by Erin Bowman
“Parker deals with some unsavory types and asks everyone to leave their effects with me,” the woman says.
I don’t like it, but I’m desperate. I unlatch the belt and place it on her desk.
“You can wait in his office—first door on the left.” She motions down the hall. “And make sure to close the door to keep the heat in. I’ll go find Parker.”
The office is windowless but cozy. A fire crackles behind a simple writing desk, and the dark green walls are covered in framed newspaper clippings. I shut the door as instructed and examine a few of the pieces. Parker is a bounty hunter, according to the stories. The most recent pictures show an elderly man—perhaps nearing seventy—but his experience can’t be ignored. There are at least a dozen outlaws whose capture he has immortalized on his wall.
I can barely believe my luck. I’m desperate enough to hire just about anyone claiming skill with a pistol, and here I’ve found a bona fide bounty hunter. That’s sure to strike fear in Uncle Gerald, have him see reason. If Parker agrees to the task, he could be in Prescott by tonight, Uncle Gerald singing a new tune by morning.
I move along the wall, reading piece after piece. Just beside the door, I catch voices in the hall.
“A girl?” a man says. “That ain’t my typical client. Think it could be Gerald’s niece?”
I freeze, my heart thrumming in my chest.
“Maybe,” replies the woman I spoke with earlier. “Go on and question her.”
“Word is she ain’t quite right in the head, that she’ll likely give false names and make up some story. Gerald said getting kidnapped by the Rose Kid rattled her something fierce.”
“Then don’t bother interrogating. Just take her to Prescott and turn her over to her uncle. If it’s a mistake, you let her go then.”
“The money is good.”
“Damn right, it’s good. Even after giving Norman his ten percent for sending her our way. I’ll get the horses ready.”
One set of footsteps fades out, leaving the foyer, and the other gets louder as it moves down the hall.
I back away from the door, reaching for the Colt, only to remember I left it with the woman. The footsteps stop outside the door. I fly to the desk, my hands scattering papers and inkwells. The doorknob turns. My fingers close over the column of a wrought iron candlestick.
Parker grabs my shoulder, and I spin, swinging in defense.
He jerks his head away, trying to dodge the blow, and the candlestick connects with his temple. There’s a sickening, dull thunk, and he falls to the floor like a lead cannonball.
Then comes the blood, pooling beneath his head.
There’s too much of it.
The candlestick slips from my fingers and clatters to the floor. Bile scratches my throat. I stumble away, still staring at Parker as I wipe my mouth.
His chest isn’t moving. His eyes aren’t blinking. The blood seeps toward me, traveling along the grooves between the floorboards.
“Parker?” comes the woman’s voice.
I race from the office, where I collide with the woman, knocking her off her feet. Then I’m sprinting down the hallway, slowing only to grab the Colt from where it still sits on the desk, spilling into the midafternoon sun. I dart for the sorrel, my heels aching as the fresh blisters there burst. I’ve no sooner untangled the mare’s reins from the hitching post and stepped into the saddle than the woman hobbles into the street, yelling, “She killed Parker! She murdered him!” A pistol flashes in her hand.
I heel the horse and fly out of Banghart’s. When the first bullet screams, the sorrel nearly bucks me. My thighs and torso ache in protest as I use every muscle to stay in the saddle. With a firm hand on the reins, I manage to keep the mare headed straight, and after five additional shots miss me, there’s a brief lull. I glance over my shoulder.
Banghart’s is shrinking in the distance, and no one is following me.
Even still, I ride as hard and fast as I can manage, my heart never slowing its frantic beating in my chest. Shadows begin to stretch across the plains. The sun starts to sink toward the craggy land to my right. When I think I’m nearing the turnoff point, I slow and search along the rail until I spot my tiny marker.
I dismount to kick it over, scattering the stones. Then I’m back on the sorrel, turning her west and ascending the hill that leads to that faded, godforsaken trail I had no intention of traveling again.
Chapter Thirty-One
* * *
Reece
As dusk falls, the sound of approaching hooves startles the lot of us.
