He tilted her chin up and kissed her.
Mrs. Brown coughed before she reentered the room, carrying a covered casserole dish wrapped in a tea towel.
Matt didn’t relinquish his hold on her, but kept his arm around her shoulder in a protective way that gave Petra the strength to accept her fate—at least for tonight. She couldn’t fight his logic, and it wouldn’t do any good to argue—he’d made up his mind. And yes, she was starving.
“Doreen, do you know where I might find Sheriff Bollo at this hour?”
Mrs. Brown laughed at his question. Her laughter, although playful, had a hollow ring to it, and Petra thought it sounded forced.
“He’s home. His wife serves supper at six sharp and the sheriff doesn’t miss a meal if he can help it.”
With her hand on his chest, Petra pushed herself out of his arms.
“Sheriff? You’re going to speak to the sheriff tonight?”
Matt pulled her back to his side and took her face in his hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll talk to him. I’m not gonna let him know you’re here in town, not tonight. I’ll try to keep him away until tomorrow, but he’s gonna want to talk to you, Petra, you can’t avoid it. I’ll be right beside you all the way. This is why we’re here. We’re here to get Beau Laski put away for good. Don’t forget it.”
All the fear, all the uncertainty, crashed down on her, and she couldn’t hold back the bout of hysterical tears she’d tried to keep at bay ever since she’d read the account of Beau and Kurt’s fate in the Herald.
The sound of her son’s squeaking protest brought her back from the brink of insanity.
Matt helped her remove the baby from his resting place within the sling. He raised the child above his head and gave the baby a gentle shake. “There now, that’s better isn’t it? You needed to be fluffed a little, didn’t you, son? It’s been a long day all wrapped up in your pouch.”
Gabriel responded as he usually did when suspended over the man’s head, he drooled into Matt’s face and made an insulting little noise with his tongue between his lips. Petra couldn’t help but laugh when Matt pretended to be insulted, then blew on the baby’s belly in retaliation.
“Good night, tadpole,” he said, handing the baby over to his mother.
She had tears in her eyes when Matt kissed her. “Eat, get some sleep. Leave the worrying to me.”
He turned to Doreen. Mrs. Brown stood there, mouth slack, her big eyes open, blinking like an owl.
“Thanks, Doreen. Keep her out of trouble.”
Then Matt opened the door and left.
Mrs. Brown clamped her mouth shut, and her hands went to her hips.
“Men, you just gotta love the rascals.”
She took Petra by the hand and dragged her to the back of the house, down a short hallway, opened the second door on the left and ushered her inside.
“This will be your room. It’s at the back of the house. No one will see the light back here. I think it’d be safer if you used the thunder mug instead of the outhouse.”
She waved her arm. “You’ll find it there under the bed. I know Beau Laski, and I know he’s got thugs working for him. You can trust Sheriff Bollo, he wants to get Beau Laski and send him away for good. Beau’s been after me, and the sheriff’s done all he can to keep me alive. I think I can guess a little of what you’ve been going through. We need to be very careful with you, honey.”
Petra felt numb. All the fight simply drained out of her.
“All I really want to do is climb into bed, pull the covers up over my head and hide. But I have to think of Gabriel. Very soon he’s going to remember he’s hungry.”
Petra started to remove the sling from her shoulders, but found it too hard to do while holding Gabriel in her arms. Her shoulders screamed with fatigue. Her neck felt stiff from holding her head up all day, heavy as a cannon ball, and just as hard.
Coming into the room, Doreen took over.
“Here, let me help you with your baby. Buck seemed mighty taken with this kid. Never seen old Buck lookin’ so good. Didn’t recognize him, as a matter of fact. When he came to the door, I tried to put a flea in his ear and send him down the road.
“I don’t know if you realize it or not, but you, you’ve gone and done what no woman or man has ever done before, Honey. You’ve gone and tamed the beast. You’ve tamed Buck Hoyt, got him all shaved and shorn. Never would’ve thought I’d live to see the day when Buck Hoyt would hoist a baby up in the air and blow on his tummy.
“Or for that matter, hold a woman as if she were made of fine china, and look at her as if he could drown in her eyes and be a happy man to die there. You must be somethin’ pretty special. I’m gonna take real good care of you. Don’t you fret.”
