Wolf Moon (7 page)

    I started in the bureau, working quickly. I found nothing special, the usual socks and underwear and shirts without their collars or buttons.

    I then moved to the closet. Nothing there, either.

    I was just starting to pick up one of the two carpet bags sitting on a straight-backed chair when I heard footsteps in the corridor.

    I paused, pulling my revolver.

    In the street below there was a brief commotion as a few drunks made their way from one saloon to another. In the distance a surrey jingled and jangled its way out of town.

    The footsteps in the hallway had stopped.

    Where had the man gone? Was it Lundgren or Mars coming back?

    My breathing was loud and nervous in the darkness. My uniform coat felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. My whole chest was cold and greasy with sweat.

    And then I heard him, whistling, or trying to-the drunk down the way, the one who'd barely been able to get his door locked. Easy enough to figure out what had happened. He had made his way down the stairs only to find that the people in the saloon wouldn't serve him. Too drunk. So he'd come back up here.

    It took him several minutes to insert key into lock, to turn doorknob, to step across threshold, to walk across floor, to fall across bed, springs squeaking beneath his weight. Within thirty seconds he was snoring.

    I went back to work.

    I took the first carpetbag to the bed and dumped everything out. The contents included an unloaded.45, a few more shirts without celluloid collars, and a small framed picture of a large, handsome women I guessed was his wife. I took it over to the window and hiked back the curtain. A lone stripe of silver moonlight angled across the back of the picture: SHARON LUNDGREN, 1860-1889, BELOVED WIFE OF DUNCAN LUNDGREN. So he was a widower, Lundgren was. It made him human for me, and for some reason, I didn't want him to be human.

    The second carpetbag didn't yield much more-not at first anyway. Mars was a collector of pills and salves and ointments. The bag had enough of these things to stock a small pharmacy. He seemed to be a worrier, Mars did.

    I had almost given up on the bag when my fingers felt, way in the back, an edge of paper. I felt farther. An envelope. I pulled it out, winnowing it upward through tins of muscle ointment and small bottles of pills that rattled like an infant's toy.

    I went back to the window and the moonlight.

    I turned the envelope face up. In the left upper hand I saw the name and address of the letter writer. My old friend Schroeder, known hereabouts as Reeves.

    The letter was brief, inviting Lundgren and Mars here to
"increase their fortunes by assisting me in a most worthy endeavor."

    I didn't have to wonder about what that
"worthy endeavor"
might be. Not when Reeves owned half a bank in town here.

    I put the envelope back in the carpetbag and the carpetbag back on the chair.

    I went to the door, eased it open, stuck my head out. The hallway was empty. In the hall I relocked the door, checked again to make sure that nobody was watching me, and then walked quickly to the screen door and the fire escape.

    I knew now that I wasn't done with Reeves. Not at all, no matter how much I'd promised Gillian otherwise.

    

    

    "He's going to do it again."

    "He?"

    "Schroeder. Reeves. Whatever name he goes by."

    "Do what?"

    "Hire two people to rob his bank and then double-cross them. Take the money and kill them."

    "You sure?"

    "Positive. Those two men I saw in town?"

    "They're the ones?"

    "They're the ones. I got into their hotel room tonight. They had a letter from Reeves."

    She didn't say anything for a long time. We were in bed. The window was soft silver with moonlight. Annie muttered in her sleep. The air smelled of dinner stew and tobacco from my pipe. Somewhere an owl sang lonely into the deep sweet night.

    "You promised to stay clear of it, Chase."

    "I was just telling you who they are."

    "You'll get in trouble. I know it."

    "I didn't mean to make you mad."

    She was silent. "I thought we had a nice life," she said after a time.

    "We do."

    "Then why do you want to spoil it?"

    "I won't spoil it, Gillian. I promise."

    "You promise," she said. "Men are always promising, and it doesn't mean anything."

    I tried to kiss her but she wouldn't let me. She rolled over on her side, facing the wall.

    "You know I love you, Gillian."

    She was silent.

    "Gillian?"

    Silent.

    I rolled over. Thought. Felt naked and alone. My sore throat was getting worse, too, and every once in a while, I'd shiver from chills.

    I couldn't stop thinking about Gillian. How she knew what was going to happen now, with Reeves and all. How betrayed she must feel.

    I tried to make it better for her.

    "I'm not your father, Gillian," I said. "I'm not going to hurt you and I'm not going to run out on you the way he did. Do you understand that?"

    But she didn't speak then, either.

    After an hour or so I slept.

    

    

    Next night, I made my rounds early. I had some business to do.

    Lundgren and Mars put in their usual appearance at the usual time, strolling down the street to the livery, picking up their horses and riding out of town just as the moon rose directly over the river.

    I rode a quarter mile behind them out the winding stage road.

    They went just where I thought they would, straight to Reeves' fancy Victorian. But just before reaching the grounds, they angled eastward toward the foothills.

    Half an hour's ride brought them to a cabin along a leg of the river. I ground-tied my horse a long ways back and slipped into the small woods to the west of the cabin. Everything smelled piney and was sticky to the touch.

    When I got close enough to see through a window, I watched Lundgren and Mars talking with Reeves. He poured them bourbon. There was some quick rough laughter, as if a joke might have been told, and then quiet talk for twenty minutes I couldn't hear at all.

    At one point I thought I heard a woman's voice, but I wasn't sure.

    When they came out, Lundgren and Mars and Reeves, they were laughing again.

    They stood making a few more jokes and dragging on their stogies and making their plans for the robbery.

    "You don't forget about that side door," Reeves said.

    "No, sir, I won't," Lundgren said.

