Chapter Thirty-Seven

They pushed their way through the snowdrifts and the bone-chilling winds on a direct line to the Lucky Strike. There was something fearsome in it, the way they were going about taking on Charley and his bunch and whoever else decided to get in the way. It was a feeling Cole hadn’t had in a long time. He didn’t know exactly how to explain it, the coldness that took over his thinking, the little extra with which his heart was beating because he knew that he was walking into a fight. His mind was fixed on just that one event, the fight he knew was up ahead waiting for them, and everything else was forgotten. All he could think about was doing what he knew he had to do, and nothing else was of consequence. That was the way he was feeling, and, if he had to guess, he’d say that was the way Miguel Torres was feeling, too.

They didn’t talk or discuss it beyond the decision they’d made before they left the old man’s stable. Miguel had thumbed a fresh cartridge into his carbine and checked the loads in the Peacemaker Colt he had taken off the stage robber. Cole changed loads in both his pistols, then placed them in the pockets of the curly coat so he could reach them easily. The wind bit their faces and snapped at their clothes and tried to take their hats. But none of that seemed to matter, because as cold as the mind tends to become in a fighting situation, the blood feels like it’s running hot in your veins. They reached the Lucky Strike, exchanged glances, and went in prepared to do what they had come for.

There were a few of the town’s citizens, mostly miners, sitting around, but overall the place was quiet. Those sitting around looked up when Miguel and Cole stepped into the room. The small talk came to an end; someone coughed. “I’m looking for Charley Coffey,” Cole said.

No one said anything for a moment. Then Harve, the barman, stepped out of the shadows from behind the bar. The swelling around his eyes from the fight he and Red had had gave him the look of an Oriental. “Coffey’s gone,” he said.

“Where?” Cole asked.

Harve placed the palms of his hands atop the bar, looked from Cole to Torres then back to Cole.

“Where?” Cole asked again.

Harve shrugged.

Miguel crossed the room and took hold of Harve’s shirt front and nearly pulled him over the top of the bar. “He asked you a question, mister!” he growled.

“I don’t . . . know,” Harve stammered.

“God damn you don’t!” Miguel said. “And you better be faster with an answer than I am with this Peacemaker.” Miguel showed him just enough of the big pistol to get his attention. Cole kept an eye on the others in the room, in case there were any who thought they had a reason to get involved. No one moved. Miguel put his face up close to that of Harve’s, and Harve tried to close his eyes, but was having difficulty because of the swelling. “I bet it’d hurt like hell I was to punch you in that face of yours,” Miguel threatened.

“Please don’t do . . . that,” Harve begged.

Cole noticed Red, Harve’s partner, standing there behind the bar, his hands hanging at his sides. He didn’t seem to be in a fighting mood, watching the way Torres was handling Harve. Miguel looked like he was going to do it, hit Harve in his tender face, when Cole stopped him by asking Harve: “Then where’s Leo?”

Harve shifted his swollen eyes toward the back, where Leo’s office was.

“Keep him and these others out here while I pay Leo a visit,” Cole told Torres. “I’ll get Leo to tell me what Harve says he doesn’t know. I come back without an answer, you can go ahead and bust him in the face.”

Harve grunted, but Miguel held him in a bulldog grip, pulled halfway over the bar top, his toes barely touching the floor.

Cole didn’t bother to knock on Leo’s door before he went in. He had a chippy kneeling before him, his head back, his eyes closed against the pleasure she was giving him. “Leave off with that,” Cole ordered. They both jumped.

“What the hell . . . ?” Leo started to protest, but Cole showed him the self-cocker.

“Go on, lady, find something else to do,” Cole told her. She looked grateful and slid out of the room, closing the door behind her. Leo sat there, sputtering and trying to button up his front. “Leave it be,” Cole said. Leo’s hands stopped. “Time for the truth, Leo.”

He looked at Cole, his piggish eyes full of anger and fear. “Truth about what?” he squealed, his face flushed.

“Everything, Leo. Start with the reasons you had those girls murdered, then go on to the part about where Charley Coffey is hiding.”

“You don’t know . . . what you’re . . . saying,” he stammered.

Cole thumbed back the hammer on the Remington. “Christ, Leo, it would be so damned easy to kill you, I have to fight the urge to keep from doing it.” The piggish eyes shifted to the pistol in Cole’s hand. “Only thing is, I want to do it slow, maybe shoot you in the legs first. What do you think that would be like, getting shot in the legs, Leo?”

Leo lost most of his color when Cole said the part about shooting him in the legs; the flesh around his neck and jowls was ashen gray as the winter sky; his face was a sheen of sweat, and the thin strands of his oily hair couldn’t hide the glisten of his scalp. “You . . . can’t do . . . this, Cole. It’d be murder.”

