“Peter acts uppity,” Carole said, “and he must have heard all the shouting and your gunshots, but you don’t see a trace of him, do you?”
“No.”
“That’s because he’s a rabbit,” Carole said, making no effort to conceal her disgust. “Peter won’t come up here and he won’t ask any questions. Not about the blood on the hotel carpets and not about the broken latch on Nathan’s door.”
“Good,” Rolf said.
“Let’s go,” Teresa said. “I’ll help you drag his body down the back stairs leading into the alley.”
“I think we ought to at least put some pants on him,” Rolf said, staring uneasily at the bloody giant’s naked body.
“No!” Carole’s eyes blazed away at the corpse. “Rolf,” she said, “you just toss Clyde down in the pit naked. If there are snakes, bugs, worms, or rats, all I want them to do is chew his damn cock off!”
Rolf shuddered and turned away from Carole. He could only imagine how much hatred both women had for Clyde Zolliver.
It took Rolf and Teresa an hour to borrow a buckboard and drive through the stormy night. Twice, they almost got stuck in the mud, but they finally managed to reach the pit and dump Clyde’s body into it. Rolf and Teresa both heard the corpse ricochet off the walls all the way down, and then they heard a tremendous splash as it struck bottom.
Rolf shivered. “With all this rain, the bottom of the pit must be filled with water.”
“Good! Clyde!” she yelled down into the black hole. “I hope you have to swim your way into hell!”
Rolf pulled Teresa away and then led her back to the buckboard. With the thunder and lightning all around, they drove away quickly. They did not speak at first, just sat close, their heads huddled low in the pouring rain. Rolf had never seen such hatred in his life. Rolf was badly shaken. He hadn’t believed that a woman could feel such deep hatred, a hatred every bit as alive and intense as any man’s.
“Rolf?” she asked as they neared Whiskey Creek and the rain let up a little.
“Yeah?”
“Did you mean it earlier tonight when you said you were going to California and wanted to marry me?”
“I did.”
“Do you still? I mean, after seeing the … the really terrible side of me?”
Rolf thought a moment or two before answering, then he looked sideways at Teresa and said, “We all have a dark side. Maybe it was good that I saw yours right away. Maybe you think I’m better than I am too.”
She hugged him tightly. “Rolf, there’s a side that I didn’t think you possessed.”
“Which side is that?”
“It was a strong side. A side that allowed you to just stand there and keep pumping bullets into Clyde, knowing how evil he was. It made me look at you differently, Rolf. It opened my eyes.”
“Does that mean we’re getting married?” he asked as the buckboard slid around a muddy street corner and Rolf turned it back into the alley behind their hotel.
She kissed his cheek. “It does, if Buck or his father don’t catch and kill us.”
Rolf smiled, and his eyes burned with tears so that he was thankful for the rain. With a close friend in Nathan Cox and a woman he loved with all his heart and had just consented to become his wife, everything in his life was now much, much different. And if he really was forced to do it, Rolf vowed he would somehow find a way to kill Buck and even old man Zolliver.
Chapter 11
Longarm was damned glad that the rain finally stopped falling and the skies had turned blue. It was cold though. He and Miss Diana Frank were bundled up in heavy coats and rain slickers, but they were still plenty chilly. There was snow atop the higher elevations of the Wasatch Mountains, and Longarm couldn’t help but think that Nathan Cox might have gotten trapped up there in this last storm and frozen to death along with the Thoroughbreds. That being the case, Longarm might not be able to recover their bodies or the stolen Denver mint plates and counterfeit currency until the next spring.
“How much farther to Whiskey Creek?” Diana asked, her face pale and windburned.
“Must be just up ahead,” Longarm said. “Yonder comes a rider. Maybe he’ll know.”
The rider was a cowboy nursing a broken arm, a broken nose, and cracked ribs. His face was swollen and purplish, his eyes filled with pain, and he was headed for Cheyenne.
“My name is Arnie and I worked for a spread called the Swinging T Ranch for three years,” the suffering cowboy explained without preamble. “I was their top hand! Only one who could bust the bad outlaw broncs that the owner kept trying to turn into cow ponies.”
“Is that what happened to you?” Diana asked. “You got stomped or thrown by a bronc?”
“Naw! I got into a fistfight about a week ago with a man named Buck Zolliver over in Redcliff. He was drunk and raisin’ hell with everyone. He slapped a saloon gal named Janice so hard, it broke her lips like they was stomped grapes. I went crazy and attacked the big bastard.
“Sounds like you made a bad mistake,” Longarm said, wanting to hear all that he could about Buck Zolliver.
“Yeah, it was a big mistake all right. Buck beat the livin’ shit outa me. He broke my nose with an overhand right that drove me through the back wall of the saloon. When I tried to get up and run, he landed on me with both knees and cracked every rib. He kept hitting me in the face so that most of my teeth are either gone or loose.”
