'Look, don't handle that letter. If we can lift some prints, Marvin can run them thr
ough AFIS. I'll get back to you.'
I closed the blinds and sat in the gloom and tried to think. These were the same men who thought they could terrorize Moon and run him out of town, except he turned the situation around on them and mutilated Roy Devins. But why put heat on Moon? Because he'd been out at the Hart Ranch? Who were they?
L.Q. Navarro sat in a swayback deerhide chair in the corner, one foot propped up on the wastebasket. He kept throwing his hat through the air onto the point of his boot, gathering it up, and throwing it again.
'Time to go to the bank,' he said.
'I figured that's what you'd say.'
'You just gonna study on it?'
'I gave it up, L.Q. It got you dead.'
'Them that won't protect their home and family don't deserve neither one. That's what you used to tell me.'
'Maybe I aim to cool them out. Maybe that's what's really on my mind.'
'Come on, bud, that little boy cain't be hanging out in the breeze, not with some rat-bait writing letters about killing him. If it was me, I'd blow that fellow's liver out and drink an ice-cold Carta Blanca while I was at it… Sorry, my way of putting things probably ain't always well thought out.'
I went downstairs to the bank, then into the vault where the safety deposit boxes were kept. I carried my rental box into a private enclosure and set it on a table and opened the hinged lid. Lying amidst my childhood coin collection and my father's Illinois pocket watch was L.Q.'s holstered double-action revolver. The steel had the soft sheen of liquorice; the ivory handles seemed molded into the steel, rather than attached with screws, and age had given them a faint yellow cast, as though the layer of calluses on L.Q.'s palm had rubbed its color into them.
I pulled back the hammer to half-cock and opened the loading gate and rotated the cylinder so I could see the whorls of light in each empty chamber. Then I holstered the pistol again and wrapped the belt and buckle around the holster and stuck it in a paper bag and walked back up to my office.
Temple Carrol had called back and left a message with my secretary—Roy Devins, whom Garland T. Moon had mutilated, had checked out of the hospital, all bills unpaid, and was thought to have taken a Greyhound bus out of town.
I took L.Q.' s revolver home that afternoon and placed it in my desk drawer in the library and read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal.
August 14, 1891
The Rose of Cimarron and me went to Denver last week on the Santa Fe Railroad and took a room as man and wife in the Brown Palace Hotel, a building which is a marvel even for these modern times. Jennie could not get over riding up ten floors on an elevator, and the truth is neither could I. The lobby was filled with potted ferns and red- velvet chairs and settees that was brought from England and which Queen Victoria was said to have sat in. The dinner was prairie chicken stuffed with rice. They give us little bowls to wash our fingers in that Jennie thought was for soup. Later, we drank lemonade with mint leaves in it and ate oysters out of silver ice buckets and listened to the singer Lillie Langtry perform. Most of the guests seemed to be Republican business men. But they was a pretty good sort just the same.
Wyatt and Morgan Earp, Dallas Stoudenmire, Johnny Ringo, Joe Lefores, and the tubercular drunkard Doc Holliday have been here and have died or gone on to whatever places are left for their kind. The streets of Denver are lit with gas lamps, and gunmen and Indians and rowdy miners are not welcome. I don't think Jennie can see it though. Denver is not the future. It's the Cherokee Strip and her people and maybe even the likes of me that's the past.
I had a terrible lesson on the way back. A grass fire burned down the trestle over a gorge and we was stuck on the prairie for two days. We walked to a camp of Tonkawa Indians that stayed half-starved during the winter because the agents stole the money that was for their food. Jennie got a box of canning jars from the train and showed the squaws how to put up preserves. She looked right elegant in her long dress, boiling tomatoes on a stone oven and pouring the stew in glass jars with a spoon set inside so the glass didn't break from the heat. I thought maybe we might have an ordinary life after all, maybe up in Wyoming or Montana where nobody ever heard of the Doolin and Dalton gangs.
When we got back on the train I seen a dark smear on the floor by the woodstove, one that somebody had tried to scrub out of the grain with sand. I asked the conductor who had bled there. He said it was the wife of a railroad board member, and she had been shot to death when train robbers fired through the glass in the window three weeks ago.
Later Jennie asked me what I was studying on. I said, That collection of trash and lamebrains down the hillock from us has gone and killed an innocent woman.
She looked out the window, pouting, then said to me, The railroad stole the land from the Indians and I ain't a bit sorry for her. If this was the Lord pulling the veil from my eyes, the light has fairly withered an old man's heart.
A motorcycle turned into my drive, the engine popping and misfiring. I turned on the porch light and stepped outside. Lucas Smothers sat astride an old, low-slung Indian motorcycle with dented, purple fenders, his T-shirt and jeans streaked with grease. He cut the engine and grinned.
'You ever see one like this?' he asked.
'Sure, they're collector's items.'
'I'm gonna restore it. It's got a crack in the frame but I can braze it. The teacher at the high school body shop said I could use the equipment in the afternoon while they're still cleaning up.'
'Where'd you get it?'
'Darl Vanzandt.'
'Darl?'
Lucas's eyes went away from my face.