flash of pain that filled Caleb’s skull like billowing smoke.
Swallowing the liquor, Caleb handed back the flask. “Tastes expensive,” he said.
Holliday nodded while accepting the flask. When he took a pull for himself, he didn’t so much as flinch. “Feel better?”
“No, but let’s get this over with.”
“What’s the matter? You don’t trust Hank to watch your place while you’re away?”
Caleb squinted through the slight haze that had rolled in behind his eyes from the combination of pain and whiskey. “Why do you say that? And how do you know so much about my business?”
Holliday’s features lightened a bit as he shrugged. “Maybe I should be asking you why you don’t recognize the face of one of your customers?” After another second ticked by, Holliday smirked. “Relax, Caleb. I make it my business to know as much as I can about the person who runs a place where I play cards. It helps me avoid the money pits.”
“Money pits?”
“Sure. Places where the only ones who win are the cheats and the owners who let them operate. Everyone else might as well be tossing their money into a pit.”
“Clever. You think up that one on your own?”
“Not hardly.” After one more pull from the flask, Holliday offered it back to Caleb. It was refused, so Holliday took Caleb’s portion for himself. “Now then, let’s see what we can do about that face of yours.”
Caleb’s first impulse was to vacate that uncomfortable chair until some of the whiskey had been purged from the dentist’s system. He stayed put when he saw that Holliday’s hands were just as steady now as when he’d started.
The whiskey gave Holliday’s skin a rosy hue and made the smile on his face a bit more personable. Anyone else would have looked like a drunkard. For a man who appeared to be a few steps over a corpse, any bit of color was a welcome change, no matter where it came from.
Only a few of the cuts on Caleb’s jaw were deep enough to need stitches. The rest only required bandaging so they could close up on their own. Now that the broken glass was out, the damage to his jaw didn’t seem half as bad as it had first seemed.
“You’ll be fine,” Holliday said, his southern accent polishing up the words like varnish on a knife’s handle. “You want some advice?”
“Sure.”
“Next time you see a bottle coming your way . . . duck.”
Caleb started to smile but held back when he realized that one of his cuts was still in the process of being stitched. He didn’t have to wait long, however, until the dentist had completed his task and was leaning back to clean his hands with a towel.
“There you go,” Holliday said in a somewhat thicker drawl. “All clean and good as new.”
Sitting up, Caleb ran his hand over the lines of his face. The glass was gone, and the blood was no longer slick upon his cheek. “Much obliged. You do good work. Now, about settling the bill.”
Holliday was already tipping his flask against his mouth while waving off Caleb’s statement with his free hand. “Worry about that later. We still have that other matter to discuss. How about we settle both things at once?”
“Fine by me,” Caleb said. Whether due to the pain or the whiskey he’d drunk to deal with it, he was having a hard time getting himself too worked up about the possibility of cheaters in his midst. Come to think of it, considering the crowd his place usually drew, having cheaters among them was no surprise. Still, rooting one or two out could go a long way in drawing better players.
“Splendid,” Holliday said. “It’s been a while since I’ve had a good game. I’ll stop by the Flush tonight.”
“I’ll have enough to pay you for the work you did, and I’ll even top off that flask of yours.”
Lifting the flask in a toast. Holliday seemed to be happier about that than anything else so far. “Mind those stitches, now.”
With that, Holliday got up from his stool and walked to the door. Before he could make it through the door, Holliday stopped and was taken over by another fit of coughing. He got it under control quickly enough, dabbed his mouth with his handkerchief, and then continued down the narrow hall.
On his way out, Caleb started to say something to the girl at the front of the office.
“Don’t worry about a thing,” she said cheerily. “Everything’s taken care of.”
He waved to the girl and left the dentist’s office. With the whiskey’s comforting haze already starting to fade, Caleb gripped the handrail and took the stairs one at a time.
[4]
The day wound up being quiet enough for Caleb to spend most of it relaxing in his office. Sitting in the room that looked to be more of a large closet than anything made to hold a desk and chair, he shook his head as he often did and wondered what the hell he was doing there.
The first answer that came to mind was the habitual one. He was there because he’d wanted to own a saloon. He’d saved his money and bided his time until he could eventually afford to put a payment down on a building that had come up for sale. With a little help from an investor or two, a few generous family members, plus no small amount of luck, the Busted Flush had been born.
Along the way, he’d also picked up a pain at the back of his skull, which hadn’t lessened since he’d scratched his name upon the papers putting the saloon under his management.
Things could have gone a whole lot worse. After all, he was still in business and had managed to pick up a small group of customers. There was even talk that the Flush might make it onto the gambler’s circuit. Being included on that informal list, which got circulated among the country’s best players, was a hell of a boon to a man in Caleb’s business.
As Caleb’s mind shifted to the other side of that same coin, he felt a massive sigh work its way up to the top of his lungs. The deeper his roots sank into the business he’d so desperately wanted, the more he felt like he was getting buried underneath it all. The walls of his office closed in like the sides of a coffin. Every noise he made rattled around in there with him.
His breathing sounded like a grating rasp.
The shifting of his boots against the floor echoed in his ears. The movement of his hands over the top of his little desk was like desert rocks being scraped together.
Even the noises that came in from the main room echoed so loudly that he wanted to tear his ears off the sides of his head.
Caleb practically jumped up from his desk and stormed out of his office. When the door swung open, Hank jumped out of the way before taking a hit square in the nose.
“What’s the rush, Caleb?” Hank asked as the customers leaning against the bar laughed at his near fall.
“No rush. I just needed to get some fresh air.”
The old miner was still in his spot. From there, he seemed to see and hear everything that happened in the place. “No fresh air in here,” he said. “At least, not when ol’ Thirsty is in the room.”
Everyone within earshot laughed at that. Everyone, that is, except for Thirsty.
The middle-aged man was dressed in a sloppy, rumpled suit. His face had the permanent, rosy hue of someone with just as much liquor flowing through his veins as there was blood. “Aw, to hell with ya, Orville,” Thirsty grunted.
Raising his glass, the old miner shot back with, “You first, you drunk bastard.”
That got another round of insults started. Some of the others chimed in like children pitching their marbles into a schoolyard game. Caleb watched the bawdy exchanges with a smile as the knot in his stomach started to loosen. The air within the saloon might have been far from fresh, but it was exactly what he’d needed.
And, using the sixth sense that his sort always seemed to have, Loco Mike Abel picked that moment to make his entrance.
Before Mike had even stepped all the way through the front door, Caleb had spotted him and was searching for the darkly dressed man Mike was there to see. It was easy enough to spot the gambler, since his face was
