Killer Poker

Chapter 26





The vengeful expression on McKinney’s face and the cruel anticipation in his voice made it clear what Conrad was dealing with. It was true Pamela had duped McKinney as she had duped so many others, but the rancher had had a mile-wide streak of viciousness and evil in him before he ever met her. Conrad had seen that for himself the first night he had run into McKinney, during that altercation in the Palace. He might have built a successful ranch for himself, but he was still a cold-blooded killer at heart, and the hardcases who worked for him weren’t much better.

Conrad wasn’t sure exactly where Rose Sullivan fit into things, but he knew she was working with McKinney. That increased the odds against him.

“You can’t get away with kidnapping me. When I disappear, too many people will ask questions. They know you had it in for me. They’ll come looking for me, and this ranch is the first place they’ll look.”

McKinney laughed. “Let ’em look. Nobody on the Double Star will talk. My men are all loyal to me. By the time anybody actually searches the place, the buzzards will have picked your bones clean and the coyotes will have scattered them all over hell and gone.”

That was certainly a grim prediction, and Conrad knew it had a good chance of coming true. But he didn’t intend to let that happen without putting up a fight.

“Get up and get dressed,” McKinney went on, and for the first time Conrad realized he was naked. McKinney added to his men, “When he’s got his clothes on, bring him downstairs.”

“And if he tries anything, boss?” one of the guards asked.

“Blow him to hell.” McKinney grinned at Conrad again. “You see, Browning, I’d rather carry out what I’ve got planned for you, but as long as you wind up dead I reckon I can accept it.” As he left the room he added, “Don’t let him get too close to you. He’s fast and tricky.”

The cowboys nodded in understanding and backed off, keeping the shotguns leveled at Conrad. “You heard the boss,” one of them said. “Get out of bed and get them clothes on.” The man motioned slightly with the twin barrels of his Greener.

Conrad looked in the direction the man indicated and saw a pair of denim trousers and a plain work shirt draped over a chair. He pushed the sheets back and swung his legs out of bed, grimacing at the pain of stiff, sore muscles from the beating they had given him. “I don’t see any boots.”

“If the boss wanted you to wear boots, there’d be some boots there. Now hurry up, damn it.”

Conrad sensed their nervousness. They were afraid he would try something. At the same time, they hoped he would. Then they could pull the triggers on those scatterguns and have it all over and done with.

He didn’t want to give them any excuse to do that, so he moved slowly and carefully as he stood up, went to the chair, and started pulling on the clothes McKinney had provided. When he was dressed, one of the guards opened the door and backed out through it, keeping his shotgun level. The other two guards flanked Conrad.

He smiled at them. “You realize that if you shoot me now, you’ll kill each other, too.”

The guards’ eyes widened, and one of them said, “Damn! He’s right!”

Conrad laughed coldly. “Don’t worry. I’m cooperating . . . for now.”

He had looked around enough to see that the room was simply but comfortably furnished, and as he stepped into the hall and felt a thick rug under his bare feet, he saw the same seemed to be true of the rest of the house. A few yards away, the hall opened onto a balcony that overlooked a large room on the first floor. Conrad hadn’t known until then that he was on the second floor.

He figured he was in McKinney’s ranch house. The outer walls were made of logs, and there was dark, heavy wood almost everywhere he looked. The horns of deer, moose, antelope, and elk adorned the walls. It was the sort of house that would be built by a man who had carved an empire out of the frontier.

Some men did that sort of thing honestly and honorably. Conrad had a strong hunch Rance McKinney was not that kind of man. It wouldn’t surprise him a bit if most of McKinney’s first herd had been acquired by the light of a rustler’s moon.

One of the guards backed away in front of Conrad while the others followed him. “They’re waitin’ for you downstairs.”

“They?” Conrad repeated.

“The boss and that gal.”

Rose, Conrad thought. Maybe that really was her name, although it didn’t seem to fit her.

Not too many gals went by Medusa, though, he told himself with a faint smile, remembering some of the classical literature he’d read back in his college days.

He went down a broad staircase with banisters made from thick, heavy beams. At the bottom, he looked across the big room and saw a table sitting in front of a massive stone fireplace that was cold at that time of year. The table was set for breakfast, and the aromas of hot coffee and food made Conrad’s stomach clench as a reminder of how long it had been since he’d had an actual meal.

