Deadly Fortune Read online

  “That again? Take it from someone who’s been pursued by plenty of men. There comes a time when you’ve just got to move on with your life and take your chances. If anyone found us here, they’d likely find us anywhere else we tried to hide.”

  Clint kicked off the blanket and climbed to his feet. “Not hiding,” he said. “Laying low. There’s a difference.”

  “Whichever you want to call it, neither one of us is sleeping in a comfortable bed.”

  “You got me there. If I don’t get something in my stomach, I won’t be much use to anyone. Some strong coffee wouldn’t hurt either.”

  “I know just the place.”

  She led Clint to a small hotel that served meals in a dining room with only four tables. Since there were just enough guests to fill half of those tables, they were seated and served in no time at all. There wasn’t a menu for them to pick from, but they were brought portions of bacon, browned potatoes, toast, and a mess of scrambled eggs. To wash it down, they were given coffee that Clint could smell even before they’d stepped into the hotel.

  “Perfect,” he sighed after sipping from the steaming cup he’d been given.

  “I knew you’d like it here.”

  “Advice from the spirits?”

  “No,” she said. “You’re a man. You’re happy with food so long as it’s piled high and within reach. The coffee is also strong enough to peel paint from a barn door.”

  “That’s always welcome after a hard night’s sleep.” Clint took a drink of the potent brew, which hit him like a slap in the face.

  “Where did you go last night?” Gigi asked.

  “To check and see if your house was still standing.”

  “And was it?”

  “Yes,” Clint replied. “But just barely.”

  Her eyes widened into saucers and then narrowed down into slits. “That’s not funny.”

  “It’s good to know I can pull one over on a woman who can see the future. I must be talented.”

  “All right. You made your point.”

  “Speaking of the future, I want you to tell me exactly what you said to those men who came to you right before these problems with Torquelan started.”

  Gigi shrugged while poking at her breakfast with a fork. “I already told you that.”

  “Tell me again. And be exact. Before I do anything else, I want to have overturned every rock to make sure I’ve found anything and everything that can possibly help me.”

  “Help you do what exactly?” When Clint didn’t answer right away, she gripped her fork a little tighter and said, “You’ll have to be exact with me first and then I’ll be exact with you.”

  “I think you’re a little too accustomed to working with paying customers.”

  Gigi let out the breath that had tensed her entire body, then she looked down at her plate.

  Even if she was putting on a bit of a performance to get her way, Clint still felt bad for snapping at her. “I can’t give you too many details because I simply don’t know them yet. All I do know for certain is that I’ve stumbled into a tangled damned mess in this town and Torquelan is at the center of it. You’re wrapped up in it as well, and since you’re more likely to talk to me without lying to my face, I’m trying to get as much from you as I can.”

  “Apology accepted,” she said with a little smile.

  Clint didn’t recall apologizing, but before he knew it, he nodded and told her, “I am sorry, Gigi.”

  She was good.

  Whatever satisfaction she took from the way she’d steered his words in the proper direction didn’t last very long. Using her fork to move her food around, she asked, “How big of a mess is it?”

  “Pretty big. At first, it just seemed like the men following me were after you or possibly me for some past incident that I forgot about.”

  “You’ve made enough transgressions to forget about one that someone might want to kill you for?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Clint said. “Anyway, now it looks like Torquelan is involved in some kind of scheme with a bunch of different mining claims and he’s started surrounding himself with armed men.”

  “Torquelan’s not the only rich man to have done something like that.”

  “True,” Clint admitted, “but none of them thought twice about firing on me and the sheriff when we went to pay them a visit. Granted, the sheriff made something of a bold entrance, but even after announcing himself, those gunhands didn’t let up. They meant to kill us, and my gut tells me that would have been the case even if we’d knocked on the door and asked politely to be let inside.”

  Gigi didn’t seem overly frightened by what she heard. Clint’s read on her was that she wasn’t looking forward to any sort of a fight but wasn’t about to run from one either.

  “Did anyone mention some miners that had gone missing recently?” she asked.

  “Yes. What do you know about them?”

  “Nothing,” she sighed. “But there were some people who came around to visit me so they could ask about where those miners might be found.”

  “What did you tell them?” Clint asked, even though he was dreading the answer he might hear.

  “I couldn’t tell them anything because I didn’t know anything. I just . . .” Gigi looked around at the few others having their breakfasts at other tables and then lowered her voice so she couldn’t be heard by anyone other than Clint. “I just told them the missing men weren’t in any pain and would be found soon. I didn’t say if they would be alive or dead. I just . . . didn’t know what else to tell them. It’s not the first time I’ve had to lie to someone grieving over a loved one and it’s never easy. It’s my least favorite thing I have to do in my line of work.” Averting her eyes from him, she added, “Now go ahead and tell me how I don’t have to lie at all. Especially to people in so much pain.”

  To her surprise, Clint reached across the table and put his hand upon hers. “It can’t be easy,” he said, “but what you’re providing is a service to those people. You’re giving them something. Hope.”

