“I think he ran down the alley there,” Raven said, gesturing toward the gap between the saloon and the adobe brick barbershop beside it, just wanting to be alone.
“Don’t you worry, miss,” said the first cowboy, unsheathing a Schofield .44 and clicking the hammer back. “That rat’ll never frighten you agin!”
Both men ran down the gap. Raven was glad they’d left, so she had some time to compose herself. When she’d drawn a couple of deep breaths, she jerked with a start as a pistol cracked down the dark alley beside the saloon.
“I think I seen him, Luke!” one of the cowboys shouted.
A gun cracked again.
“Yeah, there he is!”
Crack! Crack-crack!
Raven rolled her eyes as she got her bearings and headed east along the boardwalk. She took several more deep breaths and had managed to nearly completely scour Haskell from her mind as she followed a brick path around Duke Shirley’s sprawling mercantile building, the first-story windows of which were dark.
Shirley had closed for the day.
At the rear of the place, an outside stairway rose to the second story. An old bull’s-eye lantern hung from a nail in the railing at the bottom of the stairs, though it was not yet dark enough for the lantern to require lighting.
Raven manufactured a cool, professional expression. Loretta’s remembered warning braced her.
Sinister forces at work here in Spotted Horse.
Raven climbed the stairs to Duke Shirley’s private quarters and knocked on the door.
19
From behind the door, Raven heard the chatter of what sounded like a small child.
Footsteps accompanied the chatter, which was growing louder, and then the door opened, and a slight, young blond woman of maybe Raven’s age, maybe a little older, stood before her clad in a plain white muslin blouse and a gingham apron, holding a small towheaded boy on her right hip.
The woman’s face was open and even-featured, with widely spaced eyes and a fine, small nose. She was, in fact, subtly beautiful.
Very light speckles were sprayed across her cheeks and her nose. What prevented her from appearing radiant was her harried maternal flush, the sadness of her large, round hazel eyes, and the severe way in which she’d pulled her thick blond hair back behind her head and pinned it into a tight schoolmarm’s bun. A few wisps had pulled loose and dangled along her right cheek.
The woman said nothing but merely stared blankly at her guest.
Raven doffed her hat and said, “You must be Mrs. Shirley.”
The woman wrinkled the skin above the bridge of her nose. “Who’re you?”
Just then, a door opened at the far end of what appeared to be the parlor, and Duke Shirley stood in that half-open doorway, scowling and saying, “Who is it, Penny?” And then he must have recognized Raven, because he slapped his right hand to his forehead, making a face and shaking his head and saying, “Oh, God! I forgot!”
The woman turned with the gooing and gawing child toward Shirley and said skeptically, canting her head at Raven, “You forgot this one, Duke? Surely you don’t expect me to believe that.”
“She’s a Pinkerton detective, Penny.”
Penny glanced once more at Raven, looked her up and down, and said, “Right.” Then she walked through a curtained doorway in the parlor’s left wall and climbed a set of stairs, the child still gurgling in her arms.
Raven stood in the doorway, tired of feeling awkward and humiliated to the point where she was getting angry.
“Mr. Shirley, I see that this is a bad time. Perhaps we could get together sometime in the morning, and you could fill me in on—”
Walking toward her, he cut her off with, “I’m very sorry, Miss York.”
“It’s Agent York.”
“I’m very sorry, Agent York.” Shirley had a brandy snifter in one hand. With his other hand, he drew the door open wider and beseeched her with his eyes. “I became distracted after I returned to the store, and I simply forgot to tell my wife about our meeting.” He glanced around behind Raven. “Where’s Agent, uh, I forgot his name . . .”
“Agent Haskell is otherwise disposed. He sends his apologies.”
“Well, it’s me who must apologize. Please, come in. We can chat in my office.”
Raven blew a breath and stepped onto the braided rug in front of the door, holding her hat down in front of her belt buckle. She wanted to call it a night, but she also wanted to get a clearer picture of what was happening with the stage holdups, so that she could forget about all the peripheral annoyances and get to work on what had brought her here.
