An hour later Jack was in the town square, trying his best to ignore the stench that was coming from Harper’s body decaying up in the gibbet.
They had shops here in ‘Silver Plateau’, just like a regular town. Except he had a notion that all the goods were a mite more expensive than they were elsewhere in Mexico, or north of the border. But there wasn’t any place else the residents of this thieves’ town could go, so they had to pay the asking price or go without.
Jack sat in the town’s one and only saloon and drank a beer. He positioned himself so he could look out at the square, and wondered when he’d finally lay eyes on Amos Payne.
He reckoned it wouldn’t be long. There wasn’t much else to do in Meseta de Plata except go to the saloon.
It took Jack less than half a day to figure out that the biggest problem the men had here was boredom. These were men who’d spent their lives robbing banks and trains, and killing, and dodging bullets, and many of them hadn’t given a thought to anything in the past few years to anything other than stealing themselves enough money to live out their lives in safety here on this plateau.
Maybe they’d thought that once they got here they would be in some kind of outlaw heaven – women and booze and nothing to do but play poker and relax – and they’d be a state of eternal bliss. But now they’d got here, well fine, they’d got the poker and booze and a woman each, but they also had a lot of time on their hands, and a rigid set of laws they had to keep to, and if they broke one the price they had to pay was brutal.
And you couldn’t spend too freely, because if you emptied your bank account there were severe penalties for that, too. If you were lucky you’d be allowed to walk out. Maybe they’d give you your horse back. And then you’d be back where you started, penniless but a whole lot older, and in a strange land. And if you made it back to America you’d likely have a hangman waiting for you.
Jack reckoned that sooner or later every man here figured out that he was in a prison. A lot better than the usual kind, but still a prison. He wondered if any of them ever went plumb crazy. And if they did, what were the consequences of that?
Around two o’clock in the afternoon, the sun still hot and high, Payne walked into the saloon, went up to the bar and bought himself a whiskey.
He was tall and lean, and his face was heavily lined, with deep creases down both cheeks. He wasn’t wearing black though, and he wasn’t wearing the beaver felt top hat that Jack had heard about. Instead he wore clothes he’d bought at the town store: a cotton shirt and pantalones, and a straw sombrero.
Jack watched out of the corner of his eye as Payne sat at a table and drank his liquor, sipping it like he meant to make it last. When Jack went to the bar again to get another beer, he risked a glance directly at Payne, the man who’d killed his pa.
Payne’s eyes looked empty. Jack guessed that Payne had figured out sooner than most that Meseta de Plata wasn’t any sane man’s idea of paradise.
I could kill you now, put you out of your misery, thought Jack. Payne was only a few feet away from him. I could smash this bottle and slit your neck with it. But he didn’t. That wasn’t the way Jack did things, never had and hoped he never would. Besides, he didn’t much care for the idea of getting hanged, and his body strung up in that metal cage in the middle of the square.
Jack drank the beer and went back to his adobe.
He lay on the bed and slept awhile, and when he woke up Josefina fixed him a meal. Then he spent the rest of the day trying to think of some way he could get Payne to leave the plateau. Once outside Meseta de Plata, Jack could grab him, haul him back to Arizona. And if Payne put up a fight and Jack had to kill him, well that would work, too.
But how to get him to leave? Payne might be miserable here, but that didn’t mean he was liable to leave any time soon. Men adjusted to prisons. Jack had heard of men who’d adjusted so well that after a while they didn’t want to leave.
Payne might stay here on the plateau the rest of his natural life, but Jack was damned if he was going to stay here and wait for Payne to drop dead of old age.
Jack wondered if he’d be able to live with himself if he snuck into Payne’s adobe one night, killed him as he slept. Nobody would have any cause to suspect he’d been the one who’d murdered Payne. Maybe he’d get away with it. Then he could wait around on the plateau a couple of months, like he had nothing to hide, then return to Arizona, return to being the law-abiding, law-enforcing deputy of Paradise Flats. . . .
