Chapter 11
Sitting in the back of the cart, Anita smiled across at Lizzy.
The woman was propped up on some cushions and watching the town go by.
Despite their having had a conversation the night before about happenings in the town, they didn’t know each other well yet.
Anita had spent more time speaking to Julie and Emily than to Lizzy, who always seemed to be elbow-deep in some mine project.
“So, what do you think of this plan?” Anita asked.
After extensive conversation, the decision had been made—rather rashly, in her opinion—that it might be best to kidnap El Aguila rather than just try to converse with him.
That way they cut the head off the bandits’ operation and gave Andrew and Robert a chance to interrogate the man who had been a thorn in their side for far too long.
Lizzy turned to look at her. “I think it’s risky.”
“There is no gain without risk, you know that,” Troy said, glancing over his shoulder from the driver’s seat.
“Sure,” she said. “But this is a silly one to take. There is no scenario where we don’t end up with more trouble than we bargained for.” Lizzy sighed. “This wasn’t well thought out.”
“There wasn’t really much time,” Kevin said, keeping his eyes on the road. “Just talking to him wouldn’t give us much. He could easily just … not say anything. Then what would the point of us engaging him even be?”
They were crossing the bridge, and they stopped talking as the wheels rumbled over the wood. Anita frowned. “Is the creek even lower than before, or am I seeing things?”
Everyone had a quick look and Troy shrugged. “It’s probably the smelter and the mine using more than usual. We’ll have to come up with a plan to fix that.”
Something worried at the back of Anita’s mind. Low creek … bandits … Before she could think about it much more, Lizzy interrupted her thoughts.
“That’s a problem for another day,” Lizzy said. “Anita, how many men did that man in the linen suit have with him when you saw him last?”
“Oh, um …” Anita had to think. “I think we only saw him and the man in black. Isn’t that right, Kevin?”
Kevin nodded. “Those are the only men we saw. The others were outside, I think. I caught a glimpse of fellows who could have been them when I was fetching the cart from the stables. There were at least six men.”
“Six against us four,” Lizzy said, shaking her head. “We need a better plan than the one you fellows came up with last night, honestly.”
“We can’t just walk up to Mr. Santiago and grab him,” Kevin agreed, which was more or less what Anita had been saying all along.
“If he’s even there,” Anita interjected. “What do we do if he’s not?”
“We could ask Clara Sparks about him, I guess,” Kevin said. “Maybe she or Charles heard something or know something that we could use to help us find this man.”
“Maybe,” Anita said. “We really don’t know enough to come up with any plans at all.”
“You’re right, Anita,” Lizzy said, smiling at her. “So, here’s what we do. We go to the Flying Bull?—”
“The Lucky Bull,” Anita corrected her.
“Right, we go there, and first we casually find out whatever we can,” Lizzy said.
“There must be staff working there who might want to talk about the people staying over. We need to get the lay of the land before following up on any rash plans. The easiest way to do that is to keep our ears to the ground.”
“That could work, or I could just ask for the special suite we had last time again,” Anita said.
“They have others like the one we stayed in, on the same floor, and Mr. Santiago always stays in the south-facing one. So, maybe from which rooms they give to us, we can work out if he’s there.
If they give you the south-facing one, then we’ll know he’s not there. ”
“Or we could just get a room and then sit in the pub,” Kevin commented. “Everyone comes to the pub to eat.”
“Are you sure it’s everyone?” Anita asked. “You can order food to be brought to the room, remember.”
“That’s a good point,” Kevin conceded. “So, what do we do? Just go in and book rooms?”
Troy shrugged. “I guess that will be the best option. But if we do decide on kidnapping as a strategy, how do we get a man all the way from the top floor of the inn to the stables so we can grab him? I’m not sure this is going to work.”
They were silent for a while.
“I don’t think we can kidnap the man,” Anita said yet again, hoping that they would understand what she was thinking. “Think about it. Apart from the trouble of getting him out of the building, what will happen afterward? How long do you think it will be before someone goes looking for him?”
“And if he’s found to be missing …” Lizzy said, her eyes going large and round.
“And we haven’t even thought about what would happen to the town if that man was El Aguila and we took him prisoner,” she added, looking pale and scared—that was a first for Anita.
Ever since she’d met Lizzy, the woman had seemed unflappable. Her obvious fear rattled Anita.
“Those men of his are crazy,” Lizzy went on.
“You should have seen how they hounded the people from my village before you all showed up to save us. They’ll destroy everything in their path to get to him.
And if that man isn’t El Aguila but one of his lieutenants, then there’s all the more reason for his men to come to our town and burn it to the ground to stop him from talking,” she went on.
They rode along in silence for a while. Anita watched the countryside go by. It was very different from Wisconsin. She found that she was longing for a rainy day. There had been only five or six days of rain since she arrived.
The other thing she missed was the trees.
She missed the eastern white pines, the black walnut trees, and especially the sugar maples.
Tapping the trees for syrup was always a fun time at the farm.
They didn’t have a whole forest of maples, but they had enough of them to be able to collect a fair amount of sap.
It was a nice little seasonal side income—a tasty one, at that!
“You know,” Anita said, breaking the silence.
“Back home in Wisconsin, we would tap the sugar maples for sap to turn into maple syrup. Sometimes it would seem impossible to find the right spot to insert the spile into the bark. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to find where the sap was flowing.
