Slaughter Read online

  Astrid must have told the hostler at the stable to leave her buggy team hitched up, because she was gone by the time Frank walked the block around the hotel. The elderly man took his hat off and scratched his head at the sight of Frank.

  “Don’t you ever sleep, mister?” he asked. “You been goin’ and comin’ all day.”

  “I’m starting to wonder the same thing myself,” Frank said.

  He led Stormy out and saddled the rangy gray stallion.

  “Stay here, Dog,” he told the big cur. He didn’t think he needed Dog to come along with him to the meeting with Victor Magnusson. That would just increase the tension that was already bound to be pretty thick.

  Frank followed the directions Astrid had given him, thankful that they were pretty simple since Los Angeles had grown considerably since the last time he’d been here. He found the place without any trouble.

  When Astrid had mentioned that she and her brother had rented a place to stay while they were in town, Frank had pictured some modest cottage.

  Instead, the house in the hills just north of downtown was the next thing to a mansion, a sprawling, steep-roofed structure with a three-story tower at each end. It looked like the sort of place where a railroad baron or a silver king would live.

  Frank rode through the gate and up a circular driveway to stop in front of a massive front door. He swung down from the saddle, looked for a place to tie Stormy’s reins, and finally settled for looping them around one of the columns that supported an elaborate arched roof over the entrance.

  A brass knocker was mounted on the door. Frank grasped it and rapped sharply several times.

  Astrid ought to be back by now, he figured. If she wasn’t, Victor Magnusson would be in for a surprise when he opened that door, assuming he opened it himself and didn’t have some butler do it.

  Instead, Astrid was the one who pulled the door back and motioned for Frank to come in. He pulled his hat off as he stepped into a fancy foyer. Astrid took it from him and hung it on a hat tree with a brass knob on the end of each curving projection.

  “Did you tell your brother I was on my way over here?” he asked.

  Before she could answer, Victor Magnusson called from somewhere down the hall, “Who in blazes is that at the door at this time of night?”

  Astrid shrugged. “There wasn’t time,” she told Frank. “Anyway, it would have just meant starting the argument that much sooner.”

  He supposed she was right. He followed her down the hall as she said over her shoulder, “Victor is in the library.”

  “This is a fancier place than I expected.”

  “It belongs to a man who’s a partner in a railroad. He’s gone to Europe for a year with his family, though, so the house was just sitting here empty. His lawyer was glad to rent it to us at a reasonable price.”

  As they went along the hall, they passed several portraits of a grim-looking man and woman and some equally solemn children. Frank supposed they were the family that lived there. He hoped their trip to Europe cheered them up a mite. They all looked like their best friend had just died.

  Astrid paused at a pair of double doors, one of which was partially open. Frank supposed that they led into the library. She looked back at him and summoned up a brave smile.

  Then she pushed the door open the rest of the way and said, “We have a visitor, Victor.”

  Frank stepped into the library behind her as she entered. Astrid moved aside, giving Frank a good view of Victor Magnusson as the oilman sat behind a massive desk that was littered with papers.

  Magnusson had a pencil in his hand, and obviously had been scrawling some sort of diagram on a piece of paper. Frank could see the drawing from where he was, but since he didn’t know anything about drilling for oil, it didn’t mean a blessed thing to him.

  Magnusson had taken off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. His thatch of fiery hair was rumpled, as if he’d been dragging his fingers through it. He looked up as Frank and Astrid entered the room, and a second later, the pencil in his fingers snapped with a loud crack as that hand clenched into a fist.

  “Morgan, by God!” he said as he surged to his feet. “What the hell are you doing here?” He threw the broken pencil aside and reached for one of the desk drawers. “I warn you, I’ve got a gun—”

  “Victor, stop!” Astrid said. She cast a nervous glance at Frank, as if imploring him not to shoot her brother if he was foolish enough to drag a gun out of that desk drawer. “There’s no need to be upset. I asked Mr. Morgan to come here tonight.”

