Slocum's Breakout - Jake Logan [48]
He stepped up into the saddle, retraced his path to the butte, and found the road twenty minutes later. Conchita couldn’t be more than a mile ahead of him, but she wouldn’t remain on the road very long, he suspected. Riding faster, he came within a few hundred yards of her as he veered off the road and rode to a stand of trees.
Slocum recognized this as the spot where José and his father had run after the stagecoach robbery—and where Conchita had almost sicced the sheriff and his posse on him.
With more assurance now, he rode into the woods and felt the cool darkness wrap around him like a damp blanket. Through the spindly tree trunks he saw flashes of the woman ahead of him. When she cut suddenly to the right, he took a route parallel and began edging closer. By the time Conchita rode out into a draw that led to a peaceful meadow, he was close enough to attract her attention.
Jerking about when she heard his horse’s hoofbeats, she reached for a six-shooter slung in a belt around her saddle horn. Slocum galloped forward, and as she raised the pistol to fire, he kicked free of the stirrups and sailed through the air. His arms circled her lithe body. Then his shoulder hit her side, and she was lifted from the saddle. Both of them tumbled to the ground, Slocum on top.
Conchita lay pinned under him, gasping for air. He reached out and snared the six-shooter in her limp fingers. This revitalized her, and she began kicking and clawing in earnest. He moved his knees to her shoulders and held her in a schoolboy pin so he could look down into her lovely face. There was no way around it. Conchita was about the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen, but that lovely face now contorted into ugly rage.
“I’ll kill you!” she cried. “You cannot have me this way.”
“I don’t want you,” he said. The words were like cold water in her face.
She looked at him, stunned.
“You do not want me? But . . .”
“I want my money for springing José from prison,” he said. “You owe me. Money. And my pay just doubled.”
“I will not—”
“I don’t want you,” Slocum said coldly. “I want my money. Pay me what’s due, and I’ll get out of your hair.”
“We have no money.”
“You’ve got plenty after robbing both the stage and the bank in Miramar.”
Her eyes went wide with surprise. Conchita shook her head as if this would be denial enough. When she saw he wasn’t going to believe her, she tried fighting him again. His weight proved too much for her to budge.
“You are hurting me,” she said.
“Might be I’ll do more than that if you try cheating me. You not only tried to steal what’s my due, you put the sheriff on my trail and lied about me robbing the bank.”
“The stage, too,” she said, a wicked smile curling her lips. The beauty fled, replaced by pure evil.
“Clever. Now pay me.”
“You will leave us alone?”
“I won’t even be a memory, ’cept for how much I took.”
“One hundred dollars.”
“One thousand dollars.”
“We do not have so much. We robbed the bank and stagecoach but took only a few dollars.”
He couldn’t forget the image of José gunning down the passengers on the stage or how their father had shot the driver until he was deader than a doornail.
“Let’s go count it.”
She glared sullenly at him, then nodded once. Slocum rolled to the side and let her get to her feet. She rubbed her shoulders where his knees had pinned her so securely.
“You bruised me. You are a vicious man, John Slocum.”
He didn’t answer. She read his expression and turned away to flounce toward her horse. Slocum caught up the reins on his and mounted to ride beside her. Conchita stared ahead, never even glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. The meadow wasn’t too large, but a small stream ran through the center and vanished into the woods a hundred yards downhill.
“There,