by James, Terry
He hesitated, wondering if she was testing him, but he had nothing to hide, nothing new at least.
‘Where’ve you been for the past three years?’
She swivelled on the ledge, resting her chin on her knees as she brought them into her chest. ‘Saint Mary’s Sanctuary.’
He recognized the name, if not the exact place. ‘You’re a nun?’ He blurted it like an accusation.
‘More likely a sinner paying penance,’ she said, miserably.
Jake remembered laughter coming from a crowded blackjack table where she dealt cards. Quickly his thoughts strayed to a hotel room with the sheets on the bed still warm. She’d been a responsive lover, but she’d never been a sinner.
‘For what?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know.’ She ran a shaky hand through her hair, revealing more clearly the cavern of deep scars criss-crossing her forehead. ‘Maybe you can tell me some time, but not now. I’m too tired to think.’
‘You’re welcome to half the bed.’ He closed his eyes, wary of driving her away again if he pressed too hard. ‘I never touched—’
‘Any woman who didn’t want you to.’ The bed dipped as she slipped on beside him. ‘And I never shot any man who didn’t deserve it – probably.’
Jake was dreaming about blue-green eyes, red hair and creamy skin when a movement in the hallway snapped him awake. He pushed his hat away from his face and accustomed his eyes to the semi-darkness. Ros lay pressed against his side, snoring lightly. She stirred when he eased his legs off the bed to slip his feet into his boots.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked on a whisper.
He cocked his gun. ‘Probably nothing. Go back to sleep.’
In a blur of movement and noise, the room exploded. Jake shoved Ros clear a split second before the door left its top hinge and crashed into him. It partly pinned his leg against the bed and, as he struggled to get free, a man’s voice boomed into the room, ‘You shoulda stayed dead, bitch.’
Jake’s mouth tasted dry as cotton as he returned fire, aiming towards the flashes coming from the shadowy hallway. Then, as suddenly as it started, the onslaught stopped.
Cocking his revolver, Jake ran to the empty doorway, peering out before launching himself into the open. The passageway was empty. He started towards the stairs but a breeze on his back drew him to a window overlooking the street. There was blood smeared along the sill. He leaned out, hanging precariously across the ledge, but all was still.
As he backed inside, cussing, a commotion brought him round sharply, gun raised towards several lamps blinding him with sudden brightness. Doors on either side opened and bleary-eyed men wearing an assortment of underwear and nightshirts stumbled out.
‘What the hell was that all about?’ a fat man grumbled.
‘Sounded like a gunfight to me,’ mumbled another, winding a pair of spectacles around his ears. ‘I asked for a quiet room when I signed in. I’m going to speak to—’
‘No trouble, gents. You just go back to bed and forget about it.’
Jake recognized the high tone of the morning desk clerk, Eugene, a thin, balding man with bad skin and crooked teeth.
Jake holstered his pistol. ‘Not so fast. Did anybody see anything?’
‘I just heard a ruckus and got up to see what was going on,’ Eugene whined.
The others mumbled their agreement.
‘You better have a nice bank balance to back up them fancy clothes you wear, mister,’ Eugene said. ‘Like it says in the foy-er, all breakages must be paid for.’
The clerk’s attempt at menace didn’t worry Jake. There was nothing worth more than a dollar in the whole place. ‘Go back to bed,’ he ordered, spinning on his heel. ‘We’ll straighten this out later.’
Sidestepping the splintered door into his room, he moved towards the lamp on the dresser. The wick sputtered as he brought the flame up, but nothing else stirred.
He looked around. ‘Ros, you can come—’
Her legs protruded beyond the foot of the bed on the far side and a closer look revealed Ros face down, blood spreading across the floor around her head. She was trying to push herself up.
‘Son-of-a-bitch,’ she complained, as Jake turned her over and hauled her onto the bed. ‘I think you broke my nose.’