  “After what I told you about the way he attacked Hatch and the other drillers? For God’s sake, Astrid, what you were thinking?”

  She met his angry stare with a determined one of her own. “I was thinking that he might be just the man to help us,” she said. From the way she was standing up to him and not backing down, Frank got the feeling that this wasn’t the first argument these siblings had had.

  Magnusson made a contemptuous noise in his throat. “The day I need help from a gunfighter—” he began.

  “That day has come, Victor,” Astrid broke in. “You’ve been complaining for weeks about how the ranchers are trying to run you and the rest of the drillers out of the San Fernando Valley. You know it’s only a matter of time until they hire gunmen of their own, if they haven’t already. But maybe they won’t if they know that Mr. Morgan is working for us. Maybe no one will want to face him.” She glanced at Frank again. “I understand that he has quite a reputation with a gun.”

  “Yes, well, I’m still not convinced that he’s not working for that Montero woman,” Magnusson blustered. “They seemed rather close.”

  Astrid turned her head and gave Frank a cool glance. “Is that true, Mr. Morgan? I’ve seen Dolores Montero. She’s a very attractive woman.”

  “I won’t argue that point with you,” Frank said, “but attractive or not, she doesn’t have a bit of use for me. It’s true that I rode out to her ranch today intending to ask her for a job, but once she found out who I am, she told me to get off her range.”

  He left out the meeting that was held at Salida del Sol this evening and everything that had happened there. Magnusson might hear about it later—if, of course, he didn’t know about it already—but for the time being, Frank didn’t see any need to go into those details.

  And there was always the possibility that Frank would find out who was really responsible for all the trouble in the valley before word got around about the battle on the Montero ranch.

  Magnusson pulled at his spade beard and frowned. “This is some sort of trick,” he declared. But for the first time, Frank saw doubt in the man’s eyes and heard it in his voice.

  “It’s not a trick,” Astrid said. “In fact, it wasn’t even Mr. Morgan’s idea to come here tonight.” Her chin came up defiantly. “I went to his hotel and asked him to come see you about a job, Victor.”

  Magnusson looked shocked for a second; then his expression turned into an angry glare.

  “You went to a hotel . . . by yourself . . . to talk to this . . . this gunfighter? Good Lord, Astrid! Los Angeles may be growing, but it’s still a small town at heart. Do you know what people are liable to say?”

  “I don’t care what people say,” Astrid replied. “I care about you, Victor, and if things keep going like they have been, you’re going to wind up either ruined—or dead!”

  Then she surprised Frank by putting her hands over her face and starting to sob.

  Looking flustered now, Magnusson came out from behind the desk and hurried to put his arms around her. He was a lot bigger than she was, and looked a little like a redheaded bear as he enveloped her in an embrace and awkwardly patted her on the back with one big paw.

  “Blast it, Astrid,” he said, his voice rough with emotion, “you know I can’t stand it when you cry.”

  “I . . . I know,” she sniffled. “I just can’t bear the thought of you being shot down. It’s no shame to ask for help, Vic, and who . . . who better
to take on those gunmen than a man like . . . like Mr. Morgan?”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and moved her back a step. “All right,” he told her. “I’ll at least talk to Morgan. Will that make you feel better?”

  “I . . . I suppose so.”

  “You run along, then, and let Morgan and me talk in private.”

  “There won’t be any trouble, will there?”

  Magnusson turned his head and glared at Frank for a second before turning back to his sister.

  “If there is, I won’t be the one to start it,” he declared. “You’ve got my word on that.”

  “All right then.” Astrid pulled a fine lace handkerchief from somewhere in her dress and dabbed at her eyes. “Thank you, Victor. I know you won’t regret this.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Magnusson said, but he still didn’t sound completely convinced.

  He went back behind the desk as Astrid turned to leave the library. While she was doing so, she caught Frank’s eye, and suddenly one of her damp, red-rimmed eyes closed and then opened again in a conspiratorial wink that Magnusson couldn’t see.

  She had been acting the whole time, Frank realized, manipulating her brother with her tears. Frank didn’t know whether to grin at her or frown at her.

