by Bill Brooks
“Detective, huh? That what you are, too? A detective?”
“I guess you don’t think much of the title or the profession.”
“First god-damn’ detective I ever met,” he said. “Would you believe it? All these years, and you’re the first one. Your friend, he’s a Pinkerton man?”
“No. He’s in business for himself. His operation is a lot smaller than Pinkerton’s.”
“Who’s your friend? Maybe I’ve heard of him.”
“Ike Kelly.”
Torres shook his head. “No, ain’t never heard of him.”
“Kelly Detective Agency, out of Cheyenne,” Cole tried again.
Torres half rolled his eyes, trying to remember if he’d ever heard of it. “No. I ain’t never heard of it.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Well, what the hell does a job like detective work pay, anyhow?”
“Depends on the assignment,” Cole said.
“What, maybe a hundred a month, something like that?”
“It’s not regular pay. It all depends on the job.”
Torres lifted the glass of Red-Eyed Jim, sipped it, held it out, looked at it, sipped it some more.
“How’s a man get in that line of work . . . detective?”
“It isn’t hard to get into.”
“No, I bet it isn’t.”
“Why the interest?” Cole asked again.
“Just curious . . . about the detective work.”
“What about the other?”
“You mean, my reason for being here?”
Cole nodded.
“Yeah, like I said, I’m looking for somebody. You could be him.”
“How so? I rode up here on the stage with you. You’d know if I was the man you’re looking for.”
“No, not necessarily. It could be anybody.”
“Why’re you looking for somebody in the first place?”
Torres set the empty glass down gently, like it was an egg he didn’t want to break. “I had a brother come up here nine, ten months back. Come up here to muck gold. Him and another man, a man named Shag Hargrove. The way my brother described this Shag Hargrove, he was a gold panner. Robertito was a fool. I told him that first off when he talked about it. But you’d have to know Robertito to understand why he wouldn’t listen to me. Robertito’s young, full of piss and vinegar. A dreamer, that’s what Robertito Torres is.”
Miguel Torres didn’t seem to be talking to Cole as much as he was to himself. Cole listened closely to the rest of it.
“Robertito and this fellow Hargrove, they came here saying how rich they were going to get. I heard from Robertito once. Said they’d found something, but he wouldn’t say what or how much exactly. Then, a month ago, someone sent home his things. They were wrapped in butcher paper and sent home to the old woman. His shirt and extra pants and a dollar watch he owned. No money, of course. I went to the house and the old woman showed me Robertito’s things, wrapped up in that butcher paper. She said to me . . . ‘Miguel, Robertito’s been killed, I know it. Go see if you can find your brother and learn what happened to him.’ She cried a little. It’s mostly because of her that I came here. For me, too.”
Cole watched him pour another inch of the whiskey in his glass and take his time drinking it.
“I ain’t sentimental, like some,” he went on. “But god damn it, Robertito was my brother, the old woman’s youngest boy. You can see how a thing like that would affect her, can’t you?”
“Yeah.”
He blinked, dropped his chin a little. “See, Robertito was always chasing after something that wasn’t there. He was an unsteady boy, but damn if you couldn’t help but like him the first time you met him. He was that way. Everybody liked Robertito the minute they met him.” Then Miguel Torres stiffened in his chair and his eyes grew fixed. “They shouldn’t have sent his god-damn’ clothes home in butcher paper,” he muttered. “Not even a god-damn’ note to say what happened to him.”
“Somebody must have cared enough about him to do that much,” Cole said. “A woman, maybe. Sounds like what a woman might do if she cared about him . . . send his things home.”
