Outlaw in Paradise

by Patricia Gaffney

  She scowled at him, the blush fading. "I don't see how. Not unless you've got five dollars. That's what you're charging, isn't it, Will? You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I bet your father doesn't know about this."

  "What's wrong with it?" Will lifted his chin, offended. "Nobody else is complaining. My father would say it's free enterprise. Anyway, Mr. Gault's getting most of—"

  "Ham's a special friend of mine," Jesse butt in hastily. "No charge for him. Okay, Will?"

  "Well, sure," he agreed, "I don't care," while Ham jumped up and down, crowing with excitement.

  "How about you, Miss Cady?" Jesse wheedled. "Want to be in the picture with us?"

  "No, thanks." But she was smiling.

  "Sure? You can put on your new hat."

  "Yeah!" Ham could hardly contain himself. "It got yellow feathers an' a nest an' ribbons all over, and it the prettiest hat—put it on, Cady, okay?"

  "No."

  "Please?"

  "No."

  "Please?"

  "Ham, don't start. I'm not putting on this hat and I'm not having my picture made." Now she wasn't just smiling, she was laughing. It tickled him so, Jesse threw back his head and laughed with her. When he stopped, he realized they were all staring at him with their mouths open, as if he'd just spouted out the Russian alphabet or all thirty-eight state capitals.

  "Let's get this show on the road," he said with as surly a snarl as he could muster, whipping his own hat off and pulling on his eyepatch, slamming the hat back on his head. "You set up, Will? Ham, you ready? I ain't got all day."

  That's about how long it took to get the picture right, though. "Right" according to Ham. First he wanted Jesse sitting down with him, Ham, standing between his knees. Then—no—that was too "babyish"; he wanted to sit on the bench beside the gunfighter, mimicking his cross-legged posture. No, on second thought, they both ought to stand up and face the camera. Or—pretend to draw on each other! Yeah! Jesse could lend Ham one of his guns and he could stick it in his belt and—

  "Ham, that is not going to happen," Cady declared, in a voice that for Jesse brought back memories of his mother, on those rare occasions when she'd put her foot down. But Cady must be in a good mood today, because she didn't leave—she stayed out in the hot sun smiling at Ham's antics and Jesse's pretend-exasperation. Once she did go in the saloon, but it was only to come back with an armful of vanilla pop bottles—five of them; she even remembered Nestor. Jesse found himself trying to make her laugh again—making faces at the camera, tickling Ham a second before Will snapped off a shot. When he lay on the ground and told Ham to rest his foot on his chest and blow smoke from an imaginary gun, she lost it.

  "Quit wriggling," Will commanded, but Jesse couldn't help it: the sight of Cady doubled up, giggling and snorting, hands on her knees, made him start to guffaw along with her. Which made his chest shake and Ham's knee bob up and down, which made everybody laugh harder, which made Ham lose his balance and pitch over on top of Jesse. Then, naturally, they had to have a wrestling match.

  "Well, well, now ain't this cute."

  Cady stopped laughing. Jesse let Ham out of a loose armlock and peered past him to see Warren Turley's beady eyes and nasty smile looming over them. Clyde, his shadow, stood half a step behind him.

  Ham scrambled up and headed for Cady, who pulled him back against her and wound her arms around his shoulders. Jesse got up much, much slower. After he smacked his hat against his thigh for a while and slapped at his pants to get the dust off, he finally glanced at Turley. "Something you wanted? Like your gun back?" Cady drew a breath at that, and Turley's ugly face darkened.

  "Mr. Wylie wants to talk to you, Gault," he said belligerently. "He's up at the saloon right now, waiting for you. Wylie's saloon," he clarified, throwing a sneering look at Cady.

  "You don't say." Jesse turned his back on him and moseyed over to the bench. Slouching down, back against the wall, he stuck his feet up on the railing. "Tell him I'm busy."

  Nestor snickered. Will Shorter started putting his camera equipment away, pretending he wasn't listening. Cady kept her arms around Ham and didn't move.

  "He's waiting for you," Turley repeated, starting to turn purple. "It's important."

  It was so easy to get his goat, it wasn't even any fun anymore. "Listen, Warren, here's what you do. You go back and tell your boss what I told you— I've got too much going on right now to go see him." To rub it in, he lit a cigarette and blew a slow, lazy smoke ring at the sky. "If he wants to talk, he can bring his important ass down here. I'll be here for as long as it takes to finish this." He took another drag, flicked ash on the wood floor. "Probably take five, six minutes. Maybe you better hurry along."

