Gaffney, Patricia (3 page)

Cady halted in front of the unmade feather bed. A black,
bullet-studded gunbelt with twin holsters was slung over one of the posts, and
a black Stetson hat hung at a rakish tilt on the other. Something, maybe the
contrast between the friendly, rumpled sheets and the dangerous-looking
gunbelt, threw her off her stride.
So,
some frivolous part of her mind
noted,
even outlaw gunfighters take naps. Under the covers, just like the
rest of us. Maybe they even snore.

Which was a stupid thing to be thinking right at this moment. With
a mental shake, she pivoted to face the outlaw.

He was even meaner-looking than Levi had warned her he'd be. He
was taller than she was—who wasn't?—but not exactly a giant, maybe six feet or
so. He wore his wavy hair long, and it was the same shade of dark brown as
hers, only his was streaked with silver. Prematurely silver, though—he looked
young, not even thirty. While she watched, he did up one button on his black
shirt. But he didn't bother with the top button of his black denim trousers.

He folded his arms and leaned against the door, crossing his bare
feet at the ankles. It was hard not to stare at the patch over his right eye.
Was he terribly scarred under it? Maybe he had no eye there at all. The notion
horrified and fascinated her about equally.

She knew his name, but only vaguely, mostly from unreliable
barroom gossip. She remembered something about him being wounded at Gettysburg
before his gunfighter career started—but how could that be? In 1863 he couldn't
have been much more than twelve or thirteen years old. She also remembered
something about him being killed in a gunfight a few months ago in California.
Apparently that story was exaggerated.

"What can I do for you, Miss Katie McGill?"

"Cady," she corrected automatically.

"K. D.?"

"No, Cady. It's short for Cadence."
Oh, this is how
you talk to hired gunslingers: you make sure they know what your name is short
for.
"What about you?" she said aggressively. "Don't you
have a first name?"

He narrowed his one eye, which was an eerie shade of silver-gray,
and didn't say anything for so long, she began to perspire. "I don't need
one," he finally sneered, but by then she'd forgotten the question.

She resented it that he was scaring her. She put her hands on her
hips and said combatively, "I own this place."

"That so?" He nodded, glanced around. "Nice view.
I'm real partial to a rocking chair."

"Yeah, I thought they'd be a nice touch." She waved her
hand toward the low door that led out to the porch roof. "Airy and
all."

"Real nice touch."

Well, this was a pleasant conversation they were having. She
caught sight of a Winchester .44-.40 leaning against the wall, and it brought
her back to the point.

"What are you doing here, Mr. Gault? Who hired you?" He
just stared at her until her palms began to itch. "Wylie," she
answered for herself, because it was so obvious. "Right? It was Wylie,
wasn't it?"

"Why would Wylie hire me?"

"Maybe to burn me out, the same way he did Logan's livery
stable. How much is he paying you?"

Instead of answering, he started to walk toward her, naked feet
slow and quiet on the thin carpet. She couldn't stop herself from stepping
back, then sideways. Without even pausing, he passed her by and sat down at the
foot of the bed.

It took a whole minute for her heart to slow down.

"You listen here," she said when it did. "I'm not
paying you anything, and I'm not leaving. Rogue's Tavern is mine, and Merle
Wylie's never getting his dirty paws on it. He can't have the Rogue, he can't
have the Seven Dollar, and he can't have me. And you can tell him I said
so." Her anger got hotter with every word; by the time she finished her
little speech, her hands were shaking.

Gault stroked his mustache thoughtfully, looking at her with more
interest than menace. "I'll tell him if you want me to. What's he look
like?"

She blinked. "What?"

"Fellow Wylie. I don't know him, but I'll be glad to deliver
your message."

"You're saying he didn't send for you?"

"Never heard the name till this afternoon. I stabled my horse
at his livery."

"His
livery. Hah. That's because two weeks
ago he burned Logan's down to the ground," she shot back, mad all over
again.

"Now, why would he do a mean thing like that?"

Was he playing with her? "Because he wants the whole town to
himself, that's why."

He stood up and started walking toward her again, but this time
she didn't give way. "Greed'll do funny things to a man," he said in
a low, rough, whispery voice that sent a little thrill across the tops of her
shoulders. He was standing so close, she could smell him. Tobacco, bay rum, and
leather. And danger.

"How long were you planning to stay in Paradise?" she
asked, sticking her chin out at him, glad when her voice didn't quiver.

He turned his head to the right, and she remembered he was deaf in
one ear. "Long as it takes to get my business done, Miss McGill."

No need to ask what his business was. Professional gunfighter—he
might as well have a sign across his chest. Who had hired him, though? And who
could he be gunning for in Paradise? "Well, you're welcome to stay here as
long as you don't cause any trouble," she said firmly as she backed toward
the door.
"I
won't stand for any trouble in my place."