“Butcher paper . . .” He said it like they were the only words he remembered from a forgotten prayer. Then he drank the whiskey, drank it like there was a fire in his gut he was trying to put out with it. And for a long time, there was nothing but the sound of flies droning the air. “The writing on the butcher paper,” he said after a while. “It could’ve been a woman’s. I didn’t think of that till just now, you mentioning it.” The thought stirred behind his eyes, bringing some new hope. “Robertito liked women, and they sure as hell liked him.” He lifted his gaze toward Cole as he poured some more of the whiskey into his glass a little less carefully than before. Some of the liquor spilled over onto his blunt fingers. “But if it’s like you say, Cole, how come she didn’t take the time to write a note with it, to say what happened to Robertito? How come a woman would take the time to send his things and not bother to tell his own family what happened to him?”
“Maybe she thought she’d done her share,” Cole said. “Or maybe she was afraid of getting more involved if it was something bad that happened to your brother.”
“Maybe that was it, she was afraid.”
“Maybe so.”
This time he drank the whiskey like he was just plain thirsty for it. “It’s a damn’ weakness,” he said.
“What is?”
“Drinking.”
“To some, maybe it is.”
“To me,” he said. “It’ll get me killed someday. I know that as sure as I know anything.”
“Then why do you do it?”
This time his lips edged into a genuine smile. “Two reasons,” he said.
Cole waited for him to tell him his reasons.
“I can’t stop. And it don’t matter.”
“Dying ought to count for something,” Cole said. “The same way living ought to count for something.”
“Not to me, it don’t.”
“No sweetheart waiting back in Texas?”
He grunted. “Do I look the type?”
“It was just a question.”
“Yeah, I guess it was.”
He poured out another glass, only this time he filled it all the way to the top. “I guess we both came here because of the killing going on in this town,” Miguel Torres said, just before draining his glass.
“Maybe you should begin asking about the women Robertito might have been friendly with,” Cole suggested, but he wasn’t sure Torres had heard him, for his head had dropped slightly, like a weary old bull’s.
Cole stood, and the chair scraping over the floor brought Torres around.
“Detective . . .” he said, staring up at Cole.
“Good luck, Mister Torres. I hope you find your brother.”
The muscle below Torres’s left eye became pinched, maybe from disdain. “What’s something like that pay? That detective work?”
Cole left him sitting there, his hand gripping the half empty bottle. The company of Miguel Torres had suddenly lost its appeal.
Cole walked up the street to the stable where the old man was sitting, his face tilted to the sun.
“You get a horse in yet I can rent?”
The old man opened his eyes. “You ain’t dead yet,” he said.
“Was I supposed to be?”
The old man coughed a laugh, then spat, then wiped his mouth and nose with the back of his hand. His eyes searched around in Cole’s face like a prospector looking for quartz in a field of stone. “I heard the shots,” he said.
“About that horse . . . ?”
“Saw them carry a man over to Principal’s funeral parlor. I thought maybe it was you.”
“Well, you can see it wasn’t. Do you have a horse to rent, or not?”
He scratched the loose skin of his neck. “Got a buckskin. He ain’t fer beginners, ya know what I mean?”
“Bring him out.”
<
br /> The old man stood like it was the greatest effort in the world to do so, wiped his hands along the legs of his trousers, and disappeared inside the stable. In a few minutes he led out the buckskin. He had put Cole’s Dunn Brothers saddle on the gelding. Cole appreciated the fact that he had.
“Four dollars,” the old man said, holding out his hand. “Up front, ya don’t mind.”
Cole paid him and climbed aboard. He had barely got both feet in the stirrups and the buckskin was off. He gave him his head; it was the best thing to do with a horse that wants to run. Just let him. Cole wanted to run, too.
The buckskin ran for a long time, then Cole was able to slow him down to a walk. He followed a trail off the main road that led back in among the tall dark pines. They climbed a ridge, worked their way along it, and kept going until they came to a blue mountain lake that lay glittering in the sun. The buckskin was balky about the descent, but this time Cole was in charge, and together they went down—all the way down to the edge of the lake, then in, up to the buckskin’s belly.
Cole let him drink, then rode him out and back up on the shoreline. There he dropped his saddle and let the buckskin crop grass while he pulled off his boots and everything else he was wearing.