But would he ever be able to look at himself in a mirror again?
Any other man here on this plateau, Jack had no doubt, would be able to kill a man in cold blood and never lose a moment’s sleep. But he knew he just wasn’t made that way, and that was that.
Days passed. Every day was the same. Jack watched Payne and wondered if he’d ever get the chance to bring him to justice. After a couple of weeks he started to lose hope. But then, one night, everything changed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jack woke up, sensing there was somebody there in the bedroom with him. He could smell perfume.
Josefina?
Jack opened his eyes, but couldn’t see anything more than a vague shape in the darkness.
She whispered, ‘Don’t talk,’ and slipped under the single sheet.
It wasn’t Josefina.
It was like a dream, and when it was over Jack lay back on the bed, and didn’t know that he’d fallen asleep again till he woke up a second time, and he was alone.
He knew it hadn’t been a dream. He could smell her perfume on the pillow, and hanging in the air.
He got dressed and went outside. His adobe was on a narrow street, not much more than an alleyway, that ran along the edge of the plateau. Overhead the moon was big and yellow, the stars bright. The street looked to be deserted, but it was impossible to tell for sure. The shadows were pools of black ink.
A voice said, ‘I hope I won’t have to kill you.’
It was the Queen, again dressed as a man, with the two six-guns at her waist.
Jack couldn’t smell any perfume, just soap. He guessed he wasn’t supposed to mention what had happened a little while ago. He was supposed to pretend it hadn’t happened at all. The goddess had briefly allowed herself to become mortal, but now she was back to being a goddess again.
‘Why would you have to kill me?’ asked Jack.
‘Do you think I’m a fool?’
‘No.’
‘You are intending to kill Amos Payne, and if you do it here, even if you make it look like an accident, I will know, and you will have to pay the price. I would not want that, but that is what will happen. You will be hanged, and your body displayed in the town square.’
Jack figured there wasn’t any point in bluffing. He didn’t know how, but this woman knew everything.
‘How did you know?’ he asked.
‘Amos Payne turns up with two pairs of saddle-bags, each pair containing twenty thousand, three hundred and twenty-seven dollars. He had killed another man shortly before he arrived here. One of my guards watched through a telescope. He said that the other man tried to kill Payne to take his money, but Payne killed him instead. Then a few days later, you arrive and your saddle-bags also contain twenty thousand, three hundred and twenty-seven dollars. This cannot be a coincidence. Clearly, all three pairs of saddle-bags contained a share of the money that Payne and his gang stole from banks and railways over the course of three years. I know who his gang were, I have descriptions of them all, and you do not fit any of them. You showed me a wanted poster, but I have made enquiries, and none of my spies in the outside world have heard of a William Forrest, wanted for murder and robbery in Montana and South Dakota. . . . So I know two things: you have in your possession a share of the money from Payne’s robberies, and you are a liar. You do not want anybody here to know your real name. Why not? Because they might recognize the name. . . ? You are not an outlaw. I have spent my life among outlaws, and you are different. I saw the disgust o
n your face when you saw what that animal Brody had done to the woman. Most of the men here would not care what he did to her, they would believe that all women deserved such treatment, just for being women. Yet when I whipped Brody and was about to force him over the edge of the plateau, you wanted to stop me. I noticed that, too. . . .’ She came up close to him, her hands on her guns, ready to draw. ‘Are you a lawman?’
Jack knew that his answer might be his death sentence. But he also knew there wasn’t any use lying to her. She knew just about everything, and anything she didn’t know for sure she was smart enough to figure out for herself. She was the smartest person he’d ever met, smarter than he was, smarter than anybody.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m a lawman. My name’s Jack Tanner, and I’m deputy at a town called Paradise Flats, in Arizona.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘But you didn’t follow Payne all the way to Meseta de Plata just because he’s an outlaw. Even a Pinkerton detective would think twice at doing such a thing. . . .’ Her eyes bored into his brain, he could feel them sifting through his thoughts. ‘This is personal. This is revenge.’