Chapter Sixteen
Smiley, tucked in his bed, woofed down the chicken and dumplings. Food didn’t interest Buck at the moment, he had a call to make. “I’m goin’ out for a while. Don’t answer the door, not for anyone.”
Smiley grumbled his goodbye, waved Buck off and went right back to his supper.
Outside, Buck adjusted his coat collar to stand up to protect his ears from the icy wind. It occurred to him that in a couple of days Smiley would be fully recovered and hard to control. He adjusted the mail pouch on his shoulder and headed down the street, staying in the shadows and away from the brightly lit saloons where the men busted in and out of the swinging doors like calves out of the chute.
Sheriff Raphael Bollo was one of those big barrel-bellied, arrogant sons-a-bitches Buck tried to avoid whenever possible. The man had a holier-than-thou attitude that set Buck’s teeth on edge. He wasn’t looking forward to this interview. He tried to keep in mind—Bollo was a fair man, as far as he knew, and good at his job, not one to skirt the law under any circumstances.
The house sat right on the corner of Oak and Maple, in a neighborhood of two-story houses, all white, trimmed with plenty of gingerbread and lattice, with lace curtains at the windows. Putting his head down, Buck plowed forward, purposefully bounding up the front steps and onto the porch, lifting the brass lion’s-head knocker and clanking it three times with authority.
A young girl of eleven or twelve answered the door. She had a round face and a chunky body, the spitting image of her father, only shorter. The encounter took Buck by surprise, and he suppressed the urge to chuckle; instead he tipped his hat, going for a bit of gallantry. “Good evening miss, would your father, Sheriff Bollo, be at home, perchance?”
He’d expected a sweet, bashful reply to his query, instead he got a yell. “Pa. Pa, there’s a man here. He wants to see you.”
And that was it. The girl twirled around and charged up the stairs behind her in a flash of pink petticoats and white stockings, leaving the door gaping open with Buck standing on the threshold.
A man’s voice from the nether regions of the house called out, “Junie-May Bollo, how many times do I have to tell you not to answer the damn door at night?”
Buck heard a growl, then the sheriff appeared in the light of the vestibule, wiping his mouth with a linen napkin, his gaze to the stairwell and his disappearing offspring.
When he looked toward Buck, he stopped, squinted, and then approached with caution. “You wanted to speak with me, mister?”
Buck grinned as the man removed his silver star from his shirt pocket and pinned it over his heart, then assessed Buck over the bridge of his nose with a challenging sneer on his lips.
“I’m sorry if I interrupted your supper, Sheriff.”
Buck wasn’t sorry at all, of course, sarcasm veritably dripped off his tongue. In Buck’s opinion, Bollo could stand to miss a few meals. He was getting downright fat.
“Do I know you?” The sheriff held the door open with one hand up about level with his big head.
Buck figured the sheriff meant to slam it in his face if he didn’t get the right answer.
“You know me, all right. I shaved. God damn it. What’s the matter with everybody? Buck Hoyt, Bollo. You know me, for
Christ’s sake.”
The sheriff looked closer, leaning in, his penetrating brown eyes giving Buck a careful once-over. “Well, I’ll be damned. Hoyt, you look damn near human. I never would’ve thought it possible. You cleaned up real pretty. What you doin’ in town? It ain’t spring yet.”
Buck thrust the mailbag into the sheriff’s chest and stepped over the threshold without invitation. “Here’s the mail. Smiley Cummings showed up at my place sick as a dog. He’s gonna live, but he won’t be fit to run the mail for a while.”
The sheriff eyed the mail pouch, then Buck, then glanced outside as if he suspected more. It took him a second to make up his mind what to do next. With a sideways jerk of his head, he motioned for Buck to follow him down the hall that ran parallel to the stairwell.
Holding up the mail pouch in front of Buck’s nose, the Sheriff ushered him into a room. Buck only saw shelf after shelf of books. He grew envious. Bookcases full of books, from floor to ceiling, lined two entire walls of the sheriff’s study. He itched to have a closer look, but now wasn’t the time.
Flopping the mailbag on top of his desk, the sheriff asked, “This what brought you into town?”