The water was cold, nearly as cold as a knife, but Cole went in anyway, and it sucked the breath out of him and tempered the pain shrinking his skull. After a while, everything quit hurting and feeling bad, and he could breathe again. He soaked in the icy lake until he couldn’t feel his legs and arms, then worked his way out and lay in the grass, letting the sun warm him. He refused to listen to the voices of the ghosts. Instead, he listened to the gentle cropping of the horse and the way the wind floated over the meadow grass and the way the water kissed against the rocks there at the shoreline. It was enough, just enough, all he needed. He remembered an old Baptist preacher telling him once that it wasn’t what a man wanted in life so much that counted, as it was what he needed. And if a man just got that much out of life, he was well blessed.
Lying there on the sweet grass with the sun warming his skin and Deadwood a long way off, he had just exactly what he needed. He closed his eyes and was nearly asleep when he heard the drumbeat of riders approaching.
Chapter Fifteen
Cole rose up in time to see four riders pressed against the horizon, their horses throwing up clods of dirt. He could feel the pounding hoofs, rumbling up through the ground like a thumping heart. He pulled on his trousers and shirt and shoved the Remington into his waistband.
Three of the riders were wearing red shirts and the brims of their hats were flattened back against the crowns. They all had the same squinting eyes and long, wild mustaches and Vandyke beards. Quirts swung from their gauntlets, and their chaps flared and flattened as they lifted and fell in rhythm with their lathered ponies. But it wasn’t the red shirts Cole was watching as much as the man who rode out front. He was riding a large blooded stud with four white stockings. A horse like that would cost $300 or $400. Then he noticed the saddle. It sure wasn’t anything that the Dunn Brothers would’ve made. It had iron stirrups and a small flap of leather for the seat. It was the kind of saddle a man would want if his horse gave out on him in the middle of the plains and he had to carry it a long distance. It didn’t look like it weighed anything at all.
His attention went from the horse and saddle to the man. He was tall and well built, wearing a tailored gray suit and a tweed cap. He would be hard to mistake for a frontiersman, and the way he rode told Cole he wasn’t a Westerner. The riders drew up ten feet away, sliding their horses to hard stops, except for the dude riding the thoroughbred. He circled around Cole, then came to a halt.
The other three fanned out in a semicircle behind him. The three red shirts could have been brothers, for all their similarities. They looked on with curiosity while the dandy riding the big stud tipped his cap before addressing Cole.
“I say, my dear man, is it your habit to take your leisure on private land?”
Cole didn’t have to guess to know who it was just by the accent—Winston Stevens, Liddy’s English gentleman, he thought, for lack of a better term. He had soft brown eyes and a nose that had never been broken and a narrow, square chin and overall soft features. He wore a cravat, a bright blue one, and tall, polished boots with small silver spurs. Cole noticed the checkered stock of a sporting gun protruding from a hand-tooled scabbard just behind his right leg.
The stud pawed the ground and snorted and tried tossing its head, but the Englishman held him in check with total command. He might not have been a typical buckaroo, but he knew how to handle a horse. He wore gloves—nice soft kid gloves, expensive, like the horse and the rest of his outfit. He was the kind of gent you might well see at some cattleman’s club, sipping port from a crystal glass, or relaxing in a private rail car, smoking $1 cigars while out shooting up a herd of antelope on one of Pawnee Bill’s hunting expeditions. Cole was trying hard not to make a judgment about him, but it was difficult not to, considering how it’d gone between Liddy and him the night before.
He waited for Cole to answer his question. The other three sort of sat there, resting their forearms on the horns of their saddles, curious, like monkeys.
“Didn’t know you could own this land,” Cole said.
The gent smiled at that. “What makes you think not, sir?”
“Well, the last I knew, the Sioux owned it. I believe that is why they killed that poor crazy bastard Custer . . . because they were under the impression that the Black Hills was still theirs.”
“Ah, I see,” he said, almost politely. “The Sioux, that would be the red men in this part of the territory, is that it?”
“Yeah, that’d be them.”
