“That’s a fact.” Emmett said.
VanDorn shook his head. “We’ll have plenty enough to be concerned about without havin’ to worry about somebody slingin’ lead at a woman. I suppose the next thing you’re gonna tell me is that Sikes is bringin’ along the saloon girl this whole matter started over.”
“Nope,” Emmett said. “Sikes’s leg is still paining him a lot. He won’t be returning to El Paso with us this time. And none of us wants Geneve anywhere near Franklin Taft. The two of them’ll stay here and keep working on turning that drugstore into a proper watering hole.”
“Good to know somebody’s got goose sense.” Hands on his hips, VanDorn stared out the window a long moment before turning back to Li. “Mrs. Strong, you know I don’t mean to offend you. I just don’t wanna see any harm come to you.”
Li, still wearing her shooting clothes, said, “I appreciate your concern, Mr. VanDorn. But danger seems to be part and parcel of the life Emmett and I have chosen, no matter where we go.”
VanDorn’s gaze returned to Emmett. “I may have to accept your decision, but that don’t mean I have to like it.”
Like it or not, Emmett knew Jack would back his play and help him look out for Li.
“So what do you figure?” VanDorn asked. “Leave tomorrow?”
“Yep,” Emmett said. “Travel by rail as far as San Elizario, then slip into El Paso on horseback during the night.”
“I guess this’ll be a first, then. Just hope it doesn’t take an ugly twist.” VanDorn crossed to the door, his boots clomping on the plank flooring. He paused, hand on the knob.
Emmett rested his hand on Li’s shoulder. “It’s not a first for us, Jack. Li’s already seen the elephant.”
Door open, VanDorn stared. “Well, no steamer trunks, Mrs. Strong. We’ll be travelin’ light and fast.”
A smile played at the corner of her mouth. “I’ll leave the steamer trunk here, Mr. VanDorn. Good day.”
The ranger touched the brim of his hat. “S’pose I’ll see the three of you down at the station, then—just a bit before the westbound’s due to pull out.”
Emmett, Juanito, and Sikes wedged their way through a crowd of customers at the Javelina Saloon over on Crockett Street. The only vacant table was mere feet from the bar, where patrons in clusters of two, three, and four milled and jawed and jostled one another for service.
Sikes’s gaze swept the room. “Do you want to go somewhere else? Someplace quieter?”
Emmett shook his head. “I don’t plan on staying long.”
“Still enjoying the honeymoon, hmm?” Sikes’s eyes twinkled with his grin.
Emmett smiled. “Yes, I am.”
Juanito chuckled.
“And what about you, Sikes?” Emmett asked. “Any signs Miss Geneve might be warming up to the notion of marriage?”
“Perhaps.” The Englishman rubbed a circular stain on the wooden tabletop. “I don’t want to rush her, though.”
“Mighty gentlemanly of you.”
“She deserves gentlemanly treatment. She hasn’t had it easy over the past couple of years.”
“I’d imagine she hasn’t.”
“So I wanted to tell you thanks—for understanding why we’d rather not go back to El Paso with you.”
Emmett gave a short nod.
“VanDorn is worked up enough over Li coming with us,” Juanito said. “I think he’d have dug in his heels and refused to let either woman come along if you and Geneve had decided to join us.”
“So you’ve decided to take Li with you, after all,” Sikes said.
Scanning the room for a waiter, Emmett said, “I have.”
“Spirited girl. Nonetheless…”
Emmett cocked his head. “Nonetheless what?”
“If you’ll pardon me saying so, I believe Li would be better off remaining back here in San Antonio with Geneve and me.”
Before Emmett could respond, a portly waiter with eyes too small for his plump face stopped at the table. “Name your poison, boys.”
“Beer all around,” Sikes said.
“Beer it is.” The waiter spun and worked his way into a gap between customers.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Sikes said. “Li will do far better than most women on a trip like this. But you and Juanito could both end up in jail. What would Li do then?”
Emmett drummed his fingers on the tabletop in time with the banjo and fiddle playing in the back of the room. “Help get us out.”