  Poor Warren, he looked like his head was going to explode. Before he stomped off, he shot back a look of loathing scary enough to give Jesse a chill. But he caught sight of Cady's face—excited and pleased and downright admiring—and it warmed him clear through to his bones.

  Six

  Wylie hadn't shown up by the time Jesse took a last puff and flipped his cigarette butt over the railing. He stood up, stretching. Cady had taken Ham inside; Will was long gone; Nestor scratched under his armpit, said, "Guess he ain't comin'," tipped his hat, and strolled off toward the livery.

  Jesse's stomach growled. The sun was sliding down behind the second-story roof of the Frenchman's restaurant. He decided to go have dinner.

  He sat at a table by the window while he ate "trout almondine," which turned out to be not half-bad, although the trout was haddock and the almonds were only chopped-up peanuts. Jacques claimed vinegar pie was a Parisian specialty, which didn't seem likely. It was good, though; Jesse got it whenever he ate at Jacques'—once or twice a day. Merle Wylie passed by the restaurant while he was sipping his coffee. He assumed it was Wylie—he was with Turley and Clyde, and he walked between them and half a step ahead. While Turley and Clyde went inside the Rogue and Wylie leaned against the hitching post waiting for them, Jesse studied him.

  He looked like a strong, well-fed bay horse, maybe a little too well fed, with a thick, gleaming mane of mahogany-colored hair. His expensive broadcloth coat fit tight across bullish shoulders and a barrel chest. He was around average height, Jesse's height, but he outweighed him by forty pounds, easy. His features were murky in the dusk, but from what Jesse could make out, they matched the man—fleshy, prominent, and powerful. He pulled a long-chained watch out of his vest pocket, glanced at it, shoved it back in with small, jerky movements. He was furious, but he was trying to hide it.

  Clyde came out, said something to him. Wylie turned his back on him and paced away, five fast, wide strides before he whipped around and paced back. Clyde hunched his shoulders, trying to disappear.

  Jesse stood up. In the darkening window, he checked his reflection. Moderately bad, but something was missing... oh. The patch. He found it in his pocket and dragged it on, adjusting it over his right eye. There, that was better.

  Turley came through the swinging doors of the Rogue just then. He talked; Wylie listened, but never looked at him. He was the emperor of his little kingdom of thugs and crooks and arsonists. Maybe he even used the royal "we." Throwing a dollar on the table, Jesse went out to make his acquaintance.

  Clyde saw him first. He whispered it, but in the twilight hush Jesse distinctly heard him say, "He's over there. He's coming." Wylie turned around slowly, pivoting his bulk on surprisingly small feet. Jesse took as long as he could getting to him. A laughably long time; he hoped he wouldn't laugh in Wylie's face when they finally got together. But they were acting like a couple of elk, or was it moose— which ones locked horns and fought to the death?— and that tickled him. He sobered, though, at the thought that he was probably the only one here doing any acting. Merle Wylie looked like the real thing.

  Jesse halted about three feet shy of him. He could imagine a long, yawning, childish silence stretching out while each waited for the other to speak, so he broke it before it could get started. He whis
pered, "Wylie."

  "Mr. Gault." He jutted his chin—a kind of greeting. Turley and Clyde flanked him like bookends.

  "You want to talk to me," Jesse said, "you'll have to lose Billy the Kid and his lovable sidekick."

  Wylie thought that over while Turley simmered; you could almost see steam coming out of his ears. "All right," he decided. He gave Turley a look, and immediately, like a whip-trained dog, Turley turned and walked away. Clyde followed. They only went as far as the corner, though; at Stark's Saddlery & Shoe Repair they turned around and glared, their thumbs stuck in their gunbelts. Jesse thought of sulky children sent off to bed early.

  Now what?

  "Walk with me down to my saloon, Mr. Gault. I'll buy you a drink." Wylie had a smooth, almost rich tenor voice at odds with his burly physique. His dark eyes protruded slightly and his forehead bulged; his jaw looked hard enough to split rock. Jesse supposed he was handsome if you were drawn to big, bulky things. Boulders and grindstones, concrete slabs.

  "The Rogue's closer." The Rogue was right behind them. Strains of "My Darling Lies Yonder" on Chico's piano, soft and sweet, were coming through the swinging doors.

