The Lady Takes A Gunslinger (Wild Western Rogues Series, Book 1) (5 page)

Grace's mouth fell open at the injustice of it all. She looked at Donovan. His inscrutable gaze was pinned on the wall above Peterson's head, as if he'd already removed himself from the discussion of his future.

Withdrawing a pair of metal handcuffs from his pocket, Sanders shoved Donovan up against the bar and yanked his hands behind his back. He slid the handcuffs closed with a vicious twist of a key, and Donovan sucked in a breath.

Sanders barked orders for three of the onlookers to carry his brother's body to his office—carefully—and several others to carry Shelby's corpse to Manuello Cabrilla's Undertaking Shop down the street. Grumbling, several men stooped to lift Deke Sanders's limp form and carried him out.

Grace could hardly believe how fast everything was happening. She felt dizzy and disoriented and sick to her stomach, and she wished, more than anything, that she'd never come here tonight.

Sanders pressed the barrel of his gun up against his prisoner's back. "Move. I got a special place all ready for you. You're gonna finally get your due at the end of a rope."

A rope! Grace sucked in a breath. They were going to hang him?

"Wait!" she called as Sanders nudged an unresisting Donovan toward the door. "You can't just mean to hang him! Without a trial? That's... why, that's unconstitutional!"

Sanders didn't even acknowledge her as he jerked Donovan around toward the exit. Donovan's face was eerily devoid of any emotion—almost resigned to his fate. Sanders shoved him through the louvered doorway and they disappeared into the darkened street.

"Estupido!"
Maria spat on the floor beside her, and glaring at the doorway, she hissed, "Ah, he will have a trial. Sanders ees the marshal, but also, he ees the... what ees the word—? Judge. Reese
will
hang for the killing of his brother. Of that, you can be sure." Her angry gaze turned on Grace. "And eet will be on your head."

* * *

Reese's face collided hard with the iron bars of the jail cell. Pain shot through his cheek, but he barely had time to feel it before Sanders's knee connected with his lower back. Reese groaned and arched backward. His knees buckled as he slid down the bars, unable to stop himself with his hands pinioned behind his back in handcuffs. A few more blows and he suspected he'd lose consciousness. He feared that more than the beating. Even with Connell Smith, Sanders's deputy, standing by, Reese figured Sanders wasn't beneath hanging him in his cell and calling it a suicide. He struggled to stay coherent.

Sanders's face came close to his. Bits of spittle flecked the sides of his grinning mouth. He was enjoying this, Donovan thought, the way a mad dog enjoys tearing apart his victim. Sanders had been looking for an excuse to put him in his place for a long time now. At last he'd gotten it. Reese squeezed his eyes shut.

The marshal grabbed the lapels of Reese's shirt and yanked him close. "Oh, no you don't. I'm enjoying this much too much to let you miss this." He backhanded his face hard.

Reese tasted blood on his lip. "Shag off."

Sanders laughed. "You always were a stupid bastard, Donovan. Never knew when to quit, did you? I told them. I warned them they never should have let a mick in the ranks of the Rangers. I told 'em it would mean only trouble. First it was John Malchamp. And now my brother's paid with his life."

"He drew on me fir—"

The fist came again, knocking Reese sideways against the floor. He lay there for a moment, breathing hard, his bloody cheek pressed against the dirt. Sanders yanked him upright again.

Connell Smith took a step forward and opened his mouth to say something, but a look from Sanders silenced him. Reese's gaze slid back to the deputy. He was young as Deke, and green, and in the past had even spoken kindly to him. Smith was an eager paper soldier, poor and ambitious, but Reese doubted the idealistic gleam in his eye had ever been quite so tarnished as it appeared just now.

"My brother didn't deserve a bullet from the likes of you," Sanders said, rubbing the bloody knuckles of his right hand.

"So why don't you just kill me and get it over with? No witnesses here. Just ol' Connell there. He won't talk, will ya, Connell?"