“That easy?”
“Nothing’s easy, Sikes. Nothing worthwhile, anyway.”
“So there’s no talking you out of this.”
“Nope.”
After a pause, the Englishman said, “When do you leave, then?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Well…if you two do end up in trouble, have Li send me a telegram. I’ll leave Geneve with Mama Galvez and head out right away.”
Emmett nodded again. “We’ll do all we can to keep you right here in San Antone.”
“What’s your plan? Or do you have one?”
According to Emmett’s experience, this was not the kind of thing you could map out like a classic battle—not at first, anyway. “We don’t know how much pressure Taft and his man Mackey are putting on the local law. Ideally, I’d like to take a couple days just to watch those two snakes. Find out what really happened the morning they claim we robbed ’em.”
The waiter came back with the beers. “Hate to trouble y’all for payment with each round,” he said. “But with so many customers tonight, some folks are likely to try to skedaddle without settlin’ up. Not sayin’ you gents would.”
“Fair enough.” Sikes slid two bits across the table.
“Much obliged.”
As the waiter disappeared again, Juanito said, “VanDorn seems satisfied that we didn’t rob anyone. At least we have that going for us.”
“He knows somebody over there is lying,” Emmett said. “Just a matter of finding out who and why.”
Sikes harrumphed. “It’s Taft. No two ways about it.”
Emmett shrugged. “That’s what it seems like on the surface, but you never know.”
Sikes took a hefty swallow of his beer. “One thing’s plain—if we hadn’t have had that run-in with Taft the previous afternoon, it’s unlikely anyone would’ve ever thought to try to pin that robbery on us.”
Juanito didn’t let that thought simmer for long. “So what were we supposed to do? Let Taft tell us Geneve wasn’t going anywhere, and just leave it at that? Walk away?”
“Of course not. I’m just saying—”
Emmett held up a hand. “Walk away, do what we did, it doesn’t matter. As soon as it became obvious that we had a difference with Taft, that was enough. Somebody’s wheels began to turn, and they decided it’d be easy enough to saddle us with the blame for the robbery. Just a matter of finding out who came up with the idea.”
“And who actually stole the two thousand dollars,” Juanito said.
“Probably one and the same,” Sikes said.
After a few moments of silent pondering over his beer, Emmett said, “So tell me, Sikes—even with all this robbery business, what do you think? Do you like what you’ve found out here in the American West so far?”
“Even with all this.” Sikes nodded.
“Well, we’ll resolve this mess, old pard. Then you and Geneve and Li and I can all settle down to the kind of new life you came here looking for.”
Juanito stared at his beer glass, apparently still lost in thought.
“By the way”—Emmett motioned to Sikes—“I know it’s none of my business, but I’ve been thinking about this. However you came about the money you’re using to open up the Bowlegged Buffalo…Just make it the kind of place where your pa would’ve enjoyed passing an evening. He’d have e
nded up proud of you, my friend.”
Tight lipped, Sikes met Emmett’s gaze but gave no reply.
Touchy subject or not, Emmett had wanted to say what he did—just in case he never made it back from El Paso. A man could never know.
Once Emmett, Juanito, and Sikes finished their beer and ambled toward the door, Lope Mendez pried himself from his place at the bar directly behind where the three friends had been sitting. Owing to what he’d just heard, he could hardly contain himself. But contain himself he had to—he felt desperate to shadow Emmett Strong tonight to find out where the lawman was staying. He had to take the risk this time. The rangers were planning to leave for El Paso tomorrow.
It wouldn’t do to lurk in the darkness and dash from building to building behind them. Sudden movement would more than likely draw attention. Instead, he’d have to give them plenty of rope and follow casually at a distance. Dropping his cigarillo in the dust as he stepped down from the boardwalk, he strolled calmly along the edge of the street a good block behind Strong and his amigos.
