CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Mink Morrow stepped into the sheriff’s office.
Hank Cobb sat at his desk and Ed Bowen, a surly gun hand out of the Nevada Territory, stood at the window drinking coffee.
Cobb looked up when Morrow entered and his expression soured.
“What the hell do you want?” he said. “There ain’t no money yet.”
Morrow let his eyes slowly adjust from the sunlight outside to the comparative dimness of the office. For the first time ever he’d been completely blind for a few seconds and the implication of that troubled him deeply.
“And a big howdy to you too, Hank,” he said. “I’ve been up on the ridge, talking to the feller you have on guard up there.”
“Jonas Kane ain’t a talking man,” Cobb said.
“He talked enough. Told me them town folks of your’n ain’t gathering much money. He reckons they’re filling their own pockets.”
Cobb smiled and sat back in his chair. He’d been cleaning his fingernails with a cow horn letter opener that he now tossed on the desk.
“We’ll search them when they get down,” he said.
“When?”
“Hell, I don’t know. When it gets too dark to see, I reckon.”
“You’re mighty thin on the ground, Hank,” Morrow said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Way I figure it, you’ve only got four of your boys left.”
“It’s enough.”
“Not if the fine citizens of Holy Rood decide to think other wise.”
“If that happens, you’ll throw in with us, Mink. You need the money for your eating house. Blind gunfighters don’t last long.”
Bowen laughed. “That was funny, boss,” he said. “Blind gunfighters don’t last long . . . hah!”
“Yeah, Hank, you’re a laugh a minute,” Morrow said.
He stepped to the stove and hefted the coffeepot.
“Make a joke about this—Kane says he reckons most of the money is lost. He says it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack up there.”
“I’ll find it. Might take another day or two, but I’ll get back most of it.”
“And then?”
Cobb crossed his arms and grinned. “Then we burn this burg to the ground and skedaddle.”
“Who’s we?”
“Me and the boys and maybe you. That is, if you play your cards right.”
Morrow poured coffee into a cup. He took a sip and immediately steamed up his dark glasses, blurring his vision. Cobb didn’t appear to have noticed and he laid down the cup on the edge of the desk.
“You’re the dealer, Hank,” he said. “What cards?”
“For starters, get up on the ridge with Kane here and make sure the rubes are honestly searching for my money,” Cobb said. “Anybody who refuses to work or is putting coin in his pocket, shoot him.” He grinned. “Or her, as the case may be.”
“Anything else?” Morrow said.
Outside the wind picked up again and there was a sound of distant thunder.
Cobb rose to his feet and adjusted his gun belt.
“There will be two executions tonight,” he said. “While my money is still scattered all over the ridge, I want the whole town to attend. Keep them honest, like.”
“The whole town? I guess that includes me,” Morrow said.
“Especially you, Mink. You’ll be my assistant.”
“What’s the contraption outside the church?” Morrow said. “I saw a man’s body lying near the thing and he didn’t have a head.”
Cobb’s grin and the way he lifted himself onto his toes conveyed a warped sense of pride.
“The French call it a guillotine,” he said.
He waited for Morrow to speak, wanting to draw out the moment.
“What the hell does it do?” the gunfighter said.
“You saw the dead man. Do you mean you don’t know?”
“I mean I don’t know, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked.”
“It cuts heads off, of course,” Cobb said. “Clean as a whistle.” Then, “You’ll see it in operation come dark.”
“That’s not my way,” Morrow said.
Cobb nodded. Thunder boomed. Closer.
“Make it your way, Mink.”
“And if I don’t?”
Cobb smiled. “No cuttee . . . no monee. You catch my drift?”
Morrow stared into Cobb’s eyes as though trying to find an answer to the question he hadn’t yet asked.
“Why are you doing this, Hank?” he said finally. “Take the money you have and get out of here. Maybe you should head east, see the sights.”
For a moment Morrow thought Cobb was considering that, but the man’s reply crushed him.
“It ain’t about money, Mink. Well, it ain’t all about money,” he said. “It’s about power. You any idea what it’s like to have power?”
Morrow nodded and tapped his Colt. “Yeah, I cottoned onto the idea the first time I strapped on this gun.”
Cobb stepped to the window and Ed Bowen moved aside.
“Thunderstorm coming,” Cobb said, looking at the sky. “Blowing down from the north. Big mountains up that way.”
Cobb was silent for a while, and then said, “For a time, way back when, I guess I was exactly what they said I was—a cheap tinhorn who rolled drunks for a living. Granted, now and again I’d make some extry cash on the side, like when a woman would pay me to stick the shiv into her old man or a rooster would give me fifty dollars to do the same thing to a love rival or some such.”
He turned his back to the window, his head and shoulders outlined against a sky the color of rusted gunmetal.
“Pretty soon the word got around about who I was and how I made my living, and I got run out of town after town by the law the minute I stepped foot inside the city limits,” Cobb said. “‘We don’t want your kind here,’” they’d say. ‘Now you git and don’t come back.’”
Cobb gave up trying to establish eye contact with Morrow, guarded behind his dark glasses and shrugged. “You see, I was pegged as a lowlife and an undesirable. Where was the power in that?”
“Count your money, Hank,” Morrow said. “Money is power.”
“Yeah, if you’re like that Vanderbilt feller and have millions,” Cobb said. “But I found real power right here in Holy Rood . . . the power over people. I’m a king, dammit, and all of a sudden I think I don’t want to let it go.”
“You mean you’re thinking about staying here?”
“That’s what I mean. I’m considering it. Remain where I’m at and continue to rule this town. I can pass laws, impose taxes, order executions. Do what any king does.”
Cobb grinned. “It’s like them fellers, Wild Bill Hickok was one, who smoke opium. One taste of it and you never want to let it go. Well, I’ve had more than a taste, of power that is, and I’ve begun to think that I don’t want to give it up.”
“The law will catch up to you sooner or later,” Morrow said. “You must know that.”
“The law?” Cobb snorted his amusement. “All the law cares about is that Holy Rood is a peaceful town, a burg where outlaws and low persons are not tolerated and get short shrift. The law doesn’t care if a whore burns or a goldbrick artist is”—he drew his forefinger across his throat—“topped. So long as my town obeys the law, the law will leave me alone.”
“But you’ve already made a big mistake, Hank, and you don’t even know it,” Morrow said.
Cobb grinned. “You’re right. I’m damned if I can see it.”
Morrow stepped to the desk and picked up a thin gold bracelet.
“Look at this, Hank. You’ve taken their valuables down to the women’s wedding rings,” he said. “Now you’re grabbing all the money they put in the bank.”
“So?” Cobb said. “What’s your gripe?”
“Hank, you only have power over people when you don’t take everything they have away from them. Take everything a man has, and he’s free of you. It’s only a matter of time until the folks up on the ridge realize this, and when they do, they’ll come for you.”
“Kill a few and they’ll toe the line again,” Cobb said. He waved a negligent hand. “They’re sheep. They’ve proved that time and time again. Ain’t that right, Ed?”
“Just like you say, boss,” Bowen answered. “And sheep are bred to be fleeced. Everybody knows that.”
Morrow glanced out the window where rain pattered on the panes. “Storm’s almost here, Hank,” he said. “It’s coming down fast.”