Killer Poker

Chapter 2





The rifle in Conrad’s hands was angled up slightly as he fired from the hip. When the slug struck the man in the right cheekbone, just above the corner of his mouth, it bored through his brain and exploded out the back of his head in a shower of blood, gray matter, and bone fragments. The other man yelled a curse and grabbed for his gun as Kingston’s blood sprayed across his face.

The revolver hadn’t cleared leather when Arturo uncoiled from the ground and threw the coffeepot into the man’s face. The man screamed and staggered back as the hot metal seared his flesh.

Conrad worked the Winchester’s lever and brought the rifle to his shoulder. He waited a second to make sure the man wasn’t going to give up. When the man jerked his gun from its holster, Conrad squeezed the trigger and drilled a bullet into the man’s chest. At that range the slug had enough impact to throw the man backward into the horses.

The third man struggled to control the horses as they began to spook from the shooting. Conrad levered the Winchester again and swung the barrel toward him.

“Give it up!” Conrad called.

For a split second, the third outlaw thought about it.

Then he dropped the reins, shouted, “Go to hell!”, and clawed at the gun on his hip.

Conrad and Arturo fired at the same time. The bullets ripped through the man’s body and spun him around. He thudded to the ground, face-first.

Without anyone holding their reins, the thoroughly panicked horses belonging to the outlaws bolted off into the darkness with their reins trailing.

Conrad watched them go and smiled faintly. Slowly, he lowered the rifle and took a deep breath. The air was thick with the smell of powdersmoke and death. He knew he ought to be used to it, but he wasn’t sure he ever would be. “They must have stolen those mounts pretty recently,” he said. “Otherwise they would have been used to the sound of gunfire by now.”

Arturo said, “Excuse me, sir. I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Go ahead,” Conrad told him.

Arturo stumbled away from the campsite. Conrad heard him retching. There had been a time when the sudden outbreak of bloody violence would have affected him that way, too.

Maybe he was getting used to the killing after all.

He levered another round into the rifle’s chamber— something he should have done sooner, he reminded himself—and checked to make sure the three men sprawled on the ground were dead. He was pretty sure they were, but it took only a minute to confirm.

Arturo came back, looking pale and shaken. He wiped the back of a hand across his mouth. “My apologies, sir.”

“No apologies necessary. You handled yourself very well.”

“I’ve learned by observation, and I’ve had a good teacher.” He gestured at the corpses. “I take it these men were desperadoes?”

“One of them said something about a posse being after them, so yeah, it’s a good bet. I’ll check their clothes and see if I can find anything that’ll tell us their names.”

It was an unpleasant chore, and an unproductive one as well. He didn’t find anything in the pockets of the men except some greasy, folded greenbacks, a few coins, matches and cigarette makings, a tattered deck of cards, and a poker chip.

“If they had any loot from their crimes, it must have been in their saddlebags,” he said as he straightened from the task. “Not much to show for a life of crime.”

“What do we do with them?”

Conrad glanced at the stars. “It’ll be light in another three hours or so. We’ll bury them then. In the meantime, let’s drag the bodies over there in those tall weeds. I don’t want to spend the rest of the night looking at them.”

When that was done, Conrad told Arturo to go back to his bedroll and try to get some sleep, as he’d been trying to do when the three strangers rode up.

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to sleep after that,” Arturo said.

Conrad smiled. “Try, anyway. I’ll finish out the night on watch.”

“Well . . . all right. But if you need me, don’t hesitate to wake me.”

“I won’t.”

Despite what Arturo had said, within minutes his deep, even breathing indicated that he had dozed off. Conrad sat down on the cottonwood log again and tried not to think too much about what had just happened. If he allowed himself to brood about every act of senseless, wanton violence that had intruded itself into his life over the past couple years, he wouldn’t have time for anything else.

And he would probably go mad.





Conrad Browning had been living the happy, peaceful life of a successful businessman in Carson City, Nevada, married to a beautiful young woman named Rebel and managing the worldwide holdings of the vast business empire he had inherited from his mother, when tragedy struck. Rebel was kidnapped and murdered, and his former fiancée, Pamela Tarleton, had been behind the evil plan.

