CHAPTER 3 #2
He walked with firm steps to the bar, rapped his knuckles on the wood, and asked for a whole bottle of cheap whiskey and a dented pewter mug.
With the bottle’s neck held in his left hand, his glacial blue eyes swept every corner of the room until they found exactly what he was looking for: a poker table set up at the back, positioned under the weak, trembling light of a ceiling lamp burning whale oil.
Four men were in the hand. Untidy stacks of silver coins and a few rough gold nuggets decorated the middle of the green felt, which was already worn and stained with grease.
Nero came up without asking leave and pulled out an empty oak chair at the head of the table.
The dry scrape of wood on the floor drew the players’ attention at once.
“This game here is for men who carry real lead in the needle and gold in the pocket, friend,” snapped a man in a faded velvet vest who was dealing the cards with the mechanical, suspect dexterity of a card sharp.
By way of answer, Nero reached into his pocket and threw two hundred-dollar gold pieces onto the table. The dry, heavy sound of pure metal striking the felt smothered any attempt at objection from those present.
“Cards,” was all Nero demanded, his voice curt.
He played in a completely glacial, nearly mechanical manner.
He sketched no smile at all when he raked in the coins from a won pot, and did not snort or change the rhythm of his breathing when the game ran against him.
His eyes, however, were not focused on the figures printed on his cards; they stayed fixed on the warped grey reflections in the grease-smeared mirrors behind the bar, watching to the inch every movement at the saloon’s front door.
He knew perfectly well that the clock was running against him.
Two full hands later, a soft and delicate shadow fell across his broad shoulders.
A rustic lavender scent, subtly mixed with the iron smell of powder and the sweat of warm skin, set her apart completely from the other women who worked the room.
Nero lifted his face the smallest fraction under the hat brim and found her there.
Elena. She wore her long black hair, dark and glossy as a blackbird’s wing, pinned up in a loose knot from which a few rebellious strands escaped to fall against the pale skin of her neck.
Her eyes were large and dark and sharp as fine-pointed daggers, carrying at the back of the pupils the chronic weariness and bitterness of someone who had already watched far too many men bleed and die for absolutely nothing on that lawless frontier.
She was dressed in red satin faded by time and use, but the carriage of her body was nothing like that of a captive or a submissive woman; it was the untamed bearing of a genuine survivor of the desert.
She leaned over the poker table, pretending to prop herself casually while she reached out to pour more whiskey from the bottle into Nero’s pewter mug.
The deep neckline of the satin showed skin punished by the frontier sun, but Nero’s attentive eye caught a far more crucial detail: the small, subtle bulge hidden under the lace garter on her right thigh — the wooden grip of a two-shot Derringer, made for point-blank work.
“You lay your bets like a man with no fear of losing everything, stranger,” Elena murmured, her voice soft but loaded with a silent and urgent warning.
The set of her body blocked the line of sight of the other players at the table.
“Only a man carrying something worth protecting fears losing it,” Nero answered, keeping his blue stare fixed straight on the woman’s dark pupils.
Elena leaned in another inch. The warm breath of her mouth brushed the side of Nero’s ear at the exact moment she pretended to gather the discarded cards from the table.
“The rat you shot in the belly out in the canyon managed to drag his legs as far as the gates of the Cross Ranch,” she whispered, almost inaudibly to the others.
“Colonel Vance’s pack of butchers are already saddling up at the main stable.
They’re coming down to town with express orders to take the head off the man with the blue eyes.
If you still put any value on your life, drop those cards and go out the back door right now. ”
Nero shifted his cold eyes to the cards held between his fingers over the felt.
A pair of black aces and a pair of eights of clubs.
The iconic dead man’s hand. With a calm motion he turned the cards facedown on the wood, reached out, and took a long, generous swallow of the cheap whiskey, letting the liquor burn his dry throat.
Elena’s warning hung in the air like the fumes off the glass, but Nero did not move a single muscle.
He gathered the cards from the table, his long steady fingers sliding across the green felt.
“Tell them they don’t need to ride out to the canyon,” Nero said, looking straight into Elena’s dark eyes. “I’ll be waiting right here.”
