This Gun for Hire Read online

  When she turned around again, he was waiting for her. He tipped her chin, kissed her lightly once, then again. “You will be careful. You will let me catch you in all the ways that I might need to.” When she nodded slowly, he added, “You understand I mean that more than in the literal sense.”

  “Yes.” She slipped her hands inside his duster, laid her palms against his chest. The faint smile that tugged the corners of her mouth upward faded when she felt the press of an oddly familiar but unexpected object under the left side of his jacket. A vertical crease appeared between her eyebrows. Her eyes did not stray from Quill’s as she tapped the slight bulge with her fingertips. “What is this?”

  “You know.”

  And as soon he as said it, she thought that it was probably true. “I want to see.” When Quill merely shrugged, Calico opened two buttons on his jacket and parted the material so she could see his vest. The badge’s simplicity made a powerful statement. She had seen some badges carved from coins, but Quill’s was not like that. Silver in color, round in shape, a single five-pointed star filled the open center. Stamped in an arc above the star were the words U.S. MARSHAL, and on the rim below it was the small stamp of another star. “Was there a reason you did not want to tell me?”

  “Not a good reason. I was taken with the idea that you thought I was a bounty hunter.” He closed his jacket. “And your opinion of the marshals was not what one would call respectful.”

  “You’re right. Not a good reason.” She patted the badge through his jacket one more time. “Does Ramsey know he’s being protected by a federal marshal?”

  “No. And I don’t think ‘protected’ applies here.”

  “Quill. I know I’ve called him the pharaoh now and again, but no one could have suspected Ramses required a taster for his food. This was not predictable. Beatrice Stonechurch falls outside my experience and yours.” Calico could see that he was not prepared to forgive himself so easily. She took a step back and surreptitiously used the table to steady herself when she felt a wave of nausea uncurl in her stomach. “Were you assigned here? Is that how you came to Stonechurch?”

  “I have no specific territory. I was tapped for the marshal service because I served in the Army and had a lawyer’s background. I still don’t know who brought my name to their attention. I was just settling down on my ranch when they came to me, and I was not easily convinced.”

  “But you agreed.”

  “Eventually. They needed someone to lead a posse through territory scattered with renegades. I was familiar with the mountains and the renegades. There was some thought that I was in a position to negotiate a truce.”

  “Did you?” The question was a delaying tactic. Calico felt pressure building behind her eyes. Not wanting to call attention to it, she kept her hands where they were.

  “I did. We were after Samuel Miller, not Indian hostiles. They did not like him much either.”

  “Cutlip Miller. No one likes him. So you’re the one who brought him in.”

  “Not alone. I had men with me.”

  “Sure. The posse.” Her tone could not have been more dismissive. “And Stonechurch?”

  “You were right. I was asked to take it on.”

  “Asked?”

  “This is not my job, Calico. It’s a diversion. I am a rancher.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I own a spread.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I swear in as a marshal when it suits me.”

  “Sure.”

  Quill adopted the strategy of least resistance and stopped talking. He placed his hands firmly on her shoulders and nudged her just enough to encourage her to turn around, then he pointed to the mudroom and the door beyond it.

  Calico drew a steadying breath and led the way. A silver dollar moon cast enough light to create shadows behind them. The area immediately around the porch was trampled with footprints. They had to walk out a piece to find ones that suggested Beatrice had gone in a particular direction.

  “I never saw Ann,” said Calico as they rounded the house to the front. “I barely saw Beatrice.”

  Quill pointed out a pair of small footprints facing another, equally small, pair. The prints were surrounded by circles of disturbed snow, indicative of the women’s gowns sweeping the surface. “It looks as if Ann met Beatrice here. She must have left by the front door. We could not have heard her from Ramsey’s room.”

  Calico stared at the prints. “I wonder if they had a conversation here. I can’t shake the feeling that in the end Ann did not go without a great deal of convincing. To leave her father . . .” Calico shook her head. “It’s hard for me to conceive that she would do that.”

  “Because you would not have.”

  “You’re right. I would not have.” She paused. “I didn’t.”

  Quill started walking, careful to stay out of the tracks they were following. “There’s no stumbling, no dragging. It appears that if Ann were reluctant, she still went willingly. I think Beatrice has been grooming Ann to play a role in her scheme since Leo Stonechurch’s accident. When Leo died, Beatrice set things in motion. This has been a long time coming. Ann is the one who served her father the food that caused his collapse. She is innocent; she only thinks she is guilty.”

  “It is probably easier for her to take the blame herself than to look too closely at someone she loves. What she did had no malicious intent, but who can say what Beatrice has made her believe? She is scared. I don’t like to think about her so scared.” On her own, Ann might go anywhere, but Beatrice’s presence changed things, made the route she would take with her niece more deliberate. Calico stopped suddenly and tugged on Quill’s sleeve to bring him up short.

  “I think I know where Beatrice will go,” she said.

  “Horses?” he asked, directing his chin toward the livery.

