James put his good arm around his wife’s shoulders. “I’ll take care of this, honey. Go on up to bed. Wyatt, there’s bread and jam in the kitchen. Get yourself something to eat. I’ll be back soon.”
Pulling her shawl tight, Bessie gave Wyatt one last mean look and left without another word. Murmuring encouragement, James got the girl on her feet and steered her off toward China Joe’s, still holding that nasty oilcloth to her bosom.
Wyatt watched them go, his mind blank. He was past thinking, but even if he’d just spent a week taking a rest cure, he wouldn’t have known what to do about Mattie Blaylock. Anything with men or horses, Wyatt handled it, but women? Well, Doc Holliday was right about that much. It was a comfort and a support to have his brothers near. Women were James’ job, and he was good at it.
After a few muddled moments, Wyatt went inside simply because James had told him to, and because he liked bread and jam.
For a while he stood dumbly in the whorehouse kitchen, glad none of the girls had come in to see what was going on. There were mirrors all over the place in Bessie’s, and he caught sight of himself in the one hung above the sink. Listening hard for footsteps, he decided it was safe and lifted his upper lip in something like a smile. Wincing at what he saw, he sat down heavily.
The Frowner, his mother called him. Well, it was that or look like an idiot.
Hell. What difference did it make after all these years? He was used to things the way they were. He could hardly imagine what it might be like to laugh or smile freely. On the other hand, there was the awful memory of the tooth that went bad in ’73 while he was hunting buffalo …
They say you forget pain, but Wyatt sure as hell hadn’t forgotten being so desperate to make it stop, he came close to putting the barrel of a pistol to the tooth and shooting it out of his mouth. In the end, he let Ed Masterson hammer it out, using part of an elk horn as a chisel and a pistol butt for a mallet. If Doc Holliday could prevent that from ever happening again, it would be worth any amount of money.
Which was why, a little at a time, Wyatt was talking himself into a plan that would let him pay James back and pay the dentist, too.
Fat Larry didn’t see any harm in city deputies working two jobs, and the saloons liked having a badge in the house. John Stauber and Chuck Trask were both dealing faro part-time, and they were making a good buck. Wyatt thought that was kind of wrong—a lawman could cheat all he wanted, bash anyone who caught him at it, and say it was for disturbing the peace. But there was no rule said you had to cheat. Drunks generally did their own losing.
With his mind just about made up, Wyatt tried to summon the gumption to fry a couple of eggs but decided to rest his eyes for a few minutes. Next thing he knew, James was back and it was full daylight.
“I took her over to China Joe’s,” James told him. “When she’s clean, she can come back here and sleep off whatever she’s using. Joe thinks it might be opium. I think laudanum, more like.”
“Thanks, James.”
“Soon as she sobers up, she’s back out on the street, Wyatt. Bessie’s not gonna let her work here. You eat anything?”
“Too tired.” He pushed himself to his feet and made himself say what he’d been thinking before he dozed off. “Listen, James. About the money I owe you—”
“Forget it.”
“No! I’m gonna pay you back. I don’t want trouble with Bessie over it. Dog Kelley’s looking for a part-time faro dealer. He offered me a job. It’s two bucks an hour, plus ten percent commission, and I won’t need a bank.” James looked at him, not saying anything. Finally, Wyatt answered the question his brother wouldn’t ask. “Just ’cause they’re serving liquor don’t mean I got to drink it.”
James shrugged with the shoulder that still worked, but his eyes were narrow. “I guess,” he said. “If you say so, Wyatt.”
Wyatt caught up with Bat Masterson a couple of nights later. The whole conversation got off on the wrong foot, and it was mostly Wyatt’s fault.
Bat was coming out of the Iowa House, where he was keeping his latest girl. Even at a distance and in a crowd like the one on Front Street, there was no mistaking the sheriff of Ford County. He looked like that Irish clown fella, the one who wore yellow pants and purple shirts and a red tie. “Bat,” Wyatt called, genuinely puzzled, “why in hell do you dress like that?”
“Jesus, Wyatt! Lower your voice,” Bat said, looking around to see who else had heard. “Just because you don’t care about clothes don’t mean the rest of us have to look bad.”
“Where’ve you been? I’ve been looking for you—”
“Well, you found me now. And anyways, I don’t answer to you anymore. What do you want?”
“I want my money,” Wyatt said bluntly, annoyed by Bat’s tone. “There’s eighteen hundred dollars—”
“What? Did you bet on Concannon? Jesus! What kinda odds did you get?”
“What are you talking about? Who’s Concannon?”
“Nobody. Forget it,” Bat snapped. “So I don’t owe you eighteen hundred dollars?”
“I didn’t say you did.”
Now both of them were confused. Wyatt shook his head and held up a hand. “All right. Just listen: Johnnie Sanders might’ve been robbed the night he was murdered—”
“Who said he was murdered? He just got—”
“He was at least eighteen hundred bucks to the good and—”
“Who told you that?”
“What difference does it make? Was anybody flashing a lot of cash after the fire?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know!” Bat cried. “You know what it’s like around here, Wyatt. Somebody’s always flashing a lot of cash. Anyways, it was a long time ago.”
“Three years is a long time, Bat. Three weeks ain’t. You check his room after? Was there anything there?”
“We didn’t find any money, that’s for sure. Maybe he was carrying it and it got burned up in the fire.”
“Some of it would have been in coin.”
“Well, we didn’t find any puddles of silver, I can tell you that much! Look, Wyatt, you know yourself the Elephant Barn was a fire just waiting to happen. I told Ham and told him—”
“That’s another thing. What was Johnnie doing in that barn?”
Bat blinked. “Hell if I know.” But he was ashamed and looked it. He also knew that once Wyatt got hold of something, he wasn’t about to let it go. The best policy was to own up. “I’ll be honest with you, Wyatt. I didn’t really pay all that much attention. It was inside city limits. It was Fat Larry’s problem, not mine.”
“So what were you doing there?”
“Larry was out of town and Morg asked me. I did what I could, but it wasn’t my jurisdiction. Jesus, what’s got you all stirred up about this now?”
“That dentist said there was an ante-mortem blow to the head and—”
“Hell,” Bat said, dismissing this information with a wave. “Holliday’s always talking about his aunties. Half the time he don’t make any sense at all—”
“Ante-mortem, Bat. It’s legal. It means ‘before death.’ ”
Young Sheriff Masterson made an honest if brief effort to grasp the implications of what he’d just been told, but the effort failed to yield any conceptual breakthroughs. In 1878, Bat was, after all, just a modestly educated twenty-four-year-old kid who’d won a county-wide popularity contest by three votes. He had read one fewer law book than Wyatt himself. And, in any case, it would be nearly a century before proper police procedure for handling crimes went much beyond (1) arrest a suspect within a few hours and (2) beat a confession out of the bastard.
“Well, hell,” Bat cried. “Before? After? What difference does it make? The kid was dead when we got there. Dead is dead! And anyways, I wouldn’t believe Holliday if he told me sugar’s sweet and Kansas is flat. He is a quarrelsome drunk and a card sharp—I saw him damn near blow the head off a cattleman myself! He’s been run out of every town he ever lived in. He didn’t tell you that, I guess! Do you know why Holliday was in Texas?” Bat demanded. “Do you know why he had to leave Georgia?”