Riders of the Pale Horse Read Free Page A

friends, and they were almost as numerous as his enemies, called him Rogue, after the bull elephant who preferred his own company unless the heat was on him, and who reigned supreme over whatever turf he decided to claim as his own.
    Rogue Robards didn’t consider himself a particularly greedy man. All he wanted was his own yacht, his own tropical island, his own Rolls, his own Swiss bank account sporting some number followed by at least nine zeros, and a string of nubile secretaries to smile adoringly as he dictated his autobiography. He had long since decided on the title— Laws Are for Little People.
    The arrivals building, a converted airplane hangar of World War II vintage, was as cheerful as an empty morgue. Voicessplashed like a heavy rain off distant metal walls and roofs and concrete floors.
    Robards clumped his leather satchel down on the steel customs table and opened it without being asked. Experience had taught him that anybody as big as he was, dressed in flight jacket and laced-up boots and pressed cords while everybody else wore either the local garb or grimy business suits, was going to get searched. Opening his luggage unasked usually saved a few minutes and disarmed the worst of the questions.
    â€œAnything to declare?” the officer asked, his accent mangling the English words into insensibility.
    â€œMerely sixteen smidgens of ground worm food and a can of green guppies,” Robards replied, certain the man had memorized the question and knew no other English at all. He shook his head and lifted out his shaving kit; holding the bag toward the soldier, he said in a casual drawl, “I left my pet catfish on board with the baby alligator. I hope they get along.”
    The customs guard released him with a curt wave and turned to the next passenger. A bald-headed businessman raised his multilayered chin to give Robards a thoroughly confused look. Robards replied with a buccaneer’s grin, hefted his satchel, and sauntered toward the exit.
    There was a good deal of the pirate in Rogue Robards. Once a solid deal had taken him to New York—a solid deal being one that allowed him to walk away with his money and his life. His lady of the hour had used a costume ball to dress him up in pirate garb: fold-down boots, baggy black trousers, drawstring shirt, sword, and ostrich-plume hat. Standing on a chair to tie his eye patch into place, she had examined his reflection in the full-length mirror and declared, “You were born four hundred years too late.”
    â€œI’ve always had a soft spot for hidden treasure,” Robards had agreed.
    â€œNow the question is whether I’m going to risk letting you loose in a roomful of New York women,” the lady hadadded, getting as much of his shoulders and neck as she could manage in a full nelson. “After a steady diet of Wall Street yuppies, they might just eat you alive.”
    Rogue Robards described himself as a product of the Florida property boom. His daddy had been a swamp creature lured from the Everglades by Gulf Coast developers, who feared rolling out their blueprints on a log that suddenly grew fangs and a tail and showed a marked desire to eat them, Ray-Ban specs and all. His momma had been a washed-out woman decked in shades of gray, whose days had been filled with the drudgery of hard work and the happy sounds of a drunk husband beating the living daylights out of their only boy. Thankfully, the boy had grown up fast enough to keep his pappy from inflicting permanent damage, and left home at the ripe old age of fourteen, after landing a punch that drove his father through the front wall of their two-ply home.
    Next had come three years of roaming the drier reaches of Texas and marking time in a variety of oil fields and other places too remote to feel the nosy influence of social workers and child-labor investigators. Then Rogue Robards had come into town one evening with a paycheck burning a hole in his