Gaffney, Patricia (22 page)

"Such a gentleman," she whispered lightly, although her
heart was bursting. She let love take her, just love, not the excitement of
skin or heat or friction or even the deep, steady throb of him inside her. And
she came gently, silently, like a flower opening, so quietly he didn't know
it—she had to tell him, "All right, Jesse. All right."

After, she didn't speak at all for the longest time. Couldn't.
Afraid of what she would say if she opened her mouth and started talking. Much
better to shut up.

But it made him worry about her. "Honey? You all right?"
He probably called every woman he slept with "honey," but when he
said it to her it made her melt. Every time. "Was it okay?" He kissed
her, coaxing a smile. "Come on, tell me I was great. Hm? How was it, Cady
girl?"

She hid her face in his shoulder, afraid he'd see too much if he
looked into her shiny eyes right now, and fell back on a standard answer.

"It beats canning salmon."

****

They drove past Cady's mine on the way home. The sun was setting;
pale orange beams seeped through the low, mossy tops of the live oaks verging
the road, softening the air, the twilight. Buzzards made slow, stately circles
high up in the whitening sky. Cady loved the peaceful silence, but Jesse broke
it to ask, "Why does Wylie want your mine if it's finished?" and she
roused herself to try to explain it again.

"I've told you—that's just how he is. He's like a rotten
little boy. He wants all the toys, and he'll make everybody's life miserable
till he gets them."

"But that doesn't make sense. Are you sure the Seven Dollar
is worthless?"

"Sure, I'm sure. It has been for years. Look, there's the
turnoff to Wylie's. It starts about half a mile back, right up against the
cliff from the river. It's called the Rainbow, and naturally it's
thriving," she said bitterly. Then she remembered: Jesse had taken care of
Wylie. Threatened him, she assumed—he wouldn't say much about it. What a
relief. Wylie had been a thorn in her side for so long, it was going to take a
while to get used to the idea of him being harmless. She slipped her arm
through Jesse's and pressed, leaning against him lightly. Her gratitude
embarrassed him, but she couldn't help it. He was her hero. The whole town's
hero.

On the outskirts of Paradise, passing by the little schoolhouse
and the lot beside it where the children played baseball, she noticed a nasty,
foreign odor that grew stronger as they kept driving. "What is that?"
she said, and Jesse wrinkled his nose and swore wonderingly. By the time they
reached the center of town, the smell had become a stench. People in the street
stopped and stared when they saw her, but nobody spoke. Uneasiness crept over
her.

"Something's wrong. Jesse, what in the world is that
smell?" He looked grim and didn't answer. "Wait, you're passing the
livery," she told him. "Don't you want to take the buggy..." She
didn't finish. She knew where they were going—straight to the Rogue. Because
something bad had happened.

I
t could've been worse. They could've burned her out. They'd stunk
her out, and that was only temporary. But it was bad enough.

Shrimp Malone was the first to identify the smoldering, smoking,
reeking pile of black stuff on the bar—Levi's beautiful mahogany bar, his pride
and joy; Jesse had seen him late at night sanding and staining cigarette burns,
polishing out white glass rings, rubbing beeswax into the wood until it shone
like a mirror.

"It's tires," Shrimp claimed. "Them little rubber
tires on ore trucks." Ore trucks? "Them carts they wheel around down
in the mines. What you got here is ore truck tires, about fifty of 'em, I'd
say. On fire, and stinkin' to high heaven."

The fire department—Stony Dern—came and tried to shovel the tires
out through the swinging doors, but the smoke was too bad. He couldn't stay in
the saloon any longer than he could hold his breath. Next the sheriff organized
a group of citizens to take turns dragging the tires out with pitchforks, but
Nestor Yeakes, the first man in, promptly fainted, and Oscar Schmidt, the
second, ran back out claiming he was having a heart attack. All this excitement
happened before Jesse and Cady rode in. When they pulled up in front of the
Rogue, nobody was doing anything except standing in the street and watching
black smoke billow out of the windows.

Cady was useless, so Jesse took over. Shrimp knew a man who
blasted rock at the Rainbow and had goggles. With wet towels wrapped around his
nose and mouth and the goggles over his eyes, Jesse made three runs into the
saloon, but all he managed to do was knock half the tires off the bar and onto
the floor. Levi came back from his outing with Lia Chang about then, and
insisted on taking a turn. He lasted two trips before he had to sit down.

Others began to volunteer. Sheriff Leaver, Stony Dern, and Will
Shorter, Jr., all donned the goggles and towels and ran into the saloon as
often as they could stand it. Using shovels, rakes, and a wheelbarrow, with
five of them working in quick shifts, they finally lugged every bit of the
sticky, stinking rubber out into the street, and then the question was how to
put it out.

Throwing water on it didn't work; part of it always kept
smoldering, and pretty soon the whole thing would flare up again. In the end
they buried it. Once it was out and cold they'd move it, but for now it lay in
the street in a heap, under a foot-deep cover of dirt from Arthur Dunne's vetch
field, gravel from the cemetery, and horse manure from the livery stable.

