“If you two don’t take the prize.” Parrish Adams addressed the dusty riders who had come into his Diamond Saloon and ordered a couple of whiskeys.
The older and stockier of the two shrugged. The younger man looked sheepishly at Adams and said “We didn’t know—”
“Not here, Pete,” Adams interrupted. “You and Boyd come on in the office to talk.”
As he walked toward a doorway beneath the stairs that led to rooms on the second floor, Adams cautiously cast a glance around the saloon. The Diamond, with its gilt-framed mirrors and mahogany bar and genuine oil paintings on the scarlet papered walls, was a real showplace for Wishbone. Despite its attractiveness the saloon was usually short on patrons before noon. This morning was no exception. Only one other man stood at the bar and he had his head hung over the beer he was trying to make last. The few other men who had ventured in this early occupied tables. Most of them were engaged in a poker game. The girls Adams employed didn’t come down until afternoon, when there was enough business to make it worth their while.
“Sorry, boss,” Pete Smith apologized. “Wasn’t thinkin’.”
Adams closed the door behind him. “Which is usually the case,” he said testily. “Like it was yesterday when you held up that stage.”
“Nobody told us that girl of Len Blalock’s was gonna be on it,” the other man, the one called Boyd, countered in defense of his brother. “I was funnin’ with her a little and when she told us who she was it got us rattled.”
“So damn rattled you rode off without the strongbox, not to mention leaving Luther behind.” Adams motioned them into chairs while he perched on the corner of his big walnut desk. He was angry enough to shoot the two of them. He had not anticipated such a show of resistance from Teddy Gamble or that her drivers and guards would take such risks to defend their cargo. Most of all he had not anticipated that Boyd and Pete Smith and Joe Luther would be the most inept road agents ever to stop a stage.
Having to use them at all irked him, not because he minded going around the law, but because he preferred outsmarting his enemies to outgunning them. Men who depended solely on gunplay to get what they wanted were liable to have short lives. Adams’s many and lofty ambitions included longevity. What was the point of getting what you wanted if you weren’t around to enjoy it? Or if the weakest link in the chain, a man like Joe Luther, could bring all your carefully executed plans to quick disaster?
“We couldn’t help Luther,” Boyd said. The heel of his boot made an agitated tap-tap on the floor. “He was flat out and that driver had found his gun by then.”
With fire in his dark eyes Adams leaned toward Boyd Smith. “So you rode off and left him to be taken to prison and put all of us in jeopardy if he talks.”
“Luther won’t say nothin’,” Pete piped in. “He knows you’ll get him out. Besides, wouldn’t be no use confessin’ to Sheriff Blalock.”
That was true but it missed the point as Adams saw it. He didn’t like failure. So far, these three hadn’t given him much else. A sneering smile showed both his distaste for his companions and his disgust for their actions. Adams fingered a waxed coil of his mustache, pausing briefly as he cut his eyes toward the back door of his office, where he thought he saw a shadow pass along the threshold. “I may not get him out,” he threatened. “I may let him board in that jail until he smartens up.”
“Aw, don’t do that, boss. Luther’s all right,” Pete insisted.
“He’s an idiot,” Adams said coldly. “Getting himself knocked off a horse by some foreigner who didn’t even have a gun.” The irritation in his voice manifested itself in the tightening muscles of his lean face. “But maybe getting his head cracked with a rock did him some good.”
“Couldn’t have hurt him any,” Boyd said, wanting to make clear that he shared the boss’s sentiments about Luther.
“Naw,” Pete agreed, laughing.
Adams took advantage of Pete’s noisy hee-haw, to slide quietly off the desk and reach for the knob of the back door. Before either of the men with him realized what he was doing, Adams had twisted the brass knob and jerked the door inward. A woman in a daringly cut red dress came stumbling into the office behind it.
“Eavesdropping is terribly common, my dear,” Adams said coldly. “Like you.”
If she was offended she didn’t show it. She gave a coy smile and carefully smoothed her platinum curls, as she looked Adams in the eye. “I suit you,” she said.
“For the time being,” Adams retorted, reaching around her to close the door she’d been leaning against. He took another moment to select a cigar from the teakwood humidor on the cabinet behind his desk. He trimmed and lit it and puffed, making it insultingly plain that he did not intend to offer smokes to the Smith brothers. Not that either of them minded, with the pretty blonde preening and smiling in front of them. But Adams soon deprived them of that pleasure too.
“You two get out on the street and learn what you can about that foreigner who downed Luther,” he said irritably. “Then get over to the jail and tell Luther not to worry.” Boyd was on his feet, Pete at the door when another order came. “And tell the sheriff I want to see him immediately.”
