Of the time before Jewel.
Olivia Rosen was first to roll up in her blankets. Sartain finished his coffee and bourbon, stoked the fire against the chill night, and rolled up in his soogan.
He was almost asleep when she came to him.
Chapter 8
When Carl Warner woke slowly from a deep, luxurious sleep and opened his eyes, he saw a firm round, pink female rump staring at him like a miniature smiling moon.
Grinning, he slapped it. The girl woke with a squeal, trying to pull away from him. But the Pinkerton pinned Miss Abigail Noble belly-down on the bed in her upstairs room in her and her father’s humble little adobe house at the far eastern edge of Santa Rosa.
“Oh—owww!” she cried. “You’re huurrting meee!”
“I’m sorry, darling,” Warner said into her ear. “I just thought we’d have us a little more fun, that’s all.”
She said something that came out muffled, because Warner’s free hand was clamped down hard against the back of her neck, holding her face down against the pillow. She writhed beneath him, trying to fight him, but her strength was no match for his.
Later, he shoved her over onto her back. Her hair, which she’d taken down last night when he’d gotten her a little tipsy on expensive brandy and seduced her, was like a tumbleweed haloing her head. Her blue eyes gazed up at him through the mussed strands, as opaque as isinglass.
Warner pinched her nose. At first, she’d enjoyed the rough stuff, the naughty little thing...
“Good night, my darling,” Warner said, caressing her cheek, touching his lips lightly to hers. “Sleep well.”
He rose, gave himself a sponge bath with cold water, because he didn’t want to take the time to stoke the downstairs stove, and then shaved in her father’s room. Warner lingered in the quiet house in the predawn darkness, enjoying himself, singing as he scraped his cheeks with the bone-handled razor of the father of the girl he’d just murdered.
He wiped his cheeks with a ratty towel, buckled his gun belt around his waist, shrugged into his buckskin coat with its fur collar and fur-trimmed sleeves, donned his hat, and headed out. He whistled softly to himself as he walked along a dry wash at the edge of town, heading back toward the hotel.
He took the back stairs to his second-floor room. No one would know that he hadn’t spent the night in the hotel. No one would know that he’d spent the night with Miss Abigail Noble, not that it would matter now if anyone did, as, if the story the boy had told him was true, there would be no local lawmen left in town to do anything about it.
Warner didn’t even bother to muss his bedcovers.
He merely gathered his gear and headed for the livery barn, where he smoked a cigar, sitting outside on a log stool, boot hiked on a knee, watching the sunrise over the eastern mountains. Inside the barn, the sleepy morning hostler saddled his mount, yawning frequently and loudly.
When the man led the coyote dun out of the barn, Warner rose from his perch and slid his Winchester carbine into his saddle scabbard. He flipped the hostler a quarter tip. The man—middle-aged, gray-mustached, and looking badly hungover—caught the coin against his chest.
“Much obliged,” he said in a sleep-husky voice.
“Tell me, my good man,” Warner said, swinging up into the leather. “Do you know a Miss Rosen here in Santa Rosa?”
Pocketing the quarter, the hostler frowned up at him. “Rosen?”
“I overheard the name mentioned last night in the hotel dining room. She might have lost a child recently...”
“Oh, Olivia Rosen. Dirty shame what happened...”
“Pray, tell me.”
“Tragedy. She and her boy had taken the train north...headin’ to Cheyenne, I think. Not sure why, but...the train was hit by the Lute Lawton Bunch. The boy took a bullet. The lady...Miss Rosen...well, Lawton rode out with her. Held her for three days, headin’ toward Durango. Damn savage, that Lawton, I tell you. Put her through seven kinds of hell, I’m sure. A posse caught up with the bunch, but they never shoulda tangled with ‘em. Four ended up dead. They found Miss Rosen, though. Brought her home.”
The hostler spat to one side, shook his head. “Poor woman. Ain’t looked right since. Hardly ever leaves her house. When she did leave to buy groceries an’ such, she looked pale and thin. Poor woman. She was right purty once. Attracted the eye of every man in the county. Now that Lawton’s put his mark on her, no man’ll likely ever look at her again.”