"Sometimes trouble has a way of following a man, and there's
nothing he can do about it."

So, the frivolous part of her brain piped up again.
It's not
just in corny dime novels—gunfighters really do talk like that.
She hunted
for the proper response, and finally settled for, "I expect that depends
on the man, Mr. Gault."

"Yes, ma'am, I expect it does."

They stared at each other somewhat blankly until she said,
"Well," and searched behind her for the doorknob.

"You know what I want?"

The question made her nervous. Rather than ask what, which
would've betrayed too much interest, she just lifted her eyebrows.

"I
want a hot bath, a steak dinner, and a poker game."

For some reason—relief, probably—she smiled at him. "Sorry,
there's no plumbing on the second floor—which Levi should've told you. But you
can get a bath at the barbershop for a dollar. We don't serve meals, either,
but Jacques' is right across the street. He says the food's French, but it's
really Creole. Then there's Swensen's on Main Street, but I don't recommend it.
Not unless your stomach's made out of cast iron."

That made
him
smile, the same infectious, almost sweet
smile he'd greeted her with at the door. It hadn't lasted long, but she hadn't
forgotten it. Now it struck her the same way as the rumpled bed and the
six-guns—a funny contrast to the scary-looking rest of him.

"And the poker game?" he reminded her.

"Ah, now, there I can help you."

"Square game?"

"Absolutely. The fairest in town." Which definitely
wasn't saying much. Gault smiled again, as if he'd read her mind. They shared a
look, and just for a second she thought it was a companionable look, almost...
conspiratorial. "Well," she said again. "See you."

He touched his index finger to his forehead in a cocky salute.
When he took it away, the smile and the look, whatever it had meant, were both
gone. He didn't say "See you" back; in fact, he didn't say anything.
Oddly disappointed, Cady slipped out the door and closed it softly behind her.

Levi was still waiting for her on the stairs. Walking toward him,
she had the strangest sensation: that she'd just had a conversation with two
men, not one, and she had no idea which was real. Or which one interested her
more.

Everything in Rogue's Tavern went dead quiet when Jesse walked
in—from carnival noisy to church still, just like that, as soon as he pushed
open the swinging doors and sauntered over to the bar. On the way, he came
within two inches of smacking into a post on his blind side. Which took some of
the cockiness out of him. But he got it back when the fellows around the bar
fell over themselves trying to get out of his way. "Bourbon," he
whispered into the reverent hush, "and don't water it down this
time."

The tall, spindly bartender bobbed his bald head and slid a bottle
and a glass in front of him. While he was at it, he started to pour what looked
like sarsaparilla into the glass that belonged to a pale, thin,
cadaverous-looking gent on Jesse's left. The man stuck one bony hand over the
glass and threw a half dollar on the bar with the other, backing away as if a
scorpion had stung him. "Doc?" called the bartender, frowning.
Mumbling something, hunching his scrawny shoulders, the corpselike fellow
turned and headed for the door.

Jesse poured two fingers of bourbon and took a thoughtful sip.

"Are we playing cards here or not?" a woman's voice cut
through the uneasy silence. "Chico, finish that song, I liked it."

He didn't have to turn to know it was Miss Cady "Short for
Cadence" McGill, saloon proprietor and dream interrupter. He'd been
thinking about her all evening, even hurried through his pretty good dinner at
Jacques' so he could see her again. He had a weakness for pretty girls, but
that didn't explain why he'd passed up a golden opportunity by admitting to her
he didn't work for Wylie. That wasn't like him. Not like him at all. He hated
to think he was getting soft, not this early in the game.

A short, handsome Mexican in a derby hat went back to playing
"The Drunkard's Hiccup" on the piano. A roulette wheel spun; dice dropped;
conversations started up again. Jesse poured another inch of booze and turned
around real cool and slow, resting his elbows on the bar, hitching up one boot
on the brass rail. And squeezed his eyes shut tight so they wouldn't fall out
of his head.

Miss McGill had changed her clothes. His memory of her brown skirt
and blue blouse getup, vivid until just now, faded into nothing. Red exploded,
temporarily blinding him. He recovered by making out bits and pieces of her
slowly, gently, working up to the whole picture in stages so he wouldn't hurt
himself.

She was perched on a stool with her legs crossed, dealing
blackjack to four lovestruck cowboys. Understandably lovestruck, because her
dress... it was like she'd melted red candle wax all over her sweet little
body, that's how tight it fit her. The cowboys who weren't staring at her high,
white bosom were staring at the bare foot and six inches of bare calf swinging
under her ruffled red skirt, and the sexy high-heeled red shoe hanging off the
end of her toes. "Hit me," they begged her, going bust on purpose so
she'd lean over and deal them another card.

