Chapter One

It had been a long hard ride from Deadwood. John Henry Cole stepped from the Deadwood to Cheyenne stagecoach feeling like he had gone twenty rounds with John L. Sullivan—and lost. He waited for the driver to hand him down his Dunn Brothers saddle and his Winchester rifle. He’d made up his mind that he was going to tell Ike Kelly that he was resigning as an operative of The Ike Kelly Detective Agency, Cheyenne, W.T. He’d only been in the detective business a couple of months, since coming north from Texas. Ike Kelly had been kind enough to offer him a job when he’d had none. Kelly had needed a man, and Cole had needed to clear out of Del Rio. They’d both hoped it would work out. But Cole’s last assignment in Deadwood had nearly killed him, and even though he’d been lucky enough to survive and solve the case, he’d also broken the trust of his friend and boss.

Kelly and Cole had been friends ever since their misspent youth when they’d both worked for old José Chisholm, punching cattle, and later driving them north to the railheads in Kansas. It was there that Ike and Cole had learned the rear-end of a cow from the front, and how to ride and rope and shoot pistols. And at the end of the cattle drives, they’d learned how to drink raw whiskey and gamble a bit, and the pleasures of a woman. Just a pair of fuzz-cheeked boys learning to grow up and become men. That’s what old José Chisholm and his cattle operation had done for them. In between the first time and the second time they’d worked for that good man, they’d fought in the War Between the States. Kelly had got shot three different times and Cole twice. They’d both come out of it all right except for the bad dreams. After the war and their second go around with punching cattle, Kelly and Cole had drifted their separate ways. They’d both ended up getting married, and they’d both had sons. And they’d both seen their wives and sons die long before they should have.

Over the intervening years, Kelly and Cole had crossed paths and stayed in touch with one another because good friends weren’t something that fell out of the sky every time it rained. So it was a hard decision for Cole to return to Cheyenne and tell Kelly he was quitting, and the reason why. On the ride back from Deadwood, he’d had plenty of time to think about everything that had happened to him. For one thing, he’d fallen in love with a woman—the wrong woman. And as much as he tried not to, Cole was still carrying a small craziness inside of him—like a bullet too close to the heart. But the real problem was the woman Cole had fallen in love with was also the woman Kelly had once fallen in love with. That was the thing that he’d come back to tell Ike Kelly and the reason he was going to quit. He felt like he’d broken Kelly’s trust in him.

There were some other reasons for Cole’s decision as well. He didn’t care much for getting shot at or threatened or beaten up. All of which had happened to him in Deadwood. He was still sore and hurting in places he wouldn’t speak about in decent company. By the time Cole climbed down off the Concord stage, he felt like he’d been ridden hard and put away wet. And when he looked at his reflection in the big plate-glass window of the telegraph office, he saw a weary man who needed a shave, a hot bath, and a bottle of good Tennessee whiskey. That is exactly what he planned to do before he saw Ike Kelly.

The weather was damp and gray, threatening rain, as he started toward Sun Lee’s where he had a rented room in the back of the ancient Celestial’s laundry. He hitched his saddle over his shoulder and carried the heavy Winchester in his right hand. It struck him that old drifters were always carrying their saddles and rifles to one place or another—drifting, like the wind. A good horse and a good home were hard luxuries to come by, and harder still to keep. But Cole had plans that as soon as he finished settling up with Kelly, the first order of business was to purchase a good horse. He was tired of carrying the saddle. Beyond that—well, beyond that he had no plans.

It began to drizzle. A light cold rain pelted the brim of his Stetson. It was just one more inducement to hurry up and find that hot bath and the comfort of some Jack Daniel’s. Cole hadn’t gone a block when he heard a brass band start to play the first strains of a mournful dirge. Farther up the street, he could see cadaverous Karl Cavandish riding high up top of his new glass-sided hearse that was being pulled by a pair of dappled grays. Cavandish wore a stovepipe hat and a claw-hammer coat over a boiled shirt. His young Mexican assistant, José Hernandez, sat next to him, looking cold and miserable from the drizzle. A six-piece band trooped along behind the hearse, playing a funeral march.

