The Great West Detective Agency (8 page)

“I can afford some charity. You sure you don't want a few dollars?”

“No charity. I work for my money.”

Lucas slipped his pistol into his pocket but kept his hand on it. He studied the man more closely for any trace of fight, of anger, of intent to steal the money that had been offered freely to him.

“I will repay you.”

“All right.” He held out his hand to shake. For a moment, the Creek hesitated, then shook.

“You will get your money back.” He pulled his hand away.

“There's no hurry.”

The Indian grunted and left the alley, moving like a ghost. Lucas wondered if his feet even touched the ground. On impulse, he dropped to one knee and looked at the dirt. The smallest scuff marks showed where the Creek had walked. Tracking him would be hard, even if he had wanted to. Lucas didn't bother trying to find him out in the street. Chances were good he had simply vanished.

Not caring if he ever saw his ten dollars again, Lucas went back inside the saloon.
Cast your bread upon the water and it will return tenfold
, he thought as he made his way to a table. Carmela had finished her show, Little Otto was undoubtedly backstage with her, and serious drinkers were willing to try their luck at cards. Lucas found a table of men who looked as if they had no idea about odds and began playing.

A quick gesture to Claudette brought her by with a shot of whiskey, and all was good as the cards began running for him. Dogs and their lovely owners faded into the distance as his stack of chips grew.

L
ucas began losing consistently when his thoughts drifted from the hand in front of him on the table to other gamblers. Little Otto had said a gambler was responsible for stealing Amanda's dog. That made no sense. How could anyone make a penny unless the intent was for a ransom? Since Amanda so easily forked over a hundred dollars to put him on the dog's track, any demand would have been met with immediate agreement.

“Damn, Stanton, you're trying to improve on a pair of treys? I want you doin' that all the livelong night.” The blacksmith sitting across from him dropped two pair onto the table and scooped up a considerable pot that Lucas had bet up for no good reason. “That wasn't even much of a bluff.”

“I'm feeling sorry for you. Anything that'll get you away from the hard work of banging out a horseshoe has to improve your health.”

“Suckin' in a lungful of this smoke's worse than the fumes off my forge. I use good metallurgic coal that don't hardly smoke up the place.”

It took Lucas a second to realize the talk had gone from cards to coal.

“From Wyoming?” he asked.

“Sure thing. For two cents, I'd close my smithy and go north to mine it. I can sell all that coal out of the Powder River Basin to other farriers.”

“Good luck with that.” Lucas pointed to the chips stacked in front of the blacksmith. “You can buy yourself two mines with that much.”

“My luck's good. I want to make it three.”

Lucas laughed and touched the brim of his new bowler hat, which he had bought to replace the one lost in the sewage. What clothing he had was adequate but lacking the grandeur of his former attire. He needed to make the rounds of several finer clothing stores to replenish his wardrobe, as befitting a gambler in the Emerald City Dance Hall and Drinking Emporium, where luminaries such as Carmela Thompson appeared. He waved to Lefty as he slipped into the night—or early morning. Faint fingers of dawn already stretched toward the top of the sky.

He yawned, realized he had been playing for almost ten hours without so much as stretching. Such was the life of a professional gambler. As he passed the mouth of the alley where he had buffaloed the man collecting his due, he slowed and tried to reconstruct the fight. It had faded into his memory already. There had been a half-breed. He remembered that and paying off the man's debt, only to be surprised when the Indian refused more money and even told him he would get his ten dollars back.

Lucas patted his coat pocket. He had to count it for an exact amount, but it might be as much as what he had received from Amanda to find her dog. His fortunes had ebbed and flowed. He snorted at that thought.

“Lucky at cards, unlucky in love,” he muttered as he came to an intersection. He had plenty of money but had lost out to Little Otto with Carmela. How much longer that romance flourished was the stuff of a profitable bet. Then he remembered he would have bet that Carmela would want nothing more to do with Otto after the first date. That had been so wrong, he had better keep his money working on the pasteboard cards where he knew the odds and could read his opponents.

He realized he had dithered at the intersection longer than it ought to take to turn left and return to his room. He spun and went right, toward Capitol Hill and Amanda's boardinghouse. In spite of his run-ins with Dunbar's strong-arm guards, he was feeling on top of the world. A winning night at poker did that to him, better than any drug likely to be sold by the Celestials in Hop Town over on Wazee Street. The way things went this evening, he might even find Tovarich nosing through garbage along the way.

As he turned a final corner, he stopped, then edged toward the door leading into a bookstore. Not twenty feet away, Amanda was speaking with the two men who had dumped him into the sewage. His hand went to his pistol. At this range it wasn't accurate. He had to walk closer. The tiny bullet lacked stopping power, but a couple shots to the face always made the recipient pause and think about continuing any unpleasantness.

“. . . you have to tell him I don't know,” Amanda said.

“He ain't got it and wants it. You turn over the dog or—”

“Or what? What can Jubal do to me that will get either of us the dog? Punish me? Is that what he wants? He can do that without using the dog as an excuse.”

“We're lookin',” the second man said. “You keep huntin', too.”

“I've done what I can. I even hired a detective to track the dog.”

Lucas tensed. The men exchanged glances, then laughed.

“We took care of him. Nobody told us he was workin' for you.”

“Took
care
of him? You
killed
him?”

“Mighta drowned.”

This produced deep-throated laughter on their part. Lucas clenched the rosewood handle on his Colt even tighter. He lifted it and considered a shot. At this range it was possible to miss, to hit the wrong target. That included Amanda, but he wasn't feeling too kindly toward her at the moment since she was in cahoots with Dunbar and hadn't mentioned that to him. He lowered the gun when she protested.

“If you've killed him, I'll turn you over to the police. The marshal won't care one whit you work for Jubal.”

