“Damn, Marshal, you need to be more careful with that thing.”
“Yeah, I know,” Cummins said.
An hour later Marshal Cummins stepped into the undertaker’s parlor. The man he shot was lying naked on a lead-covered slab. Beneath the slab was a bucket filled with blood. Hanging from a hook over the slab was a bottle of formaldehyde, and a little tube ran from the bottle through a needle in the arm and into the dead man’s veins.
“Hello, Prufrock. How are you doing with him?” Cummins asked the undertaker.
“I’m about finished,” Prufrock replied. “Who’s going to pay me for this? The town?”
“No,” Cummins said. “I’m the one who killed him, I’ll pay the charges. I didn’t mean to kill him, but I feel like I should pay the charges anyway. Have you found out who he is?”
“His name is Cornelius Jerome,” Prufrock said. “He’s from New York City.”
“How do you know?”
“There’s a letter in his pocket to Governor John C. Fremont,” Prufrock said.
“He wrote a letter to the governor?”
“He didn’t write it, his pa did,” Prufrock said. “Turns out his pa is some bigwig back in New York. You want to read the letter?”
“Yes,” Cummins answered.
“It’s over there, on that table.”
Walking over to the table, Cummins saw, in addition to the letter, the other personal effects belonging to the man: a pipe and a pouch of tobacco, a pair of glasses, and a billfold. Looking in the billfold, Cum-min’s saw over three hundred dollars in cash. He read the letter.
“He sounds rich, doesn’t he?” Cummins asked.
“I’d say so.”
“Who would have thought that about this odd-looking little man?”
“What do you want me to do with the body?”
“What do you mean? You’re doing it, aren’t you?”
“I mean after I’m finished here. What should I do next?”
“Bury him,” Cummins said.
“Shouldn’t we send him back home?”
“How can we do that? We don’t know where he came from,” Cummins said.
“Sure we do,” Prufrock said. “It’s right there in the letter.”
Pointedly, Cummins tore up the letter. Then he took the three hundred dollars from the Jerome’s billfold and pressed it into Prufrock’s hands.
“What letter?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Prufrock replied, stuffing the wad of money down into his pocket. “I didn’t see any letter.”
By any definition of the term, Cletus Odom was an ugly man. A scar, like a purple flash of lightning, ran from his forehead, through his left eye, and down his cheek to hook in under his nose. As a result of the scar, the eyelid was now a discolored and misshapen puff of flesh. For a while, the eye had been black and swollen as a result of an encounter he’d had three weeks ago in an alley in Wickenburg. Angry over an article that had appeared in the Wickenburg newspaper, Odom had found a couple of men in the saloon there who, for the price of a drink, agreed to help him “teach the newspaper editor a lesson.”
Odom had not expected anyone to come to Garvey’s aid and was surprised when someone appeared, out of nowhere, to interrupt him.
“Instead of beating him up, I should have just killed the son of a bitch,” Odom said aloud.
But enough thinking about that. It was time to move on, and he had a plan in mind that would net him a lot of money. All he needed to implement the plan were a few men who would work with him. And he had already set about recruiting them.
Odom reached the tiny town of Quigotoa, Arizona, just after nightfall. Quigotoa was a scattering of flyblown and crumbling adobe buildings that were laid out in no particular pattern around a dusty plaza. What made the town attractive to people like Odom was its reputation as a “Robbers’ Roost,” or “Outlaw Haven.”
The town had no constable or marshal, and visitations by law officers from elsewhere in the territory were
