Last Lawman (9781101611456) (7 page)

The woman whipped around with a gasp, her fine, high cheeks coloring, brown eyes wide and curiously staring. Recognition sparked in them, and she said, “Well, I’ll be hanged!”

She slapped a hand to her mouth and rolled her eyes around as if to see if anyone had heard. Her cheeks dimpling devilishly, she said more properly but also with a touch of irony, “I mean…what a surprise to see you here, Marshal Spurr.”

“I reckon the surprise is half mine.”

Spurr swung down from Cochise’s back and tossed his reins over the nearest hitching post—a pretentious, wrought-iron affair with a wrought-iron horse figure at either end. Whoever owned the hotel had some mighty high aspirations for it and the railroad. He doffed his hat as he walked up the porch steps a little more heavily than he would have liked to in front of the woman he knew as Abilene, his breath rasping in and out of his still-painful chest.

“Good lord, lady,” he said, approaching her, “what the
devil are you doin’ way out here?” He extended his hat in the direction in which the older gent had disappeared. “Who was that? And who in the hell is
Martha
?”

“Shh!” Again, she looked around secretively, though humor flashed in her eyes as she stepped back away from him when he moved in to hug her. “That’s…my husband, Olden Chandler.”

“
Husband?
Abilene, the last time I saw you, you was workin’ up in Buffaloville, workin’ at the—”

“Shh! No one knows me by that name…nor by that reputation, Spurr, you old fool!” She chuckled in spite of herself, staring up at him fondly, her eyes reaching out to him as his reached out to her. His hands hung, tingling, at his sides. He wanted very badly to hold her in his arms.

He hadn’t seen her for a couple of years, but they’d once had a grand old time together, having first met when she’d been plying the “trade” down in Texas and then running into each other infrequently later across the frontier. He’d seen her more recently in Laramie and then, about two years ago, he’d found her over in Buffaloville, on the eastern edge of the Big Horn Mountains.

Abilene was the only name he’d ever known her by. Sometimes, just for fun, when they’d been lounging around in some lumpy bed together, naked as jaybirds, he’d called her “Texas.” Though she was a good twenty, maybe twenty-five years younger than him—he did not know her age for sure but guessed she was around thirty-five by now—there’d been a spark between them from the very first time they’d met.

Kindred spirits, they were—she, a whore; Spurr, a whoremongering old frontier lawman. They’d both seen the elephant a time or two. They had similarly wry senses of humor, a taste for tanglefoot, and a cynicism that shielded their hearts against the ravages of time and the mercurial nature of the frontier gods.

“Please,” she said, “call me Mrs. Chandler.”

Spurr’s lower jaw dropped, and he shook his head. “That handle sure don’t roll easy off this ole child’s tongue.”

“Try it out a few times”—she canted her head toward the front door of the hotel—“over pie and a cup of coffee?”

“You sure that’d be proper…Mrs. Chandler?”

“Put your badge on, and no one will question our morals.”

“Unless they think you’re wanted.” He gave a snort as he dug into his vest pocket for his nickel-washed moon-and-star badge of the deputy U.S. marshal and pinned it to his hickory shirt. “How’s that?”

Abilene’s warm, brown gaze rose from the badge to his craggy face. “Right handsome.”

“Now, that’s somethin’ I ain’t been accused of in a long time.”

“Come on.”

Abilene opened the front door and stepped inside, and Spurr followed her through the hotel’s small but immaculate lobby and into a dining room tricked out with cloth-covered tables, potted palms, and a ticking grandfather clock. There were no other patrons, and the matronly woman in a black gown and frilly white apron who filled their coffee cups said they were the first business she’d had in a week.

“Mrs. Anderson,” Abilene said, “this is an old, dear friend of mine—Deputy United States Marshal Spurr Morgan. Spurr, meet Mrs. Anderson. She and her husband built this place, home of some of the finest dining in all of south-central Wyoming Territory.”

