How?
Motivation, Mayfield assumed, pushing his way to the front of the men staring down at Jesse Turpin.
Conn Sullivan was motivated. He was a man on a mission of vengeance. And he was clearly every bit as deadly as folks said.
Which rankled Mayfield.
Because this was his job, not Sullivan’s. He’d warned him to stay out of it.
And now, there was a dead man lying on the floor. And not just any man. One of the men Mayfield was hunting.
One of the onlookers, a burly fellow a few inches taller than Mayfield, gave him a surly look and elbowed another man.
They started to back away from the scene.
“Wait,” Mayfield said, locking his gaze on the man who’d spoken. “You witnessed what happened here?”
“I didn’t see nothing,” the man said, surlier than ever, “lawdog.”
The way he spat the last word, it sounded like a challenge.
Mayfield stepped forward, grabbed a fistful of the man’s black hair, and slammed his face into the bar.
He felt the big man go loose in the knees and released him.
The man staggered but caught himself against the bar. When he looked up and blinked at Mayfield with an open mouth, a lineof blood draining down between his eyes from the fresh gash in his forehead, all the fight had clearly gone out of him.
His buddy whined, “Hey now, mister. There’s no reason to get rough. Old Marlon, he just don’t like lawmen is all. That ain’t a crime, is it?”
“What happened here was a crime,” Mayfield said, gesturing toward the dead man on the floor. “A crime called murder.”
“It wasn’t no murder,” another man said. “They both wanted it. The one who killed him could have shot him straightaway, but he gave him a chance. Let him talk and everything. They both got off shots. It’s just the tall one hit the mark. More than once.”
Others nodded.
“Said this fella killed his brother,” another said, joining the retelling.
“Said he was gonna kill some other fellas that helped this one,” yet another said.
Mayfield nodded. He had them now. His eyes panned the men volunteering information, and he knew they would tell him everything they knew.
But Mayfield was a man of principle, so he wanted to hear from Marlon to make sure the man had learned his lesson.
“Where did he go?”
“West,” Marlon said, wiping blood from his face. “The fellas he’s hunting are holed up in Mercy Ridge.”
Mayfield glanced at the others, who verified this claim with nodding heads, talking over each other, telling him about the place and how to get there.
Mayfield thought about the big, white horse he’d left at the livery. It was a good animal. Sturdy, dependable. But he’d just ridden it sixty miles in two days.
“I need a horse,” he announced. “Now.”
49
Conn rode out the old wagon road at a clip but slowed the gelding to a walk when he saw the sign up ahead.
Beyond the sign, Mercy Ridge, a long-forgotten ghost town in a land pocked with abandoned camps and towns and homes, clung shabbily to the mountain slope overlooking Coldwater Creek. Above the town, where men had once torn open the hillside, dreaming of silver, the half-collapsed mouth of the failed mine frowned down on the dead town, as if the mountain itself was passing judgment on men and dreams alike.
