Lawman Page 13

  Chapter Ten

  He should have sent McMarlin, Gabriel decided later that evening, instead of leaving him at the hotel to guard Megan Kearney.

  To be sure, Carlotta Roma’s house on Maiden Lane was one his old friend would appreciate. He could easily picture Tom on one of the parlor’s two red velvet settees, with a cigar clamped between his teeth, one fist full of whiskey and another full of money to buy up time with the ladies of the house.

  That time did not come cheaply. Already, Gabriel had gone through a considerable quantity of the money he’d left the Cosmopolitan Hotel with, and so far he’d only spoken with two-thirds of the ladies in question. At this rate, he’d sooner be wiring the Pinkerton office in Chicago for more money than he would be learning anything new about Joseph Kearney’s whereabouts.

  Wearily, he passed his hand over his face. The motion temporarily blotted out the colorful image of the fancied-up painted lady seated beside him. Unfortunately, it did nothing to diminish the powerful effect of her lavender perfume. The scent of it filled the air between them, so strong his eyes fairly watered.

  “Then you know the man I’m speaking of?” Gabriel asked her, more than ready to have their business concluded. “You’ve seen him here before?”

  The woman, Elsa, twirled her fingers through her unbound blond hair and giggled. “Can’t rightly say, darlin’. I have lots and lots of visitors, you know.”

  “I’m sure you do.” For her benefit, he produced a smile. “Doña Carlotta told me you were one of her most popular ladies. Looking at you now, a man could certainly see why.”

  Her answering giggle should have stolen some of Gabriel’s reluctance to cajole her into telling him what he needed to know about Kearney. It did not.

  He hated this part of his work, plain and simple. Hated the deception it needed to succeed, the subterfuge called for to drag out secrets from reluctant witnesses. He’d told Doña Carlotta he was a man seeking an old partner—Joseph Kearney—to buy out his interest in a joint business venture. From all appearances, the madam had believed him.

  Most likely, all her ‘ladies’ believed him, too, including Elsa. But Gabriel could take no pride in his skillful undercover work, and he had no heart for charming yet another woman—this one only a girl. Behind her rouged-and-powdered features, low-cut gown, and string of gaudy paste jewels, Elsa couldn’t have been more than a sweet-faced girl of fifteen years. Too young for working on her back. Too young for being misled by the likes of a Pinkerton man on a case.

  Setting aside his bottle of ginger beer, Gabriel withdrew his wallet from his inside coat pocket. “I find it takes some folks a little longer than others to remember the kinds of details I need to know,” he said. “I’d be obliged if you’d sit with me a while and think on it, Elsa.”

  “All right.” Agreeably, she struck a new pose atop the settee’s worn red velvet. With a hopeful air, she glanced at the clock on the mantel of the cold, ash-strewn marble fireplace beside them. “Miz Carlotta said you paid for ten minutes, so I reckon you ought to get all of them.”

  “Kindly put. I can see you’re a woman who takes customer satisfaction seriously.”

  “I do.” She took money seriously, too. As he’d expected, Elsa’s gaze fixed on his wallet. “All my customers are satisfied,” she assured him. “‘Cepting maybe the ones who get too drunk to see the deed done proper, if you follow my meaning. But that won’t be a problem with you, just drinking ginger beer and all. You a teetotaler, mister?”

  “No.” Just a man with a job to do, and a clear head needed to do it with. “Just a man wanting to avoid those problems you talked about.”

  He winked. She giggled. The girlish sound of her laughter made him want to shove all the money he had at her, if only she’d quit working at Doña Carlotta’s house—an urge about as allover impossible as the one he felt to quit working as an agent.

  Working with the Pinkertons was all he’d ever known, all he really knew how to do. Gabriel had never planned for anything else. He’d never needed to.

  Winter brings in the right man at the right time.

  It should have been enough. Suddenly, it wasn’t.

  But he couldn’t let it go.

  Christ, no matter what it took, he would leave a clean record behind him. He’d start over someplace new, with something better than an operative’s lonely life to look forward to. Just as soon as he found Joseph Kearney, and the proof he needed to document his case.

