Sylvie's Cowboy Page 12

  As Dan prowled away from her down the hallway, Sylvie was shoving the broken curling iron under the sofa and out the other side, into the puddle of ice water beneath the coffee table. She worried that Walt was too close to her trap—she feared she might kill him. If her trap worked. If he wasn’t already dead.

  Unacceptable! She shoved morbid thoughts aside in favor of a proactive approach. As quickly and quietly as possible, she crawled from behind the sofa and dragged Walt by the arms, one desperate centimeter at a time, away from the pool of water.

  In the hallway, Dan approached the laundry room door. A faint rustling sound met his ear. Silently, he edged close to the door and leaned to peer into the dark laundry room. Then ... a movement! He fired! Dan swung into the room to finish the job—on Sylvie’s mouse.

  The sound of Dan’s gunshot sent Sylvie skittering back to her hiding place behind the sofa. The lamp at the end of the sofa cast a dangerous light, and she yanked the plug from the wall.

  The room went dark. From the hallway, Dan fired a shot toward the living room. The lamp shattered. Broken glass and ceramics clattered down around Sylvie’s ears, but she made no sound.

  Dan started up the hallway, in the direction of the sofa. As he neared the darkened kitchen the toaster popped up with a loud clang. Dan jerked toward the sound.

  The paper towels that had fallen against the stovetop began to smolder.

  In the microwave, a dozen eggs exploded with horrific bangs. Dan fired a shot toward the kitchen.

  The paper towels ignited. The smoke detector bellowed. Disoriented and distracted, Dan moved toward the kitchen.

  In the living room, Sylvie rose from behind the sofa and tossed a throw pillow across the room to hit the refuse chute at the foyer end of the kitchen.

  The chute’s metal door rattled and clanked. Dan ran toward the sound and tripped over the fire extinguisher on the floor. Cursing the object, he nonetheless had the presence of mind to pick it up and use it to put out the flaming towels on the stovetop. Then he turned the extinguisher on the blaring smoke alarm and froze it into silence.

  While Dan was in the kitchen, putting out fires in his stocking feet, Sylvie was plugging in the broken curling iron in the living room. Then, carefully avoiding the icy puddle on the floor, she knelt beside Walt and searched his pockets for keys. No luck.

  Then she remembered his ankle holster. She looked in the wrong pant leg first, but she soon found Walt’s gun and ghosted toward the kitchen with it.

  Dan was putting out the last of the fire. He had laid his pistol on the counter in order to wield the extinguisher with both hands. Sylvie silently appropriated his weapon.

  When the smoke detector finally ceased its piercing wail, the next sound Dan heard was his gun clanging down the refuse chute, where it would fall thirty floors to the basement dumpster.

  Dan turned toward the sound and found Sylvie pointing Walt’s gun at him. “You don’t approve of killing, Sylvie,” he reminded her with confidence.

  “No, but I’d kill a dangerous animal if I had to.”

  She backed Dan into the living room, where she forced him to sit on the sofa. Between Sylvie and Dan were the coffee table, fruit basket, ice-water puddle, and Walt’s unconscious, bleeding body. Sylvie kept the gun trained on Dan as best she could while, again, she felt in Walt’s pockets.

  Smiling, Dan held up the key to the front door. “Looking for this?”

  Sylvie stood and faced him with grim determination. “Give it to me, Danny. I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t care about the money, I don’t care where you go or what you do. I just want to call an ambulance, okay.”

  He scoffed. “Do you seriously expect me to believe that Sylvie Pace, the Princess of Worth Avenue, no longer thinks that having money is important?”

  “It’s important, I can’t deny that,” she said, “but it’s not as important as other things. Things you don’t even know about, Danny. Things you’ll never have, no matter how rich you think you are. Give me the keys.”

  He pretended to go along, throwing the keys to her, but he threw them short. She would have to take her eyes off him and grope on the shadowy floor to get them.

