“That’s more like it,” the complaining man said. “I think we will all appreciate that.”
“No problem,” Matt replied. Matt started toward the back of the hall, at the end opposite the stairway.
“Wait a minute, where are you goin’?” someone asked.
“What are you doing with him? Where are you going?” another called. “The stairway is at the other end.”
When Matt reached the end of the hall, he raised the window that opened out onto the alley.
“Hey! What are you . . . ?”
That was as far as the questioner got, because, without any further hesitation, Matt pushed Norman Fox’s body through the window. It fell with a crash to the alley below. That done, he lowered the window, then, brushing his hands as if having just completed an onerous task, returned to his own room.
“That should take care of it,” Matt said. “Sleep well, everyone.”
“That was no way to handle that!” the complaining man said. “I’ve a good mind to . . .”
“Go back to bed,” Matt said.
“What?” the man sputtered. “See here, you can’t . . .”
“I said go to bed.”
“I will not be ordered around like some . . .”
“You can go to bed now, or you can join Mr. Fox down in the alley,” Matt said. “Which will it be?”
Matt’s response was not spoken in the form of a threat. His voice was quiet and well modulated, the words as devoid of anger as if he were inquiring of the time. And yet it was that cold calmness of his response, a declaration of intent, rather than a threat, that caused his antagonist to rethink his complaint.
The man opened his mouth as if to speak, but he said nothing. Then, defeated, and obviously frightened of Matt Jensen, he turned and moved quickly and quietly back to his room.
“I would suggest that all of you go back to bed,” Matt said. “The show is over.”
Chapter Eight
Thirty Four Corners—Diamond Dina’s Pleasure Palace
In keeping with the plans they had made the night before, Jake, Roy, and Jimmy rode into town the next morning after their nighthawk duty.
“Here it is,” Jake said, as they approached a white frame, two-story house. “Diamond Dina’s Pleasure Palace.” This was enemy territory but, they reasoned, worth the risk.
“You all go on,” Jimmy said. “I’ve got some things to buy at the store.”
“No, you don’t,” Roy said. “You are goin’ to get broke in today.”
“Look at ’im,” Jake said with a little laugh. “Why, he’s as skittish as an unbroken colt.”
“You’re goin’ to have to do it sometime,” Roy said. “Now is as good a time as any.”
Reluctantly, Jimmy dismounted and tied his horse off with the others. Jake trumped up the front steps and banged on the door.
“Dina!” he called. “Dina, you got some horny cowboys standin’ out here on the front porch!”
A moment later the front door opened and a large woman, wearing a bright red sequined dress that exposed the creamy white tops of melon-sized breasts opened the door. She was holding a long-stemmed cigarette holder in her hand, and smoke was curling up from the factory-rolled cigarette inside.
“Well, you boys come on in here then,” she said. “We can’t be leaving horny cowboys out in the heat now, can we?”
“Let’s go, boys!” Jake said happily.
“My, oh my, who is this young man?” Dina asked, smiling broadly at Jimmy.
“He’s someone we brung for you to break in,” Roy said.
“Like you say, we’re goin’ to give you a boy, we want you to give us back a man.”
“Oh? Are you a virgin, honey?” Dina asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jimmy said.
“Then you come on upstairs with me.”
“That’s all right. I’ll just wait down here,” Jimmy said, nervously.
“No, you ain’t,” Jake said. “It’s our duty to get you broke in, and it’s your duty to get broke in. Now you go on upstairs with Dina, like she said.”
With a look of despair, Jimmy followed her upstairs.
“How old are you, boy?” Diamond Dina asked, once they reached her room. Leaning back against the wall she studied him through a long stream of just-exhaled cigarette smoke.
Jimmy was sitting in a wooden chair on the opposite side of the room. He had gone directly to the chair as soon as they came up, and he hadn’t moved.
“I’m eighteen,” Jimmy said, hesitantly.
“Don’t lie to me, boy,” Dina said. “How old are you?”
“Sixt . . . uh,” Jimmy started. Then, with a sigh, he corrected himself to tell the truth. “I’m fourteen.”
“Fourteen,” Dina said. She flicked the ash from the end of her cigarette into a fruit jar lid that was filled with the crushed residue of earlier cigarettes. The jar lid lay on the windowsill.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jimmy said.
“Jake and Roy put you up to this, didn’t they?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jimmy repeated.
Dina sighed, then walked over and ran her hand through Jimmy’s hair. Jimmy cringed, and Dina laughed.
“Don’t be frightened, honey. I don’t seduce fourteen-year-old boys,” she said.
“I . . . I’m not frightened.”
“Good. Come back five or six years from now.”
“Miss Dina?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t tell Jake and Roy we didn’t do nothin’. They might make me go somewhere else.”
Dina laughed. “Tell you what, hon, you just hang around here for half an hour or so. We’ll take good care of Jake and Roy. Do you play chess?”
“I ain’t never played it before.”
“Would you like to learn? I can teach you.”
Jimmy smiled. “Yes, ma’am, I’d like that.”
