Virgil and I moved to the table. Virgil pulled a chair back away from the table a few feet and sat with an empty chair on each side of him. I sat in a chair at a table just next to them.
Swickey looked back to O’Malley behind the bar. He’d been standing the whole time, watching Virgil and Swickey talk as he wiped down a rack of beer mugs.
“Young fella,” Swickey said, as he picked up the coffeepot off the table. “Could we get some more coffee here, please?”
“Certainly,” O’Malley said.
O’Malley came around the corner of the bar. Swickey handed off the pot to him, then turned and faced Virgil with one elbow on the table and one on the back of his chair.
“There’s a good number of cow-calf operations over here on this side of the bridge that goddamn sure didn’t want to see that bridge built.”
“There one in particular?” Virgil said.
“There are a few, I’d suspect. But considering another aspect of all this, Eddie Winslow here,” Swickey said, looking to the man sitting just to the right of him, “has other information I feel is something you will want to hear.”
“What’s that?” Virgil said.
“Eddie had some bad dealings with someone he thinks had a hand in this,” Swickey said.
“Who?” Virgil said.
“Cotters,” Eddie said. “Two fellas, name Cotter.”
Virgil looked and me and shook his head a little.
58
“What sort of bad dealings?” Virgil said.
Eddie Winslow wasn’t a big fella, but he looked to be as tough as they come. He was an angular, rawboned cowboy with a dark complexion and steely eyes.
“Tell him, Eddie,” Swickey said.
Eddie swiveled in his chair a little, facing Virgil, and placed his strong hands on the table in front of him.
“Me and my partner, Jim Lee, we was working for an outfit up on the north fork of the Red,” Eddie said. “Things petered out for us, and we come down this way. Jim was from this part of the country. We hired on with an outfit between Yaqui and here, pretty good-size outfit.”
“What outfit?” Virgil said.
“Rancher’s name is Westmorland,” Eddie said.
Swickey shook his head.
“Don’t think Westmorland is any part of this,” Swickey said. “I don’t know him, but I know of him. He’s a second-generation rancher and he’s a family man, always had a good reputation. I’d be surprised if he had any part in this, but of course you never know.”
Eddie nodded.
“He was fair; seemed so, anyway,” Eddie said. “He was good to us, fed us good, paid us regular and treated us good. He had some good hands, too, but then these two fellas hired on, them Cotters. They seemed nice enough to me, but I’m a dumbass. Jim was the one that said they was up to no good, and sure enough he was right.”
Eddie stopped talking for a moment. He looked down at his hands clasped on the table in front of him, then looked back up to Virgil and continued.
“Jim come back one night and told me them two asked him if he’d consider throwing in with them, doing a job with them.”
“What kind of job?” Virgil said.
Eddie glanced to Swickey, then looked back to Virgil.
“Jim didn’t spell it all out, exactly,” Eddie said. “Had to do with shutting down the bridge that was being built over the Rio Blanco, though. Said there’d be good money involved.”
Eddie stopped talking when O’Malley came to the table with a pot of coffee and two extra cups.
“Here ya go,” O’Malley said.
Eddie watched O’Malley walk away, then started talking again.
“See, my friend Jim was a rough sonofabitch and all the hands knew he spent time in Brigham’s Hole in Salt Lake for holding up a bank and killing a teller. These two Cotter hands figured Jim was a good pick for doing something dirty. But Jim had given up his wicked ways. He told them to fuck off, that he didn’t want no part of nothing that would put him back behind bars.”
“Where is Jim?”
Eddie looked to his hands again, then looked back up to Virgil, shaking his head.
“Dead,” Eddie said. “That following day was Jim’s last day on God’s green Earth.”
Virgil looked to me.
“What happened?” I said.
Eddie took his time before saying anything.
“Them two killed him is what happened,” Eddie said, looking intently at Virgil. “He didn’t go along with their shit and they for sure killed him. They did their lying best to pin it on Mexican rustlers. Mexican rustlers, shit... They had Jim’s horse when they come back, too. I knew damn good what happened.”
“What’d you do?”
“While they were spinning their bullshit yarn,” Eddie said, “telling the day boss what went down, I got on my horse and got the hell outta there.”
“You never saw them again?” Virgil said.
“No,” Eddie said. “I got out of there and didn’t look back. I was owed money, too, but I just got out of there while the getting was good. They knew Jim and me was good friends and I figured it’d be just a matter of time ’fore they did the same thing to me they done to Jim. I just run off.”
Eddie looked to me, then back to Virgil.
“I knew where they’d been working that day,” Eddie said. “I rode out and found Jim’s body.”
“Where?” Virgil said.
“He was hanging from a goddamn scrub oak,” Eddie said. “They strung him up.”
Eddie stopped talking for a moment. He looked away, then back at Virgil with a fierce expression on his face.
“They tortured Jim,” Eddie said, shaking his head slowly from side to side. “It was like they enjoyed it or something. His face was all swollen and... his trousers was down... it was...”
59
“Cotters done it?” Virgil said. “You’re certain?”
Eddie nodded.
“Hell, yes, they did,” Eddie said. “Jim saw something in them the first day. He told me to stay away from them. He told me they was no good and he was right.”
“Tell me everything else you know about them,” Virgil said.
“Don’t know nothing, really,” Eddie said.
“What’d they look like?” I said.
“They kind of looked alike,” Eddie said. “Twenty-eight, thirty maybe, one was a little older, bigger, they both are good-size fellas, beards... I don’t know.”
“Any idea where they are, or where they could be?” Virgil said.
Eddie shook his head.
“I don’t,” Eddie said. “But Jim’s handle for them was ‘them boys from the brakes.’”
“The brakes?” I said.
Eddie nodded.
“Yaqui Brakes?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “Jim knew this country. I guess he was talking about the Yaqui Brakes, I don’t know. Jim said they bragged they had their own whorehouse or some shit, and that they’d supply him with all the ax he could handle.”
“Whorehouse?” I said.
Eddie nodded.
“You sure about that?”
“That’s what Jim said,” Eddie said.
“We been through there, Virgil,” I said.
“We have,” he said.
“Where is this,” Swickey said. “The Yaqui Brakes?”
“Brush country,” I said. “Off the tracks in bottomland between here and Yaqui.”
Virgil nodded.
“Rough holdout place,” Virgil said.
“It is,” I said. “Scrawny creek through there. Summer was sixty, seventy transient tenters, campers, when we was through there. Winter now, won’t be as many down there, I’d say. Southern no-good holdouts, mostly.”
Eddie nodded.
“Those boys were southerners,” Eddie said. “That’s for damn sure.”
“Whorehouse down there seems like the type of place they’d be,” I said.