Slocum's Breakout (17 page)

“I have heard from friends in Miramar,” Murrieta said. “The sheriff is angry with Conchita for leading him on this wild-goose chase. He ordered her away.”

“Maybe now he'll stop listening to her,” Slocum said. “That'll make my life easier.” He shuffled the stacks of bills around on the table. “I ought to have known better than to think they'd hand over very much. There's hardly two hundred dollars here.”

“It will be enough?” Maria's eagerness dampened Slocum's triumph a little.

“Can't say. Depends on what Durant can do with it. Will any judge be bribed for two hundred dollars in greenbacks?”

“Judge Ralston might. He gambles often but not well,” Maria said. She clung to Slocum's arm. “What if we need more?”

“That'll be up to your lawyer to let us know. Might be this kind of money would bribe a guard at the prison.” Slocum felt the bile rise and burn at the back of his throat. Having any further dealings around San Quentin gave him the collywobbles. He wanted nothing more than to be done with this, Atencio free, and him on the road to Oregon or just about anywhere else.

“Procipio has sent for him. He will be here soon.”

Slocum started to suggest a way to spend the time before the lawyer arrived when he heard a buggy rattling along the rocky road leading into the village. He scooped up the bills and tucked them into his coat pocket. Letting a lawyer see money before things got spelled out was always a mistake. They focused on the money and nothing more.

Slocum laughed wryly. In some ways, lawyers and the Valenzuela family were alike. Dangle money in front of them and they looked for the most devious way possible to grab it.

“I'm a busy man. This had better be good, Murrieta.” Durant pushed past Procipio and stood in the small room looking belligerent.

“How are you coming with getting Atencio out of prison?” Slocum asked. Durant was a busy man. He said so. There was no need for pleasantries—or politeness.

“I can't find a judge to issue a longer stay of execution or to go along with the idea that he's been hanged once so he can't be hanged twice for the same crime.”

“What about getting the banker to say he was wrong identifying Atencio as a horse thief?”

Durant waved his hand about, as if shooing away horseflies.

“Galworthy is too caught up in putting a new vault in his bank. He's tired of getting robbed, he says. Doesn't say a thing about how he robs anyone who puts money in or those he loans to.”

“So you've given up trying?” Slocum winced as Maria's fingernails cut into his arm. She wanted to blurt out her anger but instead clawed at his arm, letting him do the talking.

“There's only so much I can do, and everyone is starting to ridicule me. There wasn't any evidence against Atencio save that of the banker's eyewitness testimony. Galworthy's come out and said all you people look the same to him.” Durant stared at Maria, putting the lie to that. “A man shot up the bank, broke the window, and then took Galworthy's own horse and rode away.”

“Galworthy only saw the horse thief from behind?” Slocum asked.

“I tried to bring that out in the trial, but the judge wouldn't let the jury hear it. Banker Hezekiah Galworthy is a fine, upstanding man and pillar of the community so if he said Atencio stole a horse, that was good enough.”

“He was not even in Miramar when this happened,” Maria said, finally unable to contain herself. “He was here. In this village.”

“Out in the fields working?” asked Durant.

“No,” Maria said reluctantly. “He was in bed.”

“So he was too sick to even be in Miramar,” Slocum said. “There weren't any other witnesses?”

“None. And Galworthy and Atencio were feuding. The animosity stretched back a month or more over payment on his mortgage. Everybody knew that.” Durant heaved a shuddery sigh. “I can't get elected dog catcher after this. My career is damned near at an end.”

“Can you bribe a judge?” Slocum asked flat out when he saw Durant begin to shift his weight from one foot to the other, getting ready to leave.

“That's highly irregular, not to mention illegal.”

“How much would it take to get Atencio's sentence commuted?” Slocum watched the lawyer closely.

Durant looked from Slocum to Murrieta blocking the doorway, then back. He rubbed his hands on the sides of his coat. Slocum didn't see the outline of a six-gun or smaller pistol, though the lawyer obviously wanted a weapon in his hands right about now.

“I don't know. That's something you have to edge around. Invite them for a drink. Feel out their needs.”

