PILATE’S
BLOOD
Book Four in the John Pilate Mystery Series
J. ALEXANDER GREENWOOD
PILATE’S BLOOD
Book Four in the John Pilate Mystery Series
J. ALEXANDER GREENWOOD
Original Copyright © 2014 by J. Alexander Greenwood
Revised second edition Copyright © 2019 Caroline Street Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1798047620
All rights reserved. Published by Caroline Street Press. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Cover designed by Jason McIntyre
TheFarthestReaches.com
Books by J. Alexander Greenwood
Pilate's Cross
Pilate's Cross: The Audiobook
Pilate's Key
Pilate's Ghost
Pilate's Blood
Pilate's 7
Pilate's Rose
Big Cabin & Dispatches from the West
(with Robert E. Trevathan)
Non-Fiction
Kickstarter Success Secrets
Kickstarter Success Secrets: The Audiobook
Visit www.PilatesCross.com
for the latest updates, merchandise and the Clues Blog.
Dedicated to Everyone
Who's Been
A Jack
to
A King
and Back
PROLOGUE
Hell is surely hot, thought Alvin as the sweat ran down his face, chest, and the middle of his powerful, blacksmith’s back. The light from the lantern was poor, but his weary eyes knew well enough what he would see: dirt, rock, roots, and darkness.
Dank and dark, like a welldigger’s arsehole.
He was almost finished, but that gave him only a small modicum of relief. The box he had secreted for Jubal Olafson wasn’t safe above ground. Word had come on last week’s stage stop in Cross Camp that the canny son-of-a-bitch, Ballanger, and his pard, Cotton Johnson, were looking for something important, and this time it was more than Frank Tash’s $60,000 in stolen herd money. The pair had made short work of Monte Crandall and his brothers, Reed and Hoyte. Hell, Monte even got his neck stretched for his trouble.
Hunting down stolen money wasn’t Ballanger and Cotton’s primary vocation, but word on the trail was that they were up for just about anything, as long as the price was right. Alvin wasn’t taking any chances.
If Ballanger and Cotton rode up from Indian Territory to sniff the air, they’d reckon pretty damn quick who Jubal’s blacksmith was. They’d turn their hairy nostrils to sniffing around his smithy and find the box.
Alvin wasn’t a saint, himself, but he sure hated that Jubal took that looted rebel box at the expense of three men’s lives. The Swede had smiled and smiled like true villains do, helping Alvin haul the heavy box off his wagon and into the smithy. Under a thin veneer of trail dust, the box was stained dark with blood.
“Those retired Johnny Rebs. Ha! They’s got blood as red as da dirt back in Ind’in territ’try,” Jubal said, laughing and wiping his thick neck with a filthy handkerchief.
“Kilt?” Alvin asked, not looking Jubal in the eye.
“They didn’t surrender when we admonished them to do so, so…well, we introduced ‘em to their God, and I do not mean the revered General Lee. Took the lockbox and put the licks in to get back across the Missouri. Course, I had to remove a couple saddle bums from my employ when all da shoutin’ was done. Not trustworthy, see, men who’d kill so easy.”
Concern creased Alvin’s features.
“Al, you got nothin’ to fear.” Jubal laughed again. “We been square for years. Trust means all, my friend.”
Alvin nodded. “So… What do you want me to do with the box?”
“Just keep it safe here in the smithy, till I get back from Fort Kearney,” he said, resting a meaty hand on Alvin’s anvil. “There’s a lovely piece of Calico up there in Yagmin’s Saloon. I suspect she’d enjoy my attention to her prat.”
Alvin mentally brushed off Jubal’s vulgarity and shifted the heavy box with a groan.
“Here, man. Don’t rupture yourself,” he said, rising to aid the blacksmith.
“It’s damn heavy.”
The men muscled the box behind a coal-fired forge in the corner of the smithy and covered it with a tarpaulin.
“When you comin’ back?”