    Mars went over to his horse and hopped up. His small size made it look like a big effort.

    "Talk to you boys soon," Reeves said, cheery as a state legislator on Flag Day.

    Lundgren and Mars rode away, into dew-covered fields shimmering silver with moonlight.

    Reeves stood there for a time watching them go, the chink of saddle and bridle, the heavy thud of horse hooves fading in the distance.

    A woman joined him suddenly, as if from nowhere, slipping out of the door and into his arms. Silhouetted in the lantern light from inside, they stood there kissing for a very long time, until it was obvious that they now wanted to do a lot more than kiss. It took me a while to realize who she was.

    A few minutes later Reeves slid his arm around her waist and escorted her back inside. They turned out the lights and walked back out and closed the door and got up in Reeves's black buggy.

    Just before he whipped the horse, I heard her say, "K-Kinda ch-chilly out h-here t-tonight."

    And then they were gone into the night.

    

    

    There was a potbellied stove on the ground floor of the police station, and when I got back there, two men stood next to it, holding tin cups of steaming black coffee in wide peasant hands. Winter was on the air tonight.

    Kozlovsky nodded upstairs. "Don't know where the hell you been, Chase, but the chief's been lookin' for you for the last hour and a half."

    Benesh shook his head. "He's been drinkin' since late afternoon so I'd watch yourself, Chase. Plus he's got a prisoner up there in his little room. Some farmhand who got all liquored up because of some saloon whore. He made the mistake of making a dirty remark to the chief."

    In their blue uniforms, the flickering light from the stove laying a coat of bronze across their faces, they might have been posing for a photograph in the
Police Gazette
.

    "I'd better go see him," I said, coughing. I was feeling worse.

    The two men glanced at each other as I left.

    The "room" they'd referred to was on the second floor, way in the back beyond the cells, which were dark now, men resting or sleeping on their cots, like zoo animals down for the night. Every time I came up here, I thought of prison, and every time I thought of prison, I thought of all those old men I'd known who'd spent most of their adult lives in there. Then I always got scared. I didn't want to die in some human cage smelling of feces and slow pitiful death.

    Halfway to the room, I heard the kid moaning behind the door ten yards away. I also heard the sharp popping noise of an open hand making contact with a face. The closer I got, the louder the moaning got.

    I knocked.

    "Yeah?"

    "Chief, it's me. Chase."

    A silence. Then footsteps. The door yanked open, the chief, sweating, wearing only his uniform trousers and shirt, his jacket on a coat hook, stood there with his hands on his hips, scowling at me. For all that the police officers and some of the citizens talked about Hollister's "torture room," it was a pretty unspectacular place, just bare walls and a straight-back chair in the middle of an empty room. Right now, no more than half-conscious, thick hairy wrists handcuffed behind him in the chair, sat a beefy farm kid. His nose was broken and two of his front teeth were gone. His face gleamed with sweat and dark blood, and his eyes showed terror and confusion.

    "I've been looking for you," Hollister said.

    "That's what I heard. I had to go home. My daughter Annie's been sick."

    "Nobody could find you for over an hour, Chase. Don't give me any horseshit about your poor little daughter. Now you go downstairs and wait for me in my office."

    He was drunk but you probably wouldn't have noticed it if you didn't know him. The voice was half a pitch higher and there was something wild and frightening in the blue eyes.

    "You want me to put him in a cell?" I said, indicating the farm kid.

    "I'll put him in a cell when I'm ready to put him in a cell."

    "I wouldn't want to see you get in any trouble, Chief."

    "I'll worry about that, Chase. You just go downstairs to my office and wait for me."

    Just as the door closed, I glimpsed the kid in the straight-backed chair. His brown eyes looked right at me, pleading, pleading. I thought of the kid that day in the quarry, coming up and crying out for mercy…

    A moment later I heard a fist collide with a face. The kid screamed, and soon enough came another punch.

    He was on the other side of a locked door now. There was nothing I could do.

    I went back through the cells.

    A man was lying awake on the cot, his eyes very white in the gloom. As I walked past his cell he said, "He gonna kill somebody someday, beatin' folks like that."

    I just kept walking. Apparently the man was a drifter and hadn't heard that a prisoner had already died here in what the newspaper called a "mysterious fall."

    Twenty minutes later Hollister walked into his office, sat down behind his desk, took a small round gold tin of salve from a drawer and proceeded to rub the salve onto the knuckles of his right hand. They looked pretty bad, swollen and bloody. He had his uniform jacket on now, and he once again appeared in control of himself.

    "The sonofabitch tried to hit me," he said.

    "That's a pretty neat trick when you're handcuffed."

    He glared at me. "Are you accusing me of lying?"

    I stared at my hands in my lap.

    "Somebody in this town doesn't like you, Chase."

    "Oh?" I raised my eyes and met his. He was sober now. Apparently, beating up people had a good effect on him.

    He opened the center drawer of his desk, extracted a white business envelope and tossed it across his wide desk to me.

    "This was waiting for me when I got to work this morning," he said.

    "What is it?"

    "You know how to read?"

    I nodded.

    "Then read it for yourself."

    I opened the envelope, took out a folded sheet of white paper, and read what had been written on it in blue ink. The penmanship was disguised to look as if it was a child's.

    The message was just one sentence long.

    "It's a lie," I said.

    "Is it?"

    "Yes."

    He took out his pipe, stuck it in his teeth and leaned back in his chair.

    "It wouldn't be the first time, you know."

    "The first time for what?" I said.

    "The first time an ex-convict ended up as a police officer."

    "I'm not an ex-convict."

    "Whoever sent me that letter thinks you are."

    "Somebody's just making trouble."

    "How long were you in?"