Chapter 11
As inky indigo spread across a cloudless sky, Cass grimaced. A hoity-toity gala wasn't the way he'd envisioned spending Devil's Eve.
Violins and woodwinds were making a high-falutin' noise in the gaily lit musicians' pavilion at Hancock Park. Everybody who was anybody in Lampasas had congregated here to raise money for the hospital's new wing. To Cass's way of thinking, this charity fandango was really just an excuse for a lot of rich folks to sip champagne, munch on snails, and show off gold watch fobs and diamond earbobs.
Oh. And to watch Sadie perform.
Apparently, his social-climbing ex-lover had become quite the darling of the Grand Park regulars. Even he had to concede that the way she'd filled out her skin-tight, black satin gown last night should have been grounds for a public indecency charge. He'd been sorely tempted to punch out Baron's lights when the randy old skirt-chaser kept ogling her breasts. Cass was almost relieved to know that Poppy had accompanied her husband to Sadie's recital tonight.
Almost.
The truth was, Poppy was getting on Cass's nerves. She kept finding reasons to stand beside him, brush against him, stroke his arm. Cass didn't like the way his body responded to her attentions—and especially when his brain didn't want the complication. In truth, he was more than a little insulted. Poppy thought nothing of risking his job, his friendship with Baron, and maybe even his freedom from a penitentiary, because she'd decided he'd make a suitable stud pony.
But Poppy was wrong to think he was free with his seed just because he was a womanizer. To think he might have slipped up somewhere, leaving his baby in some long-forgotten lover's belly, had the power to give him nightmares. No child should have to grow up without a father. He, Collie, and Sadie could all attest to that fact.
Besides, a Ranger, who roamed the state risking bullets every day, had no business siring rugrats when he couldn't be home, protecting the ones he loved.
Cass drew a ragged breath at the notion. Tonight was as close as he had ever come to being a real Ranger. He didn't want anything to go wrong on his watch. He had a lot to prove, now that he'd been exonerated and was working for a senator.
That's why he'd taken extra care at dinnertime, when he'd visited the Barleycorn Saloon on Western Avenue. He'd acted as civil and cordial as a fella in chaps could be while visiting a taproom full of cowboy-hating sodbusters. He'd even bought the house a round of drinks to loosen tongues and win allies.
But charm only went so far when roostered rednecks were itching for a cockfight. He'd no sooner coaxed a sweet, young Mexican girl, named Marisol, to confide how her brother, Joaquin, had shined the shoes of a mean-spirited homre with notches on his six-shooter, when a brute in a sack coat grabbed her arm and yanked her away from Cass's table.
"I don't like my ruts to stink of cow," the redneck announced with a sneer.
"I am a dancing girl, Seňor O'Shaunessy!" Marisol protested, trying to wrench her arm free of her captor's ham-sized fist. "Let me go!"
Cass smiled pleasantly, rising with his whiskey bottle. "Seňorita Marisol asked you kindly, amigo. Don't make her ask again."
O'Shaunessy curled his lip at Cass's pale gold hair and honey-colored tan. "I don't take orders from Greasers. Especially albino ones."
"Good thing I'm Irish then." Cass winked.
O'Shaunessy roared, taking a swing. Cass ducked, grabbing the bully's arm, twisting it behind his back, and using O'Shaunessy's momentum to slam his face into the table. Cass didn't need much strength to pin O'Shaunessy there, not after smashing the whiskey bottle for a weapon. He let the amber glass scratch blood from the redneck's throat.
"Now then," Cass instructed in that same pleasant tone. "I believe you owe Seňorita Marisol an apology. Let's hear it, amigo, lest I remember where I hid my Peacemaker."
"You mustn't trust him, seňor," Marisol whispered urgently, pointing at a suspicious lump under O'Shaunessy's sack coat. "He has a six-shooter!"
"Well, lookie there." Cass relieved the redneck of the .45 poking from his waistband. "Little notches. And they look like steers."
"It ain't even loaded!" O'Shaunessy wailed.
"Yeah? Well, mine is. Start talking if you don't want your ass used as target practice."
Cass sighed at the memory. Like he'd assured Poppy earlier in the week, most gun-toting chuckleheads strapped on firearms for show. O'Shaunessy fell into that category. The redneck had practically peed his pants at Cass's threat. That's why Cass believed O'Shaunessy's claim that he knew no other "mean-spirited hombre" with a notched six-shooter.
