They flinched back from the menacing muzzle of the gun. “Sure, Deputy,” Reuben muttered. “Didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”
The stink from Thad fouling himself the night before still lingered in the air. Bo looked over at the other cell and saw Thad sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall with a dull, dispirited look on his face. Bo knew they’d have to clean him up and get some clean clothes on him somehow. Thad’s father ought to be the one to handle that, Bo decided, whether jails gave him the fantods or not.
“Miss Bonner, just put that tray down on the desk,” Bo called into the front room. “You don’t want to come back here, and I mean it.”
Simeon Devery nudged his brother with an elbow, leered, and said, “They got one of them pretty Bonner girls to bring us breakfast.”
Bo glanced sharply at him. “Forget it,” he said under his breath. “She’s not coming back here, and you’re not going to say one word to her.”
“You’re a cruel man, Deputy,” Simeon said.
Bo went out into the office, where Tess had placed the tray on the desk. “You’re sure you don’t want me to take it to them?” she asked.
“I’m positive,” Bo said. “Thank you, though, and thank your mother for me as well for providing the food.” He went to the still-open front door. “Now, if you want to head back over to the cafe—”
The sound of a terrified scream coming from somewhere down the street cut the suggestion short.
Bo bit back a surprised exclamation. He didn’t know what was going on, but it occurred to him that Tess might be safer here in the sheriff’s office than she would be out on the street. He looked back at her and snapped, “Stay here!” then stepped out onto the boardwalk and took off quickly toward the sound of the screaming, which hadn’t stopped.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Scratch emerging from the cafe and knew that his old friend had heard the screams, too. The silver-haired Texan loped across the street to join Bo.
“Got any idea what that commotion’s about?” Scratch asked.
Bo shook his head. “Not one.” He drew his Colt. “I think it’s coming from that alley up there, though.”
The cries echoed from the walls of the buildings on either side of the narrow passage. As Bo and Scratch reached the alley mouth, they saw that it ran all the way through to Grand Street on the other end, where the unknown trouble was taking place. As the Texans started through the alley, Bo saw a woman on her knees next to a huddled, shapeless figure. She had her hands clamped to her cheeks and was swaying back and forth a little as she screamed.
Bo and Scratch came up to her as a crowd began to gather in Grand Street near the alley mouth. Bo saw that the shape on the ground was a man lying on his back. A dark pool of blood surrounded his head. The blood had come from his throat, which had been slashed deeply from one side to the other in a wound that resembled a hideous, grinning mouth.
Scratch reached down to take hold of the screaming woman’s arms. “Ma’am, come on away from there,” he told her, raising his voice to be heard over the cries. “You got to settle down now.”
She tried to pull away from him, but he was too strong. He lifted her to her feet. She turned abruptly and clutched at him, pressing her face against his chest as she began to sob.
Bo looked at the people in the street. “Anybody know who these folks are or what happened here?”
A man pointed at the corpse. “That…that’s Duke Mayo. He’s a gambler, plays at the Fan-Tan most of the time.”
Bo nodded grimly. He and Scratch had passed by the Fan-Tan while they were making their rounds, and he’d heard about the place. It was a dive, a gambling den in a particularly squalid stretch of such establishments along Grand Street, which hardly lived up to its name in places.
“What about the woman?”
“I think she’s a whore. Janey, Jenny, something like that,” the townsman said. “I wouldn’t know for sure. I don’t have no truck with women like that.”
Bo thought the fella was protesting a mite too much, but he didn’t say anything about that. Instead, he asked the woman who was crying, “Ma’am, do you know anything about what happened here?”
She took her face away from Scratch’s tear-streaked shirtfront and stopped wailing long enough to shake her head and say, “N-no. Duke and I…we were supposed to get together for breakfast…like we always do…before we turned in for the day.”
Bo understood what she meant. Gamblers and soiled doves lived their lives mostly at night and slept away the days.
“But he…he didn’t show up,” the woman went on. “So I…I went looking for him…” Her voice trailed off in a series of sobs.
Bo gave her a moment, then said, “And I reckon you found him like this?”
Her head bobbed up and down wordlessly.
“You and him were…friends?”
“He was my…my…husband!”
She went back to wailing.
Bo and Scratch looked at each other, and Bo shrugged. Gamblers and prostitutes could be married just like anybody else, he supposed.
Bo said to the townie who had identified the dead man, “You say he played at the Fan-Tan?”
“Most of the time,” the man replied, adding hastily, “Or so I’ve heard. I don’t frequent places like that,