Cole stopped under the eaves of the White Elephant Saloon and waited and watched as the procession passed. He made a cigarette and smoked it and wondered who the unlucky soul was inside the black crêpe-draped coffin. A few of the town’s citizens followed along on foot and in buggies behind the band. The men all wore suit coats, the women black dresses and hats with veils. Cole watched as they headed up the street, turned the corner at the north end of town, and headed for the city cemetery, what some called boothill. A number of people watched the procession from doorways—mostly saloon doorways—having taken a break from their normal activities. Funerals, fires, shootings, and cuttings always drew the curious, and even gamblers and whoremongers would take time out from their activities to witness such events.

Cole stubbed his cigarette and hefted his saddle once more. Only this time, a familiar voice stopped him.

“Too bad about your friend, John Henry.”

Cole didn’t have to turn around to recognize who it was: Leo Foxx, Cheyenne’s city marshal.

“What was that?” Cole said, turning to face a man he didn’t like.

Foxx looked at Cole with the flat, pushed-in features of a pug fighter, the dull eyes that could read a card or leer at a woman but could not express even the remotest amount of compassion. Leo Foxx, gambler, pistoleer, man-killer, and lawman was just the sort of man a lot of town councils hired as their marshal. The thinking generally went—it took a desperado to tame a desperado.

“I said, it’s too bad about Kelly,” Fox repeated. He wasn’t alone; he never was. He had two of his deputies with him, men that were better at getting him a beer or a woman than they were at understanding the law. The one Cole recognized was Bill Longly, a Texas gunfighter sometimes called Long Bill. Longly’s reputation included several dubious shootings while serving as a city marshal in places like Big Springs and Tascosa and other one-horse towns, trying to rid themselves of the bad element by hiring the same.

The Longlys and the Foxxes usually didn’t last long before they were fired. But there was always another town looking for a gun tough to do their dirty work, so such men were never long without jobs—unless someone killed them first. It was apparent that no one had killed Longly yet. Foxx probably enjoyed the idea of having a man like Longly working for him; it was akin to keeping a mean dog around just to see who he would bite next. But it wasn’t Longly that troubled Cole; it was what Foxx had said.

“What about Ike?” Cole asked.

“That’s him that passed by in that meat wagon,” Foxx said, picking at his back teeth with the nail of his little finger. “Somebody murdered him.”

Cole dropped the saddle. His self-cocker was in easy reach, resting on his left hip in a cross-draw holster. He was prepared to pull it, more than prepared.

“Who killed him?” he asked, feeling the hot anger race through his blood like a prairie fire.

Foxx, for all his deficiencies as a man, was a skilled gunfighter and he knew a man ready to fight him when he saw one. He took an instinctive step backward nearly bumping into Longly. “Hold the hell on before you pull that piece, Cole!”

“Tell me who killed Ike?” Cole repeated.

“Not me, god damn it!”

Cole kept his eye on all three of them. The third man, whose name he didn’t know, was short, squarely built like Foxx, same black mustaches only not as well trimmed and cared for as Foxx’s. Cole could tell by the way Foxx shifted his gaze that he wasn’t up to a fight unless he was forced into one.

“I’ll ask you one more time, Foxx, then I won’t ask again.”

“It happened two nights ago. Me and the boys were in the Blue Star when someone ran in and yelled … ‘Fire.’ We ran outside, saw the blaze. Whoever did it, burned him up in the fire. We found what was left after the ashes cooled. There wasn’t much. Old man Cavandish said he’d bury the remains regardless … him and Kelly were friends. That’s all I know about it. That’s all anyone knows.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Hell, go down and see if his office ain’t burned to the ground. Burned up Ella Mims’s millinery shop next door, too. Town fire department had a hell of a time keeping half the damn’ town from burning down. Lucky it rained that night or it would have.”

Maybe it was that Cole just didn’t want to believe that Ike Kelly had been murdered. Maybe he just wanted to take it out on Foxx because he was the one who had told him. Whatever it was, Cole knew he had to get it under control. He stood waiting, looking into their faces, challenging them to make something happen. And when it didn’t, Cole again picked up his saddle and walked away.

