“You got a visitor,” said the man in his early thirties who was one of two keeping watch over him. When Nate had been tossed into the makeshift jail, the man had introduced himself as Adam Ross.
Nate opened his eyes to find the skinny fellow stooping down to gaze in at him with the same melancholy expression he always wore. “A visitor?” he asked.
“Yes. He says he’s the preacher from back where you call home.”
Nate jumped to his feet and almost knocked himself out cold by slamming his head against one of the thick wooden beams above him. Rubbing the sore spot on top of his skull, he shuffled forward. “About time!”
“You expecting a visit from a preacher?”
“Yes, sir. Are you gonna deny me my chance to pray in a time of need?”
“I suppose not,” Ross said. “It’s about time for you to have a stretch and relieve yourself anyway. You’ve got a few minutes to do all of that, including talking to your friend. Make any moves I don’t like and—” Ross finished his statement by showing Nate the shotgun with which he’d already become very familiar.
“Got it,” Nate said. “Can I step out now?”
Ross took a few steps back, held his shotgun at hip level so he could point it inside the little structure and shouted, “Come on out. Make it slow and keep your hands where I can see them!”
Nate followed the directions to the letter until he got a look at who else was out there waiting for him. “Pete?” he said while dropping his hands and taking a few quick steps toward the tracker.
“Easy!” Ross warned. “Is this your preacher or not?”
“Sure he is,” Nate replied. “I’m just surprised he took the time to pay me a visit.”
“Anything to tend to my flock and all of that,” Pete replied.
The skinny man with the shotgun backed away. “You’ve got another couple of minutes. I’ll let you know when your time is about up. Once it’s over, there ain’t no more to be had and you’ll go back inside. Otherwise . . .”
“I know, I know,” Nate said. “You’ll cut me in half with that shotgun or some such thing.”
“Well . . . right.” Without any more threats in his arsenal, Ross stepped even farther back where he could hold a quiet conference with another fellow who was a squat, younger man with a thick head of black hair.
“I thought Frank would be out here,” Nate said in a hushed voice.
“I’ve seen the way the waves part for him when he tells folks who he is,” Pete told him. “Worked for me just as well even without the starched shirt. All I had to do was carry myself like Frank, mention I was a man of the cloth and I got a chance to see you even quicker than by showing those old tin stars you carry with you. Speaking of them, I suppose those two idiots over there didn’t have much respect for whatever badge you were carrying?”
“It wasn’t one they recognized. Besides, they were paid to lock me up no matter who the hell I was. How much money did you bring? Those two aren’t exactly beholden to anyone other than whoever paid them most recently.”
“Deaugrey is working on passing the collection plate around.”
Nate sighed and shook his head. “You didn’t have to say you were a priest. Mentioning you wanted to visit me probably would have been enough.”
“Just thought I’d give it a try,” Pete said offhandedly. “Call it an experiment.”
“Maybe your next experiment could be tracking down a man named Abraham Keyes. Ever hear of him?”
“No.”
“About eighteen months back, Keyes shot a marshal in Wyoming named Russ Cavanaugh.”
Pete nodded. “I remember hearing about Cavanaugh. Just never knew he was a lawman. Nobody had much good to say about him as I recall.”
“I was tending to some business down in New Mexico at the time and when I came back, Cavanaugh was in the ground and Keyes was locked up for putting him there. He had a date with the hangman and my only regret was that I couldn’t get to town quick enough to watch him swing.”
“So you knew Cavanaugh?”
“Yes,” Nate said with a solemn nod. “He was a good man. More importantly, he was a good lawman.”
That raised Pete’s eyebrows as he said, “Mighty high praise coming from you. I’ve never heard so many disparaging remarks about lawmen from someone who owns so many damn badges.”
“That’s because I was given most of them badges while serving in some official capacity or other. I’ve been a deputy, a sheriff and the servant of a few state courts. More often than not, my job ended on account of me refusing to go along with an order given by some crooked son of a bitch who sells justice to whoever’s got the most coin in their pockets. In the time we’ve known each other, how many of the killers or backstabbing cocksuckers we hunt down wind up being lawmen?”
“Quite a few,” Pete admitted.
“Not all lawmen are bad, which means the good ones deserve a hell of a lot better than Russ Cavanaugh got.”
“Plenty of good folks get killed, Nate. If they don’t get what they deserve from the law, we take it to them. That’s why I sign on to work with you so much.”
“It would have been fine if Keyes got what he deserved, but that’s not what happened,” Nate continued. “Keyes has pulled together a small fortune from corrupting lawmen. He finds any crooked son of a bitch wearing a badge and sends work his way. Sheltering fugitives, helping prisoners escape, lining up robberies . . .”
Pete let out a slow whistle. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Forget about the small fortune, he could stand to make a large one. Probably a few. I can think of about a half dozen more uses for some lawman who’s willing to ride in and do what I asked.”
“Keyes thought of plenty of uses for them. He even arranged to have honest lawmen killed in particular towns or counties so he could have one of his snakes take over the position in preparation for some larger job put together by any number of outlaws who’d paid for the privilege.”