Shirley closed the door, glanced at the curtained doorway, and said, “I apologize for that. Penny’s been under a lot of stress with one of our boys fighting a slight fever.”
He looked harried, his handsome, bespectacled face flushed as he glanced around the parlor, which was simply, humbly furnished but a mess of wooden toys and children’s strewn clothes. “I also apologize for the mess.”
He sighed, sipped his brandy, and looked at Raven over the rim of the snifter. Behind his round-rimmed glasses, his eyes were bright, as though maybe his current drink wasn’t his first of the evening.
Lowering the glass, he thrust it toward the door at the far end of the parlor and said, “Right this way,” and tramped off across the large patterned throw rug that covered most of the floor.
Raven followed him. He held the door open for her. When she’d entered the office—which was nearly as large as the parlor and furnished much like an attorney’s office, dominated by a large desk with hand-carved legs, and with several game trophies staring down from the walls—he closed the door and moved to the desk.
“Would you like a brandy, Miss . . . I mean, Agent York?”
“No, thank you, Mr. Shirley.” The way he’d looked at her a moment ago was not unlike the way other men looked at her, and for that reason, she didn’t want to suggest that this was anything but a business meeting.
“Well, I hope you don’t mind if I have another,” he said, splashing what Raven assumed was brandy from a cut-glass decanter into the snifter, nearly filling the glass to the brim.
Capping the decanter, he glanced at the leather sofa to Raven’s right, straight across from his desk, and said, “Please, have a seat. I do apologize if I seem a little, uh, under the weather. I drink when my nerves are shot, and they got more than a little beat up when I returned to the store after meeting you and Agent Haskell and found this waiting for me. My wife had picked it up at the telegraph office earlier, but, distracted by the young ones and the inventory we’re in the midst of, she forgot to mention it.”
He sagged into his high-backed leather chair behind the desk, which was a mess of ledger books and sundry papers of all shapes and sizes. Papers were even spilling from the drawers of the three tall filing cabinets flanking him, and more were strewn across the rug, much like the children’s toys in the other room. The Shirleys’ apartment had an air of desperation about it.
Shirley gave Raven an incredulous look across his desk. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink?”
“I’m sure, thank you.” Raven crossed her legs and hung her hat on her knee. “Can I ask what has you so upset, Mr. Shirley? Does it concern your stage line?”
“Sure as hell does—uh, pardon my French.”
“Please don’t apologize for your French, Mr. Shirley,” Raven said, trying to keep her impatience out of her voice. “I might look like butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth, but I could teach you some French that might set your ears to burning. Now, then”—she uncrossed her legs, took her hat in her hands, and leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees—“what seems to be the trouble, beyond what I already know?”
Shirley studied her skeptically, then curled one side of his mouth in a smile. “Sorry,” he said. “I reckon I’m just not
used to women, especially such purty ones, bein’ so bold.”
He sipped his brandy. He took a deep pull, as though the liquor were beer, and then he smacked his lips and ran his fingers down his thick auburn mustaches and across his mouth.
He said, “The telegram was from the superintendent of the Blue Moon Mine up along Rainey Creek, sixty miles northwest of here in the foothills of the Big Horns. It’s a small Texas-owned outfit, not real profitable, but lately they’ve been chipping out some nice color. They smelt it themselves and send the bars via my stage down to Douglas and then by train to the U.S. Mint in Denver.
“So far, only one of my stages hauling their gold has been robbed. Fortunately, it was insured by Wells Fargo, as is my line overall, and that’s why you’re here. So far, I’ve mainly lost the money for replacing valuables stolen from my customers—only a couple of thousand dollars. Besides the customers themselves, of course, and there’s a good many people who use the line, it being the only one out here and no spur railroad lines so far.
