Utah Deadly Double (9781101558867) Read Online Free Page B

be,” Fargo agreed. “But she sure as hell didn’t give him the go sign to slice her up like a Sunday ham. Besides, I ain’t worried so much about that. If she’s telling the straight about this jasper’s appearance and horse, I’m the one’s in a world of shit.”
    â€œCould be she ain’t telling the straight,” Old Billy suggested as Fargo went down on his haunches to study the edge of the trail. “Hell, you’re famous, Fargo, you old pussy hound. And life around this hole is about as exciting as a bucket of sheep dip. Could be that gal flopped in the hay with some trail tramp who cut her up and made tracks out of here. So she turned him into Skye Fargo to get some attention.”
    Fargo bent his face even closer to a track that caught his eye. “Nah. Look at it with the bark still on it. Trouble follows me, and trouble follows you. This fellow is real enough, all right. But what’s his play?”
    Fargo reached into one of the prints and pinched the dirt. “A few hours old, is all. He didn’t picket or hobble his mount, just left it half in the hay, half on the trail. His horse’s rear offside shoe is a mite loose.”
    Old Billy, better at cutting sign on Indians than whites, looked puzzled. “How the hell you know that?”
    â€œLook at the print close—you can see it’s smudged. A loose shoe will do that.”
    Fargo began sifting carefully through the flattened hay, searching for clues. His patience paid off when his fingers extracted a small piece of foolscap folded once. He opened it up and read the four-word note before handing it to Old Billy.
    â€œFargo, you jughead, you know I can’t read nor cipher. The hell’s it say?”
    Fargo glanced at it again. “ ‘Death’s second self, Fargo.’ ”
    Old Billy’s homely face puckered with confusion. “That’s the whole shootin’ match?”
    Fargo nodded.
    â€œIt’s too far north for me. The hell’s it mean?”
    Fargo heaved a weary sigh and glanced all around them. “It means Ginny was likely telling the truth. And you and me got trouble on our tail.”
    Â 
    In the western reaches of the Unitah Mountains, two days’ ride northeast of Salt Lake City, lay the crude outpost of Echo Canyon. It was a place most pilgrims avoided, if possible. If not, they crossed their fingers, loaded their weapons, and stayed in groups for self-protection.
    It was a double handful of tar-papered shacks and boasted neither hotel nor school nor church. However, there were four grog shops always doing a lively trade. In the most nefarious of these establishments, a trio of rough, unusually pale men sat nursing a bottle of wagon-yard whiskey.
    â€œWell, boys,” said Butch Landry, wiping his lips on his sleeve and passing the bottle around, “by now Skye Fargo might be cooling his heels in a Mormon calaboose.”
    Landry was a compact, powerfully built man who could wrestle a seventeen-hand horse to the ground. His eyes were as black and fathomless as obsidian.
    â€œDon’t mention no goddamn calaboose,” drawled Harlan Perry, a big, raw-boned man who hailed from the hollows of Tennessee. “Ain’t no son of a bitch born of woman ever hauling me to prison again.”
    â€œEase off,” Landry said. “We got away clean, didn’t we? And if Deets earns his pay, Fargo will soon get a taste of what we ate. Remember, boys, under Mormon law no man can be executed without a year or two in prison for ‘penance.’ Ain’t that the shits?”
    As he often did, Landry fell silent and stared at his folded hands atop the table. Their leader, the other two had learned long ago, was a brooder with an explosive temper that made him kill without warning. But when he murdered a federal paymaster in west Texas for taking too long to throw a strongbox down, the U.S. Army hired Skye Fargo to track down