Kate’s just starting dinner and I’m stoking the fire, so it’s Jesse who grabs the Winchester and darts to the window, expecting the worst.
“It’s just Charlotte,” he says, sounding ’bout as puzzled as I feel.
It were a surprise to all of us when we woke to find Vaughn gone, but we all understood. Kate was even a little relieved. “Let her go home. She ain’t gonna find her way back, nor will she wanna.” And that’s why Vaughn’s reappearance don’t make a lick of sense.
I set the poker aside and push to my feet, following the Coltons out the door.
Vaughn draws rein near the stable and swings off the sorrel. I take one look at her and know something’s wrong. She’s wearing the same spooked look she had on for most of the time in the stagecoach, and her hands are trembling.
“We didn’t think you’d be coming back,” Jesse calls, ’parently unable to see the tension in her shoulders.
“Something’s wrong,” I say, shoving past them and jogging into the clearing. Vaughn’s wearing the beige dress borrrowed from Kate, and there’s blood on the skirt—dark, as though the material were dragged through a river of it—plus a spattering on her front.
“Oh my God. What happened?”
“I went to B-Banghart’s,” she says, her lip trembling ’bout as bad as her hands. “My uncle has a b-bounty on me. He’s said I’m not right in the head after being kidnapped by you and that he just wants me home.”
“You were recognized?”
She nods. “I thought I was hiring a gunslinger, but he was a bounty hunter, and instead of proposing a job for him, I had to . . .” She puts her hand to her mouth. There’s water building in her eyes, but she blinks it back. “I didn’t mean to kill him. I only meant to knock him out, but there was so much blood . . .”
“Were there witnesses?” Kate asks.
“A woman at the hotel,” Vaughn says. “I wasn’t followed.”
“If’n yer uncle’s bounty mentioned that I kidnapped you,” I say, thinking out loud, “it won’t matter that I let you go, that you came to Kate on yer own or went to Banghart’s solo, neither. The Rose Riders’ll hear yer name and my name and assume I’m holed up near Banghart’s too.”
“Jesus Christ, this ain’t what we needed,” Jesse says. “They’ll come searching. They’ll be crawling the valley.”
Vaughn starts scrubbing at the blood on her skirt, not bothering to look at him.
“We were supposed to take care of them boys on our own terms, but now we gotta do it while they’re looking for us!”
She scrubs harder.
“You might as well’ve advertised the whole thing!”
She works the material so hard, her hand blurs.
“Whitewashed a building and painted WE’RE HERE! Sent a telegraph saying—”
“Can you not do that?” I snap at Jesse. “Not now.”
His mouth hangs open, mid-sentence.
“It’s already done,” I insist. “And a lecture ain’t gonna change what happened.”
Kate gives Jesse a knowing look, as if to say I’m with Reece on this one. Then she squeezes Vaughn’s shoulder reassuringly. “I’ll boil some water for tea,” she says, and waddles for the house.
It’s quiet for a moment, the clearing silent ’cept for the grunting of the pigs over by the tank.
“I’m sorry,” Jesse finally says to Vaughn. “It’s just—it ain’t wh
at we needed. More folk looking for us.”
“Lord Almighty, I get it!” Vaughn erupts. “I messed everything up! I get it, I get it, I get it!” She jogs away from us, heading for the tank.
“You shoulda stopped at sorry,” I tell Jesse.
“Kate says I never know when to bite my tongue.”
“She ain’t wrong.”
He runs a hand through his hair, frowning, then grabs the sorrel by the reins and leads her to the stable. I grab a blanket from one of the stalls before darting after Vaughn. She’s dropped to her knees in the shallow tank, scrubbing at the hem of her dress while she shivers.
“Get out before you damn near freeze,” I tell her.
She turns and finds me standing there, blanket tucked under my arm. Her fingers are raw from the scrubbing, knuckles blue with cold. It’s like me talking ’bout the temperature makes her finally feel it, ’cus she scrambles from the tank. She flops to a seat in the mud and I drop the blanket over her shoulders.
