The Chili Queen (16 page)

“Not us,” Earlie said.

Suddenly, Ned caught sight of Sheriff Tate coming out of a cigar store across the street. He jerked his head in the sheriff’s direction, and Jesse and Earlie exchanged glances. “Come on, Jess, let’s ride. Be seeing you,” Earlie told Ned, and without another word, the two faded into a group of men who were walking past.

Ned took Emma’s arm and hurried her along in the opposite direction, toward the hotel. He walked as quickly as he could without drawing attention. Emma seemed to sense the urgency and did not question him about the two men until they had collected their keys from the desk clerk and reached her room. Ned closed and locked the door, then went to the window and moved the curtain a little to peer out at the street. Neither of the men was in view. He let out a sigh of relief.

“Who are they?” Emma asked.

“The Minder brothers,” Ned replied, straightening the curtain and moving to the side of the window. He did not care to stand where he could be seen. Emma had removed the sunbonnet, and he thought he saw her flinch. “Heard of them?”

“No. As least, I don’t think so.”

“Earlie and Black Jesse Minder. I heard they were killed. I wish they had been. I guess they’re still alive because the devil didn’t want them, and the Lord wouldn’t have them.” He pulled out a chair, set it just out of view from anyone looking up from the street, and straddled it. “Black Jesse is braggedy-talking and ugly from ignorance, but Earlie is the big toad in the puddle. And he is purely evil.” Ned lifted the corner of the curtain and looked out the window again. “I rode with the Minders once, but I quit them. I wouldn’t join up with them again if it would turn me to gold.”

“They’re bank robbers?” Emma asked.

“No, they’re not smart enough. Mostly they rob and kill people they meet up with.”

“Highwaymen then.”

Ned put his chin on the top of the chair and stared straight at Emma. “If you want to put a fancy name to it, you can call them that. I call them vagabonds, scoundrels—murderers. They kill even when they don’t have to. They like it.” Ned shook his head back and forth a couple of times, trying to rid himself of a memory.

“What is it?” Emma asked. She had seated herself on the bed and leaned forward.

“You don’t want to hear it,” Ned said, rubbing his hands over his face. The hangover was gone, replaced by a feeling of unease about the Minders.

Emma continued to stare at him, until Ned looked up and shook his head at her. “You wouldn’t want to know,” he repeated.

“Yes, I would. When we agreed to rob this bank, I considered it to be something of a prank, but since last night, I have been weighing the seriousness of it. If you are mixed up with two killers who are here, perhaps we should reconsider. At the very least, I should like to know your connection with them.”

Ned considered her words then nodded glumly. “Sometime back, I met up with Earlie and Black Jesse in Taos and kept company with them. We pulled a couple of jobs, nothing big. They seemed all right at first, not too bright, but most outlaws aren’t very smart.” Ned glanced up at Emma and grinned. “Some are.”

She smiled a little.

“I didn’t see right off that they were a pair of hard cases. But later, we robbed a man, and Earlie shot him. He didn’t have to because the man had already given us his money. Earlie did it for pleasure. I was afraid they would shoot me, too, so I got to thinking then that I’d go off by myself. But I hadn’t figured out how to leave them.” Ned nodded to himself, recalling the dilemma. “Then one day, we were on our way down from Colorado. We saw two barefoot, redheaded boys on a horse, one in front of the other, riding it bareback. Twins or thereabouts because they looked just alike. They couldn’t have been more than eight or ten years old. They were singing when we rode by them on the trail, and they waved at us, happy as hogs in a wallow. When we got past a little ways, Earlie bet Black Jesse ten dollars he could get them both with a single bullet. He used a rifle. The bullet went clear through one into the other. They fell off the horse and lay still, and Earlie and Jesse rode back to see were they both dead. They argued about it some. Jesse said one was still moving when they got there, but Earlie said he died in a few minutes, so that counted.”

Emma’s face turned to such sadness that for a moment, Ned thought she might cry. He sorely felt like crying himself. Recounting the story had unnerved him. “It’s been some years. I never told anybody,” he said. “I believed the safest thing to do was disappear and never see them again. That’s what I did. I never saw them until today.”

“Why didn’t you stop them from killing the boys?” Emma asked.

The curtain swayed a little in the breeze, and Ned jumped. Then he settled back down in the chair, looking dejected as he stared at the floor. He didn’t say anything, and Emma leaned forward and asked again, “Why?”