When they were gone he grabbed the woman and pulled her to him, but when she lifted her face for the expected kiss he roughly twisted her arm behind her back and snarled at her. “Don’t do that again, Norine,” he warned. “Having my wife spying on me makes me look like a fool.”
The pain of his manhandling excited Norine. She purred with pleasure as she slowly and sweetly answered him. “I wasn’t spying, darling. I came to tell you something important and didn’t want to interrupt at the wrong moment.”
Adams let go of her arm. “What is it?”
Freed, Norine wrapped herself around him, pressing against all the places she knew were sensitive to her charms. “That detective you hired,” she said breathlessly. “He sent a letter.”
Clearly moved by his wife’s antics, Adams, nevertheless, kept his hands at his sides. “Don’t take all day to tell me, Norine.”
She stepped back, putting distance between them as she smiled up at her husband’s intent face. “He found that gambler you wanted him to find, the one who won part of the Gamble Line off old Zack Gamble.”
“And—”
She sighed. “The man already sold out to somebody else.”
A jerk shook Adams’s lean frame. “Who?” he demanded.
Norine stretched, curling her spine backward and thrusting her nearly exposed breasts even further out of the tight red bodice. An unconscious malice lay behind her action. She liked her husband’s full attention at all times, no matter how pressing a distraction might come along. When she was sure he was completely focused on her, with both mind and body, she told him what he wanted to know. “Horace Roper bought it off him about a month ago.”
Adams clinched his fists and sucked in a breath that didn’t come out for several long and painful seconds. In the interim his face turned red as flame. He looked as if he would explode. “For that bitch,” he said at last.
“For himself, apparently,” Norine continued, wiggling a step closer. “Ten percent of the company is registered in Roper’s name. The other forty still belongs to old Zack.”
Adams, outraged, made the unsettling move of turning his back on Norine. “She thinks she’s outsmarted me,” he said. His voice was low and held a threatening note.
“No, darling,” came with strained sweetness from Norine. “Teddy Gamble doesn’t know you’re behind the attacks on the Gamble Line. How could she?”
Adams turned. Sometimes, often, Norine tried his patience. “She knows. She can’t prove it’s me, but she knows. If you’d heard her yesterday after Northrop left our meeting you wouldn’t doubt what I’m telling you.”
“So what?” Norine lifted her dainty ring-clad hands. She stretched them out and slid them down her husband’s hard chest. “It’s only a matter of time before she’s out of business, and it won’t matter who has the shares.”
Adams caught her marauding hands and held them tightly between their two bodies. “It matters because I could have enjoyed taking down the Gamble Line from the inside out. Not to mention the great waste of destroying something that will eventually belong to me. I wanted that ten percent,” he said hotly. “With an interest in the company, even a small one, I’d have been well on the way to getting full control. I’d have known about everything—assets, schedules, deals with the miners. Now, my dear, everything must continue to be done the hard way.”
“Nothing wrong with the hard way,” Norine said suggestively. “It always turns out right for me. Besides,” she went on, delighted with the harsh glare Adams gave her, “you’ll win.” She inevitably found Parrish Adams most exciting when he was angry. At the moment he was seething and she intended to take advantage of his fury. With little resistance from him she tugged their hands down to groin level and began slowly stroking her husband.
“You’re damned right, I’ll win,” he growled at her, though he made no effort to stop her assault. “I’m taking over this territory.” He began to rock against her. “From here to California. And when I do, nothing will move in or out unless Parrish Adams gets a cut. No ore, no payrolls, no supplies, nobody. I’m building an empire here and no chit who can’t make up her mind if she’s a rooster or a hen is going to stop me.”
“I know what I am,” Norine purred. Her hands had unfastened his trousers and closed around his hardness, making brisk strokes that had begun to take effect.
A throaty groan emanated from his throat as he jerked free of her, whirled her around, threw her face down over his desk and snatched her billowing silk skirts up over her head. “You’re a whore,” he said, and drove into her.
***
The room smelled of perfume and sex. Norine, purring like a satisfied cat, lay across the desk as he’d left her. Adams had adjusted his clothes and was washing his hands when a knock came at the door that opened to the saloon. Cursing, he pulled his wife’s wrinkled skirt over her naked bottom and pulled her to her feet. “Get out,” he said.
“Adams? You there?” Len Blalock’s hesitant voice came behind the sound of Norine’s scurrying footsteps.
“Come on in,” Adams replied to the sheriff as he ran his hands over his tousled hair and smoothed it to his head. Coatless but presentable, he was in the leather chair behind his desk when the lawman stepped in.
