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

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  HIDE AND SEEK

  Keeping low, Slocum scuttled to the fence, under it, then to the base of the hill and along that base. When he heard a scuffing sound, he stopped dead and listened hard.

  There it was again. Someone was making their way toward his old position, about thirty feet up the hill from where he presently stood.

  He moved over a couple of feet, taking cover behind a scraggly sage, then held very still, alert for the slightest sound.

  Suddenly, Carlito stood up from nowhere—Slocum thought he must be part Apache!—and wheeled to fire behind him . . .

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  THE GUNSMITH by J. R. Roberts

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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 BORDER WAR

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Jove edition / August 2006

  Copyright © 2006 by The Berkley Publishing Group.

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-16546-1

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  1

  Slocum headed down through the Arizona Territory to the border country. He’d been asked by Ralph MacCorkendale, a fellow he’d met about three years back, to come down and quell a little “disagreement” about the ownership of some cattle that carried MacCorkendale’s brand.

  MacCorkendale thought he owned them. Pablo Valdez, another rancher just across the border, seemed to think that anything that wandered into Mexico was his, regardless of the brand it carried.

  MacCorkendale was more than a tad vexed about it.

  And rightly so.

  They had tried negotiations, they had tried hiring muscle, and now things had gotten serious. MacCorkendale had hired Slocum.

  Valdez had called in Jorgé Rodriguez.

  Now, Slocum had dealt with Rodriguez before. First, he’d fought alongside him during the Pleasant Valley War, next he’d fought against him in Silver Springs, and the last time they met up, he’d played cards with him. All nice and amiable.

  Rodriguez was a good partner in a fight and a worse opponent. Slocum was hoping that Señor Valdez could be convinced of the error of his ways before somebody got killed.

  Especially if that somebody was him.

  All that aside, there was someone down in the border-lands that Slocum felt a need to see: one Señorita Maria Anna Lopez.

  She owned and ran Cantina Lopez all by herself these days, her papa having died five years back. She was sloe-eyed, copper-skinned, had straight hair as black as a raven’s wing and so long it covered her butt, and a figure that wouldn’t quit.

  He could span her waist with both his hands, he remembered.

  He hadn’t seen her for over a year and was eager for some time spent in her company.

  As he rode along on Concho, his tall, black-spotted, leopard Appaloosa gelding, he amused himself by wondering if she still lived upstairs, over the cantina, and if she still had that round table up there, the one by the windows, where they’d made love the last time.

  Did she still have poreless, flawless skin and those legs—oh, those legs!—that went on forever? A man could spend an eternity wrapped in those legs.

  Were her breasts as round as he remembered, as plump and full and tipped in those sienna nipples that hardened and peaked at his slightest touch? Was her backside still as round and muscular, yet soft and pliable?

  Was she married?

  That last question, which had crept in from who knows where, sent a shudder through him—enough so that the horse beneath him felt it and gave a little nervous hop.

  He put a hand on the Appy’s neck. “It’s all right, Concho, just me bein’ silly.”

  The horse snorted and resumed his pace, and Slocum gave a shake to his head. Married! No, she wouldn’t have gotten married, not Maria. She had a business to run! She was independent, strong!

  But then, running that cantina would be a lot easier with a husband to do half the work, wouldn’t it?

  Or maybe she’d actually fallen in love.

  Part of Slocum—the vain part—doubted that she could ever love another man. After being with him, that was. But the other part knew it was a real possibility.

  Maria was a beautiful girl who owned property, a business. He had a feeling she’d spent the last year being the target of every horny caballero and cowboy in the district.

  Part of the joy went out of him. His face set into a scowl.

  Well, if it’s to be, then it’s to be, he thought and urged Concho into a lope. MacCorkendale was waiting.

  Maria Anna Lopez, the sloe-eyed beauty who lived upstairs over her cantina, smiled warmly at the vaquero who had just touched her—quite by accident, although with questionable intent—in what she considered a highly inappropriate manner, and then brought down the wooden chair she held over her head.

  Very hard.