Ros tensed, unable to focus as breathtaking pain spread from her nose and ricocheted around her body. Rudd’s quick thinking had almost certainly saved her life, but right now she wondered whether she’d ever breathe right or stand straight again. He’d slammed her down so hard she thought she’d suffocate. The sensation had seemed familiar and frightening, but in keeping with the other memories she had, it was indistinct.
Jake tipped her head back and pressed a towel against her face while he dabbed at her shirt with the edge of a blanket. She let him. Usually she picked herself up, but it was comforting to have someone else do it for a change.
‘Let me look at you,’ he said throwing the towel down and peering into her face. ‘I’m no doctor but I don’t think it’s broken. Are you hurt anywhere else?’
She tried to flex her fingers, but a lightning sharp pain in her wrist and thumb paralysed her. ‘Beats me how I hurt my hand when I stopped the fall with my face. I guess I should thank you for at least not killing me, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t do that right away. Did you see who it was?’
‘No, but I don’t think he’ll be back in a hurry. There was blood on the windowsill.’
Ros pointed past him to a sack half-hidden behind the splintered door. ‘What’s that?’
‘Beats me,’ Jake said, straightening the door on its remaining hinge before he retrieved the sack.
He held it as though it was a bag of rattlers, gingerly untying the knot in the top, then peeping inside. His nostrils flared as though the stench of rotting flesh was in his nose, his mouth tightening with revulsion as he reclosed it and threw it in the hallway.
‘What was it?’ Ros’s hand trembled, her stomach clenching as she recalled the story the train guard had told about the body on the track. ‘No, don’t tell me.’
‘You know, don’t you?’
She clenched her chattering teeth and nodded, willing her knees not to knock as she squeezed them together. ‘A scalp … with hair like mine.’
‘Is that what you heard about that scared you more than me?’
She fought to control a new kind of fear. What if he decided not to help her? She had to know. ‘I understand if you want to change your mind about helping me.’
Jake looked offended. ‘If anybody can get you through this, I can. You’ve just got to trust me.’ He pressed her down onto the bed and swung her legs up. ‘I know it’s hard, but try to get some sleep. There’s nothing we can do now that we can’t do later.’
She wanted to believe him, but Jake hadn’t done anything to make her believe he was equal to bloodthirsty bounty-hunters and woman-killers.
CHAPTER 5
Something akin to gunfire startled Ros awake and she blinked rapidly, shying away from the direction of the window where a volley of rain lashed the glass. Pain gripped her in an instant and she groaned, unsure whether to roll over and suffer in silence or shoot herself and be done with it.
Rudd’s arm tightened around her shoulder. When she glanced at his face, he appeared to be dozing. Judging by the daylight, the stiffness in her back and the sour taste in her mouth, she’d been asleep for a while. Somehow, she’d rolled onto his side of the bed and draped herself over him, using his chest for a pillow. It was a mistake, but she had to admit, she felt safer than she had in days.
‘Are you awake?’ she whispered.
‘Of course.’ His hand slid away from his pistol. ‘How are you feeling?’
She sat up, bringing her knee between them as she spun to face him.
‘Fine,’ she said, lying as pain locked her hand.
She glanced at some swelling around her thumb and wrist, but decided to worry about it later. Right now she needed an answer to at least one n
agging question.
‘Were you following me last night, or was it a coincidence that we met?’
Drawing his brows together, he tilted his head in a quizzical bird-like movement. ‘Good morning to you, too.’
She dropped her focus to a new stain on the knee of her tan pants. ‘Look, Mr Rudd, I want to trust you, but I don’t know … Despite what happened last night – me saving your life, you saving mine – I need to know, is it you who’s been following me? Either you were, or you weren’t. It’s a simple enough question.’
As he considered his answer, his natural sparkle seemed to dim, taking with it some of her optimism. Eventually, he got up and walked to the washstand, splashing his face with water before he continued. ‘One that could take a while to answer honestly and, to tell the truth, I’m not inclined at the moment.’
‘So you were.’ Disappointment dulled the gratification she might have felt at being right.
