Wolf Moon (10 page)

    "Something I can do for you?" Hollister said when he saw me.

    "I just rode in from town and heard that the bank was robbed."

    As I said this, Reeves turned around and faced me. His look of displeasure was deep and pure.

    "Yeah, and one of the tellers was killed. Had a gun in his cash drawer. Just a kid, too. Briney."

    Briney was the youngster who'd opened my account. The one with the rimless glasses and the altar boy smile.

    "Specifically against my orders," Reeves said. "I specifically forbid my tellers to keep guns in their drawers. I didn't want anything like this to happen."

    Reeves wasn't angry only at me. He was also angry at Lundgren and Mars. A robbery would get a town riled. But the murder of a young man would put them in the same mind as that old man I'd just seen on the street. They'd want a hanging.

    Reeves scowled at me. "What I want to know is how the robber got the key to the side door of the bank." That had troubled me, too.

    Hollister shifted forward in the chair behind his desk and started cleaning his pipe bowl with a pocketknife.

    "Reeves here thinks the robbers got the key from somebody who had access to the bank."

    "One of the employees?" I said.

    Hollister shook his head. "Huh-uh. Bank employees aren't given keys."

    "Could one of the employees have stolen it?" I said.

    "Reeves says no." Hollister spoke as if Reeves weren't here. "Says the only person with a key is himself."

    "And one other man," Reeves said, his eyes fixed on my face. "You."

    I looked at Hollister. His face was drawn and serious. "You know where the keys are, Chase?"

    "In the drawer in the back room. Where I always leave them when I finish my shift at night."

    "You never take them home?"

    "Never. You said not to."

    Hollister nodded somberly toward the back. "Why don't you go get that ring of keys and bring it up here?"

    I looked at Reeves. He was still scowling. "All right," I said.

    My bones were still aching and I was starting to cough some, but those problems were nothing compared to what I was beginning to suspect.

    In the back room, where Hollister posts the bulletins and directives for the men, I got into the desk where all the junior officers sit when they have to write out reports.

    Left side, second drawer down, I found the keys. Usually there were seventeen in all. Today there were sixteen. I counted them again, just to make sure that my nerves hadn't misled me. Sixteen. The bank key was missing.

    I sat there for a long time and thought about it. It was pure Reeves and it was pure beautiful, the way he was about to tie me in with Lundgren and Mars.

    I went back up front. I set the keys on Hollister's desk.

    He looked down at them and said, "Well, Chase?"

    "There's one missing."

    "You know which one that is?"

    "Yes, sir."

    "The bank key?"

    "Yes, sir," I said.

    "I knew it," Reeves said. "I goddamn knew it."

    "I didn't take that key, Chief."

    Hollister nodded. "I believe you, Chase, but I'm afraid Reeves here doesn't."

    I met Reeves' gaze now. There was a faint smile on his eyes and mouth. He was starting to enjoy himself. If only one person had the key to the bank other than himself, then who else could the guilty party be?

    I stood there feeling like the farm boy I was. I'd never been gifted with a devious mind. Reeves had not only robbed his own bank, he had also managed to set me up in the process-get me up and implicate me in the robbery.

    "A little later," Hollister said quietly, "you and I should talk, Chase."

    I nodded.

    "Why don't you go ahead and start your shift now?" Hollister said.

    "Yes, Chase, you do that," Reeves said. "But you can skip the bank. Thanks to you, there isn't any money left in there."

    

    

    It was a long afternoon. The sun was a bloody red ball for a time and then vanished behind the piney hills, leaving a frosty dusk. Dinner bells clanged in the shadows and you could hear the
pock-pock-pock
of small feet running down the dirt streets for home. The only warmth in the night were the voices of mothers calling in their young ones. If there was concern and a vague alarm in the voices-after all, you could never be quite sure that your child really was safe-there was also love, so much so that I wanted to be seven or eight again and heading in to the dinner table myself, for muttered Praise the Lords and some giggly talk with my giggly little sister and some of my mother's muffins and hot buttery sweet corn.

    There were a lot of fights early that night. The miners, learning that they would have no money tomorrow, demanded credit and got it and drank up a lot of the money they would eventually get. In all, I broke up four fights. One man got a bloody eye with the neck of a bottle shoved in his face, and another man got two broken ribs when he was lifted up and thrown into the bar. The miners had to take their anger out on somebody, and who was more deserving than a friend? Like most drunkards, they saw no irony in this.

    Just at seven Gillian and Annie brought my dinner, cooked beef and wheat bread. It was too cold for them to stay, so they started back right away-but not before Gillian said, "Annie, would you wait outside a minute?"

    She studied both of us. Obviously, just as I did, Annie sensed something wrong. She looked hurt and scared, and I wanted to say something to her, but when Gillian was in this kind of mood, I knew better.

    Annie went out the back door of the station, leaving Gillian and me next to the potbellied stove in the empty room.

    "There was a robbery this morning, Chase," she said.

    "So I heard."

    "Reeves' bank."

    "Right."

    "He did it again, didn't he?"

    "Did what?"

    "Did what? God, Chase, don't play dumb. You know how mad that makes me."

    "There was a robbery, yes, and it was Reeves' bank, yes, but other than that, I don't know what you're talking about."

    She studied me just as Annie had. "Chase."

    "Yeah?"

    "I made up my mind about something."

    "Oh?"

    "If you take that bank robbery money, I'm going through with what I said. About leaving you. I'm going to pack Annie and I up and go and that's a promise. I don't want our daughter raised that way."