  "I prefer my place."

  "I prefer Cady McGill's."

  Standoff. They stared at each other, blank-faced, hard-eyed. It went on until Jesse decided to add a little smile, gleeful and kind of nuts, to his expression. That might have been what did it—Wylie snapped, "Fine," and strode, stiff-shouldered, toward the saloon—but he wasn't sure. Wylie wasn't like the others, an instinct told him. He wasn't going to be half so easy to scare.

  Things were quiet at the Rogue tonight. A few diehard gamblers played poker at a couple of tables, and a few cowboys were shooting pool in the back, but the roulette and blackjack tables stood empty. Levi was reading a book behind the bar; Chico was only noodling now, not even playing a song. Jesse looked around for Cady, and spotted her at a back table talking to Willagail. She stood up when she saw him—or maybe when she saw Wylie, it was hard to tell. She'd changed out of the blue dress and white apron. Yes, indeed. What she had on now was a shiny, slinky, sort of silvery-green deal that had something in it, some wire miracle that pushed her bosom almost up to her throat. It looked about as comfortable as chain mail, but it sure was an eyeful.

  "Evening, Cady," Wylie said in a monotone, barely moving his lips.

  She slitted her eyes and nodded once. "What do you want?"

  "Nothing I could get here. Comfort. Intelligent clientele. Honest whiskey."

  Cady suggested Wylie do something Jesse had always thought was physically impossible. He shivered; the temperature between these two was below zero and falling. The reason for it hit him all of a sudden, like a smack in the face. They used to be lovers. Had to be. Hostility this strong, this obvious—what else could account for it? He'd disliked Wylie before on principle, and now he despised him. Now it was personal.

  Cady spun on her heel and moved away. At the bar, she said something to Levi while Jesse and Wylie took seats at an out-of-the-way table, and not long after that the bartender loped over to ask what they wanted.

  Wylie let out a short, derisive laugh. "Listen, buck, I wouldn't drink the water in this place."

  Levi's limpid, heavy-lidded eyes blinked at him slowly, patiently. "All right, boss," he said in the oddest voice; it sounded almost tender. Was this some Buddhist response to provocation? Jesse had never heard him call a man "boss" before. Wylie made a nervous, impatient gesture and gave him his shoulder.

  "I'll have a double shot of that fine, fine bottled in bond you served me last night, Levi," Jesse said, overcompensating. "And a beer chaser," he threw in. What the hell.

  They sat without speaking during the time it took Levi to bring the drinks. Jesse slouched in his chair— his screw you posture, guaranteed to annoy—while Wylie sat stiff and heavy, his strangely small hands resting on his beefy thighs. Cady, Jesse noticed, stood with her back to them at the bar, pretending to ignore them; but more than once he caught her watching them in the mirror.

  "So. Wylie," he said, taking a sip of his whiskey after Levi set it in front of him and went away. "Why don't you tell me what's on your mind."

  He waited a whole minute before saying, "Who hired you?" as if Jesse hadn't spoken first. His way of controlling the conversation.

  Two could play that game. "Say, I read the other day where your old friend Cherney skipped town. You miss him? Guy like that, must seem like you lost a brother, Merle. A twin."

  "What do you know about Cherney?" His bulging, bulbous face was ruddy to begin with; when he got mad, it turned the color of saddle leather.

  "Me? Nothing. I told you. I just read the papers." He said it like he was lying, though, just to make the bastard crazy.

  He gripped the edge of the table. He had clean, short fingernails, shiny and buffed. "What are you doing in Paradise, Gault? Who hired you?"

  Jesse took a sip of whiskey, set the glass down and picked up his beer, took a slug and exhaled with deep, exaggerated satisfaction. He'd take any odds on a bet right now that Wylie wished he'd ordered something, anything. "What makes you think anybody hired me? Nice place, Paradise. I like it here. I might just—"

  "Cady, right? Admit it. I know it was her."

  Jesse put a cigarette in his mouth and lit a match to it. Blew smoke at the ceiling.

  Wylie's grip on the table tightened. Whitened. Suddenly he relaxed it and sat back in his chair, smiling falsely, crossing one heavy leg over the other. The metal glint of a boot gun flashed before his pants leg covered it up. He patted his dark red hair, which was thick as a beaver pelt, and a ruby ring on his middle finger winked in the lantern light. "How much is she paying you?" he asked in the silky tenor. "Well? Come, you might as well tell me."