‘When you saved my life, yes, I’d followed you from the livery stable. When I came to town, no, that was coincidence. Or at least I thought it was.’
‘You’ve changed your mind?’
‘Uh-huh. You talk in your sleep. You kept saying ‘Emmett Swain’.’
‘I did?’ she asked, trying to sound indifferent.
‘Last night Sully mentioned that name, then later the sheriff said something about him.’ He threw down the towel and faced her. ‘Tell me about him.’
She searched her tattered memory. ‘He’s a man I was going to marry, a long time ago.’
A frown darkened his expression. ‘How long ago?’
‘I don’t know, four or five years maybe. I don’t remember everything before I woke up in the mission. Well that’s not entirely true. Some things are still there but … just before the accident … that is to say; parts of my memory are a bit holey.’ She swirled her finger against her temple.
‘You mean you don’t remember anything that happened in Hays?’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘And that’s something to do with the accident?’
‘What do you know about that?’ she snapped.
There was the slightest hesitation. Just enough to make her think his next words would be a lie.
‘Just what I heard and things I read.’ He smiled disarmingly. ‘Of course, it looks as though the reports of your death were exaggerated.’
‘Thanks to … the sisters at the sanctuary.’ She stretched her back, hoping he wouldn’t notice her white lie. ‘I was as good as dead when they found me.’
‘Found you? I don’t understand. The accident happened in town, didn’t it?’
‘That’s right, but from what I’ve been able to piece together, when I was taken to the doctor’s house someone had other plans for me. He patched me up then got a message that he had another patient to see across town. While he was gone somebody kidnapped me.’
Her voice cracked under the strain of recalling the cold-bloodedness of her abduction, although she had no true recollection of it. What she knew had been stitched together with information the girls had given her and things she’d found out in Hays just a few weeks ago. She saw no reason not to share the scant details
‘They took me outside town and dumped me in the middle of nowhere, to die, with a bullet in my back for good measure.’
Rudd’s knuckles turned white as his hands balled into fists. ‘You don’t need to say anymore about that. Tell me what happened after you left the sanctuary.’
Her breath formed a misty cloud, time dragging as she decided where to start. ‘I went back to Hays, to the doctor who’d patched me up after the accident. I didn’t know what else to do. Sadly, he’d died a few months earlier, but his wife remembered me. She had a few things of mine that he’d kept.’
‘What things?’
‘Nothing important, a stage ticket, a letter he found in my pocket.’
‘His wife still had them after all that time? Why?’
Ros had asked herself the same thing. Now she just shrugged.
‘She said her husband thought someone would come for them.’
Jake’s attention seemed to wane as he gazed somewhere beyond her. Then, as if he’d been in a daydream, he said, ‘Mind telling me what was in it?’
‘It was more of a note really and it was faded.’ She closed her eyes, her lips moving silently before she said, ‘Marry me. It was signed Jay. I asked around but nobody knew what happened to him. I think he died.’
She let the detail sink in, trying to read Jake’s expression, but he remained impassive.
‘You said you knew me before, so what about Jay? Did you know him?’
Jake hesitated. ‘No. Listen, I’ve got things to do. I need to ask around town, see what I can find out.’
She didn’t believe him. He’d been firing questions like bullets until she mentioned Jay. For such an abrupt change to come over him, there must be something he wasn’t telling her and she couldn’t risk letting him leave before she had answers. On the other hand, she had no intention of begging.
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t ask you to tell me about another man. In fact, there’s no reason why you should even get involved in my troubles.’
The ploy worked, drawing him into a denial.
‘Believe me, there are at least a dozen reasons why I should get involved.’
‘Like what?’
He took a minute. ‘I lied to you. I let you believe I was something I wasn’t, and when I should have trusted you, I lied again. If it hadn’t been for my lies you wouldn’t have—’
He left her with a hunger to know more that propelled her off the bed and pressed her face within inches of his. ‘Everyone lies. With you it’s more than that.’
‘Now you’re talking as if you know me.’
