by Eric Red
Lifting the collar of her coat, Bess Sugarland displayed her U.S. Marshal’s badge. “Morning, Sheriff.”
The local lawman’s lips moved and his rheumy porcine eyes tried to focus and calibrate the sight. “Marshal?”
“Marshals. Two of us.” Emmett showed his badge.
Noose and Bess exchanged a curious glance, both remembering Emmett had told them earlier he had already spoken to the sheriff in Consequence, who didn’t appear to recognize the marshal, but they had more important things to worry about at the moment.
Bess was the one who did the talking, but the sheriff looked straight at Emmett and spoke only to the male marshal. “I’m Sheriff Bull Conrad. How can I assist you folks?”
“We’re looking for Judge William Black.”
“What business do you have with the judge?”
“Marshal business.”
“And what business would that be?”
“We’d like it if you could point out where we can find him, save us the trouble of knocking on the doors of your town, bothering folks.”
His jaw working a piece of chewing tobacco like a cow chewing its cud, Sheriff Conrad spat a foul splat of black juice at the hoof of one of the three horses.
The wrong horse.
When the lawman looked up, he saw the huge man on the gold horse staring very dangerously at him. Conrad locked eyes with Noose but the violence radiating in Joe’s fearsome gaze made him break the staredown fast; the big stud was the only one of the three who hadn’t spoken and didn’t need to say a word to get the point across that the marshals were expecting an answer.
“Down the street. Second road to your right. Take it to the end. Right next to the courthouse.”
“Obliged,” said Bess without tipping her hat.
The trio rode directly down the street, at a brisk clip.
Without moving from his seat, Sheriff Conrad’s hooded eyes watched them go. The chewing tobacco worked in his mouth.
The door to the jail opened and Deputy Tom Rickey stepped out, carting a Winchester. “Who was that, boss?”
“Trouble.” He spat.
Hit a bull’s-eye in the hoofprint in the snow of Joe Noose’s horse, Copper, filling it with tobacco juice.
* * *
The house was grand, freshly painted lime green, two stories with gabled windows and a large porch that wrapped around the front and two sides. The fourth side of the house was built into another building of red brick, white marble trim, and a tower with a widow’s walk marking it unmistakably as a courthouse. The elaborate dual structure was a vainglorious construction in the backwater excuse for a town.
And it was way too quiet.
Noose sensed it riding up.
So did Copper; the coiled tension in the horse’s flanks could be felt between Noose’s thighs as he sat tall in the saddle.
“Something ain’t right,” the bounty hunter said.
The lady marshal knew enough not to second-guess her friend. She drew her revolver. Threw a sharp glance to her fellow lawman.
Emmett slid his Winchester out of his saddle sheath, levered it by spinning the rifle around in his hand to cock it.
Noose dismounted first, drawing his Colt Peacemaker and cocking the hammer, putting up a hand to the others to let him go first. Crouching to make himself a smaller target—hard to do for a man his size—he moved like a cat onto the porch, flattening against the wall between the fancy windows.
Behind him, the two marshals got off their horses. Bess gave a hand signal to Emmett and each split off to approach the house on either side.
It was silent, except for the crunch of their boots on the packed snow.
Peering quickly through the window on his left, Noose saw nothing but the darkened parlor through the window. Nothing moved. Holding his pistol at the ready, he advanced across the porch to the door and grabbed the knob. It turned easily and the door cracked open, unlocked. With the toe of his boot, he nudged it open. No bullets came his way.
What did was the coppery scent of blood, a lot of it.
And the smell of charred meat.
Joe Noose entered the charnel house.
What he found in the office made even him go pale and feel sick.
Staring down at what used to be a man, every square inch of flesh branded again and again with a Q brand.
“What the hell is that smell?” Bess said from the other room.
Hearing the footsteps and jingling spurs of his comrades Noose stepped to the door to bar entry for Bess. “You don’t need to see this.”
She pushed past him stubbornly and he let her by with a sigh. “Out of my way, Joe . . . Oh my G-God . . .”
“Bless my ass.” Emmett had, too, now seen what The Brander had done to Judge Black.
