Chapter 1 #2
Emmett touched his hat brim and turned his horse off the fork and let it pick its own pace on the familiar ground.
He built a cigarette one-handed from the pouch in his vest pocket, which was a skill it had taken him a long time to acquire and which he still didn’t always get right in wind. This morning, the air was still enough.
He struck the match on his thumbnail and lit it, and he smoked it slowly while the horse carried him through the red hills and out the far side onto the flat ground that ran the last mile into town.
Colinas Rojas was quiet at this hour. The main street ran east to west and the buildings on either side of it were mostly dark, a light in the bakery window being the exception.
The baker’s name was Huerta and he started at three in the morning and by full sunrise had more bread than he could reasonably sell, but he kept at it with commitment. Emmett respected that.
He smoked the last of the cigarette and pinched it and dropped it and let the horse carry him past the bakery and the hardware and the feed store and the small frame building that served as a schoolhouse three days a week.
Past the schoolhouse the street narrowed where a warehouse had been built too close to the road and never corrected, and on the far side of the warehouse the assayer’s office had a new sign.
LANDRY AND SONS. Old Prentiss Landry had died in February and apparently his sons had wasted no time refreshing the paint. That was their business.
He was thinking about nothing in particular.
He did this sometimes, coming back off a job.
Let the mind go slack, like releasing a fist you’d been holding.
He’d learned it was necessary. Some men didn’t and you could see it in them after a while, something tight and permanent that settled in behind the eyes and didn’t leave.
He was past the last buildings and on the road that ran toward the mission district when he saw the man.
He was standing off the right side of the road in the brush, not making any effort to conceal himself, just standing there in the dark with his arms at his sides.
The serape he wore was black and gray, heavy wool from the look of it, and it fell to his knees. His hat was black and pulled down. No part of his face was visible from this angle and distance.
Emmett stopped his horse.
The man didn’t move.
“Morning,” Emmett said.
The man turned toward him. He had a build that was hard to read under the serape. He might have been broad or lean or anywhere between.
“Good morning.” Mexican accent. Not heavy, but there. The careful pronunciation of a man who’d learned English from someone who spoke it correctly.
Emmett rested his wrist on the saddle horn and looked at him.
“You’re a long way from anywhere out here,” he said.
“I was walking.”
“From where?”
The man gestured south and east, which covered a considerable amount of territory and told Emmett nothing specific.
“Is this the road to Colinas Rojas?” the man asked.
“It is.” Emmett didn’t move. “Town’s back that way. North about a mile.”
“Thank you.”
Neither of them moved for a moment. A nighthawk went over, its call coming down sharp from above them, and then it was quiet again.
“Anything else I can help you with,” Emmett said. It wasn’t quite a question.
The man seemed to consider this. He reached up and adjusted his hat brim, not raising it, just settling it.
“I’m looking for someone,” he said. “In town.”
“That so.”
“A man named Samson Jennings.”
Emmett kept his face where it was.
“Can’t say I know everyone in town,” Emmett said. “What’s your business with him?”
“Old family friend.” The man said it the way you’d read a sentence off a page. Even spacing, no particular emphasis anywhere. “I haven’t seen him in some time. I heard he was in Colinas Rojas and I wanted to pay my respects.”
“Long walk for a social call.”
“I enjoy walking.”
Emmett looked at him a moment longer. The man stood with complete stillness, which was something he noticed because most people couldn’t do it. They shifted weight, scratched, moved their hands. This man just stood there like he’d been planted.
“You come up from the border?” Emmett asked.
“I travel a good deal.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” the man said. “It isn’t.”
He said it pleasantly. No edge to it and no apology either. Just a statement of fact, offered the way you’d confirm the time.
Emmett let the silence run for a moment. The horse moved under him, wanting to go, and he held it still with his knee.
“Marshal’s office is on the main street,” Emmett said. “East end. If your friend’s in town, someone there can tell you.”
The man tipped his hat. His hand was dark from sun and there was a callus on the thumb visible even at this distance.
“You’ve been very helpful,” the man said.
“Mm.”
The man turned and walked toward town, unhurried, the serape moving around his legs. Emmett watched him until the dark swallowed him. Then he watched the spot where the dark had swallowed him for a moment longer. Then he turned his horse and continued on toward the house.
A man who didn’t answer questions wasn’t necessarily a dangerous man. Plenty of people had reasons for privacy that had nothing to do with anyone else.
But a man that still, that patient, standing alone in the brush before sunrise asking after a specific person by name—that was a man with a purpose that went further back than this morning.
Emmett had been reading men for a long time and he filed what he’d read without drawing any conclusion he couldn’t support.
He’d mention it to Samson when he saw him next.
***
The mission-style house sat back from the road on a piece of flat ground with two old oaks at the front that Irine had hung clay pots from, the pots empty now at this time of year but still turning on their ropes in the morning air.
The walls were white plaster over adobe and thick enough to keep the house cool in summer, and the roof was clay tile.
Emmett hadn’t built it himself. He’d bought it from a retired surveyor who’d built it for a wife who died before it was finished. It was a good house and he knew it and was grateful for it in the way you’re grateful for things you didn’t earn through any particular cleverness.
He put his horse in the small stable behind the house and stripped the tack and rubbed the animal down and gave it grain and water.
He worked slowly. The horse ate and Emmett stood in the stable in the gray early-morning light coming through the single small window and listened to the sounds of the place.
Somewhere in the house, Irine was moving. He could hear her through the wall.
He hung the bridle on its peg and went in through the back.
She was at the stove with her hair down and a shawl over her nightdress, coffee on already, cutting something on the board beside the stove. She heard him and looked over her shoulder.
“You’re late,” she said. Not an accusation. Just information.
“Had a long ride.” He went to the stove and poured coffee from the pot into the cup she’d already set out. The cup was blue and white and had a small chip on the rim that he always drank away from out of habit. “Samson’s logging the bounty.”
“Was it bad?”
“No. Two men. It went clean.”
She looked at him again and he met her eyes, and she could read him well enough after twenty years to know what “clean” meant coming from him. She nodded and went back to her cutting.
“Hungry?” she said.
“I could eat something small.”
“Sit down, then. Marielle’s got a stew from last night. I’ll warm some.”
He sat at the table and set his hat on the empty chair beside him and finished the coffee. Outside the window the sky was going pale gold at the horizon.
“Irine,” he said.
She turned.
“On the road. Man in a serape, black one. Standing off the road east of town. You know who he might be?”
She thought about it, wiping her hands on a cloth. “No. What was he doing?”
“Said he was walking.” Emmett set the cup down. “Looking for Samson.”
She watched him.
“He say anything else?”
“Asked questions without answering any.” Emmett looked at the window. “Mexican. Well-spoken. Knew exactly who he was looking for.”
“And you think he’s trouble.”
“I think he’s something. I don’t know what yet.” He turned the cup in his hands. “Probably nothing worth losing sleep over.”
“But you’re telling me.”
“I tell you things.”
She smiled at that, just slightly, and turned back to the stove.