‘Payne’s gang raided my folk’s homestead in Arizona, looking for food. My ma and pa put up a fight, so the gang killed ’em. A man called Sims killed my ma, and Payne killed my pa.’
‘Did you kill Sims?’
‘No. I caught him, and handed him over to a posse. He’d killed a man in Nogales.’
‘You could have killed him, but you didn’t. You handed him over to be punished for the murder of somebody else.’
‘Yes.’
She nodded. ‘I have heard of lawmen who genuinely believe in the law. It seems you are one of them. Even when it is a matter of revenge for the murder of your parents, you cannot bring yourself to go against the law. You could have killed Payne here, in Meseta de Plata. You could have discovered which adobe was his, murdered him as he slept, thrown him into the ravine and hoped nobody realized you were the one who had done it. That, I think, is what I would have done.’
He shrugged. ‘Yeah. But I couldn’t. I suppose you think that’s foolish?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It is, I think, very noble. You have your rules, and you stick to them no matter what. You are a very unusual man, Señor Tanner.’
She lifted her hands away from her six-guns.
‘You ain’t going to kill me, hang my body up in that metal cage?’
‘No. All you have done is lie about your true identity, and many men here do that.’
Jack stood there in the moonlight, feeling about as small and stupid and useless as any man could feel. ‘I tracked Payne all the way down here, and now that I’ve found him, I can’t do a damn thing about it. Not unless I break my own dumb rules, kill him, and get myself killed in the process. Either that or I go back to Arizona, and let him live out the rest of his rotten life on this plateau.’
The Queen of Meseta de Plata shrugged. ‘That was the situation till about three hours ago.’
Jack stared at her. ‘Why? What happened three hours ago?’
‘He left Meseta de Plata. He took his horse and his guns, and he was wearing his black preacher clothes and that ridiculous top hat. But not his money, of course. That remains here. Those are my rules.’
‘Where did he go?’ asked Jack. ‘North? South?’ Jack figured Payne would go south, try his luck down there. Surely he wasn’t such a fool as to head back up to America?
‘He’s gone east. I don’t know exactly where he is heading right now,’ she told him. ‘But I think I know where he will be two weeks from now.’
Amos Payne rode east all the way to Durango, a distance of over a hundred miles. But even in Durango he could feel the Queen’s spies watching him.
He got himself a room at a small hotel and changed into the clothes he’d worn on the plateau, the cotton shirt and pantalones, and the straw hat. He bought a carpet bag and pushed his black clothes and beaver felt top hat into that.
He hadn’t shaved for a month, and his stubble was almost fully-fledged beard length. He shaved the beard into a goatee and studied his reflection in the square of mirror he always carried with him. Over the past few weeks his skin had acquired a deep tan. The tan, together with the goatee, made him look quite the Mexican. Nobody would realize he was a gringo till he opened his mouth.
He sold his horse and boarded the train for Piedras de Negras, a coal mining town five hundred miles north-east, on the Coahuila–Texas border.
‘You have the money with you, señor?’
Payne had brought enough money to do what he had to do. He’d had to leave the bulk of his money in the care of Meseta de Plata’s bank. But that didn’t matter. In a short while he’d have far more money than he’d taken with him to that godforsaken place.
‘Yes,’ said Payne. ‘I have the money.’
‘Where?’ asked the Mexican. His name was Arturo Arroyo. He was fifty-seven years of age, a family man and a criminal who could procure anything, at a price. He was sitting with Payne in a bar called the Loro Dorado. He owned the bar, just as he owned many establishments in Piedras de Negras. In Arroyo’s opinion, Payne – in his cotton shirt and pantalones and his straw hat – didn’t look like a man who could afford to buy a good cigar, let alone a crate of dynamite.
‘The money is in a safe place,’ said Payne.
