Chapter Twenty
Beau
A light drizzle of rain couldn’t dampen Burning Scrub’s enthusiasm for a hanging, although showing up with picnic baskets struck Beau as unkind. The festive mood was mildly insensitive, as well.
Despite all of that, he planned to play his part in this adventure for all it was worth. He’d never given less than his all for a performance and he wouldn’t start now.
Sheriff Earp escorted him on the short walk from the jail to the scaffolding. Beau had concerns. Adam was supposed to oversee his hanging, but Belle took care of that. The sheriff didn’t know how the fake hanging worked, so it was a relief to discover Grady in charge of the props.
The sheriff wasn’t of the same opinion as Beau.
“I’ll take things from here,” he said to Grady.
But Grady had written the script, and he wasn’t above making his own minor ad libs.
“We need you for crowd control,” he said.
“Beau is popular with the townspeople. We don’t want anyone storming the scaffolding and attempting a rescue.
” He glanced meaningfully at Belle, who was near the front of the crowd, standing with Benny and Mavis.
Belle waved.
“She seems to have recovered from the grief of your pending loss,” the sheriff said to Beau.
“Yes, well. What can you expect from a harlot?” Beau said.
The sheriff stepped aside so Beau could mount the scaffolding, where Grady was waiting. Grady slipped the noose over his head and tugged the knot tight around his neck, although not so tight as to choke him, which was thoughtful, considering he was the executioner.
“Any last words?” Grady said.
Beau channeled desperation and sorrow. Like a man about to die. He was so great at this. Maybe he should talk to Leon about doing movies.
“Bury me with my boots on,” he said. “And remember, kids. Crime doesn’t—”
The floor dropped out of the platform before he finished speaking. It was slick from the light rain, and he wasn’t prepared. His hands flew to the rope around his neck, which turned out to be a good thing, because the box under the platform intended for breaking his fall wasn’t there.
The two-piece design of the rope kept the noose from tightening and choking him, but it caught him under the chin.
He worked his fingers under it, but he couldn’t get it off while he had his whole weight bearing down on it.
He kicked, spinning on the end of the rope, and hoped Grady would get the message without spoiling the show that things had gone south.
Anytime now, Grady.
Anytime.
*
Belle
While Belle understood that Beau liked to put on a good show, he tended to take things too far. She didn’t remember his body spinning that way the last time he hanged.
She checked to see if Grady had noticed anything wrong, but Grady wasn’t paying attention to Beau. Nobody was. They were distracted by two men on horseback barreling up Main Street toward them.
One was Huck Hanson. His hardened companion reminded Belle of the men who used to hand hockey bags stuffed with cash to her father to take to the casinos. Both wore jeans and white cotton shirts, like bad Halloween costumes thrown together the day of the party.
“What in the thundering hell is going on here?” the stranger roared.
He drove his horse into the crowd, parting them the way a hot knife cleaved through butter, and shouldered the animal up against the scaffolding. He leaped from the horse to the edge of the platform, teetered precariously for a second, then grabbed Beau under the arms and hauled him to safety.
The sheriff drew his gun from its holster and fired a warning shot over the stranger’s head. “Leave the prisoner right where he is. The hanging’s justified. He shot a man in cold blood.”
The stranger withered Sheriff Earp with his glare. “If you fire that gun at me again, you’d better make sure you kill me. Otherwise, you’ll live to regret it.”
Only Adam could have delivered that line any better. Burning Scrub loved it, except for Benny, who appeared at a loss as to how to deal with this new glitch in the script. He muttered a slur regarding the stranger’s parentage under his breath.
“My word,” Mavis said to the sky, which told Belle nothing about what her grandmother was thinking, although it led her to suspect that the town’s debriefing after the sheik left was going to be thorough.
Huck Hanson seized his chance to get in on the adventure.
“Sheriff,” he said to Earp, his voice booming throughout the mountains and across Beaverhead County.
“Turns out, there was a bounty on the gambler’s head.
He was wanted, dead or alive. Governor Potts sent word this morning that the prisoner’s been pardoned, and the reward money for shooting the gambler is his. ”
“How thoughtful of the governor to send his personal representative to deliver such wonderful news,” Mavis said. “Welcome, Mister…”
“Schmidt,” the man said. “Leon Schmidt.”
Leon Schmidt. Beau’s agent. What was he doing here?
