The Accomplice (8 page)

To Caleb’s surprise, Holliday wasn’t about to let himself drop. He also wasn’t about to accept any help from anyone else. Twisting away from the support Caleb offered, Holliday took a few steps down the hall. Unfortunately, that allowed the guard a real good look at Caleb reaching out from his cell.

“Get away from there!” the guard shouted as he swung at Caleb’s arm. “I said you’re not to be released, and I meant it!”

The guard’s club slammed against the bars, crushing Caleb’s elbow in the process. Even as Caleb pulled his arm back in, the guard was reaching for the gun holstered at his hip. In the same instant the young man’s hand found the pistol’s grip, he realized that he couldn’t move his arm enough to get that weapon out of its leather resting place.

Even though Caleb had been right there the whole time, he hadn’t spotted Holliday’s movement as the gaunt dentist had reached out and slapped his hand down on top of the guard’s to trap the lawman’s gun before it could clear leather.

Confused and rattled, the guard looked at Caleb and his own holster a few times before realizing that it was Holliday who prevented him from drawing.

“Keep this up, Doc, and I might reconsider letting you go,” said a man from the other end of the hall.

Caleb tried to get a look at who’d spoken, but couldn’t see much of anything besides the two men standing directly in front of his cell. Pressing his face against the bars allowed him to spot the Texas Ranger making his way to the scuffle between Holliday and the young guard.

Ben Mays was a handsome fellow with light brown hair and a glimmer in his eyes that seemed to welcome whatever trouble he saw. Plain, battered clothes hung over his muscular frame, and a well-worn hat rested a ways back on his head. As he stepped up to Holliday, he kept his hand on the grip of his gun without drawing it. Even so, the threat was easy enough to read in his face.

“You’re an upstanding member of this community, which is why I don’t mind cutting you a little slack,” Mays said. “But if you don’t step away from that boy, I’ll have to toss you back into your cell.”

Holliday sucked in a breath and took a step back. Holding both hands up, he leaned against the wall opposite Caleb’s cell and nodded.

Mays nodded as well as he reached out to pat the guard on the shoulder. After a few good-natured slaps, he practically shoved the kid back down the hall to where the rest of the lawmen conducted their business. “Go on and collect Doc’s things,” Mays said. “That is, unless he intends to stay for a while longer?”

“I believe I shall be excusing myself,” Holliday said in a voice that was much more familiar to Caleb. “I was hoping my associate here could join me as well.”

Without looking at Caleb, the Texas Ranger shook his bead. “Not right now, he won’t.”

“And why is that?”

“Because he killed Mike Abel.”

“You mean Loco Mike Abel?” Holliday asked. At first, the sound he made was a cough. That cough shifted into a laugh. “Surely the man’s name speaks for itself. If I was defending myself in there, then surely my friend in the next cell was doing the same.”

“I’ll be needing to check on that.”

“And he’s supposed to sit in there and wait?”

“That’s how it works, Doc. You should know that by now. I hear you’ve had to sleep off a hard night’s drinking in every one of these cells at one time or another.”

“Hardly,” the dentist replied, sounding more like a southern gentleman now that he’d had a chance to collect himself.

Glancing over at Caleb, Mays took in the sight of the other man as if he was looking at a dog standing up on its bind legs. “Witnesses say this one here gunned down Mike after the fight was over. That’s murder in anyone’s book.”

“He was going for a gun,” Caleb said in a voice that was even rougher than Holliday’s. After clearing his throat and straightening up, Caleb added, “Mike was stirring up shit since the first time he walked into my place. He lost at cards and then started shooting. He’s not the first asshole to get himself killed like that.”

“No,” Mays said as he squared his shoulders with Caleb and stepped up to the bars, “but he’s the first asshole that you gunned down in front of a dozen witnesses. Doc here gets to leave because he’s an upstanding fellow with even more upstanding fellows to vouch for him.”

“And what does that make me?” Caleb asked.

“It makes you the fellow sitting in that cell waiting for me to do my job.”

“And if I don’t have enough upstanding folks to vouch for me?”

Mays narrowed his eyes and said, “Then you’ll be the fellow who hangs for committing murder.”

If Caleb’s cell had been a respite from the chaos of the Busted Flush, it was a sanctuary after Holliday’s coughing and snoring were taken out of the mix. After the dentist was released, Caleb managed to get back to his cot and catch some well-deserved sleep. His arm was aching, and the stitches in his jaw were still hurting, but the quiet of that cell was enough to beat it all.

Caleb was yanked from his sleep by the pounding of boots against iron bars. This time, it wasn’t the young guard who’d fetched Holliday earlier but another guard with long gray hair gathered up by a leather strap behind his head.

“Do I finally get something to eat?” Caleb asked.

The guard shook his head and grumbled in a voice soaked in gin. “You can get something to eat fer yerself,” he grumbled as he unlocked and opened the door.

Caleb got up from the cot, walked right up to the bars, and stopped just short of leaving the cell. “What’s going on?”

“You’re free to go.”

“But Mays said I had to stay.”

“I guess he spoke to enough folks to convince him you could leave. Anyways, I suggest you do just that before anyone changes their mind.”

It was hard for Caleb to argue with that logic, so he walked out of the cell and headed down the vaguely familiar hallway. The last time he’d walked through there, he’d been kicking and screaming with the blood pumping like a torrent through his head. Now that he was calmed down again, he barely even recognized the inside of the Texas Ranger’s office.

There wasn’t anyone else inside the place apart from the one, older guard. A clock on the wall said it was getting close to eleven at night, and the shadows outside the office’s windows verified that nicely. Caleb could already hear the rowdy voices that marked practically every night in Dallas, drawing his next thoughts immediately back to his saloon.

