Defiant (40 page)

Wade didn't flinch. He didn't care what Sinclair thought as long as Mary Jo wasn't tainted by him. “That's right,” he said coolly. “But I didn't count on putting them in danger. I don't want anything to happen to the kid.”

“You willing to hang for that?”

“I'm willing to let them try.”

“I still don't know why you think I should believe you. Maybe you want me to bring all the men into town, so your friends could rustle cattle or raid the ranches.”

“You have me.”

“Yeah, I do, don't I?” Sinclair said, standing. He put a hand on his six-shooter. “And you're going to stay a while. Move into that cell.”

Wade stood. “What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to think on it some,” the sheriff said laconically.

Wade's good hand clenched into a fist. He would have sworn he'd gotten through to him. Now, he wasn't sure. He hesitated. “If Kelly thinks I've been taken, he might also think I talked.”

“I'll consider that, too,” Sinclair said. “Now get inside.” His hand brought the gun from the holster and pointed it at Wade.

Wade slowly obeyed, knowing there was nothing further he could do, or say. He just hoped to hell he hadn't just condemned Mary Jo and Jeff, that he hadn't failed once again.

24

Matt Sinclair locked the cell, checked the office to make sure everything was secure, then left for the telegraph office.

He needed time to think.

He'd been raised in Kansas, was eighteen when the war started. He'd wanted to join but he was needed at home; he finally joined the Union Army in '64 when his brother was old enough to take care of the farm.

The Sinclair family's farm was in northeast Kansas, and it had escaped much of the violence that splattered blood throughout Missouri and Kansas. He'd heard enough tales, though, and had known men who'd gone through the hell of the border war. He knew about Centralia, how unarmed soldiers had been killed in cold blood, then mutilated and scalped.

He had nothing but contempt for the guerrillas on both sides, most of whom used the war as an excuse to steal and kill. And it had been his experience that such men didn't change. A conscience existed, or it didn't.

But the man called both Wade Smith and Brad Allen confused him.

Matt Sinclair considered himself a fair judge of character. A sheriff had to be. He hadn't liked Wade Smith when he'd first met him. Something about those cold, guarded eyes had alerted him, and he had the troubling sense he'd seen the face before. He'd tried to ignore the warning signals, afraid that they might be jealousy, resentment that Mary Jo Williams appeared attracted to her foreman. Now he knew the truth.

Leopards didn't change their spots, dammit. The man was pure trouble. Matt had absolutely no reason to believe him.

Nothing but the fact that Brad Allen now sat in Matt's jail when he could have easily killed Matt and escaped.

For the life of him, he couldn't figure what the man had to gain in jail that he couldn't gain outside it. Except Matt's trust. Matt sure as hell wouldn't have released someone like Shepherd on a stranger's say-so.

So Brad Allen, alias Wade Smith, was a smart son of a bitch.

Matt went to the telegraph office and sent three wires, one to the sheriff in Texas who'd sent out the last poster on Clay Kelly, one to a fellow lawman in Lake City for help, and one to the U.S. Marshal's office requesting the status of Brad Allen.

The telegraph operator looked at him strangely, but didn't ask questions. He'd learned long ago he wouldn't get any answers.

Then Matt walked to the largest of the two saloons in town. “Any strangers around?”

“Just that new foreman from Mrs. Williams' place.”

“Let me know if you see any others.” Matt sighed. He wished he had time to ride out to Mary Jo's, but she was half a day's ride away. He had stopped thinking of her as Mrs. Williams months ago, although he still called her that publicly. In his mind, though, she was Mary Jo, and the stranger's easy use of that name irked him as much as the blow across his head. He shook away the thought and went over to the bank.

Sam Pearson was owner and president of the Last Chance Merchants and Farmers Bank, and he was bent over some ledgers, while a clerk counted figures at the counter. There were no customers.

“You have a lot of cash now?” Matt asked, not bothering with formalities.

“Enough,” Sam said. “The ranchers deposited their cattle money here.”

“Is there any other place you could put it? Besides your safe?”

“Barton at the general store has a good safe. So do you. Mind me asking why?”