“You think I give a damn what anyone in this town would call it, Leo? Do you want to know who’s backing my play out there in your bar right now? A deputy U.S. marshal. Do I look like a man that’s worried about being charged with murder?”

“You can’t do this . . .”

Cole put the front blade of the self-cocker just under the sag of neck that spilled down from Leo’s chin. “Go ahead, Leo, tell me again how I can’t do this.”

He swallowed hard enough that the flab of neck pushed against the barrel of Cole’s pistol. “It wasn’t just me . . .” he muttered.

“Go on.”

“It was . . . Johnny who did it . . . he’s the one that killed them.”

“But you ordered it done.”

He was trying to hold the bile down, choking on it, tasting it. He swallowed two or three times, and every time he did, the barrel of Cole’s gun moved under the bobbing of his Adam’s apple. “OK . . . all right!” he cried, throwing up his hands.

“You had Johnny kill those women because you didn’t want the competition from Liddy’s operation, is that it, Leo?” His eyes rolled until they showed white. “Wasn’t there enough lonely miners to go around? You had to get all the trade, cut everyone else out?”

He snuffled, a thin line of mucous leaking from his right nostril. “She didn’t . . . go along with the . . . operation. She wouldn’t pay up . . . it was the principle of the . . . thing.”

“Principle!” Cole was having a hard time holding in his anger. “You had those women killed for something as little as that?” Leo nodded again, unable to speak because the bile was right there in his throat, and, if he tried to say anything, it was all going to erupt out of him. “I don’t get it, Leo. Why go after the women? Why not just kill Liddy instead? If you wanted her out of business, why not just take her out?”

He was shaking now, shaking and sweating and leaking through his nose. “He wouldn’t let me . . .” he managed to mumble.

“Who wouldn’t let you?”

“Stevens!” he blurted. “He wouldn’t let me have Johnny . . . do her.”

Cole felt he had finally got the truth. “Tell me exactly how he fits into this, Leo.” He shoved the front sight of the self-cocker a little harder into the doughy flesh. Leo was clamping his jaws shut, trying to keep from losing his breakfast all over his gaiters. “We had a deal . . . I run things around here . . . he controls most of the big mining claims. He said between the two of us . . . we could control it all.”

“He was already a rich man, Leo. Why bother?”

Leo swallowed again, like he couldn’t get enough air. “It ain’t . . . about money with him. It’s the . . . power.”

“So you supplied the guns and he supplied what, Leo, the brains?”

“Yeah . . . something . . . like that.”

“Until Stevens came along with his schemes and money, you were just nickel-and-dimeing it, that the way it was, Leo?”

He nodded his head. “Nickel-and-dimeing it . . . that’s right.”

“I still don’t get murdering the women. Why didn’t Stevens just let you kill Liddy and be done with it? Why go to all that trouble to try to scare her off?” Leo was having a hard time coming up with enough words. “Let me guess.” Cole was losing patience. “Stevens was in love with her, that’s why he wouldn’t let you kill her?”

“Not just . . . that.” Leo groaned.

“What else?”

“She’s his sis-sister, you know . . . they’re related for Christ’s sake. Jeezus . . . can you quit poking me in the neck with that?”

Cole held the barrel against his soft flesh while the revelation sank in. It was a big fact Liddy had forgotten to mention in their conversations both in and out of bed. The whole thought of it was doing a slow dance in Cole’s head. “I should kill you for lying, Leo.”

“Honest to Christ . . . Cole, it’s the truth!”

Cole wanted to close his eyes and pull the trigger and feel Leo slide away from his gun. “I’m going out there, to Stevens’s place, Leo. And when I’ve finished my business, I’m coming back here. You be ready to ride the stage with me back to Cheyenne to stand trial for the murders of those girls. You try running, I’ll hunt you down and kill you myself. One way or the other, you’re going to pay the check for this.” Cole let down the hammer and took the pistol away from Leo’s neck. A red mark showed against the doughy flesh where he had pressed it with the barrel. “Remember, Leo, what I said about trying to run.”

As Cole turned toward the door, Leo was busy, bent over a spittoon. Cole stepped back out into the bar, where Miguel was still holding Harve by his shirt.

“What’s up?” Miguel Torres asked.

“You can turn him loose now,” Cole said.

Harve staggered backward after Miguel released him. As the two looked at each other, a sharp explosion sounded from behind the door to Leo’s office. Miguel started to go back, but Cole stopped him. “What the hell’s going on, John Henry?”

“I think Leo just paid his bill.”

“For what?”

“His sins.”

Miguel walked over to the front doors, looked out. “What’s the next move?”

“Soon as this weather lets up, we pay a visit to Winston Stevens.”

“Well, this must be your lucky day, then,” Miguel said. “It just stopped snowing.”