  Elsa scooted closer, draping her arm along the settee’s carved cherrywood backrest. In her fingers, she dangled Gabriel’s discarded bottle of ginger beer.

  “In that case,” she said, letting her hand travel suggestively up and down the bottle neck, “maybe I can ‘courage you to stay a little longer. Sounds like you’ve got a theory what needs testing out.”

  Despite himself, he smiled at her ingenuity. It took a certain quantity of brass to approach a man like that, whether paid up-front for the task or not. “Another night, perhaps,” he said. “Right now, I need to know if you’ve seen my friend, Mr. Kearney. It’s mighty important that I find him.”

  Disappointment softened the rouge-reddened line of her mouth. Elsa raised her head, gazing about the parlor as though her answer might be found written on the fancy gray flocked wallpaper and ornate painted moldings.

  “I don’t recall if I’ve seen him or not,” she said, taking a sullen slug from his ginger beer bottle. “So many fellas come in and outta here….”

  One of them was Joseph Kearney, if the hints he’d gleaned from Hop Kee’s cook at the Celestial Kitchen could be believed. His visit there after leaving Megan in McMarlin’s care at their hotel had been more productive than he’d expected. Turned out, Gabriel had remembered far more of the Mandarin Chinese tongue than he’d expected.

  Evidently, growing up in the shadows of opium dens had conveyed its share of lasting advantages on him.

  He gazed at Elsa, taking in her crossed arms and willow-tree posture. With a woman like this, answers came only one way.

  “Let’s see if I can improve your memory,” he said.

  She gave him a suspicious look. Upon remembering what he held in his hands, though, the girl suddenly found the gumption to sit a little straighter. “I reckon my memory could use a little poke in the right direction, at that.”

  “I don’t doubt it could.”

  Gabriel unfolded his wallet, absently noting the warmth it carried from being in his pocket. The same warmth must have been present earlier, too, he realized, struck by the knowledge that when he’d wrapped his coat around Megan to keep away the chill, the creased leather in his hands had spent the better part of an hour exactly where he’d thought about being.

  Nestled up against the curvy warmth of her bosom.

  His fingers stilled on the money he’d begun counting. Had she bewitched him, that he could sit an arm’s length away from a desirable, readily available woman, and still be thinking of Megan?

  Hell, no. He’d never cared much for bedding prostitutes, was all. Meeting Megan Kearney, with all her quick-stepping ways and sassy mouth and starched-over curves, had not a damned thing to do with it.

  Gabriel stood, hat in hand. He threw a quantity of folded money on the low table fronting the settee, then added a card with the name of another agent at the hotel. “Leave a message for me here if you recall anything.”

  Overhead, the parlor’s cut-glass chandelier chimed on a breath of wind, drawing Gabriel from his thoughts—and firming his resolve to have this finished. He’d had all he wanted of tracking and searching…and battling with hard-headed women, at least for today.

  From the front of Carlotta’s house came the swoosh of a door opening on the surprisingly cool Territorial night. The tinny strains of a piano playing nearby grew louder, rising over the ever-present drone of cicadas. A mule brayed nearby, a dog’s howl joined the chorus, and then the door closed. The room grew quiet again.

  By the time he looked back at Elsa, she’d alread
y snatched up the money. Lips moving, she silently counted the bills he’d left, then stared up at him. “If this don’t point my memory in the right direction, I don’t know what will.”

  “See that it does.”

  The girl smiled and tucked the money into her bodice, sending another wave of lavender fumes upward.

  Scent that strong ought to be outlawed, Gabriel thought. He refused to compare it to the subtler fragrances of roses and spice that Megan’s skin carried, or to the faintly antiseptic tinge that overlaid those scents. He refused to contemplate the cockeyed pride he’d felt in identifying that smell, so uniquely hers, as the starch Miss Megan used on her crisp, high-necked dress.

  And all fragrance aside, he refused to remember the shattered look on her face when he’d stared up at her China stars and pretended to feel nothing. When he’d told her he would have used her piece of little-girl’s heaven to capture her father quicker.

  Heavy-hearted, Gabriel put on his hat and went into the night. The next leg of his search lay only a few houses down Maiden Lane, past a home-sized brewery, a saloon, and a store advertising notions, patent medicines, and ‘lady’s things.’ Staring at the partly shadowed gilt sign, he wondered if those ‘lady’s things’ included colognes and such.