“We was joshin'. He ain't dead. If anything, he found all kinds of new friends since he was where he usually flops around.”

They laughed again.

If he aimed low, he could hit them in the legs. If he missed and hit Amanda, it wouldn't be too serious since her thick skirts would devour the small slug. Lucas braced his hand against the door frame and started to squeeze off a round when the men moved away. As Amanda turned to follow them, she blocked a clear shot.

Lucas grumbled to himself. What was he doing? He wasn't a killer. He didn't shoot men from ambush, even if they deserved it. Besides, these two deserved something more than a bullet in their pea brains. A quick step took him back out into the street, then he saw his chance had passed. Whatever retribution he would deliver to Dunbar's henchmen had to wait.

He wanted it to be more appropriate than an unseen killer gunning them down, even if he would take some satisfaction in pulling the trigger.

Another problem rose to push away his desire for vengeance. Amanda Baldridge had lied to him. The dog might have been in her possession, but it hardly sounded as if it was hers. That meant it belonged to someone else. She had hired him to possibly commit a crime, if stealing a dog was ever a crime. He knew men who ate their dogs and never had a second thought about it.

He tucked away his pistol and went after Amanda and the men, his steps allowing them to increase the distance so they weren't likely to notice him. Lucas had no clear idea what he intended until the trio ahead turned and started up York, going to Dunbar's house. Telling Amanda to her face he wasn't going to continue the hunt for her dog—or whoever's dog it was—looked more like a suicide mission by the minute. The three went to the front door, knocked, and were let inside.

Lucas found a stump across the street and sat on it, staring at the elegant house. He had taken her money and felt obligated to complete the job, but she had lied to him. Not once had she told him of her alliance with Jubal Dunbar or that the dog would be passed from her hand to the politician's once it was found.

Tovarich was better off scrounging through garbage than being in Dunbar's care.

It took some moral wrestling but Lucas finally decided the money he had received, or what was left of it after bribes and greasing information sources, had been earned in spite of not finding Tovarich. Amanda had forfeited his services.

The stench of sewage still clung to him in spite of fancy stinkum toilet water and hard scrubbing with lye soap. Spending Amanda's money, he would end up about even when he bought a new coat and replaced the rest of his clothing soiled in the dunking. This hardly evened the score with Dunbar's men, though.

A slow smile came as he thought that he was pretty much invisible to Amanda. She thought he worked for the Great West Detective Agency. Unless she happened to wander into the Emerald City, to see Carmela, he was safe from discovery.

He retraced his steps, but when he got to the intersection, he stopped. Ahead lay his rooming house and to his left the Emerald City. The hairs on the back of his neck rose, warning him he was being watched. Using a hitching post to lean against, he worked to build himself a cigarette, taking his time and looking around without seeming to do so. He caught his breath when sudden movement down a branching street caught his attention. Someone dodged out of his line of sight.

With his cigarette lit and a cloud of smoke rising around his face, he smoked for a couple minutes. He won the waiting game. The quick move of a head out and back showed that whoever was spying on him had kept up his vigil. Not hurrying, Lucas walked across the street toward a tannery, then spun and darted to the street in time to see his stalker running away. His fingers brushed over the butt of his Colt. Again the distance was too great and the reason for shooting nonexistent. He might be jumping at shadows.

He crushed out the cigarette and walked to the corner of the tannery, knelt, and looked at the tracks closest to the wall. All he could make out was a small footprint, possibly a woman's boot or that of a large boy. He sighed, then inhaled. As he did so, he caught a curious odor. He sucked in even more and tried to remember where he had encountered this before.

“Whatsa matter, mister, you havin' an attack? You a lunger?”

He looked up to a man wearing canvas pants and a red-and-black-checked shirt. His occupation fairly screamed out to Lucas, having sat across a poker table from others dressed similarly.

“Prospecting for gold,” he said, sure he identified the man's profession.

“Ain't nuthin' in this town what ain't been extracted already. You got to get into the hills if you want to hit it rich. Oro City, Ouray. Them's where the blue dirt is, where you'll find color both gold and silver.” The prospector fixed Lucas with a steely look, as if daring him to refute such logic.

“I'm not so sure I haven't hit pay dirt.” Lucas stood and took a final sniff. The lingering scent was so familiar, but identifying it was just a tad beyond his ken.

“Don't ask me to stake you, mister. You dig there, you get nuthin' but tannic acid from all that leather. That will burn clean through your skin and ruin work gloves in a day. I know. I used to work in a tannery up in Missoula Mills.”

“What do you make of that?” Lucas stepped around the prospector and watched a double column of men riding down the street in the direction taken by his skulker. They rode with military precision although none were in uniform. The man at the head of the column stared fixedly ahead as if he had all the bones in his neck frozen into place. The riders following him looked around them like hungry wolves.

The double column neither slowed nor sped up. As if he counted cards, Lucas ticked off the riders one by one and reached a total of twenty.

“Don't make nuthin' of it, mister. They's ridin' through, that's all.”

“They have the look of men sniffing after gold. You'd better watch your claim, old-timer.”

The prospector moved on, cast a backward glance at Lucas before assuring himself the crazy man wasn't following.

Lucas watched until the dust settled behind the soldiers—he instinctively thought of them that way because of the man at the head of the column and the way they rode. And the way they looked. He had seen one company too many that looked like this as they rode through his hometown of Wolf Creek, Kansas, during the war.

Denver was getting to be an even more interesting place by the minute. Lucas decided it was time for him to find some new duds, catch a few winks, and get ready for the next evening at the Emerald City. With both Carmela and Amanda beyond his charms, he had to scout out new territory. Fortunately, with new clothes and a few dollars, that wouldn't be hard.