Territory (14 page)

Ringo shook his head and added, “Seems like this town is nothing but Franks, Bills, and Johns. I’m making a new rule: anybody gets shot around here for the next year, he’d better be named Frank, Bill, or John. I want the herd thinned.”

“Damned shame you couldn’t have said so before road agents killed Bud Philpot.” McLaury’s voice was low and hard, and he shot a sideways look toward the door.

“I don’t believe the fellows who did it take much account of what I want.”
Ringo’s mouth softened just enough to be called a smile. “Not everybody does.”

McLaury eyed Ringo sharply, but as far as Jesse could tell, there was nothing to see.

Brocius stared thoughtfully at the ceiling moldings. “Frank, Bill, or John. Nope, can’t do it, Johnny.”

“You just try not to shoot
anybody
for the next year. It would do you a world of good.”

Jesse set the cards down in front of Ringo to cut, and said to Brocius, “Do you make a regular practice of shooting people?”

“No, but the last one was the city marshal, and he died. It was an accident, though.” Brocius beamed at him. Jesse wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be reassuring.

Frank McLaury snorted.

Brocius leaned forward across the table. “It was, damn it! I didn’t have one thing against Fred White.”

“I expect that made White feel better,” McLaury snapped.

“Gentlemen,” Ringo said, and lingered over the word. “Might we get on with business?”

The bartender, unaware that his herd was to be thinned, brought the drinks. Brocius had stout, McLaury had brandy and soda. Jesse smelled absinthe, gin, and Curaçao when Ringo’s glass passed. Jesse bought the round, which sweetened McLaury a little.

The next five hands went as the first had, or possibly worse. Jesse caught cards so sweet they might have been printed on maple sugar candy, and he had to play them as if they were wormwood and gall. At last, on the sixth hand, he got cards that seemed bad enough to make it safe to stay in to the end.

All the players were in after the draw. McLaury bet five. Ringo shook his head over his cards like a disappointed preacher over his congregation. “If that’s how it is, somebody’s got to make you ladies play poker.” He pushed ten dollars into the pot.

Jesse looked down at his pair of nines. Nobody,
nobody,
would stay in the last betting round with less than a pair of jacks, let alone raise like a madman. He put ten dollars in the pot. He had three dollars left in front of him— almost done.

Brocius gave the rest of them an outraged stare. “Johnny, if you ask me to lend you money tomorrow, I’ll laugh in your face. Drop.” He slapped his cards down and shoved them into the deadwood with both hands. “Frank, what’ll it be?”

McLaury looked pale. “I’ll see it,” he said, and laid down another five.

“All right then, you damned fools,” Brocius said, “show ‘em.”

McLaury had two sevens and a queen kicker. Ringo had four cards to a straight—in other words, nothing at all. Jesse’d won the hand. He looked up, stunned. Ringo stared blandly back at him.

Only a madman—or someone willing to sacrifice ten dollars to find out what another player was up to—would raise with a handful of nothing. Ringo had literally forced him to show his hand. And Jesse had bought himself another hour of poker.

But the god of cardplayers seemed to have forgiven him. He got honestly bad hands from then on, and when he tried to make them worse, they tended to comply. Jesse even managed to maneuver McLaury into winning money from him, and it seemed to make the man almost cheerful.

At last, when Ringo raised, there was nothing left in front of Jesse. He shook his head. “I’m shy. Unless …”

He pulled the handkerchief out of his pocket and let it unfold on the table. The twisted silver gleamed against the white cloth. “I could throw that in,” Jesse said.

To Jesse’s stretched nerves, the instant went on forever: the three men staring at the bright, vicious bauble. Brocius tilted his head, curious; McLaury scowled; and Ringo’s face did nothing significant, just as it had been doing since Jesse had first set eyes on it.

Ringo reached out, and Jesse held his breath.

“Should another sorcerer touch this, it will bite him, too, though not so hard as you were bitten
.” When Lung had said that, Jesse had half ignored him. Even if it was true, people like Lung didn’t clog the streets. But he remembered the pain—

Ringo picked up the token. It might have been a toothpick. Jesse, on the other hand, felt something like a pang of hunger, seeing it in Ringo’s hand.

