Gid's wagon stood where they'd parked it, canvas down, the team mules asleep in the corral beyond. She put her hand flat on the wagon bed as she passed — habit, or prayer — and felt the edge of the gray blanket under the canvas, folded neat as she had left it. Under the blanket again by daybreak, she thought, or not under it at all. Then the office.
Pruitt's door lock was a good one and she took her time, feeling for the pins the way you'd feel for a pulse. It gave on the third try with a sound no louder than a knuckle cracking. Inside: ink, dust, lamp oil, the smell of a man who had smoked cigars in this room for a decade while other men died on his schedules. She set the saucer on the desk, lit the tallow, cupped it down to a coin of light.
The route book was where greed always keeps a thing — close. Bottom drawer, locked. The hairpin went to work again and the drawer sighed open, and there it was: black leather, swollen fat with a year of schedules, the clerk's fair hand ruling the columns and Pruitt's own writing crawling down the margins like something that lived there.
She read fast and memorized faster. Dates. Roads. Cargo values, exact to the dollar, for runs no outsider should have been able to price. Crosses in the margins — and the robbed runs all wore crosses, every one. Worse, three runs yet to roll wore them too, dated ahead, the ink dark and certain. These were not records. They were orders. Hold for the 14th. Value firm. R. to the pass. Her finger went slower. Two years back, a stage run, Las Cruces to Cerro Blanco, wore a cross and a notation in that same hand: escort light. She had heard a man say that driver's name exactly once, in the dark, in a voice like gravel settling, and she sat a moment with her hand flat on the page before she did her job — which was to count the crosses, fix the dates in her memory, and put the book back so precisely that August Pruitt would swear on his mother's grave it had never breathed air.
She was easing the drawer to when the yard door of the vault room — beyond the office, through the connecting door left an inch ajar — took a key.
Light first, then Pruitt's voice, genial as Sunday. "—won't take a minute, son. Hold the lamp steady."
Jo pinched the tallow dead between finger and thumb and went behind the office door with her back to the wall and her heart going like a drum in a parade.
The vault clerk was a narrow young man with spectacles and the stunned look of a clerk woken at midnight by the man who signs his pay. He held the lamp high. Pruitt worked the vault, then an inner box, and Jo, through the inch of door, saw the sealed strongbox off Gid's wagon come open under Pruitt's hands, the seal broken neat as surgery. A sealed list lay inside atop the bills. Pruitt lifted it out, looked at it, and set it back without breaking its wafer — evidence he still meant to use, not destroy.
"Count it out to them," he said, to two shapes beyond her sight, road men by the smell of horse and old sweat. "Half now. The rest after the yard work, when the transfer's done and done clean." Bills whispered, hand to hand. One of the shapes laughed once. The clerk's hand shook so that the lamplight shook with it.
"Mr. Pruitt." The boy's voice cracked on it. "That box is sealed company property. It's wrote in the book as sealed—"
"Then unsee it, son." Kindly. Terribly kindly. "Write nothing. A man who writes nothing can be wrong about nothing, and there's a raise in that for a clerk who understands the freight business." A pause. "Do you understand the freight business?"
"…Yes, sir."
"Good boy."
The vault sighed shut. Bolts went home. The yard door locked behind them, and boots crossed toward the saloon's last light. Jo stood in the dark with her memorized pages and her memorized numbers lining up in her head like soldiers who had waited two years to be called — eighty-one two-oh-four, eighty-one two-seventeen — and counted to three hundred before she breathed easy.
She was at the office door, hand raised to the latch, when boots came back across the yard — one set, unhurried — and stopped outside. A key worried the lock, turned, withdrew. The door moved a finger's width against her palm and held: still barred by her weight and the latch she'd thrown. Through the wood, close enough to sour the air, Tobe Riggs breathed, listened, and laughed once, softly, at nothing.
"Suit yourself," he said to the empty dark, and went away whistling toward the saloon.
Jo counted to three hundred again. She slipped the latch, eased out, pulled the door to until the lock clicked, and crossed the yard in the shadow of the freight sheds with the book's ghost riding her shoulder and her heart finally slowing.
The wagon stood quiet in its pool of dark. She laid her hand on the canvas, and under it her fingers found the folded gray blanket, and she let herself — one breath's worth — believe the night was done with her.
Chapter 23 — Taken
The wagon had been her country for three days of road, and she went to it the way a fox goes to earth — without thinking, which was the mistake she would be charging herself for the rest of the night.