Buck had to hand it to him, Bollo was no fool. He answered with an easy, “No.”
Standing, as the sheriff sat down in his big swivel chair behind his highly polished desk, Buck deliberated on how to play out this hand. When Bollo leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head like a man waiting for the entertainment to start, Buck made up his mind.
“So, Hoyt, you gonna tell me, or are you gonna make me guess?”
Pulling up a chair, Buck sat down and made himself comfortable, crossing one leg over his knee, and dangling his hat from his booted foot. “I heard you had Beau Laski locked up in your jail.”
Narrowing his eyes, Bollo gave Buck a penetrating look. “That’s right. What’s it to you, Hoyt?”
Buck shook his head and tried not to smirk. “How’s he doin?”
Tipping forward in his chair, the sheriff slapped his hands on his desk and rolled forward. “All right, let’s quit playin’ games, Hoyt. You came here to tell me somethin’, somethin’ to do with the Laski case. Spit it out or get out of my house.”
It was all he could do not to burst out laughing. Somehow Buck managed to keep a straight face. “It’s just fascinating, is all. I s’pose he’s got a lawyer?”
Huffing, the sheriff folded his arms across his desk. “He has. He bought himself a damn fine layer, Chandler McManus. He’s one of them highfalutin lawyers from Portland.”
“Ah, hah.” Buck nodded, not surprised by this bit of information. “Who you got trying the case? Is it still that weaselly little runt from back east, what’s his name, Duck something or other.”
Scraping his chair back, the sheriff shoved himself up to a standing position by bracing his hand on his desk. “You want a drink?”
Buck nodded. “Sure, I’ll take a snort.”
With his back to Buck, the sheriff ceremoniously poured the amber liquid from the whiskey decanter into two crystal-clear shot glasses. “His name was Duckworth, Howard Duckworth. Nice fella, newly married to a pretty little gal. She was also from back east. Their house burnt down with the two of them in it about a week ago. I suspect arson, but I got no proof, no witnesses.”
The sheriff carefully put the crystal stopper back in the neck of the bottle. “The Yurvasi woman’s housekeeper, Ida Ridenhour, she got herself run down by a wagon load of ore about a month ago. I can’t find the wagon or the driver, and there were no witnesses. She was my one and only witness to what went on over there in the Yurvasi woman’s house. All I have now is Mrs. Ridenhour’s statement.”
Bollo set Buck’s shot glass down in front of him on the edge of the desk and went back to take his seat. “I found an attorney by the name of Rhodes, Thomas Rhodes, who’s gonna take over for Duckworth. I’ve got him hidden away in the basement of the courthouse. If he gets killed, I’m comin’ after you, ‘cause you’re the only man I’ve told that to.”
The sheriff shrugged his big shoulders and sighed before moving forward in his chair and folding his arms on the desktop, his gaze locked on Buck. “Okay, now, I told you what you wanted to know. Suppose you tell me why you’re really here?”
Buck tossed back his drink and set the empty glass on the sheriff’s desk. “First tell me how Beau’s doing. How’s he taking being locked up?”
The sheriff ignored his whisky, too intent on boring a hole through Buck’s head with his gaze. “My, my, you are curious. All right…I’ll give you the straight dope. Everybody in town knows all the facts anyway, no sense you being the only one ignorant. Besides, by tomorrow morning I suspect you’d have all the details.”
The sheriff swallowed the whiskey in one gulp and got up to pour another round for the two of them. “Beau’s fine. I’d say, he’s better than fine for a man who claims to be paralyzed from the waist down. He’s got women bringing him food three, four times a day, including my wife. He’s got the preacher praying for his soul. He’s got a lot of people, who, just a couple of weeks ago, wanted to hang him up by his balls to the nearest tree, now thinkin’ he’s repented for his sins and seen the error of his ways. Some even think whatever sins he’s committed weren’t really all that bad to begin with. I’ve become the mean old fart who’s persecuting the poor broken man who has surely suffered enough.
“Day by day, the case I thought I had against Beau Laski, the case I thought to be an open and shut case, has begun to crack and split wide open. As a matter of fact, the way I see it, Beau Laski might never make it to trial. I’ve lost all my witnesses, most of them dead from mysterious and, to say the least, timely accidents, and some disappearing off the face of the earth like the Yurvasi woman.”
