Infamous (4 page)

And he wore a silver Colt, holstered in a gun belt, low around his hips.

Jamie slouched down now, next to A.J. on the couch, putting his feet up on Alison’s desk.

“She’s not exactly the wicked witch spinster professor we imagined her to be, is she?” he asked.

“Nope,” A.J. answered.

“Hmm,” Jamie said. “She’s kind of … mysteriously attractive. I can’t quite figure out what it is about her. I suppose, if you go for interesting-looking women …”

A.J. didn’t say another word. He didn’t shift in his seat, didn’t move, barely even breathed.

And yet, somehow Jamie turned and looked at him, his blue eyes perceptive and astute as he nodded. “You see it, too. That whatever-it-is. I can tell by the way you look at her. You like her,” he concluded. “Well, well, well. First day in Arizona and Mr. Ice Cube’s already starting to thaw? I’ll be damned. Which is not something I say lightly anymore.”

A.J. just shook his head.

Jamie whistled softly through his teeth. “So … what’s the plan? Ask her to dinner before you tell her that you’re not the actor who’s playing me in this movie? Save the bombshell that her book is a fictional piece of crap with nary a fact within its pages for dessert?”

A.J. laughed in despair. Yeah, that would work.

And Alison hung up her phone. “What’s so funny?” she asked, eager to be let in on the joke.

“Um,” he said, because she was smiling at him again, and he was an idiot.

It was idiotic that he let himself get tongue-tied, that he didn’t simply ignore the way his pulse sped up when this woman met his eyes.

Because, really. What did he think was going to happen here?

Even if she got past the news that he’d come here to explode every so-called historical “fact” that she believed about Silas Quinn, there was the little matter of Jamie.

Hi, my name’s A.J. and I like fresh spinach salad and slow-cooked pot roast, hikes in the mountains in the fresh morning air, classic rock, the Arts and Crafts period for architecture and furniture, the comedies of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and oh, yes, long walks on the beach at sunset
while having heart-to-heart talks with the ghost of my long-dead great-grandfather
.

There was no point in delaying any of this. There was no way to finesse this situation.

When he ponied up the truth about why he was here in Jubilation, Dr. Alison Carter was going to hate him or dismiss him. Either way, the friendly smiles and sparkling eye contact would cease.

He took a deep breath, but Alison beat him to the punch. “You know, it just occurred to me that I don’t know your name.”

“Showtime,” Jamie said, heavy on the
sh
. “You gonna tell her your real name or make something up? I always liked Ferd McGurgle. It’s not one of those names you forget, where you have to stop and think,
Now, who did I say I was again, Tom Smith or Bill Jones …?”

“Actually,” A.J. said, trying his best to ignore Jamie’s
help
, “you
do
know my name.” He cleared his throat as she looked puzzled, that little ever-present almost-smile ready to expand across her face. He exhaled and just said it. “It’s Gallagher.”

“Nicely
done.” Jamie applauded. “Good segue, good choice—honesty. Much better than Ferd. I’m proud of you, kid.”

But Alison was still puzzled, still about to smile, until she realized what he’d said. Her mouth dropped open, but she closed it fast. “Gallagher?” she repeated and the smile was definitely gone. “As in … 
Gallagher?”

“As in Austin James Gallagher,” A.J. told her with a nod. “I’m A.J., for short. I was named after my great-grandfather.” He lifted her file. “Jamie. He dropped the Austin after he came west. Too many people thought he was from Texas, which kind of pissed him off.” He tried to make a joke. “He’d met a few Texans he didn’t particularly like, so …”

Silence.

Yeah.

Alison was just sitting there behind her desk, gazing at him with eyes that were a whole hell of a lot less warm now.

“She’s taking the news rather well,” Jamie said dryly. “At
least she hasn’t called in the sheriff yet. You might want to tell her the rest of it, kid. This way, you get it over with all at once. Like pulling off a Band-Aid. While you’re at it, come to think of it, you should tell her about me.”

A.J. looked at him. There was not a chance in hell he was going to do that.

But Alison had found her voice. “You’re not the actor the casting office found to play Jamie Gallagher.”

A.J. shook his head and answered, even though she hadn’t made it a question. “No, ma’am. I’m not an actor. I’m a carpenter. From Alaska.”