And then my father would come along, and he would look at the tree and he would make a hole, insert the spile, and just like that, the sap would flow.
He always said that the reason he could find the spot so easily was that he had learned to look at the tree differently.
Now, I still don’t know what he meant by that.
But I think maybe it kind of means … We’re looking at this from the wrong angle. ”
“What do you mean?” Lizzy asked.
“Well, we keep looking at this as us needing to either kidnap or directly interrogate a very unwilling, dangerous person, but what if we don’t need to do either of those things?
” Anita asked. “What if we just took his briefcase? Surely that would hold plenty of information. There could be documents pertaining to illicit dealings that Robert could take to the marshals and use to get this man arrested. He could be out of our lives for good then, and we wouldn’t have had to do more than a little thievery. ”
Kevin pressed his lips together and then reached out to press Anita’s hand. “It’s not a bad idea.”
She smiled, pleased by the mild praise, knowing her quiet-spoken husband meant a lot more than he’d say in front of everybody.
A few hours later they pulled up to the front of the Lucky Bull. Anita’s hands were sweating, and her heart was pounding.
“Come on,” Kevin said, offering her his hand. “Let’s go in and see what there is to see.”
Lizzy and Troy were waiting for them by the door, and they opened the front door and stepped into the reception area.
It looked the same, and Anita was surprised that she had thought it wouldn’t.
Of course it would look the same. They had been there only a few weeks earlier.
Gosh, had it been that recently? It felt like she and Kevin had been married for years!
But if that were the case, there would be children—she was starting to daydream happily when George interrupted them.
“Oh, it’s the newlyweds,” the man said, looking up from the newspaper he was reading. He looked no more or less friendly than he had on their first visit. “How are you two? Still enjoying married life?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Kevin said, smiling while holding onto Anita’s hand very tightly.
She clutched his too, and she was sure both sets of knuckles were white with the force of their hands being pressed together.
“What brings you back here?” George asked, smiling in that very efficient manner that didn’t reach his eyes.
“We had to come to town for a few things, and since we had such a wonderful time here, we thought we would bring friends along,” Kevin continued.
Here, he and Anita stepped to the side and let Troy and Lizzy come forward.
“We thought perhaps we could book that lovely suite again, and maybe our friends could have one of the suites on the top floor too?” Anita asked.
“If we could have a south-facing one,” Lizzy said, interjecting. “We would really appreciate it.”
“Let me see,” George said. He opened the ledger and ran a finger down the entries. He sniffed and then looked back up at them. “It seems that we do have two suites open at the moment. Neither is south-facing, I’m afraid.”
Anita’s heart thudded in her chest. Did that mean that they were in luck? Could Mr. Santiago be staying in the inn right now?
“Oh, that is sad,” Lizzy said. She pouted and made a bit of a scene of it.
While she was distracting George with a whole lot of questions about the suites they did have available, Anita casually leaned against the perfectly polished countertop and let her eye slide down the list of names.
It caught on one—Mr. Santiago. From the look of things, he had checked in the day before. What luck!
“It’s a perfectly lovely room,” George said, beginning to sound annoyed.
“Then I’m sure we’ll love it,” Lizzy said and beamed at him.
Looking confused at her abrupt about-turn, George made several entries in the ledger and assigned them keys. Then he led them upstairs.
“Is Mrs. Sparks around?” Anita asked. “I would love to say hello.”
“Unfortunately, she’s out at the moment, but I will inform her that you have returned,” George said stiffly. “She is always so happy to know that folks like it enough here to come back.”
“It certainly is a lovely inn,” Anita said.
They reached the top floor, and George showed them to two suites that were next to each other. Anita and Kevin had the same room as before, and Lizzy and Troy got the one beside it. Then George left them after explaining how things worked to Troy and Lizzy.
“This place is surprisingly fancy,” Lizzy said, inspecting Anita and Kevin’s room. “And that view. I’ll bet it’s wonderful at night with the stars overhead.”
“It is quite something,” Anita said. She looked over at Kevin and he smiled.
“All right, we’re in,” Troy said, snapping Anita out of her reverie. “We should keep an eye on our neighbor. How do we know when he’s in his room and when he’s out? And how will we find out if he has the briefcase with him again?”
“Slow down,” Kevin said. “He’s in his room. That’s for sure.”
“How do you know?” Lizzy asked.
“The key for the south-facing room isn’t on the hook downstairs behind the reception desk. You saw where he took our keys from. The one over the cubbyhole labeled ‘South’ isn’t there,” Kevin said.
A short while later, Anita and Lizzy stood in the doorway to Kevin and Anita’s suite, talking quietly while the men did some talking of their own before they all ventured out to the pub shortly.
“So, how do we do this?” Anita asked Lizzy.
The woman stared at Anita in surprise. “I thought you had the plan!”
“I thought you did!”
Suddenly, the door across the way from them opened and two men stepped out.
Anita recognized them both instantly. One was dressed all in black and had a scar running from his right eye to the corner of his mouth.
The other was dressed in a light cream linen suit and carried a white hat with a black ribbon hatband.
His shoes were highly polished and looked unsuitable for the place he found himself in.
After all, this wasn’t New York or Chicago.
This was San Antonio, and it was still rough around the edges.
But none of that mattered because in his hand was what Anita and Lizzy were now certain was of the greatest importance … his briefcase.