"Ike Sorrell," Caleb said. "Of all the men in this valley, you picked the worst creek to fall in."
Sorrell looked up at him out of the mud, and then past him, at Tasin on the paint horse, and at Tess with the rifle. "Wren," he said, with the air of a man playing a card he has been saving. "Before you decide anything β I know things you need. I know where Voss keeps everything."
"Bring him to the kitchen," Caleb said. "Mind his leg. And somebody put a kettle on. This is going to take some time."
Chapter 18
: What Sorrell Knows
They bound Ike Sorrell to a kitchen chair with clothesline and set his broken leg straight on a second chair with a folded quilt beneath it, and if Sorrell noticed the contradiction in being tied and tended by the same hands in the same minute, he was wise enough, for once, to keep his observations to himself. The kitchen smelled of smoke and strong coffee.
"You fired on a judge," Caleb said. "You fired on Tasin. Tonight you came with men who burned my barn. Tell me why the next words out of your mouth shouldn't be to a marshal, from inside a cell."
"Because a cell is where Voss wants me," Sorrell said promptly. He had the quickness of a man who has rehearsed this conversation during a long, painful crawl through a creek. "And I can talk where it counts, Wren. I'm the only man alive who can, besides Voss himself." He tried to shift his leg, winced, and stilled. "Nine years I rode for that man. Nine years of his dirty work, and tonight he sent me to burn a house with children in itβ"
"One child," Tess said from the stove. "And she's the one who'll shoot you if you lie to us, so I'd not dress it up."
Sorrell looked at her and, to his credit, did not smile. "Fair enough."
Tasin sat by the door in Samuel's old chair, his shoulder freshly bound with strips of Tess's best sheet, saying nothing. His silence was not absence β it was weight.
"Talk, then," Caleb said. "Start with what matters. Not the letters. I already have letters."
That landed; he saw it land. Sorrell's eyes flicked to the desk in the front room, visible through the doorway, and away again, and Caleb understood that Voss's right hand had known for years what Samuel Wren kept in his father's desk β had perhaps been sent, once, to look for it, and failed to find the secret place.
"The letters are talk," Sorrell said. "Talk can be denied, burned, called a forgery by better liars than me. What Voss can't deny is his own books." He leaned forward as far as the clothesline allowed. "The lease β the territorial lease he waves at judges. You know it's forged?"
"I believe it. Believing isn't proving."
"It's drawn on a form the territory stopped using before the war, with a seal copied off a genuine document. But the real proof is better than that. Voss keeps his own private lease book β the true one, where his clerks enter what's bought, what's stolen, and what's only papered over. Every parcel in this valley, Wren, with a mark beside it saying which. And the transfer papers for your ranch."
Caleb went still. "My ranch hasn't been transferred."
"No. But the papers are drawn, signed by men who'll swear they witnessed your mark, dated ahead. I've seen the folder." Sorrell's voice dropped. "It's in the safe room behind his office in Paloma. Brick room, steel door, no window but the skylight the builders put in for light before the company bought the building. The whole file's there β lease book, transfers, a bribery file with names and amounts that'd make your letters look like Sunday school."
"The watch?" Caleb asked.
"One man, nights. Old Pegram, deaf in one ear, sleeps more than he wakes since his wife died. Rounds at ten and two with a lantern, whether he's awake for them or not." Sorrell shrugged with his unbound shoulder. "I know because I set the watch, most nights. There's my value, Wren. I'm the map to the room."
"And your price?"
"My price is I don't hang." Sorrell looked, for the first time, directly at Tasin. "And I don't get given to β I don't get left somewhere quiet where Voss's friends can finish what the creek started. A marshal. A trial. My testimony against his word, and whatever the law gives me for the rest, I'll take. That's a better bargain than he's offering me, which is a grave with no stone on it, and we both know it."
The room was quiet a while. The coffee pot ticked on the stove.