“Then why are you here?” Alison point-blanked it with a directness that A.J. admired.

Admired and respected and, yeah, liked. A little too much. He tried to brush off the disappointment that he knew was going to pile up as he continued to talk to her, and she continued to be funny and smart.

“Well, I guess I’m here because …” He cleared his throat. Where and how to start? “See, I must’ve read about it online,” he said. “The fact that Henry Logan was making this movie based on your book. It was the first I’d heard of it—your book—so I searched for it and … Couldn’t find it. I finally ordered it direct from the publisher.”

“Small press,” she said. “Low print run. It’s still hard to find.”

A.J. nodded. “No kidding. I read there’s gonna be a trade paperback reissue from a bigger publisher.”

“It’ll hit bookstores when the movie comes out,” she said.

A.J. nodded again. “Congratulations. That’s great. It was, um, well written. A quick read, considering the length, and uh …”

“Thank you?” she said, crossing her arms and raising an eyebrow. “And you came here because you wanted to … tell me that? Maybe get your copy signed …?”

“Not exactly.” A.J. hesitated.

Next to him, Jamie started to whistle quietly, a rather tuneless rendition of one of the snippets of music the organist used
to play at the college summer league baseball field in Anchorage, prompting the crowd to shout, “Let’s go!”

A.J. finally spoke, just as Alison, too, leaned forward.

“I’m here because, like I said before, you got the story, the facts, completely wrong,” he told her, as she said, “If you’re here for your share of the millions of dollars I’m making off this book, you’re in for a shock. My advance was a low five figures. And even if I
were
making a ton of money, which I’m not, every lawyer on this planet would agree. You don’t even remotely own the rights to the story of a man who’s been dead since 1898.”

“1977,” A.J. corrected her. “And no, ma’am, that is not why I’m here. Not for money, no. I’m here because …” He glanced at Jamie.
Because Great-grandpa’s ghost wouldn’t stop pestering me until I packed a bag and headed south
. No way was he telling her that. “Well, because you wrote in the introduction to your book that you were striving for historical accuracy. And you seemed to mean it. And there’s a whole pack of inaccuracies in your book that could use some clearing up.”

“Understatement of not just one century, but two,” Jamie said.

A smile had found its way back onto Alison’s face. “Really.”

“I thought,” A.J. told her, “from what you wrote, that you’d be interested in the truth.”

“A truth that has Kid Gallagher living until 1977—a full one hundred and one years after he was born?”

“That’s right,” A.J. said, glancing at Jamie. This was good. She seemed interested, and okay, maybe a little too amused, but at least she hadn’t kicked him out on his ass into the dusty street.

“Silas Quinn shot and killed Kid Gallagher in 1898,” she countered with patient authority. “It’s been documented.”

“Will you please ask her to stop calling me
kid,”
Jamie said plaintively, effortlessly rising and starting to pace from one end of the tiny room to the other and back again. “You
might also want to point out that Quinn was a lousy shot. He couldn’t hit the side of a barn, even if he was standing inside of the damn thing, firing off a cannon.”

“Jamie Gallagher’s death was documented only by Silas Quinn, and by people who’d heard about it
from
Silas Quinn.” A.J. sat forward, on the edge of the couch. “The marshal was pretty good at telling tall tales.”

Alison laughed—a short burst of delight. “In other words, you’re saying Silas Quinn was a liar.”

“Silas Quinn was an asshole,” Jamie interjected, “but we can go with liar for now.”

“According to my great-grandfather,” A.J. said evenly, trying to ignore the increasingly agitated ghost, “Quinn never caught up with him and Melody in the desert, after they left Jubilation, so yeah. That would make him a pretty big liar.”

“The man was filth,” Jamie said. “A ruthless, nasty, ugly piece of excrement.”

Alison couldn’t keep her amusement off her face as she stood up, unaware that she was neatly blocking Jamie’s path. “So I’m supposed to take the word of a man who kidnapped and murdered another man’s wife? Over the American West’s most well-known hero?”

“A walking turd, he was,” Jamie said, pulling up short to avoid going directly through her. “Conniving and cruel. Plus, he smelled bad. Didn’t bathe often enough.” He examined Alison’s face from his up-close vantage point, then glanced back at A.J. “She
is
oddly attractive for such a tall woman, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” A.J. said, answering both of them. “You have to wonder about the fact that no one besides Quinn ever saw Jamie’s body. Or Melody’s, for that matter.”

