The Clint Adams Special Read online

  Staking a Claim . . .

  Clint could feel the rifleman’s glare burning straight through to the back of his skull. The fellow either believed that he stood outside the range of Clint’s pistol or had supreme confidence that he could put Clint down before a shot came his way.

  “Where are all those other gunhands you promised?” Clint shouted.

  After a few seconds, the man replied, “You’ll meet them soon enough, I reckon. That is, unless you want to put an end to this right here and now.”

  “By handing over the map or by us killing each other?”

  “Either one suits me just as well.”

  Clint moved in closer, to get into pistol range.

  “Are you going to tell me who you are?” Clint asked.

  “All you need to know is that I’m the man with a rightful claim on this gold.”

  “If that was the case, you wouldn’t need the map.”

  “Stop splitting hairs, Mr. Adams,” the man said in an aggravated tone. “Put an end to this now before things get a whole lot worse.”

  “You’re bluffing. The odds are evened out and you’re trying to get what you want through talk.”

  The man’s voice took a steely edge as he replied, “You want more than talk? So be it.” He flipped open his coat to reveal the holster strapped to his hip.

  DON’T MISS THESE ALL-ACTION WESTERN SERIES FROM THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  THE GUNSMITH by J. R. Roberts

  Clint Adams was a legend among lawmen, outlaws, and ladies. They called him . . . the Gunsmith.

  LONGARM by Tabor Evans

  The popular long-running series about Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long—his life, his loves, his fight for justice.

  SLOCUM by Jake Logan

  Today’s longest-running action Western. John Slocum rides a deadly trail of hot blood and cold steel.

  BUSHWHACKERS by B. J. Lanagan

  An action-packed series by the creators of Longarm! The rousing adventures of the most brutal gang of cutthroats ever assembled—Quantrill’s Raiders.

  DIAMONDBACK by Guy Brewer

  Dex Yancey is Diamondback, a Southern gentleman turned con man when his brother cheats him out of the family fortune. Ladies love him. Gamblers hate him. But nobody pulls one over on Dex . . .

  WILDGUN by Jack Hanson

  The blazing adventures of mountain man Will Barlow—from the creators of Longarm!

  TEXAS TRACKER by Tom Calhoun

  J.T. Law: the most relentless—and dangerous—manhunter in all Texas. Where sheriffs and posses fail, he’s the best man to bring in the most vicious outlaws—for a price.

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  THE CLINT ADAMS SPECIAL

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2014 by Robert J. Randisi.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  JOVE® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  The “J” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-14533-7

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Jove mass-market edition / August 2014

  Cover illustration by Sergio Giovine.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Description

  All-Action Western Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  ONE

  OLD MEXICO

  “We’re rich! We’re goddamned, god-blessed, filthy, stinkin’ rich!”

  Clint stood at the mouth of a cave that was stuck deep in a desert south of the Texas border. Apart from a bunch of lizards and scorpions, it seemed that nobody had set foot there in years . . . perhaps decades. The man beside him, however, had been a bit more optimistic. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he swore up and down that other men had been to that cave. Not only that, but those same men had left something behind. Until this moment, Clint had been satisfied to let him dream. Now he started to believe there could be more to it than that.

  George Oswalt was hunched over in a dark corner of the cave. Because of his wild mane of hair, thick build, and heavy breathing, he seemed more like a creature that would live in such a place. When he’d stood up to hold his arms up high and waved them over his head to make himself even taller than his normal six feet three inches, he looked even more like a bear.

  “You see this?” George hollered. In one hand was a dusty pouch and in the other was something that glittered in the faint bit of light from the lantern Clint was carrying. “See this here? I was right! I was right!”

  “Take a breath, George,” Clint said. “I’m still trying to figure out how we could be both god-blessed and goddamned.”

  George’s round face twisted into a confused expression beneath a mask of coarse, dark brown whiskers. “Huh? Oh. What?”

  “Never mind,” Clint said. “Let me get a look at what you’ve got there.”

  More than happy to share his find, George hurried forward so quickly that he almost stumbled over the uneven surface of the cave’s floor. He stretched out both hands while sputtering, “This is it! It’s here! It’s really here! I can’t believe it. I mean . . . I do believe it, but . . . I can’t . . .”

  “George?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Shut up.”

  George was about to say something to
that, but opted to nod instead.

