Chapter Twenty
He spotted Wilkes again about forty yards ahead, moving through the crowd toward the north exit.
Sam had been steering Evelyn toward the center of the fair, toward Foster's deputies, toward the plan they'd made.
The sensible plan. The plan that involved law and order and patience and every other thing Sam Cooper had agreed to because a woman had asked him to and because a sheriff had warned him against playing the lone hand.
He'd been following the plan for about ninety seconds, which turned out to be the exact duration of Sam Cooper's capacity for following plans when the man who'd murdered his parents walked through a crowd thirty yards from where he stood.
Wilkes moved along the far side of the aisle, dark coat, low hat, that deliberate stride Sam had been tracking across three territories and twenty years of sleepless nights.
He walked with the easy confidence of a man who believed he could appear and disappear at will—who'd spent decades proving himself right about that particular skill.
The sheer arrogance of a murderer strolling through a town fair while his victim's son watched from across the aisle lit a fuse in Sam's chest that burned straight through every promise he'd made to Foster, every word he'd given Evelyn, and every rational thought his brain tried to put between him and what happened next.
He let go of Evelyn's elbow and ran.
"Sam! Sam, don't, Sam!"
Her voice cut through the crowd noise behind him, sharp and scared, and he registered it the way he registered fence posts on a hard ride; a thing he passed without slowing.
He'd apologize later. He'd explain later.
Right now, twenty years of rage and grief and obsession had narrowed down to a single moving target in a dark coat, and every fiber of training Sam Cooper possessed was locked onto that target. It drove him forward.
He pushed through the crowd without ceremony, shouldering past a woman carrying a basket of eggs, knocking a display of leather goods sideways as he squeezed between two stalls.
People shouted as he shoved past. A man grabbed at his coat, and Sam tore free without looking back.
The Colt hung heavy on his hip, but he left it holstered because drawing a weapon in a crowd of families would bring Foster's deputies down on him before he reached Wilkes.
He needed to reach Wilkes. He needed to put his hands on this man before the ghost vanished again.
Wilkes turned a corner at the end of the stall row.
Sam reached the corner three seconds later and spotted him about fifteen yards ahead, still walking, still maintaining that measured pace.
The man hadn't run. He walked through this fair like a man out for a Sunday stroll while Sam Cooper burned through the crowd behind him, and the disparity of it made the fuse in his chest burn shorter.
He closed the distance in about ten strides, the last five at a dead run, grabbed Wilkes by the back of his coat collar, spun the man around, and shoved him backward into the frame of an empty stall. He pinned him against the post with one forearm across his chest.
The face. Up close, filling his vision. Angular jaw.
Nose crooked at the bridge where it had broken and healed wrong.
Dark eyes set deep under heavy brows, the same eyes Sam had seen in firelight twenty years ago while his parents' house burned.
The bounty poster sketch had captured the structure but missed the eyes.
The eyes held an intelligence the sketch couldn't render; a calculating patience that scanned Sam's face the way Sam scanned a trail, reading every piece of useful information.
"You and me got us some business, Wilkes."
The man looked at Sam's forearm pressing into his chest, then looked at Sam's face.
He didn't struggle or try to pull free. His body stayed loose against the stall post, relaxed in a way that told Sam more about the kind of man Amos Wilkes had become than any bounty poster could convey.
A man comfortable with violence didn't tense up when violence arrived.
He conserved his energy. He waited for the opening.
People had stopped moving around them. A circle began forming, drawn by the particular magnetism of two men locked together in a stance that promised trouble.
A woman pulled her children back while a man stepped forward, then thought better of it.
Voices murmured at the edges. Sam could feel the attention pressing in from all sides, but the crowd occupied approximately zero percent of his processing capacity because the face in front of him occupied all of it.
"I reckon you know who I am." Sam pressed harder against Wilkes's chest, leaning his weight into the forearm. "I reckon you know right well why I'm standin' here."
"I know who you are, Mr. Cooper." Wilkes's voice came out steady and conversational, but pitched low enough for a private exchange in the middle of a public spectacle.
"You favor your daddy somethin' fierce. I spotted the resemblance the first time I laid eyes on you in town.