Arroyo shrugged. ‘Very well. There is a warehouse near here. I shall write down the address. Go there at nine o’clock this evening, and bring the money. You can have the dynamite then.’
Arroyo wrote down the address on a slip of paper and gave it to Payne. They shook hands and Payne left the bar.
A man followed Payne back to his hotel. When Payne entered the hotel, the man watched from the door and saw which key the desk clerk handed to him. It was the key to room number 27.
The men came at seven o’clock. Two of them.
They beat up the hotel manager and made him open his safe, but there were no large amounts of money in there. So then they went up to room 27.
They entered the room quickly and quietly, and killed the man they found there. They spent the next few minutes searching the room for the money, but they didn’t find it.
They left empty-handed, and told Arroyo they hadn’t found the money.
Arroyo was angry. Instead of killing the man as soon as they had entered the room, they should have tortured him and made him tell them where it was.
‘Idiots!’ Arroyo shouted. ‘Must I always have to do your thinking for you?’
Amos Payne had known that the man had followed him from the bar to the hotel.
Entering the hotel lobby, Payne had seen that the clerk behind the desk was not the one who’d been on duty when he had registered. Nor was it the one who’d been there two hours earlier, when Payne had left the hotel and dropped the key to room 37 on the desk.
Knowing that the man following him was lurking near the door, Payne scanned the rows of hooks behind the desk, each hook with a room number above it. The key to room 37, his room, was still there on the hook. The key to room 27, the room directly beneath his, was also on the hook.
‘Room 27,’ he said.
The clerk handed him the key to room 27, and Payne had gone upstairs to the next floor. He let a minute go by, then went back down to the lobby.
The man who’d followed him had gone.
Payne went up to the clerk and said, ‘You gave me the wrong key.’ He slammed the key down hard on the desk.
‘I’m sorry, señor. But you asked me for the key to room number 27. . . .’
‘Don’t tell me what I said, you goddamn fool. I asked you for the key to room 37, not 27!’
‘Apologies, señor,’ said the clerk. He held out the key to Room 37.
Payne glared at the man, snatched it out of his hand and went upstairs.
Payne, his ear pressed against the floor of room 37, had heard the occupant of room 27 enter at a little after six o’clock. He’d heard the man wash his hands and face, and lie on the
bed. Payne had heard the springs squeak. Then he’d heard the man snoring.
At seven o’clock Arroyo’s men entered, using pick-locks. The fellow on the bed woke just as the men got to him. He cried out, not loudly, the cry cut short by the garrotte or whatever they used to strangle him. There was more squeaking of bedsprings, then silence.
The men spent a while searching room 27 for the money, but they didn’t find it, because it was in the room above, with Payne.
When the men left, Payne followed them. He followed them to a pleasant, white-painted house on the outskirts of Piedras de Negras.
Arroyo’s home.
A message came for Arroyo at ten o’clock. A boy had been paid to deliver the envelope. Arroyo opened the envelope and took out the square of paper.
On it was written: Am at warehouse with money. Where are you?
The gringo was alive.
The fools killed the wrong man, Arroyo thought. I am surrounded by idiots.
It didn’t occur to Arroyo to wonder how it was that the gringo knew where he lived.
He kissed his young wife and his eight-year-old daughter, and told them he had to go out on unexpected business.
At least the gringo has no idea that I tried to kill him and steal his money, he thought.
‘This time, do it right,’ Arroyo told the two men as they rode up to the warehouse. These were the same two men who had killed the wrong man at the hotel a few hours earlier. They evidently needed everything spelled out to them.
The men nodded and muttered, ‘Sí, señor.’
‘As soon as he shows us the money, shoot him. But be very careful not to hit any of the dynamite. You understand?’
‘Sí, señor.’
Now they were at the warehouse. They couldn’t see the gringo.
There were large double doors at the front of the warehouse, but fitted into one of the doors was a wicket gate. Arroyo hammered on the door with his fist and shouted to the men guarding the warehouse to open up.
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