“The object is to take the king,” she said as she started laying out the chessboard.
Half an hour later Dina and Jimmy started down the stairs. “Remember,” she whispered to him, “you just follow my lead.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Jake and Roy were sitting in the parlor, talking to a couple of the girls who weren’t engaged at the moment. They looked up when they saw Jimmy and Dina come in.
“Well,” Jake said, “how was it?”
“It was . . . ,” Jimmy started to say, but Jake interrupted him.
“Don’t be ’shamed if nothin’ . . . uh . . . happened,” Jake said. “It’s near ’bout always like that for your first time in the saddle. You got to be broke in, you see and . . .”
“What do you mean if nothing happened?” Dina asked. “This young man has nothing to be ashamed of.”
Jake and Roy looked at Dina with an expression of confusion on their faces.
“Wait a minute,” Roy said. “Are you telling me that something did happen?”
“Whoowee, honey, that’s exactly what I’m telling you.” Dina fanned her face. “Don’t let this young man’s age fool you. Why, he’s much more of man than either of you are, and I should know.”
The other women in the parlor laughed.
“Honey, you come back anytime,” Dina said, putting her hand on Jimmy’s cheek.
“I will, and thank you, ma’am,” Jimmy said. Smiling, Jimmy looked at the two cowboys who had brought him into town. “What do we do now?” he asked.
“We need to get back to the ranch,” Roy said. “We can’t be lollygagging around here all day.”
Santa Domingo
Matt was awakened the next morning by a series of loud popping noises, which intruded into what had been a sound sleep. Startled, he sat straight up in bed, slipped his pistol from the holster that hung from the bedpost, then got to his feet, ready for any intrusion.
Moving over to the window, he pulled the curtain to one side and cautiously looked down on the street. He laughed when he saw the source of the popping sounds. Two young boys were running up and down the st
reet, setting off strings of firecrackers.
Fifteen minutes later Matt was eating a sandwich of bacon and biscuit when the sheriff came into the dining room.
“My deputy tells me you had a busy night,” the sheriff said.
“Busier than I planned,” Matt replied.
“Let me ask you something, Mr. Jensen. Are you in a habit of throwing people out of upstairs windows?”
“I don’t make a habit of it,” Matt said. “But the others on my floor seemed to be uncomfortable with the intruder spending the rest of the night on the floor, so under the circumstances, it seemed like the logical thing to do. I didn’t think he would mind. Since you didn’t come to arrest me in the middle of the night, I take it that you are all right with what happened.”
“Oh, I am indeed,” the sheriff said. “There were enough witnesses to the circumstances that the judge had no difficulty in declaring it a justifiable homicide. Besides, I don’t think anyone is going to particularly miss Mr. Fox. He wasn’t exactly what you would call a leading citizen of our community.”
“Good,” Matt said. “I wouldn’t want that getting in the way of what I have to do.”
“By ‘have to do,’ you are talking about your search for Rufus Draco?”
“Yes! You know about that do you?”
“I know what he did to that family up in Colorado. And Sheriff Billings sent me a telegram about him. He’s wanted in New Mexico now, too, for killing that whore back in Lorenzo.”
“She wasn’t a whore,” Matt said.
“You knew her?” the sheriff asked in surprise.
“No, but I met her friends. She wasn’t a whore.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it. But I wish you luck in your search, and I hope you find him.”
“I will find him,” Matt said, resolutely.
“This might help,” the sheriff said, pulling an envelope from his pocket.
“What is that?”
“If you had taken the time to look through Fox’s pockets before you threw him through the window last night, you would have found this yourself.”
The sheriff handed Matt a folded piece of paper. Opening it, Matt read the note.
I will pay you $400 dollars more when Matt Jensen is kilt.
Rufus Draco
“I’ll be damn, Fox didn’t just happen to choose my room, did he?” Matt asked.
“It doesn’t appear so.”
“It says four hundred dollars more,” Matt said.
“Yes. We found ninety dollars in his pocket. Eighty dollars of it is in twenty-dollar gold pieces.”
“Twenty-dollar gold pieces?”
“Which, according to the information I got from the sheriff back in Lorenzo, is what was stolen from the whor . . . uh, the young woman who was murdered. That makes me wonder if Fox might not have been the one who killed her.”
“No, Fox didn’t do it,” Matt said, resolutely. “Not the way Michelle’s body was left.”
“But the gold twenty-dollar pieces,” the sheriff said.
Matt thumped the note. “It says here that Draco was going to pay four hundred dollars more. I think Draco gave Fox the gold coins as part of the payment, the gold coins that he took from Michelle’s room after he killed her. No, he didn’t just kill her—the son of a bitch butchered her.”
“You may be right,” the sheriff said. “Fox didn’t just happen to drop in on you, last night. He was trying to earn another four hundred dollars.”
“Even without the note, I figured it had to be something like that,” Matt said. “I had never met him before, so there was no other reason for him to come after me as he did.”
“Too bad you had to kill him. He might have been able to give you a little information.”
“It would have been helpful, that is true. But it doesn’t matter. I’m going to find the son of a bitch.”