“I wouldn’t leave town if I was you,” the guard said as he lowered himself onto a chair behind one of the office’s three desks. “Until this clears up, you should stay where we can find you. Otherways, Ben will come looking for you.”

“Well, he knows where to find me.”

The guard let out a snorting laugh and said, “Sure he does. We can round you up quick enough if you step out of line.”

“Will I need to talk to a judge?”

“I reckon so.”

Caleb stood there for a moment. waiting to see if anything else would happen. With the threat of being hung still lurking in his mind, he half expected to be shot in the back as he walked out through the front door of the office. But nothing so dramatic happened as Caleb stepped out of the building and back onto the street.

It was a hot, sticky evening, and the crickets were almost chirping loud enough to drown out the voices and music coming from the entertainment district. Normally, Caleb heard those sounds and smiled at the thought of all the money that would be flowing through the Busted Flush.

Tonight, however, it was just noise.

“I believe I owe you a drink,” said a voice from the nearby shadows.

Caleb turned to look and found a narrow silhouette leaning against a post in front of the storefront across the street. Recognizing the figure immediately, Caleb crossed the street and approached the man who’d been waiting for him.

Holliday’s skin was even paler in the moonlight, and the darkness made his cheeks appear to be even more sunken. Even with all that, the dentist looked better than he had earlier in the day. His eyes weren’t so cold, and the angles of his face weren’t as sharp as they had been before.

As he got closer to the dentist, Caleb began to pick up on the reason for Holliday’s better mood. “You’ve already been drinking,” he said.

Straightening up, Holliday took a step forward and tugged on the lapels of his black waistcoat. Beneath the waistcoat, he wore a dark gray shirt and a black string tie. His black pants matched the rest of the outfit, making Caleb look like a vagrant in comparison. On his right lapel, he wore a gold and diamond stickpin that glittered like a star that had been plucked from the collection overhead.

“And here I thought I was going to be civil,” Holliday said.

“Too late for that, Dr. Holliday.”

The dentist furrowed his brow and took a step forward. “You did save my life, so I figure I ought to pay you back in kind.” He extended a hand and put on a smile that was too bright to be anything but genuine. “And please, call me Doc.”

Before he could think about anything else, Caleb found himself shaking Doc’s hand. The other man’s grip was strong and steady, which didn’t seem to match the aroma of whiskey that hung like a thick cloud around his head.

“You have a last name, Caleb?” Doc asked.

“Yeah. Wayfinder.”

Doc took back his hand and snapped his fingers. “That’s right. After all the confusion over the last day or so, that slipped my mind. Now, how about that drink you promised me?”

“Wait a second,” Caleb said after catching a glimpse of the Texas Ranger’s office. “I need to find Ben Mays. I don’t even know why the hell I got out so quickly. And besides, you’re the one that owes me a drink.”

“Semantics. Besides, there’s no need to worry about Mays.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re out because you don’t deserve to be inside that miserable cage. That’s the beauty of our divine justice system.” When he said that last sentence, Doc didn’t even try to mask the sarcasm in his voice.

“Last time I heard, it sounded like Mays was gonna use that divine system to string me up and hang me out to dry.”

“Possibly,” Doc said with a shrug. “But there was no way he could do that after so many witnesses came forward to give their accounts of what happened.”

“Witnesses came forward?”

Doc was walking down the boardwalk, heading straight for the loudest part of town. “Of course they did. All it took was a little organization to get them together and set their stories straight.”

Although Caleb had been walking at Doc’s side, he came to a halt the moment he heard those last few words. When he saw that Doc had no intention of stopping, Caleb reached out and dropped his hand onto Doc’s shoulder. It took a good amount of effort to turn Doc around.

“You got some people to lie to Ben Mays?” Caleb asked.

Knocking Caleb’s hand away, Doc replied, “There was no lying involved, thank you very much. There were folks in that saloon who saw what truly happened, and all I did was gather them up and point them in the right direction.”

Caleb’s eyes narrowed. “And what about setting their stories straight? What, exactly did that involve?”

Doc looked back without reacting in the least to Caleb’s frustration. In fact, the more Doc studied Caleb’s face, the more he nodded. “All right, so maybe I suggested a few things they should say, but not a bit of it was a lie.”

“Great,” Caleb snarled as he turned and pressed his fingers against his forehead to try to soothe the ache that was growing inside his skull. “How long do you figure it’ll be before Mays finds out about this and hauls me back into that cell to rot?”

“You know what your problem is?” Doc asked in his easy southern drawl. “You worry too much. You didn’t do anything wrong besides put down that mad dog before he killed someone. If it wasn’t you, someone else would have killed that son of a bitch, and Mays knows it. All he needed to hear was verification from someone else to that effect.”

Oddly enough, the more Caleb thought about it, the more sense Doc’s words seemed to make. “Who did you get to speak for me?”

“Just half a dozen or so people that were there when everything happened. Mays showed up like clockwork asking around about what happened. Besides the barkeep at your saloon, those others just said what happened.”

“And what about the ones that were saying I killed Mike Abel in cold blood?” Just mentioning that caused those accusations to echo through Caleb’s mind just as they had been ever since the shooting had stopped.

Doc waved off that question like it was a gnat buzzing around his head. “Forget about them. They didn’t bother showing up while Mays was poking his nose about.”

“So I’m really free?”

“You’re out here walking around, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. I suppose I am.”

“Then let’s get that drink and stop fussing about the past.”

“Sounds good, Doc. I know just the place.”