“Gimme a fortnight or so,” Jubal said, picking his impressive nose and eating what he found. He then ran a filthy hand through his blond, Nordic locks. “I need a bath. May head over to Feather’s tent. She performs quite the old-fashion.”
Jubal turned to leave, laying a filthy finger beside his nose rather than in it. “Alvin, uh… There’s one more thing.”
“Yes, Jubal?”
“Don’t get no ideas ‘bout that box. You’ll be rewarded if I return to find it safe and sound. On the contrary, if I return and it’s been disturbed…well, no dark corner of Hell will be far enough out of reach of my hand.” Jubal held his meaty hand out to Alvin, as if for a shake. Then, instead, he curled it into a greasy fist, pulled it away, winked, and strode into the thoroughfare.
Alvin sat up at night in his smithy, a double-barreled shotgun at the ready as he watched over the cursed box. He waited a fortnight, then another, then another, with no sign of Jubal.
Eventually, word arrived in Cross Camp that Jubal Olafson had been brutally stabbed to death back at Fort Kearney, in the midst of a passionate embrace, no less. The lovely piece of Calico at Yagmin’s apparently had other ideas rather than allowing Jubal to sodomize her.
Alvin eyed a pickaxe in the opposite corner of the smithy, a relic obtained on barter with a prospector for some horseshoes. He pondered a moment about swinging it down on the bloody box lock. Instead, he spat on the floor, put aside the shotgun, picked up the pickaxe, and swung with all his might into the soft Nebraska earth.
CHAPTER ONE
A haze of cigar smoke gave the tiny room a Beijing-in-winter sort of look. It was the kind of place where factories pumped out sticky soot you’d find tattooed under your collar after a three-minute walk around the block.
“Two,” Hilmer Thurman said, working the word out from around a stub of cigar.
Nelda, a willing victim of forty years lying prone in a tanning bed, dealt two cards.
“I’ll take three,” Robeson said, holding up three dark fingers for emphasis.
The leathery Nelda dutifully dealt three cards.
“Off the top of the deck, if ya don’t mind.” Robeson’s pearly teeth shone in the haze.
A chorus of masculine laughter ensued around the table as the men belched out smoke with their chuckles.
Thurman allowed a faint grin and glanced “Ya know our Nelda better than that, Robeson,” he said, his mouth curling a grin around the cigar.
“Yeah, ya asshole,” Nelda said, laughing, her crow’s feet deepening.
“Just teasin’,” Robeson said, pushing his trucker cap back on his sweaty head and scrubbing at his thinning curls.
“Shit, I know, Robie,” Nelda said. She flung cards at the other two men at the table after they signaled their next moves. “Everybody still in?” she asked, her long, garish nails tapping the felt.
Everyone nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s the river.”
“Things sure been quiet ‘round here lately,” Robeson said, scratching absently at his chin.
Thurman grunted, his eyes on his cards, his face sans smile.
A young, sinewy man with wide, weed-weary eyes farted. “‘Scuse.”
“Otis, please!” Nelda said, rolling heavily shadowed eyes.
“That sure as hell wasn’t quiet,” Parker Nemec said, waggling his eyebrows. The youngest man at the table, he was president of the tiny but solvent Bank of Cross. “Sounds like Otis had some o’ your baked beans with his burnt ends today.”
Robeson grunted and threw a ten-spot in the pot. “Ma beans do not tend toward da gassy, for your information.”
“Yeah, right,” Nemec said. “Well, I gotta say your ribs are fantastic. What do ya put on ‘em? Some kinda dry rub?”
Long a local institution, Bart Robeson’s Tin Roof Rib Shack set just off the state highway, a few miles from Thurman’s Brown Betty Roadhouse. Southeastern Nebraska wasn’t particularly known for high-quality, not-to-be-missed barbecue, making the Shack an oasis for barbecue fiends. Unlike the repulsive soot belched by Chinese factories, the Tin Roof Rib Shack’s sweet smoke drew locals and out-of-towners alike, seemingly against their will.