“The boy’s father?”
“Didn’t have one. At least, none that owned up to it.” The hostler smirked. “I heard tell he’s some local mucky-muck. Married. With a family. Everyone’s got their theory just who exactly he is, but...”
The hostler let his voice trail off.
“Say, why you so interested in Miss Rosen?” he asked Warner.
Warner shrugged. “I’m just a libidinous bastard, I reckon.” He grinned.
The hostler frowned. “Lib...say what?”
“Never mind, sir.” Warner lifted his hat. “Have a good day!”
* * *
Warner had a good memory. He had no trouble recalling the boy’s directions out to the ghost town called Scully’s Wash. He simply followed the main road south out of Santa Rosa, turned west onto the road to Porfirio and then took the right tine in the first fork he came to.
The tine was no longer much of a trail since it hadn’t been used for the past eight or nine years, when Scully’s Wash’s boom had gone bust, but Warner’s livery mount handled it just fine.
The trail cleaved a narrow valley between tall, pine-covered mountains for eight miles. Then, at a moldering prospector’s cabin flanked by a privy and a trash pile strewn with rusty airtight tins and where Warner spooked two coyote pups playing like kittens, the trace swung north and jogged along a broad dry wash for another three miles.
As Warner trotted north, the ghost town slowly rose out of the stark mountain valley ahead of him, the mountain sage and dun-colored bromegrass still striped with the remains of dirty, crusty snowdrifts.
Even if he hadn’t remembered the boy’s directions, the Pinkerton would have been able to track the five lawmen, for their horse’s shod hoof prints were still clear in the spongy spring soil. The five sets of horse prints overlaid those of a horse pulling a single wagon. The horse and wagon tracks trailed off toward Scully’s Wash, and they returned from the same direction.
The five riders’ tracks did not.
It looked to Warner, who considered himself a pretty good tracker, that the five lawmen had followed the wagon out from town. Another rider had been riding toward the ghost town around the same time that the wagon and the lawmen had. That rider had for the most part steered clear of the trail, however, as though he—or possibly, she?—had been following someone and hadn’t wanted to be seen along that person’s back trail.
Maybe the woman, Olivia Rosen, had also followed the wagon out from town...
Warner, who had trained among Pinkerton’s best senior detectives, thought the scenario he formulated on his ride out from Santa Rosa, having seen the tracks and having paired those tracks with the boy’s story, was probably about as accurate as any detective’s could get without a crystal ball handy. When he sat his dun in the middle of Scully’s wash, staring down at the two men lying dead in the muddy street, that scenario became all the clearer.
One of the dead men staring up at him, mouth still agape, wore the badge of the Santa Rosa Town Marshal. The other dead man wore the badge of a deputy sheriff. He lay not far from a broken whiskey bottle and a badly charred rag.
Swinging down to investigate more closely, Warner saw that the deputy had been shot with either a forty-four or a forty-five-caliber rifle or revolver. The town marshal’s wounds were smaller. The spent shell casings near the marshal’s body, cast down near the base of the steps leading up to a saloon, were of the .41-caliber variety.
The woman’s gun, most likely. Since the boy had said she had shot the marshal, there was no doubt
in Warner’s mind that the pistol—probably of the pocket variety—was hers. The Pinkerton saw the crates that the boy must have knocked over in his haste to flee the scene of the crime.
Warner smiled, imagining what had happened. The shooting, killing, bleeding, and the men dying...
The boy had spied the woman, Olivia Rosen, popping lead into the marshal, and he’d been so shocked and horrified that he’d nearly jumped out of his boots!
Warner turned to the saloon. The humble, two-story mud-adobe building looked as though it had been the centerpiece of a small war. Bullets had blasted chunks out of the bricks and doggets of wood from the window casings and front door. Glass from what had remained of the windows littered the gray-worn front porch.
A thud sounded behind Warner.
The Pinkerton wheeled, reaching under the flap of his fancily stitched buckskin coat to unsheathe his Bisley revolver. A door opened near where the crates were scattered on the boardwalk. There was a grunt. A man lurched forward through the doorway and then gave a shrill cry as he fell to the boardwalk, groaning.