  “And what if their loved ones are dead? What kind of hope is that?”

  “It’s the kind that will provide them some measure of comfort. And who’s to say if you’re not correct in telling them they’ll be reunited with them someday?”

  “You don’t think that notion is a bit . . . quaint?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Clint said. “It’s been working for preachers for a long time, so it must have some kind of foundation.”

  Gigi smiled at him and went from picking at her food to eating it again. “I think I do remember a few other exact words I told those men.”

  “Good. Let’s hear them.”

  Closing her eyes, Gigi sat up straight as if the table between her and Clint were the one inside her tent. “I told them that their dealings with the man they were doing business with would end up with . . . fire.”

  “Fire?”

  Slowly, she opened her eyes again. Looking more surprised than Clint, she said, “Yes. Fire.”

  “Why did you mention fire?”

  “Because that’s what I saw. Truly. I remember it now. When those men asked me about their business dealings, I saw fire.”

  “Which men?” Clint asked.

  “All of them. All the ones who came to me that I later found were connected to Torquelan. I saw fire, Clint, and it wasn’t any sort of act.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Really?” she asked as her expression brightened. “You’re a believer?”

  “Don’t get carried away. I believe you right now. That doesn’t mean I buy into the whole fortune-telling thing.”

  Gigi shrugged. “I’ll take what I can get. I also told them that the gold in their mines wouldn’t end up in anyone’s hands. Not theirs and not the man they were dealing with who I now know to be Torque
lan.”

  “Was that a real vision also?”

  “Yes,” Gigi replied without hesitation. “But I’m not certain what it means. The real visions are like that. Never as clear as the ones I make up.” Wincing, she quickly added. “Embellish. Not as clear as the ones I embellish. There’s a difference.”

  “Whatever you say.” Clint chuckled. He still couldn’t shake the notion that she wasn’t lying to him about those genuine visions. What mattered more than him believing her, however, was the fact that Torquelan or someone working for him seemed to believe that she’d seen those things. And since her visions had obviously stricken a nerve, there must be something to them.

  “Where do you go from here?” she asked.

  “Sometimes when you’re trying to untie a knot, it’s easier to just cut straight through the thing instead of trying to figure out how it got so tangled up in the first place. Soon as I finish my breakfast,” he told her, “I start cutting.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  It did Clint a world of good to stop trying to untie the knot that was Torquelan’s entire business structure. Whatever the man had set up for himself, simple or complicated, wasn’t something Clint was likely to uncover in a short amount of time. So he focused instead on what he could see with his own eyes or what he’d already found out during his short stay in Las Primas.

  The first thing he did was look into the search for those missing miners. Since that was a mystery that had just come to light in recent days, it wasn’t difficult to find folks in town who were willing to talk about it. Clint knew he had to take the stories he collected with a grain of salt, but the basic elements were the same throughout all of them.

  Chuck Ainsley, Steven Vester, and Michael Howe were the names of the missing miners. As far as Clint could piece together from the stories he’d heard, all three of the men had gone missing within a week of one another. They were all fairly competent at their craft, and the claims they’d made had panned out well enough for them to earn a living. None of them had struck it rich, however, which made it seem peculiar that Torquelan would go through the trouble of kidnapping or possibly killing them.

  Clint wound up at Sweet Caroline’s for a beer after spending a good portion of his day wandering about town talking to folks. He’d already spoken to the barkeeps working at most of Las Primas’s other saloons, so Clint settled in by asking Barry the same question he’d asked the rest.

  “Ainsley, Vester, and Howe?” Barry replied as he set Clint’s mug of beer in front of him. “Them three had some mighty bad luck, but it’s not like they weren’t warned.”

  “Warned?” Clint asked as he took a long drink. “Warned about them being kidnapped?”

  “No, that’s not the bad luck I meant. I was talking about the cave-in. I’d bet half a fortune that at least one of them’s buried in their own mine.”

  “Hasn’t anyone checked there yet?”

  “Sure they did,” Barry said with a backhanded wave. “But they didn’t look hard enough. Working behind a bar in as many mining towns as I have, a man tends to get a good feel for how these fellas’ minds work. Plenty of miners go missing when they strike out on their own to dig on a hunch or they just slip and fall into a pit somewhere.”

  “What did you mean about a cave-in?” Clint asked to try and get the barkeep’s story back on track.

  “There was a few cave-ins not long ago. At least one that I know about for certain. It was over at Howe’s silver mine. Not too big, but any cave-in can be dangerous.”

  “Has Howe been seen since the cave-in happened?”

  “I think so.”

  Clint let out a tired sigh.

  “But,” Barry added, “he could very well have gone back. As for them other two, Dr. Lumier warned them about cave-ins, too.”

  “Who’s Dr. Lumier?”

  “Some French fella.”

  “Besides that,” Clint said, trying awfully hard not to reach over the bar and strangle the babbling bartender.

  “He came to town some time ago, saying he was from the Federal Office of Mining Regulations.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “That don’t mean there ain’t one,” Barry scolded.

