York stuffed the gun in his waistband just as Hollis’s eyes fluttered open. Then the killer’s face contorted into something ugly with pain and hate, though it included a terrible grin. A slight bob of the head bid York to lean closer, which he did.
“See you... see you in hell,” the Preacherman whispered.
“I don’t remember that one,” York said. “What’s that? Proverbs? Psalms?”
Then the Preacherman’s grin was gone, and so was he.
To his final reward.
Chapter Fourteen
At just after eight o’clock the next morning, Caleb York entered his jailhouse office to the unmistakable aroma of his deputy’s coffee. Always strong enough to curl the bark off a tree, the stuff had taken some getting used to, but York had come to depend on it to get his day going, after coming straight over from the hotel without taking breakfast yet to check with Tulley and see if anything had come up overnight.
After the shooting at the Victory last night, he expected news this morning.
He got it.
Tulley, a York-designated tin cup of Arbuckles’ in hand, rushed over from his table to set the coffee down and lean in like a friendly madman. The nice shirt of the night before was gone, and the skinny, bowlegged deputy was back to a badge-pinned BVD top and suspenders.
“That feller you shot last night? One ye didn’t kill?”
“I vaguely recall,” York said after braving a sip.
The white-bearded coot thrust out a finger, pointing toward the lockup. “He’s back in the cell next to mine.”
Tulley was not a prisoner — exactly — but did regularly camp out on the cot in a cell, keeping the office manned through the night.
York sipped again. Few things made him wince in pain, but this bitter brew did just that.
“Trammel,” he said.
“Yep. Lafe Trammel. The doc brought him over round midnight, all bandaged up and loopy on laudanum. Trammel, I mean, not the doc. I deposited him in that cell. Slept good. Didn’t bother me none.”
If Tulley’s own lumber-mill-in-action snoring hadn’t woken their guest, then Doc Miller must have administered a pretty good slug of the morphine/alcohol mix that was laudanum.
Tulley pressed a hand on the desk and leaned forward, keeping his voice hushed. “But our guest woke up this mornin’, when the Mexie’s roosters ’cross the way started in to crowin’. He was blubberin’, Sheriff — blubberin’ like a baby.”
“Do tell.”
Tulley jerked a thumb toward the cells. “He’s scared, Sheriff. From them spooky eyes down to his dirty toes. Now, when I checked on him bit ago and give him a walk out to the privy, he got cocky again. All tough talk. ’Bout how he’d make you pay for gunnin’ down his Preacherman pal.”
Another bracing sip. “So what do you make of it, Tulley?”
“Jest braggadocio. The no-good’s scared of what’s goin’ to happen to him. Scared of what you might do to him.”
“Good to know, Tulley. Good to know.”
Tulley nodded, grinning, self-satisfied, then headed back to his table and his own tin cup of eye-opener. When he’d settled in his chair, something came to him, and he called out, “Oh! That envelope there — Ralph Parsons from the telegraph office dropped that by first thing!”
York, who hadn’t noticed it atop a pile of circulars, plucked off the little yellow envelope and had a look inside. As he read, he smiled slowly to himself, then folded and tucked the telegram into his breast pocket. He finished his coffee, then headed back to the cell where Lafe Trammel sat slumped on the edge of his cot, which was chained to the wall.
The lanky gunhand had his right arm in a sling, and his hat was beside him on the blanket, but otherwise he looked the same — bulging eyed and scruffy, though his filthy shirt and bandana and trousers bore some reddish-brown bloodstains. The doc had given him a fresh bandage, a little smaller, for his cheek.
“What the hell charge you holdin’ me for, York?” the prisoner blustered, getting to his feet and coming over to the bars. “After you shot my partner, I was jest meanin’ to protect myself.”
York found a chair and dragged it over. Sat. “You know, Lafe, you have a point. It’s within my power to take you at your word and send you on your way. If I did, you’d have no reason to hang around Trinidad, would you now?”
Had those eyes grown any wider, they’d have fallen out of Trammel’s head and gone rolling around on the floor.
“You got nothin’ in this town I give a good goddamn about! You spring Mrs. Trammel’s baby boy, and the ass end of my horse is the last you’ll see of me!”
York nodded slowly, as if considering the offer. “On the other hand, you’ve been traveling in the company of Alver Hollis and that fellow Landrum, may they both rest in peace or not... and of course, Hollis was a known hired gun.”
“Never proved. Never proved.”
“If I were to tell the circuit judge that you drew down on me in a gunfight you and the Preacherman and Landrum started, before witnesses... well, the only question is whether you’d get a rope or a prison cell.”
The pop eyes popped. “A rope! I didn’t kill nobody!”
York made a fatalistic click in one cheek. “You drew down on a lawman. We hang you for that in this territory.” York didn’t know if that was true, but he made it sound so.
Trammel hung onto the bars of his cell as if they were all that was holding him up. “Turn me loose, Sheriff. Turn me loose, and you won’t see hide nor hair of me again.”
York was shaking his head glumly. “I can’t have the good folks of Trinidad thinking a man can pull on me and I just let him get away with it.”
Trammel shook the bars, and they rattled some. “I’m the one got shot! I didn’t get away with nothin’!”
“You are the one who got shot,” York granted, pointing a forefinger at the prisoner. “You might have been killed.”
“I might have been!”
“But you weren’t. I didn’t kill you, like I did the Preacherman. Like my deputy did Landrum. What do you make of that, Lafe?”
The goggly eyes drifted. “You... you missed?”
York grinned at him. “Really? You know my reputation. Do you really think Caleb York would miss at such close range?”
A thought worked to form, then, “You winged me on... on purpose?”
“I did.”
Trammel shook his head. “What for, Sheriff? I’da killed me in your place. It ain’t like you ain’t a killer yourself. The Preacherman said you was one right dangerous son of a... buck.”
York shrugged. “Maybe I wanted you alive.”
Trammel made a face. “Why would you want a no-good drifter like me to keep breathin’?”
“Possibly to answer a question or two.”
The prisoner’s big eyes went half lidded, like a stage curtain that couldn’t come all the way down.
York went on. “Possibly, I might trade you your freedom for some answers.”
The curtains on the eyes came down farther, leaving only a pair of skeptical slits. “I’m listenin’.”
“Good. Because I’m asking. Who was your target in town?”
Trammel’s lips flapped with escaping air. “You know the answer to that one already, Sheriff. You was! But not no more. With the Preacherman gone, I sure as hell ain’t gonna go up against you.”
“Not even bushwhacking me from around a building or crouched down in back of a barrel?”
“No, sir! You let me go, I’m gone. Nothing left but my dust.”
York nodded thoughtfully. “Okay, then. Last question. Who hired the Preacherman? Who wants me dead?”
The prisoner swallowed. “That kinda sounds like two questions.”