Warner ran over and mounted the boardwalk, careful of the gaps left by missing boards. A man in a black leather coat and black whipcord trousers lay on his belly, half in and half out of the abandoned grocery store, writhing in pain. Blood shone on the rotten planks around him. Warner dropped to a knee and turned him over to find himself staring down at Detective Bradley Decker.
Decker gazed up at Warner though deep-set, pain-racked eyes. At least, Warner thought it was Decker, though the man was so pale he appeared a poor likeness of his former, more robust self.
“Decker!”
The wounded man placed his hand on Warner’s forearm. “W-water,” he hissed. “Please...water...”
“Hold on, Detective.”
Warner ran over to where he’d left his horse ground-reined in the street. He grabbed his canteen off his saddle and jogged back over to where Decker lay on the boardwalk. Warner set the canteen down and then helped the wounded Pinkerton sit against the front of the abandoned shop.
“Jesus, you look bad, Decker,” he said, twisting off the canteen’s cap and quickly surveying his fellow Pinkerton’s wounds. The man’s upper-left chest was bibbed with blood, some of it frothy. The bullet had probably nicked a lung. Blood also oozed from a deep gash along the side of his neck, and from a wound in his upper right thigh.
Warner raised the canteen and helped Decker drink. Decker got a couple of sips down, but then he choked. Warner pulled the canteen away as the wounded Pinkerton convulsed, almost strangling, until foamy pink blood frothed on his lips and dribbled down his chin.
When Decker had finished coughing, he looked up at Warner, his eyes rheumy. “Help...help me...to a...doctor...”
“Sure, sure, Brad—don’t worry about that. I’ll rig a travois.” Warner capped the canteen. “You think you’re well enough to travel?”
Decker nodded his head. Mostly it just bobbed like a near-dead weight on his shoulders. “I’ll make it.”
Warner glanced at the saloon behind him. “Sartain?”
“Yeah.” Decker looked up at Warner and gritted his teeth in anger. “He surprised us. Ambush. Before we could get in position.”
“I don’t doubt that a bit,” Warner said, glancing dubiously over his shoulder at the bullet-pocked saloon again. He turned to Decker. “Why didn’t you wait for me? You must have known I was called in.”
“Would have,” Decker said, running a sleeve of his leather coat across his bloody mouth, “but I was afraid he’d light a shuck.”
“What made you think he was going to run?”
Decker might have been in agony, but he still managed to curl one side of his upper lip in a wry grin. “I’ve been at this job long enough to know when a man’s about to get happy feet, Carl.”
“Oh, right,” Warner said. “Sure, sure. You’d know if anyone would...with all your experience.”
Warner had worked with Decker only a couple of times, but both times Decker had been quick to remind him of his seniority, having been with the Pinkerton Agency a year and a half longer than Warner had.
Decker looked skeptically at Warner, as though trying to read him.
Warner manufactured a sincere expression. “Like I said, I’ll rig a travois. I’ll get you back to Santa Rosa, get you to a sawbones. He’ll sew you up good as new.”
Decker nodded and sagged back against the grocery store’s front wall.
Warner rose and turned away as though to begin gathering the material for a travois but then squatted down before Decker again. “Say, Brad—Sartain didn’t have a woman with him, did he?”
A strange, sheepish light entered Warner’s gaze. Then he frowned, shook his head. “I...I don’t think so. We never would have moved on him if we’d known a woman was with him.”
“Right.”
Warner started to turn away again but stopped when Decker said, “Why do you ask?”
“Someone in town said they saw a woman heading this way yesterday ahead of you and the lawmen.”
“Oh,” Decker said, shaking his head once more. “I...I never seen one. Might have been one, though. I don’t know. He cut down on us so fast.”
“Right, right. I bet he did,” Warner said. “Did you see which way he rode out of here?”
Decker jerked his chin up slightly. “North. Toward the mount...” He let his voice trail off, looked at Warner with a suspicious cast to his gaze. “No point in goin’ after him. He’s long gone by now. Once I’m healed up, we’ll trail him, you and me.”
