Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jonah ducked through the half-frame of what used to be a doorway and scraped his shoulder on a nail that had no business still holding on after however many years this place had sat rotting.
His shirt tore. Logan’s old shirt, actually—the one Grace had mended at the collar with stitches so small that they even put Logan’s to shame; Logan’s stitches already made most tailors look drunk.
Great. One more thing to explain.
Ace crouched by the far wall on an overturned crate, picking his teeth with a splinter of pine.
He’d tipped his hat—that goddamn bowler hat, all greasy and dented like somebody sat on it once, and Ace just mashed it back into shape.
The lantern between his boots threw shadows up through the gaps in his teeth, and the light turned his face into something carved wrong and left on the shelf.
“You’re late.”
“I’m here.” Jonah dropped onto the only other surface that could hold weight, a plank someone had wedged across two rocks. It wobbled. Everything about this place wobbled. “And I got something to say to you.”
“That so?”
“Grace nearly broke her neck.”
Ace looked up. “Come again?”
“Your man.” Jonah’s hands balled against his thighs. “Whoever you sent skulking along the south fence, Grace spotted him. She could’ve cracked her skull open on a rock, could’ve—”
“She didn’t.”
“She could’ve died!”
“Your sister’s got a talent for stickin’ her nose where it don’t belong.” Ace pulled the splinter from his teeth and flicked it into the dark. “That ain’t my problem.”
“Not your—”
“I told you to keep her inside and occupied, and instead she’s runnin’ down my boys on horseback like some kinda—”
“She ain’t a dog you can pen up!”
Jonah’s chest tightened under the ribs like someone had their fist in there.
Logan had carried Grace home on his back, and Jonah had stood there watching from the bunkhouse window like the useless sack of dung he’d always been, pretending he didn’t know exactly why that man had been on the fenceline.
Ace stood up off the crate slowly, the way he always did when he wanted you to remember he could reach the knife on his belt before you could blink. Short as a fence post and twice as mean.
“Let me lay this out for you real clear, Jonah, since you seem to be gettin’ confused about our arrangement.” He stepped closer, and the cheap whiskey and sour tobacco stink rolled off his coat like heat off a stove. “She works for me. You—”
“She does not—”
“You work for me. The whole lot of you work for me, whether you know it or not. And if your sister gets hurt because she can’t mind her own business, that’s her own foolish fault for bein’ a nosy busybody.”
The fist in Jonah’s chest squeezed harder.
He ought to stand up. Plant a knuckle right between those three missing teeth and add a fourth.
But his legs stayed where they sat because Ace skipped threats and went straight to appointments.
He told you what he’d do, and then he did it.
Afterward, he picked his teeth just like this and asked if you had any more questions.
Jonah would get one punch in before he got himself killed, and that wouldn’t help anybody.
“You said nobody’d get hurt.”
Jonah’s voice came out smaller than he wanted. Like a kid’s voice. Like the fourteen-year-old who’d stood outside Ace’s flophouse on Mulberry Street with an empty stomach and hands that shook and said yes, sir, to a man who smiled with gaps in his teeth and called it opportunity.
“That’s what you said. You said—”
“I said I’d try. And I am tryin’. Am I not kindly?”
“Grace—”
“I said…” Ace leaned in. “Am I not kindly, Jonah?”
“Yeah…” Jonah looked down. “You are.”
“Not my fault your rancher boy’s too smart by half.” Ace sat back down on the crate. “Ridin’ every fence, checkin’ every gate, got that whole property locked tighter than a Pinkerton’s safe. I might as well take him out of the picture.”
Everything in Jonah’s gut dropped straight to the floor. “No.”
“I ain’t askin’ your permission.”
“You can’t — look, Ace, listen to me.” Jonah leaned forward on the wobbling plank. “You touch Logan, and it’s over.”
“What do you mean?”
“His old man’ll ride to the sheriff inside an hour, his brothers’ll have every cattleman in the county runnin’ search parties, and Grace—”
Grace. Grace, who hummed while she rocked Miriam to sleep in a crib Logan spent nineteen days carving by hand. Grace, who looked at that man like he’d hung every one of those stars she never saw in New York.
If Ace killed Logan, Grace would burn the world down.
“Grace what, Jonah?”
“You kill him, and you get nothin’.” Jonah leaned forward. “Think about it. Right now, the whole family trusts me. I’m inside.”
“Fat lot of good it’s done me.”
“I can still help!”
Ace tilted his head. The lantern caught the wet gleam of his gums. “So what do you suggest, since you’re so full of good ideas tonight?”
Jonah’s tongue sat dry and thick in his mouth. He’d been working this over since the ride out here, turning it like a stone in his pocket, and every angle cut. But the alternative—Logan in the dirt with a hole in him, Grace screaming—right.
So…
“The Pitkin County Harvest Fair’s comin’ up in a few weeks.”
“So?”
“Grace is enterin’ her vegetables in some kind of competition. She’s been talkin’ about it nonstop, got the whole family roped in. They’ll all go. Every last one of ’em.”
Ace scratched his chin and nodded.