“Losing customers is one thing, but losing contracts with the Blue Moon will ruin me. Wells Fargo won’t continue to insure them, or my line, if they lose any more shipments or if any more of my passengers are robbed. Business has been tough on me, Miss York. I’ve funneled a lot of money from my mercantile into the stage line, and so far, I haven’t made that money back. If the stage line goes under rather than earn the profit I’d forecast it to do—that I desperately need it to do—I’ll go broke.
“I started the mercantile before the drought hit, but with several large ranches going under, I can’t make it with the mercantile alone. The livery barn across the street was an idiot’s mistake. I never should have bought that two years ago. The price had seemed right at the time, but every day I keep it open—even with Sonny working only for fifty cents a day and a place to sleep—I figure I’m losing a good ten or fifteen dollars.”
“Why not close it?” Raven asked.
“Because people depend on the livery and feed service, especially stockmen and drummers drifting through, who also patronize the mercantile. They see the livery barn as a necessary service, and I’d like to keep it open, to keep folks happy, if for no other reason. A town needs a livery and feed service!” Shirley shook his head miserably. “But I won’t be able to keep it open much longer, I’m afraid. I have two kids and”—he stopped abruptly to stare down into his glass as though he’d spied a fly in it—“and another one on the way.”
It didn’t appear to be something he’d intended to share. Looking chagrined, he covered the look with a sigh, took another swallow of the brandy, ran a hand through his thick hair, and poked his glasses up his nose. “I’m afraid the death of my stage line will lead to the death of Spotted Horse itself.”
He was silent after that, sitting sideways to the desk and staring at the floor. Raven studied him. He was, indeed, a handsome man. No doubt a man for whom looks and charisma had gained him much favorable attention and business success.
And here he was at a place in his life where, almost inexplicably to him and unfairly, his looks and his charisma were unable to help him.
He turned to Raven, and his jaws were hard, his drink-bright eyes sharp with anger. “I need those . . . those bitches run to ground. I need that whole gang who’ve been making my life miserable strung up by their goddamn thumbs. Do you understand me, Agent York?”
“Completely.”
Raven stood and walked to the large map on the wall to the right of Shirley’s desk. It encompassed most of eastern Wyoming and western Dakota Territory north to the Montana border and south to Cheyenne.
“Show me where they’ve hit the stage so far and exactly when each strike happened. Perhaps there’s a pattern. At the very least, we’ll have an area to begin investigating.”
Shirley got up a little uncertainly and stumbled over to the map. He pointed out each place where the stage had been robbed. So far, it had been robbed eight times over the past two years. As drunk as he was, he could not remember the exact dates of each robbery, but from what he told Raven, she could make out no time pattern.
All she could see was what anyone could have seen. All of the robberies had occurred along a twelve-mile stretch of stage trail between the town of Recluse, seventy-five miles north of Spotted Horse, and Spotted Horse itself. All had occurred in rugged, desert-prairie country gouged, tucked, and folded into the stark, craggy limestone formations knows as the Pumpkin Buttes.
“Nothing much exists out there,” Shirley told Raven, “except a few dry watercourses, coyotes, and prickly pear. Once there were a few ranches”—he shook his head slowly, sadly—“but damn few these days. Even fewer that are solvent.”
Raven turned to an oil painting of a rugged-looking old cowboy with a silver soup-strainer mustache and wearing a high-crowned tan Stetson hanging to the right of the stage-line map.
“Who’s this?”
“The old man,” Shirley said, half-smiling admiringly at the painting. “My father—Henry Benford Shirley, his own mossy-horned old self. Poison-mean, school-stupid, and wily as a jackrabbit in a field of coyotes, the old boy carved a ranch out of that country, by God.”
“In the Pumpkin Buttes?”
Shirley nodded. “There was grass out there once. Enough to raise a few cows. Enough open space for an old Missouri outlaw like young Henry to hide from the law. He and Ma raised me and my brother and a sister out there. They’re all dead now—both my folks. My sister was struck by lightning when she was picking chokecherries in a ravine, only twelve years old, and my brother got shot by a deputy sheriff over in Dakota—for very good reason, I’m afraid.”
