“You figured he was so mad over what happened on the river he’d have to let it out by thrashin’ some poor whore?” Preacher said.
“That’s right. Who did he choose? Not Cassandra again, I hope. She’s just now getting back to something approaching normal.”
Preacher pulled out one of the chairs and sat down at the table without waiting for an invitation. “That’s who he picked,” he said, “but Jessie wouldn’t allow it. She went with him herself.”
Cleve had been idly straightening the cards. At Preacher’s words, he stopped and frowned. “Jessie?” he murmured. He started to get up from his chair, then sank back down and went on, “Nothing to worry about. She won’t let him get away with any ugly behavior.”
“How’s she gonna stop him if he loses control of himself ?”
“She’ll kill him,” Cleve replied with a shrug. “We’d rather keep him alive, of course, so that we can ruin a few more of his plans and steal some more profits out from under him, but if she has to, she’ll cut his throat, or perhaps blow his balls off with that little pistol she carries. That would be most appropriate. The one thing she won’t do . . . is let him hurt her again.”
“So he did whale on her before, the way he did on Cassandra?”
“That’s right. What do you think turned her against him?”
“I don’t know. Greed?”
Cleve shook his head. “Jessie’s not a greedy person. Me, on the other hand . . .” His voice trailed off into a laugh.
“What does she want, then, if it’s not the money?”
“Revenge? Power? Simply to be free of Beaumont, which she knows she never truly will be as long as he’s alive?” Cleve went back to straightening the cards, picking up the deck in his long, slender fingers and tapping it on the table to even the edges. “I’d say that all of those things play a part in her actions.”
“That’s why she was willin’ to have that riverboat crew murdered so they couldn’t tell anybody about me double-crossin’ Beaumont?”
“You found out about that?” Cleve seemed surprised. “The men we hired weren’t supposed to take care of that part of the job until after you were gone.”
“They didn’t wait quite long enough,” Preacher said in a grim, flinty voice. “I heard the shots and went back, saw the riverboat burnin’.”
Cleve shrugged again. “Well, you have to admit, it was effective.”
“Was the fire Jessie’s idea?”
“What?” Cleve shook his head. “Jessie didn’t know anything about that, Preacher. It was all my idea.”
Preacher felt relief go through him. He hadn’t wanted to believe that Jessie was capable of such a thing, but truly, he didn’t really know.
“You didn’t think Jessie came up with that, did you?” Cleve went on. The gambler shook his head. “Even if it had occurred to her that your secret needed to be protected, she wouldn’t have given the order for those riverboat men to be killed.”
“Then why did you?” Preacher asked.
Cleve sat up straighter. “Because someone had to! When I threw in with Jessie on this, I knew I might have to make some of the difficult decisions that she couldn’t make.”
“Like murderin’ innocent men?”
“Beaumont has murdered innocent men. At least, he’s been responsible for it, many times. And you saw what he did to Cassandra. A man like that is worse than an animal, because he knows what he’s doing. He just doesn’t care.”
Preacher couldn’t argue with any of that. He knew Cleve was right about how bad Shad Beaumont was. He still wasn’t sure that justified sinking to Beaumont’s level.
There was no way to go back and change things now though. He just said, “I don’t like it,” and left it at that.
Cleve chuckled. “Then it’s a good thing you’re not in charge here, isn’t it?”
Preacher let that go, although it wasn’t easy, and said, “What’s next?”
“Jessie and I haven’t decided yet. We were thinking that some of Beaumont’s warehouses might just happen to burn down.”
Preacher shook his head. “You do somethin’ like that, you’ll risk burnin’ down the whole town, includin’ this place. You don’t want to take that chance. You’d be better off cleanin’ out those warehouses instead and movin’ the goods somewhere else.”
“That would involve killing the guards. I thought you were opposed to that much bloodshed.”
“I ain’t gonna lose any sleep over somebody who takes money from Beaumont, knowin’ the sort of varmint he is,” Preacher said. “Anyway, you wouldn’t have to kill the guards, just knock ’em out.”
Cleve looked across the table at him. “Do you know anyone stealthy enough to accomplish something like that?”
“I might,” Preacher said. “I just might.”
Cleve thought about it for a moment and then began to nod. “I’ll talk it over with Jessie, but it’s not a bad idea. That way the merchandise isn’t destroyed. The profits from it go into our coffers instead. Which makes me wonder . . . just how big a share are you expecting out of all this, Preacher?”
“I ain’t all that interested in the money, either. I’m after a different payoff.”
“Making Shad Beaumont’s life a living hell and then killing him?” Cleve guessed.
Putting it like that made it sound even worse, Preacher thought, and yet that was exactly the goal that had brought him to St. Louis. Never again, he vowed. From here on out, whenever he had a score to settle with a man, he would do it right out in the open.
“Let’s just figure out which of those warehouses you want to clean out first,” he said.
Three nights later, in the dark of the moon, Preacher stole through an alley near the riverfront. He had a bandanna tied over the lower half of his face like a damned highwayman, which he didn’t like, but it was necessary to conceal his identity because it was possible someone might see him and recognize him if he didn’t wear it.
His destination was a warehouse full of stolen goods supplied by a ring of thieves working for Beaumont. Jessie had agreed with the plan Preacher and Cleve hatched, and now Preacher was carrying out his part of it.
He had waited until after midnight to slip out of his quarters at Beaumont’s house and make his way here. According to what Jessie had been able to find out, there were two guards outside the warehouse and two more inside. She knew this because Beaumont’s men sometimes patronized her house when they had been lucky at cards and were particularly flush. A whore could always find a way to make a man talk and never even realize just how much information he was spilling.
Evidently things had gone well three nights earlier when Jessie took Beaumont upstairs. Preacher didn’t like to think too much about that, but clearly Beaumont hadn’t given in to his rage while he was with her, and that was the important thing. Since the ambush during the attempted riverboat robbery, Beaumont had resumed his normal routine for the most part, although he spent some of the time asking questions in waterfront dives, trying to find out who was behind what had happened. Preacher accompanied him on those trips and saw firsthand how Beaumont wasn’t having any luck with his investigation. Jessie and Cleve had done a good job of covering their tracks.
For a man who had crawled into Indian camps and slit the throats of several warriors without any of the other Indians knowing a thing about it until morning, sneaking up on these warehouse guards didn’t pose much of a challenge for Preacher. Even though it was late, raucous laughter and the scraping notes of a fiddle came from a nearby tavern, helping to cover up any sounds he might make as he approached the big double doors of the warehouse. Two men sat on kegs near the doors, one on either side, and while they might be tough gents, their senses didn’t come anywhere near being as keen as those of a Blackfoot or Crow warrior. Preacher slipped along the brick wall of the building until he was close enough to reach out and touch the nearer of the two guards.