  She glanced away, and Dan lunged for her. He stepped in the puddle and sharply reacted to the electric shock that whacked him from the defective curling iron. Sylvie watched in horror as he reeled and fell—onto the knife protruding up from the coffee table. Then all was still.

  Stunned, Sylvie stared for several seconds at the gruesome tableau before her, outlined by the city light from the wall of windows. She swallowed a sob, shook herself, and scanned the floor nearby. A glint of silver flashed in the meager light, and she snatched up the key.

  Praying that Walt was still alive, she ran for the door, let herself out into the building’s corridor, and raced to find a telephone and help.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - THE PARTNER

  Sylvie parked Walt’s red truck at the end of the hospital parking lot near a small, blue lake dotted with black and white Muscovy ducks. She appeared calm and assured when she emerged from the truck dressed in jeans, plaid shirt, old cowboy boots, and a floppy well-worn Stetson. She carried a handful of wild flowers and a tote bag bulging with paperbacks.

  She was a different woman than she had been four weeks ago. She wore no makeup these days, and her hair curled naturally about her shoulders. People often said she seemed to get prettier every day.

  Sylvie’s priorities had changed irrevocably the night she sat in a helicopter and held Walt’s limp hand all the way to the hospital. Death had ridden with them, hovering closer and closer, but was cheated of its prey by a narrow margin.

  She had experienced the loss of her money, her cars, her home, and her supposed friends, but that was nothing. All those losses were mere inconveniences. She needed only one thing to live, thrive, and be happy—and she had felt Death’s bony fingers trying to take him away from her. Only then had she experienced true despair.

  Enjoying the clear Florida sky, the azure lake, even the hissing, milling ducks, Sylvie strolled through the lot toward the hospital entrance.

  Minutes later, she exited the elevator onto an upper floor and breezed down the hall, flowers and books in tow. She started talking even before she was through the door of the familiar hospital room. “Sorry I’m late. Had to chase old Beauregard halfway to Okeechobee—”

  She finished the sentence under her breath, “—before I could shut the gate and leave.” The bed was empty. A nurse’s aide was stripping the sheets. Sylvie couldn’t get air into her lungs. Oh, please, God! He can’t be dead!

  “What happened!”

  The aide looked up at the visitor. “Pardon?”

  “Where have they taken him?” Sylvie demanded to know.

  “Who?”

  “Mister McGurk! Where is he!”

  A teenaged Candystriper volunteer entered with an armload of fresh linens. “I think she means Walt,” the teen told the aide.

  The aide smiled and nodded, “Oh, Walt! He’s down in physical therapy. Be back in about half an hour.”

  Sylvie felt as if a valve in her feet had opened and her blood had simply dropped out of her body like water down a flushing toilet. She dropped her load of flowers and books into the visitor’s chair near the door and leaned against the doorjamb to keep from collapsing on the cold tiles.

  The Candystriper worried that the cowboy lady was going to faint. “Are you okay? Ma’am? Are you—” Sylvie was gone. She had bolted as if the room were afire.

  Sylvie didn’t stop moving until she reached the shore of the small lake outside the hospital. She slumped onto a bench and tried to calm her panicked heart. She watched the ducks on the lake. On the opposite shore families strolled. Children floated toy boats along the water’s edge twenty yards away. At first the sights were blurred, but she soon had herself under control, and tears stopped flowing.

  She didn’t know how long she sat there. She didn’t hear the man wearing bathrobe and slippers w
ho limped up behind her, leaning heavily on a cane. She rubbed her temples.

  A deep voice said, “Headache?”

  She started and would have turned toward him, but he leaned his cane against the bench and used both hands to begin massaging her neck and shoulders. “There now,” his velvet voice soothed her, “just you relax. Let Uncle Walt make it all better.”

  She nodded and closed her eyes.

  He continued the massage. After a minute had passed in silence, he inhaled deeply and said, “I was twelve and living on the streets. He was ten years older and a hundred years meaner and drunk as a skunk. He tried to knife me for the two dollars I had in my pocket and I killed him. Deader’n dirt.”