“Hot damn.”
“I only found out about this later.” Nate glanced over to where the two guards were standing. Ross and the shorter fellow were keeping an eye on him from a distance but didn’t seem anxious to move him back into the repurposed smokehouse. “When I got back from that job in New Mex back then and heard about Keyes being tossed into a jail cell for gunning down Cavanaugh, I thought that was the end of it. A friend of mine sent word to me of what happened with the trial, but her telegrams stopped coming.”
“Did something happen to her?”
“I looked into it and never did find out what the hell happened where she was concerned, but news on the trial wasn’t hard to come by. Russ Cavanaugh’s name was being dragged through the mud in every newspaper there was.”
“That’s where I heard it,” Pete said.
Tensing as so much past anger flooded back into him, Nate said, “You ain’t the only one. Cavanaugh was a good man. He was one of the few lawmen who I was proud to serve as a deputy. After I handed in my badge, he brought me in again whenever he needed help hunting down some outlaw that had gotten by him. And there weren’t many of those.”
“More high praise coming from you.”
“Damn right it is. Everyone talking about his murder was suddenly calling him every filthy name in the book. Shootings were pinned on him, even a rape for Christ’s sake. Cavanaugh was a family man in his sixties when he was killed. I knew him well enough to know for certain there was no way in hell he could have done those things!”
“Just a bit longer!” Ross shouted. “Then it’s back in the box for you.”
Nate nodded to him impatiently before turning back to Pete. “I jumped onto a train the first chance I got to do what I could to clear Cavanaugh’s name. By the time I got there, it was already over. Cavanaugh was branded a murdering liar who threatened to kill Abraham Keyes in cold blood. Keyes was found guilty
of killing him, but the shooting was written off as self-defense. I took it upon myself to find out what happened and it barely took any digging at all to figure out Keyes was behind it.”
“How many men did he have working for him?” Pete asked.
“Enough to get the job done. As for exact numbers, nobody but Keyes himself knows that. What I do know is that Keyes pulled every string he could to try and get himself free and when that didn’t work, he pulled more strings to make Cavanaugh look like a demon straight out of hell.”
“That’s a long way to go to spite a dead man’s name,” Pete mused.
“But worth it considering his sentence went from what was sure to be a hanging to three years in jail.”
“Three years?” Pete said in a voice that was loud enough to catch the attention of the two armed men nearby. Noticing the curious looks he was drawing, Pete lowered his voice and asked, “That’s all he got for killing a lawman?”
“For killing a crooked lawman who was painted as something worse than most of the men he’d locked away, yes.”
Pete squinted before saying, “I thought you said this was a year and a half ago.”
“I did.”
“And Keyes is already out?”
“Yeah. I’ve seen him,” Nate replied. “He busted in on Grey when he was about to bed that whore he was talking about during the ride here. That crazy bastard barely got away long enough for me to come pull his fat from the fire.”
“Oh, the crazy bastard you mean is Grey?” Pete asked with half a chuckle.
But Nate wasn’t laughing. “Keyes is plenty of things, but he ain’t crazy. After all the searching I did to try and set things right after Cavanaugh’s trial, I never did find anything that could be used as real evidence to put a noose around his neck or at least get him transferred to some hole in the desert where scum like him goes to rot for the rest of their goddamn lives. No matter how many dead ends I found, I always thought I had more time to keep looking.
“If things got too close to the time when he was to be let out, I could look that much harder. And if it got down to the time that Keyes was to be released, I could be there when he stuck his nose out in the open and hound him until he made a mistake. Hell, I could even be there if he got sick of looking at my face and decided to try and kill me,” Nate said as if he were yearning to find a melon-sized gold nugget at the bottom of a river. “Instead, the son of a bitch gets out free as a bird—ahead of schedule!”
“All right,” Ross said as he approached with his shotgun held at hip level. “Time to get back in there.”
“Just give me another minute,” Nate said. Before he got permission from either of the armed men, he looked back to Pete and spoke in a rush. “More than likely, these two assholes right here are crooked and were fairly cheap to buy off,” he said while nodding over to his guards. “Keyes used them to cover his escape and stick me in here for as long as possible. I’ve heard them bickering with one another when I was brought in, and I’m just being held until someone else comes to pick me up. If that someone is a lawman, he’s probably gonna get a story similar to the one that smeared Cavanaugh’s memory and I’ll be hauled off as some sort of outlaw. If he’s one of the lawmen in Keyes’s pocket, I’ll be dead in less than an hour.”
“I said that’s enough, damn it!” Ross said. “Now get into that box or you’ll be dead in less than a minute!”
Both Pete and Nate took a good, long look at the armed men. Having seen plenty of killers and twisted souls in his day, Nate was able to take stock of Ross and have absolute confidence in his conclusion. The younger man would defend himself, but he wasn’t about to pull his trigger just to make a point or enforce his demand. The other one, though, had the look of someone who would go along with any order he was given.
“Get me out of this damn smokehouse,” Nate said. “Do it before Keyes’s men get here or things will get even worse.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Pete said.