“Oh, please, Mrs. Chandler,” the jowly but stately old woman intoned, holding her silver pot in a pudgy, beringed hand. She had a heavy eastern accent. “We’re the
only
dining within a hundred square miles!” She gave a falsetto laugh and favored Spurr with a bemused glance behind her round-rimmed spectacles. “And if the spur line’s business doesn’t
pick up soon, we’re going to have to return to Philadelphia, though the dry air out here is so much better for Malcolm’s cough!”

Humming nervously under her breath, she returned to the kitchen through a swinging door. When she’d brought out two pieces of peach cobbler topped with rich plops of buttery whipped cream, she topped off her only two customers’ coffee cups and retreated to the silent kitchen.

Spurr sat back in his chair, staring in wonder at the woman he knew as Abilene, who held his gaze with a wry, faintly sad look of her own. “Mrs. Chandler…” he said, absently caressing his spoon handle with his thumb. “How did that happen?”

“I answered a newspaper ad.”

Spurr arched a brow.

“Olden was looking for a wife. His first one died two winters ago of a lung fever, and he was lonely. Not too many women out here as you can imagine. Lots of cattle, a few horses. Not many women.”

“Where’s the ranch?”

“Twelve miles north of here, in the foothills of the Bighorns. Pretty place along a creek.”

“Must be a lonely place along a creek.”

“Not half as lonely as Buffaloville, Spurr…when you never came back.” She stared at him pointedly through the steam rising from her coffee.

Spurr arched his other brow. “And do what—marry you?”

“Take me with you down to Mexico. That’s where you were going, were’t you?” She frowned at the badge on his shirt. “Why did you change your mind?”

“About what—Mexico or retirement?”

“Both.”

Spurr leaned forward and lifted his coffee cup to his mouth. He blew on the hot liquid and sipped. “When old bulls get put out to a back pasture, they’re soon found with their bones strewn by coyotes along some draw.”

“Not if they have a nice, fat heifer to entertain them.” Abilene smiled, then slid her eyes to one side, making sure they were still alone.

“Come on, now,” Spurr said, smearing the cream around on his pie with his fork, “we done talked through all that foolishness.”

“So we did. Still, Spurr, I’d hoped to see you again.”

“I got a job to do, Abilene. Besides, you and I both know we had our best times in Laramie—at the Lady’s Hole Card.”

She laughed in her customarily sexy, husky way. “Yes. And, as you pointed out, if we tried to stretch the game any farther or longer, we’d end up dealing from the bottom of the deck. You’d either shoot me or I’d shoot you. It’s just our way.”

Spurr laughed. “There you go.”

She cut into her pie and said over the piece she held atop her fork, “I’m glad you didn’t go to Mexico before I could see you again, Spurr. But…I wish…” She studied the cream-topped chunk of pie on her fork.

“If wishes were wings, pigs would fly,” Spurr said around the pie in his mouth, before she could finish her sentence. He swallowed, sipped his coffee. “Is he good to you? I mean, aside from leavin’ you here to drift over to the Bighorn with his pards…?”

“He’s likely a hell of a lot more honest with me than I’ve been with him. He thinks I’m a widow.” She sipped her coffee, wrinkling the skin above the bridge of her nose. She set her cup down in its saucer, then dabbed at her lips with her napkin and looked past him toward the front window and the street. “He’s very good to me. Better than anyone’s been to me before, except for you, for the short times we were together. But it’s all…it’s…a little…boring. Do you know what I mean, Spurr?”

“Hell, there’s nothin’ wrong with boring, Abilene.”

“Easy for you to say, livin’ the life you’ve lived.” She
glanced around, then leaned forward to whisper, “On the back of a horse and not on your back.”

“Abilene!”

They both laughed quietly and at considerable length, hunkered over their plates. When their mirth finally dwindled to snickers, then died altogether, a silence fell over the table.

Then Spurr said, “Nah, but it’s worn me—this life o’ mine.”

Chewing, she canted her head to one side and regarded him quizzically for a time before saying, “Your heart?”

“My heart, my pecker, everything.” The laughter boiled up again in his chest, and he covered his mouth like an abashed schoolboy funning with his favorite girl at school, hoping the old schoolmarm wasn’t overhearing.