  Clint held the lantern up a bit so more of its light could shine down onto George’s hands. His attention was first caught by the left hand, which held several dirty coins. He took one of the coins from George and held it right next to the lantern for a closer look.

  “Well?” George asked in an excited whisper. “Is that what I think it is?”

  The coin was rough around the edges and stamped with a simple design. Obviously, it had been melted down and cast by someone other than the United States Treasury. Even so, that wouldn’t have much impact on its value if it passed the rest of the tests. For now, however, Clint could only go with what he had, which were his senses and experience.

  He rubbed the coin between his finger and thumb. He tossed it a few inches into the air so he could feel its weight when it came down to slap against his palm. Finally, he clamped it between his teeth so he could look for indentations.

  “Far as I can tell,” Clint admitted, “it’s gold.”

  George clenched his fist around the rest of the coins in his hand so he could pump that hand into the air as he shouted, “Hot damn!”

  “Let’s see the rest of them.”

  George handed them over along with the pouch he’d been carrying so he could return to the corner where his celebration had begun. “I knew it! I knew there’d be something here, I just knew it!”

  Now that he had more than one coin in his hand, Clint got a better feel for their weight and texture. He’d held plenty of gold in his day, and he was certain he was doing so again. “Yeah,” he said. “You knew it, all right. Even so, let’s take this back to town so we can be absolutely certain.”

  “You are certain! You just said so yourself!”

  Knowing it wouldn’t do much good to argue while George was so worked up, Clint opened the pouch and took a look inside. There were only three or four more coins in there, and they looked just like the ones in his hand. He dumped the coins he was holding back into the pouch, folded the top over, and tucked it into his pocket. “Let’s see what else you found,” he said while walking over to join George in his corner.

  George’s enthusiasm was just as explosive when he turned his attention back to his discovery. “Look here, Clint! I found this underneath a shelf of rock. Come see.”

  The cave itself was wide but stretched back less than ten yards. While the mouth of the opening was large enough for a horse to enter, the ceiling sloped downward at a steep enough angle to force the men to stoop over before they got all the way to the back. George hunkered over about halfway inside the cave where the shadows got thick enough to require the use of the lantern. This was one of nearly a dozen caves they’d explored that day. In the days before that, they’d poked around into so many holes and caverns that Clint had lost count of them.

  On the ground directly beside George’s feet was a pile of flat rocks that were all big enough to use as dinner plates. The wall of the cave formed an alcove with a top edge that protruded from the vertical surface in a peculiar way. Extending his arm to shed some more of the lantern’s light into the alcove, Clint said, “There’s tool markings and jagged edges in there. That was definitely hollowed out by a pickax.”

  “Or possibly blasted out with dynamite,” George offered.

  “Could be. It’s certainly not natural, though.”

  “Of course it ain’t. Jeb Preston would’ve made little hidey-holes like this one before he was killed to make certain his money stayed safe.”

  Clint laughed. “There’s no way to know this is Preston’s money.”

  “You think we just happened to stumble upon someone else’s gold in these caves?” George’s eyes were wide as he looked up and around as though he fully expected to find more valuables protruding from the stone walls around him. “This is Preston’s money and this is only the start of it.”

  TWO

  Trujillo was only eight miles from the cave where George had made his discovery, but the town felt like it was about a thousand miles away from the rest of the civilized world. There were only two streets worth mentioning, bisected by a third. Any other path was either an alley cutting between dusty buildings or ruts in the ground that led to nowhere in particular. Since there were no signs on either of the two larger streets, Clint named them First and Second. The one cutting across them was named Cruces, and it was at the northwest corner of First and Cruces that Clint found himself later that day.

  Now that the sun had begun its descent, the wind blowing in from the desert had lost some of its scalding touch. Clint stood inside a small shop owned by a horse trader named Ramon. Apart from horses, Ramon also dealt in gold. He was a short fellow who seemed even smaller due to a back that had been bent to an uncomfortable angle after years of hunching over one river or another in search of his next fortune. His scalp, bare except for a few wayward strands of black hair plastered down with spit and sweat, had the same coarse texture as the desert floor. When he scratched it, the dry scraping sound rolled through the stagnant air within his place of business.

  “Well?” George asked expectantly. “You satisfied?”