  “No. She might take a mount if she were alone, but Ann doesn’t ride. At this late hour, Beatrice will not ask for a rig, plus Ann’s recent acquaintance with Boone Abbot makes that especially risky.” Calico raised her hand, pointed to the far end of town, and then lifted her arm a fraction higher, indicating the shadowed adit carved into the face of the mountain. “She will be hiding in one of the mine tunnels. If you’re right about her connection to the problems in Number 1, my guess is that’s where she’s gone. She will have friends there.”

  Quill considered it, nodded slowly. “She could walk to any of the entrances. It makes sense. But she cannot hope to hide in the tunnels for the long term; she must have some escape route in mind.”

  “Why? People who do not expect to get caught hardly ever do. That’s been true in my experience. What drives them out is desperation, not an alternative plan.”

  “Desperation,” said Quill, “makes them reckless.”

  “And unpredictable.”

  Quill said what they both were thinking. “More dangerous for us.”

  Calico nodded. “What you said earlier about thinking and not reacting? Let’s do that.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Let’s do that.”

  Ann Street was deserted. Few of the shops had lamps burning in the apartments above them. The saloons were closed, but a trio of miners crowded the bench in front of one. As Quill and Calico passed, one of the miners was elbowed to the boardwalk. He grunted softly but did not try to rise.

  “That was Jim Shepard on his bucket,” said Quill. “Hard couple of days. I would stay down, too.” When Calico asked what he meant, he told her about the dynamite in storage that had not been turned. “George Kittredge had his entire crew working. Volunteers only, but I don’t think there was anyone who did not come forward.” He was aware that Calico’s steps had slowed. They had just passed Mrs. Birden’s dress shop, but whatever had distracted her, it was not something in the window. “What is it?”

  “I heard this story,” she said slowly. “Not precisely thi
s story, but one like it.” She stopped in her tracks. “Beatrice told me. Sticks of unexploded dynamite lodged in one of Number 3’s tunnels caused her husband’s accident. It was only today—yesterday now—that she told me about it. It came up because of Boone Abbot. He’s the one who found the dynamite. Beatrice says the sticks weep nitroglycerin. No, she says they sweat it. She was particular about that. A man’s invention, she called it. I suppose she’s right.”

  “She is, but then that observation is coming from a woman whose preferred method of killing is poison.”

  “I’m aware.” Calico picked up the pace again. She took inventory of her symptoms and realized the bracing air was helping. There was no longer any sense of pressure behind her eyes. She felt focused and alert. The one troubling leftover from her encounter with Beatrice was the intermittent surge of dizziness that made her stomach curdle. “I would say that women prefer subtler methods, but I am carrying a gun.”

  “True.” He looked over at her. Moonshine put a pale blue cast on her features when she raised her face. “Are you all right?”

  “I am.”

  “You would tell me if you needed to stop, rest, toss your dinner.”

  “I would.”

  “Liar.”

  Calico shrugged. “Why do you ask?”

  “Still trying to see if I can surprise the truth out of you.”

  That made her grin, and there was faint evidence of it yet when they reached the entrance to the Number 3 mine. “How many men work at night?”

  “Only five or six. They cluster in a single tunnel in each of the mines, especially at night. It improves the yield of the ore and reduces risk because they are looking out for each other.”

  Calico looked around. A couple of lanterns lighted both sides of the entrance, but the area all around was deserted. “Shouldn’t there be someone posted here?”

  “Yes, at least that’s what I’ve been told.” Quill also cast his eyes right and left. He took down one of the lanterns. “I think we should go to the other mine entrances before we walk blindly into this one.”

  Calico agreed. Thinking, she reminded herself. Not reacting. They took the path to Number 2. There was a gradual uphill grade over the course of almost half a mile. They set a pace that covered the ground quickly. At Number 2 they were indeed met by a miner sitting on a chair outside the adit. Calico hung back in the shadows while Quill questioned the man. Calico heard nothing in the miner’s voice to suggest that he knew anything more than he was saying. When Quill returned, they began a switchback descent to Number 1. The route took them close to town again.

  Calico pointed out the dark, yawning mouth of another adit. There were no lanterns to mark the entrance of this shaft, nor anyone posted nearby.

  Quill shook his head. “That’s not Number 1. That opening leads to storage chambers. The dynamite is in there along with other equipment they don’t want to expose to the weather. That’s where I was earlier with George Kittredge. It looks as if everyone’s finally stopped working.”

  He told her to look down and off to her left. “You see that wide, dark seam running along the side of the mountain?”

  “Yes, but I don’t hear water.”

  “Seam, not stream. It’s a crevice, a rift. I don’t know the proper term. I do know it’s something like one hundred twenty feet deep, so if you have to go that way alone, make sure you use the footbridge.” They continued on toward Number 1. “Didn’t Ramsey bring you down here?”

  “I only saw Number 1, but we came from another direction. We had a rig and we did not ride this far.”

  “The bridge would not support a rig. I don’t think it would support a horse. Supplies are moved around the mountain from the train station, not across the rift.”

  They stopped before they reached Number 1 because they could see lanterns at the entrance and a miner perched on a nearby boulder smoking a cigarette. Quill said, “I don’t think Beatrice came here, or even came this way. Her husband was injured in Number 3, and the lack of a man at the entrance back there seems telling.”