Connell's face flushed and he swallowed hard. "I reckon as how I would. No matter who he killed, Marshal, he deserves a trial."

Sanders wiped his mouth harshly against the edge of his dirty sleeve. "You goin' up against me, boy?"

"No, sir. I just think—"

"You aren't paid to think," Sanders snapped. "You're paid to follow orders. So do your job!"

Connell flinched, his breath coming fast with anger. "Yes, sir."

Sanders turned back to Donovan. "You'll get a trial, then I got a rafter in the livery all picked out and a nice long rope. You're gonna almost feel that dirt under your feet, but you're not gonna be able to quite get a hold of it. An' while the life is squeezin' out of you, I'm gonna watch. I'm gonna watch, Donovan, for Deke. Ain't nobody gonna help you." Sanders lifted him by the shirtfront and shoved him into the cell. Donovan's head cracked against the dirt floor and he squeezed his eyes shut.

"You're a dead man, Donovan. You can count on that," Sanders finished, and slammed into his outer office, leaving Connell behind to lock him in.

Connell stepped over Donovan's legs, reached behind him, and unlocked the handcuffs. A new pain rushed to Reese's nearly numb hands as feeling returned, but he had only the strength to draw his arm up near his face on the floor.

"I reckon there ain't nothin' I can do," Connell told him.

Reese shot a disgusted look at him.

"Deke was more a son to Sanders than a brother," Connell explained in his own defense. "Raised him nearly himself. But the apple don't fall far from the tree. Deke was trouble waiting to happen."

Donovan opened one eye and looked up at the deputy. "It was self-defense."

"Can you prove it was?"

Donovan edged up on his knees and Connell backed warily out of the cell, slamming the door shut. Dragging himself to his feet, Donovan gripped the bars, breathing hard. He stared at the young man and asked the only question that came to mind. "Can you prove it wasn't?"

* * *

The cramped little room at the inn was dark when Grace pushed her way through the door and slid it shut behind her with a trembling hand. For the first time, she wished there had been two rooms to let instead of just this one she shared with Brewster, because the last thing she wanted right now was to tell him what a mess she'd made of things tonight. She wished she were home, where she could crawl into her own feather tick and pull the covers over her head.

She brushed at her damp cheek and inhaled the unpleasant scent of the coal-oil smoke from the lamp that had recently sputtered out. Darkness shared the small room with her like an entity, stealing the air her lungs sought, pressing in on her throat like a fist.

The reed shutters, tightly closed to hold the nightly invasion of mosquitoes at bay, blocked not only the moonlight but any hint of a breeze as well, and she began to perspire almost before she'd fully entered the room. From somewhere down the street came the distant roar of voices and bawdy laughter, and closer, the mumbling Spanish song of a drunken pedestrian halfway between cantinas. Here, in darkness of the room, came the rasping snore of Brewster, who lay sleeping in the room's only bed.

She listened for a moment to the sound, hoping she hadn't wakened him. He needed his rest after all they'd been through to get here. And he wasn't well. She knew that only too well by the increasing coughing fits he was given to and the feverish look in his eyes when she'd put him to bed tonight.

With a shaking hand, she dropped the wooden door latch into place
.
Leaning back against the portal with a shaky sigh, Grace stared into the darkness, trying to calm her thudding heart.

Reese will hang for the killing... he has you to thank for it.

Grace swallowed down the bile that rose in her throat. Was it true? Was she to blame? Was Donovan to die because of her? God help her, she hadn't meant for any of this to happen. And she could hardly take all the blame for it. After all, it wasn't she who'd been pickled to the gills with whiskey, nor had she chosen such a foolhardy challenge with a gun.

Yet she was the one who'd entered into that snake pit of her own free will, seeking help from Reese Donovan. And the blame was hers for being fool enough to believe that she could walk in and out of a place like that, unmolested.

Nothing in Jack Leland's western adventure novels had prepared her for what happened tonight. Nothing in them told her what she should do now. Certainly, she had no idea what to do with the memory of Donovan's bleak expression as he stared at her, or the unexpected feelings that tingled through her at the remembrance of his rough hands against her flesh.