  She was very strong for a girl.

  The chair was no longer recognizable as furniture, but the vaquero—although unconscious—was still a vaquero.

  Some of the other customers shrank back. Still others, who knew her, ignored the entire proceeding.

  She brushed her hands on her full, white skirts, although they weren’t really dirty, and said, “Diego! Take out this trash!”

  From the back, out of the kitchen, came Diego, a short man—a little pudgy, she had always thought, but very strong—with a mustache and a balding head, who leaned over, picked up the vaquero’s booted feet, and dragged him toward the front door.

  He didn’t say a word.

  He didn’t ask a question.

  She liked that in an employee.

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  Come to think of it, she liked that in a man.

  Well, most of them.

  About the time Diego came back in, she turned and walked behind the bar. She or Diego usually tended the bar themselves. Otherwise, too many “complimentary” whiskeys seemed to get handed out, and the cerveza tended to run a little too freely.

  She didn’t allow trouble in her cantina, she kept a close eye on the cash box, and she had never, ever let a man become more important that Cantina Lopez.

  Well, except one.

  She had no time for a family of her own. She had a niece and nephew to take care of, a mother that needed to be fed and clothed, a drunk of a sister that needed watching, and a brother-in-law best not spoken of.

  She was one very good businesswoman, was Maria Anna Lopez. She had to be.

  Slocum rode into the MacCorkendale place, the Bar M Ranch: a curious affair, for although the outbuildings were constructed from adobe bricks, the house itself was built entirely of wood. Odd, in adobe territory. Slocum wondered where he’d found the wood to put the place up!

  There were few men around, which surprised him, but he decided they must be out on the range. Those who remained eyed him curiously but gave him a wide berth. No one said a word to him as he rode through the yard and up to the house.

  Now, the house was huge, and Victorian in style—all gingerbread trim and brightly, wildly painted in blues and greens and tans and orange and white—and probably three stories, if you counted the turret. Which, of course, he did.

  He tied Concho to the porch rail, climbed the steps to the wraparound porch, and knocked on the front door, which was heavy with ornate, leaded glass.

  A moment passed before a blond girl answered, curtsied, and said, “You must be Mr. Slocum?” in a thick German accent. Slocum nodded in the affirmative, his eyes taking a quick inventory.

  She was a little on the stout side, pretty enough, with freckles and blue eyes. Yellow pigtails were wound elaborately into a kind of bun contraption on her head. A long, white apron succeeded in covering what figure she might have had, and she carried a very serious expression. Sturdy was his snap judgment.

  “Yes’m, that I am,” he replied when he found that she was just going to stand there, blocking the door. “MacCorkendale around?”

  She stared up at him, not blinking, not giving a single sign of what she thought of him, if anything, and then she said, “Ja. You wait in parlor.” And moved aside.

  He took it as an invitation and stepped in.

  The house was surprisingly dark and cool, filled with deep mahogany furniture and goldfish bowls and potted ferns and what Slocum thought were some very good oil paintings of ships at sea or racehorses or the occasional still life. All in all, the place fairly reeked of New York, or maybe Europe, and seemed completely out of place here on the Arizona desert.

  The girl led him to the right, into the parlor, pointed him toward a dark brown leather chair, and said, “I get Mr. MacCorkendale.” She curtsied and was gone.

  Belatedly, Slocum removed his hat and tossed it to a tabletop. He sat and stared at a painting of a full-masted schooner plowing the seas until the doors slid open again, and MacCorkendale walked in.

  In contrast to his house, MacCorkendale was all Westerner. He was dressed in Levi’s, a worn, blue work shirt, dusty boots that tracked faint white streaks over the dark, highly polished wooden floors, and was presently mopping his brow and the back of his neck with a soggy-looking red bandanna.

  He was leaner than Slocum remembered him, but he still had a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, an open face with a ready grin, and sparkling blue eyes. He’d left his hat someplace, but the suntan line across the center of his forehead marked the angle at which he usually wore it.