“Heard tell Judge Ralston has big gambling losses.” Slocum pulled out the wad of greenbacks and put them on the table in front of him where Durant could see.

The lawyer licked his lips, rubbed his hands some more, and finally came to some sort of a decision. From the way the man's face went blank, Slocum knew playing poker with Durant would be a sure way to lose. For all his nervousness before, he was dead calm now and unreadable.

“There might be a tad of truth in that,” Durant said. “After a drink or two he becomes, shall we say, aggressive in his betting. That aggression is seldom coupled with luck. Or skill.”

Slocum held up the stack of bills, riffled through them, then held them out. Durant made the greenbacks disappear as if by magic.

“It might take a few days for me to put this money to good use.”

“Don't go taking too long,” Slocum said. “Atencio is due to swing real soon.”

“Yes, there is that,” Durant said. “I'll do what I have to for him.”

“You'll get him out,” Slocum said, an edge coming to his voice.

“Sir, that might not be possible. For this amount of money, stopping the hanging might be the full extent of what I can do. Better to be sentenced to life in San Quentin than to die within those walls.”

“No!” Maria cried out and started around the table. Slocum stopped her with an arm around her waist.

“Let him do what he can. If Atencio's sentence is changed, we can work on a pardon later.”

“Yes, that's right,” Durant said, his face still an emotionless mask. “There'll be all the time in the world then.”

The lawyer nodded brusquely, pushed past Murrieta, and in a few minutes the clatter of his buggy along the rocky road disappeared, leaving only the normal sounds of the farming village behind.

“All we can do is wait,” Slocum told Maria and Murrieta. The words tasted like ash on his tongue. He wasn't one for waiting. He wanted to be doing something, but for once he had to let someone else do the work even if he didn't like it.

“He is gone,” cried Procipio Murrieta. “I have looked, others have sought him, but he is gone!”

“What are you talking about?” Slocum had the cold knot in his gut that he knew what Murrieta was saying but needed to hear it spelled out.

“Durant has taken the money and left. He sold his buggy and horse, took the ferry to Oakland, and is gone!”

“Son of a bitch,” Slocum muttered. He ground his teeth together as he let anger wash over him. Never trust a shyster. By now he ought to know that and yet had let Durant waltz away with the money that might have sprung Atencio from prison if they had bribed a guard. Now they had nothing, and Atencio again was due to hang in two days.

“We should never have trusted him,” Murrieta said.

“He was your lawyer,” Slocum pointed out. He immediately regretted having spoken. It wasn't Murrieta's fault. It was Durant's for being a slimy maggot. By now, Durant could be a hundred miles away. More. He could have caught a train and be on the other side of the Sierras by now, far out of reach of retribution for his theft.

“There is no chance he goes there to find a way to free Atencio?” Maria asked. She had been working in the field and was covered with fresh earth.

“Gomez told me of the sale of the buggy and horse. Durant said he had important business back East.”

“He might have needed the money to add to what John gave him,” Maria said.

She fell silent when she saw the expressions on Murrieta's and Slocum's faces.

“How do you get him out?” Murrieta asked.

Slocum had no answer. San Quentin was a fortress filled with guards. He had sneaked in once as a prisoner and another time as a guard. There wasn't any way in hell he'd try either of those subterfuges again. Unable to pace as he thought, he left the small house and went out into the bright sunlight. A few white clouds worked their way in from over the ocean. Otherwise nothing disturbed the broad blue expanse overhead. A few seagulls vented their wrath at not having enough to eat—they never got enough.

They never got enough
rattled over and over in Slocum's head. He had to stop now. If he kept on, he would not only fail to free Atencio but would end up a prisoner again. It didn't matter if Wilkinson locked him up as Jasper Jarvis or John Slocum. To be in San Quentin again would mean his eventual death.

“John, where are you going?” Maria came from the house, wiping her hands on a rag.

“I need to think.”

“Of ways to free Atencio?”

She recoiled at his black look. He began walking, not sure where he went but wanting to be away from the village and all its hardworking men and women. They struggled to grow their beans and wanted nothing more than to live quietly, raise families, and . . .