‘Maybe I do.’ She shook her head in denial. ‘You seem familiar, as though I know more than I should about you.’
‘That’s an understatement.’
She stepped back from him, suddenly uncomfortable with their close proximity.
‘We were lovers?’ she asked.
He nodded.
‘So why don’t I recall your name?’ She chuckled. ‘I guess, that answers one question I always had about my past. I was a whore.’
She didn’t sound upset, more resigned to the truth.
‘No, you weren’t. We were more to each other than that.’
Before he could say more, she stalked to the window, looking for a distraction as she digested this new twist. It took a while.
‘Did Jay know? Were you the one who killed him?’ She didn’t give him time to refute the accusation. ‘Jake – Rudd.’ She said it several times, chewing over the words like a delicacy. ‘I wish I could remember you. There’s something you’re not telling me and I want to know what it is.’
‘That’s enough for now. The past ain’t always a good place to revisit,’ Jake said. ‘You’re just going to have to trust me. When the time’s right, you’ll remember.’
This time she decided not to argue but she couldn’t resist throwing him one final challenge. ‘You said you were a liar. Why should I trust anything you say now?’
‘Because the truth might be more than you can handle, and I don’t want another bullet in my back. Trust me, Ros. If you’d trusted me before, things would be a whole lot different now.’
CHAPTER 6
By the time he walked out of the hotel and into weak winter sunshine, the noon stage was just pulling up. He stopped in the doorway, waiting for a throng of passengers, friends and relatives to clear the area before he could continue. When he started on his way, someone tugged his sleeve, stopping him, and a child’s voice asked, ‘Can I help you, mister?’
Jake looked down into the grubby face of a boy no more than ten years old. ‘With what?’
‘Anything that’ll get me the price of a biscuit at Peggy’s café.’
Jake looked him over from his skinny shoulders to his bare feet, taking in the ragged britches and the frayed cuffs of his faded shirt. He need
ed more than a biscuit to put flesh on his bones and colour in his cheeks. Jake thought about giving him a few cents, but figured the way the kid’s brown eyes bored into him, he wasn’t looking for charity.
‘My name’s Jimmy McKendrick. I’m all right. Everybody knows me, mister. My pa killed hisself after he lost our farm, so I run errands. Please, mister, I wouldn’t cheat you.’
The boy’s story was uncomfortably familiar, reminding Jake of a part of his life he preferred to forget. Yet meeting Ros again had already dragged him some way back towards it, and now this boy’s plight brought more unhappy memories.
‘All right, kid,’ he said, shoving the similarities to the back of his mind. ‘Go tell the sheriff to meet me in the saloon.’
He flipped a coin, watching the boy’s freckled face brighten as he snatched the reward out of the air.
‘What name shall I tell him, sir?’
‘Rudd.’
Jimmy repeated it. ‘I’ll tell him, and if you need anything else just ask for Jimmy, that’s me. Everybody knows where to find me.’
‘All right, Jimmy, I’ll remember. Now, do you know which way to the nearest saloon?’
Jimmy’s smile disappeared, his hands balling into fists. ‘Are you one of Swain’s guns?’
Jake frowned. ‘No.’
The kid’s scowl transformed into a grin. ‘Good, ‘cause I kinda like you and he killed my pa. You watch out. He’ll kill you too if you’re not one of his kind.’
The boy was rambling, but from the moment he’d mentioned the name, he had Rudd’s attention.
‘His kind?’ Jake asked trying not to sound too interested.
‘Thief. Murderer. Liar. Cheat.’ His chin trembled and he pouted. ‘He killed my pa. He’d kill me too ‘cept he don’t think I’m big enough to worry over.’ He chuckled. ‘He’s wrong though. I got a gun and I’ve been practising. One day I’ll … I’ll….’
For all his big words, the tremor in Jimmy’s voice betrayed his lack of conviction. Maybe when Jake had time, he’d sit Jimmy down and tell him about the trouble a gun and a big mouth could get him into. For now, he ruffled the boy’s hair and slipped two more bits into his hand.