“Pretty. Real silver—” Ringo flexed the metal slightly, and bounced it on his palm. “And damned near pure, I’d say.” Ringo looked at Jesse across the twisted silver. “Kind of Irish-looking. What is it?”

Jesse tore his eyes away from the metal. “Good-luck charm.”

“Appears to have run dry,” Brocius observed.

“Sometimes they pick right up after a change of owner,” Ringo said absently. He bounced it again in his palm. “All right. I say it’s five dollars’ worth of used-up luck.” He tossed it into the pot.

Jesse’s insides gave a lurch. “Then I’ll take two,” he said, pushing two cards into the deadwood and fighting the urge to pick up the bright twist of silver.

Now he held five cards constituting not a damn thing. No way to win the token back—and the point was to
lose
it. What was wrong with him?

When the betting came ’round, Jesse laid his cards down. “Fold. I’m busted.”

Ringo raised his eyebrows. But he said nothing.

Brocius hovered over his cards, and McLaury snapped, “Come on, Bill. Staring won’t improve ‘em.”

“I thought one of those queens winked at me, is all,” said Brocius. McLaury took the bait; his eyes snapped to Brocius’s cards. Then Brocius smiled and tossed his bet in. “Show ’em all, boys,” he ordered, and spread his in front of him. There were no queens in his hand. McLaury glowered at him.

Ringo won the hand and swept the pot toward himself.

And Jesse felt something in the small of his back, a tug and release, like a thread breaking. The token lay in the little heap of bills and coins. It was just twisted metal, and shone with nothing but the lamplight overhead.

He stretched and slid his chair back. For the first time he noticed his shoulders were sore and his shirt was damp down his back and under his arms. “Thank you, gentlemen. You’re fine cardplayers and fine company.”

They all got to their feet when he did. “Always glad to take a polite man’s money,” Brocius said as he shook Jesse’s hand. “A sight better than taking Frank’s—he gets so damned surly.”

McLaury, surprisingly, smiled. “Poker’s serious business.”

“Frank!” a voice called from the front of the room, and McLaury and the bartender both looked up. A slender man with rumpled brown hair came toward the table. His blue eyes and straight nose were twin to McLaury’s, but the frown sat on his features as if it were a stranger there. “I’ve been down at Dexter’s for half an hour, you jackass!”

McLaury yanked his watch out of his pocket and snapped it open. “Hell, Tom, I’m sorry. We got going a little.”

He and Brocius moved to meet the newcomer. As they did, Ringo laid a hand on Jesse’s shoulder.

“Well, Mr. Fox. Nice to meet you. And if you ever hanker to play the same game as the rest of us, you come find me. Hear?”

Jesse met his eyes and tried not to look guilty. He didn’t think it worked. “I’d like that.”

The front door swung open again, and two men walked in. At first, with the light behind them, all Jesse could tell was that they were tall and light-haired. He saw Ringo stiffen.

Under the gas lamps the men’s coats were sober black. One of the pair was
maybe a hair taller and thinner than the other; he had a splendid silver-blue brocade waistcoat showing above his lapels. They both had light eyes, startling blue, but the thinner one’s were the equal of Ringo’s for cold. He nodded toward the cigar cabinet and spoke to the bartender. His brother—they had to be brothers, even more than McLaury and the man who’d come looking for him—stood at the bar and watched the room.

Ringo’s attention was like an arrow knocked and aimed at the newcomers.

“Thank you again for the game,” Jesse said.

“Oh, don’t leave now.” Ringo kept his eyes on the men. “If you’re going to play in this town, you’d best meet these two.”

The thinner one had his cigar; he lit it as he walked over to the table. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “You’re all here for a prayer meeting, and the preacher just left.”

It would have been a joke among friends. But Jesse could tell that it wasn’t, and these weren’t.

“Good morning, Wyatt,” Ringo said. “Fine day for a stroll down Sixth Street. Or are you peacekeeping? I can’t always tell.”

If God and the Devil were to arrange a parley, they’d sound like this,
Jesse thought. A wagon passed in the street, and something in its load, some bright surface, shot reflected light into the backbar mirror and off it into Jesse’s eyes. For an instant the two men were black cutouts in a storm of light.