  “But Number 1 is where they are having trouble. If she has something to do with that, then I think that’s where she would have friends. We should go in, and you should at least talk to the miner standing guard.”

  “All right. We’ve come this far.”

  They walked side by side until the path widened closer to the entrance. That was when Calico stopped and let Quill go on. She stepped into a moon shadow created by a large mound of snow that had been shoveled away from the adit, and she listened to the exchange.

  * * *

  Ann Stonechurch huddled inside her coat. The floor of the tunnel was hard and cold. She could not sit on it any longer. No matter how she tried to separate herself from the ground, icy fingers worked their way through her coat, her gown, her shift, and finally, her drawers. She wished she had worn half a dozen petticoats. She wished she were wearing her cloak with the ermine trim and deep pockets. She wished she had thought to bring . . . no, what she wished was that she had never been persuaded to leave her room.

  Ann knew she belonged at home, not here. No matter what had happened, or would happen, her place was at her father’s side. She was filled with remorse for every wrong choice she had made.

  She started to rise, pushing herself up with the rough tunnel wall at her back.

  “Sit.”

  Ann had been told to sit down before, but this time she ignored the snarled order and got to her feet. “It’s too cold to sit.” Her teeth began to chatter.

  “Stop that.”

  “I c-can’t help it-t-t.”

  “You want to be warmer? Go on down the tunnel. The deeper you go, the warmer it gets.”

  Ann thought they were already deep inside the mountain. She judged they had walked three hundred yards and her companion had extinguished lamps as they passed them. Without a lantern, the route to the outside was black as pitch. “You would let me do that?”

  “Sure. Why not? Oh, you think there might be a way out. No. There’s not. There’s no way out but the way we came in.”

  Ann wrapped her arms around herself. She shivered again and averted her eyes from the man guarding her. It helped calm her to pretend that he was not watching her with what she thought of as unusual interest. He had already made a comment about her hair, something about it being as dark and thick as his sister’s. It was not long after that that she unwound her blue woolen scarf from around her neck and wrapped it over her hair. He did not comment, but she intercepted his sly, secretive smile before she was finished. She had read about smiles like that, and seeing it in fact, not fiction, filled her with dread as cold as the floor under her.

  His narrow smile was not merely cunning, not only wicked. In Ann’s mind, it defined evil.

  “Where is my aunt?” she asked. “She said she would not be long.”

  “Now I’ve been here same as you. What makes you think I would know the answer to that?”

  Ann shrugged, shook her head.

  “I asked you a question,” the man said. “I answer yours. You answer mine. Or didn’t anyone teach you that?”

  “I saw Aunt Beatrice speaking to you. I thought she might have told you more than she told me.”

  “See? That was not so hard.”

  Ann watched him out of the corner of her eye as he leaned back against the wall and rotated his shoulders to scratch an itch he could not reach. He sighed and moaned as he moved.

  “Found the sweet spot,” he said. He hunched, rubbed between his shoulder blades. “Ah. And again.” When he was done, he straightened and took a step toward her.

  Ann could not help herself. She flinched. He seemed satisfied with that because he stopped, turned slightly, and rested a shoulder against the tunnel wall. He ignored her and examined his nails. He did not look up again until he removed a small knife from the pocket in
his coat. This time Ann did not react. She stared at it without interest, in fact, without expression of any kind, and maintained those schooled features even when he chuckled.

  She turned her head when he began to pick at his nails with the knife. “I would like to walk d-down a ways,” she said. “Where it’s war-warmer.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  She had not expected him to let her go so easily. It convinced her that he was telling the truth about there being no outlet. It did not matter to her as much as it probably should have. What she wanted more than warmth was to be away from him.

  He was a large man, uncomfortably so. He occupied too much space, took up too much air. He spoke rather more softly than she thought he would, but his voice was deep and had a ragged edge that made every word sound as if he were growling it out. He had a thick neck and dark, shaggy hair. His beard was short, wiry, and his mustache did not hide his upper lip but outlined it. He had wide shoulders and a broad chest. His hands were as big as mallets when he curled them into fists. To Ann, they were blunt, heavy instruments of violence. She could not think of them in any other fashion.

  Ann was already moving into the circle of light from a lantern some thirty yards from where she had been when she heard him call after her.

  “Don’t get lost, Miss Stonechurch. It’d be a real shame if I had to come looking for you.”

  Ann looked back over her shoulder, but he was not in view. She shivered. Once again, it was not because she was cold.

  * * *

  Quill held up his lantern as he approached the miner sitting on the boulder. The tip of the man’s cigarette glowed brightly as he took a last, deep drag. He ground it out on the rock and then flicked it away.

  “Mr. Cavanaugh, right?” asked Quill, setting the lantern on the ground to leave his hands free.

  “Ah. You remembered.” He grinned briefly. “I have to say that depending on how you look at it, it’s either too early or too late for you to be here on a casual matter. No one who can’t sleep comes out here.”