Ned let out his breath. He leaned back until he was balancing the chair on two legs. “I thought they were joking at first. By the time I realized Earlie meant it, Black Jesse had pulled a gun on me. He’d have killed me if I’d made a move. So I thought maybe I could talk them out of it. I said, ‘You got better things to waste your bullets on.’ Earlie smiled like he agreed with me, and I thought he’d forget about it. But all of a sudden, he turned and shot the boys. I should have tried to stop him, hit his horse maybe.”

Emma thought that over. Then she reached out and touched Ned’s arm. He was startled and looked up at her. “Sometimes we have to choose between two things that are evil. He’d have shot the boys anyway—and you, too. You’d have been throwing your life away for nothing.”

“Black Jesse laughed at me later, saying he’d only been bluffing, but I knew he would shoot me up like lacework. Still, I should have thought of something.”

“You’re not partly God. You couldn’t have done anything for them if you were dead, could you?” Emma asked.

Ned stared at the pattern on the bedroom wall made by the sun going through the lace curtain. One of the designs looked like a pickle, and he had an urge to trace it on the wall with his finger, but he stayed in the chair, thinking over what Emma had said. “It has occupied my mind ever since. I’ve looked at it a hundred ways to Sunday and never figured out what I could have done different.”

“You can’t do it different. It’s a lesson of life. You learned from it, and next time…” She grew quiet, and Ned thought she was done, but then, she said quietly, “I myself have learned from evil.” Ned wanted to ask what evil she had encountered on a Kansas farm, but Emma seemed to shake off whatever she had been thinking. She stood up and went to the window and looked through the curtain. She moved closer and put her eye to a hole in the lace and stared through it. “I believe those are the two men we have been talking about,” she said.

Ned moved the curtain an inch and looked out. The Minder brothers were riding under their window. He could see their bedrolls tied behind their saddles. After the two men passed the hotel, Ned pressed his face against the glass and watched until he could no longer see them. “I guess they’re leaving, just like they said,” he told Emma. He grinned, and Emma smiled back. Ned left the window and went up close to her, taking her chin in his hand. “Maybe you haven’t thought serious enough about this. You can still say no.”

“There won’t be any shooting, will there?”

Ned shook his head. “I’ll tell you what. If anybody’s inside the bank besides the teller, we won’t go in. The teller won’t risk his life for somebody else’s money, but the banker might. If he gets back before we have a chance to pull the job, we’ll call it off.”

“That would please Welcome.”

“What’s she got to do with it?”

“I was only making an observation.” Then Emma said, “I agree with your terms.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

Ned reached over and touched her cheek with the back of his fingers then abruptly pulled away his hand and said brusquely, “I’ll go change my clothes and come back in ten minutes.”

“I’ll be ready.”

She was. When Ned entered Emma’s room without knocking, she was dressed in men’s pants and shirt, a handkerchief knotted around her neck and a worn hat on her head that covered her hair. Ned had given her the hat, but Emma had gotten the rest of the outfit on her own. She looked like a young man, and although they would cover their faces when they went into the bank, Emma nonetheless had rubbed something on her chin that made her look as if she had a few days’ growth of beard. Ned took a gun out of his pocket and handed it to her, but Emma declined it.

“I’ve brought a revolver with me,” she said. “After all, I might have needed protection from Mr. Withers.”

“You sure are a steady one,” Ned told her, rubbing his hand over the stubble on his face. “Shoot, I don’t guess I ever met anybody so cool, even a man.” He felt nervous, as he always did before a job, and wondered if it showed.

They made their way down the stairs and out the back door of the hotel. Through the glass window of the bank, Ned could see that the banker’s chair was empty. But someone was talking to the clerk. “By zam,” he muttered. He took out the makings of a cigarette, sprinkling tobacco on a paper and licking it. Before he could put away the fixings, Emma took the tobacco bag and papers from him and made her own. Ned stared at her so long that Emma, amused, reached into her pocket for a match, which she struck on her pants’ leg, and lit her cigarette. Then she held the match for Ned. “I never saw a lady smoke a cigarette before,” he said, inhaling.

“Addie smokes.”

Ned was about to reply that Addie was not a lady, but thought better of it. The cigarette relaxed him. He and Emma would draw no more attention than any other pair of men who had stopped for a smoke.

