Just then, Toby returned to the table with their beers.
“Everyone looks very serious,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Nothing, Toby,” Jinny said. “Nothing you need concern yourself about.” To Mal, it sounded like something a parent might say to quell a fretful child’s fears.
“Well, this here’s a celebration,” Toby said, raising his glass. “In case it escaped your attention, Mal, Jinny and I — we’re boyfriend and girlfriend now. Ain’t that great?”
“Just dandy,” Mal said, clinking his glass listlessly against Toby’s. “I’m happy for you both.”
Toby might not have marked the stiffness with which he spoke, but Jinny certainly did.
“Mal’s cool with it,” she said. “I’m sure he is. He’s taking a moment to adjust, is all.”
When Jamie showed up, he, too, was taken aback when Toby told him he was now officially dating Jinny. He coped with the shock better than Mal had, though. “Of all the guys in this neck of the woods,” he said, “she could do a lot worse than you, Toby. And, given her track record, has.”
“Hey!” Jinny slapped him playfully.
“Some of the losers you’ve stepped out with in the past, sis,” Jamie said. “It beggars belief. What was the name of that one, looked like a pig?”
“Marcus, and he did not look like a pig.”
“If he didn’t, how come you knew who I was talking about? And then there was the fella with the overbite. Chipmunk guy. Not forgetting the one whose nose squeaked when he breathed. Gary? Glen? Gil? Something with a ‘G,’ anyway.”
“Greg couldn’t help it with the nose thing.”
“Like a gorramn pennywhistle it was,” said Jamie. “You don’t look like a pig, Toby, you don’t have an overbite, and your nostrils don’t make a noise, far as I’m aware. That puts you leagues ahead of the rest. Congratulations.”
Later, Toby and Jinny danced together to the plinking honky-tonk of the player-piano while Jamie and Mal hatched plans.
“Sheriff Bundy made an ass of himself today, as usual,” Jamie said. “Willard Krieger was saying stuff about the Union, badmouthing ’em. You know how that old coot is. Got an ornery streak in him a mile wide.”
“Only reason Krieger moved to Shadow was to escape ‘Union meddling,’ as he calls it,” said Mal.
“Right, and now he’s incensed ’cause that meddling’s spread as far out as here. He was saying his taxes have gone up threefold.”
“Everyone’s taxes have gone up.” Hence Mal’s mother’s combine harvester restoration project. Anything to make a little extra cash on the side.
“But Krieger’s now got to pay extra duties on the goods he imports for his hardware store. He’s putting his prices up, of course, but he ain’t best pleased, and neither are his customers. Anyways, he decided to go out into the town square and tub-thump for a spell. He stood on an actual soapbox and harangued passersby. Got himself a fair-sized audience, in fact. Then Bundy wanders along and arrests him on the spot.”
“What for? Man has a right to free speech.”
“Not if it’s what Bundy considers ‘seditious talk.’”
“There a law against that?”
“If there ain’t, it doesn’t bother Bundy none.”
“So Krieger’s in jail now.”
“He is. And you know what, Mal? The Four Amigos are going to bust him out.”
Mal was in such a cranky, belligerent frame of mind just then that Jamie’s proposal didn’t sound at all wrongheaded to him. It sounded, instead, like a very fine suggestion indeed. Not least because it would peeve Sheriff Bundy, and Mal was still smarting from the way the lawman had backhanded him at the Hendrickson place a few months back.
Jamie soon roped Jinny in on the jailbreak scheme, and naturally, where Jinny went, Toby was sure to follow.
“If Jinny’s up for it,” he said, “I don’t need asking twice.”
Jamie’s plan involved a small amount of plastique, some detonation cord, a wheeled motor vehicle, a towrope, and a whole heaping of chutzpah. The barred windows of the cells in the town lockup were in back of the building. Jamie affixed a pencil-thick length of the putty-like explosive around the outside of the window frame, inserted the det cord, and attached one end of the towrope to the bars and the other to the rear fender of a quad bike. It all happened in an instant. Jamie lit the fuse. The plastique blew, loosening the brickwork around the window. Jinny gunned the quad bike’s motor and torqued the throttle. The quad bike leapt away, hauling on the towrope and dragging the window-bar assembly loose. Before the dust even began to settle, Toby sprang into the hole, set to tell Willard Krieger he was free and should scramble out while he could.
Only problem was, they had got the wrong cell. Toby’s face said it all. “Krieger ain’t here. No one’s here. Cell’s empty.”
In that moment of frantic incredulity, as it dawned on the Four Amigos that all their efforts had been for naught, a familiar voice yelled at them.
“Hold it right there!”
Sheriff Bundy came huffing around the angle of the building, with his deputy, Orville Crump, close on his heels. Where Bundy was fat and aggressive, Crump was lanky and sly. They were the proverbial chalk and cheese, yet somehow they got along together and made a good team.
Both had their government-issue sidearms out and leveled at the miscreants.
“Oh, you’ve gone too far this time, my friends,” Bundy said. “You’ve really screwed the pooch. Destruction of public property? Attempting to aid and abet the escape of a felon? Unauthorized use of explosive materials? You are going down!”
They didn’t, in the event, go down. Marla Finn, Toby’s lawyer mother, managed to get them off on a technicality. She and her husband, however, were furious with their boy and forbade him ever seeing the others again. Mal and Jamie, at least. They made an exception for Jinny, after Toby pleaded with them. He spoke about her so enthusiastically, with such evident ardor, that they couldn’t bring themselves to keep her from him. They were, frankly, just glad that Toby had got himself a girl. They had begun to worry he might never find love. And Jinny was, all said and done, something of a catch.
It was, in effect, the end of the Four Amigos, although as far as Mal was concerned the end had already come, the moment he walked into the Silver Stirrup and the castle of hope he had been building for himself came crashing down around his ears. He consigned the gold locket with the fancy “J” on it to the back of a drawer and forgot about it — for a time, at least.
Seeing Toby Finn again after so long had brought back these memories of Mal’s youth on Shadow. They played in his head like mind movies as he lay in that subterranean cell, cold, trussed up, miserable. They swirled like stirred-up sediment in the riverbed of the past, muddying his thoughts.
Toby. Jinny. Jamie. Himself. And how it had all ended in disaster and a fireball and a ton of recrimination.
Mal was only dimly aware of the clunk of a bolt being drawn back, door hinges creaking open. Footsteps shuffled towards him. He braced himself for another beating. There wasn’t much he could do to prevent it, so he was better off just withstanding it, weathering it.
“Reynolds?” someone whispered.
Mal turned his head. He saw a vague silhouette in the semi-darkness of the cell, a man bending over him.
“Here,” the visitor said. “Drink this.”
Mal was being proffered an enamel mug. He struggled up to a sitting position.
“What’s in there?” he said. “Poison? Piss?”
“Just water. Reckoned you’d be thirsty.”