  He grinned right off and said, “Slocum!” in that big, booming voice and stuck out a paw. As they shook hands, he said, “Glad to see you! Mighty fine, mighty fine! Get you a drink and a cigar?”

  “Pleased,” replied Slocum, who was lucky to get the word in.

  “Suppose you’re wonderin’ about the house,” MacCorkendale went on as he moved toward a small bar in the corner. “Ain’t to my taste, I gotta tell you, but the wife, well . . . you know. No, I don’t reckon you do . . .”

  He poured three fingers of scotch whiskey into a crystal glass, pulled a cigar from the humidor, and handed both to Slocum before pouring himself a drink.

  Slocum bit off the end of the cigar—which turned out to be a very fine Havana—before he asked, somewhat incredulously, “You get married, MacCorkendale?”

  “Hell, yes,” MacCorkendale said, taking a seat opposite Slocum. “Two years ago last November. Hell of a gal. You met her. Helga.”

  The woman at the door? Slocum had taken her for a maid! He said, “The blond gal?”

  “That’s her!”

  With his thumbnail, Slocum popped a lucifer into flame and lit his cigar, puffing on it longer than was necessary before he said, “Nice catch, MacCorkendale. Pretty gal.” He could imagine as much fire coming from her in the bedroom as a pan of cold water.

  MacCorkendale was enthusiastic, though, and went on. “Oh, yeah, she’s pretty and smart, real smart. Knows about all kinds of things!” He checked the hall to make sure she wasn’t listening.

  “I let her pick the plan for this place from a catalogue,” he went on, “and I’ll be damned if they didn’t ship it out here! I mean, they sent the whole blasted house—in pieces!”

  He stopped to bark out a laugh. “Why, my boys had to put it together like a jigsaw puzzle—course, there were instructions—and I thought it was damn silly, and I’d been a pure-D fool. I mean, don’t it seem a little like a duck in a henhouse to you? Just did it to humor her, you know? But now, by God, I think it’s grand!”

  The pride in MacCorkendale’s voice was overwhelming, and Slocum nodded in agreement, even though he would have likened it more to a hog in a henhouse. Maybe it would grow on him. But he doubted it.

  He took a sip of his scotch. “So, tell me more about this trouble you’re having with Pablo Valdez, MacCorkendale.”

  2

  Ralph MacCorkendale was forthright, if nothing else. Slocum heard his story, had made his excuses for dinner, and was on his way to town, all within the space of forty minutes.

  MacCorkendale hadn’t told him anything he hadn’t already known—or suspected—about Valdez or his hired gun, Rodriguez. And the smells coming from the kitchen were . . . less than appetizing, although MacCorkendale swore up and down that his Helga was the finest cook in the whole damned county.

  But Slocum already knew the best damn cook in the county—in fact, the gal who was just about the best at everything important—and wanted to hie himself to her cantina pronto.

  So he did.

  He rode into Jaguar Hole at a soft jog, tied Concho beside the water trough at the rail in front of Cantina Lopez, said a silent prayer that she was still there and still single—and willing—and pushed through the swinging batwing doors.

  There wasn’t much of a crowd inside—but then, he hadn’t exactly expected a mob at three in the afternoon on a Wednesday. He didn’t see Maria right away. There was a balding Mexican man at the bar and a few patrons scattered at the tables in the shadows.

  He went to the bar and ordered a cerveza. While the bartender poured it, he asked, “Maria around?”

  The barkeep slid his glass to him from five feet away, lazily rubbed his hands, then the newly sudsy bartop, and said, “Be back very soon. You a friend?”

  Slocum nodded. “An old one. Can I get a plate of enchiladas? Beef?”

  “Right away, señor,” said the man, still without expression, and slid through a door behind the bar and into the back room.

  Slocum carried his cerveza to a table and sat with his back to the wall and his boots propped up on another chair. He tipped his hat back and took a long, refreshing drink. Jaguar Hole wasn’t a long ride from MacCorkendale’s place, but it was sure a dry one. From his vantage point, he could see out the front door, and see Concho still lipping at the trough’s water.