Cory thought about having another drink, but rejected the idea. That wasn’t the answer.
“So if I don’t agree to go you’ll reveal to the town who I really am?” he asked.
“No,” Shaye said. “I admit, that was my plan, to threaten you that way. I mean, right up until I got to the door. But not now.”
“So what is your plan?”
“This is it,” Shaye said. “Just to ask you to go with them.”
“You want me to babysit your sons?”
“They’re fine young men,” Shaye said. “They can take care of themselves, especially Thomas. He’s very good with a gun. Someday he’ll be better than me, maybe even better than you ever were.”
“But…”
“But they don’t track,” Shaye said, “and you do. It’s what you used to do.”
“A dozen or so years ago,” Cory reminded him.
“Trackin’ isn’t somethin’ you forget how to do, is it?”
“I’m not wanted anywhere, you know,” Cory said. “I was never a criminal.”
“I know you weren’t,” Shaye said. “Just a man with a reputation who decided to change his life.”
“When did you spot me?” Cory asked.
“As soon as you rode into town.”
“And you never said a word? Let me settle here?”
“Why not?” Shaye said. “I know what it’s like to want to leave a name behind you.”
For a few moments Cory studied the man seated before him.
“You’re askin’ me to do this.”
“Yes.”
“Not threatenin’.”
“No.”
“You could, you know,” Cory said.
“I have the feelin’ this has happened to you before.”
“Many times.”
“Would you give in this time, again? Give up your business?” Shaye asked.
“No. When you walked in, I had the feeling it was going to happen all over again, and I wasn’t going to give in this time. But this…this is…different.”
Shaye shifted his weight in the wooden chair, which creaked beneath him.
“Look, Mister…Cory, I’m sorry that I’m askin’ this of you, but I don’t see that I have a choice.”
“So it would be me and your two boys?”
“One other man,” Shaye said.
“How will you convince him?” Cory asked. “Does he also have an old life behind him?”
“No,” Shaye said, “but he owes me for this one.”
Cory hesitated, then said, “I’ll have to think it over.”
“That’s fair,” Shaye said, “but my boys are gonna have to leave tonight, before dusk. If they wait until mornin’, the men they’re chasin’ will have too big a head start.”
“Give me…an hour.”
“Fine.”
Shaye struggled to his feet, walked to the door. He opened it, considered turning the sign back around to read “Open,” but had a feeling the shop was going to stay closed.
30
Thomas and James tried to look the stalls over without stepping inside. There were plenty of tracks made by the horses, but neither of them could pick up anything distinctive.
After that they had Ron Hill take them out back to look at the horses in his corral.
“Which ones were theirs?” Thomas asked.
“You know anythin’ about horses?” the liveryman asked them.
“I do,” James said. Thomas had to admit, his younger brother was a better judge of horseflesh than he was. He didn’t exactly know when that had happened, but it had.
“Well, then you can pick them out,” Hill said, “’cause they ain’t mine.”
At first Thomas was going to tell Hill they weren’t there to play games, but maybe this would take his brother’s mind off other things. He watched as James opened the corral door, entered, and closed it behind him. There were enough horses in the corral—twenty head or so—that he could have been trampled if he wasn’t careful, but he moved among them with surprising ease, and just as surprising, they seemed to accept his presence.
“This one,” James said, putting his hand on a big bay mare that, even to Thomas’s unpracticed eye—and now that his brother had pointed it out—had obviously seen better days.
“That’s one,” Hill said.
James nodded, examined the horse, then lifted each of the animal’s feet to check the bottom. That done, he walked among the animals again and picked out a dappled gray that seemed to be a bit swaybacked. When Hill affirmed that this was, indeed, the other horse, James repeated the inspection and then left the corral and returned to his brother’s side, after locating and identifying all the horses the bank robbers had ridden into town on.
“So, what did you find out?” Thomas asked.
“Not much.”
“But you looked like you knew what you were doin.”
“I didn’t,” James said. “I guess we better go and find Pa.”
James headed off, and a confused Thomas hurried after him.
Shaye’s hip was screaming bloody murder by the time he reached the Road House Saloon. When he walked through the front door, he was almost dragging his leg.
“Twice in one week,” Al Baker said to him. “What an honor, Sheriff. You lookin’ for Thomas?”
“I know where Thomas is,” Shaye said.
“What happened to you?” Baker asked as Shaye limped to the bar.
“I think you probably already know.”
“Yeah,” Baker said, “I heard about the robbery.”
“And the murders?”
“Yeah. Uh, listen, I’m, sorry I didn’t come to help, but it was all the way at the other end of town, and by the time I heard about it, it was all over.”
“I’m lookin’ for Rigoberto.”
“The Mex? What for?”
“I need to talk to him.”
“Check the back room,” Baker said. “He sleeps back there. I haven’t seen him yet this mornin’, so he’s probably still sleepin’ last night off.”
“Thanks.”
“He’s usually up before noon,” Baker said as Shaye headed for the back room, “so last night must have been pretty bad.”
Great, Shaye thought, the one day he might need Rigoberto Colon, and the man was sleeping off a good one.
Rigoberto Colon was another man in town about whom he knew something nobody else did. People tended to think town drunks had always been town drunks, but that wasn’t the case with Colon. In Mexico, Colon had been part of an aristocratic family, until his father lost all their money and committed suicide, taking Rigoberto Colon’s mother, brother, and two sisters with him. Colon happened to be out that day, and so had survived the day’s massacre. Since then that was all he had done—survive, rather than live. He wandered from town to town, eventually left Mexico and wandered through Texas and New Mexico until he found his way to Arizona. Around that time he decided he could not deal with the guilt anymore, and crawled into a bottle. He’d been there ever