Those words were barely out of Pete’s mouth before he was shoved away by the shorter guard. Ross pushed Nate at the end of his shotgun until he was once again surrounded by the stench of smoke and the sweat of every prisoner who had been locked up in that squalid little box before him.
21
After taking a bit more time to scout the vicinity of the smokehouse while also watching the men who were guarding it, Pete made his way back to the Straight to the Eight. Deaugrey was at the same table and barely looked up to acknowledge Pete was there after being tapped on the shoulder.
“Just another hour or two,” was all Deaugrey said before shifting his intense gaze back to his cards.
Normally, Pete didn’t take kindly to being brushed off in such a casual manner. When dealing with Deaugrey Scott, however, it helped to set one’s expectations somewhat south of normal. Pete stepped up to the bar and waited for the tender to come to him.
“You get what you needed, friend?” the barkeep asked.
“Mostly. How’s he doing?” Pete asked while nodding over to Deaugrey’s table.
The barkeep looked over there as well. Shrugging, he said, “Seems to be doing well enough. The other players don’t seem too happy when they take a stretch or come over for drinks, so I guess that bodes well for your friend.”
“Speaking of drinks . . .”
“Your friend hasn’t had one that wasn’t at least half water since you left. I was about to start tapering it off even more in a few minutes.”
Pete watched Deaugrey for a few seconds, taking careful note of his manner and posture. Deaugrey seemed relaxed, but not overly so. When he spoke, his voice still boomed to its normal, aggravating bluster. “He’s fine the way he is,” Pete told the barkeep. Placing some money on the bar, he added, “This should cover the rest until the game is over. You’re doing a fine job.”
“Happy to be of service. Anything else you need? Something that’ll hit you harder than liquor? Maybe some company for the night?”
“I’ll let you know. You got any rum?”
“Part of a bottle. Don’t know how well it’s held up, though. There’s not much call for that particular poison around here. Only reason I have any was because one of the former—”
“I’ll have a glass,” Pete said sharply.
Knowing how to take a hint, the barkeep searched the bottles behind him without another word. When he found it, he pulled out the stopper, took a sniff, winced and poured some into a glass.
Pete reached for his drink and had a sip. He’d tasted better, but he’d certainly had a whole lot worse. After finding a comfortable spot where he could watch Deaugrey’s table without being jostled by too many other customers, the tracker settled in for a while.
Surprisingly enough, Deaugrey actually did realize Pete was sitting there the entire time. He came over to stand beside the tracker before Pete could finish his second glass of rum.
“How you holding up?” Pete asked.
Deaugrey let out a snorting laugh. “I was about to ask you the same thing. It’s not too often that you indulge in that piss water you like so much, but when you do it usually means a wild night.”
“That remains to be seen. I’ve gone to visit Nate.”
“Still just those same two morons standing watch over him?”
“Yeah,” Pete said. “But they’re armed morons.”
“Most morons tend to be armed,” Deaugrey said while slapping the bar to get the tender’s attention. “Answer me one thing. Do I have to stab you or him for bringing me the watered-down drinks?”
Pete looked at the barkeep who was squarely in Deaugrey’s sights before admitting, “That’d be me. I figured you’d want to stay sober for a while.”
Standing so he faced Pete head-on, Deaugrey held out both arms as if to embrace him and asked, “Do I look like a man who’s doing badly for himself?”
“No mo
re than usual,” Pete said, which was part truth and part jab. Every time Deaugrey took a fall, whether it was being tossed into a cell or getting knocked onto his ass, he managed to pull himself together and rebuild. When Pete had met up with him this time around, Deaugrey had been dressed in something close to rags and riding a slope-backed mule. Now, not only was he wearing better clothes than before, but he’d somehow managed to get a new pair of boots as well.
“You’re supposed to be collecting money to buy Nate’s freedom, am I right?” Pete asked.
“Yes.”
“Then why are you spending so much on new clothes?”
Deaugrey daintily grabbed the lapels of a gray waistcoat and peeled it open to reveal a battered double rig holster strapped around his waist. Along with the .38 that Frank had lent him, he also carried what looked like a .44 Colt. “You mean these old things? These were kindly donated by some patrons of this establishment who have since seen fit to seek their pleasures elsewhere.”
“You mean you cleaned them out for everything they had.”
“Every dime, as well as some choice pieces of clothing, a pistol, these boots and a very nice pocket watch.”
“What about cash? How are you doing in that regard?”
“I think I’ve collected enough to take a good run at getting Nate out of that jail,” Deaugrey replied. “That is, unless you’ve already broken him out yourself?”
“Not quite, although I don’t think it would be too difficult. Has Frank shown up while I was away?”
“No. What have you two been up to while the rest of us were working so diligently?”
Pete ran through the broad strokes of what had happened while they were in Nagle. Although Deaugrey listened, it was difficult to tell whether he was truly paying attention or if some other kind of nonsense was running through his head.
“Sounds like Dog Ear has been busy since his most recent liberation,” Deaugrey said.
“Yeah, but it seems Nate has all but forgotten about him. He’s hung up on the notion of finding this Keyes person.”
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