Chapter Twenty-Four
Sneaking off the ranch at two in the morning had one obstacle greater than any other.
Gerald.
That damn rooster slept on a fence post about eight feet from the bunkhouse door and operated on a hair trigger.
Breathe too loud, step too heavy, exist too aggressively in his general vicinity, and the bird lit up like a fire bell, crowing and flapping and waking every living thing in a quarter-mile radius.
Jonah had learned this the hard way. Twice.
So, tonight he went out of the window. The bunkhouse had one on the east wall, about four feet off the ground, just wide enough for a man to slide through sideways if he sucked in his gut and accepted that his shirt buttons would scrape the frame.
Mason snored three feet away, face down in his pillow, dead to the world in that total way only a nineteen-year-old with zero guilt and a clear conscience could manage.
Must be nice.
Jonah hit the dirt outside. Stayed low. Moved along the east wall of the barn, cutting behind the chicken coop—Gerald shifted on his post, one eye cracking open, and Jonah froze for a solid five seconds until the bird tucked back in—then through the gap between the tool shed and the hay barn, down the slope to the creek.
The new iron grate blocked the culvert. Well, it would’ve had Jonah not set up hinges to open it. The fact that all the Fosters trusted him enough not to check the doggone grate only made bile rise at the back of his throat.
He followed the creek south for about a mile, past the property line, through a stand of aspens that glowed bone-white in the dark, and up the ridge to the old prospector’s cabin that sat half-collapsed in a clearing nobody visited because nobody had a reason to.
Ace Pike sat on an overturned crate, cleaning his fingernails with a knife.
Five-five on a good day with his boots on, and he made up for every missing inch with meanness.
Red, blotchy face from the drink. Three missing teeth on the left side gave his smile a lopsided, jack-o’-lantern quality.
Greasy hair shoved under a bowler hat that he’d probably stolen off some poor bastard on the Bowery ten years ago and never cleaned since.
The man looked like something you’d scrape off the bottom of a dock piling. And he ran a crew of thirty pickpockets, half of them kids, with the organizational precision of a bank president.
“You’re late.” Ace pointed the knife at him, then went back to his nails. “Sit down.”
“I’ll stand.”
“I said sit.”
There was no crate to sit on besides the one Ace occupied, which meant the floor.
Wet, warped boards that gave under pressure and probably housed about six kinds of fungus.
Jonah lowered himself onto a section near the wall that looked marginally less disgusting than the rest, bracing his back against the planks.
“So.” Ace folded the knife. “You wanna tell me about the cow?”
“Heifer.”
“What?”
“It’s a heifer. A cow had a calf. A heifer hasn’t. There’s a—” Jonah caught the look on Ace’s face. “Never mind. What about it?”
“What about it?” Ace leaned forward on the crate. “What about it, he says. Like he didn’t dig a hole in the middle of a pasture where eight hundred pounds of beef could walk into it and break its leg and get every man on that ranch ridin’ fences with rifles.”
“I dug at night. In the dark. With a shovel I had to carry—”
“And you didn’t fill it in.”
Jonah’s mouth shut.
“You dug a hole. You didn’t find nothin’. And then you just... left it. Open. In a cow field.”
“I was gonna go back and—”
“When? After they found it? After that tight-ass rancher of yours put two and two together and started checkin’ every square foot of his property?”
“Ace—”
“I told you, dig at night, fill it in before dawn. Simple instructions, Jonah. A child could follow ’em.” Ace stood up. “I know, ‘cause I’ve had actual children follow ’em.”
“I ran out of time. The sun came up faster than—”
“The sun.” Ace stared at him. “The sun came up faster than you expected. The sun. Which has been risin’ at roughly the same time every mornin’ since the Almighty invented mornings.”
“Look, I made a mistake and—”
“You made a disaster. I had two boys sittin’ in those trees south of the creek ready to come in tonight and dig the west section, and now they can’t get within a mile of the place without runnin’ into some fool on horseback with a Winchester.”