It suddenly crossed Matt's mind that maybe this was what Allen or Smith or whoever he was wanted: the money placed in a more accessible spot.

“I'm not sure,” Matt said slowly. “I'm hearing rumors that an outlaw named Clay Kelly's in the area. He likes banks.”

Sam blanched. “You know what that would mean to the town?”

“Hell, yes, I know.”

“How sure are you?”

Matt hesitated. “Enough that I'm going to put a posse together to guard the bank for the next several days.” He surprised himself at the commitment. Until this minute he hadn't been sure he believed the prisoner in his jail. “I've also sent for some extra help, but it might take several days to get here.”

“I'll disperse the cash around, make some payroll deliveries early to the ranches.”

Matt nodded. “But don't tell them why. I don't want anyone to know but those on the posse. If Kelly comes, I want a surprise.” He hesitated, then added as insurance, “And you don't want a run on the bank.”

“This doesn't have anything to do with the prisoner you're holding, does it?”

“Shepherd?” Matt said, realizing suddenly that no one knew his original prisoner had been broken out of jail. He shrugged. “I'm not sure. Just disperse as much cash as you can. Starting in the morning, I'll have men posted all over the town. We'll get them trying to go into the bank.”

Sam Pearson nodded.

Matt had a dozen questions in his mind now for the man in his jail. Dammit, he believed him. He didn't want to, but he did.

He stopped by the boarding house and picked up two meals, one for himself and one for his prisoner. He wanted answers, lots of them, and then it was going to be a very long afternoon. He wished the ache in his head would go away. He felt the bump again. It was tender as hell. He had Allen to thank for that.

Wade had never been in a cell before. He'd never known how crushing it could be to the spirit, locked like an animal in such a small space. He'd better get used to it, he told himself.

What really made it unbearable was his helplessness. Why had he ever thought he could trust Sinclair?

He kept seeing Mary Jo's face, and Jeff's, and Kelly's leering one. He should have just told Mary Jo to take her money from the bank, and the hell with the rest of the town. She wouldn't have done that, though. He knew that.

Wade cursed Matt Sinclair and he cursed himself. He was too worried to sit down on the iron cot with its inch-thick mattress. He investigated the lock, thinking he should have done that before giving his gun to Sinclair.

How could he have been so wrong? But the man had seemed to be listening, and Wade had so few options. If only his arm were functioning, but that was like wishing the sun was blue. It wasn't, and nothing was going to make it so.

He heard a key turn in the front door of the jail, and he leaned against the bars. He didn't care if he looked anxious or not, desperate or not. By God, he was!

Sinclair entered loaded down with a tray. He put it on the desk, then took a sandwich over to Wade. Wade just stared at it, refusing it.

“Take it,” Sinclair said. “We have a lot to talk about.”

Wade obeyed reluctantly, taking the food in his good hand, watching warily as the sheriff poured some coffee from the pot on the cookstove and set the cup down on the cell floor. Then the lawman pulled his chair up close to the bars and plopped down in it with his own sandwich. “How many men are with Kelly?”

Wade released a long breath. He started pacing, mindless of the sandwich in his hand. “Four now with Shepherd. Two young gunnies. Seem real eager with their guns.”

“Would they go in shooting?”

“These would. Kelly enjoys killing.”

“And you, Allen, you enjoy killing?”

Wade stopped in mid-stride.

“I'm from Kansas,” Sinclair said quietly. “I know what Anderson did there.”

Wade felt the familiar sickness of soul. “Kansas and Missouri were both pits of hell,” he said tonelessly. “My entire family was wiped out by Jayhawkers, my mother and sister raped before they were murdered. I did my share of killing. I won't lie to you about that, and I don't excuse myself.” He clenched his teeth together. He didn't want to talk about it, but he had to make Sinclair believe him, and the truth was the only damn option. “There was some satisfaction at first,” he added slowly, trying hard to be honest with himself. “Maybe even some pleasure. I don't know. I just knew how angry I was, how … I needed to avenge my family.” He hesitated. “That went away, but not fast enough,” he said. “I'll always regret what happened back then. I've tried damn hard to forget it, but I can't and I never will.”