“But you did well for yourself,” Raven said, smiling at him with genuine admiration.
He smiled back at her, and there was that male look again. God help them, men just couldn’t help rewarding a compliment with a leer, believing deep down that the compliment meant that the woman wanted nothing more than to climb into bed with them.
“So far, I’ve done all right,” Shirley said. “So far.”
“You have any idea who might be hitting the line?”
“None at all. I thought all the outlaw gangs had pulled out of this region several years ago.”
Raven considered that, nodded. “We’ll figure it out, Mr. Shirley,” she said as she donned her hat and moved to the office door. “And we’ll get started first thing in the morning.”
At the door, she stopped and turned back to catch him staring at her rump. He flushed only a little.
Raven ignored the appraisal and asked, “When is your next stage due to pass through that country?”
“Tomorrow,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “The stage from Recluse is due in around nine in the morning.”
Raven nodded thoughtfully. “Will there be any gold on it?”
“No. The next gold shipment will come through in three days, due in Spotted Horse around noon.” He paused to add gravity. “It’s a large one. Double the regular ones. The mine superintendent won’t say exactly, but I’m guessing more than fifty thousand dollars in gold smelted into bars.”
“Three days.” Raven paused, pondering. “Who knows about the gold shipment, besides yourself and the superintendent of the Blue Moon?”
“No one. Tate Kimble, the superintendent, sent word to me personally two weeks ago about the exact date of the, as he put it, ‘sizable’ shipment.”
“So only you and Mr. Kimble know about the gold being shipped on Saturday.”
“Yes.”
“At least, as far as you know.”
Shirley scowled and nodded. “Yes. At least, as far as I know.”
Raven sighed and opened the door.
Shirley said, “I’ll see you out.” As they crossed the parlor, he said, “Again, I apologize for the foul-up concerning supper. I hope you can find something to eat.”
“D
on’t worry about that,” Raven said. “I’m sure Mrs. Waddell will rustle something up for me over at the hotel.”
“I’m sure she will.” Shirley chuckled. He closed his hand over the knob of the outside door and stopped, his face only a couple of feet from Raven’s. She could smell the brandy on his breath. He smiled leeringly and said, “How is it such a beautiful woman came to be a detective, Agent York?”
He’d kept his voice low so that his wife upstairs with their children wouldn’t hear.
Raven was saved from attempting to answer the question by a sudden knock on the door. It startled them both. They both gasped and jerked, and then Shirley said, “Oh, for chrissakes!” And he opened the door.
The simple-minded young man from the livery barn stood just outside the door, looking anxious. He stuttered, switching his gaze between Raven and Shirley before managing to spit out, “It’s Miss Ver-verlaine, Mr. Sh-shirley. She says she-she-she needs to see you right away!”
Shirley grimaced. He glanced at Raven. “Uh, Verlaine Couchigan runs the stage office yonder, oversees the books and hostlers an’ such.” He tipped his head forward. “I’d better see what’s troubling her. I hope it’s not another telegram from the Blue Moon!”
“I hope not, too,” Raven said, walking out onto the landing and around the stocky young liveryman.
She stepped aside as Shirley came out, donning his bowler hat, and then she followed Duke Shirley and Sonny to the bottom of the stairs. Shirley tipped his hat to Raven, and he and Sonny strolled off into the night, heading north of the mercantile.
Raven watched them recede into the balmy darkness, Loretta Waddell’s voice whispering again inside her head: sinister forces at work here in Spotted Horse.
20
Haskell awoke to the warm, wet sensation of a mouth sliding very slowly up and down on his cock.
It was a pleasant sensation. His cock was hard and tingling, and the tingling was steadily growing. But there was another sensation, too. A none-too-pleasant one.
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