  He settled for doing neither, and kept his face carefully neutral as Astrid left the room. Magnusson had sat down behind the desk again, and he motioned for Frank to pull up one of the other comfortable armchairs in the room.

  “You’ll understand if I don’t offer you a drink, Morgan,” Magnusson said. “I’m not sure yet if we’re going to be allies or not.”

  “That’s fine,” Frank replied as he sat down and faced Magnusson across the big desk. “I’m not sure I want to work for you. I’m here mostly as a favor to the lady.”

  Magnusson cleared his throat. “Astrid was out of line coming to your hotel like that.”

  “No harm done,” Frank said with a shrug. “Why don’t you tell me about the trouble you’ve been having out in the valley, and then we can decide what to do from there?”

  Magnusson nodded and launched into the tale.

  Chapter 20

  “People have been drilling for oil in the San Fernando Valley for nearly twenty years,” Magnusson began, “but only on a limited basis. I came here to Los Angeles a couple of years ago and started drilling here in town when the boom hit. I did well enough I decided to expand to the valley.”

  Frank broke in to say, “Your sister told me the fella who owns this house is in Europe for a year with his family. If you’ve been out here for two years, where were you staying before you rented it?”

  Magnusson waved a big hand. “Astrid wasn’t with me then. I just had a room in a boardinghouse. The same place my drillers stay, in fact. But when she came west, I needed somewhere better for her, of course.”

  Frank nodded. “I reckon that makes sense. Mind if I ask what prompted her to join you?”

  “Our mother passed away,” Magnusson replied with that rough growl in his voice again. “Astrid had been taking care of her. But with her gone, there was no reason for Astrid to stay back in Minnesota.”

  “I’m sorry,” Frank said.

  Magnusson shook his head as if to say that what was past was past. He went on. “When I decided to expand my drilling operation into the valley, I looked into the situation, of course, and found out the same thing other drillers had discovered. The title claims those ranchers have are pretty shaky legally, especially the Montero, Sandoval, and Lopez places. Those involve Spanish land grants, and some of the other drillers had already filed lawsuits seeking a ruling on them before I even got here.”

  “But you took advantage of the situation anyway, even if you didn’t start it, didn’t you?”

  One of Magnusson’s big fists thumped on the desk. “A man’s got to grab hold of his chances where and when he finds them, damn it! If you were a businessman instead of a gunman, you’d know that, Morgan.”

  “Go on,” Frank said, suppressing the irritation he felt at Magnusson’s attitude.

  Magnusson glowered across the desk for a second before he continued. “At first, I confined my drilling to areas that I either knew didn’t belong to any of the ranchers, or property where clear title was in dispute. But my God, Morgan, there’s so much oil down there! You don’t know what it’s like. To a man like me, knowing that oil’s there is like a man who’s dying of thirst knowing that there’s a whole lake of cool, clear water right under the ground if he can just get to it.”

  “So you started setting up your rigs wherever you damned well pleased,” Frank said.

  “Yes, damn it, I did—but only after asking Francisco Montero for permission. I would have paid him a good royalty on whatever I pumped out of his range.” Magnusson shook his head. “But he turned me down flat, the old bastard.”

  “That’s because he was a cattleman, not an oilman.”

  “No, it’s because he was a damned fool . . . although he had sense enough to marry Dolores Sandoval, I’ll give him that. She’s a beautiful woman. Every bit as stubborn as her husband, though.”

  “Because she turned you down, too, when you asked for permission to drill on Salida del Sol range,” Frank guessed.

  “I could have made her a very rich woman.”

  “Maybe she’s already got what she wants,” Frank suggested. “Not everybody is interested in nothing but money.”

  With a faint sneer on his face, Magnusson asked, “What about you, Morgan? What are you interested in besides money?”

  Frank shrugged and didn’t answer. Despite everything he’d said, he knew that Magnusson still considered him a hired gun, available to the highest bidder. For now, it suited Frank’s purposes to let the man believe that.