Ace paced the cabin. The floorboards groaned under him, which, given that Ace weighed about as much as a wet cat, said more about the floor than the man.
“How much ground you covered so far?”
“The north pasture, most of it.” Jonah rubbed his chin. “The section between the barn and the tree line. And the spot in the south field where the… where the heifer thing happened.”
“And?”
“And nothin’. Dirt. Rocks. Worms. Whatever the hell grubs are. No loot.”
“It’s there.”
“Maybe somebody already dug it up. Maybe the guy who buried it lied to you. You met him in prison, for God’s sake, men in prison lie about everything, it’s practically a hobby.”
“Dawson didn’t lie.” Ace stopped pacing. “He told me exact. West side of the property, between the creek and the main house, buried four feet down. A strongbox with gold coins, silver bars, and jewelry from six different jobs across three territories. Enough to set a man up for life.”
“And he just told you. Over cards.”
“He told me because he’s doin’ life for murder, he’s never gettin’ out, and a man with no future likes to brag about his past. It’s human nature.” Ace tapped his temple. “I listened. I remembered. I checked the property records at the county office. Everything lines up.”
“Except we can’t find it.”
“Because you’re diggin’ in the wrong spots, and now you can’t dig at all because you left a hole open like a damn amateur.”
Amateur. Twelve years in Ace’s crew. Twelve years of running corners, cutting purses, dodging coppers, keeping his mouth shut, his hands quick, and his sister fed. One mistake with a shovel in Colorado, and he ranked as an amateur.
“Give it a few weeks,” Jonah said. “Logan’ll calm down. He always does. The patrols’ll go back to normal, and I can start diggin’ again.”
“I ain’t got weeks.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t you worry why not.” Ace crouched in front of him. Close enough that Jonah caught the whiskey on his breath. “You ain’t brought enough, so you don’t get to wait.”
“I took what I could take without ’em noticin’ the cash missing. Logan counts every bill in that box. Every one. The man tracks pennies the way most people track children. If even a dollar went missin’—”
“Then you shoulda been smarter about it.”
Bile climbed higher up Jonah’s throat.
Picking pockets hurt nobody. Not really. Some rich guy on Broadway lost his wallet; he went home and got another one. The wallet meant less to him than the buttons on his coat. But this. Logan’s ranch. Grace’s family. The baby.
Miriam.
Last night, before Logan rode out on patrol, Grace had set Miriam in Jonah’s lap on the porch and asked him to watch her while she packed food for the riders. And Miriam had grabbed his finger, looked up at him with those big dark eyes, and smiled.
“Ace.” He pressed his palms flat on the floor. The wood dampened his skin. “Listen. I think we should call it. Take the silver, split it, and go our separate ways. The cache might not even—”
“Call it?”
“Yeah.”
“Call it.” Ace smiled. “Jonah, you owe me eleven years of favors, loyalty, and a considerable sum of money you borrowed against future earnin’s that you never earned. You think you just call it and walk away?”
“I’ll pay you back. I got a job now. I can send—”
“You got a job shovelin’ horse manure for a man whose property you’re robbin’. That ain’t a career, son. That’s a cover story.”
“It’s more than that.”
“Is it?” Ace tilted his head. “You gettin’ attached, Jonah? Is that what this is? You spend a few weeks playin’ cowboy with your sister’s fake husband, and now you think you’re one of them?”
Jonah clenched his jaw.
“Because let me explain something to you, real simple.” Ace planted both hands on his knees. “You are not one of them. You’re a thief from the Fourth Ward who picks pockets for a livin’. And that’s who you’ll be when this is over.”
“You don’t—”
“And if you think for one second that you’re gonna back out on me…” Ace leaned in. “Then I want you to think about your sister.”
Jonah seized up like a gear jamming. “What about her?”
“Pretty girl. Black hair, brown eyes, freckles. Works hard. Loves that baby like it’s her own. Sleeps in a room on the second floor, east side of the house, window with the blue curtain.”
