2

    

    People made jokes about the way Dodds kept his office. Three times a week he had it dusted, twice a week he had the floor mopped and waxed, and once a week he had the front windows cleaned. When his fancy rolltop desk was open visitors could see that his fastidiousness continued into his personal belongings as well. Everything had its proper drawer or slot. Nothing was left loose inside the desk except a small stack of almost blindingly white writing paper on which Dodds wrote in a labored but beautiful hand, always in ink with an Easterbrook steel pen. He had a son in Tucson and one in New York, and he wrote to them frequently. His wife dead, the sons were the only family he had left and corresponding was the only way he could stay in contact with them.

    Unfortunately, they weren’t so good about writing back. One of the sons had gone and had a baby, Dodds’s first grandson, but before Dodds knew anything about the birth let alone the pregnancy, the kid, named Clarence, was born and already walking around his home in New York, where his father worked as an accountant. Dodds lived in a sleeping room two short blocks from the sheriff’s office. He’d moved here after the missus died, selling the white gabled house they’d lived in on the edge of town, and making himself available to whatever kind of trouble arose.

    Many nights you could see Dodds running down the middle of the street still pulling his suspenders up. The law-the jail, more exactly-was Dodds’s life. He was sixty-one and would soon enough retire, and he meant to store up as many war stories as possible. He had some good ones. A drunken Indian, defiant beyond imagining because Dodds had arrested his brother, snuck into the office one night, jimmied up the rolltop desk and took a crap right in it. Then he’d locked the desk back up and waited for Dodds to come in and learn what had happened.

    Another time Dodds had swum out against a hard current on a rainy day and rescued a two-month-old lamb that had fallen into the river. And then there was the Windsor woman, a genuine redheaded beauty with a touring opera company, a woman who also managed to steal a goodly number of diamonds and jewels and rubies from the local gentry who’d given her a fancy party. Oh, yes, he had some good tales, and he loved to tell them, too, over a bucket of beer on cool nights inside screened-in porches. It was too much trouble to find another woman and, anyway, he couldn’t ever imagine loving anybody else the way he had Eva; so he said to hell with it and indulged himself in those pleasures that can only be enjoyed by solitary people. Such as being a fussbudget, which he most certainly was. It was said among the town’s lawyers that you might not piss off Sheriff David Dodds by breaking into his room in the middle of the night but you’d piss him off for sure if you wore muddy boots while doing it.

    Now Dodds sat at his desk, rolling his Easterbrook pen between his fingers the way he would a fine cigar, thinking about the former Pinkerton man he’d run in last fall for being drunk and disorderly. O’Malley, the man’s name had been. For the first week O’Malley had been there, Dodds hadn’t been able to figure out what the man was doing in Myles. The check he’d run indicated that O’Malley had been let go from the Pinkertons. When that happened, it usually meant that the man had been found morally corrupt in some way; Alan Pinkerton was a stickler. So what was O’Malley doing there? During the long and noisy night that O’Malley had spent in one of the cells in back, he’d given Dodds at least some notion of why he’d come to Myles. A man had hired him to find out who had killed his daughter. Dodds had thought immediately of the killing in Council Bluffs, so it was not difficult to intuit from that that O’Malley was looking for those bank robbers people had been seeking so long.

    During O’Malley’s last three days in Myles, Dodds had followed him everywhere. He never learned exactly who O’Malley had decided on but, given the places he stopped at, O’Malley seemed to be giving most of his attention to three men-Griff, Kittredge, and Carlyle. Then O’Malley was gone.

    Since then, Dodds had kept close watch on the three men, noting that while Griff and Kittredge saw each other occasionally, they stayed clear of Carlyle. The three men used to be close friends. He wondered what had gone wrong between them.

    Earlier this afternoon, when he saw Septemus Ryan and James ride into town, he knew immediately that he was looking at the man who had hired the Pinkerton. He remembered from pictures that this was the man whose little girl had been killed.

    He liked trouble, Dodds did. He believed it kept him young. He sensed that he was now going to have plenty of trouble, and very soon.

    

***

    

    The black man and the Mexican in the next cell stared at the nineteen year old who was balled up on his straw cot like a sick colt.

    “Couldn’t you let me go till my pa gets here? You know he’ll go my bail, Sheriff.”

    “I suppose he will. But that don’t mean I can let you go. I didn’t hand down that sentence. Judge Sullivan did. And there ain’t a damn thing I can do about it, even if I wanted to.”

    “All I did was raise a little hell.”

    Dodds had been in the cell block with this kid for ten minutes now. It was enough. He didn’t especially like seeing a boy like this thrown in with a bunch of hardcases, but then again, the kid should have thought about what he was doing when he got drunk the night before and shot up a tavern. He could have killed a few people in all that ruckus.

    Dodds went to the cell door and called for his deputy to let him out. Dodds never took any chances. Only a fool brought keys into a cell with him.

    Through the bars on the high windows, Dodds could see that it was getting dark. His stomach grumbled. He was looking forward to meat loaf and mashed potatoes and peas at Juanita’s Diner down the street. It was Tuesday and that was the Tuesday menu.