He had uncovered that fact and attained some small degree of vengeance for Rebel’s death, but only by abandoning his old life and taking up a new identity, that of the wandering gunfighter called Kid Morgan.

He came to that naturally, because his father was Frank Morgan, the famous—or infamous, depending on how you looked at it—gunfighter known as The Drifter.

Attempting to put his past behind him, The Kid had decided that Conrad Browning was no more. His new identity might be fictional, but he embraced it. During the time he had spent wandering in and out of trouble he’d first met Arturo, who was working for a man who wound up being a deadly enemy to Kid Morgan.

Eventually The Kid had learned how hard it was for a man to give up who he had been. Pamela Tarleton was dead, but one of her relatives had tried to carry on her campaign of hate against Conrad Browning, and in the course of that, Conrad had uncovered Pamela’s plan to strike out at him from beyond the grave.

According to the letter she had written to him, she had given birth to twins, a boy and a girl, and Conrad was their father. The children, who would now be three years old, were hidden away somewhere in the West. Somewhere he would never find them, the letter boasted.

Shaken to the core by the revelation that he was a father, Conrad wasn’t going to give up easily. Recruiting Arturo to help him, he had returned to Boston, where he had been engaged to Pamela, learning where and when she had given birth. She had left Boston with the infant twins and headed west. Conrad was able to pick up her trail that led to Kansas City and then across the plains. Following the route of the Union Pacific, Conrad and Arturo were traveling by horse and buckboard, stopping at every settlement to ask if anyone had seen a woman traveling with two small children and a nurse, several years earlier.

The odds against discovering where Pamela had hidden the children were long ones, but Conrad intended to keep searching. The Browning business empire was still thriving. Money was no concern, and neither was time.

His children were out there somewhere, and he intended to find them.





Conrad let Arturo sleep until the sky was gray with the approach of dawn. He built up the fire and put fresh coffee on to boil, then took bacon from their supplies in the back of the buckboard and got it sizzling in a pan. When the bacon finished frying, he would use the grease to cook up some flapjacks.

The good smells woke Arturo. He pushed himself up on an elbow and yawned. “I would have prepared breakfast, sir.”

“I know that,” Conrad said, “but I cooked for myself for a long time when I was out on the lonely trails. I don’t mind.”

Arturo sat up and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “I must say, having seen you in the midst of glittering high society, it’s difficult to believe that you also spent so much time living like . . . like . . .”

“Some sort of owlhoot?” Conrad asked with a smile.

“Basically, yes.”

“There’s something to be said for solitude. Seemed like every time I got around people too much, I wound up in some sort of scrape. Usually a shooting scrape.”

“Ah. Then what you’re saying is . . . the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Conrad laughed. “That pretty much sums it up. Whether I’m Conrad Browning or Kid Morgan, people are all the time shooting at me.”

Arturo looked toward the weeds where they had put the bodies of the dead outlaws. “Indeed.”

“We’ll have breakfast first. Then we’ll take care of that little chore.”

“Yes, of course. Wouldn’t want to dig graves on an empty stomach, would we?” Arturo climbed to his feet and went over to the fire. “Why don’t you let me finish that? You’re more skilled at tending to the horses.”

“Sure.” Conrad tried not to chuckle. Sometimes he wondered who exactly was in charge, him or his so-called servant.

The horses had plenty of grass to graze on, so Conrad took them over to the creek one by one and let them drink. While he was doing that, Arturo finished preparing breakfast. The smell of coffee and bacon made Conrad forget that he was a little tired.

They would push on toward Denver, once they had finished the burying. He had been to the city that lay in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains many times. Denver was a big place. If Pamela had hidden the twins there, finding them wasn’t going to be easy.

So far in the quest, Conrad had been able to uncover enough clues to keep him on the trail. More than once, he’d had a feeling Pamela had left those clues on purpose. She had wanted him to keep searching. She’d realized how much torment he would be in knowing that his children were out there somewhere.

Arturo poured the coffee. He handed a cup to Conrad, then knelt by the fire to dish up the bacon and flapjacks. The sun was barely peeking over the horizon.

With a sudden thunder of hoofbeats, a large group of riders surged out of the reddish-gold glare and galloped up to the camp.