Marisol had tried to help by describing a brown-eyed, brown-haired, brown-bearded customer of Joaquin's. The features she'd listed could have belonged to any one of hundreds of men in Lampasas. But when she'd described how the hombre had rendezvoused with a gaunt, stoop-shouldered man with a crab-apple face, Cass had suspected Pendleton. Marisol swore up and down that Pendleton had passed the hombre a sack of money.
Maybe Collie's suspicions about Pendleton aren't so far-fetched, after all.
Cass's jaw hardened as he remembered how the hombre—or rather, the sniper—had escaped from the livery. He couldn't let the bastard elude him again. But recognizing an assassin at a public gala in Hancock Park wouldn't be easy. Little more than starlight and paper lanterns were available to illuminate the faces of the crowd.
Cass scanned the white folding chairs, marching like well-heeled soldiers across the sun-beaten grasses that surrounded the pavilion. A dozen suffragettes with wildly waving fans had taken refuge in the shade with their perspiring beaux, but most of the highbrow couples were congregating under hardy live oak trees or golden cedar elms, rather than strolling through the field of wilting, yellow daisies near the boardwalk. Unfortunately, a dry heat couldn't be eluded anywhere during a Texas drought, even after dusk.
The conductor of the Grand Park's orchestra was swinging his arms with great gusto, and his blue-liveried musicians were fervently playing the kind of ruckus mostly heard in opera houses. Cass didn't know Mozart from Bach—or Bach from Stephen Foster, for that matter. But he did know a two-bit killer could clean up as good as any dude in a top hat.
And Sadie should know that too.
That's why Cass had half a mind to walk over to that stage, tear down the handbill with her golden-eyed portrait, and cry fraud. Or thief. Or something that would make Sid lock her up out of harm's way.
Yes, Collie was right. Caring makes me a fool.
But Cass couldn't shake his worry that Sadie was in danger. Why else would she go to such lengths to disappear, creating a multitude of identities with beards, spectacles, and wigs?
Did the sun fry her brain? What can she possibly be thinking, to let her face get plastered all over Hancock Park for some stupid music recital?!
"You got cotton in your ears, boy?"
Cass's neck heated. Apparently, Baron had asked him a question.
"Uh... reckon I was scanning the crowd for snipers, sir."
Baron laughed good-naturedly, clapping Cass's shoulder. Despite his show of good spirits, the senator was having trouble disguising his affliction. His swallowtails looked more like a sack suit on his diminishing frame. According to his doctors, who'd posed a variety of uncertain diagnoses, Baron's weight loss was probably due to a faulty liver.
Poppy claimed that sex, whiskey, and tobacco were the real culprits.
At any rate, Lampasas's famed mineral baths didn't appear to be leeching the poison from Baron's blood. And that could be bad news for cattlemen, especially if Baron withdrew from the election.
"Fess up, boy," Baron ribbed him, twirling his handlebar mustachios. "You were scanning the crowd for pretty faces."
"Naw." Cass grinned at Baron's lampoon. "I wouldn't stand a chance against Coon Collie, here."
The boy shot him a withering look. As usual, Vandy was frisking at Collie's heels, acting adorable, and earning coos from eyelash-batting belles. Vandy was a skirt magnet. Cass didn't understand why Collie didn't
have at least one female trotting after him like a puppy on a string.
As if on cue, Collie growled in his usual, surly manner, "That churnhead of a clerk refused to give me the tickets. He claimed the front row is sold out."
Cass arched an eyebrow at the stretch of seats in question. Huddled beneath long ropes of orange and yellow lanterns, in honor of the Halloween season, the chairs were pinned with paper signs, each scrawled with the word, Reserved.
"I'm sure Mr. MacAffee did his best," Poppy said to her husband, her tone suggesting that Collie's best would never be good enough. "But you can hardly blame the clerk for refusing to believe that a youth of his... er, proclivities was running an errand for a senator. The chef at the Globe Hotel made such a ruckus over that stolen-trout incident, Mr. MacAffee's coon made the headlines—which is more than I can say for your campaign, dear. Perhaps you should get a coon to steal a trout."
"Cranky already?" Baron hiked an eyebrow at his wife, whose elegantly piled curls barely came up to his chin. "Did you remember to take your medicine?"
"Did you?" she fired back.
