The Circuit Rider (11 page)

“I
’m
sorry,” Bird said. “I must not have heard you correctly. Who killed their cell mate?”

The
young cowboy smiled at Bird. “A damn preacher, can you believe it?” He started
laughing. “Some of the boys are talking about stringing the bastard up. What
the hell? He rapes a woman and kills a guy with his bare hands? And he claims
to be a preacher?”

Bird
poured herself another shot of whiskey. She raised the bottle to the cowboy. He
nodded and held out his glass. She poured him one, set the bottle down, and
sipped from her glass.

“You
never know about people, do you?” she said.

“Hell
no. You never know about a town, neither,” he said. “Prosperity was supposed to
be a quiet down, now we got a mad preacher killing people!”

“Don’t
forget about Smitty,” the bartender said. Bird turned to the man, who was
wiping down the bar with enthusiasm.

“Who’s
Smitty?” Bird said.

“Nicest
young man you’d ever want to meet. Left work at the bank one night, no one ever
saw him again until they found him a half mile from town. Someone sliced him
up, looked like the work of the Kiowa, and then smashed his face in. You could
barely recognize him, from what I hear. But until this week, Prosperity’s been
a mighty quiet town. In fact, people joked we should have named it Serenity, it
was so quiet. Glad we didn’t. We’d look like fools.”

The
young cowboy threw down the rest of his drink and looked back at a group of
other cowboys leaving the saloon.

“Thank
you for the drink, ma’am.” He hesitated. “Ma’am, may I ask you a question?”

Bird
raised an eyebrow at him.

“Well,
you don’t look like a…workin’ lady, if you know what I mean.”

“You
sure know how to flatter a lady,” Bird said.

The
cowboy suddenly looked flustered. “No, I meant it as a compliment.”

“I
know,” Bird said. “What’s on your mind?”

“Well,
if you ain’t a workin’ lady, then who are you and why are you drinking in a
saloon?”

Before
she could answer, the saloon doors swung open and two men walked in with a
swagger and a collection of tied-down guns that immediately put Bird on edge.

“Listen,
you’re a good-looking youngster,” Bird said. “And ordinarily I might consider
taking you back to my hotel room and turning you into a man. I’m sure it
wouldn’t take but a minute or two.” Bird winked at him. “But not tonight. Take
your free shot of whiskey and vamoose.”

The
cowboy took Bird’s advice, and she leaned back against the bar, watching the
two men who’d entered as they commandeered a table at the back of the room. One
of them looked terribly familiar to Bird, but she couldn’t place him. A bottle
of whiskey arrived at the newcomers’ table and the men drank quickly, with
little talk or wasted motion.

Bird
noted the way they sat at their table, one gun always free of obstruction so
they could draw and shoot from a sitting position.

It’s
how she always sat.

So
a couple of hard cases in town. She knew they weren’t cowboys. Or gamblers. And
from the dust on their clothes, they’d ridden a long way.

Bird
downed another shot of whiskey. She let her eyes roam over the others in the
saloon. Every single man in the place seemed natural to her, except those two.

Well,
she wasn’t going to learn anything more here tonight, she thought. She threw
another coin on the bar, showed the bottle she’d be taking with her, and left
the saloon.

She
went back to the hotel, thinking about Mike Tower in jail.

And
how to go about getting him out.

Fast.

I
t
was a long night. Not the longest in Mike Tower’s life, but it ranked up there
with the best of them. There was no quiet. Just shouts. Music. Pistol shots. Drunk
cowboys stumbling down the street.

It
never ended.

He
closed his eyes from time to time, willing himself to get some rest, knowing
that he would have to be ready to face whatever the next day might bring. He
didn’t know what that would be: a lynch mob, an attorney, a pardon, or a bullet
to the head by someone consumed with a maladjusted sense of justice.

His
eyes briefly closed in the early morning, just as the sun was coming up.

It
was a typical sleep pattern for him — brief and usually consisting of one of
two nightmares.

This
time, it was the one from the war.

It
was the same dream, like always.