“Because there were no bodies,” Jamie said. “She’s a little too skinny, but those legs must be a mile long. Gotta love that, especially when she wraps them around—”

“Don’t,” A.J. stopped him, unwilling to hear anything having to do with sex come out of his gramps’s mouth. But of course, now Alison was looking at him oddly, so he quickly added, “Get me wrong. I appreciate the amount of research
that you’ve obviously done, but much of what you included in your book can be traced back to a single source—Quinn himself. I know he said he buried them both up where he said he killed Jamie.”

“It was near the Painted Desert, where he caught up with them,” Alison said, unaware that Jamie had given her physical appearance a hearty thumbs-up. “It was summer. There was no way he could bring the bodies all the way back. Not in that heat.”

“Not to Jubilation,” A.J. said, resisting the urge to tell the ghost, who was still too close to her, to back off. “You’re right, that would’ve been too difficult. But there were other towns nearby. At a time when a strategy for keeping men from breaking the law was to drag the bodies of outlaws into town behind your horse …? A time when lawmen would display the men they’d killed, like heads on a pike on a castle wall, as a warning to stay in line …? When newspapers would pay good money to snap a picture of a dead outlaw like Billy the Kid …?”

“Quinn was heartbroken,” she countered. “He stayed in the desert for months. His wife was dead—”

“Nope,” A.J. said. “You got that wrong, too. Great-grandma certainly wasn’t anywhere close to dead.”

“Nice!” Alison laughed. “I didn’t see
that
one coming. Although I probably should have.”

“It’s true.”

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’re saying that Melody Quinn left her famous, important husband and ran off with some two-bit, vicious gunfighter.” Her sarcasm made it clear she was highly skeptical of A.J.’s claim. But he had to give her credit for hearing him out.

“Vicious,” Jamie said. “That’s a good one. He was a vicious, conniving, stinking, walking turd. Thank you, darlin’.” He blew her a kiss and disappeared, only to rematerialize on the other side of her.

“Jesus,” A.J. said, because he still hadn’t gotten used to Jamie popping in and out like that. He still couldn’t believe his eyes—if it truly were his eyes that needed to be believed,
and not his brain that was responsible for sending him hallucinations of the old man he’d adored back when he was a child and life was so much less complicated.

And great, now Alison was looking at him as if he’d just shouted
Jesus
in the middle of her office, which he had, and there was nothing to do about it but plunge onward. “Yes, Jesus, yes,” he said, which sounded even more stupid than he’d thought it would. “She ran. As fast as she could. Although
escaped
might be a better word.”

“Escaped
is a much better word,” Jamie said.

“Ah,” Alison said, leaning back so she was half sitting on the very edge of her desk, arms crossed in front of her. “And that must’ve been … because Silas Quinn was, what? Abusing her?”

She clearly didn’t believe a word of it, but at least she was willing to discuss the possibility. It was a start.

A.J. nodded. “Yes, again. Quinn absolutely abused her, both physically and emotionally. She was planning to leave him, even before she met Jamie.”

Alison didn’t speak, didn’t nod, didn’t react. She just calmly and silently—and thoughtfully, with a serious chunk of this-is-too-funny in her eyes—looked down at him, her long, blue jean–clad legs out in front of her, her purple T-shirt stretching slightly against the lithe, trim, yet very feminine curves of her body.

A.J. waited, gazing back up at her, as Jamie started pacing again at the edge of his peripheral vision.

Alison moved first, spoke first. “And that’s it?” she asked, pushing herself off her desk so that she was standing in front of him.

A.J. blinked. But before he could open his mouth to respond—assuming he had the slightest idea how to respond to
And that’s it?
—she continued.

“You walk up to me and say,
Excuse me, Dr. Carter, may I have a moment of your time
 … Well, actually, I think you said,
Um
, but I’m almost positive what you meant to say was
Excuse me, Dr. Carter, may I have a moment, because everything you wrote in your book, which you spent close to a
decade of your life meticulously researching and documenting, is wrong
, and you … just expect me to believe you?” She smiled at him, genuinely amused.