The bile reached the top.
“You know which window I mean, Jonah?”
“Don’t.”
“The one the rancher’s boy put in for the nursery. Nice room. Nice crib. Little flowers carved in the headboard.”
“Ace, I swear to God—”
“You swear to God, what?” Ace spread his hands. “You’ll fight me? You’ll run to the rancher and tell him everything? ‘Oh, Logan, I been robbin’ you blind, but don’t worry, I feel real bad about it.’ You think he keeps you around after that? You think he keeps her?”
Jonah’s fists balled against the floor. His knuckles pressed white into the rotten wood.
“Here’s what happens, Jonah. You go back to that ranch. You keep smilin’. You keep eatin’ their biscuits and playing with the baby and doin’ whatever it is cowboys do all day. And you start diggin’ again.”
“And if I don’t find it?”
“You will.”
“But if I don’t?”
“Then we have a different conversation. One your sister sits in on.” Ace picked up the knife again. Flicked it open. Went back to his nails as if they’d just been discussing the weather. “Now get out of here.”
Jonah stood up.
“Oh, and Jonah?”
Jonah looked at him.
“Fill your damn holes.”
***
The walk back took longer than the walk out.
Same distance. Same trail. Same aspens glowing white in the dark, same creek running its quiet line through the cottonwoods. But every step dragged, heavy, as if his boots had filled with something thicker than mud.
He stopped at the creek. Crouched at the bank. Splashed water on his face, and the cold bit hard enough to make his eyes sting, and for about three seconds, he let himself think the stinging came from the water.
Grace.
In a room with a blue curtain and a crib with flowers on it and a baby who grabbed fingers and smiled at everyone, even the people who deserved it least.
He’d put her there. That part sat right at the center of this whole mess, the part he kept stepping around like a hole in the floor.
Ace hadn’t dragged Grace to Colorado. Ace hadn’t written the response to the mail-order ad.
Ace had handed Jonah the newspaper and said, ‘Get your sister on that ranch,’ and Jonah had done it.
Granted, he’d lucked out with Mason and Thomas choosing her.
He had no idea what he would’ve done if they hadn’t.
But he’d believed in Grace. Because he’d had to do this. Because Jonah always did what Ace said.
He’d been doing what Ace said since he’d been fourteen years old on a street corner in the Fourth Ward with empty pockets and a hungry sister at home.
But somewhere between the newspaper and now, the plan had…
It had changed. It had grown legs, and a heartbeat, and brown eyes, and a laugh that echoed off the barn walls, and a family that argued about knots and told jokes on porches and carved roses into—
He pressed his wet hands over his eyes.
What was the smart play here?
Tell Logan? Confess everything? Take the beating, take the exile, grab Grace and the baby, and run? Run where? With what money? Was there a place that Ace’s crew couldn’t reach?
Grace had burned the letter. She’d originally told him to do it, but then she’d changed her mind and insisted she do it. He’d watched her burn it, standing by the stove yesterday morning, feeding the paper to the flame with steady hands and a jaw set tight enough to crack walnuts.
He’d promised to tell her everything, but he’d only told her some of it.
The pickpocketing. The Fourth Ward. The years of stolen wallets and purse-cutting and running from coppers through alleys that stank like fish guts. Enough to explain the letter, make her cry, and earn the look she’d given him.
He stood up from the creek bank. Wiped his face on his sleeve. His hands steadied. Not because anything inside him had settled, but because panic only helped if it moved your feet, and standing by a creek at three in the morning accomplished nothing.
He climbed the slope. Crossed the property. Slid back through the bunkhouse window, scraping his shirt buttons on the frame. Lay down on his bunk. Stared at the ceiling.
The wood planks ran straight and even, each one butted tight against the next, because Logan Foster built things right. Logan cared about the people who slept under his roof enough to make sure the boards above them held together without gaps.
Lord… What do I do?