She had one hand still on the canvas when the shadow by the off-side wheel stood up out of the shadow of the wheel, and she knew the height of it, and the looseness of it, before the voice came.
"You walk soft for a laundress," Riggs said. "Office doors, though. Laundresses don't generally pick 'em."
She went for the seat box, where her pistol lay wrapped in oilcloth, knowing she was late, and got her fingers on the wood before his hand closed on her wrist — not hard, almost gentle, the way a man takes up a rein he owns. The second man came around the wagon tongue with a rifle carried low. One of the shapes from the vault room. She could smell saloon whiskey on him, and new money, or told herself she could.
"Now," Riggs said, pleasant. "We can do the rest of this loud, or we can do it mannerly. Mr. Pruitt's a mannerly man."
She let go of the seat box. There would be other arithmetic later; this sum was already added. "You followed the lamp in the office."
"I followed the laundress." He took the pistol out of the box himself, weighed it, smiled at its short barrel. "Run all over town today, that woman did. Folded shirts for half of Cerro Blanco. Funny thing — nobody'd ever seen her before yesterday, and a town this size knows its laundresses." He turned her wrist loose and stepped back, courteous as a dance caller. "Walk ahead of me, Anna. Mind the dark."
Pruitt was waiting in the office with the lamp lit high and the route book squared on his desk like a place setting. He rose when she came in — rose, in his own office, at two in the morning, for a prisoner — and Jo understood, watching him, that the courtesy was the cruelest tool he owned and he knew precisely how it cut.
"Miss Hartley." He said it without triumph, almost with relief, the way a man sets down a weight. "Wells Fargo's own. I confess I had it narrowed to you or the schoolteacher, and the schoolteacher can't shoot." He gestured at a chair. She stayed standing. "As you like. — You've read my book, I expect. And heard my vault. I won't insult either of us by asking."
"Then I'll save you the asking about the box. Sealed company property, opened at midnight, paying road agents in the dark. Your clerk writes nothing, Mr. Pruitt. But he saw."
"Clerks see what keeps them fed." He sat, folded his hands. "Here is the shape of the morning, since you'll want to plan your part. At first light the deputy marches Mr. Mercer out for transfer to Las Cruces — papers in order, witnesses in the yard, everything clean. You'll be brought out with him. Conspirators travel together. At the wagon, a strap will fail. A horse will shy. And you two poor desperate people will run for the alley like the guilty thing you're painted — and my men, doing their plain duty, will stop you. It's a sad story. The camp will tell it for a week, and then the camp will go back to work, and this line will run quiet for the first time in a year."
"The Marshal—"
"—is a day out, if he's coming at all, and the wire to Las Cruces has proven unreliable of late." He smiled then, and she saw the whole man in it. "Roads, too. Things fall on roads."
They bound her wrists in front with a harness strap — not tight enough to mark, he instructed; marks ask questions — and locked her in the storeroom off the office, with a bucket and a drift of old waybills for furniture. The window was shuttered and nailed on the inside, the way this country nailed everything against the wind. The key turned. His steps went away unhurried, a man going to a good bed before a busy morning.
Jo sat down on the waybills and set to work on the strap with her teeth, patient as water. She got it loose enough to hurt and no looser, and in the end she let it be — a strap she could slip at the right second was worth more than a strap on the floor behind a locked door. She tried the shutter once anyway, shoulder and bound hands together, and the nails held like they'd been driven by the wind itself; she tried the door with her weight and felt the lock laugh at her through the wood. So. The room was a fact. Facts could be worked around or waited out, and she had never once in her life been beaten by the second kind. She leaned her head back against the storeroom wall and did the only work left to her.
Eighty-one two-oh-four. Eighty-one two-seventeen. Eighty-one two-thirty-three. Eighty-one two-forty-six. Eighty-one two-fifty-nine.
She said them in order, the way her instructor at the agency had drilled her, a face to each number and a place to each face, until the fear under her ribs had somewhere to sit down. Outside the shutter the yard began, very faintly, to wake: a mule stamping, harness bells trying one note, a man's voice calling for coffee. First light was coming up the road like a creditor.
One breath of open air, she promised herself, in a yard full of witnesses. That's all I need. One breath, and I'll spend it shouting.
Chapter 24 — The Cut Wire
The telegraph sounder lived in the depot office on the other side of the jail wall, and for two nights Gid had fallen asleep to it the way a man falls asleep to rain — clicks and pauses, the whole wire world talking through Cerro Blanco in a language of sparks. In the small hours of the third night it stopped mid-sentence, and the silence it left woke him cleaner than a gunshot would have.