  If they did, he ought to stop on the way and buy Megan a bottle of lavender perfume. To be sure, they would both be better off if she used it.

  By the time Gabriel rounded the alleyway corner leading to the back side of the Cosmopolitan Hotel, most of the lamplight inside the looming two-story building had been extinguished. Moonlight cast his shadow on the rough adobe wall beside him, and a musty-scented autumn breeze stirred his clothes as he walked on silent feet to inspect the rear of the hotel.

  He couldn’t shake the feeling of being followed. It had stuck with him all up and down Maiden Lane, inside a half-dozen brothels and out, and all the way to the stables a half-mile distant where he’d boarded his horse before coming here. The nagging feeling of being pursued was one a man didn’t ignore.

  Not if he wanted to stay alive.

  Gabriel did.

  Long practice had taught him a pinch of caution was worth double its effort in surprises avoided. With that in mind, and the force of habit setting his feet on a path around the hotel’s grounds, he traveled the alleyway parallel to the hotel’s rear.

  Instinct kept him alert, and sharpened all the night sounds around him. Mice scuttled from one dark corner to the next, and the breeze pushed pages from a discarded Arizona Citizen across the wagon wheel-rutted dirt pathway. Overhead, the windmills that creaked incessantly to bring water to the presidio competed with the strains of distant saloon music and Spanish singing from the streets beyond.

  He wished he had a whiskey. He wished he had a great hunk of saltwater taffy, to finish off the night with something sweet. He wished he had a soft bed waiting, piled high with enough pillows that a man could truly rest his bones without feeling like he was about to plummet clean through the mattress and onto the floor. He wished he had a woman in that bed waiting for him…a woman with lush brown hair and eyes shining with the reflections of a thousand cut-tin stars.

  Or maybe eighty-nine.

  Damnation. Thoughts like these would get him killed for sure.

  Gabriel quickened his step, knowing he’d be better served to wish for something simpler. An answer to his case, a hard-certain lead to Kearney’s whereabouts…reason enough to sing, like those troubadours he’d heard before. Maybe the first two would lead to the third, and he’d be able to leave the Pinkerton life behind him without regrets—and without an unsolved case on his record.

  The alleyway narrowed as he reached the area behind the Cosmopolitan’s rear courtyard. Here, an adobe wall jutted into the pathway, its bulk intended to shelter the fountain and saltillo-tiled hotel courtyard inside.

  Gabriel slowed, listening hard. With its irregularly shaped wall and cover of concealing water sounds, this would be an ideal spot for an ambush. All he heard, though, were the muted sounds of water splashing into the fountain, and an accompanying feminine voice…swearing?

  “Drat those bizcochitos!” he heard next, followed by the sounds of shoes—he surmised—scraping against something. A frustrated, feminine grunt followed, and then the night fell silent.

  Only one voice he knew carried such determination—even wedded as it was to a lovely feminine form and misleadingly compliant manner. Only one woman he knew would be fool enough to scrabble around past midnight, and in the midst of the city, at that.

  Megan Kearney.

  Only one man he knew would look forward to the kind of homecoming that wildcat woman would offer. And Gabriel was standing in that man’s boots.

  Lucky him.

  “Ooof!” Drat this wall. Slung halfway across it, Megan felt the thick adobe surface of the hotel courtyard’s wall jab into her midsection for what had to be the third time straight. If she didn’t hurry, the Pinkerton man would beat her inside the hotel.

  And then he’d discover she’d been gone, all along, despite the dapper and agreeable agent he’d left in charge of her care. Agent McMarlin couldn’t have kept a dog from scratching its fleas, and the fact that he’d so readily accepted her need to take a sudden, unplanned-for and luxuriously extended bath—privately—in her hotel room only proved it.

  Even if it hadn’t, the church bell-loud snoring she’d heard issuing from his station outside her closed door not long after her tub of hot water had been delivered most assuredly would have. The man barely deserved his badge. In her opinion, she’d bested him easily.

  Almost too easily.