Rogue's Tavern was uninhabitable. Everything in the saloon and
above it—all four bedrooms on the second floor—was either ruined or stank too
bad to go near. Jesse could kiss his clothes, everything but what he had on his
back, good-bye. Cady, luckily, was in better shape; smoke went up, not
sideways, and three closed doors from the saloon, the hallway, and her office
stood between the fire and her bedroom. She still claimed everything in her
room stank, but Jesse said they were carrying the reek around in their
nostrils, that a flower garden, a
perfume
factory, would smell like
burning rubber to them indefinitely. "How long is indefinitely?"

They were drinking coffee at Jacques', staring dolefully out the
window at the saloon and the big mound of smelly dirt in front of it.
"Till you get it cleaned up."

"Cleaned up," Cady said wretchedly. "I wouldn't
even know where to start." She hadn't cried—he wished she would—but she
looked shattered. Like somebody had beaten her up.

"I'd say you start with turpentine. And paint scrapers, like
you were going to strip the varnish off a table or something. You get all the
rubbery soot off, then you wash everything with strong soap and water."

"But that'll take forever."

"Days. So you hire people to help you. Plus I'll help, and
Levi and Ham'll help. That's four of us right there, and then you pay some kids
to pitch in."

"Stony might help," she said thoughtfully. "And
Gunther. Jim Tannenbaum. Maybe Stan Morrissey."

"I'd forgotten you had all these men in love With you."

"It's not that, they just want their drinking place
back."

"Cady, it's going to be all right. You'll have the place spic
and span in no time."

She tried a wan smile, but it didn't work. She put her forehead
against the glass and closed her eyes tight. Finally he saw a tear, just one,
squeeze past her lashes. "Bastard," she gritted out between her
teeth. She made the window rattle by butting her head against it. "Damn
that
bastard."

If they weren't in a restaurant, he'd have taken her on his lap.
As it was, he scooted his chair closer and wrapped his arm around her.
"Don't worry about him, honey. Don't even think about him."

"Damn that bastard." She seemed to be stuck in a rut.

"Shh. Shhh." He tried to soothe her, but she wouldn't
soften, wouldn't unwind from the tight ball of fury and loathing. Until he
said, "It's all right, Cady. I'll take care of him."

Then she looked at him. She was red-faced but almost dry-eyed.
"You will?"

He nodded. "Yeah."

She watched him for another minute, then laid her head on his
shoulder, exhausted. "Okay," she sighed. "Okay, then."

He took her home. He tried to make love to her, but she couldn't
relax. So he massaged her feet instead—he was good at that. That did it. She
fell asleep on her stomach with one leg in the air. He kept on rubbing that one
skinny foot, softening his touch little by little, before laying it down on the
mattress and gently covering her up.

He stretched out beside her. For a long time he lay quiet, listening
to her breathing, watching moon shadows crawl across the graceful hills and
valleys of her pale, sheet-covered body. Trying to think of a way to "take
care" of Wylie without getting himself killed. Finally fatigue swamped
him. When he drifted off, he still hadn't come up with a plan.

****

It took three days to get the saloon clean enough for customers,
and three more before you could go upstairs without holding your nose. More
people pitched in than Jesse could believe or Cady could imagine, some for pay
but most for nothing, and yet it still took forever to wipe down the walls and
the ceiling, the floor, every stick of furniture, every glass, every ash can,
every spittoon. The naked lady over the bar was ruined, destroyed, fit for
nothing but the garbage heap. Or so Jesse thought, until a veritable tidal wave
of opposition to trashing her rose up from the regulars—Stony and Sam, Leonard,
Jersey Stan, Gunther Dewhurt—and a committee formed spontaneously to try to
save her. Research was done; theories were tested; experiment performed. Years
ago, Leonard Berg, it turned out, had refurbished houses for a living; he knew
something about oil paints. He made a concoction. With a crowd of naked lady
fans looking on and offering suggestions, he applied it to her soot- and
goop-blackened charms. Presto! Like magic she was re-formed, restored to
voluptuous splendor before their admiring eyes.

After that everybody seemed to take heart, even Cady, and the work
went faster. Leonard had a brainstorm and tried applying his miracle formula to
the bar, and enough gunk came away that it could be sanded down and refinished.
This was a major discovery. A new bar would've cost at least a thousand
dollars, a good one, anyway, and Cady was already racking her brain and going
over her accounts, looking for a way to pay for it. Now she wouldn't have to.
Things were starting to look up.

In a way. Jesse had a problem, however. The further along repairs
and cleanup proceeded at the Rogue, the more time Cady had to dwell on the man
responsible for making them necessary. "Did you talk to him? Did you do
anything yet?" she took to asking once or twice a day. "All in good
time," Jesse would say, with a hint of sinister mystery in his manner,
hoping to imply he had some fiendish plot afoot. But he didn't. For the life of
him, he couldn't figure out what to do.