“I believe you will.”
“By the way, I haven’t been keeping up with the date, is it the Fourth of July, or something?”
“The Fourth of July? No, that’s nearly a month away. Why would you ask a thing like that?”
“I saw a couple of boys setting of firecrackers this morning.”
The sheriff chuckled. “Oh, that would be Bryan James and Wes Pollard. I’ve already talked to them about disturbing the citizens with their shenanigans. It turns out that they have the same birthday, so they decided to make a little noise so that everyone would know it.”
“Harmless enough, I guess.”
“By the way, before you leave town, you might want to go down and take a look at the display that is in front of the hardware store,” the sheriff said.
“What display? What are you talking about?”
“You’ll see it as soon as you get there,” the sheriff promised as he left Matt’s table.
Finishing his biscuit, Matt left the hotel dining room and walked down toward the hardware store. There were several people there, men, women, and children, standing around the front porch looking at whatever it was the sheriff had said was on display.
When Matt got closer, he saw what it was. It was a dead man in a coffin, the coffin standing up in front of a hardware store. His arm was crossed in front of him, and a pistol was clutched in his hand. There was a sign posted above the coffin.
NORMAN FOX
shot dead while attempting to murder
Matt Jensen
Matt had not gotten that close of a look at him last night, so he studied him more closely this morning, just to make certain that he hadn’t ever run across him under some other name.
Matt was pretty good at remembering faces, even a face that was now drawn of features and drained of blood by death.
“Hey!” someone said. “You’re Matt Jensen, aren’t you?”
Matt didn’t answer.
“You are, I seen you when you was in the saloon last night. Clyde said that’s who you was.”
“Yes, I’m Jensen.”
“Hey, Arnie!” the man shouted to someone was setting up a camera on a tripod, preparing to taking a photograph of the body of Norman Fox. “This here is Matt Jensen! He’s the one that kilt Fox last night. Why don’t you get his picture?”
“Mr. Jensen, would you consent to having your picture taken?” Arnie asked.
“I’d rather not,” Matt replied.
“Come on, Jensen,” the man who had spotted him first said. “Get up here and stand alongside ol’ Norm’s body, and have your picture took with him.” The man chuckled. “I knew Norm. I think he’d actually get a kick out of that.”
Matt had turned to walk away, but when he heard the man say that he knew Fox, he stopped.
“You knew Fox?”
“Yeah, I knew ’im.”
“How well did you know him?”
“Well, we wasn’t what you would actual call friends,” the man said, growing a little unsure now, under Matt’s more intense questioning. “I mean I just know’d ’im is all.”
“Do you also know a man by the name of Rufus Draco?”
“I’ve heard of him, but I ain’t never met him. What about havin’ your picture took? If you won’t have it took with Norm, maybe you’d have it took with me.”
“Hell, Lenny, if Matt Jensen does get his picture took, I might want to buy a copy of it from Arnie. But I sure as hell don’t want your ugly mug standin’ alongside him,” someone from the crowd said, and the others laughed.
Matt had no desire to have his picture taken, certainly not standing beside the corpse of the man he had killed last night. On the other hand, he did want to spend a little more time in town, asking a few questions and he was afraid that if he came across as too aloof even to have his picture taken, he would get very little cooperation from anyone.
Then he saw Bryan James and Wes Pollard, the two boys who were celebrating their birthday, standing out toward the edge of the gathering. Matt smiled.
“I’ll have my picture taken if those two young men will have theirs taken wi
th me.”
“What? You mean you want our picture took with you?” one of the boys asked. Although Matt knew their names, he didn’t know which was which.
“Why not?” Matt said. “I understand today is Bryan James’s and Wes Pollard’s birthday. I’m not wrong, am I?”
“Whoa, Bryan! He knows who we are!” Wes said.
“Come on,” Bryan said. “Let’s get our picture took with him!”
The two boys hurried to stand beside Matt, one on either side of him, and Arnie, who had been setting his camera up to photograph the corpse of Norman Fox, now repositioned it so he could get a picture of Matt, posing with the two boys.
Matt stood until the photograph was taken.
“Now, Mr. Jensen, if you don’t mind, could I have a photograph of you, alone?”
“I want one, Arnie!” someone shouted.
“You’re going to sell them, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir, but I would be glad to share any money I might make with you,” Arnie said.
“That’s not necessary. But what I do want you to do is to make certain that each of the two boys get a copy of the photograph you just took.”
“Yes, sir,” Arnie said with a broad smile. “I’ll be glad to do that.”
Chapter Nine
Springfield, Illinois
On what had been the last day of school two weeks earlier, Sylvia Poindexter’s students all came up to her desk to tell her good-bye. Some brought her an apple; others brought her letters they had written to her. One such letter read:
Dear Miss Poindexter,
You are my favorite teacher. I’m sorry you won’t be here next year.
Your friend,
Tony
All the other letters were similar, all of them in response to her earlier announcement that this would be her last year. The reason this would be her last year was because a few weeks ago she had received a letter from her father.
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