  "Why? Assuming she's paying me anything. Why would I tell you?"

  "Because whatever it is, I can better it." He looked around at Cady's clean, comfortable saloon, smiling a little derisive smile, his black eyes contemptuous. "I can double it. Triple it." He leaned forward, massive body stiff and intense. "Name your price, Mr. Gault. Just tell me what you want."

  Ah, thought Jesse, the magic words. Now that they were out, he felt disappointed. In the end, Wylie had been as easy as all the others.

  He started to drop his cigarette on the floor, remembered Ham, and flicked it into a nearby spittoon instead. "My price to do what?"

  Wylie lowered his voice. "Burn her out."

  Burn her out. A picture flared in Jesse's mind: the pretty, red-painted Rogue in smoky, stinking ruins, and Cady in the street watching it smolder, hugging herself in her paisley night robe, trying not to cry.

  "Burn her out?" he said in shocked, carrying tones.

  Wylie jerked back, as startled as if Jesse had thrown his drink in his face. "Shut up!" He hissed it, glancing around, flushing. "Shut up, God damn you. Are you insane?"

  Maybe so. He would never burn down Cady's saloon—he would never burn down anything—but he could've lied and said he would. He could've blackmailed Wylie. Or stolen a fortune from him and never had a twinge of conscience because the bastard was a thief and a bully and God knew what else.

  But he wasn't going to do any of those things. And if that wasn't insane, Jesse didn't know what was.

  "Oh, that's right," he said in the creepy whisper— reverting to Gault. "Arson's your specialty, isn't it? I heard about the old livery stable. Who did that one for you? Turley? Tell me, how many horses got barbecued in the process?" Wylie shoved his chair and started to stand. "Sit down!"

  He did, after putting on a careless sneer to show he didn't have to if he didn't want to.

  Really, you know, Jesse thought—far from the first time—the majority of grown men were about a boulder's throw, maturity-wise, from scabby little boys. "I got one thing to say to you, Merle. When I finish, you can get up and leave."

  Wylie made the same anatomically improbable suggestion Cady had made to him. This thing was going around.

  Ignorin
g it, Jesse said slowly and clearly, "If anything happens to this saloon, if so much as a window gets cracked, I'm going to come after you. You can try to hide behind those two hoodlums outside, but it won't do you any good. In the end it'll boil down to you and me. And then it'll just be me."

  "No. No. That's not how it's going to be." White saliva drooled in the corners of his lips. He looked mad enough to spit, and maybe just plain mad, too. As in insane. One ace shy of a deck. "I'll hire a gun of my own, somebody faster, smarter, a killer, you won't stand a chance. You better keep looking over your shoulder, Gault, because you'll never know when it's coming, you'll be—"

  "You better keep looking straight ahead, because I don't shoot men in the back. Know why? Because I like to see their eyes when they're dying. I like to see the fear get cloudy and the desperation set in. And then I like to see the emptiness. The coldness. Blank. Dead."

  Wylie's chair scraping the floor sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard. He was reduced to cursing, crude, vicious oaths in a hoarse voice, as if he'd been shouting all day. Jesse laughed at him. But when Wylie finally ran down, hurled a last curse and stalked away, he almost groaned with relief. Because he'd just remembered the boot gun.

  If Cady had any doubts left about whether or not Jesse worked for Wylie, the names she and everybody else could plainly hear Merle calling him finally set her mind at rest. And if they hadn't, the look on Merle's face would have. She was in his path—he had to cross in front of her to get to the door—and she had to make herself stand still, not shrink against the bar or flinch from the anger in his black, bulging eyes. How could she ever have found him good-looking? And charming, too—imagine that. It hadn't even been that long ago. Either she'd been crazy and blind, or he'd changed. Or both. More likely both.

  She watched Jesse take off his hat and scratch his head with both hands, hard. "Play something soft," she told Chico, touching his shoulder as she passed behind him. Jesse saw her coming and sat up straight, quit slouching. The way he looked at her... she became aware of the twisting of her hips as she maneuvered through the mostly empty tables. "Hi, Stony. Hey, Bailey, how're you doing," she greeted her few scattered customers, but she never really stopped looking at Jesse. The closer she got, the sweeter he smiled. The gladder she felt.