    Deputy Harrison, a twenty-five year old with lots of ambition and a certain cunning, but not much intelligence, came through the cell-block door and said, “The pretty boy here giving you any trouble, Sheriff? If he is, I’d be happy to take care of him for you.”

    “No, no trouble,” Dodds said, weary of Harrison’s bluff swaggering manner. Dodds had two deputies, Windom and Harrison. Widom possessed wisdom but no courage and Harrison possessed courage but no wisdom. Together they made Dodds one hell of a deputy.

    “Had to come back and get you anyway, Sheriff,” Harrison said.

    “Oh?”

    “Yep. You got a visitor.”

    “Visitor? Who?”

    “Man named Ryan. Septemus Ryan.”

    “Here you were looking for me, Sheriff.”

    Up close, Ryan gave the same impression he had riding into town this afternoon. A kind of arrogance crossed with a curious sadness.

    The mouth, for instance, was wide and confident, even petulant; but the brown eyes were aggrieved, and deeply so.

    Ryan put out a hand. He had one damn fine grip.

    “Coffee, Mr. Ryan?”

    “Sounds good.”

    When they were seated on their respective sides of Dodds’s desk, tin cups of coffee hot in their hands, Dodds said, “You look familiar to me, Mr. Ryan.”

    Ryan smiled. “You were probably a customer of mine at one time or another. Ryan’s Male Attire in Council Bluffs. The finest fabrics and appointments outside Chicago.” He smiled again. He had a nice, ingratiating smile. His brown eyes were as sad as ever. “If I do say so myself.”

    Dodds decided not to waste any time. “I saw your picture in the state newspaper not too long ago.”

    Ryan just stared at him with those handsome brown eyes. “They was lowering a casket into a grave and you was standing topside of that grave. They was burying your daughter, Mr. Ryan. Or are you going to deny that that was you?”

    Ryan shook his head.

    Dodds leaned forward on his elbows. “Then not too long ago an ex-Pinkerton man came to Myles. He seemed to be looking for somebody special.” A hard smile broke Dodds’s face. “He probably didn’t tell you this part, Mr. Ryan, but one night he got drunk and in a fight down the street, and I had to bring him back here to cool him off for the night, and during that night he told me all about this man who’d hired him. I got a good notion of who that man would be, Mr. Ryan.”

    Ryan continued to stare at him. There was no reading those eyes, no reading them at all.

    “You were the one who hired him. And I know why, too. You had him backtrackin’ the men who killed your girl. And that eventually led him here. Isn’t that about right, Mr. Ryan?”

    “I’d be a foolish man to interrupt a sheriff as well-spoken as you.”

    “So now you’re here, Mr. Ryan, and there can only be one reason for that.”

    “And what would that be, Sheriff?”

    “You plan to take the law into your own hands. You plan to kill those three men.”

    Ryan sat back in his chair. “Are you going to arrest me, Sheriff?”

    “Wish I could. All I can do right now is warn you. I’m not a man who abides vengeance outside the law. I grew up near the border, Mr. Ryan, and I got enough lynch-law justice in my first fifteen years to last me a lifetime. I seen my own brother hanged by a pack of men, and I seen an uncle of mine, too. It’s one thing I don’t tolerate.”

    Ryan kept his eyes level on Dodds’s. “Oh, I expect there’s a lot you don’t tolerate, Sheriff Dodds.”

    “And why the hell’d you bring that boy along? If I ever seen a sweeter young kid, I don’t know when or where it’d be.”

    “Maybe that’s his problem. Maybe he’s too sweet for his own good.”

    “So you invite him along so he can see you kill three men?”

    “You’re the one who keeps saying that, Sheriff, about me killing those three men. Not me.”

    Dodds’s chair squawked as he leaned back. “I make a bad enemy, Mr. Ryan. I’m warning you now so you won’t make no mistakes about it. When I took this job twenty years ago, it wasn’t safe to walk the streets. My pride is that I made it safe and I mean to keep it safe.”

    Ryan drained his coffee and set the cup down on the edge of the desk. “That about the extent of what you’ve got to say?”

    “That would be about it, Mr. Ryan.”

    “Then I guess I’ll get back to my nephew. Promised him a fancy dinner and a good time in your little town.”

    Dodds pawed a big hand over his angular face. “If you’ve got proof they’re really the killers, Mr. Ryan, give me the proof and let me take them in. I’d be glad to help hang the men who murdered your daughter.”

    Ryan stood up. “I appreciate the offer, Sheriff. And I’ll definitely think it over.”

    With that, he tilted his derby at a smart-aleck angle, nodded goodbye to Dodds, and went out the front door.

    

***

    

    Dodds listened to the front door close, the little bell above the frame tinkling. He sat there for a time thinking about Ryan and his brown eyes and what those brown eyes said. Sorrow, to be sure; and then Dodds realized what else-it could be heard in his laugh and seen in his smile, too-craziness, pure blessed craziness, the kind you’d feel if somebody killed your little girl and got away with it.