Humor and blood slid from Borah’s face simultaneously. “Uhmm—”
“So, yes.” McParland stood, his pipe extended like a baton. “Shall I explain?”
“Shut the goddamned door first,” growled Borah.
McParland did. “Before you went, I’m sure you read about Alice threatening to publicly embarrass her stepmother. That was when we were planning the extradition. And I think you knew, right then, that this would likely go to the Supreme Court—meaning you would eventually need Roosevelt’s help. But he’d not look kindly on being asked to weigh in. He’d probably refuse you outright. So, especially with you being a junior Senator, you’d need something more robust, shall we say.
Your wife went with you to Washington, and no doubt attended the Senator’s Ball after the swearing in. And I’m sure Alice was there too, with her father.” McParland grinned at the anguish that had formed on Borah’s face. “At some point, you found an opportunity to woo Alice, lift her skirts and give her the bully punch. Only you needed it seen by a staff member, but not by your wife. My guess is you paid a man to walk in on you. Coat closet, probably. But if I’m wrong on that detail, that doesn’t mean I lose this.”
Borah muttered, “My God,” and buried his face in his hands.
“The next day, your hired man got word filtered back to the White House that the president’s rowdy daughter was corrupted by a certain married senator—and during the ball, steps from her father. When Darrow gets this to the Supreme Court, you’ll be there to argue it, and while you’re there, you’ll pay a visit to the White House. And Justice Fuller will get a telephone call from Teddy soon thereafter.”
“Goddamnit, Jim.”
“I’m sure I have a few things not exactly right, but close enough. You don’t need to confirm it, but you do owe me sixteen dollars.”
“All right,” whispered Borah, nodding.
“Tell you what, double or nothing. You guess how I figured that, and I’ll take nothing. But get it wrong and it’s thirty-two to me.”
“No. No. I have no idea. None. And, frankly, I’m not sure I want to know. But I’ll pay you another two just to tell me.”
“Sorry, Senator, I can’t do that.”
“So the double-or-nothing was already lost?”
“Aye. You’d never have guessed.”
“You’re a dangerous man.”
“Me? Nah, I’m just an old detective. But you, bravo! Darrow will be mighty disappointed on his first go at the Supreme Court.”
“That he will,” murmured Borah, still stunned—the lit cigar dangling between his fingers, ashes ready to drop, his face a bundle of embarrassment, anger, and wonder at what had just been done to him.
“Ah, don’t fret yourself, Senator. You just shagged the president’s daughter for this case. You didn’t plant a live bomb in the front yard of a chief justice—like I did in Denver.”
“How’s that— What?”
<><><>
– 44 –
THURSDAY
March 21, 1907
Jack Garrett turned twenty-seven as the Overland Limited glided him across Nevada’s alkaline desert—warm sunlight bathing him through the window. The steady rumble lulled his eyes closed, his mind kneading, mulling, gnawing the images it made. In a waking dream he flowed from thought to thought to thought along the long straight stretches of that endless desert, while the memories and moments oozed through the wood walls of the train car, seeping up through its grumbling floorboards.
He was heading to capture a merciless killer. Not to bring him to justice, but to bring him to testify against the killer’s master. Had Haywood ever killed anyone—by his own hand? Should it matter? Murderers like Orchard and Adams had a choice, didn’t they? They stepped forward to pull their straw. They chose to act. Maybe they enjoyed it. Or they feared reprisal if they failed. Did they fear death? Can Death fear itself? No, they must like it. No sanity there. Killers from the cradle. The devil’s agents on earth.
How often had his mother admonished him about Satan’s disciples? Her boy was to keep a guarded heart and a steady eye against them—those demons who would harm him, who would bring him to do harm. She’d said it so often and with such fire, that he began to suspect her truth lay elsewhere: that her greatest fear was that he was one of those demons. Just as his father had been.