  She tried to stop him, “You don’t have to—”

  He went on as if she’d said nothing. “Juvenile Court put me in the custody of a man named Harry Pace—who came down to speak up for me because his wife read about it in the papers and wouldn’t let him rest until he did something to help. So, Harry and Helen sent me to boarding school and college and set me up in a business. Took care of me like a son even though they had a little girl of their own. I didn’t see her but once or twice a year, when I’d come home for school holidays, but I always thought she was the most beautiful thing God ever made.”

  He seemed to wait to catch his breath, but the massage never stopped. Soon he spoke again. “I woulda been dead or in jail a long time ago if it hadn’t been for Harry. I ain’t excusin’ what I done, helpin’ him with his crazy scheme, but I owed him a big favor, and he collected. I swear I’ll never lie to you again.”

  Sylvie slid away from his hands and turned to face him. “Why are you telling me this?”

  He let the back of the bench take some of his weight. “I think one should be familiar with one’s associates. You ain’t asked to be a partner in this ... enterprise, but I intend to take an active role in signin’ you on.”

  He looked down at his feet, smiled, and shook his head. He lifted his head to gaze into her waiting eyes. “I know,” he said, “I oughta be on my knees right now, but I’m some stiff yet.”

  Sylvie rose, walked around the bench, and melted into his arms. “Are you proposing, McGurk?”

  “Well,” he said, “as much as I hate to ask you to give up a promising career in electrical appliance repair...”

  She kissed him.

  He pulled her closer and kissed her. Bathrobe and cane notwithstanding, he kissed like a man whose strength and health were fully restored.

  ###

  About the Author

  Iris Chacon’s ancestors have lived and farmed in Florida as far back as the Spanish occupation in the 1700s. Few people know that North America’s first cattle ranches and cowboys existed in Florida, even before places like Texas and the great American Southwest became the sources of cowboy myths and legends. Iris has a home in small-town central Florida, is a wife and mother, and writes for radio, stage, and screen as well as for ebooks.

  Connect with Iris Chacon

  Facebook: Facebook profile

  LinkedIn: Iris Chacon

  Send email to Iris Chacon by sending to: IrisChacon137 at gmail dot com

  Cover art is by Fiona Jayde of Fiona Jayde Media

  Enjoy the following sample from Mudsills & Mooncussers, the next ebook by Iris Chacon.

  MUDSILLS & MOONCUSSERS

  What can Yankee spy Aaron Matthews do when the Confederate agent he seeks appears to be the very woman with whom he has been falling in love?

  It’s a deadly game of spy vs. spy in Civil War Key West.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Facts

  1860

  In 1860, the small population of an island called Key West, southern tip of the United States, had grown wealthy upon the wreckage of ships. The noble citizens of Key West often rescued passengers and crews when tall-masted wooden ships were forced by storms onto the shallow, knife-edged coral reefs lining the Gulf Stream waters called the Florida Straits. Maritime law stated that the first boat captain to hail the foundering vessel earned the right to salvage and sell whatever could be taken off the wreck before it was claimed by the sea.

  Less noble citizens had been known to build fires on nearby islands north of the official Key West lighthouse. Such a false light could cause helmsmen to turn toward the shore miles before it was safe to do so, driving their doomed ship onto the reefs and into the hands of the waiting wreckers. Moonless nights worked best for fooling unwary mariners onto the rocks. For that reason, these dishonest ship wreckers were known as “mooncussers.” In the worst cases, mooncussers had been known to kill—or perhaps merely fail to rescue—passengers and crew members. Dead men tell no tales.

  The wrecking business was lucrative—and sometimes even honest—and by the 1850s had made Key West the richest town per capita in Florida. Of course, there were few towns in the state at that time. Citizens of Key West did their shopping in Mobile, Alabama, or Charleston, South Carolina. The nearest Florida ports of any significance were Tampa and St. Augustine. At the mouth of the Miami River was a small trading post at meager Fort Dallas, but the city of Miami would not flourish until early in the next century.

