Longarm 242: Red-light (14 page)

“Sure, Ben. Whatever you say.”
You bastard.

“I believe I'll have me another drink, and then I got to be goin‘, sweetheart. You know me—I got places to go and things to be doin'.”

Nola reached for the bottle and the glass. Mallory was looking at her expectantly as he waited for her to pour the drink. Cool and calm despite the pain she felt and the storm of emotions that was raging inside her, Nola did just that.

She didn't spill a drop.

 

Longarm was dressed and sitting in one of the comfortable armchairs in Nola's room, reading the rest of the newspaper. He glanced up as she came in, then lowered the paper and looked again at her, feeling his insides go taut with fury. The bruises on her face told the story plain as day.

Somebody had slapped the hell out of her.

“Mallory,” he said. Somehow, he just knew.

Nola nodded and took a deep, shaky breath. “I know you must've come here after Mallory, Custis,” she said. “And I'm ready to do anything you want to help you get him. Anything at all.”

When she had told him what had happened downstairs, Longarm didn't see any point in keeping the truth from Nola any longer. “You're right,” he told her. “I came here looking for Mallory and his gang because they've been holding up stagecoaches and stealing silver shipments from the mailbags.” He held up the copy of the
Bugle
so that she could see the headline. “He was busy doing just that the past couple of days, and I reckon that's why it took him until now to come in here and rough you up for shooting his man the other day.”

Nola took a deep breath. “I knew he was a bastard. I knew he was an outlaw. I didn't know he was such a cold-blooded killer, too. But I don't have any trouble believing it,” she added grimly. “Not one bit.”

Longarm stood up, went to her, put his hands on her shoulders. “I'm sorry about what he did to you.”

“No need for you to be sorry,” she said with a shake of her head. “You didn't have anything to do with this, Custis. I can see how you might feel bad about Mrs. Keegan and even Dupree, but you didn't have anything to do with Mallory slapping me around. That was just him being a no-good bastard, as usual.”

Longarm nodded. “I reckon you're right.”

“Well. What do we do now?”

“We
don't do anything. But it's time that I got back to my job, which is bringing in Mallory and recovering as much of the stolen loot as I can.”

“I can help you do that when the time comes,” said Nola, “but you're not ready yet, Custis. It's been less than a week since you were shot.”

“I just lost a little blood,” he protested. “That bullet didn't scramble up my insides none.”

“You still need to get more of your strength back before you go after Mallory.” Nola smiled suddenly, as if an idea had just occurred to her. “And I can help by finding out where he's stashed the silver the gang has already stolen.”

Longarm frowned. “How are you going to do that?”

Lightly, Nola touched her bruised cheek. “You wouldn't believe it to look at me now,” she said, “but Mallory's got a soft spot where I'm concerned. All I have to do is let him think I'm sorry about what happened with his men, and he'll forget all about being mad at me. Once he's feeling friendly again, I can get the information out of him, I promise you that.”

The furrows on Longarm's forehead deepened. “I ain't sure I like the sound of that,” he said.

“Custis, I'm a whore, remember?” she said bluntly. “Worse men than Mallory have bedded me. It doesn't have anything to do with ... with you and me.”

Longarm grimaced, but he knew she was at least partially right. “I ain't sure there
is
anybody worse than Mallory,” he muttered.

“Oh, yes,” she said, and for a moment he heard the hollowness of memory in her voice. “Ben Mallory is an evil bastard and doesn't care who knows it. He doesn't hide his evil behind a face that pretends to care—”

She caught her breath and turned away sharply. Longarm wanted to hug her and tell her it would be all right, but he let the distance between them remain. Sometimes folks just had to be alone with their pain, and he sensed that this was one of those times.

When she turned back to him a moment later, her eyes shone brightly, as if tears lurked there. Her cheeks were dry, however. “Right now I think you should lie down and rest some more,” she said briskly. “For now, you just let me worry about Mallory. By the time you've recovered, we'll be ready to make our move.”

Grudgingly, he nodded. “All right. But you be mighty careful. It would probably be a good idea, too, not to mention who I really am or what we're up to when you're talking to those gals of yours.”

“You mean Angie and Rafaela and Mickey?” Nola smiled. “They think you're some sort of outlaw, that Mallory's men were after you because you were trying to move in on their territory. It would probably be best to let them keep on believing that.”

Longarm nodded again. “I wish I could get word to my boss about what's going on, too. I reckon ol' Billy's getting pretty worried by now, even though he wouldn't admit it. But it'd be too chancy to risk a telegram.”

“There's no telegraph service here anyway,” said Nola. “But you could write a letter if you'd like. Is there anyone you could send it to who would deliver it for you, so that you wouldn't have to address it to the chief marshal?”

Longarm grinned. He knew the address of Henry's rooming house, knew that the young man could be depended upon to pass along a message to Billy Vail. “That's a good idea,” he told Nola.

“I'll bring you paper and a pen.” She pointed at the bed. “Now rest!”

He put a finger under her chin and tilted her head up so that he could kiss her. “Yes'm,” he murmured against her lips. “You're right—I got to get my strength back.”

For more reasons than one,
he thought.

Mallory didn't come back into the Silver Slipper that evening, but he showed up again the next afternoon, once more in an expansive mood. It was snowing lightly outside, and as Mallory entered the saloon, he took his hat off and slapped the white flakes from it. With a grin, he called loudly, “Drinks are on me!”