Cass winced. Baron wasn't fond of highbrow music recitals, but he was forever looking for opportunities to win votes. According to a rumor on the street, Rexford Sterne and his "plus one" had RSVP'd for this charity event, so naturally, Baron had bought tickets.
The senator reached for a pair of champagne glasses on the tray of a passing waiter. "Here," he said, handing one to his wife. "Drink. You need it more than I do."
"What I need is relief from this heat."
"Say the word, Sugar Plum, and I'll send you back to the hotel."
Poppy's chest heaved.
Baron smirked.
Cocking his head, the wily senator trained his gaze in the direction of the big-eared hick at the Will Call table.
"Tarnation, Collie. Is that the fella who's making my precious Popsicle melt? Good thing he sassed you instead of me, 'cause I would've plugged that hayseed on sight."
The air around Poppy crackled with chill. "Yes, by all means. Let us rid our lives of inconveniences, starting with marauding raccoons, that like to cannonball into bath—ow! Baron, for heaven's sake, watch where you're walking!"
Apparently, Baron had stepped on her toe. Cass wasn't surprised, since Baron had been looking at every woman in the park, except her. Now he was gawking at a particularly curvaceous Cajun whom they both knew. Clinging to Wilma's hand was a girl—approximately nine years in age—who was pointing with great excitement at a shooting star. The child was dressed in blue calico with a crisply pressed pinafore, white cotton stockings, and highly polished, black Mary Jane shoes. Her head was ringed by yellow sausage curls.
Cass arched an eyebrow—first at Wilma, since she was the last person on earth whom he'd expected to see entertaining a child—and second at Baron, who swung his wife so quickly in the direction of the Will Call booth that she stepped on Vandy's paw.
The coon yiked.
"Hey!" Collie barked at his boss's wife.
"Serves the varmint right! He's always underfoot."
"Don't mind the missus, boys," Baron counseled with his horsey smile, but irritation roughened his tone as he herded them away from Wilma. "Poppy wouldn't know what to do with herself if the good Lord made nagging a sin."
Poppy's eyes flashed green lightning. "Allow me to remind you, dear, that I agreed to risk my life in this trigger-happy boomtown, only because you promised to start taking your medicine."
Baron rolled his eyes. "Nasty stuff," he muttered to Cass. "Tastes like ashes mixed with turpentine."
"Honestly." As usual when Poppy was upset, she started fondling her relicario, the heart-shaped pendant bearing a drop of blood from each of her miscarriages. "You're worse than a child. I mix in molasses for you, don't I? What good is there in winning an election if you're too sick to do the job once you reach Austin?"
"No squirmy little liver bug is gonna keep me out of Austin," Baron flared, hiking his breeches and snorting the way an angry bull does before its charge. "I won over Lampasas County voters once, and I'll do it again!"
The Westerfields' bickering attracted the notice of a grim-faced Sid by the refreshment stand. The marshal had been conferring with a heavily veiled woman, who kept wringing a handkerchief. Sid directed his glare first at Baron, then at Cass's double-holstered rig.
The next thing Cass knew, the tin-star was headed their way.
"Howdy, Sid." Ever the politician, Baron pasted on a grin and pumped the marshal's hand. "Any news about that sniper?"
"'Fraid not," Sid admitted gruffly. For this hoity-toity affair, he'd traded his usual dungarees for fancy, black broadcloth and a silver bullet on a rawhide bollo. Standing well over six feet, Sid's balding head and barrel-sized chest were easily as imposing as Baron's.
"Perhaps you should question your friend, Rexford Sterne," Poppy told Sid snidely. "I daresay the Rangers already know who was crouching on that rooftop—and probably what he ate for breakfast. In fact, I'm tempted to wire the Rangers myself to find the elusive Mrs. Dalrymple. Clearly, she was a fraud. And probably a thief."
Cass stiffened as Poppy waved Sadie's handbill under Sid's nose. Poppy could be a bulldog when she sank her teeth into any scrap of evidence that might lead to Baron's paramours.
But Sid had bigger fish to fry. "Begging your pardon, ma'am," he said grimly, "but I did wire the Rangers—to help with another manhunt that has to take precedence. Seems like we've got a killer on the loose. Refresh my memory. When's the last time you saw Tito Ferraro?"
Poppy blinked. Two spots of color bloomed on her powdered cheeks. "M-Mr. Ferraro?"