  “Anyway,” Magnusson went on after a moment, “I kept drilling, and a couple of months ago things started happening. My men were shot at. Equipment was damaged in the night. A wagonload of pipe was stolen from a drilling site. We found the wagon and the pipe at the bottom of a ravine. The bastards who took it had stampeded the team over the edge. It took us almost a week to recover all that pipe.”

  “And you think Señora Montero’s men are responsible for all this?”

  Magnusson’s brawny shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. “I don’t know it for a fact, but who else could be behind it? Other drillers have had the same sort of trouble, and it’s happened on other ranches, too. I think the whole bunch of them have banded together to run us out. Then they’ll bring in drillers of their own.”

  “It is their land,” Frank pointed out.

  “We haven’t had the last word on that.”

  Frank let that dubious claim go and asked, “Have any of your men been wounded by the bushwhackers?”

  Magnusson jerked his head in a nod. “Damn right they have. They’ve gotten busted arms and legs. A few have wound up in the hospital. I’d say that we’ve been mighty lucky no one’s been killed so far.”

  The oilman’s story sounded almost exactly like what Dolores Montero had told Frank earlier in the day. Frank didn’t think that was a coincidence.

  More than ever, he was becoming convinced that someone was trying to stir up trouble between the oil drillers and the ranchers in the San Fernando Valley.

  And the best way to discover the identity of that troublemaker was to get right in the middle of the trouble. He could do that by pretending to go to work for Victor Magnusson against the cattlemen.

  “If you hire me, what is it you want me to do?” Frank asked bluntly.

  “Put a stop to the harassment, of course.”

  “How do you suggest I do that?”

  Magnusson’s voice hardened even more. “By whatever means necessary, of course.”

  “Including murder?”

  Magnusson glared at him. “Damn it, my men are the ones who are getting shot at! Don’t talk to me about murder.”

  “The ranchers claim the same thing is happening to them.”

  The
oilman waved that off. “What else do you expect them to say?” he asked. “They’re just trying to cover up for what they’ve been doing.”

  “Maybe so,” Frank said.

  “No maybe about it. I know who my enemies are. The question is, do you want to help me deal with them?”

  Frank didn’t believe for a second that Magnusson was right about Dolores and the other ranchers, but he nodded anyway. Astrid Magnusson coming to his hotel tonight had been a lucky break, and he intended to take advantage of it.

  “Yeah, I’ll sign on with you, Magnusson,” he said.

  “And you’ll do whatever it takes to stop the trouble in the valley?”

  “I will,” Frank said, and that answer wasn’t a lie. He might not proceed exactly as Magnusson expected him to, but his goal was definitely to put a stop to the trouble in the valley. Just so Magnusson wouldn’t be suspicious, he added, “As long as I’m well paid.”

  “Oh, you will be,” Magnusson said. Frank could sense the oilman’s stiff-necked attitude loosening a little now that they had agreed to work together. “Maybe I’ll offer you that drink now.”

  “And maybe I’ll accept it.”

  Magnusson got up and went to a sideboard, where he splashed whiskey from a decanter into two glasses. He carried them over to Frank, who stood up to accept the glass that Magnusson offered him.

  “To success,” Magnusson said.

  “To success,” Frank echoed as he clinked his glass against the oilman’s.

  Of course, the two of them probably defined success in different ways, he thought wryly as he downed the drink. The whiskey was smooth, but it lit a fire in his belly.

  Astrid must have lingered outside the library door. She came back in then, and Frank figured she had been eavesdropping and had heard the glasses clink together and taken that as a sign her brother and Frank were getting along now.

  She said, “I take it you gentlemen have come to an agreement?”

  “We have,” Magnusson said with a curt nod. “I’ll be honest with you, Morgan, I don’t fully trust you yet, but I’m willing to give you a chance.”

  “That’s all I’ve ever asked for,” Frank said. “One thing concerns me. I’ll have to be around your drillers quite a bit if I’m trying to find out who’s been ambushing them. How are Hatch and the others going to react to having me around?”