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“What are you doing? Having a mass hallucination?” Chill challenged.

“Are you trying to be insulting?” Bow shot back.

Chill glanced at him. “You’re either hallucinating, or you’re still drunk, the four of you.”

I leaned into Chill’s space. “Slight problem with that, brother. Drunk or hallucinating, explain how we witnessed the same thing.”

Chill looked at me, and I saw the puzzlement cross his face. “Then you’re all yanking my chain,” he retorted.

“Yeah, I’ve got better things to do with my day than mess about pretending I’ve seen a ghost,” I snapped. With that, I headed into the clubhouse, Asgard on my heels. What on earth had I just seen?

Law

Bow seemed on edge when he arrived for his shift. He agitatedly began reorganising our files until I stopped him.

“What’s going on?” I demanded.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Bow banged the file on his desk and met my eyes.

Somewhat stunned by the question, I leaned my ass on the desk and rested my hands on it. Was my deputy asking me a trick question?

“Seriously, brother, do you?” Bow repeated.

“Honestly, I can’t say either way. We know there’re things out there we can’t explain, Aurora-Victoria, for one. Is there life after death? I hope so. Have I seen a full-on spirit? The answer is no, Bow.”

Bow stared, and I realised he was struggling to tell me something, and he was worried I might mock him.

“Just tell me.”

“On our jog this morning, Demon, Mare, Asgard, and me all witnessed a ghost.” Bow dropped his bombshell.

I could handle this in several ways; the first was to assume Bow was pulling my leg. Second, Bow and the others saw something they mistook for a ghost. The final option was to believe they’d seen a ghost, which I thought was freaking Bow out.

“Tell me what you saw.”

Bow held my eyes and described what he had seen. As he spoke, a feeling niggled at me. I pressed him for more details, then got up and walked down the hallway to our records office. In here, we kept all arrest records and criminal reports. We’d discovered, when the conversion was done, lots of old records dating back to when Merritt was first built.

Bow’s description jogged a memory.

I opened the filing cabinet and started going through the top drawer. I pulled out a file that held old wanted posters. Bow came closer, and so I began flicking through them. Finally, my hand landed on the one I’d been looking for.

“Is this the person you saw?”

Bow took it from me, and his eyes widened. “Is this some sort of setup, Law?”

“No,” I said emphatically.

Bow looked at me, put the wanted poster on the spare desk, and slid it toward me. I couldn’t decipher his expression. “Law, that’s him.”

“It says here his name is Michael Shaughnessy, otherwise known as Merritt Mike. He was wanted for murdering a miner. He had a three-hundred-dollar bounty on his head. Let’s check if the former sheriff ever caught him.” I turned around to the filing cabinet and pulled out the second drawer. Briskly searching, I found what I needed. I pulled it out and nodded for Bow to follow me back to our desks.

Once there, I opened the file and began reading through it, passing the pages to Bow. There wasn’t much in it—details on Merritt Mike’s early life, including siblings and parents. It mentioned his wife and son, and that he worked in the number one mine. Merit Mike lived hard—he enjoyed gambling, drinking, and fighting. That sounded about right for a man of those times.

“Here,” I said, passing Bow a sheet of paper. On it were details of the murder. Merritt Mike had beaten and then shot a miner to death for making comments about his wife. He then went on the run, hiding out in the Black Hills and avoiding justice for four years. Merit Mike was finally caught when he stumbled and broke his leg running from a dog. He was brought in and hanged in town.

“I don’t know what’s going on, boss, but that is who I saw this morning,” Bow insisted. “And Demon, Asgard and Mare will agree.”

“I believe you,” I said, because I did. Bow wasn’t messing about; he actually believed what he was saying.