Turning his empty shot glass upside down on the desk, then setting it back upright with two fingers, Buck let all the information the sheriff had told him sink in. He swiped a ring of spilt whiskey off the desk with his coat sleeve. Fixing his gaze on the sheriff, he asked, “You said Beau claims to be paralyzed from the waist down. What do you mean by that? Doesn’t he have a doctor to back up his claim?”
The sheriff snorted. “He’s had four doctors. The first one, who tended Kurt right after the explosion, told me Beau had a fractured hip. Said he’d walk again, but with a cane. He left town, the same day Kurt passed away. The second doctor didn’t last long at all—Beau tossed him out on his ear. The word is the doctor refused to give Beau a higher dose of opium. The doctor also said Beau would make a full recovery and would walk with a cane in good time. I think he was probably a good man. The third doctor, a doctor from Boise, lasted a bit longer. He said Beau would be in a wheel chair for the rest of his life. In the doctor’s opinion, Beau would be able to stand for short periods of time, but would never walk with any degree of comfort or stability. The last I heard the man had left for his home in Scotland.
“The fourth doctor, who is the only doctor to see Beau while in his jail cell, has pronounced Beau paralyzed from the waist down, no longer a man at all, just a mere shadow of his former self. The charlatan is still in town, living the good life at the Geizer Grande Hotel.”
Buck bent forward, leaning on his folded knee. “Well, Sheriff, all we have to do is prove Laski is a liar, which shouldn’t be all that hard, as we both know the man’s never told the truth in his whole miserable, piss-ant life.”
With raised eyebrows, the sheriff pulled back in his chair. “When you come up with a plan on how to do it, you let me know, I want in on it. Right now, I’m all out of ideas.”
Buck dried his mustache with the back of his hand. “I’ll be on my way. Tomorrow morning, say around eight, you come around to Doreen Brown’s house. Bring the attorney you got stuck down in the basement. Come in the back door, and don’t let anyone see you. I’d advise you not to tell anyone where you’re going or who you’re seeing. If there’s a way to distract the people in town right about then, do it. We can’t trust anyon
e, not even your deputies. Beau Laski is trash. You and I know it. But he’s got a machine here in Baker City, and they’ll do whatever Beau asks them to do.”
Buck got to his feet and set his hat firmly on his head, but the Sheriff wasn’t ready to adjourn, not just yet. “Since when do you come in here and tell me what to do, Hoyt? I’m not goin’ to Doreen Brown’s house at eight in the morning or any other time, not until you tell me what this is all about. Are you staying with Doreen, Hoyt?”
A grin on his face, Buck reached across the desk, his hand out to the sheriff. “Would it make you jealous?”
Buck couldn’t help himself, he had to tease the man a little. He knew all about the sheriff’s crush on Doreen. It’d been goin’ on for years
The sheriff didn’t answer, he didn’t have to, the veins on his forehead were bulging, his round face flushed and eyes narrowed, glittering with intense disdain, Buck knew he’d hit a nerve.
Not real keen on having his jaw broken, Buck let the man off the hook and came clean. “No, I’m bunked up with Smiley at his shack. Sorry, I can’t take a chance on telling you anything tonight. We both better get some sleep. You and I have a lot to do between now and the beginning of the trial.”
The sheriff stood there, red in the face, holding his breath for a second or two, then he expelled it amidst a rush of curses before he took Buck’s hand and tried to crush it. “This better be good, Hoyt, or I’m gonna throw you in with Beau and let the two of you duke it out. My money is on Beau. He’s meaner than you, and he’s got some kind of deal goin’ with the devil—the man just can’t lose.”
Chapter Seventeen
After leaving the Bollo house, Buck started to retrace his steps, and headed across town to Smiley’s place. A fistfight erupted in the saloon across the street. Buck stepped back into the shadows between the buildings. Two hurling bodies spilled out the doors of the saloon to land in a squirming mass of flailing arms, kicking legs and a cloud of dust. A crowd of cheering onlookers followed the two combatants out into the street. Buck stood well back, leaning against the side of the Emporium, his arms akimbo, watching the show.
Dance Hall Road Page 15
