“Well, you just heard it.”
After draining the glass, Nick set it down and reached for the bottle.
“You haven’t had that much to drink in a while,” Catherine said.
“You’re the only place in town that bothers keeping any of this for me,” Nick replied as he tapped the bottle of vodka with the edge of his glass. “I’d hate to see it go to waste. Are you going to tell me about that fellow you were talking to, or do I have to wait until you warm up to the subject?”
Catherine blinked and took a step back from the bar. Crossing her arms sternly, she said, “Sheriff Stilson must be working you awfully hard for you to be so cranky.”
“He’s got me walking the same rounds as before and I can’t blame him for it. Even with what little he knows about me, it’s a miracle he deputized me at all.”
“The way you handled that bank robber who rode through here a few months ago should have been enough to convince anyone. That is…unless he came here because he knew you from your wild youth.” Although she’d been kidding when she’d said that, Catherine quickly recognized the expression on Nick’s face.
“
Nick let a few seconds pass before he answered. “He won’t be coming around here again.”
“That’s because he’s buried in the cemetery.”
“As far as Stilson knows, he is.”
“What?” Catherine asked. “He isn’t?”
Nick shrugged and waved the bottle as if he was about to pour. Before he could refill his glass, Catherine reached over and took the bottle from him.
“He isn’t?” she repeated.
“I’m trying to live a quiet life here. Isn’t that why I allowed you to talk me into wearing this ridiculous thing?”
Seeing that Nick was pointing to the badge on his chest, she replied, “That ridiculous thing earns you some respect and it puts people off your trail.” She paused and shrugged before adding, “I thought it was a pretty good idea.”
“It is,” Nick said as he reached over to rub her cheek. “And it does put people off my trail, but that doesn’t mean I’m safe from anyone else who comes through here looking for me. How long do you think it’ll be before that man you were talking to finds out who I am and where I can be found most every day of the week?”
“You’re out at that cemetery or your workshop more often than that parlor you run. A squirrel can’t get within twenty yards of any of those places without you knowing about it.” She patted Nick’s hand and smiled lovingly. “Perhaps you should talk to Stilson about being a deputy in more than just title. It…probably pays better, you know.”
“I’m doing the only work I know,” Nick said. Looking away from her, he added, “Well, the only work that won’t land me in jail, anyways. Things around here have been good. I’d rather not fool with that.”
“Good for the town isn’t exactly good for an undertaker, which is your chosen profession. You can still do that job when it’s needed, but we could use a salary that doesn’t require a steady stream of people dropping over.”
“It’s been a while since the last funeral,” Nick said. “Some of the folks around here are bound to keel over sooner rather than later.” He met Catherine’s eyes and smirked. “When it rains, it pours.”
She wasn’t amused.
“All right, so maybe I just don’t like wearing this thing.” With that, Nick took hold of the badge and tore it off his shirt. He looked down at it and then flipped it over to find shreds of cotton hanging from the pin behind the star. “What did that fellow want?”
“Who?”
Looking up at her, Nick said, “The fellow who you were talking to outside not too long ago. The one who scampered off the moment he saw me coming.”
Catherine took a deep breath and ran her finger along the top of the bar. After pausing for a while, she realized that Nick was still waiting for an answer. “He was asking about you.”
Nick straightened up as his hand immediately drifted toward the gun at his side.
Watching him go through that simple, practiced motion was almost enough to bring tears to Catherine’s eyes. Under most circumstances, she looked at him the way any wife would look at her husband. There were moments when she was exasperated and moments when she wanted to laugh at him, but all of those moments were shaded by the love that flowed so easily between them.
When Nick made that subtle reach for his gun, he became the man he’d been when they’d first crossed paths. That also drew her attention to the gnarled stubs that remained of the middle two fingers on his gun hand and the pieces of his left hand that had also been torn away. Even the parts of his hands that were intact were covered in old wounds that made them look as if they’d been cobbled together from spare parts.
The gun at his side wasn’t much different. It had begun as a Schofield revolver but had been restructured into something else. Its handle was whittled down to less than half its original size. Catherine had seen the gun enough to know the barrel was gnarled and grooved as well, as if it had been heated, twisted and then allowed to cool. Most people figured the gun was a cheap piece of garbage only used to fire a round at the occasional snake.
Those people would have been dead wrong.
Catherine had seen what that gun could do in the proper hands. In fact, there was only one hand for the pistol and it was the same hand that hovered over it now.
“What did he want with me?” Nick asked.
Snapping herself out of the silence that had enveloped her, Catherine replied, “He said he needed to ask you something, but didn’t say what it was. I know it had something to do with a lot of money.”
“How much is a lot?”
“So much that he was willing to hand over a thousand dollars as an advance if I could help steer him in the right direction.”
“Are you serious?”
She nodded. “And that was without any bargaining on my part. I probably could have gotten a higher offer.”
“Maybe, but collecting it would have been another matter.”
“Just the fact that he offered that much with a straight face told me a lot. Or do you think it was all just a load of dung?”
Nick rubbed his chin and felt the fresh whiskers that had taken up residence there. Even through the beard, he could feel the scars and lines as if they were tracks left in freshly blown sand. “It wasn’t dung,” he muttered. “At least, not all of it. Even if he figured on killing you, he wouldn’t have parted with that amount of money so easily. Not unless he was certain he could miss it if push came to shove.”
Knowing better than to question Nick’s instincts on the matter, Catherine told him, “He wanted to know where you were.”
“What did you tell him?”
“To try back tomorrow. It was the best I could do with you coming up on us so fast like that. Do you think he could have been an outlaw?”
Nick chuckled coldly as he lowered his hand. “No man on the right side of the law bolts from a badge like that.”
“Did he look familiar?” Catherine asked.
“Nope. I don’t even know how the hell he found me.”
Catherine closed her eyes for just a bit longer than it would take her to blink. A change drifted over her face like a stray cloud passing across the moon. “I think I may know how he found you.”
“You do?”
“Back when you and Joseph Van Meter were riding together, someone came here looking for me. Well…I guess they were looking for me so they could get to you.”
Nick nodded solemnly. “And they almost found you. If Sheriff Stilson hadn’t covered our tracks, things might have turned out a whole lot worse.”
“Well, it’s my guess that whoever came looking sent a telegram about what he found…or didn’t find. Someone at that telegraph office remembered you being mentioned, and that got around to someone else.”
“Jesus Christ,” Nick grumbled. “I wonder why anyone even bothers with newspapers and such when there’s