    "He killed my two brothers."

    "Don't give me that kind of whiskey talk, Chase. Your brothers are dead and I'm sorry about that, but no matter what you do, you can't bring them back. But you can give Annie a good life, and I'm going to see that you do or I'm taking her away."

    "I love you, Gillian."

    "This isn't the right time for that kind of talk, Chase, and you know it."

    She walked to the door and turned around and looked at me. "If you break her heart, Chase, or let her down, I'm never going to forgive you."

    She went right straight out without saying another word, or giving me a chance to speak my own piece.

    

    

    The fights went on all night. A Mex took a knife to a miner who kept calling him a Mex, and two miners who should have known better got into a drunken game of Russian roulette. They both managed to miss their own heads, but they shot the hell out of the big display mirror behind the bar.

    Just at eleven, when I was finishing my second sweep of the businesses, making sure all the doors were locked, making sure that no drunken miners had sailed rocks through any of the windows, I was walking past an alley and that was when they got me.

    They didn't make any noise and they surprised me completely.

    Mars hit me on the side of the head with the butt of a.45, and Lundgren dragged me into the shadows of the alley.

    "Where's our money?" Lundgren said.

    I didn't answer. Wouldn't. Because no matter what he did to me, it wasn't going to be his money ever again.

    Mars took the first three minutes. He worked my stomach and my ribs and my chest.

    At one point I started throwing up, but that didn't slow him down any. He had a rhythm going, and why let a little vomit spoil everything?

    By the time Mars finished, I was on my knees and trying to pitch forward.

    Lundgren had better ideas.

    He grabbed me by the hair and jerked me to my feet and then started using his right knee expertly on my groin.

    He must have used it six, seven times before I couldn't scream anymore, before I let the darkness overwhelm me there in the dust that was moist with my own blood and sweat and piss…

    Just the darkness…

    

    

    Six years ago, two Maryknoll nuns on their way to California stopped through here. They stayed just long enough, I'm told, to set up an eight-bed hospital. It's nothing fancy, you understand, but there's a small surgery room in addition to the beds, and everything is white and very clean and smells of antiseptic.

    Doc Granville got me into his examination room but then had to go out to get a man some pills. Apparently, people felt comfortable stopping by at any hour. While I was in the room alone, I looked through his medical encyclopedia. There was something I needed to look up.

    When I was finished, I went back to the table and laid down and Doc Granville came in and got to work.

    He daubed some iodine on the cut across my forehead. I winced. "Hell, son, that don't hurt at all."

    "If you say so."

    "Miners do this to you? I know they're raising hell because their paychecks are going to be late."

    "I didn't get a real good look at them. But I think it was Mexes."

    "You must be at least a little bit tough."

    "Why's that?"

    "That beating you took. And you're up and around."

    I thought of mentioning what I'd just read. I decided not to. Things were complicated enough. "I'm not up and around yet."

    He laughed. "I don't hand out that many compliments, son. Just accept it with some grace and keep your mouth shut."

    I smiled at him. For all his grumpiness, he was a funny bastard, and a pretty decent man at that.

    The pain was considerable. He had me on the table with my head propped up. He'd fixed the cuts on my face and then carefully examined my ribs. They were sore. Not broken, he said, but probably bruised. I tried not to think about it.

    He was about to say something else when knuckles rapped on the white door behind him.

    "I told you I'd be out in five minutes, nurse. Now you just hold on to your britches."

    "It's not the nurse."

    And it wasn't.

    "Your boss," Granville said in a soft voice.

    I nodded.

    "They're going to hurt like a bitch when you get up, those ribs of yours."

    "I imagine."

    "Nothing I can do for it except tape it up the way I did."

    "I appreciate it."

    He went to the door and opened it.

    Hollister, in his blue serge, walked into the room with the kind of military precision and stiffness he always used when he was trying to hide the fact that he'd been drinking.

    He nodded to Granville and came straight over to me. He scowled when he saw my face.

    "What the hell happened?"

    So I told him the Mex story, the same one I'd told Granville. It was better the second time around, the way a tall tale usually is, but as I watched him, I could see he didn't believe a word of it.

    "Mexes, huh?"

    "Uh-huh."

    "Two of them."

    "Uh-huh."

    "I'm told you didn't sound your whistle," he said. "I didn't have time."

    "Or use your weapon."

    "I didn't have time for that, either."

    "They just grabbed you…"

    "Grabbed me as I was walking past an open alley."

    "And dragged you…"

    "Dragged me into the alley and-"

    "Why did they drag you into the alley?"

    "Because I saw them in the alley, fighting-one of them even had a knife-and I told them to stop, and they turned on me."

    "Just like that?"

    "Just like that."

    "Before you could do anything?"

    "Before I could do anything."

    Granville was watching me, too. He was pretending to be sterilizing some of his silver instruments, but he was really watching Hollister try to break my story.

    Hollister suddenly became aware of the doc. "You do me a favor, Doc?"

    "Sure, Ev."

    "Wait outside."

    "If you want."

    "I'd appreciate it."

    "Sure."

    Doc looked like a kid disappointed because he had to stay home while all his friends went off and did something fun.

    Doc went out and closed the door.

    Hollister didn't talk at first. He went over and picked up a straight-backed chair and set it down next to the table I was lying on. Then he took out his pipe and filled it and took out a stick match and struck it on the bottom of his boot. The room smelled briefly of phosphorous from the match head and then of sweet pipe tobacco.

    He still didn't say anything for a long time, but when he did speak, it sure was something I paid attention to.