His father’s name was Charlie Bowdre. Jack saw a tintype of him once, but all he remembered was a bandoleer of bullets and the details of a distinctive hat: black, wide-brimmed, round-crowned, flat-topped, probably beaver. Stars on each side. Through the years, he had picked up a few of the stories. His father spent most of his life in New Mexico, around the town of Lincoln, where he fell in with Billy the Kid. In the seventies, they killed a number of men in the Lincoln County War and got US Marshal Pat Garrett on their trail. So they tore out to Fort Sumner. There they hid and rustled some, along with other members of Billy’s gang. And there Charlie got a prostitute pregnant, only to bolt again, hiding out in a Stinking Springs farmhouse. When Marshal Garrett and a posse of twenty rode up on that house, the firing started—bullets flying like a plague of locusts, so the story went. When Charlie got shot in the chest, Billy shoved him out the front door, telling him to kill Garrett first, then he could die. But his father met a hail of bullets, dying before his face found dirt. He was put in a hole in the fort’s old military graveyard.
Five months later, Jack was born in a boarding house just outside Fort Sumner, and was given the name, Leslie Bowdre. A year later, Pat Garrett killed Billy the Kid and buried him next to Jack’s father. Around that time, Jack’s mother found Jesus and swapped her boy’s last name to Garrett—not to honor the man who’d killed the boy’s father, but in the clenched hope that the great lawman’s surname might serve as a talisman: repelling bad while forevermore reminding her boy of the godly man she expected him to be. Only then could she have peace.
At eighteen, Jack began his quest. It was more her quest for him, but he convinced himself it was his. In Texas, he sought to join the Rangers, but that ended in a Jack County bar fight where a man died. He had nothing to do with the killing, but when the dead man’s friends fingered him as the shooter, Leslie Garrett was a wanted man. He crossed the Red River and began a two-year drunken drift through the Indian reservations of Oklahoma Territory. During those years, he found the hat that he still wore, added the stars, and dreamed of his tintype father.
When he finally pushed north, arriving in Abilene, Kansas on his twentieth birthday, a new century was underway. But what promise it held seemed quickly lost when he learned his mother was dead from galloping fever. Dismayed at himself, ashamed for his betrayal of all he had promised her, he changed his first name to the Texas county where he had first lost his way.
Self-reborn, Jack Garrett rode to Denver, hell bent for leather. There he went straightaway to the Opera Building and pledged himself to the Pinkertons. Chief Detective McParland wasn’t there that day, but Jack met him soon enough. McParland transferred him to St. Louis to train as an agent, and three years later, Jack was back in Colorado as the spy, Operative 21.
He wasn’t sure if McParland knew his birth name—that his father had been a no-good killer, an outlaw with Billy the Kid. Probably the old detective did. Jack didn’t much care either way. He was no more Leslie Bowdre than he was Leslie Garrett. He wasn’t an outlaw and never would be. He was no killer from the cradle. He knew he was no agent of the devil. Just as he knew his mother was finally at peace. Oh, that she might see him now. Him a Pinkerton Agent, set to do right. How proud she would be.
Rousing, he adjusted his hat and peered lazily through the window at the passing world in its shades of creams, browns, and distant blues. Returning his focus to within the car, he saw Iain across the aisle, sleeping long-wise on a bench. Finally, he looked forward, through a window, across a passageway, and through another window, to a black blotch in the car ahead.
He knew it was the pinched crown of Captain Swain’s dark gray homburg.
His thoughts settled up there on Swain. The Thiel detective seemed as calm as can be, with murder on his mind. An execution, really. Jack knew himself: he was no killer. But could he kill a man if need be? Sure. He thought so. But then had to shake off the image of Wade Farrington lying dead. Was any sane man comfortable killing another? Was Captain Swain sane? Adams deserved death for what he’d done—no doubt about that. But by whose hand should that end come?
***
At 12:15 that afternoon, when Jack and Iain stepped from the train in Battle Mountain, Nevada, they were flummoxed, alone in the rickety depot, certain they’d made a grave error.
“Where is he?” asked Jack.
Iain looked around. “Didn’t get off, I guess.”