“You had to,” I say.
She grunts but keeps staring at the water. “Is that how you deal with it? You tell yourself you had no choice and that soothes your conscience?”
I find a rock in the mud and sit beside her. “The first time’s the hardest,” I admit. “You’ll have nightmares, prol-ly. I couldn’t sleep for weeks after mine.”
“How’d it happen?”
“You don’t care.”
“I do, or I wouldn’t have asked.”
I knead my hands together, not sure I want to reopen those wounds. They’re hard enough to think on, but it ain’t like I’ve ever been able to talk ’bout them neither. Riding with the gang made sure of that. But maybe that’s how healing works. Maybe sometimes you gotta bleed out the poison in order to recover strong.
“’Bout a week after I started riding with the boys,” I begin, “we were identified while passing through a town. A deputy rounded up a small posse to come after us, but they never stood a chance. Boss waited till that posse entered a dry arroyo, and then he had us open fire from our perch farther up the gully. When he noticed I weren’t shooting, he told the other boys to stop. There were only one posseman still standing by then. I reckon he were ’bout the age I am now.”
I press my thumb into the palm of my shooting hand, staring at the thin scar there.
“And?” Vaughn prompts.
“The fella knew he was beat. He threw his gun up to us and told us to ride off. Boss picked up the man’s weapon and told me to execute him. ‘I ain’t shooting an unarmed man,’ I said. Boss kicked me in the back, and I went tumbling into the gully, splitting my palm open on rocks as I tried to slow my fall. When I came to a stop, I were ’bout a few dozen paces from the posseman.
“Boss checked the fella’s pistol and snapped the chamber shut. ‘He’s armed now,’ he said, and threw the pistol back down to the posseman. It landed near his feet. That fella looked at me and the gun and me again. He knew Boss weren’t gonna let him walk home. I reckon he figured it better to die fighting than to just roll over and take it. So he dove for the gun and I made my decision as his barrel leveled with my chest. I shot him.”
“You had to,” she says, same as I told her.
I turn toward her. “You know what happened next, Vaughn? Boss came sauntering down into the gully. He plucked the pistol from the dead guy and showed me that the chamber were empty all along. He’d emptied it before tossing it over. Boss clapped me on the shoulder, smiled, and said, ‘Guess you shoot unarmed men after all, Murphy. Yer one of us now.’ ”
“You didn’t know. You didn’t have a choice,” she says.
“Ain’t there always a choice?”
“But Rose tricked you. If the gun had been loaded and you didn’t shoot, where would you be?”
“Dead,” I say. “But like you, I did what I had to in the moment, and it’s haunted me ever since. That’s our punishment. We gotta live with the things we done.”
She looks right at me, and it ain’t like the glares I’ve been given so far. This look ain’t hateful or vengeful or full of spite. It ain’t judgmental neither. No, this is warm, something akin to understanding.
“Reece . . .” she says slowly.
I shoot to my feet.
She keeps looking at me, and I think there’s gonna be more, but that’s it. Just my name. Not the Rose Kid, but Reece. It leaves me feeling like I been knocked from the saddle.
“You should change out of them wet clothes,” I say. “Before you get ill.” I head for the house, not once looking back.
Chapter Thirty-Two
* * *
Charlotte
Dinner is a stew of potatoes and rabbit (pulled from one of the snares), plus freshly baked bread. It is warm and surely flavorful, but I barely notice.
I can’t stop picturing Parker’s face as I struck him with the candlestick—his eyes wide with shock, his mouth caught in a perfect O.
You had to, Reece said.
I refuse to believe it. I understand what he meant, can follow every point he made, yet it still doesn’t seem fair. Parker was my enemy for that one moment at the hotel, but that does not mean he was a bad person. In fact, the clippings on his wall suggested he was a very good person—an old man nearing retirement who had delivered many an outlaw to the Law. Uncle Gerald can be quite persuasive, and as far as Parker was aware, he was doing us both a favor. I was just a confused, ill-minded young woman, terrorized by the Rose Kid, whose doting uncle longed to see her safely home. Parker was only trying to do what he deemed right. And I killed him for it.
