House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“With his cigar. I hid in the canebrake. I could hear him looking for me, beating the cane with a stick.”

His eyes searched her face. “Why did you let them in?”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“You said you were out of the life forever.”

“No one says no to Harvey Logan when he’s drunk. Not even Sundance.”

“Where are they?”

“Probably at Miz Porter’s.”

“They’re living in a brothel?”

“She holds parties for them.” She rested her hand on his. “Let them go. You’re home now.”

“They told you they’re going to rob a bank?”

“No, they didn’t. You’re not a lawman now, anyway. I cleaned the house. I put flowers in every room. I baked a white cake with strawberries. Come home, Hack.”

“Did Longabaugh put his hand on you?”

“No.”

“Did he eat off our plates? Did he use our dinnerware? Or sit on our furniture?”

Her eyes started to tear.

When they reached the ranch, he went into the house and came back out with his Army Colt and saddlebags and entered the barn and saddled his horse. She followed him inside, silhouetted in the doorway against the red sky. He hung his pistol belt on the pommel and swung into the saddle. “You’re pretty as the sunrise. But the contradictions in your eyes confound me and turn uncertainty into a way of life.”

“Stay.”

“Then tell me the truth.”

“You just heard it,” she said.

He stooped as he rode under the door frame. He heard a drop of rain tick on the brim of his hat. He turned in the saddle and looked down at her. “Did you think I’d be unfaithful to you in Trinidad?”

“Not if you were sober.”

“That’s not much of a recommendation.”

“It’s as good as you’ll get.”

From atop the horse, he could see the curled flesh above her breast where she had been burned. “You put me in mind of a line from William Blake. The one about the canker in the rose.”

She took a pin out of her hair and reset it, her eyes empty. “Sundance is faster,” she said. “But Harvey is the one most apt to put you in a box.”

HE PAID A brakeman to let him and his horse ride most of the way to San Antonio inside a slat car loaded with baled cotton and barrels of pickles that leaked brine on the floor. It was dusk when he rode into the section of San Antonio that had been the concession of the city to Old Nick since the 1870s. Most of the cowboys had departed since the coming of the railroads and the outbreaks of tick fever and the closing of the Chisholm and Goodnight-Loving trails, but others had taken their place: gandy dancers and cardsharps and drummers and pimps and derby-hatted salesmen and slaughterhouse meat-cutters who washed off in a horse tank and left the water dark red before entering the saloon.

Busthead was fifteen cents a glass, mug beer a dime. There was always a free lunch on a counter. The dirt streets were lined with wood buildings that had never been painted. Seagulls spun in circles above a garbage dump next to a dilapidated loading chute where the train tracks used to be. Hackberry rode past a dance hall and a gambling house and a café that never closed. A calliope was playing in the middle of the street. On the corner of South San Saba and Durango was a two-story brick building with a wide balcony and wood pillars. The light had turned to purple horsetails in the sky, and he could smell rain and feel the barometer dropping, and for a moment thought he heard thunder, like cellophane crackling. He unlaced his saddlebags and pulled them from his horse’s rump and draped them on one shoulder, then stepped up on the porch of Fannie Porter’s infamous bordello.

The woman who met him at the door had a British accent and did not vaguely resemble an ordinary madam. “You look like a weary traveler,” she said. “Are you in need of a boardinghouse? I’m afraid this one is only for ladies.”

He removed his hat. “Do you know a Mr. Longabaugh or his ­associate, Mr. Logan?”

Her face was rosy, her eyes thoughtful. “I don’t think I recall those names offhand. What did you say your name was?”