  Clint couldn’t exactly fault him on that. Moreover, he knew that faulting the barkeep wouldn’t do him a lick of good anyway.

  “So what did this federal man have to say?” Clint asked.

  “Don’t rightly know. I wasn’t there.”

  Clint leaned over and spoke as if he was confiding solely in the man standing behind it. “That doesn’t mean you didn’t hear a thing or two about what happened.”

  It didn’t take long for Barry’s face to show a sly grin. “Now that you mention it, I did hear a thing or two. That doctor fella warned about some sort of underground activity that might cause cave-ins. Actually, lots of folks know about that part. But what most of them folks don’t know is that Ainsley, Vester, and Howe were the first ones who heard about it. Vester even found a section of his own mine that had collapsed.”

  “I hadn’t heard a thing about that,” Clint said. “And I spoke to a man who claimed to have played cards with Vester on a regular basis at a saloon a few streets down.”

  “Vester only played at that rat trap saloon because he could fleece them drunks for half of what they were worth,” Barry grunted. “He came here much more often and he spoke to me about plenty of things. One of them was that this Dr. Lumier was making the rounds talking to some of the local miners about some kind of secret project that’d help in the predictin’ of quakes.”

  “Predicting earthquakes?”

  Barry nodded. “The doctor came to me special asking if I could recommend anyone who might be interested in helping test the device he brought along with him. I had a feeling he was fishing for a bribe. He mentioned that the device will benefit all miners once it became used commonly, but could benefit a select few who could use it before anyone else knew about it. Could let them know when to sell a claim, when to buy, when to move on to new ground, that sort of thing.”

  Clint wasn’t a miner by trade, but he could definitely see the possibilities. It didn’t take much imagination at all to buy into the notion of a government worker taking advantage of his position by sticking his hand out for a bit of extra profit.

  “You said this doctor was using some sort of device?” Clint asked.

  Barry tapped his chin. “You know something? I never actually saw it, but I think it was a device. Some sort of machine or measuring instrument, but it sounded convincing to me. It sure would explain the cave-ins at Vester’s and Howe’s places.”

  “So you think Ainsley had a cave-in as well?”

  Barry shrugged. “Could explain why nobody can find him. Sure, there’s already been folks down at his claim, but if it was a smaller cave-in and them folks didn’t know exactly where to look . . .”

  “Then nobody would find him,” Clint said.

  “You got it.”

  “Would you happen to know where those three men’s claims are?”

  THIRTY

  There was still plenty of daylight when Clint reached the mine owned by Michael Howe. It was the closest to town, located just over a mile away tucked in good and tight among some hills. Clint nearly rode past it altogether, even with Barry’s directions fresh in his mind. The only sign marking the spot was coated in dirt and halfway overgrown by thorny weeds. After pulling back on his reins, Clint hesitated before climbing down from Eclipse’s back.

  “You think that’s it, boy?” he grumbled. “Sure doesn’t look like much.”

  Eclipse let out a huffing breath and shook his head as if letting Clint know that he agreed with the assessment. After all, they’d found nothing more than a hole in the ground marked by a few planks of wood. Since he’d come this far, though, Clint swung down from his saddle so he could get a closer look.
/>   As he approached the little sign sticking up from the filthy ground, Clint could hear nothing but Eclipse’s breaths and those of the wind itself as it rolled across the sunbaked California terrain. Since the sign barely came up to his knees, Clint had to squat down so he could wipe away some of the grit that had collected upon its surface. With the dirt chipped away, he could make out a few words scrawled there in flaking black paint.

  PRIVATE PROPERTY—KEEP AWAY

  Beneath the warning was a number, possibly one that would match the official claim Michael Howe had filed with the proper authority to make the mine legally his. Clint stepped to one side so his shadow wasn’t blocking the mine’s entrance. Even with a bit more light shining down on it, the opening didn’t look any more appealing.

  “How the hell did the owner even find this place?” Clint wondered aloud. “Oh well. I guess this is what I came for.”

  Clint left Eclipse in a spot where the Darley Arabian could get some measure of shade. From there, he made his way back to the mine entrance and steeled himself for a dirty climb into what could very possibly be a nest of snakes or spiders.

  The mine entrance had probably started off as a crack in the rocks. There were still chips and scrapes in those rocks from the tools that had been used to widen the crack into something large enough for a man to get through. Not a large man, but a man all the same. Angled somewhere between fifty and sixty degrees, the entrance made Clint feel unsteady on his feet and expecting to be taken off them at any moment. As he stepped cautiously into the jagged hole, he searched for friendly surfaces with his fingertips as well as anxious toes within his boots.

  Once inside the mine, things took a turn for the better. The ground leveled out a bit. The air was cooler. The light was even coming in at a more favorable angle, which allowed him to see a ways into the murky depths. It wasn’t the sort of mine that had been worked by any sort of company or team of diggers. There were no tracks on the ground and nowhere near enough space to accommodate a cart. Clint did, however, spot a small pile of tools propped against a portion of rock that folded into something of a natural alcove.