“Guess I do.” She turned to Jak and J.B. “You boys in at noon today? Might need you for these stupe merchants. Kind can give you real trouble when they’ve sniffed the cork and glimpsed some of my girls.”
The two men both nodded. J.B. answered, “We’ll be there, Miss Stanwyck.”
“Good. See you around, Ryan.”
DOLORES WATCHED the outlanders leave her saloon and sighed, aware that a thin film of perspiration covered her body and her pulse was racing.
Around 400 a.m. the previous morning, when she’d been fast asleep in her locked and barred apartment above the Montana Queen, which was also sec locked, she had been awakened by two shadowy figures standing by her four-poster.
Intruders were a constant menace, as she kept the saloon’s jack locked in a huge wall safe in her room, and she had always carried a blaster tucked snugly beneath her pillow.
It was a compact Smith amp; Wesson Model 669, holding twelve rounds of 9 mm parabellum ammunition. It was a short-recoil weapon with double-action trigger and an inertia firing pin. The slightly unusual feature was the serrated recurved trigger-guard bow.
Dolores had fumbled for it, trying to lie still, faking sleep, feeling her heart pounding.
Her fingers touched the cold metal of the butt, and she started to withdraw it. To her surprise, the figures still hadn’t moved. One stood close to the window and one at the foot of her bed. As far as she could make out in the filtered moonlight, neither was carrying a blaster.
“Please God” she said under her breath, closing her hand on the Smith amp; Wesson, finger going for the trigger. She always kept one round under the hammer, despite the risk of an accidental misfire, and she knew that the safety was off.
Dolores powered herself upright, finger tight on the trigger, keeping the barrel of the powerful blaster moving between the two figures. “One breath and you’re fuckin’ history,” she said firmly.
For a few moments nothing happened.
Then the tall figure by the window laughed, a frightening sound because it brimmed with confidence. He was looking down the barrel of a 9 mm automatic and he could laugh like that. “Pull the trigger, lady,” he said in a sinister, whispery voice.
“I can shout for my sec men.”
“Do it.”
“You’ll get chilled.”
Now it was the much bulkier man at the bottom of her bed who spoke. From his silhouette he was incredibly fat, something over three hundred pounds, and he had a voice to match. Soft yet intense, like a stiletto slicing through honey.
“You have no sec men on the premises. One patrolled outside and one slept in the back, on two-hour shifts.”
Dolores noted the use of the past tense. “What’s happened to them?”
“Both sleeping,” the fat man said. There was no need for him to elaborate.
Dolores wasn’t frightened to use violence. It went with the job. And if she’d carved notches on her blaster for every man and woman she’d killed, there would have been eight or nine of them.
It seemed that she held the best cards, but in her heart a part of her knew that something was wrong. But she couldn’t work out what it was.
“I’ll take you both out,” she warned.
The fat man seemed to suddenly lose patience. “Enough,” he snapped, starting to waddle toward her. “We’ve come to talk to you about some visitors in the ville. Things we need to know. Things you can do to help. When you’ve told us what we need to hear, then we’ll go away. Leave you alive. More useful to us. But if you were to reveal to anyone that we’ve been here”
“Particularly to these outlanders” the skinny intruder added.
“Then we shall return and we will hurt you horrible so that your own mother would weep to see what an ugly corpse you’ve made. You see how easy it is to reach you, past all the bolts and bars and locks.”
Dolores was terrified. In panic she tugged on the trigger and heard the dry click of the hammer striking an empty chamber.
She repeated the action, again and again, then started to weep.