“I stay behind. Tell ’em I’ll watch the ranch. Guard the property. And while they’re gone, you come in, dig wherever the hell you need to dig, find what you’re lookin’ for, and get out. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody even knows.”
“And the land? You go tearin’ up pasture and garden beds, that ain’t exactly subtle, son.”
“I know.”
The garden. Grace’s garden, the one she’d planted with seeds she picked out herself in town, the one she talked to like it could hear her, kneeling in the dirt with Miriam on her hip, checking the squash for bugs every morning as if it mattered more than anything.
It didn’t matter more than Logan’s life.
“I know it ain’t subtle. But a torn-up ranch beats a dead rancher, and you get your gold or silver or whatever the hell Dawson buried out there, and then you’re gone.”
“That right?”
“That’s right. You get what you want, and you leave us alone.”
Ace worked his jaw side to side slowly. The splinter gap in his front teeth made a soft whistle when he breathed through them. Three breaths. Four. Five..
“Alright.” Ace slapped his knees and stood. “Alright, Jonah. That’s the first smart thing you’ve said in weeks.”
“Don’t call it smart.”
“Oh, it is smart. You’re keepin’ the golden goose alive and handin’ me the eggs. That’s business. Your daddy woulda been proud.” Ace grinned, and the gaps in his teeth turned the expression into something worse than a scowl. “You’re more like me than you think, boy.”
Jonah’s stomach turned over like he’d swallowed pennies.
Like the time he’d lifted a watch off a blind man on Fulton Street.
At twelve, he’d had hands quick as lightning, and the man had said God bless you, son because he thought Jonah had bumped into him by accident.
Ace had grinned like this that night, too.
“We done?” Jonah stood up off the plank.
“We’re done. For now.” Ace settled the bowler hat back down over his forehead. “You just make sure that whole family’s on the road come fair day. Every one of ’em. I don’t want so much as a dog left behind.”
“Fine.”
“And Jonah?” Ace’s voice followed him to the doorway. “Don’t go gettin’ sentimental on me.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I know you like playin’ house up there, choppin’ wood, feedin’ chickens, an’ havin’ supper with the family.”
“So?”
“That ain’t your family, boy. That’s a job. And the sooner you remember that, the better it goes for everybody.”
Jonah ducked through the doorway and out into the cold.
The night air hit his lungs like creek water, a whole different animal from the swampy weight of the harbor air he’d grown up breathing.
Colorado kept surprising him with how many stars it had.
Back in New York, on a clear night, you could count maybe a dozen through the factory smoke.
Here, they packed the sky so thick it had to be fake, like somebody had poked a thousand holes in a dark sheet and hung a lantern behind it.
The walk back along the creek took twenty minutes in the dark.
Jonah kept his boots in the water where possible because it killed the sound.
He’d learned this running errands for Ace through the Fourth Ward alleys at night, where getting heard meant getting caught and getting caught meant getting beaten by whoever owned that particular stretch of cobblestone.
He reached the culvert. The iron grate, the one he’d helped Mason build—four hours of hammering and fitting, Mason cracking jokes the whole time, and Jonah laughing until his ribs hurt—swung open on the hinges he’d installed himself.
The bunkhouse window slid up. Gerald opened one of his evil eyes as he sat on his perch, but the distance held, and the bird settled. Jonah swung himself inside, landed on the floor, and lay down on his bunk still wearing his boots.
Pulling them off would take everything he had left and then some.
Mason snored in the next bunk. Thomas mumbled something into his pillow—probably poetry, the man wrote rhymes in his sleep, which was ridiculous and a little bit admirable, not that Jonah would ever admit that to him.
The ceiling above him—
Damn it. Logan had put that ceiling in. Tongue-and-groove pine with every board fitted so tight you couldn’t slide a playing card between them.
The man built things the way he did everything else.
Precisely. Logan didn’t redo. He measured and thought and measured again until he got it right the first time, and then it stayed right.
Years later, you’d lie on your back underneath it, and it held.
And, in a few weeks, Jonah would hand Ace the keys to tear it all apart.
Grace’s garden. Rafe’s roses. The fences Logan rode every morning at dawn.
The cradle with the carved flowers. The nursery with the blue cushion.
The chicken coop where Gerald terrorized anything that moved.
Ace would rip all of it up, trench through the grounds, and turn the whole place inside out while the family stood in some fairground watching strangers judge Grace’s tomatoes.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until colors bloomed. The taste of pennies sat on his tongue again. Twelve years old and a blind man’s watch in his pocket and Ace’s hand on his shoulder.
You’re more like me than you think, boy.
He rolled onto his side and stared at the wall. Mason’s snoring hitched.
Tomorrow he’d eat breakfast with them. Sit at that table, pass the biscuits, laugh at something Thomas said, hold Miriam while Grace cooked, and look Logan in the eye like a man who wasn’t about to ruin his ranch.
His boots pressed against the footboard. He should take them off. The mud would stain the blanket, and Grace would—
Grace would notice. She noticed everything. That letter from Ace, the way he’d come back with creek mud on his trousers, the way he’d—
He closed his eyes.