Sun Lee looked up from his bowl of soup. Some of the soup still clung to his long thin chin whiskers like yellow dew. “Mistah John Henly … you back!”

Cole dropped the saddle on the floor and laid the Winchester on the counter without bothering to take them back to his room.

“How about taking care of these for me, Sun?” he asked. “I’ve got to go see about something.”

Sun Lee looked sad, sad as an old hound. “I sorry Mistah John Henly about what happened to Mistah Ike.”

“Me, too,” Cole said. Hearing Sun Lee confirm it, made it real for Cole, Ike’s death. It put knots in his stomach and something painful pressed against the sides of his temples. He thought he’d left the killing back in Deadwood, but now he was right back in the middle of it again.

Sun Lee stared at Cole with those sad-hound eyes. Cole wondered how much tragedy a man like him had seen in his lifetime to have given him such sad eyes—probably a lot more than anyone suspected.

“Poor, poor Mistah Ike,” Sun muttered, shaking his bony skull.

“I’ll be back in a while, Sun.”

The two burned-out lots between the other buildings that showed the scorch of the fire along their walls looked like rotted black gaps between teeth. The charred remains of a few thick timber posts were all that was left, that and the burned smell. Cole headed for the cemetery.

By the time he arrived, the mourners were just leaving, heading back for town. Some raced; a burial was cause for celebration, a reason to get drunk and raise a little hell because you never knew when your time was coming. Only Karl Cavandish and his Mexican assistant, José, remained behind to fill in the grave.

Cole asked Cavandish if he might take over the shoveling from him, and Cavandish allowed he could. Cavandish’s face was sweaty and his hands shook. It took twenty minutes for Cole and the boy to fill in the grave. It had stopped raining by the time they finished. Cole made a cigarette and offered the boy one that he gladly took.

“What can you tell me about this?” Cole asked Cavandish.

He was a tall, cadaverous man with deep-set eyes and a dark beard. He could have passed for the twin brother of the late President Lincoln. He was checking the harnesses of his team. His tall stovepipe hat was beaded with raindrops.

“I know as little or as much as anyone,” he said. “Our dear friend was … obviously murdered, perhaps shot, his office set afire with him still in it. Whoever did it certainly must have had … some deep anger against him. That, or just plain crazy ….” Cavandish’s voice seemed to catch on the rising wind and get carried off.

“That’s it … you don’t know anything more?”

Cavandish shook his head.

“No. Me and José did the best we could, considering … ah … the situation. Ike was my friend, you know. I gave him a good coffin. It’s the best I could do.”

“I’ll be glad to pay the expenses,” Cole offered.

“No. It’s not necessary. Do you want a ride back to town?”

Cole told him no. Cavandish was wise and experienced enough to understand a person’s need to grieve alone. He and José climbed atop the hearse, and he snapped the reins over the haunches of the grays and started back down the hill, keeping the hearse’s wheels in the same set of muddy tracks they’d cut earlier.

The cemetery was surrounded by a black, wrought-iron fence with a gate and a high arch. The gray tombstones were stained dark from the earlier rain. Some were tilted, their epitaphs worn away by time. They were cold reminders of the fragile mortality of good men and bad alike, the strong and the weak. It seemed odd to Cole that it was the one way he’d never thought about Ike—in death. He’d always been such a solid, enduring man, a man who’d outlived his wife and child and many of his friends as well as enemies. For Cole he hadn’t been the sort of man to whom he would attach the fragility of dying. They weren’t that much different in age, yet, somehow, Ike had seemed much older and wiser.

Ike Kelly had been there for Cole when Zee Cole and Cole’s infant son Samuel had died. He had gotten drunk with Cole and let Cole raise hell and cry about it and feel sad because of it. And when he said he understood, Cole had known Ike had meant it, because he’d lost a wife and a son, too. And after Cole’d shot that Mexican bandit, Francisco Guzman, and had had to leave Texas, it had been Ike who’d offered him a job. Cole felt he owed Ike Kelly a lot, and now he wasn’t going to have the chance to repay him, unless he could find the man who had killed Ike.