Killer Poker

Chapter 24





“Don’t make me kill you, Conrad,” Rose warned.

Instinct made him clamp down on his nerves. He didn’t want to do anything that would startle her into pulling the trigger. She was just out of easy reach, but not far enough away that he could dive out of the line of fire. A little more pressure of her finger on the trigger would put a bullet in his brain.

In the back of his mind, he was cursing himself for getting caught. The strain of the poker tournament and the things Rance McKinney had told him had filled up his head to the point that, while he hadn’t forgotten about Rose, he hadn’t taken the threat she posed seriously enough.

Coolly, he said, “I thought you wanted to kill me, Rose. You’ve been trying hard enough to do just that ever since I’ve been in Denver.”

A faint smile curved her lips. “Things have changed.”

That was interesting. He couldn’t think of anything that had changed since the last time he’d seen her, but if there was something that kept her from pulling the trigger, that was fine with him.

“What do you want?”

“Go ahead and unlock the door, then go into your room. Don’t make any fuss about it. If you raise a commotion and anybody sticks his head out to investigate, I will kill him. That person’s blood will be on your hands.”

“Take it easy.” He started to turn toward the door.

“Carefully!” she ordered.

Taking it slow, Conrad finished unlocking the door and turned the knob. He swung the door open. The room inside was dark.

“Go on!” Rose ordered in a low voice.

As Conrad stepped into the darkened room, he sensed her rushing up behind him. He knew she probably wanted to knock him out, so he threw himself forward into that darkness and twisted aside at the same time. He flung an arm out behind him and snagged the sleeve of the nondescript dress she wore in her disguise as a maid. Closing his hand on the material, he dragged her with him.

She cried out as they went sprawling on the floor. Conrad kicked the door closed, figuring she wouldn’t start blazing away blindly. The shadows were his friends. He rolled over onto his belly, then held his breath and lay absolutely still.

Silence greeted his ears. Rose knew any noise she made would tell him where she was. And yet they couldn’t lie there forever, trying to wait each other out. Sooner or later, somebody would have to move.

A little light from the gas streetlamps outside penetrated through the tiny gap in the curtains over the window, and more light seeped under the door from the corridor. Conrad’s eyes began to adjust. He could make out the vague shapes of the sitting room’s furniture.

His guns were all in the next room, but he couldn’t reach them without betraying his presence. Still, he needed to be closer so he wouldn’t have as far to go to get them when the showdown came. He slid a couple inches in that direction, the carpet on the floor making his movements silent.

A carriage team suddenly clattered by in the street outside. Rose might use that noise to cover up any sounds she made, Conrad thought. He lifted his head to look for her and saw a flicker of motion to his right. That gray dress she was wearing! It loomed in the air as she leaped at him.

Conrad whirled to meet the attack, surging to his feet and lifting his hands to grapple with her. He reached for her arm and tried to grab the wrist of her gun hand so he could keep the pistol pointed away from him.

He caught hold of empty fabric.

He heard the springs on the divan sag under a sudden weight, then something crashed into his back and drove him forward on his knees. In the split-seconds as he was falling, he knew Rose had slipped out of the dress and thrown it in the air to lure him into moving, then leaped onto the divan and from there onto his back. As he landed on the floor with her solid weight on his back, the impact drove the air from his lungs. The next instant, one of her arms looped around his neck and closed on it with incredible strength, keeping him from drawing a breath.

“You think a woman can’t fight?” she said in his ear. “You think we’re all weaklings?”

He didn’t recall ever saying that, and he certainly wouldn’t say it about Rose Sullivan, or whatever her name was. She obviously took her job as a hired killer seriously and was in superb shape. The lack of air was making his head spin as unconsciousness threatened to overwhelm him.

But he was bigger, heavier, and stronger than her, he told himself. He had to be able to break loose from her grip. He got a hand under him, then a knee, and heaved himself off the floor, taking her with him. Pitching to the side, he sent them crashing into the writing table against the wall of the sitting room.