Jesse looked away in self-defense, scanning the spacious,
high-ceilinged room, trying to work up an interest in what kind of a saloon he
was in. He liked saloons, liked to think he was an expert on them. A saloon
gourmet, you could say. This one had the usual equipment—stag's heads and
spittoons, mirrors and hanging lanterns, the requisite naked lady at ease over
the bar. A stone fireplace took up half the back wall; dark wood paneling
covered the other three to chest height, then ivory-painted plaster up to the
tall beamed ceiling. Handsome. Cheerful. And something else he couldn't put his
finger on that set the Rogue apart from the ten thousand or so other bars he'd
been in.

Then it hit him: the place was clean. No smudges on the mirrors,
no oily head prints. The waxed bar glowed like Chinese lacquer. He could see
his reflection in the crystal-clean plate-glass windows. Strangest of all, the
smoky air smelled pretty much like air, not the inside of a wet coal stove.

Well, wasn't that just like a woman? He wanted to sneer and call
the place prissy, dismiss it as a dandified bar no self-respecting man would
drink beer in, but he couldn't. The Rogue was a great bar. And it
was
just
like a woman to run a clean saloon, but it turned out—who'd've thought?—a clean
saloon was nice for a change. It probably made you feel a lot better while you
were defiling your lungs and pickling your liver and squandering your wife's egg
money on simpleminded games of chance.

Natural caution told him to stay away, but Miss McGill's red dress
was calling to him like a siren. First, he poured a little more liquor, though,
and stuck a thin black cigarette, prerolled, in the corner of his mouth—for
that
look at me wrong and I'll blow your brains out
effect so vital to a
man in his line of work. Nobody stared openly, but he felt the cautious, veiled
looks as he moseyed around the tables of drinkers and poker players, heading
for the blackjack table.

A man saw him and started to scramble up off his stool, but Jesse
put a friendly hand on his shoulder— which still made him freeze like a bird
dog—and whispered, "Just watching." He was pretty sure McGill knew he
was there, but was making a point not to look at him. So he looked at her.

She sure had good posture. And she wasn't barefooted after all;
she had on flesh-colored stockings. This afternoon she'd worn her curly dark
hair down, but tonight it was up in a big, top-heavy pompadour that took some
getting used to. In fact, he couldn't get over how completely different she
looked from a couple of hours ago. Not that he was complaining. But even the
freckles were gone. She had rouge on her lips, and perfume he could smell from
here. Which was fine, great, he liked perfume and red lips on a woman, but...
But nothing. She was gorgeous, and as soon as he got over the shock he'd start
to appreciate it.

That dangling shoe looked in danger of falling off as the swinging
foot bobbed faster and faster. He liked the idea that he was making her
nervous, but except for the foot you'd never have known it. She kept her face
poker straight, as the saying went, and she handled the cards with the crisp,
quick, slightly bored snappiness of a true professional.

"You're busted, Gunther," she told a plaid-shirted,
lumberjack-looking fellow, and leaned over to scoop up his cards. Jesse's eyes
went where every other man's went, and that's when he saw it.

Or thought he saw it—it only flashed for a second, and afterward
he wondered if it had been a trick of the light. So he waited until the game
was over— dealer won—and she swept up everybody's cards with one long,
leaning-over pass. There it was, no mirage, no bourbon-induced hallucination: a
genuine tattoo on the shadowy inside curve of her left breast. Some kind of a
bird, an eagle or something, flying out of the cleft and nose-diving toward the
nipple. His cigarette fell out of his mouth.

He stepped on it, pretending he'd meant to drop it, hoping nobody
noticed it wasn't even lit. Hell, no danger of that: who'd be looking at his
cigarette when they could look at Cady's tattoo? She dealt another round, and
he was so fixated on catching another glimpse of the elusive bird he forgot all
about trying to catch her at card-palming or double-dealing. Which might, now
that he thought of it, be the whole point. Hm.

He was thinking about other uses for the tattoo, less practical
but more interesting ones, when a tall, willowy blonde trapped his arm between
her powdered breasts and breathed, "Hi," on a gust of gin and
bitters.

He was glad to see her. It was good that he struck fear in the
hearts of men, but the down side was that hardly anybody talked to him. He got
lonely. "Hi," he returned, then wished he'd said something meaner,
more menacing. But what?
Those real?
Not very gentlemanly. And say what
you would about Gault, he always tried to be a gentleman.

"I'm Glendoline," the blonde confided in a childlike
whisper, blinking dreamy blue eyes and pursing her lips as if she wanted to kiss
him. "And you're Gault. I heard all about you."