“Damnit,” Jack murmured. “Swain stayed on the train. So Adams isn’t here, and we’re two idiots in the middle of the desert.”
“I wish you weren’t right, but— Wait.” Iain pointed through one of the depot’s windows. Outside, Captain Swain was talking with a man wearing a sombrero, standing by a wagon hitched to two horses.
“Son of a bitch,” whispered Jack. “Tell me if he’s coming.” He walked to the closed ticket booth and tapped its wood shutters.
“What you want?” asked eyes through the slats.
“Two tickets to Austin.”
“Nevada?”
“Yes. Quickly please.”
“No quickly to it,” replied the man as he opened the window.
Jack saw the attendant was gaunt, cheeks hollow and dark. “How much for—”
“Three dollars. Six for two.”
After glancing at Iain, who was still focused beyond the window, Jack paid the thin man. “When’s the next one?”
“Don’t rightly know,” said the man, handing Jack the tickets.
“What?”
“No silver in Austin for fifteen years. Thus wise, Nevada Central Short Line don’t run till— Well, till it does. Nobody living down that way much. Least not the sort to ride the train regular. You got your Jensons, they’re there. Stokes is gone. There’s the Canter widow. And old man Pritchard. No, he died—”
“How about a guess?” asked Jack. “Next train to Austin?”
“Nevada?”
Jack stared at the man.
“Next week, best I’d tell you.”
“Jack,” said Iain, approaching. “He’s gone.”
Jack turned. “Where’d he go?”
“I think he hired one of that man’s horses. Rode off on it.”
“Damnit.” Jack held the tickets toward the agent. “Then I need my money back. We can’t wait till next week.”
“No refunds.”
“How do you figure? I just—”
“They’re used.”
“Used for what?” asked Iain, now standing beside Jack.
“For the train, of course,” said the attendant. “You thick?”
“What did ya say there, slim?” asked Iain, his voice deepening.
“Never mind,” said Jack. “I’ll keep them. How many miles do you think it is to Austin— Nevada?”
“Hundred. Maybe ninety on a good day.”
Iain cocked his head at the man. “How do ya figure that?”
“Don’t ask him,” said Jack. “Just— Don’t ask.” He walked toward the main door. “Let’s go.” Once out of the building and down the rickety steps, with their bags slung over their shoulders and a shotgun and a rifle in their hands, the two Pinkertons walked toward the nearest structure, a church, and proceeded to its far side. There Jack surveyed the area, noting two barely standing buildings across from the church: a saloon bearing the name, THE KING’S ARMS; and a mercantile of some sort, its sign appearing to have long fallen away.
“The Austin train won’t be till next week,” said Jack. “Swain must have known that. So, now he’s gone on ahead, on that Mexican’s horse.”
“He might’ve seen me,” said Iain. “I think he probably knew we were in there.”
“Not hard to figure. We three were the only ones dumb enough to get off in this ... place.”
“Do you think he spotted us in Truckee?”
“I don’t know,” huffed Jack. “But he knows we’re on him now.”
“So, let’s find a couple of horses and get after him.”
Jack looked around. “Alright. See any?”
They walked to the middle of the dirt street. There was nobody around. But then, following the sound of a sonorous gurgle, they entered the building with the fallen sign. Inside, it appeared to be a general store. Though the shelves were almost barren of food, there were a few sacks of flour and sugar, tins of black beans, along with boots, hats, ammo, tobacco, and hard candy. Beyond the expected, the shelves and cases also bore a dusty menagerie of glass insulators, fishing gigs, oil lamps, beads, porcelain inkwells, a stuffed parrot, brass spittoons, a red fly-pulley, tin boxes, wood spools, a flintlock pistol, and what appeared to be a string of scalps. The detritus and entritus of lost and discovered life, amassed and accreted over decades. Behind the counter of this walk-in cabinet of curiosities, an old-timer had collapsed in a chair with only his snore rising. “Hello there, Sir,” began Iain. The man rumbled himself awake and looked up.
“Where is everybody?” asked Jack.