All the while, he ran ideas through his mind. He and Victorio Sanchez might actually be able to kill Strong somewhere along the way to El Paso. If not, they could follow him all the way there, find out about this Taft hombre who was accusing him of robbery, and somehow help make sure the charges stuck.
He snorted. Now that would be gratifying—watching the marshal haul Strong away in handcuffs and leg irons. Maybe watching them stretch his neck.
At Avenue E, Sikes peeled away from the other two. Mendez already knew where the Englishman lived—upstairs from the old drugstore. Strong and Galvez, meanwhile, continued heading west.
The number of people out on the street diminished, and Mendez altered his path, hanging closer to the building fronts, lingering here and there, but still keeping his prey in sight.
After making a few more turns, Strong and Galvez entered a walled garden gateway. Mendez made mental notes—which street, how far from the corner. He scanned the avenue. A house diagonally across the street from the one Strong and Galvez had entered had stairs leading up to a second-floor main entrance. After another quick glance both ways, Mendez hurried to the other side and ducked into the shadows alongside the front steps.
He let a good thirty minutes pass before concluding that this must be where Strong was staying. Only then did he feel free to rush across town and let Victorio Sanchez know everything he’d learned tonight.
“This is too rich.” Victorio Sanchez laughed. “Emmett Strong, an outlaw. And we can help put him behind bars.” He was still grinning as he took a draw on his cigarillo.
Lope Mendez sprawled in one of the crude chairs at Sanchez’s table. “Sí, rich, eh?” He too chuckled.
“I like it.”
“So what do you think—kill him on the way to El Paso, or bring some kind of evidence to help prove his guilt in the robbery—let him go to prison?”
“Opportunity, amigo. Either one. We take whatever time and chance offer us, just like what you found out tonight. But we must move, get ready to travel right away. We need to be waiting for them when they come out of that house in the morning.”
“It’s late,” Mendez said. “You have food, bullets, everything you need on such short notice?”
“I tell you again: opportunity—when she comes knocking at the door, we don’t keep her waiting. I’ll gather what I have. It will be enough.”
Mendez rose. “All right, then. I’ll be back in an hour. We can leave whenever you’re ready.”
Sanchez’s pleasantly plump lady friend, wearing a dark-green skirt and an off-white blouse, came out from the bedroom. “You are going somewhere?” she asked.
“Sí, angelita.” Sanchez waddled over to her and wrapped his thick arm around her waist. “Lope and I will be gone a few days. I need you to help me get ready.”
She lowered her head. “But you will come back, right?”
“Of course, of course. How can I stay away from you, my angel?” He glanced at Lope. “I see you in an hour, amigo.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
VanDorn had pulled off his pinch-crowned hat and was mopping sweat from his brow with a handkerchief when Emmett, Li, and Juanito rode up to the train station at ten fifteen the next morning.
“Morning, Jack,” Emmett said.
VanDorn shook his head. “You may have her dressed in men’s clothes, Emmett, but that pretty girl will never pass for an hombre.” He gave a slight grin. “You real sure you wanna drag her into what could be a whole passel of trouble?”
Emmett glanced at his wife. “Pretty as she is, I can’t bring myself to leave her behind.”
With an impish grin, Li said, “Once I put on my duster and pull my hat down low over my eyes, you’ll be surprised by the transformation, Mr. VanDorn.”
“Pardon my skepticism, ma’am,” VanDorn said. “And please, you might as well start callin’ me Jack.”
“Then you need to call me Li—like Robert E. Lee. Or short for Levi.”
“Reckon I can do that.”
Emmett grinned. “Well, now that all the formalities are out of the way, we’d better get on with it.”
Juanito swung down from his saddle. “I’ll go buy our tickets.”
“Gracias, hermano,” Emmett said.
It took a good twenty minutes to get the horses situated in the livestock car and then to negotiate for four seats together in the second of the two passenger cars. A mule-stubborn old miner wouldn’t budge until Emmett finally persuaded him with a pair of choice cigars. With the parley done, Emmett and Li settled in on the bench seat facing Juanito and VanDorn. The whole time, the sun had been beating down mercilessly on the stuffy railcar, so it was a relief in more ways than one when the locomotive whistle wailed and the train at last heaved out of the station.
