Territory (51 page)

“Just a couple of pressing questions.”

“You hidin’ a badge? If you are, I’d keep hidin’ it. Unless you got a dozen deputies outside.”

Jesse laughed. “I’m no lawman. I’ve got a story he can straighten out for me, is all.”

Clanton tossed the rest of the second drink down. Even in the gloom, his cheeks and nose showed red. “Jim ain’t very obliging.”

“And he doesn’t sound like a man I’d want to disoblige. I’d do what I could to make it worth his while, though.”

Clanton opened his mouth as if to ask what with, but shut it again. No one riding alone on the border would answer a question like that.

“Need another?” Jesse asked, nodding at Clanton’s glass.

Clanton shook his head regretfully. “Nah, I’m high enough to see in the window. How long you ’round for?”

“I leave at first light. What is it, thirty miles to Cloverdale? I’ll ask again there.”

“Well, if I hear anything about Jim before then, I’ll pass it on.”

“Mighty good of you. Nice to meet you again, Mr. Clanton.”

In the ice cream parlor in Tombstone, Jesse had shaken Wyatt Earp’s hand. Mildred had given Earp some ridiculous tale about mess, and hadn’t. They’d seen the rest of the encounter differently. Jesse put out his hand, and Clanton took it.

He hadn’t expected the strength of Clanton’s handshake, or the calluses. How did this work? Not taking, not this time. How to gather honesty and good intentions and deliver them out through his skin—

Clanton smiled. “Well met anytime, Mr. Fox.”

It might have worked; he couldn’t tell. He put his hat on and headed for his room and its unpromising bed.

The sky was still gray when Jesse led Sam out of a stall the next morning. He almost wished he hadn’t slept so soundly; whatever position he’d ended up in had left him sore in every muscle. He felt Sam’s legs to see if he suffered anything similar, but there was no heat or swelling there.

As he snugged up the front cinch, he saw movement at the stable yard gate. He looked past Sam’s nose to see Ike Clanton coming toward him.

“Guess I damn near missed you.” Clanton’s heartiness rang a little hollow. “Still mean to find Jim?”

“I do. Thought of anything that might help?”

Clanton shook his head. “Ask in Cloverdale—I can’t do better than that. You could do me a favor, though.”

“I’ll try.”

Clanton took a leather pouch out of his coat pocket. “I been keepin’ this for Jim. Seems like you got as much chance to come on him as any, and more than most. Would you pass it along?”

The pouch was moose or elk hide, thick and scarred. The contents shifted and clinked, heavy in Jesse’s palm. He raised his eyebrows at Clanton.

Clanton flushed. “It’s to get him out of the country.”

“You trust me with it?”

“Ain’t you trustworthy?”

Jesse hefted the pouch. “Oh, yes.”

“If you don’t find him, I guess you better fetch it back to me. I’ll be in Tombstone for a couple-few days. But likely you’ll find him.” Clanton tugged his hat brim and hurried away.

Jesse stared at the sack of money in his hand and sighed.
This is what happens when you meddle with people’s minds.

John Gray was away from his house. His ranch foreman shook his heavy head and grinned when Jesse asked about Crane. “Ain’t you heard?” the foreman asked. “The fellow’s a wanted criminal.” Whatever was involved in the “trust me” hex, it didn’t seem to work every time. Jesse smiled and thanked him and turned Sam’s nose south and west toward Cloverdale.

He’d sleep rough again; there wasn’t enough of the long twilight left to reach town in. The sky above him was a luminous deep purple, with little clouds like rabbit scut dyed orange dotting the western horizon.

Until Clanton gave him the bag of money, Jesse had managed not to think about what he really wanted. He could find Crane, and decide then. Crane might not even be Lung’s murderer, and he wouldn’t have to decide at all. The chickens could stay uncounted.

But the weight of the leather bag in his pocket clarified things. He wanted Jim Crane dead. He wanted him to know he was about to die, as Lung must have known. He didn’t want Crane to get away, and he didn’t want to carry the money that could help him do it. Assuming Jesse could find him by riding blind through the benighted wilderness at the tip of Arizona Territory.

Except he wasn’t blind.

Jesse squinted at the rough track that led away from Gray’s ranch. Something like a scarf of mist lay above the ground. It disappeared one moment, then reappeared the next, like a hawk turning in a clear sky.

He urged Sam forward. The horse’s knees touched the wisp of light and it vanished. But there was more ahead, curling down the track and out of sight.

It could be mist—but the evening wind didn’t stir it.

I miss the night vision,
he’d said to Lung. And Lung had told him to summon it, as if it could be called like a dog.

At the memory, anger and grief flashed in him like a struck match; he snuffed them as well as he could. Lung would have enjoyed seeing Jesse forced to accept everything he’d told him.

“Here, boy,” he whispered. It didn’t work, of course.

He concentrated on the trail of light ahead, willed it to grow stronger, surer. The effort made him squeeze his eyes shut—

When he opened them, the world was an image printed on silver. Underexposed, but brighter, sharper than a full-moon night. The track ahead showed wheel ruts, stones, puddles, and clear footing. A ringtail shot across the path—a flash from its eyes, a flick of its tail—and disappeared into the brush.

But the wisp of light was still frail and faint. He laughed softly. What would Lung have had to say about that? He nudged Sam forward, following the streak of light that might, or might not, be Jim Crane’s trail.

Judging by the stars, it was next to morning. Was Crane going into Mexico? For all Jesse could tell, he might be across the border. The dry ravines and scrub oaks didn’t distinguish between nations.

Light flickered ahead, reflected up the face of a bluff. A campfire.