He went to the sheriff's office and acted like an irate citizen,
but that backfired. "Of course I know it was Wylie," Tommy Leaver
admitted readily, "but what can I do about it? There's no proof. Nobody
saw anything, or else they're not saying. Cady left her back door open and
somebody, probably Turley and Clyde, snuck in and set those tires on fire. You
know it and I know it, but what can I do? Wylie will deny it, and then what? If
I tried to arrest him or any of his boys, they'd shoot me down before I could
get my mouth open."

"You could deputize some men, get up a whole crowd. With that
many—"

"I tried that. Nobody'll do it. People are scared, nobody
wants to risk getting killed. Who can blame them?" He straightened his
neat string tie, slicked back his perfectly combed hair—he was the
neatest
sheriff
Jesse had ever seen—and fixed him with a speculative eye. "You could take
him, though," he said earnestly.

"Me?" Jesse laughed with fake heartiness. "That'll
be the day." Too late, he saw the trap he'd walked into.

"They're scared of you. I could make you a deputy, Mr. Gault,
and you could—or
we
could, I'd go with you—we could take Wylie into
custody."

"Yeah? Then what? You just said he'd deny it, so what happens
next?"

"Then—then we try to get some of his men to go against him.
If they see him locked up in jail for questioning, they might get scared. All
we need is one. We could—"

"Hold it, hold it. Sorry to disappoint you, Sheriff, but you got
me mixed up with somebody who gives a damn."

"But I thought—you and Cady, I just thought—"

"Yeah, well, what's between me and Cady has nothing to do
with the
law.
The
law
is something I don't mess with, ever. Got
me? Jesse Gault does not work for sheriffs, see? Jesse Gault never has and
never will be a
deputy."
And he stalked out, all snotty and pissed
off, definitely on his high horse, before the sheriff could say another word.

That was a close one. Not to mention stupid. And now he was back
where he started. What the hell had he gone to Leaver for anyway? How
un-Gault-like could you get? Desperation was driving him these days; he
couldn't see straight. He'd started avoiding Cady, for Pete's sake, just so she
couldn't ask him if he'd taken care of Wylie yet. He missed her like crazy. He
had no idea what he was going to do.

No—he did have one idea, one middling bright notion, and as soon
as he thought of it he got itchy to do it and get it over with. It had nothing
to do with Wylie, not directly, and it would have to stay a deep, dark secret
from everybody, even—no,
especially
—Cady. But that was okay.
He'd
know
he'd done it, and afterward he wouldn't feel so damn helpless.

His luck at gambling had been up and down, nothing consistent, so
his net worth had stayed about the same for a couple of weeks: roughly five
thousand dollars. He didn't know how much money the Sullivan widow needed to
keep her sheep ranch, and he didn't know how much Luther Digby needed to keep
Wylie from foreclosing on the general store. If he asked, it would rouse
suspicion. So he would split it in half, he decided, twenty-five hundred to the
widow, twenty-five to the Digbys. Now the only question was how to get it to
them without anybody knowing.

Except for the dog, Mrs. Sullivan was easy. Under the guise of
finding new trails to run Pegasus on, he found out from Nestor where she lived:
two miles outside of town on the road to Jacksonville. Then it was just a
matter of waiting for midnight, stuffing money in an envelope, scribbling
"From a friend" on it, and sliding the envelope under her front door.
He forgot she lived on a sheep farm, though, which meant she had a sheep dog,
which meant he wasn't going to get anywhere near her front door. But she had a
box for deliveries, at the bottom of the quarter-mile-long driveway to her
house. Was that a safe place to stash twenty-five hundred bucks? He decided to
take a chance, and by ten o'clock the next morning the news was all over town
that a miracle had struck the Sullivan family in the night.

One down. The Digbys should've been even easier, but they weren't.
He waited until the next night, and he almost got caught. What the hell was the
wife— Sara, her name was—doing up at one in the morning, floating around
downstairs in her nightgown, holding a candle? Taking inventory? Making herself
a cup of hot milk? Whatever, she spotted him, just as he was straightening up
from slipping the envelope under the door. Their eyes locked. He wheeled and
sprinted for the blackness of the alley, positive she'd recognized him. A few
sober moments of reflection reassured him, though. She had a candle under her
chin; naturally he could see her perfectly, down to her blond eyelashes. He'd
been in the pitch-dark, through wavy glass, hat pulled low, shirt collar high.
She'd seen a man, that's all. He was safe.

Speculation ran wild. Who was the mysterious "friend" whose
generosity had saved two Paradise families from ruin? Who could it be? The
Reverberator
had a field day wondering, guessing, interviewing, opining. The minister,
Reverend Cross, was high on the list of suspects, although nobody could figure
out where he'd have gotten all that money. An old spinster lady named Miss
Sleet reputedly had thousands stashed away in her mattress, but she was so mean
and stingy, nobody could feature her as the anonymous benefactor. There were
other possibilities—Otis Kerns, the bank president; old Mr. Deaver, who owned
the saw and lumber mill. They were cited most frequently, because they were the
richest.