"Now see here, Sid," Baron interceded testily. "Tito was in my employ, guarding my missus. Are you saying Tito is wanted for murder?"
"Tito's dead," Sid said flatly. "What the coyotes left of him was found this afternoon in a cedar brake, about two miles south of town. Doc says it was the bullet that killed him. But bullets don't make a man's tongue turn black or his eyes go yellow and buggy."
Poppy gasped, pressing a gloved hand to her mouth.
"Collie," Baron barked, "escort my wife to a proper seat. A lady's ears shouldn't suffer such tales."
For once, Poppy didn't argue, but Collie looked madder than a wet hornet to be missing this juicy bit of gossip. He dragged his feet as he herded her away.
"What the hell's the matter with you?" Baron growled at the lawman. "You know better than to talk business in front of a woman."
Sid's flinty gaze was openly speculative as he glanced between Baron and Cass—searching for an incriminating reaction, perhaps? But Baron looked as stunned as Cass felt by the news of Tito's death.
"Tito left a note," Cass volunteered. "He was heading home. He wasn't familiar with these hills. Maybe he was bitten by a copperhead, became feverish, and got lost," he added, recalling how snake venom had nearly snuffed out his own life last year.
Sid grunted, turning to Baron. "You still have this note?"
"Hell, Sid, if I kept every scrap of paper that ever crossed my desk, I'd have to build another barn."
"Uh-huh." Sid didn't look convinced. "I heard Collie had words with Tito. I heard they argued lots of times."
Cass tensed. "Says who?"
"Says a witness, that's who."
Baron was frowning. "Collie's just a kid."
"Age don't make no nevermind. I was riding posse on my thirteenth birthday. Shot my first bank robber that year, too. And I'm not the only one who took to guns young," Sid added, drilling Cass with a dire glare.
Cass's jaw hardened. So much for his assumption that he and Sid were friends. "That hurts my feelings, marshal."
"Cut the crap, Cassidy. Don't you think I contacted a few Kentucky tin-stars? According to the Whitley County sheriff's office, Collie was arrested on murder charges in Blue Thunder Valley about two years ago. Seems like he was stealing coons from a taxidermist, who took exception to the thefts—and wound up dead."
Cass clenched a fist.
No one knew better than he did how a youthful crime could ruin a boy's life. "If you wrote to Sheriff Truitt," Cass said acidly, "then he should have told you those murder charges didn't stick. Collie was released for lack of evidence, and the real murderer was shot by a bounty hunter."
"Whom you plugged," Sid accused.
"The bastard had just murdered a man! And he was fixing to plug Sera, Lynx, and Collie, whom he was holding hostage!"
Baron clapped a restraining hand over Cass's shoulder. "That bounty hunter had a stack of murder warrants against him, and Cass was exonerated in a court of law," the senator said in crisp, businesslike tones.
Sid's eyes glanced narrowly from Baron to Cass.
"Just so we're clear, Cassidy," the marshal ground out. "I'll be watching you. And that smart-mouthed kid, too."
With a terse nod, Sid turned on his heel and strode into the night.
Cass was so angry, his limbs were shaking.
Baron's beefy hand squeezed his shoulder, half in sympathy, half in reproach. "Simmer town, hotshot. That tongue of yours is going to dig your grave."
"Collie's a good kid!"
"I know, son. But somewhere in town, the boy made an enemy. Maybe even Sterne."
"Sterne?"
"Sure. Everyone knows Sid's in Sterne's back pocket. Sid even admitted it. After he found the corpse, he called in the Rangers. When a body's found outside the city limits, the proper procedure is to call in the county sheriff." Grimly, Baron shook his head. "Looks like Sterne found a new way to make things personal between you and him."
Cass was seeing red at that point.
The crowd rippled and parted near the pavilion. Applause swept through the seated members of the audience, who quickly climbed to their feet. Whoops and hollers erupted as the clapping grew louder, rushing like wildfire from couple to couple. Sterne strolled onto the grounds with a stunning, brandy-eyed redhead on his arm.
Sadie.
Cass's heart kicked hard.
Her luscious figure was sheathed in a sleeveless evening gown of breezy, ivory silk. A daring scoop revealed the abundance of freckles on her back, and a golden bow rode flirtatiously above her bustle. A gauzy shawl of matching gold drooped from her shoulders and fluttered over her elbow-length gloves.
Devil in Texas (Lady Law & The Gunslinger Series, Book 1) Page 15