Ned strained his neck to peer inside the bank, but it was dark, and all he could see was a black figure with his back to the window. “Hurry up,” he muttered as he finished his cigarette and threw the butt into the dirt. He didn’t want a second cigarette, but taking out the makings gave him something to do, so he rolled another. As he used his teeth to pull the string on the tobacco bag tight, he glanced at the bank again. There was movement inside. “He’s leaving,” he muttered to Emma, who had sat down on the step and was leaning forward with her arms on her knees, her back to the bank. Ned dropped the cigarette and broke it apart with his foot, then stuffed the bag into his shirt pocket. He squinted to see what was going on. “
They’re
leaving. There are two of them. Must be farmers asking for a loan. Maybe they got treated better than us.”

Of a sudden, the door of the bank was jerked open, and two men hurried out. Emma jumped up, but before she and Ned could retreat into the hotel, the Minder brothers rushed out of the bank and stopped in front of them.

Earlie narrowed his eyes at the two, then smirked. “That teller in there, he’s color-blind. He can’t tell his money from mine.” Earlie raised the gun so that it was pointed at Ned. But Ned was more concerned with the knife in Earlie’s belt, which was big and covered with blood.

Black Jesse grabbed Earlie’s arm. “You whack him down outside here, and somebody’ll hear it. Come on.”

Earlie thought that over for a few seconds. “I guess it’s your lucky day, Ned boy.” Black Jesse started down the street, but Earlie held the gun on Ned a few seconds longer, then he pointed it at Emma. “Was you going to the bank?” he asked. “They ain’t got no money left.”

“Is he dead?” Emma asked.

Earlie shrugged. “He makes sounds like a calf that’s got its throat cut.” Earlie laughed, then turned and ran after his brother, and the two turned the corner. In a few seconds, Ned heard horses galloping away.

Ned grabbed Emma’s arm and tried to pull her inside the hotel, but she resisted. “That teller, he may be dying. We ought to help.”

“And get hanged for something the Minders did? How are we going to explain what we’re doing out here and why you’re dressed like a man?”

“We can’t let him die. I can’t let a man die, not one who doesn’t deserve it.”

Ned thought that over. The teller bothered him, too.

“Give me your hat,” Emma said, reaching up and untying his neckerchief. “I’ll change clothes. You go upstairs with me, then come down the front steps and say you heard yelling at the bank.”

Ned wished he’d thought it through that way. He turned and led the way upstairs, but just as they got to Emma’s room, they heard a commotion on the street. Someone yelled, and then there were footsteps. Emma collapsed onto her bed with a sigh of relief. She looked ashy, as she put her hands to her face and seemed to shrink into herself. “I believe I am very foolish,” she said.

Ned sat beside her and put his arm around her. “It’s done with.”

“We could have been the ones who injured that man. We might have shot him.”

“We weren’t,” Ned replied. “You can’t fret about what didn’t happen.”

“We must leave.”

Ned wanted to hold her longer, but Emma was right. It was dangerous to stay. They changed their clothes and picked up their bags, and in a few minutes, they were in the lobby, where the desk clerk told them the bank had been robbed. “Two men. They knifed poor old Stingy Dan, the teller. He scratched out ‘Minder’ in blood on the floor, but myself, I heard one of the Minders was dead. My guess is it was a Minder paired up with Ned Partner. He hangs out not far from here. But a pair of old ladies could have robbed Stingy Dan. Hell, your sister here could have pulled it off.” He cocked his head at Emma and ran his tongue over his teeth.

Emma appeared only mildly annoyed. “Well, then, if farming does not work out, we shall have a new way to earn our livelihood.” Then she raised an eyebrow at the clerk. “I for one should prefer robbing hotels that overcharge.”

Ned paid four dollars for the two rooms, and he and Emma walked to the livery stable, where they collected the horses and wagons. They stopped to pick up the box of rations they had bought at Spillman & Gottschalk, for the grocery clerk would think it strange if the purchases were left behind. Then Ned took a north road out of town instead of heading east to Nalgitas. The Minders were likely to go southwest toward Santa Fe, where they were known to have kin. So the posse would go that way, too, Ned explained to Emma. But if the fool desk clerk convinced the sheriff that Ned Partner had robbed the bank, the posse would ride east toward Nalgitas. So the two of them were better off going straight north, then circling east in the morning.