Holstering his pistol, Noose looked around the office, peering through the doorway opening into the empty parlor and living room. “He’s gone now. Ain’t going to catch him standing around here. Let’s saddle up. Hasn’t snowed this morning. His tracks are probably still fresh.”
“Wait. Joe, look.” Bess crossed the room, pointing to the floor.
The men turned to look.
The oriental carpet had been ripped away, torn jaggedly by a knife.
A hidden steel safe was built in the floor, two feet wide by two feet deep.
Its door was open.
Inside, the safe was empty.
“The Brander took something, but what?”
“One way to find out.” Noose grunted with a cracked grin. “Let’s go ask him.”
He was first out the door into the saddle.
Two minutes later, the bounty hunter and the two marshals were distant figures on the white horizon, galloping away, following the clear sign of the single horse and rider on the unbroken snow.
* * *
Two hours later, the sound of screaming reached Sheriff Bull Conrad’s ears.
He had almost forgotten about the three interlopers who had ridden out to see the judge that morning. After all, it was hardly an unheard of occurrence that marshals or lawmen from other counties and districts passing through the area had business with Bill Black, who was the district judge of the territory. The most memorable thing about the trio was the mouthy female with the badge that Conrad was still fuming about. And that big son of a bitch with the killer’s eyes who’d stared him down. He didn’t like that stud one bit. The crooked lawman considered what such an individual was doing with those marshals.
And the sheriff wondered why he remembered the face of the male marshal. He’d seen him before. But where?
As he sat at his desk in the sheriff ’s office going over his private ledger, taking account of his ill-gotten gains and expenditures, Conrad was brooding about the book that Black had told him about last night. It was the first time he’d heard of it, and it changed everything. All of the names and payoffs in black-and-white. If that book ever got into the wrong hands, Conrad would be at the end of a noose. For the last few weeks, he had been planning to end the association he’d had for five years with Judge Black. It was getting too dangerous. Letting the Jensen gang off after they’d murdered a local rancher and rustled his cattle was going too far. He and Black had taken the steers and three hundred and twenty-five dollars in gold the gang had robbed somewhere as a payoff. Conrad had vehemently objected to taking the cattle but the arrogant old jurist figured he’d get away with it by selling it off. The lawman sold his share of the livestock to Black for a discount, just to wash his hands of it. The judge and sheriff ’s little conspiracy had worked only because the county was so spread out. They’d made a lot of money, but it was time to get out. Better not to push his luck. A man always had to know when to quit.
Across the room, the cell was empty.
Deputy Rickey was seated at the smaller desk, oiling his revolver.
Then they heard the screaming.
Bursting out the front door, Conrad and Rickey saw a Hispanic woman they recognized as Judge Black’s housekeeper run
ning down the street in hysterics, waving her arms. Exchanging glances, the sheriff and deputy rushed to her side and demanded to know why she was screaming. The woman spoke no English, but what little Spanish the racist Conrad understood indicated that she had found her employer dead.
Ordering Rickey to round up the rest of the deputies and meet him at Judge Black’s house in a hurry, Sheriff Conrad set off on foot as fast as his sturdy legs would carry him.
Ten minutes later when his gang of dubious lawmen arrived at the jurist’s house, they found their boss standing in disgust over the ghastly human remains. Sheriff Conrad rounded on his deputies. “Those two phony marshals and that gorilla they rode in with ain’t no law. I knew it ’cause ain’t no such thing as no woman marshal. They got that book from the judge and all our names is in it, boys. We need to get after them sumbitches, put ’em down, get that book back. If the law gets their hands on it, our necks are in the noose. Now, move out!”
The sheriff and his six deputies got on their horses and rode, following the tracks of the four riders on the snow heading true north.
CHAPTER 26
The muffled sounds of the hotel casino downstairs came up through the floor as Deputy Sweet folded his pair of eights when Rachel showed him her full house. The room service dishes for the dinner they ordered were piled aside to make room for the game of cards they had been playing. Ten hands of straight poker. She had won every hand. He didn’t mind losing; what he won was the exquisite gleam of pleasure in her own card-shark skill that had returned some of the light to her eyes, which he had missed.