Same jaw. Same eyes. Same damn fool temper, if I'm any judge. "
The mention of his father sent a jolt through Sam that started in his spine and radiated outward through his arms into his fists. His grip on Wilkes's coat tightened until the fabric creaked.
"You don't get to speak on my father, you hear me? You don't get to say his name or think about his face or mention him in any manner, because you took him from me, you son of a bitch. You took 'em both."
"Took 'em?" Wilkes tilted his head, studying Sam with that patient, calculating look.
"Boy, I ain't took nothin' from you. What happened to your folks was business.
Bad business, I'll grant you that much; business what went sideways in a way I never intended, but business all the same.
Your daddy made hisself a choice that night.
He could've stepped aside, but he chose to fight. That there's on him, not on me."
The fuse reached the powder.
Sam hit him. He drove his right fist into Wilkes's jaw with everything he'd been carrying for twenty years.
The grief and the fury. The memory of pulling Sarah through a burning window—while his mother screamed, the smoke poured black against the sky, and the cold ground waited where he'd dig their graves with a pickaxe at ten years old.
All of it went into that punch—every ounce of pain—and Wilkes's head snapped sideways, cracking against the stall post behind him.
The crowd gasped, and several people cried out.
Sam pulled Wilkes off the post and threw him forward into the open aisle.
Wilkes stumbled but caught himself, turning to face Sam, and for the first time his expression changed.
The mask of calculated patience cracked just enough to show what lived underneath it, and what lived underneath turned out to be amusement.
The man wiped blood from his split lip with the back of his hand, and grinned at Sam Cooper with red-stained teeth.
"There he is." Wilkes spat blood into the dirt between them. "There's the boy I been waitin' on. I was wonderin’ if you had any of your daddy's fight in you, Cooper, or if you was all bark and no bite. Glad to see the apple don't fall far from the tree."
Sam swung again. Wilkes ducked it, faster than a man his age had any right to move, and came up inside Sam's reach with an elbow that caught Sam across the cheekbone and rattled his vision.
Sam grabbed Wilkes's coat with both hands and drove his forehead into the bridge of Wilkes's already broken nose.
Cartilage crunched. Wilkes staggered backward.
The crowd scattered away from the fight, the circle widening as people pulled back. A man hollered for the sheriff. A woman screamed. Children got scooped up and carried off. The fair had stopped being a fair and had become a spectacle—the kind that turned ugly fast.
Sam pressed forward. He threw Wilkes into a stall table, scattering goods across the ground and jars and fabric crashing into the dirt. Wilkes hit the table edge with his lower back, grunted, and came back swinging with a right cross that connected solidly with Sam's temple.
He saw stars. Brief but real. A burst of white across his field of vision that lasted about half a second before his training brought him back.
Sam had taken harder hits from bigger men, meaner men, and more desperate men.
The difference with this particular man punching him in the head at a town fair came down to this: Sam wanted to be hit.
He wanted the pain because the pain justified the violence, and each blow Wilkes landed permitted Sam to hit back harder.
Hitting this man, this specific man—the man who'd stood in the smoke of his parents' burning home giving orders while a ten-year-old boy dragged his four-year-old sister through a window—constituted the single most satisfying physical act of Sam Cooper's entire life.
He grabbed Wilkes by the throat with his left hand and drove his right fist into the man's ribs. Once, twice, a third time. Wilkes doubled over. Sam pulled him upright by the coat collar and hit him in the jaw again, sending him stumbling backward into the aisle.
"Somebody fetch the sheriff!" a man's voice from the crowd urged. "These boys is fixin' to kill each other!"
Two men stepped forward to intervene. Sam shoved one away without looking. The second grabbed Sam's arm. Sam tore free and turned back to Wilkes just in time to see the gun.
He’d pulled a small, snub-nosed revolver from inside his coat where he'd kept it concealed the whole time.
The barrel came up fast, and he aimed it at Sam's chest from about five feet.
Wilkes's face had gone flat, the amusement and patience gone, replaced by the empty efficiency of a man who'd made his decision and intended to follow through.
Sam lunged for the gun.