  What the “War Between the States” was called depended on where one lived. Some saw it as The American Civil War; some called it The Great Unpleasantness; southerners sometimes labeled it The War of Northern Aggression; some just said it was the fight between the North and the South.

  Whatever its moniker, the war played out in microcosm on the tiny island of Key West. Located just 90 miles north of Havana, Cuba, Key West was a community of staunch southerners—indeed, they considered themselves the southernmost of the southerners. The cay was too small for even one plantation and housed very few slaves. Still, as a matter of pure geography, no one was more southern than the so-called “Conchs” of Key West.

  That’s why it was ironic, and more than a little vexing, that a small battalion of Northern soldiers managed to march out of their barracks one night and steal across the island and into its only military installation: the mostly-completed Fort Zachary Taylor. Thus it was that, when the metaphorical smoke cleared over Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and war began in earnest, the southern citizens of Key West found their city occupied by Yankee soldiers without a shot having been fired.

  Key West was to remain in Union hands throughout the war. But since nobody had the prescience to know that fact ahead of time, the North and South waged war in their own unique way, on the miniscule island at the bottom of the North American map.

  Those are the basic facts. But to know the truth in its entirety requires more than the facts; it requires the story.

  The Story

  1861

  At twilight on January 13, 1861, the sun’s fiery ball sank into the blue-green Gulf of Mexico at the edge of the world. Clouds bled pink and purple. Bird shadows fled to their roosts across the red-orange orb or splashed into the limitless sea, spearing a last-minute meal and carrying it away.

  While the city of Key West slept, a small group of Yankee soldiers slogged through mangrove swamp in the dead of night and occupied an unfinished brick fort on the southern tip of the southernmost island of the United States.

  Wooden sailing ships crowded the harbor. Tift’s Ice House, the Custom House, and various warehouses squatted on the shoreline. Bahama-style homes lined the wide dirt street that ran north-south, from water to water, across the small island.

  Key West was the most strategic point in the Confederacy, covering access from the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea to the Gulf of Mexico and the Confederate harbor cities from Texas to Florida. This small band of soldiers would hold Key West for the Union until reinforcements could arrive four months later.

  When April arrived, and with it the anticipated Union reinforcements, that first puny band of soldiers breathed a sigh of relief. After four tense, exhausting months as the minority representatives of the United States of America, surrounded by Confederate citizens, the Yankees’ numbers ha
d finally increased. Their position in the fort was secure. They thought the worst was over, the hard work was done. Of course, they were wrong.

  1862

  Sergeant Jules Pfifer, a career Army man, marched his patrol briskly through the evening heat toward one of the tall wooden houses along the dirt street. Atop the house was perched a square cupola surrounded by the sailor-carved balustrades called gingerbread. These porches, just large enough for one or two persons to stand and observe the sea from the rooftop, were known as widow’s walks. From this particular widow’s walk an illegal Confederate flag flaunted its red stars and bars against the clear Key West sky.

  The soldiers in Union blue marched smartly through the gate in the white picket fence, up the front steps, and in at the front door—which opened before them as if by magic.

  “Evenin’, Miz Lowe,” Sergeant Pfifer said, without breaking stride.

  “Evenin’, Sergeant,” the lady of the house answered, unperturbed.

  On the Lowe house roof, the stars and bars were whipped from their post; they disappeared from sight just as the soldiers, clomping and puffing and sweat-stained, arrived atop the stairway. Pfifer and another man crowded onto the widow’s walk. Consternation wrinkled the soldiers’ faces when they found no Confederate flag, only 17-year-old Caroline Lowe, smiling sweetly.

  ...

  In the twilight, the brick trapezoid of Fort Zachary Taylor loomed castle-like over the sea waves, connected to the “mainland” by a narrow causeway. Yankee sentries paced between the black silhouettes of cannon pointed seaward. Firefly lights sparkled on the parade ground and among the Sibley tents huddled on shore at the base of the causeway.