The other players at the poker table, men who knew the weight of Jonathan Vance’s name, began hurrying their coins away.
Fear is contagious. In under two minutes the hum of The Broken Spur had emptied out.
The piano player shut the lid of the instrument with a dull bang and vanished out the back.
Customers and prostitutes slipped away through windows and side doors.
All that remained were the oil lamps swaying from the ceiling, the barman crouched behind the counter, and Nero, seated facing the entrance.
Elena did not run. She took three steps back and set herself in the gloom near a wooden post, her right hand resting discreetly under the satin skirt, where the Derringer was waiting.
Her dark eyes stayed fixed on the stranger.
The sound came in off the dirt street. The heavy tramp of at least six horses pulling up short in front of the saloon.
Creaking leather, the ring of spurs on the wooden porch.
The swinging doors were shoved open with violence.
Five men came in. They wore dark dusters and carried repeating rifles and revolvers in their hands.
At the centre of the group stood a tall fellow with broad shoulders and a thick beard that smelled of rope tobacco.
His name was Kurt, Vance’s chief foreman in Bitter Creek. Beside him, pale, with a bloodied bandage tied hastily around his belly, stood the young mercenary who had escaped Nero in the canyon. The young man pointed a shaking finger toward the back of the saloon.
“That’s him, Kurt…” His voice failed from exhaustion and loss of blood. “That’s the man in the long coat. The blue-eyed son of a bitch.” Kurt took two steps forward, his heavy boots knocking on a floor swept clean of customers.
He looked at Nero, then at the nearly empty whiskey bottle on the table. A cruel smile took shape under his beard.
“So you’re the fellow who likes taking heads,” Kurt said, his deep voice ringing through the empty saloon. “Old Vance was mighty put out about losing McCready. And when the Colonel is put out, somebody has got to bleed dry.”
Nero did not stand up. He raised the pewter mug, took the last swallow of the bitter liquor, and set his glacial blue eyes directly on Kurt’s.
“There are five of you,” Nero said, his tone far too calm for a man surrounded. “That’s a bad count.”
“That’s a fine count for us, stranger,” Kurt laughed, lifting the barrel of his Remington.
“Not for you,” Nero answered.
In the millisecond that followed, Elena acted out of pure survival instinct.
With one quick movement she reached out her left arm and yanked the cord of the nearest oil lamp, bringing it down on the floor.
The glass shattered and fire spread in a fast line, dropping the back of the saloon into a dancing gloom full of shadows.
That was the fuse the room had been missing.
Nero threw his body backward while he kicked the heavy oak table forward.
The frame went over, serving as a shield exactly as the first three shots from Vance’s men exploded in the darkness.
The balls punched through the tabletop, throwing splinters into the air.
But Nero was no longer behind it. He rolled to the left through the dark.
Both Colt Patersons leapt into his hands as though they were extensions of his own arms. The double click of the hammers coming back was the last warning anyone got.
POW! POW! Nero’s first two shots tore through the smoke.
The young mercenary shot in the canyon got no second chance; the lead found his chest and dropped him dead before he could fire.
The second shot took the foreman on Kurt’s right, punching through his throat. The man went down on his knees, drowning in his own blood.
“Kill him! Kill the son of a bitch!” Kurt roared, firing blind toward the muzzle flash of the Colt.
The saloon turned into a hell of powder, smoke and flame.
Nero moved like an apparition among the overturned tables.
His Patersons sang in a lethal rhythm. Two more shots.
Another of Vance’s men collapsed with his skull split open.
One of the remaining mercenaries, panicking as he watched his companions drop like flies, threw down his rifle and drew a long knife, rushing desperately at Nero’s silhouette in the gloom.
He believed he had the hunter unarmed. A long, sharp metallic sound scored the dark air of the saloon.
Nero drew the cavalry sabre off his back in a rising arc.
The heavy dark-steel blade cut the air and met the attacker’s chest with brutal violence.
The man was opened from below before he could so much as cry out, his body slamming into the front of the bar.