“Secret recipe,” Robeson said, his gravelly voice somewhere between a whisper and a mumble.
“We talkin’ or playin’?” Thurman said, good-natured but betraying a mounting impatience.
“Good hand there, Hils?” Nemec surmised.
Thurman shot him a brief, stony look, to which Nemec responded with a nervous laugh.
Otis unleashed a second gaseous issue, which reverberated like sharp raps on a solid oak door. “’Scuse,” he recited again.
“Oh good God,” Nelda said.
“That, my friend, is inexcusable,” Nemec said. “I bet fifty.”
“You ain’t ma friend,” Otis mumbled, his bloodshot eyes on his cards.
Nemec shrugged, aiming for nonchalance, though he felt a creeping unease in the wake of Otis’s callous remark, especially after Thurman’s cold eye. “Okay,” he said, keeping his eyes on the prize.
Thurman bet fifty, plus twenty more.
Robeson glanced from his cards to the orange tip of his cigar, and then his eyes drifted lazily to the pot. He produced a wad of cash from his pocket and thumbed a wrinkled c-note on the table.
Nemec whistled through the gap in his front teeth.
Thurman puffed on his stogie, his lip curling on the left side. “I think—”
“A hundert?” Otis said. “Shit! You know I don’t carry that much—”
“Then fold, negro,” Robeson said, smiling.
Otis blinked, twice. “You don’t gotta be like dat.”
Thurman glanced over Nemec’s shoulder, staring at Tom. “Everything goin’ all right, buddy?”
Tom nodded and adjusted his trucker cap, then folded hairy, meaty arms across his barrel chest and belly. He gestured to Nelda with his chin.
“A man of few words,” Nemec observed.
Otis sighed, then jammed his index finger in his mouth. He dug around until a popping sound issued, and then he tossed his teeth on the pot. “There,” he said through his gums. “Dem dentures is wert five hundert, easy.”
“Good Lord, man, maybe to you they are,” Nemec said.
“Oh yeah, dat car wreck took your natural choppers.” Robeson cackled. “A’ight. I’ll cover ya, but if you lose, you’re gonna wash those things in Bud before I take ‘em.”
“Good idea. Nelda, can you get me another beer?” Thurman said.
“My pleasure. Anybody else?” As she stood, she banged her head on the single naked light bulb suspended over the table, the tiny room’s only source of illumination. “Ow! Damn it.” She steadied the bulb with one hand, rubbing her head with the other. “Can you gents handle this? I think I need a drink and a smoke or three after two farts and an upper in the pot.”
Thurman nodded. “We’re about through here anyway.”
She nodded, then squeezed past the men to head to the door, her exit letting foul air out and country music in.
Thurman chuckled softly. “So, Parker, I hear your bank swooped in on Perry Mostek’s widow pretty fast.”
“Swooped in?”
“Well, yeah. He only disappeared what? Three, four months before you turned up as Perry’s wife’s business agent. Your bank wants to auction the property off to the highest bidder.”
“Well, that’s business. Mrs. M. came to us, and Perry probably ain’t coming back,” Nemec said, his eyes on his cards, a bead of sweat tickling his right armpit.
“Maybe, maybe not. Yet you decided you’d quietly entertain an offer on one of the last going concerns in this one-horse town without so much as a by-your-leave reach-around for the rest of us?”
“Well, I…uh… The Mosteks are struggling, and the town needs a store. I figured you’da said something if you wanted it before now, so—”
“I hear that Mick B&B owner put up an offer. He’s no grocer. What the hell does he want with it?”
“He says his family ran pubs and grocery shops back in Cork, in Ireland,” Nemec stammered. “His bed-and-breakfast has done real well. He wants to diversify his portfolio.”
“Well, tough shit,” Thurman said.
Robeson kept his eyes on the table.
“That kind of shit bothers me, Parker,” Thurman said, puffing on his cigar, his forehead wrinkled in consternation. “Know why?”