  Megan wished she could say the same for the blasted wall. It certainly hadn’t seemed this large—or this slippery—when she’d climbed down from the balcony and clambered over it to follow agent Winter earlier this evening. With rancor, she glared at the dark stubbled surface of her perch.

  As though in answer, the wall sent a chill straight through her, one that easily penetrated the plain calico gown she’d changed into for her adventuring. I will not wish to have Gabriel’s toasty warm suit coat around my shoulders again, she told herself staunchly. And I will not let a pile of bricks defeat me.

  Not even if those bricks came complete with cold, mold, and the occasional pigeon dropping for decoration. She’d grown up running around the wild lands of the Arizona Territory desert, for heaven’s sakes! Compared with the canyons and rocky hillsides she’d explored as a child, this measly wall was nothing.

  Levering herself upward, Megan attempted to wrap her hands around its edge and roll her body toward the beckoning safety of the hotel courtyard. Instead, she wobbled. Her locket and its chain swung forward from their hiding place inside the neckline of her dress, and clinked into the wall with an impact that made her wince. Forced to cling to the adobe like a gecko in the sun, she had to admit the obvious.

  Her bizcochitos-eating personage just wasn’t up to the challenge of scaling walls and escaping from Pinkerton men. Or even escaping from one singular rogue Irish Pinkerton man, with hardness in his gaze and a tenderness to his touch that made her shiver to recall it.

  With effort, Megan shoved that remembrance from her thoughts. As someone with a two-foot wide wall to ascend, and quickly, she couldn’t afford such distractions.

  Besides, after all he’d said at Hop Kee’s, she certainly knew better than to succumb to Gabriel Winter’s heartless charm now.

  And she knew as well not to let him capture her in the midst of undoing her earlier escape. She hated to think what his reaction would be. To be sure, it would involve those irons he bragged about carrying with him—and maybe even a cell at the county jail, too. For a lady! The man had no chivalry in him at all.

  Goaded by visions of handcuffs and hatched iron bars, Megan struggled harder to thrust herself up and over the wall. The worst of it was, she’d risked herself tonight by following Gabriel, and had learned practically nothing about her papa’s activities in town.

  Doubt
less that was because Gabriel had taken the most unlikely route possible to tracking her father. She hadn’t the faintest notion why agent Winter had insisted on visiting Doña Carlotta’s house and so many others, when everyone knew respectable men like Joseph Kearney did not frequent such places.

  Perhaps his activities hadn’t been rigged toward tracking down her papa at all, she mused. Perhaps Gabriel had personal reasons for visiting Maiden Lane tonight.

  Like wanting a dalliance with one of the ‘maidens.’

  Horror loosened her grip on the rough adobe she clung to. He wouldn’t! a part of her protested, but the rest of her could all too easily picture the devilish Gabriel charming one of the ladies. He’d flatter her with compliments, all spoken with his deep, brogue-laden voice. He’d stroke her cheek, maybe curl his big gentle fingers around her nape and draw her closer for a stolen kiss. He’d look at her with that slumberous, cat-with-cream expression in his blue-eyed gaze, and strike her breathless with the intensity it held.

  Not that Megan cared one whit.

  Nosiree. Not even half a whit.

  The cad. Newly determined to best him, she dug her hands into the wide top edge of the wall and pulled. Her fingertips touched the edge, flexed…and then the nail on her little finger bent backward and snapped.

  Squealing, Megan clutched her injured finger. Utterly unbalanced by the movement, she dropped to the alleyway below like a bucket of brass buttons shoved from a shelf.

  “Ooof!” Dust billowed around her, stirred by the impact of her bottom hitting the dirt. A chill breeze whipped up the length of her stocking-clad legs, alerting her to the fact that her fall had also managed to toss her skirts in a jumble. Through tears of frustration, she glared up at the courtyard wall.

  Outlined against it, bold as you please, was the shadow of a man. A very tall, very big, hat-wearing man.

  Instantly, her throbbing finger vanished from her list of worries. So did the bedraggled state of her dress and the possibility of being caught by Gabriel Winter before she could return to their room and pretend to be asleep. Who but a bandito would be out past midnight, slinking through alleyways and preying on innocent women?