  Ramon looked down at the flat stone on the counter in front of him, placed the stopper back into the small vial of acid he’d been using, and gave his head one last scratch. “It’s gold,” he declared.

  “I told you!”

  Where George nearly jumped up and down with enthusiasm, Clint kept his arms stoically crossed and his eyes gazing calmly through the dirty glass of the window in front of him. “What about the markings on the coins?” he asked. “Have you ever seen the like?”

  “Sí.”

  “Where?”

  Ramon picked up the coin he’d been testing and grazed the tip of his thumb over its surface. The calluses on his hands were so thick that he didn’t even feel the sting of the acid that remained in the grooves etched into the gold. “El General.”

  George squinted at the bald man behind the counter. “El henner . . . what now?”

  “El General,” Clint said, pronouncing each word just as well as someone who’d been born south of the border. “He was some sort of Army officer?”

  “I think so,” Ramon said. “He just wants us to call him that.”

  George stepped forward. If there’d been a chair for him to use, he would have perched on the edge of it. “What’s his real name?” he asked.

  Looking at both other men in turn, Ramon said, “Señor Preston.”

  Slapping the countertop so hard that he nearly spilled the vial of acid, George spun around on the balls of his feet. “Told you! Hot damn!”

  Ramon didn’t share the other man’s enthusiasm. He simply put his acid away before it ruined his counter, and then he stored the flat stone out of sight. “You want to sell these coins?” he asked.

  “Yer damn right I do!”

  Before the haggling over price could begin, Clint said, “I’m getting something to drink down the street.”

  “I’ll be along shortly,” George replied without taking his eyes off Ramon.

  Clint stepped outside, more than happy to let the other two men squabble over percentages and pennies. He walked to the corner and headed straight down Cruces Street to a wide building situated almost exactly between First and Second. The saloon was called Tres Burros. Judging by the way the three crudely drawn animals on the sign were butting heads, however, it seemed that whoever had painted the sign didn’t know the difference between a donkey and a ram. Fortunately, Clint didn’t frequent the place to admire its artwork.

  As Clint approached the bar, the man behind it looked his way and said, “There you are, Mr. Adams. Can I set you up with a beer?”

  “Do you have to ask, Danny?”

  “I suppose not.”

  By the time Clint picked his spot at the bar and placed one foot upon the tarnished brass rail next to a spittoon, a mug of frothy brew w
as waiting for him. He picked it up, brought it to his mouth, and tipped it back. The dark, potent beer did a fine job of washing away the dust that he’d brought back with him from the surrounding desert.

  “That,” he sighed gratefully, “is just what the doctor ordered.”

  The bartender frowned.

  “What doctor?” Danny asked.

  Clint shook his head.

  “Never mind.”

  THREE

  Tres Burros was one of the larger places in town. Of course, since most buildings in Trujillo didn’t even have a second floor, that wasn’t saying much. The bar ran along one side of the main room, and a small stage was on the other. In between, there were several round tables and a rectangular one used for faro. Counting the dealer and the single player trying to buck the tiger, there were only eight other people in the saloon at the moment. Since none of them required a refill of their drinks, Danny stayed close to Clint and busied himself with cleaning shot glasses.

  “So,” Danny said after a few more seconds. “Where’s Mr. Oswalt?”

  “George should be along soon.”

  “Is he at Ramon’s shop?”

  Clint looked up from his mug and asked, “Why do you ask that?”

  “Because you two found something in one of them caves, didn’t you? Isn’t that what he was hooting and hollering about when you two rode into town?”

  Actually, Clint wouldn’t have been surprised if the entire town had heard George carrying on when they were still at the cave. “We did find a little something.”

  “Gold?”

  “Not sure. That’s why we went to see Ramon.”

  Even though Clint had tried to keep an even tone and a vaguely bored expression, Danny looked at him as if a mountain of riches had been uncovered less than a mile outside of town. “How much gold did you find?”

  Clint could see a few of the other men in the saloon turning to look at him and could feel several more sets of eyes searing into his back. “Not a lot,” he replied. “And like I already mentioned, we don’t know if it’s gold.”

  As he’d been talking, the narrow door near the end of the bar was opened and a woman dressed in a simple brown skirt and loose-fitting white blouse emerged from a back room. “I thought I heard your voice, Clint,” she said. “Come back here, will you?”