Nemec shook his head. His hands trembled, and moisture leeched into his cards. He was as pissed as he was scared. He wasn’t used to the rough stuff; in the past, his position with the bank and a need to appear to be above the board made him immune to such behavior.
“Because my cousin, Ollie, used to run this town. You took your marchin’ orders from him till that idiot, Scovill, and his boy wonder pal, Pontius Pilate, blew him and Craig away.”
“Now, Hilmer,” he said, raising a finger, “You never… You never expressed any interest in the store, so I—”
“I guess people think they can get away with murder around here, maybe worse.”
“You bet. I think you’ve got that part of Ollie’s portfolio covered.” Nemec smiled but regretted the misfired attempt at flattery even before the last syllable took flight.
Thurman nodded, and Tom, moving with surprising alacrity for a large man in such a tight space, wrapped a length of wire around Nemec’s neck and began to twist it.
Nemec’s eyes bulged, his complexion blotchy as he rose from his chair, grunting and clawing at Tom’s massive paws.
Otis and Robeson sat motionless, except for Robeson’s cigar, which fell from his limp mouth, rolled down his ample shirtfront, and collided with the floor in a hail of sparks.
Thurman leaned forward, removed the cigar stub from his mouth, and blew smoke in Nemec’s slowly strangling face. “Got a few breathin’ problems, eh?”
Nemec did his best to nod, his hands clawing at Tom’s.
“So we’ve got your attention?”
A blob of spittle fell from his lips, and tears worked from his eyes as he tried to nod again.
“I say what’s what in this shitty little town. You bet,” Thurman said. His voice never rose or quavered; it was as if he was casually explaining what cards were wild in the next hand. “Not you, not Robie or Otis or that new college president bitch, and especially not that asshole, John Pilate. You got that?” He paused, as if to let it sink in, then continued, “Now, you’re gonna do me a favor, and I’ll return one. Comprende?”
Tom’s grip on Nemec loosened.
Nemec nodded, gagging and choking.
When Nemec caught his breath, Thurman resumed. “You’r
e gonna cancel the deal with the widow, and you’ll recommend that Mrs. Mostek call me and take my offer. You’re gonna tell Cusack the deal’s off, that Mostek changed her mind. Then you’re gonna keep your mouth shut. Got it?”
Again, a nod attempt.
“Good, because if you don’t, if you screw up even one of those things, big Tom here will twist your head off, and Robie’ll smoke your ass and serve the carcass to family and friends at your wake.”
Robie’s gaze scraped the table, his hands clutching his cards.
Otis snickered into his fist, until Thurman raised an eyebrow.
Tom pulled Nemec to his feet.
Nemec gurgled, gagging some more.
“Good.” Thurman nodded, and Tom let go of the wire.
Nemec fell forward on the poker table. His right arm flailed, smashing the light bulb. The room fell into darkness, save the orange glow of Hilmer Thurman’s cigar cherry. Nemec gasped, heaved, and gurgled then sank to the floor.
“Damn your eyes, Otis. Don’t even think of making a grab for your fucking teeth,” Thurman said. “This hand ain’t over.”
CHAPTER TWO
“What do you mean, gone?” Pilate said, clutching the phone in a white-knuckled grip and pacing in his farmhouse kitchen.
“He left,” Monique Fraley said, her voice squirming with the slippery finality of an unpleasant truth.
“With my money?” Pilate said, stifling the urge to shout. He glanced out the window at his wife, Kate, his stepdaughter, Kara, and his infant son, Peter, playing in oak leaves piled in mounds around the yard.
“Well, the bank accounts are cleaned out, which means he eloped with money from every author in his stable,” Fraley said, her words tinged with a resigned disgust, “and my last two paychecks.”
“I’m sorry, Monique,” Pilate said. “My book was a bestseller. Six weeks or whatever on the list and we’ve hardly seen a dime. If Frechette skipped town, does that mean we may never see that money?”
Pilate's Blood Page 1