Ah, now he had her number. He'd never known about this species of
woman before, the kind who liked dangerous men and would go to amazing lengths
to get them. After the money, they were the second-best thing about being a
gunfighter. Or at least they had been in the beginning, when he hadn't wasted a
minute taking advantage of their breathless interest in him. Lately, though, it
was starting to wear thin. It wasn't that flattering anymore. It was like getting
a compliment on your hair when you were wearing a wig.

"Want to sit down and have a drink with me?" Glendoline
purred, pointing to an empty table for two. "You could show me your
gun." Her china-blue eyes were innocent as a doll's, so he decided she meant
the suggestion literally.

"Why not?" he said in the gravelly whisper, which made
her roll her eyes in ecstasy, and turned to follow her. Her skinny, sashaying
butt was a cute distraction, but he glanced away from it to see if Cady was
watching.

She was. But she looked away quickly, slapping cards down hard in
front of her customers, pretending she couldn't care less. Everybody was
playing a game, Jesse philosophized pleasantly. He was just playing a bigger
one than most people.

He made a big deal of taking the chair facing the door so he could
sit with his back to the wall, which almost sent Glendoline into a swoon.
Another girl, a plump, buxom redhead named Willagail, was serving drinks to the
customers at the next table. What kind of a place was this, it occurred to
Jesse to wonder. If his new friend wasn't a whore, he'd eat his hat. So... did
that mean McGill was, too? Well, God
damn.
No, she couldn't be.

Why not? Just because a girl had freckles didn't mean she couldn't
turn tricks. He sat down slowly, peering at her across two tables of poker
players, trying to picture her in the role of madam. It was hard, but not
impossible. What did he think of that? He had, as they said, mixed feelings.
He'd been thinking about her and him together in his big feather bed since
approximately the moment they met. Now, for some reason, it needled him to
think that all he might have to do to get her there was pay her.

He bought Glendoline—"Call me Glen, honey"— a drink,
then another drink, then another. It went without saying that the bartender was
watering them down, but still, for a skinny girl she sure could put away the
booze. She asked him the usual questions, how he'd become a gunfighter, how
many men he'd killed, what it felt like to shoot somebody, and he avoided them
with the usual sinister stares and enigmatic grunts. Glendoline wasn't too
bright, but under the bloodthirsty curiosity she seemed sweet. He missed her
when she went off to "see about something." After all those drinks,
he was pretty sure what she was seeing about was the privy behind the saloon.

Something bumped his leg. Looking down, he saw a little black boy,
a miniature version of the bartender but with hair, squatting at his feet,
halfway under the table. He had a whisk broom in one hand and a cigarette-filled
dustpan in the other.

"Howdy," said Jesse. The boy jumped, never taking his
scared, white-rimmed eyes off him. "How's it going? You like that job? How
much they pay you? I had a job cleaning out horse stalls once. I was about your
age, twenty, twenty-one," he teased—the kid looked about seven. "Paid
diddly squat, a quarter a week. Which is worse, you think, raking up horse
manure or cigar butts and spit? Hm? Who's dirtier, horses or cowboys?"

"Horses," the boy ventured, scuttling out a few inches.

"I don't know," Jesse said thoughtfully, rubbing his
jaw. "Some old boys are mighty damn messy."

"Yeah, but they don't do they business on the flo'."

"Well, that's true, that's surely true. That is a very good
point. Cigarette? So tell me, what's a smart fella like you doing in a
god-awful place like this?"

"This a
good
place." His huge black eyes went
wider still. "Why you think this a god-awful place?" He came all the
way out from under the table, and when Jesse casually pulled Glendoline's chair
out for him, he perched on the edge, curiosity getting the better of his
nerves.

"You
like
it here? This place?" He looked around
in mock disbelief. "What's good about it?"

"Well, Miz Cady the best thing, and I like it when Chico play
the piano, and Miz Glen and Miz Willagail, they nice, plus sometimes I get tips
or candy or a piece o' licorice. And my daddy, he the bartender and everybody
like him, so that make 'em like
me."

"Uh-huh. So why's Miss Cady the best thing? By the way,
what's your name?"

"Abraham."

"Pleased to meet you. You married?"

"Naw." He giggled, then instantly sobered. "
'Cause. She just is. She let me do anything, drive her buggy, come in her room
and play with stuff. And she always give me things, like a book or a apple or
something. She funny, too, and she always smell good."

"I noticed that myself."

Abraham banged his heel against the chair leg, more at ease now
but still devouring Jesse with his eyes. "Poppy say you a
gunfighter," he said shyly.

"Yep."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why you wanna go and shoot people?"