Rose cried out in pain and her arm came loose. Conrad dragged air into his body as he twisted around and reached for her. A small but hard fist slugged into his face as she struck out blindly. Her other hand tried to claw at his eyes, and her knee dug at his groin. She was constantly in motion, and it was like trying to fight a wildcat.

The wig had come off, and he could tell she had tied her blond hair up in a tight knot on top of her head. He grabbed her hair to hold her still. Before she could pull away from him, he hit her.

She went limp, and even after everything that had happened, he felt bad about hitting a woman. As she sprawled onto her back and her arms fell out to her sides, he pushed himself to a knee and stood up over her.

Her foot came up with blinding speed and slammed into his groin.

Pain exploded through him, bringing with it the knowledge that Rose had been pretending to be stunned. She had fooled him, and he cursed himself bitterly as the agony forced him to double over and fall to the floor.

He heard the door of the suite open, and a harsh voice asked, “What the hell happened in here? You were supposed to get the drop on him.”

It took a moment for Conrad to realize through his pain that the voice belonged to Rance McKinney.

“Don’t worry about that,” Rose snapped. “Just take care of him.”

“Oh, I’ll take care of him, all right,” McKinney said with obvious anticipation.

Conrad wished he had a gun. Although he might not have been able to see straight to fire it, he would have tried anyway.

But he didn’t get the chance. A dark shape loomed over him, and the world fell on his head, making everything else go away.





Sometimes just being alive came as a great surprise, which was how Conrad felt as awareness seeped back into his brain, along with a great deal of pounding agony.

He had been knocked out before, so he knew what it was like to feel as if a band of demons was inside his skull, slugging away at it with balpeen hammers. That was actually his pulse, and pain shot through his head with every beat of it.

But that meant his heart was beating. When he’d passed out, it had been with the grim acceptance of death. Rose and McKinney would probably slit his throat while he was unconscious.

Instead he was alive, and he gradually became aware that he was moving. The rough surface on which he lay swayed back and forth underneath him.

A musty stink filled his nostrils, and something scratchy rubbed against his face. After a few moments, he realized he was wrapped up in a blanket and probably lying in the back of a wagon. The roughness of the ride told him the vehicle wasn’t rolling over Denver’s paved streets.

So he was out on the trail somewhere, he thought. The fact that McKinney had been in his hotel room along with Rose Sullivan gave him a pretty good idea where he and his captors were headed.

They were on their way to McKinney’s Double Star ranch.

Despite the pain in his head, Conrad forced himself to concentrate on the predicament in which he found himself. He remembered how Rose had slipped into the hotel in disguise and gotten the drop on him. The exchange she’d had with McKinney proved the two of them were working together. Conrad didn’t know if that had been the case from the start, or if Rose had gone to McKinney for help after her true identity as a hired killer had been discovered.

It didn’t really matter, he told himself. What was important was that two very deadly enemies of his had teamed up . . . and he was now their prisoner.

So far he hadn’t budged as awareness came back to him. He remained as motionless as possible. The wagon’s bumps and jolts made him move a little, but he kept his muscles limp so that would look natural. The longer he could keep them from realizing he had regained consciousness, the better.

When he got a chance to make a break for freedom, he wanted to take them by surprise.

He wondered how long he had been out cold. It seemed like a long time, hours, maybe, but he knew that feeling could be deceptive.

Along with the hoofbeats of the team pulling the wagon, he could hear other horses. Outriders, more than likely. Maybe McKinney himself, since he struck Conrad more as the type to ride a horse than sit on a wagon.

Rose would be on the wagon. He considered the possibility of throwing off the enshrouding blanket, grabbing her, and using her as a hostage.

It wouldn’t work, he decided. For one thing, he was too likely to get tangled up in the blanket and slowed down by it. For another, just because McKinney and Rose were working together didn’t mean that he gave a damn what happened to her. If Conrad threatened to kill her, McKinney might just laugh and tell him to go ahead.

Anyway, he wasn’t the sort of man who used a woman as a shield, even a dangerous woman like Rose Sullivan. He would have to find another way out of the mess.

And it would have to be soon, because he heard McKinney say, “There it is. The Double Star ranch. The last place that bastard Browning will ever see.”