“No. They’re ghost towns. Chesterfield bought up most of the land south of here. Deray bought the rest. And any place too stubborn to sell out was either burned out or they had their water rights stole out from under them. You can call it legal purchase, but we all know what it really is.”
Grey gaped at her. “All of them? You’ve got to be wrong.”
“She’s not, you know,” said Looks Away. “If anything, Jenny’s understating the problem. You’re coming into this at the end of a very destructive and very thorough process. Deray and Chesterfield are like two fists and Paradise Falls is the flesh caught between the punches. Lucky Bob thought he could turn it around. He thought he could get one or the other to see reason and maybe find a compromise that would allow Paradise Falls to survive. I advised him against it. So, for the record, did Jenny. Lucky Bob was like that, though. Clever as he was, his weakness was always believing the best in people. He thought that if he could speak with them face to face that there could be some kind of opening of the heart, a meeting of the mind.”
“He went to see this Deray character?” asked Grey.
“Indeed.”
“And we think that Deray somehow turned him into a Harrowed? Or one of those lesser undead?”
“The man is, after all rumored to be an alchemist of some note. That certainly stands against him. And Brother Joe claims that he’s a necromancer as well,” said Looks Away.
“A what?” Jenny asked. “That some kind of wizard?”
“Yes,” said the Sioux. “One who has power over the dead.”
“That fits,” Jenny said sourly. “Deray’s army are all monsters.”
“That’s just swell,” said Grey. He grunted and sucked a tooth thoughtfully for a moment. She looked at Grey. “Does that scare you?”
“Of course it does, but if you think it’s going to chase me off, think again. What about Chesterfield? Is he a wizard, too?”
“No,” said Looks Away. “He’s an asshole.”
Jenny gave a short, hard laugh.
“He doesn’t have power over the dead or any of that?” asked Grey.
“No. Why?”
“Nothing… I’m just working it all through.”
“Working what through?” asked Jenny.
“Maybe Lucky Bob had a good idea.”
“But we know how that turned out,” said Looks Away, shaking his head.
“Right, so I’m wondering if Jenny’s pa went out to see the wrong man.” He tapped the map. “Chesterfield’s place is pretty close. Couple hours easy ride. If Deray is the kind of monster we all seem to think he is, then maybe Chesterfield’s only a corrupt asshole.”
They looked at him.
“That’s almost certainly the case,” said Looks Away. “However what possible leverage could we use on a rich man who is, as you so eloquently phrase it, a corrupt asshole?”
“You ever hear the expression, that the enemy of my enemy is my friend?”
“Yes. But in my experience it’s almost never as simple as that.”
Jenny snorted and nodded. “Chesterfield is every bit as bad.”
Grey picked up the Kingdom M1. “Then I guess we’ll have to be worse.”
The smile that blossomed on Jenny Pearl’s face was one of the most disturbing things Grey had ever seen.
“Hold on right there,” he said quickly. “You are not coming along.”
“The hell I’m not.”
“The hell you are.”
She stepped toward him. Five foot two to his six four. But her sudden anger seemed to fill the room. He’d read so many dime novels about women with fiery tempers, but not one woman in any tale could hold a candle to the swift fury of Jenny Pearl.
“And why not? I can ride and shoot as well as any man, and better than most.”
“I do not doubt that,” he said. “But I need you to stay here in town.”
“Why?”
“Because who else is going to keep these people safe if something else happens?” he asked flatly. “Brother Joe? Mrs. O’Malley? Come on, Jenny, you’re the only one around who everyone’s afraid of, which means they’ll listen to you.”
“He’s jolly well right about that,” said Looks Away. “You’re more valuable here in town than as another gun in what is ostensibly a diplomatic venture.”
“My ass.”
Neither man dared make a comment. They let their silence do their talking for them, and Grey could see Jenny work it out. Her expressions showed on her face. Every expression did. She was lovely, but she had no poker face at all. He wondered if she’d ever wanted to play cards. He’d learned a kind of poker from a frisky lass in Louisiana. Loser had to shuck a garment.
Her answer snapped him back to the moment.
“Very well, damn you both,” she said.
Chapter Forty-Two
Looks Away argued that no such expedition could be undertaken in their present condition. They were dead for sleep, filthy, and hungry. So they did their best to lock up the workshop and they trudged back to Jenny Pearl’s.
With the deputies all dead and the town’s well free — at least for now — they were able to get enough water to take actual hot baths. Jenny heated big pots of it and corralled a couple of the town’s kids to run them out back to where Looks Away and Grey sat, naked but uncaring, in a vast metal washtub. The men scrubbed and scrubbed and finally wrapped themselves in sheets and tottered inside. Jenny gave them a choice of spare bedroom or couch. Grey let Looks Away take the bedroom and he flung himself down on the couch and slept all through the day and into the night.
He’d left orders to be awakened if absolutely anything untoward happened.
However the night passed without incident.
Though, that was not entirely true. It passed without violence. It passed without trouble.
But not without incident.
Deep in the night, the moon still riding the sky and long before the first cock crow, Jenny Pearl came down the stairs in a cotton gown and nothing else. Grey heard the creak of the stairs and opened his eyes to what he thought was a spirit in a dream. Her blond hair was unpinned and fell around her shoulders and her eyes were smoky and half closed.
For a heartbreaking moment she looked less like Jenny and more like Annabelle, but Grey felt ashamed of thinking that. Annabelle was long gone now. All except for the ghost that haunted his life. She was gone and Jenny Pearl was alive.
So alive. So real.
So beautiful.
Without saying a single word she unfastened the gown and let it puddle around her ankles. Grey’s heart beat wildly inside his chest as he saw her painted in silver moonlight. Slim but ripe. Full breasts with nipples the color of dusty roses. White blond hair on her head, a dark blond below. A flat stomach and lovely legs that were strong and graceful. On her sternum, between her breasts, was a dark scab left from the bullet that had nearly killed her. It was right over her heart.
She raised the corner of the blanket under which he lay and crawled onto the couch, on top of him. She wrapped her legs around his hips and even as she sat astride him she deftly guided him inside of her.
Grey began to speak, but she silenced him with a kiss.
“Please,” she said in a husky whisper. It was the only word she spoke.
They made love with infinite slowness. It was a gentler encounter than he would have guessed from her fiery nature. Slow and soft, unhurried and unforced. A sweeter encounter than any in Grey’s experience. And all the sweeter for that.
Neither of them rushed toward any cliffs. They discovered a rhythm that was the song of their mutual connection. And when Grey felt himself lift finally toward the inevitable, she was there with him. Even then it was not a screaming climax, but a warm release that nearly brought him to tears. It was in those moments that he realized how far his life’s trail had taken him from any true understanding of what gentleness was.