“You’re a hell of a poker player. How did you learn to play cards like that?”
“My husband taught me.”
“He was a card player, then.”
She nodded. “A professional gambler. Still is, I reckon. A good one once. He won a lot, cheated when he didn’t. We traveled all over, him and me, on the poker circuit. Tombstone. Dodge City. Wasn’t a place we hadn’t worked. After we got married I was always on his arm and we were quite the couple then, real pieces of work. I was very beautiful back in those days, before he cut me. We’d work the towns, me turning the heads, him slipping an ace out of his sleeve when them drunken gamblers was staring at my bosom. I’m a bad person.”
“You’re a good person.”
“I’m a bad wife. If I’d have been a good wife to my husband and not run away maybe things would have been better—different anyway.”
She felt like talking now, and he felt like listening.
“I don’t know how I stayed with him as long as I did. My husband told me day in and day out I couldn’t do nothing. Didn’t know nothing. Swore he’d leave me and I’d have to become a sporting girl and sell my body or starve to death. Thing was, I believed him. Didn’t know how I’d survive on my own. I was his property, he’d tell me. ‘I own you,’ he’d say.
“Round this time he had him a run of bad luck at cards and we was on the dole. He blew our money on whiskey and was drunk all the time. Then he started beating me and he didn’t know about hitting a person in places it don’t show. He’d just haul off and hit my face, and when the woman on his arm at the card table has a black eye, makeup don’t fool nobody, so the men stopped looking at me, and one of ’em saw my husband slip an ace out of his sleeve. Some cowboys broke his hands. He couldn’t wipe his own ass for a year let alone play cards. Still I stayed with him. I was scared to leave. He was so broke and crazy he got it into his head I was the only property he had, the last thing he owned, and nobody was gonna take it from him. By the time I ran away it was too late. When I finally got the guts to stand up to him he took a wire cutter to my face, saying my face was his property and he could take a piece of it anytime he wanted. When they had me at the hospital I was too scared of that man not to run away, so I did. I was so ugly I disguised myself as a man and somewhere along the line I became Puzzleface.
“But I knew he’d find me eventually, even with a disguise.” Rachel’s eyes were vacant, empty even of despair as she intoned hopelessly, “‘I own you.’ That’s what he always said. He always said he’d kill me if I ever left him, and wherever I ran he’d find me and he’d kill me and said I’d never get away from him. I hear him in my dreams every night. He does own me, Nate. That’s the vows you take before God when you get married. Till death do you part. I am his property and when something’s your property you can do what you want with it, and if he wants to kill me, he can do it because I was a bad wife and I ran away.” Rachel was sinking into the quicksand of fear and self-loathing inside herself.
Reaching over, Sweet grabbed Rachel and shook her gently but forcefully, until she raised her eyes to his, but there was nothing there. “You stop that. You hear me? You stop it. You need to stand up for yourself. You are better than that no-account man and you need to show him you’re better by standing up and living your life and being all you can be. But first you gotta stop feeling sorry for yourself and stand up.”
“What good will it do?” She shook her head. “I’m a woman, Nate. A woman can’t stand up for herself. It’s a man’s world and a woman got no freedom in this world. Men got freedom. Never realized it until I put on that man’s suit and became Puzzleface. When I became Puzzleface and had me a taste of life as a man my life changed. I was born again. You see, when the world thinks you’re a man you can do just about anything.” Rachel was grinning until she remembered. “But he knows I’m Puzzleface now and it’s the end.”
She hung her head.
“I’m tired, Nate, so tired. I want to go to bed.”
“Sure, Rachel. Get some sleep.”
When Sweet closed the door on her room, stepping into his own room to begin his long night-guard duty, the last view he had of Rachel sitting on the bed was of someone who had lost the will to live. He had never seen such a lost soul.
Washing his face and hands in the pot by the mirror, the deputy splashed water on his face and looked at his own face, facing the honest truth that he could not save this woman, as much as he wanted to.