She dropped her face into her hands. She'd done many things she'd been sorry for in her life, but never had she managed to make such a complete mess of things as she had tonight.

"Grace? That you?"

Brewster's voice came out of the darkness like a beacon of light. She wanted to run to him, fling her arms around him like she'd done as a child and let him make everything all right again. But she couldn't do that, any more than he could fix what she'd done.

"Yes, it's me." She pulled a sulfur-tipped match out of the tin holder and struck it against the roughened bottom. The match flared blue, then orange as she lit the coal-oil lamp in the wall sconce. The flame sputtered and caught as she replaced the hurricane glass around it. Behind her, Brewster coughed, a damp, chest-racking sound that shook the brass bed.When he stopped, he lay spent, watching her with worried eyes.

When had he gotten so thin? she wondered, noting the hollows in his cheeks. The sight of it shocked her, and tears welled in her eyes.

"I woke up a ways back and you were gone," Brew admonished. "Didn't I tell you to stick close to the inn?"

"You warned me. But I didn't listen." She bent her head, hiding her tears in the shadows of the flickering lamp. "I wish to God now I had."

He edged up on one elbow, real concern showing on his lined face. "Grace?"

Her throat constricted, and she dropped her face into her hands and cried. "Oh, Brew, it was awful. Two men dead and it was all my fault. Maria was right. And now Donovan's going to hang and there's nothing I can do to stop it, because I didn't really see it happen."

He sat up straighter in bed with a rustle of sheets."Maria who? And you don't mean that fella we was gonna go see tomorrow, Reese Donovan?"

She dropped her hands and nodded miserably. Crossing to his bed, she slumped down on the edge and told him the whole awful story. When she'd finished, Brew was silent. Angry, she suspected, and with good reason. She'd made such a mess of things this time, and she had no one to blame but herself. When he spoke, however, it was with the calm patience she'd come to trust over the years from the man who'd taken the place of her parents so long ago.

"Gracie, I ain't gonna say I told you so, because it ain't gonna do no good. You've always been a headstrong girl, and that's the way of it. And it ain't gonna do Mr. Donovan, who's sitting in a jail cell waiting for the hangman's noose, no good neither. The only thing to do now is decide how to fix what's been done."

"I don't see how," she said miserably. "Maria said Marshal Sanders would hang him without a fair trial. He wouldn't even listen to me. He's a powerful man in this town, Brew. Those men—and I mean, a roomful of bandits,
miscreants
—they were afraid of him. And aside from the three of us, not another soul would speak up for him."

She got up and walked to the shuttered window, peering through the crack of light at the edge. "And when Donovan looked at me," she went on, "it was as if he expected it all, somehow. But how could he?"

Brewster rubbed his stubbled chin and allowed his gaze to roam slowly over her face. "You reckon this fella, Donovan, is worth savin'?"

Her lips parted in surprise at his question. "Any human being is worth saving."

The old man stared at her evenly. "What about him?"

She threaded her arms across her chest, knowing what he meant. "Well, he's rude and arrogant and he drinks like a fish. But he's not a murderer. It's just not in his eyes, if that makes any sense."

"Comin' from you?"

Despite the illness that had lingered in his face the last weeks, she thought, just for a moment, that his blue eyes gleamed.

"So," he went on, "all we gotta do is figure how to get Donovan to change his mind about helping us."

"Helping us? But he—"

"—needs a favor, eh? And a favor like that deserves one in kind, don't it?"

"I've seen that look before. What are you talking about, exactly?"

His shaggy gray eyebrows arched with mischief.

"You're not thinking what I think you're thinking!"

He grinned. "It won't be the first time I've done something that bends the rules a bit. And I reckon it won't be the last."

"But a jailbreak? That's illegal," she sputtered. "That's a hanging offense."

"Luke's worth it, ain't he? 'Sides, if I don't get caught, who's to say who did what?"