A silver star shone from the gray serge vest Len Blalock wore over his white shirt. His face was wide, his skin weathered. The combination of sun and worry made him look older than his forty-seven years. He was a heavily built man but much of his weight had turned from muscle to fat with the years. A good portion of it had settled around his middle where it all but obscured his gun belt. He hadn’t, though, quite lost all the instincts that had once made him a good lawman. He caught the faint essence of Norine’s perfume and looked for her. “Thought I heard your wife,” he said.
“You didn’t,” Adams retorted. “Have a seat.” While the sheriff pulled up a chair Adams relit his cigar. He puffed heavily, filling the room with pungent smoke and quickly ridding it of telltale odors. He did offer a cigar to the sheriff but the lawman declined, citing a breakfast that had not set well with him.
Len Blalock was the kind of lawman Adams liked, a man who had been at his job a decade or more and come to the conclusion that the price of honesty and keeping order had been too high. Adams had observed those traits in Sheriff Blalock when he’d come to Wishbone and opened the Diamond Saloon. He’d made a point of doing the sheriff a few favors, had helped him settle a debt on his house and loaned him money for his daughter’s schooling. And then he’d owned him. All of that had taken place just far enough back for the sheriff now to start having second thoughts about selling out. “Been avoiding me?” Adams asked the man.
“No. Being careful, that’s all,” the sheriff said too quickly to be convincing. “Got your man locked up. Didn’t want anybody making a connection before he goes to trial.”
Since yesterday Blalock had worried himself sick wondering what would happen when Joe Luther did go to trial. He was fairly certain Luther would be convicted. All those witnesses on the stage, including his daughter, had seen his face. Once he was convicted and looking at prison, what was to keep Luther from revealing who he worked for or that Len Blalock had played a role in the attacks on the Gamble Line?
Feeling dry-mouthed, the sheriff waited for enlightenment from Adams, hoping against hope that the man had a solution that would spare them both being named conspirators to the crime. At the same time he was wishing he’d never met Adams. And he was acknowledging to himself that, much as he wanted to, he’d never dare break with him.
His efforts to hide his feelings from Adams had his stomach feeling full of rocks. His head felt as if it were split. Seeing Justine and Joe Luther in his office yesterday at the same time had brought home to him an inkling of what he had bargained away. He hadn’t thought of his association with Adams as selling out until then. He’d realized how close Justine had come to being mauled and killed by men he’d been helping protect.
The trouble was, he couldn’t see any way out of the predicament now. He’d agreed to look the other way while Adams harassed the Gamble Line until Teddy Gamble was willing to sell out or had lost her Wells Fargo contracts. In return Adams had promised there would be no killing. Now he doubted if Adams would keep his word.
He was ashamed of what he’d become—for the promise of a few dollars—but afraid to buck Adams. He put a hand to his brow as if to still his throbbing head. He’d been a fool to throw his hat in with the businessman, but he’d be a bigger one to try and get it back.
Adams, black brows drawn together, sat and watched Len Blalock stew. He could as good as guess what was going on in the sheriff’s mind. Smiling perversely, he rocked back in his chair and laced his fingers together behind his neck. “Don’t worry about Luther,” he said. “He’s not going to trial.”
The sheriff shook his aching head. “Don’t see how even you can prevent a trial—unless you’ve got the circuit judge in your pocket.”
“Not yet,” Adams retorted.
“Then how—”
“Luther’s going to escape. You see to it.”
“Me? Let a prisoner escape.” Momentarily disbelieving what he’d heard, the sheriff stared at the still smiling Adams.
“Either that or shoot him. Makes no difference to me. But Luther doesn’t go to trial.”
Some of the courage he’d once possessed filled Len Blalock. “I’ve got to draw the line here, Adams,” he said. “I’ve got a reputation for running a tight jail.” He pushed out of the chair and stood, legs wide apart, before Adams’s desk. “And I don’t shoot down an unarmed man.”
Adams was unmoved by the sheriff’s protests. “You’ll find a way,” he insisted. “Incidentally, wasn’t that your daughter who came in on yesterday’s stage?”
Uneasily, the sheriff nodded. Justine was the love of his life. He’d been both father and mother to her since his wife had died ten years back.
“Pretty girl.” Adams’s face had a feral look that gave even the hardened sheriff a chill. “Too bad she didn’t stay in the East where it’s safer.”
Defeated by the implied threat, Blalock dropped his head. He’d compromised all he’d once believed in, to provide for Justine, to get her out of Wishbone and in a place where she’d rub shoulders with finer people, maybe find a husband who’d give her the better life she deserved. Justine, though, had ideas of her own. She’d left her expensive school and come home unannounced; stating she’d missed her pa too much to stay away. He cringed at the thought of her ever finding out what he’d done.
Grimly he nodded to Adams. “I’ll see that Luther gets away tonight.”