The only one who could save Rachel was herself.
And he didn’t see how.
All the U.S. Marshal could do was what he was able to by the power of his badge: patrol the hotel and see if he could flush out her husband before the man could kill his wife. Sweet still had absolutely no idea what the husband looked like because Rachel carefully refused to provide any identifiable physical characteristics.
She had, however, provided insight into the kind of man he was: a lowly, mean, insecure, insolvent gambler. The deputy might be able to spot a man like that in the place he would likely be, the casino downstairs.
Grabbing his Winchester, Deputy Sweet decided to go downstairs and take a look.
* * *
In the next room, Rachel lay in bed in the darkness, listening to the sound of the door closing on the other side of the wall and the deputy’s footsteps departing down the hall.
She was truly alone now.
As she rested her head on the pillow in the total darkness, she prayed for this to stop, just wanting it all to be over.
With her eyes open, she saw just dark, when she closed them, the dark was the same.
Rachel tried to let go.
It would be over soon.
But in the silence of the room, Rachel kept hearing Nate Sweet urging her to stand up, words she couldn’t get out of her skull, until she had to sit up.
Striking a match, she lit the coal oil lamp she had just blown out on the nightstand, and once again the room was bathed in bronze firelight.
The woman rose to her feet and stood straight.
She knew, quite suddenly, what she had to do.
But Rachel could not do it by, or as, herself.
Shrugging the nightgown off her shoulders, it dropped like a discarded skin around her ankles, undraping her nude body aglow with lamplight as Rachel opened the armoire where the clothes of Puzzleface were neatly hung, and she dressed herself.
* * *
>
The hotel casino was in full swing as Deputy Sweet entered to have himself a look around. It was Saturday night and all the tables were crowded with cowboys and gamblers busy playing poker, blackjack, faro, and roulette. The place bustled with excitement and activity. The air was filled with cigar smoke and laughter, the sound of ice and liquor poured into glasses, sporadic shouts of victory or defeat, and a rollicking honky-tonk piano.
There were six card tables, Sweet saw, three had poker games going, two had blackjack, and Sweet couldn’t see the other game from his vantage. In one corner there was a separate faro table and dealer. In another corner the roulette wheel. The casino floor was filled shoulder to shoulder with people. Carting his Winchester rifle at ease in the crook of his right elbow, the lawman casually patrolled the room, his laconic gaze scanning each and every face. Many of those faces were townspeople and friends he knew, and those people he smiled at, then immediately shifted his gaze to search out faces of strangers he did not know, looking for the one who was in town to kill his wife. The deputy moved calmly between the tables, weaving his way smoothly through the crowd, his eyes constantly on the move, canvassing the place.
—There, a surly-looking long, gray-haired blackjack player in a disheveled sheepskin jacket who looked heeled. No, too old. Rachel married a younger man.
—There, a dapper elegant New Orleans dandy type with a pencil mustache and slicked-back hair, cleaning up at one of the poker tables. The dandy was puffing a big cigar and flashing his shark grin almost as much as he flashed his money. Professional gambler. Asshole. Take a closer look. Sweet started for the table to talk to the gambler, but something told him that was not the guy.
—Moving steadily on through the crowd, the deputy made a full rotation, spotting a few grungy-but-seasoned gamblers in the casino whom he was deciding to keep his eye on when his gaze fell on a big, rough-hewn man in the weathered remains of what used to be an expensive hand-tailored jacket and right away Deputy Sweet had a gut feeling this was Rachel’s husband. He was sitting thirty feet away at the first poker table, pushing chips into the pot and drawing three cards. A heavy revolver was clearly visible on his dirty belt. The man’s hair was long, oily, and stringy, his clothes covered with dirt stains from sleeping out of doors. The man was clearly insolvent and gave off the odor of the gutter; his nervous pawing of the cards and lunges of his head were animalistic. He twitched a lot. He was big and mean and feral. From twenty feet away, Sweet felt the man’s bad energy and knew he was one of the bad ones; and he couldn’t help but picture the son of a bitch taking a pair of wire cutters to Rachel’s face.