“You understand, right, Charlotte?”
“What?” I glance up from the stew.
“It ain’t safe for you to leave again,” Kate says. “Not after what happened at Banghart’s. Word of that man’s death’s only gonna bring more bounty hunters to the area, and you’d do best to lie low a little while.”
I touch my brow, feeling dizzy. She’s right—I know she is. I can’t very well help Mother if I end up thrown in jail or charged with murder, but Mother doesn’t have days to waste. I could doom her by sitting still.
“At least one good thing’s come of all this,” Reece says. “The Rose Riders’ll make their way to Banghart’s.”
“I already said that ain’t nothing but trouble,” Jesse argues. “They’ll be looking for this clearing, searching us out.”
“That’s why I’m gonna go to them.”
“They’ll kill you,” Kate says. “And if they don’t give you the bullet, they’ll give it to that ma of yers.”
“Not if I give ’em what they want.”
The room seems to ripple with tension, everyone at the table suddenly very still.
“I will shoot you myself before I let you give us up to Rose,” Jesse snarls.
“Yer misunderstanding,” Reece says. “See, I been thinking . . . Say I go for a ride ’long the rail, and when they show up, I tell ’em I’ve been looking for ’em. That I got an in with the man Boss wants dead—the gunslinger done killed his brother. They’ll wanna come straight here, but I’ll say yer holed up strong. Too many guns. A path that bottlenecks. I’ll suggest they get on a southbound train from Seligman instead and I’ll be sure to get the man onboard. They’ll think I’m turning you over, Jesse, when really, you and me’ll be waiting to pick ’em off one by one.”
“Why bother waiting for the train?” Jesse argues. “I’ll follow when you try to meet ’em. Stay hidden in the trees and take ’em out while yer proposing the train setup.”
Reece shakes his head. “You’ll barely get one shot off before Boss realizes I’ve conned him and shoots me dead. And that’s even assuming there’s tree cover where we end up meeting. Or that the whole gang’s together. Last thing I want is to be making the deal with Boss and one the other Riders finds you camping out in the shrub. Once they see I ain’t loyal, it’ll be over. The train job’s the way, and I can pull it off if you let me set it up alone.”
“There’s just on
e problem with that,” Kate says. “Remember yer buddy that got away back in Prescott, the one you and me shot at from the porch? He already knows you ain’t loyal.”
A smile spreads over Reece’s lips. “Nah. He thinks I ain’t loyal. He didn’t see me kill no one, and his back were turned and fleeing by the time I joined you firing from the porch. It all happened so fast. All I gotta do is plant a seed of doubt, make Diaz reconsider what he saw, and Boss’ll believe me.”
It all seems too easy, but the Coltons are seriously considering it. As I swallow another spoonful of stew, they exchange meaningful glances, unspoken words passing between them.
Reece glances around at us, resolute. “Look, Luther Rose don’t want to think I defected. He wants to believe I’m loyal. If’n I give him the right story, he’ll accept it and fall right into our plan. His bloodlust is blinding him, his need for revenge making him sloppy.”
“That I can believe,” Kate says.
“But what if he doesn’t buy it?” I argue. “What if Rose doesn’t wait to hear your story and shoots you before you even get a word out? Folks entering the lions’ den rarely emerge unscathed.”
His smile flattens into a thin grimace. “I thought ’bout that too, Vaughn, but it’s a risk worth taking. Even when I consider all the ways it can go wrong, it still feels like the right course.” He glances my way, his eyes hollow. “I gotta do this. For myself, for the Coltons”—he glances at them—“for all the Territory. This is how I make up for the bad I done. This is how I set things right.”
The Coltons nod in agreement and start discussing how Reece should wait a day before wandering the plains. The Rose Riders will surely hear about my incident with Parker, but it may take a little time for word to travel and for the gang to make it this far north.