That was Mallory's way, Nola thought as she stood at the end of the bar. He ruled Galena City through a combination of largess and sheer terror. He was like an old-time king or emperor whose word was law, who might be generous one minute and the next minute might order someone's head cut off.

She put a smile on her face. The bruises were still there, but they had been covered up with cosmetics today. She moved toward him, and when he noticed her, he threw his arms wide and grinned at her. “Nola! My favorite saloon-keeper!”

She allowed him to embrace her and willed her muscles to relax, rather than tensing in the revulsion that she really felt. “Hello, Ben,” she murmured.

“No hard feelin's about what happened yesterday, are there?” he asked.

“Of course not. You were right, and I was wrong.”

He kissed her, then said, “That's what I like to hear.”

She could feel the eyes of her bartenders and the women who worked for her watching her to see how she was going to handle Mallory. They would take their cues from her. But she knew that they would be at least a little disappointed to see her knuckling under to him.

That couldn't be helped. When the time was right, they would know how she really felt about him. Everyone would know, including Ben Mallory himself. It would be quite a surprise, and she hoped he would take that surprise with him to hell.

“Have a drink with me?” asked Mallory.

“Of course. I'd be glad to.” Nola signaled to one of the bartenders, and he put a bottle on the bar in front of her. The whiskey wasn't the usual Who-hit-John, either. It was the good stuff, the stuff that actually matched the label on the bottle. Nola smiled at Mallory and suggested, “Why don't we go over to a table and sit down?”

“That sounds mighty fine to me.” He put his arm around her shoulders as she picked up the bottle and a couple of glasses and headed for a table in the corner. As they walked, he reached down and brazenly fondled her breast through her dress.

Nola hoped he couldn't hear her teeth grating together.

They sat down, Mallory hooking one of the chairs with his foot so that he could pull it over close to the one where Nola sat. She eased the cork from the neck of the bottle and poured drinks for them. Mallory picked up his and looked at her expectantly, and she realized he was waiting for her to join him in a toast. She lifted her glass.

Mallory clinked them together. “To good times,” he said.

“To good times,” echoed Nola.
Let's see ... that would be looking down at your sorry corpse.

He could see none of that thought on her face. She'd had years of experience at hiding what she was really feeling, going all the way back to the time when she was a child and—

No, she told herself, she had enough to worry about now without going back that far in her memory. She smiled, sipped the whiskey, and asked, “What have you been doing lately, Ben? We haven't seen as much of you around here as usual.”

“I'm a busy man, you know that. Always got plenty to do.”

“So I've heard.”

He frowned, and for a second she worried that she had gone too far. “What do you mean by that?” he demanded.

“Just that everyone talks about what a clever man you are, and how strong, too, the way you keep those men of yours in line.”

That was laying it on awfully thick, but Mallory had always been susceptible to flattery. It worked this time, too, as he grinned and said, “Yep, I reckon I'm pretty smart, and I don't let anybody get away with crossin' me. That's why I had to rough you up a little. People got to show me the proper respect.”

Nola nodded and said, “That's right. And the stronger you are, the more money you have, the more people respect you.”

Mallory tossed off the rest of the drink and poured himself another one. “Damn right. I reckon you've heard the old saying about the golden rule.”

Nola arched her eyebrows curiously.

“Him that has the gold, rules!” Mallory cackled and slapped the table with an open hand. The slap sounded almost like a gunshot. He was clearly delighted with himself. He leaned back in his chair and tilted the glass to his lips again, and when he lowered it, he said, “Only in my case, it's silver I got plenty of, not gold.”

“What did you do, buy a mine?”

“Hell, you ought to know better'n that, Nola! Do you really think I'm goin' to grub around in a hole in the ground to dig the stuff up when I can wait for somebody else to do it for me?”

Nola allowed a worried look to appear on her face. She didn't want to seem too curious about his business. “Maybe you'd better not tell me any more, Ben. I might be better off not knowing.”

“I'll tell you anything I want,” he snapped. He wasn't happy about her trying to stop his boasting. “The same way as I take anything I want. The fellas who run those mines thought they were so damned smart, hidin' their silver in mailbags and shippin' it out on the stagecoaches. Well, I showed 'em how smart they really are! That silver they worked so hard for is mine now, and I got it stashed where they'll never find it!”

He polished off the second drink, tipped the bottle and splashed more whiskey into the glass. Nola had never seen him really drunk, but whiskey did loosen his tongue to a certain extent. She had been counting on that tendency, and it was holding true so far. If she could keep him drinking, that and his sheer arrogance might be enough to make him reveal the things she wanted to know.

She nodded and said, “I figured you might have a hideout somewhere up in the mountains.”

“Yeah, it's a place where nobody can bother us. Not the whites, not the Paiutes, not anybody alive. And I never been afraid of dead folks!”

Nola wasn't sure what he meant by that, but at least it was a start. He had admitted that he and his gang were responsible for the silver robberies, and he had given her a hint as to where the stolen loot was hidden. When she reported this conversation to Custis, maybe he could figure out what Mallory meant.

Mallory threw back his third drink, then surprised her by reaching over and grasping her wrist. “I'm tired of talkin',” he said. “Why don't we go upstairs?”

Despite her brave words to Custis about being bedded by worse men than Mallory, Nola's skin crawled at the thought of letting him have her again after what he had done. She forced a bright smile onto her face and used her free hand to nudge the bottle closer to Mallory.