And not be locked up in San Quentin on trumped-up charges.

He came to a path leading to the top of a low hill. He trooped to the summit and then sat on a rock, staring across the cultivated fields. Some were brown from lack of irrigation but many were producing good crops. He remembered his home in Calhoun, Georgia, and how the family had farmed. Grains, mostly, and alfalfa for the livestock. Those had been good days before the war.

His family was long dead. He pulled his watch from his vest pocket and looked at it, case closed. This was his only legacy from his brother, Robert. Robert had been the good hunter. Slocum had tried to match his accuracy and stealthiness and had usually come up shy of that ideal. Robert had died during Pickett's Charge. All the marksmanship and woodsmanship in the world wouldn't have saved him once he started marching into the Federal guns.

Slocum wasn't going to keep barking up the tree—the tree where Atencio would be hanged. He didn't know the man and only owed Murrieta the effort to get his friend free from San Quentin because of how he had sacrificed himself in the first escape. There had to be an end, and Slocum had reached it.

He went into a crouch and had his Colt out of the holster at the faint crunch of a foot turning a rock behind him.

“You are very fast,” Maria said. “Your aim is good also, I suspect.”

“You shouldn't have followed.”

“I had to, John, I had to. Atencio means the world to me, to Procipio, to the entire village.” She moved forward, as silent as a ghost now. He wondered if her tiny feet ever touched the earth. She had cleaned up and put on a fresh blouse. Her billowing skirt needed serious cleaning after her work in the fields, but he suspected she did not have another. Not for everyday use. He was sure she had a fancy Sunday-go-to-meeting dress, but there was no call for such wear now.

“I've done all I can. I can track down Durant and try to get the money back, but time's running out.”

“Two days,” she said sadly. Maria moved closer and reached out to touch his cheek. “You have done all you could. I am sure Procipio will release you from your promise.”

That stung him. He jerked away and stared out over the valley and its neat fields of growing pinto beans. Some men made promises and forgot them right away. Slocum kept his. Having Maria tell him Murrieta would relieve him of his word, freely given, burned like a knife wound in his gut.

“What else can I do?”

“There is nothing,” she said. “You are so very clever to have saved Atencio. But you are going?”

“Yes.” He saw no reason to lie. Breaking his promise was bad enough.

“It is for the best. The sheriff hunts you, the guards from San Quentin seek you out, and even the Valenzuelas would kill you if they find you. There is no one here to keep you safe.”

Maria moved closer. Her lush body pressed into his back as her arms circled his waist and held him close. He found it increasingly difficult to simply stand. Her fingers pressed lower, beneath the buckle of his gun belt, moving slowly, carefully, stimulating and making him increasingly uncomfortable trapped in his jeans.

Slocum gasped when she unfastened his gun belt and let it drop to the ground, then began working on the buttons holding his fly together. When he sprang free, warm air surrounding his rigid manhood, he sighed with relief. Then he gasped again as her fingers circled him and began exerting a steady pressure all around. The warmth of her hand, the way she knew exactly where to touch him, made Slocum steely hard.

He ran his hands back along hers, up her wrists, and stroked her bare forearms. She pressed her cheek against his back. He felt her soft breathing become increasingly harsh as she moved her body against his.

He turned slowly in the circle of her arms. He was reluctant to have her release her hold on him but knew there was more, better, waiting. He kissed her upturned face. Her lips, her eyes, down to a shell-like ear. His tongue lightly ran around the rim. Maria sighed with the feathery light touch.

Slocum groaned as he felt her hands return to work on his erection again.

Continuing to pioneer his trail of wet kisses, he followed her jaw and went to her slender throat. From there he burrowed lower, popping open the crisp white blouse and finding the nut-colored breasts waiting so enticingly for him. He sucked one nipple into his mouth and tongued it. This produced a heartfelt moan of desire. He quickly left that nipple and went to the other. After giving it the same treatment, he buried his face between her breasts. The warm, sleek flesh on either side of his face aroused him. He worked lower.