The man stood and toddled around to the back of the counter. “Good sirs, what’s your poison?” he asked, his aging voice carrying an effeminate, English cadence.
“No thank you. You serve liquor?” asked Jack. “I thought—”
“I most certainly do. This is a saloon. The King’s Arms.”
“Oh, I didn’t—”
“Nothing for me either,” said Iain.
“No?” asked the proprietor, clearly disappointed. “So why interrupt my scandalous dream?”
“Where are all the town’s people?” asked Iain.
“Who else must there be?” replied the Englishman.
Iain stared at him.
“Do you have water?” Jack asked.
“Fire?”
“Just water.”
“Costs the same, I’m afraid.”
“Alright.”
Two grimy glasses containing water bearing a sheen were placed next to the dusty brass register. “There you are.”
“That’s water?” asked Iain.
“Near enough,” said the man.
Jack swirled his glass. “Anybody here have horses to lend us?”
“Oh, no. I’m afraid not.”
“No?” asked Iain. “Just no, English?”
“No.”
“We saw a fellow leasing a horse at the depot,” said Jack.
The old man nodded. “Hector. Yes. He said he’d be letting a horse this morning. A gentleman wired him for it.”
Jack absorbed that for a moment, and then shook his head, giving an almost silent, defeated laugh. “Swain— He knew there would be no train. So he telegraphed ahead for the only horse.”
“But the Mexican fella had two horses,” said Iain. He looked at the proprietor. “But he leased only one of them.”
“Yes,” replied the Englishman. “Of course. How else could he have gone home?”
“Where does Hector live?” asked Jack.
“I wouldn’t know, now would I?”
Iain grunted at the wizened man’s London accent.
The man peaked an eyebrow. “Perhaps a place called Stone House, a day west. But I couldn’t be certain.”
“No, I don’t reckon you could, at your age,” said Iain.
Jack glared at Iain, then extended a hand toward the man. “My name’s Jack Garrett. I’m a Pinkerton agent. And this irritating Scot is Agent Iain Lennox.”
The man shook Jack’s hand, then Ia
in’s. “Sir Edmund Rowan, at your service. I’m not actually a Sir, but I should have been ... my friend used to say.”
“You’d claim that, wouldn’t ya?” groused Iain.
“We’re tracking a killer,” said Jack. “And we could use your help, Sir Rowan.”
“Thank you. Propriety left with the silver, I’m afraid.”
Jack continued, “Maybe you can assist us. We need a few things, and some information.”
“I make it my trade to help others, especially when requested by a handsome law man.”
“Excellent,” said Jack, placing a silver dollar on the counter. “I have a question for you.”
“We’re not the law though,” said Iain.
“How’s that?” asked Sir Rowan.
“You said he’s a law man, but—”
“It’s fine,” Jack said, frowning at Iain.
Sir Rowan pressed on. “So how may I be of service?”
“If you needed to get to Austin quickly— And by Austin, I mean Austin, Nevada.”
“Is there another?”
Jack blinked slowly. “Say you couldn’t wait for the train. Next week as I hear it. You needed to get there soon—faster than one horse could take you, which I figure is about three days, two in a hurry. How would you do it?”
Sir Rowan took the dollar and pondered the question, letting silence extend beyond his turn to speak.
Iain said, “Do you understand what he’s asking ya, m’lord?”
Sir Rowan nodded. “I do, Jacobite. Do you?”
Jack pulled Iain aside and spoke lowly. “Can you leave off the Scottish Revolution, just for a time?”
Iain shrugged and took a step back.
Jack returned to Sir Rowan. “I apologize. Any ideas?”
“You can walk, ride a horse, take the train, or a motor-carriage. Unless you’ve got one of those flying contraptions, an aeroplane.”
“Aye, an aeroplane!” Iain said, becoming instantly animated.
“Oh, no,” began Jack.
“That would be the way,” declared Iain. “If we flew there. That’d be the bollocks. We’d be there in an hour, if we—”
American Red Page 37