Belle’s brain had finally processed that things had gone terribly wrong.
Her professional instincts trumped her panic, although the panic was there, feral and fierce.
She gathered her wits and her skirts and rushed up the few steps of the scaffolding.
She pushed past Beau’s startled agent. “Out of my way. I’m a doctor. ”
Beau was sitting upright by now. He’d worked free of the noose, and it swung with pendulum precision over the gaping hole in the platform.
“I’m okay,” he said.
His voice sounded raspier than usual. A quick inspection showed that the skin was rubbed raw under his chin, but other than that, there didn’t seem to be any serious harm done. Burning Scrub had just seen its last hanging, however. She’d make sure of that.
Leon hovered over her shoulder. “He doesn’t sound okay. He sounds like crap. Are his vocal cords damaged?” He had a thick New York accent, and cords came out cawds.
“He’s fine.”
“Told you so.” Beau smiled, and her heart scuttled around in her chest, going from panic to something else entirely.
He added a light touch to her arm to further complicate what she was feeling. He might be fine, but she hadn’t ruled out vasovagal syncope for herself. The possibility of passing out in front of the whole town left her giddy with horror, which didn’t help.
Grady came to the rescue. He had a background in theater, and he’d been through failed performances before.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he boomed from the scaffolding in a startlingly strong voice for a man normally so softspoken. “Beau Jones has been pardoned. There will be no second hanging. Grab your picnic baskets and head on over to the church grounds so we can celebrate the good news.”
Huck proved he had no trouble in pivoting, either. “Sheriff Earp. Why don’t you and I go along and see who’s got the best picnic basket that they’re willing to share?”
He hustled the sheriff off, shooing the townspeople along with them.
Only Grady, Benny, Mavis, Leon, Beau, and Belle remained.
Grady peered into the shadowy hole under the dangling noose. “The box is gone.”
“No kidding.” Beau rubbed his throat.
“Are you sure?” Belle checked the hole, too, thinking maybe Beau had accidentally kicked the box into a corner with his overacting, but the space under the scaffolding was empty. The wave of vertigo passed. “Who would do such a thing?” Because the box hadn’t walked off by itself.
“The mean lady took it last night.”
Grady reached over the side of the platform and pulled his daughter up by her hands, then lifted her into his arms. She clung to his neck. Everyone, with the probable exception of Leon, knew who the mean lady was.
“When was the last time anyone saw Shanda?” Benny asked.
Belle’s opinion of her mother wasn’t high, but this was a mean, malicious, dangerous trick that served no purpose other than to cause harm, and honestly, it didn’t fit, because what did she stand to gain?
“She was in the saloon when Belle and I were arrested. After that, I have no idea,” Beau said.
Grady cleared up the puzzle.
He hiked his daughter into a more comfortable position. “Adam and I hid the money inside the box. She must have taken it out of the scaffolding so she could open it up.”
Now it made sense. Putting the box back after she took the money out probably hadn’t occurred to her. She would have been more interested in making a speedy escape than in whether Beau hanged.
“Brilliant,” Benny said, apparently impressed by the genius of Grady and Adam, at the same time Mavis said, “Idiots.”
Leon, who’d been doing his best to follow the conversation until now, gave it up as a lost cause. “I get that this is a Western theme park. But who is Shanda, and what does she have to do with you people hanging Beau?”
Mavis gave him a sanitized version of current events.
Beau’s role in their client’s adventure involved shooting a gambler who was caught cheating at cards.
The hanging had worked well in rehearsals, but their safety officer had met with an unexpected demise.
The look she cast Belle was scathing. No one had thought to check the scaffolding that morning.
Shanda was a cast member who stole the church’s petty cash fund.
They’d been hiding the money in various places around town. No one could be trusted these days.
“Now,” Mavis said to Leon, neatly shifting the conversation and any potential blame. “Maybe you’d be so kind as to explain to us what you’re doing here?”
*
Beau
Beau and Leon were alone in the saloon. The others had gone to the church to check on the sheriff and carry out damage control, and Belle had gone with them so Beau and Leon could talk.
The sheik had posted the selfie he’d taken with Beau to his Djitanian social media accounts, likely assuming no Americans would see it.
Leon, however, spent an impressive number of hours on social media sites—national and international—searching for mentions of Beau to make sure everything about him remained on brand, and he’d stumbled across it.