Emmett leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees as he spoke to VanDorn. “What’ll you tell the marshal in El Paso? That you couldn’t find us? That we escaped?”
VanDorn fingered one end of his long, salt-and-pepper mustache. “I could tell him the truth—that you and Juanito are there in El Paso with me, just layin’ low while we look into what Taft and Mackey are up to.”
Brows knit, Juanito caught Emmett’s attention and gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head.
“Jack, I thought we’d already come to an agreement on this,” Emmett said. “Juanito and I can’t openly help you investigate a crime if we’re among the accused. You’re not trying to change the terms of our understanding on the fly, are you, amigo?” He cocked his head.
“Alonzo Perry is a true professional,” VanDorn said. “I trust him.”
“OK, you trust him. I’m sure he’s a good man. But maybe he’s the kind of ‘true professional’ who prefers to do everything according to Hoyle. Our methods are gonna have to be a mite unorthodox in this case, don’t you agree?”
VanDorn pursed his lips. “I s’pose you’re right.”
“And you’re gonna have to give some answers to Franklin Taft, too,” Emmett said. “Alonzo Perry is not the only one who’s gonna want to know why you didn’t arrest us, bring us in for a trial.”
“Taft? I’m in no big hurry to give any answers to that capper. Unless he and his boys sat down and concocted the whole robbery story out of thin air, then somebody else waylaid ’em. Question is, if somebody else jumped and robbed ’em, why’re they ignorin’ the real road agents and tryin’ to pin it on you two and your friend Sikes? Somethin’s not right.”
“You bet something’s not right.” Emmett’s tone was firm. “What Juanito, Sikes, and I did the day before—waltzing in and liberating one of Taft’s doves—that might’ve humiliated those boys, might’ve set Taft back a little. But whoever robbed ’em left ’em bruised and bleeding and stripped Taft of everything he’d made off the Wild Hog, startin’ from the day he took over the place. So
why’re Taft and Mackey more interested in seeing us punished than in recovering all that money from the real vermin that jumped ’em?”
Li frowned. “Like Jack said, maybe they made up the story. Maybe they’ve only hid the money, and they plan to go get it once again after they’ve seen you convicted.”
Emmett met Li’s gaze. “I find it hard to believe a man like Taft would let himself get beat about the head and bloodied—like the marshal said he was—just so he could see me and Juanito hauled off to prison.”
“But it is possible, right?”
“I suppose so.” Emmett nodded, accepting the notion in theory. But at gut level, it didn’t ring true.
“But if Taft didn’t make up the story,” Juanito said, leaning forward. “If some real band of desperados actually did jump them—”
VanDorn spread his hands. “Why ignore the real desperados? Unless by some strange twist of fate they happened to look a whole helluva lot like you three.”
Pursing his lips, Emmett shook his head. “Masked or not, what three banditos would look enough like me, Juanito, and Sikes to warrant Franklin Taft jumping to that conclusion?”
“Sometimes people see what they want to see,” Juanito said.
“That’s true enough.” VanDorn nodded.
“Couldn’t have been the former owner of the saloon,” Juanito said. “Or Gus, the old bartender. Taft would have recognized them.”
Emmett stared out the passenger car window into the far distance. The railcar’s wheels pounded out a steady, repetitious ka-chunk, ka-chunk. “Taft says they robbed him of every last dime the Wild Hog has earned him.”
“That’s what he told the marshal,” VanDorn said.
“Ever since he took over the place.”
“Yep.”
“If that’s true”—Emmett peered from face to face—“then that had to have been the first trip he ever made to deposit the house take. It wasn’t as if Taft and Mackey went down to the bank every so many days at precisely the same time of day to deposit the earnings, right?”
“What’re you getting’ at?” VanDorn shifted to let the conductor pass down the aisle without bumping his arm.
Strong Suspicions (Emmett Strong Westerns Book 2) Page 10