“Spurr!” Abilene choked on her coffee, tears glistening in her eyes. “You haven’t changed.” She patted her chest and swallowed and regarded him tenderly from beneath her brows. “I always loved that about you.”

“No wife would.”

“Of course not.”

“That’s why it’s best things turned out the way they did, I reckon.”

“Oh, hell,” she said, whispering. “How would we ever know if the other way wouldn’t have worked just as well, after it’s all tallied up?”

“Your wisdom is equaled only by your beauty, Mrs. Chandler.” He frowned. “Who’s Martha?”

“No one you’d care to know,” she said. “Whose trail are you on, Spurr?”

He looked up from the plate he was cleaning with his last bit of pie, a little surprised by her abrupt change of subject. His brows beetled. “Let’s stay on this awhile longer. Damn, how I’ve missed you!”

She sat still in her chair, only half her pie eaten. The
corners of her mouth rose slightly, and she said softly, “I’d love nothing better than to go upstairs with you, Spurr. Bring us a bottle, toil away the afternoon, listen to your jokes. Just like old times. You’re not going to believe this, but I miss the way you always sighed into my neck when we finished and tugged on my ear.”

Spurr tipped his head back and loosed a loud guffaw before catching himself and covering his mouth with a napkin. He felt the wetness of tears dribbling down his cheeks. Looking across the table, he saw her mouth straighten. The humor faded from her eyes.

He cleared his throat. “But those times is through—is that what you’re sayin’?”

“I’ll die out there at the ranch, and I’ll be buried near Olden and his first wife, May, and his boy, James, who died three days after he was born. And these last years may be a little dull, and I’ll always remember you with a smile, but I have it good now—better than I deserve.” She looked down at her lap. “And this is the last time I’m likely to see you, Spurr.”

He stared at her, his joyful nostalgia turning to a lonely ache behind his belt buckle.

She stared back at him, this time tears of sadness glistening in those large, brown eyes of hers. “You oughta go on down to Mexico like you planned once before.”

“I look that bad?”

“Spurr, you burned it from both ends. You deserve a rest.”

“Or a proper grave?”

“Not some ravine somewhere, dyin’ slow with a bullet in your belly.”

She stared those words home for a time.

He found himself feeling rankled by them, defiant. “Listen, goddamnit, like I done told you once before, I’m gonna live to a hundred and twenty, and I’ll gallop out to that ranch to lay lilacs on your grave, Abilene.”

Her eyes brightened. She brushed one hand and then the other across each cheek. “I’d like that, Spurr.” Her gaze drifted, and she frowned out the window behind him.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Your friends are here.”

At roughly the same time but about twenty-five miles as the crow flies to the west, Erin Wilde looked up from the open account book in the second-floor office of her mercantile. She swept her thick, curly chestnut hair back from her face with one slender hand and plucked her steel-rimmed reading glasses off her nose.

She slid her swivel chair back away from her desk and lowered her hazel gaze to the floor. She’d dropped a pencil a few minutes ago but had been too immersed in the futile attempt at balancing her accounts, trying to keep her business running smoothly in these months after the death of her husband, to bother retrieving it. She’d simply picked up another one.

Now the pencil that was still on the floor quivered and bounced ever so slightly, turning a slow circle on the scarred floorboards. She could feel the vibration through the soles of her low-heeled leather boots.

Riders coming hard toward Sweetwater. A good many of them, too.

Erin’s heart quickened slightly. More business, perhaps? She could certainly use it. She had more credit customers than those who paid, and, as more than one of her fellow businessmen had told her, her generous heart would not continue indefinitely to provide food for herself and her young son, Jim. Maybe the thuds she began hearing now were the hoofbeats of ranch riders heading to town for supplies.

If so, they’d better have more in their pockets than lint and tobacco flakes.

Erin—a tall, slender, clear-eyed woman of twenty-six—rose from her chair and strode to the window overlooking the street. She wore a brown-and-cream-plaid Mother Hubbard dress to conceal the lush curves of her body and to forestall the advances of the men of Sweetwater, whom she sensed were waiting for the proper amount of time to pass after Daniel’s death from cancer to begin knocking on her door after business hours.