip Watson’s camp.”

  “Good. Don’t have to pay ’em nothin’.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said, “if you lost some more at that pass.”

  She spit. “Balderdash.”

  “What,” I asked, “if your boys didn’t hold off Whip and his men? You thought about that?”

  “Don’t need to.”

  “Don’t you?” Now Jingfei was staring at me, with that do-you-know-what-the-hell-you’re-doing? kind of look.

  I didn’t, but I told Crutchfield, gesturing again toward Peach Fuzz, “Me and him, we deserted Whip. Woman-napped the Chinese princess here.” Now Jingfei was really giving me an evil eye.

  She snorted—Crutchfield, not Jingfei, who was too ladylike to snort or fart or chew tobacco or anything like that except to answer nature’s call with two armed guards—and spit out more juice. “You’re borin’ me, and I want to get back to camp, have me some whiskey, and do some celebratin’.”

  “You think Whip Watson would just let us go on a . . . picnic?”

  She brought the Marlin up, braced the stock tighter against her shoulder, and said, “Try not to bleed all over ’em leather seats.”

  My voice rose an octave or two, and I doubt if I sounded much like that thespian who’d played Captain Bang in Our Island Home, as I sang out, “You’ll have need of every gun you can muster if Whip Watson ain’t dead, and I’m real good.”

  By grab, I had killed that guy with the bandolier back during the fight at camp just a few hours earlier. And the fellow in Rogers Canfield’s office over in Calico—blowed his sorry hide right out a second-story window. Not to mention Pink Shirt in Chinatown. Sure, I hadn’t popped a cap on him, but I had been the last person down the ladder and that ladder did cause Pink Shirt’s death. And I’d shot down a real ass named Sean Fenn in New Mexico Territory. And also had killed that drover in Missouri and the idiot in the Indian Nations whose faces still gave me fits every now and then when I was trying to sleep. And I figured that I might have to kill another, perhaps two, maybe just one of those Percherons by accident, if I had to dive out of this Columbus carriage and pull the Colt and start blasting until I was blasted to Purgatory.