He
was behind enemy lines, posing as a Confederate soldier, spying on them for the
Union. He had infiltrated a Virginia regiment and managed to sneak across and
leave a message for his Union counterpart.

In
the dream, he had left a slip of paper detailing how the Confederate soldiers
planned to approach the battle, the number of wounded, how much artillery was
still operational, and how much ammunition and fighting spirit still existed.

It
wasn’t until he was riding back, across a narrow river into a thick stand of
woods where the regiment was hiding, that he began to fear something had gone
wrong.

As
he walked his horse back into the camp, he noticed the sentries were missing. The
bedrolls were empty. The officers’ tents were open, revealing empty chairs and
tables, no one sleeping in their bunks.

He
rode into the middle of the camp.

And
then the soldiers began to appear.

From
out of the woods, they emerged like ghosts. Men with soot-blackened faces,
bandages seeping blood, eye patches covering empty sockets.

They
walked slowly toward him.

They
knew.

The
rope came from behind him, caught him around the neck, and he was pulled from
his horse.

They
began to beat him until one officer approached, his long sword shining in the
moonlight.

They
held him down and the officer lined the edge of his blade along Tower’s neck Then
he raised his hand and the blade whistled through the steamy night air —

A
cannon boomed.

The
officer froze.

A
cannon boomed again and the scene evaporated. Tower opened his eyes; the sight
of the jail cell’s ceiling brought him back to reality.

A
hammer began beating at the jail’s front door.

This
wasn’t a dream.

They
were coming for him.

To
kill him.

S
he
knew.

Her
eyes snapped open at the sound of the cannon fire, and she reached out, grabbed
the whiskey bottle from the table next to the bed, pulled the cork, and took a
long drink.

She
knew.

One
day, maybe she would stop drinking the whiskey. Firewater, as the Indians
called it. But there was something about it for her. Yes, it calmed the demons,
the rage she felt for the man who had done things to her no man should ever do
to a young woman, a girl really.

But
the whiskey worked.

Even
when her head was clouded and she could barely walk, nights when she fell face-first
into a pillow or a bedroll or sometimes even the floor.

She
knew, and the reason she knew came down to one simple thing: the tent out by
the river.

There
was no ranch. No farm. No sod house where Susan Arliss and her husband were
making a go of it.

That
was a lie.

And
if she wasn’t really a farmer, then who was she? And why had she lied about what
she was doing in Prosperity? Larkin, the store owner, had said he hadn’t met
the husband, just Susan Arliss.

After
that trip to Rifle Creek, it started to fall into place.

Bird
got to her feet, splashed water on her face, rinsed her mouth out, then took
another drink of whiskey.

She
strapped on both guns, thumbed more shells into the loops on her belt that were
missing cartridges, and grabbed her Winchester rifle, which was leaning against
the wall by the door.

Bird
hurried downstairs, wishing she had time to down a cup of coffee with a little
extra something tossed in for good measure, but there wasn’t time.

The
big celebration was about to begin, along with another event the town of
Prosperity hadn’t planned on.

She
walked down to the jail, where a group of men had clustered near the front
door. She could see Sheriff Ectors standing in the doorway, talking to the
group.

When
he saw her, his face immediately became rigid. He held up his hands.

“Bird,
we don’t want any trouble,” he said.

The
group of men turned as one. Bird immediately picked out the leader, the tall,
thin man with the cruel mouth. He had on a bright-red shirt and a black leather
vest. His face was sweaty, and Bird recognized the signs of a long night of
drinking. She’d seen that same sick and exhausted look in the mirror many, many
times.

“Bird
Hitchcock?” the leader said. “Shit, I don’t believe it.”

Without
breaking stride, Bird walked right up to him, drew her pistol, and whipped the
barrel into the side of his head, a brutal crush of metal applied directly to
the man’s temple.

He
folded to the ground like a sack of flour that had fallen off the back of a
wagon.