McKinney sat at one end of the table, Rose at the other. Her pale, wavy hair was loose around her shoulders, which were left partially bare by the low-cut blue gown she wore.

McKinney grinned as he got to his feet. “Glad to see that you’ve decided to join us, Browning.” He waved at an empty chair halfway between him and Rose. “Have a seat.”

“You’re putting me in the middle so that if your men cut loose with those Greeners, none of the buckshot will hit you or Rose, I take it.” Conrad walked to the chair. He kept his face coolly impassive and didn’t let them see how much he hurt all over.

McKinney chuckled. “That’s right. Sit down.”

Conrad sat. The coffee had already been poured in his cup, and the plate in front of him was piled high with steak, eggs, and biscuits.

He turned to look at the woman and nodded politely. “Good morning, Rose. Or would you rather I called you by some other name?”

“Rose will do fine,” she told him, without indicating one way or the other whether that was her real name. “You really shouldn’t have put up such a fuss, Conrad. It would have been much easier on you if you’d cooperated.”

“Guess I always was too stubborn for my own good.”

“That’s the truth,” McKinney said. “Otherwise you would’ve given up Pamela when you had the chance and not turned loco.”

Conrad started to tell the rancher again that he was making a big mistake, but he gave it up as a waste of breath. After everything that had happened, McKinney would want him dead even without the lies Pamela had told him. McKinney’s arrogance would have demanded revenge for that humiliating defeat at the poker table.

“Dig in,” McKinney said. “You might as well enjoy your last meal.”

Conrad picked up the coffee and took a sip of the strong, black brew. As he did, it occurred to him that McKinney might have had the coffee and food drugged. But why would he do that? He already had Conrad completely in his power. Conrad drank some more of the coffee, making him feel better right away.

The food helped even more. He was hungry enough that he wanted to wolf it down, but he forced himself to eat slowly and deliberately. “Just what is it you have planned for me, anyway? I know you’re going to kill me, but how?”

McKinney cut off a bite of his steak, popped it in his mouth, chewed and swallowed. “Nobody ever claimed that Rance McKinney wasn’t a sporting man.”

“What does that mean?”

From the other end of the table, Rose said, “He’s going to do something foolish. He’s going to give you a chance to fight for your life.”

Conrad had hoped McKinney might be leading up to something like that. He would stack the odds against him, sure, but the idea of leaving Conrad one single shred of hope before crushing him would appeal to the rancher.

Conrad turned his head to look at Rose. “I suppose you’d rather just put a bullet in my head.”

“That’s right,” she said without hesitation. “I was paid to see to it that you wind up dead.” Her sleek shoulders rose and fell in an elegant shrug. “But since you and that Italian friend of yours ruined all my other plans, I wound up having to go to Mr. McKinney for help. He’s calling the shots now.”

“Damn right I am. And what we’re gonna do is have ourselves a little hunt.”

Conrad looked back at him. “What do you mean by that?”

“The Double Star is a big place. My range runs for miles back up into the foothills. My men are going to take you out there and leave you, just like you are now, no gun, no boots, just the clothes on your back . . . and then we’re going to track you down and kill you like an animal.”

Conrad’s eyes narrowed. “That doesn’t sound like a very sporting chance to me.”

“It’s better than you’d get with that devil.” McKinney nodded toward Rose at the other end of the table. She didn’t appear to take offense at the characterization.

“You’re probably right about that,” Conrad agreed. He ate some more of the food and washed it down with the coffee, making an effort to stay calm.

He had said people would come looking for him, but he didn’t know if that was true. He wasn’t sure who it would be. Arturo was still in the hospital, but he wasn’t any sort of frontiersman. Bat Masterson would deliver the bank draft for Conrad’s winnings to Ellery Hudson, to be deposited in one of Conrad’s accounts, but neither of them would have any reason to suspect something had happened to him in time to help him. Nobody else in Denver cared one way or the other about him.

He was probably on his own, he told himself. Alone, on foot, weaponless, with a horde of killers coming after him . . . that was the fate McKinney had in mind for him.

McKinney didn’t know it yet, Conrad thought without an ounce of bravado, but the rancher had made a bad mistake by not killing him right away.

At that moment, the man sitting at the table calmly eating his breakfast before being taken out to be hunted down like an animal might still look like Conrad Browning . . .

But Kid Morgan was back.