Warner drew a deep breath, brushed his gloved hand across his nose. “I don’t know, Brad. I think I’m gonna go after him. You know, while his trail’s warm.”
“That bastard don’t leave a warm trail,” Decker said, his eyes brightening in anger. “You know that. You read the same reports I did.”
“That’s what they say,” Warner said. “To that I say hogwash.” He slid his Bisely slowly from its holster.
Decker watched him, frowning. “What’re you...”
“You didn’t wait for me,” Warner said mildly, “because you wanted to be the only Pinkerton to run him to ground. You hailed assistance only because you wanted it to appear you were following protocol.”
He clicked the Bisley’s hammer back and continued with, “You knew a woman was with him, I’ll suspect. You learned it from the wagon driver. He’d been here, and he’d turned around, and your bunch talked to him. I saw the tracks. But you didn’t care about the woman. You just wanted to take Sartain down as fast as you could. That’s why that saloon is all shot up so that the next breeze’ll likely knock it asunder.”
Decker stared at the pistol that Warner was raising, sliding the barrel to line up the sights on Decker’s face. “Hold on, now. That is not how it was, Carl!”
“Sure was.” Warner grinned. “Even if it wasn’t, there’s no point in hauling you back to Santa Rosa. Why, that’d be a complete waste of time, shot up as bad as you are. You’ll die on the way.”
“I’m not that bad. I’ll make it. You get me to a sawbones, goddamnit, Carl!”
“Just so we’re clear,” Warner said. “I don’t hold it against you, wantin’ The Revenger all for yourself. I understand. I would have done the same thing. The problem for you is, you failed. Now, it’s my turn to take the bastard down. All by my lonesome. The credit will all be mine, and mine alone.”
Decker was staring at the Bisley’s barrel, breathing hard. “Easy, now, Carl. You don’t want to do this. Why not just ride away? Leave me. I’ll get help. Someone’ll come...sooner or later.”
“That’s what worries me,” Warner said.
He smiled into Decker’s eyes. Decker stared back at him. Fear grew in the wounded man’s gaze. It grew quickly to stark, knowing horror.
Warner’s smile grew broader. As he began to take up the slack in his trigger finger, Decker screamed, “Nooo!”
The Bisley roared.
The bullet punched into
Decker’s open mouth to blow his brains out the back of his head. The man’s head bounced off the front of the grocery shop and dropped toward Decker’s lap. The man’s entire body shuddered. Then, still shuddering, it slumped sideways to the boardwalk.
Warner looked at the smoking Bisley in his fist. Decker’s blood had painted the barrel red. Warner cursed and wiped the gun on the dead man’s pants.
He holstered the weapon, walked out into the street, mounted his horse, and rode north toward the mountains.
Chapter 9
“What are you doing?” Sartain asked, peering up at the woman from his bedroll.
She knelt beside him, holding a blanket around her shoulders. “A deal’s a deal.”
She lifted his blanket away from his chest and lay down beside him, squirming a little, working her way into his bedroll, lowering her face to his.
“Hold on,” Sartain said, splaying his hand across her chest, holding her back. “I told you I don’t require payment.”
“You told me you don’t require payment for exacting revenge,” Miss Rosen said, her face only inches from his. She’d unpinned her hair. It hung toward the ground, slanting down behind her left shoulder. “The deal was that I would give you my body in payment for taking me along while you exacted revenge on Lawton’s bunch. That’s what I promised, and I always...”
Sartain held two fingers up across her lips. “I didn’t make any such deal. I’m not that kind of—”
She placed two fingers across his lips. “Every man is that kind of man.”
“I had no choice but to take you. The boy saw you kill Tatum. I couldn’t very well send you back to Santa Rosa, now, could I?”
“Many men would have.” Miss Rosen frowned down at him, vaguely puzzled. The fire’s dull umber glow was reflected in her eyes. “I don’t understand you. I realize I’m not as pretty as I used to be...before Lawton. But I can still turn a man’s head. Is it because of Lawton? What he did...”
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