“I
haven’t had my coffee yet, fellas. That means I am especially unpleasant. Right
now, the quicker I shoot every one of you stupid sonofabitches, the sooner I
can get in there and have Ectors’s coffee. You decide.”

Two
men reached down and picked up the red-shirted leader as the rest of the men
scattered.

Ectors
looked at Bird.

“One
coffee, coming up,” he said.

“Y
ou
really expect me to believe someone is planning on robbing the Bank of
Prosperity?” Ectors said. “You need to explain it to me all over again, because
I’m having trouble understanding why you think that.”

They
were standing outside Tower’s cell. Bird thought he looked like cow shit.

“I
went out to question Susan Arliss,” Bird said. She’d had a quick shot of
coffee, along with some of Ectors’s cheap whiskey, but it hadn’t done the
trick. She was short on patience.

“Everyone
said she was new in town and that she and her husband, who no one had ever met,
were starting a farm out near Rifle Creek. Well, I went out there, and there
was no farm. No ranch. No sign of even any attempt at a farm or ranch. What I
did find, however, was Susan Arliss. She’d been killed.”

“What?”
Ectors shouted. He started pacing. “This is horrible!”

“Shut
the hell up, Sheriff. I thought lawmen were supposed to stay calm.”

She
looked at Tower, who hadn’t said a word and was just waiting for her to
continue.

She
pointed to Tower. “Look at Tower, Ectors. That’s how you should act.”

Ectors
slowed his pacing.

“But
it wasn’t just that she’d been killed,” Bird continued. “They’d put her body in
the creek. Now, why did they do that? I asked myself that question. Only one
reason to do that: to delay people finding the body. So why? Why did it matter
when she was found?”

Ectors
and Tower looked at her.

“Then
I find out that a man named Smitty, who worked at the bank, had just been found
dead after being tortured. This, all just before Prosperity’s biggest town
event — payday for the cowboys as the last of the herds gets shipped off. And I
bet that bank is full of the cattle buyers’ cash, just waiting to be paid out.”

“I
see where you’re going with this, but you have to have more,” Tower said.

Bird
nodded.

“Two
men were at the saloon last night. Real hard cases, gunfighters. I didn’t
recognize him at first, but one of them is a man named Luke Dryer.”

She
saw Tower involuntarily flinch at the name.

“He
used to be a gun for hire, but then he started robbing trains and banks,” Bird
said. “He was one of the men.” She looked at Tower. “You know him?”

Tower
sighed. “I do. I knew him during the war,” he said.

A
shot sounded outside from the street. Ectors flinched; neither Bird nor Tower
did.

“Now,
I can’t explain why the woman attacked our preacher or why some cowboy tried to
come in and finish the job, but I can tell you that Susan Arliss was here
working, probably with Dryer’s gang,” Bird said. “Here’s how I figure it: They
set up camp outside of town, far away enough that people won’t stumble across
them, and they sent her into town for supplies. She probably told them about
her run-in with Tower and they killed her. After all, she’d been their cover
and now did nothing but draw attention to them.”

Ectors
looked at Bird, then at Tower, then back to Bird. Suddenly, it looked like he’d
made a decision. He went to the rack of Winchesters and pulled one down.

“Now,
I heard there’s a big, fancy show from back east with singers and dancers to
end this Prosperity celebration,” Bird said to the sheriff. “What time does
that start?”

Ectors
glanced at the clock.

“They’re
doing it right now,” he said.

“Where
are your deputies?”

“I
gave them the morning off. They’re probably at the show, too,” he said.

Bird
pointed at Tower. “Let him out and give him a gun. I think he knows how to use
one.”

“No,”
Ectors said. “He killed a man last night.”

“Well,
those men are going to rob, maybe even kill, some of your innocent townspeople
if you don’t stop them. Right now, it’s just you. I’ll help you, but only if
you let him help, too,” she said.

Ectors
rammed cartridges into the rifle’s magazine, then threw the keys to Bird. She
unlocked the cell, and Tower walked out.

He
went to the gun rack and selected a Winchester. He grabbed a handful of cartridges.

“Let’s
go,” he said.