Jesse dismounted, led Sam into a hollow in the rocks, and tied him. He took the boxes of cartridges from his saddlebags and put one in each coat pocket.

The rifle would look damned unfriendly if he walked into the camp with it. But he didn’t want his last thought in life to be, “Well, that was stupid.” He slid the rifle out of its scabbard and tucked it under his arm.

Closer in, he heard men’s voices and the rustle of the fire. He also heard the small sounds of a herd of cattle: a snort, the scrape of a hoof, an irritable bleat. Crane might be at that fire; and he might be in the company of men moving cattle that weren’t theirs, who wouldn’t care for a stranger arriving armed in the darkness.

A twisted cedar, its branches lost in shadow, stood where the light changed from the polished-pewter darkness he’d conjured to the yellow of the firelight.
Jesse propped the rifle against the cedar’s trunk and laid a box of cartridges by the stock. Then he walked into the camp, his hands away from his sides.

Two men sat at the fire. A third rummaged in the back of a buckboard. Four dark shapes at the firelight’s margins might have been sleeping men in their blankets. As Jesse stepped into the light the men by the fire rose, hands on the pistols in their belts. Jesse shaded his eyes. The thread of light that had led him was gone.

“Who’re you?” the shorter of the men called. “And what do you want?”

The glare of the little campfire made his eyes water. Now that he had the night vision, how did he turn it off? “My name is Jesse Fox. I’m looking for Jim Crane.”

Something hard and cold pressed the skin below his left ear. “What d’you want him for?” asked a leisurely voice at his shoulder.

Jesse weighed possible answers, searching for one that would get the gun barrel out of his jaw hinge. “Ike Clanton asked me to give him something.”

“Where’d you meet my boy?” That was the man by the buckboard. Jesse could see him at the corner of his eye, his long white beard and dense eyebrows catching the light.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Ike’s my son.”

“Animas. In a saloon.”

The old man snorted. “Likely he was in Animas.”

The man at the fire said, “Crane, don’t be a damned fool.”

The gun barrel stayed where it was as Crane reached around Jesse, pulled the revolver out of his holster, and tossed it to one side. “I’m just protectin’ myself. Now you keep your hands right there,” he said in a kind of slow chuckle. “ ‘Cause if you got a hideout on you, I will shoot you if you go for it.” He gripped Jesse’s lapel and pulled him around.

Jesse looked at Crane’s round, smiling face and pale eyes, at the pistol in his left hand, and felt a shudder pass through him. This was what Lung had seen, the last thing.

He had seen a man whose terror ran so deep that no uncertain light, no cocky posing or gunman talk, could hide it from the sight of a knowledgeable man. Lung would have known that nothing he could do would outweigh whatever caused that fear, whoever ordered Lung’s death.

“Who was it?” Jesse asked him.

Outside the circle of light a cow scrambled to its feet and shook, then another. “Oh, Christ Jesus, not now,” muttered the short man by the fire. “Crane, put that gun down.”

The taller one beside him said, “Want me to check ‘em, Will?”

“Wait, maybe they’ll settle. Crane, you pull that trigger and I’ll have a hundred cows on the run. And I swear to God I’ll send you to your Maker before I head after ‘em.”

Crane tapped his temple in a mock salute. “Whatever you say, Mr. Lang, sir. Me and my guest’ll go attend to business elsewheres.” He stepped back and jerked his head. Jesse walked past the buckboard out of the camp, with Crane behind.

It was a relief to be out of the fire-glare. Here he could see better than Crane, and that might prove useful. More useful still would be to know how to turn this witch-sight on and off when he needed it, but learning to do it with a gun at his back was beyond him.

“Stop. Turn around.” Crane lowered his voice. “Who was who?”

“What?”

“You asked back there, who was it?”

Jesse studied his face again. “Who are you so afraid of?”

Crane laughed. “I ain’t afraid of no one. And you ain’t gonna be the first.”

“All right. Who told you to kill the Chinese doctor in his home, and kidnap and kill the Chinese whore?”

Starlight winked on the pistol as Crane’s hand jerked. “What the hell—”

“The doctor was a friend of mine.”

Jesse watched Crane’s face work, and finally settle into a parody of his cocksure grin. “Never knew a fella was friends with a Chinee.”

“You can tell me. It won’t get back to him.”

Crane laughed again—at least, it was probably supposed to be a laugh. “How’ll you stop it? Shit, I could whisper it to you on a church altar. God hisself couldn’t keep it mum. You got no notion.”

Jesse wanted to tell him otherwise. But there was a good chance Crane would shoot him if he did.

“What did Ike send for me? Or was that just talk?”

“It’s in my right coat pocket. Can I take it out?”

“No. Turn the hell around.”

Jesse did, and Crane reached around him from behind and pulled out the bag. Jesse heard Crane step away, but nothing else. He kept his hands up and turned slowly back.

Crane clutched the bag, feeling the shape of the contents and shaking his head. “Shit,” he said.

“Clanton said it was to get you out of the country.”

“Heh.” He kept shaking his head, but slowly, as if it hurt him. “Heh. God
damn.” Finally he raised his eyes to Jesse’s. “It’s too late. It’s too goddamn late. Couldn’t run far enough anyway.”

“Who was it?”

“Why? One’s bad as t’other. Earp done his best to kill us all, ever since the holdup. His baby brother ‘bout pissed himself when the shootin’ started, and I thought maybe the Earps was all mouth and no sand. Out here, you can’t kill your man, might as well stay home and stick to your sewin’.” Crane gave another snort of laughter. “But Wyatt don’t have no such trouble. He got Bill and Harry, though Jesus knows how—”

“That was the Hasletts.”