“I don’t believe you’ve met my friend Mr. Fox.” Ringo smiled, but not at Jesse. “Mr. Fox, this is Mr. Wyatt Earp.”

Earp turned his icicle gaze full on Jesse. It was like a match held close to his face. Not cold; hot enough to burn. “Any friend of John Ringo’s,” Earp said, and didn’t offer his hand.

“Likewise, I’m sure,” Jesse said.

“What brings you to Tombstone, Mr. Fox?”

“A visit to an old friend. I stopped on my way to Sonora.”

“Continuing on soon?”

Jesse pretended to hear nothing in that but the words. “My business there will keep.”

“When you go,” Ringo said, “don’t take the stage. I hear it’s dangerous hereabouts.”

Earp turned back to Ringo. “What
are
you doing in my bar?”

Ringo’s eyes grew large. “My gracious. I thought it was Milt Joyce’s bar. I thought you just ran the gambling.”

“And what were you and your friends doing?” Earp’s eyes cut toward the tabletop, where the last pot lay in front of Ringo’s chair.

“That’s not gambling. That’s poker. Well,” Ringo added with a thoughtful look toward Frank McLaury at the bar, “maybe some people were gambling.”

But Earp hadn’t looked up from the tabletop. The twisted-wire token still topped the pile of Ringo’s winnings. Earp leaned over the table and stared at it. He didn’t reach for it.

Then he looked up, into Jesse’s face. He frowned at Ringo, then at Brocius and the two McLaurys at the bar, who were pointedly ignoring him and the man he’d come in with.

“You boys should be careful who you play with,” Earp said. “And where you do it.” He turned on his heel and went back to the bar.

Ringo sighed. Jesse couldn’t tell if it was out of relief, regret, or satisfaction.

“My, this is a nice, friendly place,” Jesse said.

Ringo’s head snapped around; he looked as if he’d forgotten Jesse was there. Then he laughed, a harsh crack of sound. “You really on your way to Mexico?”

“I was last week.”

“Well, that’s a nice friendly place. Even counting the
soldados
.” He gathered up the money on the table and thrust it, haphazard, into his pockets. “I’d love to stay and trouble the brothers Earp, but now’s not the time. You remember my invitation, Mr. Fox.”

“I will.”

Ringo went to the bar and slapped Curly Bill Brocius across the shoulder blades. Brocius threw a mock punch at him. The Earps raised their heads and watched, like a pair of guard dogs waiting for the command to bite. Brocius followed Ringo out. The McLaurys finished their drinks and went, too.

The room seemed uncommonly long, and the air had the spiderweb stickiness he’d felt when he’d arrived in town. One of the Earps—not Wyatt, the other one—looked up from his drink and into Jesse’s face. His frown made two hard lines between his brows. Remarkably like Lung’s expression, when Jesse had got up to leave.

“I do feel responsible for you. If I had known what would meet you here, I would never have called you.”

“Nonsense. If I weren’t in trouble here, I’d be in it somewhere else.”

“That hardly needs to be said. But it might be trouble you understood and were skilled in. I did not call you here to have you killed.”

Jesse nodded to the Earp brothers, picked up his hat, and went out into the

painful dazzle of Allen Street at midday.

His room at Brown’s Hotel looked out over Fourth Street, which made it marginally quieter than the ones in front on Allen. It also made it hot in the afternoon, when the western sun glared in for hours before it set.

Jesse opened the windows (they were always open when he left the room, and always closed when he came back), took off his coat, his waistcoat, his tie, and his collar, and unbuttoned his shirt. If a breeze came up, at least he’d feel it. Then he sat at the secretary desk, pulled a sheet of paper toward him across the blotter, and gave his pen a shake to start the ink.

On the rooftop across the street, three crows quarreled over a bit of trash. A cart passed out of sight below him, its axle screaming. There were two candles in candlesticks on the desk, unlit and waiting for dusk. The maid had replaced last night’s burnt-down ones; the wicks were white and fresh. He set them side by side. One was a little shorter than the other. Or could that be the candlestick?