Gil Willart.
For a moment, the two men froze, each with a hand hovering over a holstered six-gun.
York tried to calm the situation. “Just need a word, Gil. Just a word.”
Right hand still poised to draw, York gestured with his left for Willart to keep coming. When they were on the same step, the two men walked slowly down, side by side, and then over to an empty table toward the front.
York and Willart sat across from each other. The weathered foreman looked glum.
“How’s Pearl doing?” York asked.
“She’s gonna be okay. Purty blue right now. Been through plenty.”
“You like the girl.”
“I do.”
“Maybe you’d like to take her away from all this.”
“What d’you mean, Sheriff?”
“Maybe give her a better life.”
“I’m a damn cowboy.”
“So, you weren’t jealous? Of Upton?”
The green eyes in the leather mask flared. “That pip-squeak! Hell, no. If he wanted to marry her, that was jake with me. Pleased to see her catch a break.”
“You wouldn’t have minded that? Her going off and marrying somebody else?”
The cowboy shook his head. “No. Why, you think I belly-shot that clean-nails bastard? No, sir. I wasn’t even in town.”
“That’s right, Gil. You were in Las Vegas.”
Willart shifted casually. “I was at that. Lookin’ into buying some cattle for my new boss.”
“Didn’t happen to run into the Rhomer boys while you was there, did you?”
The foreman frowned. “What’s Rita been tellin’ you, anyways? You know you can’t believe nothin’ these whores come up with.”
“Call Rita a ‘whore’ again, Gil, and I’ll hand you your teeth.”
York waved Rita over.
“Yes?” she said.
“Check on Pearl,” York said. “If she’s up to comin’ down, put a robe on her and bring her. If not, tell her we’re comin’ up to talk.”
Rita shook her head. “Can’t you leave the poor kid alone?”
“No.”
She sighed and trudged off.
“Gil,” York said pleasantly, “if I find out you hired the Rhomers to come and kill me, I’ll consider that right unfriendly.”
Willart worked up a sneer. “And you’ll kill me like you killed so many?”
“Most likely, yes. Now my thinking is, you don’t have enough against me to hire those Rhomers yourself. You’d be doin’ it for somebody else. That banker maybe.”
“I’m listenin’.”
York shrugged. “Well, in that case, I’d be way madder at who give you that task than at you for carryin’ it out. I might even trade your worthless goddamn life for such information.”
Willart was thinking about that, green eyes moving, when the scream came from upstairs.
A woman’s scream, it ripped the quiet night at the Victory apart like a piece of cheap cloth. York and Willart both jumped to their feet, looking up in the direction of that terrified howl.
Rita was on the landing in front of the doors to the dance-hall girls’ cribs, leaning on the railing, her face white, her eyes huge, the red mouth in the pretty face distorted into something ugly.
“It’s Pearl!” she cried.
“Come with me,” York said to Willart, but he needn’t have bothered, because the cowboy was just behind him as they both bounded up the stairs.
The door to Pearl’s room stood open, the way Rita had left it.
The skinny brunette was sprawled on the bed, still half under a sheet, much of that sheet stained scarlet now, the girl’s head back too far, in a position made possible by whoever slashed her throat ear to ear, creating a gaping, grinning second mouth. The blood had run down the front of her white nightgown, like her body was crying for her, but she was dead, so it wasn’t flowing now.
York instinctively turned to Willart, whose horrified expression turned to fear as he shoved York, hard, and took off running.
York followed the cowboy out onto the corridor of the landing. Gasps and cries came up from the patrons below. Willart ran down the stairs so fast that he stumbled a third of the way from the bottom, somersaulting the rest of the distance, and when the cowboy got to his feet, he found himself facing Caleb York, halfway down the steps by now.
“Don’t!” York said, holding up his left palm, and stopping where he was.
But Willart went for his gun, and it hadn’t cleared its holster when York’s two .44 bullets ripped through him, shaking him, making him do the saddest little dance, as blood shot out his back in twin streams, before he crumpled on legs that, no matter how bowed, just couldn’t hold him up anymore.
Chapter Thirteen
The explosive reports of his .44 were still echoing and reverberating in the high-ceilinged saloon when — still several steps up from the man he’d just shot — Caleb York said, “Damn.”
He went down those last few steps and knelt by Gil Willart, knowing the man would be dead but checking anyway. Rita was making her way slowly down the stairs, leaning a hand on the banister all the way down. Her face was white as a lace hanky.
She paused on the step from which York had fired, asking, “Did you have to kill him?”
Slowly, York got to his feet. “I wish to hell I hadn’t. He died knowing things I need to.”
The dark eyes were big and round. “Why did you then? You shot him twice, Sheriff. If you wanted him alive...”
“A man pulls on me, I put him down.” He glanced at her. “That’s how I can be standing here jawing about it with you.”
She drew in a breath, nodded. But she stayed where she was on the stairs, the garish beauty of her dance-hall attire at odds with the crumpled shot-to-hell cowboy at its foot.
York asked the woman, “Were any of the other rooms up there occupied?”
She shook her head. “No. None of the girls was doing any... entertaining this evening.”
“Well, we need to clear this place out,” the sheriff said, but when he turned to look, the clientele had already skedaddled. All that remained were one bartender and the dealer at the poker table, as well as the girls at the table back near the empty dance floor and unmanned piano. The doves looked ashen and afraid, and one was crying. They’d clearly seen Willart die, and even in a room this size, the bouquet of gunpowder lingered.
Finally getting around to holstering his .44, York went over to the bar and told Hub to stand guard at the batwing doors. For now, the Victory was closed. The big bartender did this without comment or question.
Then York went over to the poker table and told the gambling man who dealt there to go fetch Doc Miller.
The dealer, Yancy Cole, wore a white round-brim black-banded hat, a gray suit, and a ruffled shirt. It was the kind of outfit that got you killed if you weren’t a gambler, and sometimes got you killed, anyway.
In a Southern accent that might have been real, Cole said, “Perhaps the unduh-take-ah might be the bettah party to bring around.”
“We won’t have to send for the undertaker,” York said. “He should be here anytime now.”
The sheriff had barely spoken those words when the bartender at the doors let in a little man all in black — did Perkins sleep in those mourner’s duds? — and came over in a solemn one-man procession. He had his black beaver high hat in hand, revealing a head bald as an egg, and he was skeleton skinny under that frock coat.