There was a long silence, then Sinclair continued his questions about Kelly. How might he strike? From what end of town? How many men would he send inside?

“You don't want to wait until he's inside, or he'll kill everyone there,” Wade said. “He doesn't leave witnesses.”

Sinclair raised his eyebrows. “You were friends?”

“I said I rode with him. I also rode with Jesse and Frank James, the Cole brothers. We were all with Quantrill and occasionally with Anderson, but that didn't particularly make us friends.”

“When is the last time you saw him?”

“I left Anderson after Centralia.”

“Why?”

“That's personal.”

“Not anymore,” Sinclair said. “I don't know how far I can trust you. You're asking me to put a lot of faith in a man on a wanted poster, who walked in here and used a gun on my head.”

Wade's hand gripped the bar. He was being asked to expose everything he'd buried inside for so long. He hadn't been able to tell Chivita, nor Mary Jo, hadn't been able to put his capacity for violence into words. Not while that violence still existed inside him, and it
had
lingered, exploding again when Chivita and Drew were killed. It was alive even now. He wanted to kill Kelly with his own hands for threatening Mary Jo. God, he hated admitting what kind of man he was. But he needed Matt Sinclair, and Sinclair wasn't going to accept evasion. “Because I was turning into the same kind of animal as those Jayhawkers who killed my family.”

Sinclair rose from the chair and walked away from him. Wade watched as he poured himself another cup of coffee. Wade knew he was thinking, assessing, wondering how far he could trust one of Anderson's guerrillas, a butcher like other butchers. He felt a chill run through him; he could never put that damn past behind him.

“How old were you?” Sinclair finally asked.

Wade was momentarily stunned by the question, then he shrugged. He'd surrendered his privacy when he walked in here. “Fifteen when they raided our farm,” he said.

“That when you joined Quantrill?”

Wade hesitated. “The next year, but I'd been hunting for someone like him.”

“And since the war?”

“I've been trying to get away from the war, from what happened then,” Wade said flatly, without excuse. “Moving around, mostly in the mountains. Hunting. Rounding up wild horses and breaking them for trade.” Then he remembered his lie about Denver. “I went into Denver occasionally for supplies.” He wasn't going to mention the Utes, or Chivita. The way most folks felt, that would only condemn him. Ordinarily, he wouldn't care, but …

Sinclair's eyes bored into him, and Wade realized the lawman knew he was holding something back. “You wouldn't know anything about a miner found dead a month ago?”

“No,” Wade lied, afraid that admission would hurt Mary Jo, hurt his believability, but God, he hated lying again.

Sinclair was good at his job. Very good, a hell of a lot better than Wade had expected. He kept changing the subject, throwing questions apparently at random but boring in, inch by inch.

“Would Kelly expect you back?”

Sinclair was offering him a way out of this cell. Wade wanted to take it. Christ, he wanted to take it. Already, he felt suffocated by his confinement. He thought about spending the rest of his life in a cage, if, that was, he didn't hang.

He locked his jaw together for a moment. “No,” he finally admitted. “I don't know where he is, and we don't particularly care for each other. He thinks I want a share of the money, but he expects me to find him later.”

“Trusting sort, are you?” There was doubt in the lawman's voice.

“He doesn't think he gave me a choice. If I didn't do what he wanted, he was going to find a way to tell you just who I was, and then he would go after Mary Jo. He suggested I just come in and slip Shepherd a gun.”

“You could have.”

“And you would be dead.”

“That would bother you?”

“I told you I didn't want any more innocent blood on my hands.” Anger shaded Wade's words now. He was tired of talking, of being forced to talk about matters he wanted to forget.

“I don't think you did say that,” Sinclair said, milking him again. “Not exactly.”

“Damn it, enough about me. What are you going to do?”

Sinclair just sat back. “What would you suggest?”

“An ambush as they come in.”

“More killing?”

Wade swallowed hard, trying to control that anger of his. “Kelly's a coward at heart. They all are. Put enough guns on them and they'll surrender.”