Cole could see the red shirts were enjoying the conversation. “Full of it, ain’t he?” one of them said to the other two. They all grinned like can-eating goats.
Winston Stevens looked at his hands as though he were admiring them, or the kid gloves he was wearing. He looked at them a moment, then back at Cole. “You see, my dear man, this is private land. I’ve purchased it.”
“The hell you say.” Cole spoke with mock surprise. “How’d you manage that?”
One of the red shirts edged his horse closer to get between Cole and the Englishman.
“Hold on now, Mister Coffey,” Winston Stevens said.
The mention of the name rang a few old bells for Cole. He looked at the man and the man looked back. Charley Coffey had grown some since the last time Cole had seen him. He’d grown a mustache, for one thing. It made him look foolish. The last time he’d laid eyes on him was when he’d been locked up in a Kansas jail for stealing a man’s union suit off a clothesline. Charley was just a kid then, fourteen, fifteen, maybe. No one thought he’d amount to much. But Charley’d proved them wrong. He had made himself into a gun artist of sorts. He had killed a few old outlaws on his path to glory—a petty thief in Fort Riley, two Army deserters in Hays City. Off and on over the years, Cole had heard rumors about Charley Coffey. Kid Charley, some called him. Then he’d heard, last winter, that he’d killed Jim Ketchum in Telluride. Some claimed it had been a fair fight. If it was, that would make Charley the genuine article. Jim Ketchum was no slouch with a gun.
“No sense in letting this man backtalk you, Mister Stevens,” Charley said, feeling brave, with the others there to back him up.
“No, Charles, I don’t think that is what the gentleman was doing. I simply think he is misinformed about matters. Wouldn’t you say that was the case, sir?”
It hadn’t taken Cole long to dislike him, the manner in which he spoke. “You’re Winston Stevens,” he said.
The Englishman offered Cole a look of mild surprise. “I am, sir, and might I ask who you are?”
“Name’s Cole. John Henry Cole.”
Charley Coffey lost that slouched, surly look he’d had when he heard Cole tell Winston Stevens who he was. “I know this sum-a-bitch!” Charley declared.
“Watch your mouth, boy
,” Cole warned. “Only my friends call me sum-a-bitch.”
Coffey wasn’t quite sure how to take that—as a joke or not. His holster was half turned around from the hard riding he’d just done; his pistol was resting just about the middle of his spine. Cole could see he was trying to figure out a way to reach it without being shot first, but there was no way. He knew it and Cole knew it.
“Hold up, Charles,” Winston Stevens ordered.
“Take his advice,” Cole told Coffey. “Even you’re not that fast, and I’m not that slow.”
The other two were waiting for the play to begin. Most men won’t enter a fight that’s not their own—not for $30 a month and board, they won’t. One spat; the other scratched his jaw. Cole guessed both were a little more than disappointed that Coffey hadn’t shot him or he hadn’t shot Coffey, or somebody hadn’t shot somebody. They’d probably been having a slow week until Cole had come along.
“Have we met, sir,” Winston said, “you and I? Have we met somewhere along the way?”
“No, I don’t believe we have. But I met a friend of yours and she mentioned your name.”
A quizzical look troubled his brow.
“It’s the accent. It stands out in this country.”
He smiled, showed Cole his teeth. He had a lot of teeth, Cole thought. “Jolly well,” he said.
“Well, now what?”
“Well, I hate to seem an old fussbudget about it all, Mister Cole, but, if I allow you to stray onto my property, then I invite everyone, don’t I? And then you can see how that would become a problem, can’t you?”
“Is it the grass?” Cole wondered.
“Pardon?”
“Are you worried that someone will steal your grass?”
Again that furrowing of the brows. He didn’t quite get it.
“I mean, is that what you’re worried about, a man comes and takes a swim in your little lake here, rests himself, then, when he’s ready, he’ll steal your grass? Because to tell you the truth, I don’t see anything else a man would want with this country other than to look at it. So I guess I don’t understand your concern about trespassing.”