"Tomorrow I ride into Dry Fork," she said. "I've been treating Sheriff Shaw like a coward for three years because it was easier than asking what he's up against. I want to hear it from the man himself β what Garrett Sloan owns in that town, exactly, down to the last broom closet. And then, Mr. Stanton, I want to hear the rest of your story. All of it. I believe I've earned the part you've been keeping."
Chapter 11
Who Owns the Town
The sheriff's office in Dry Fork was a stone room behind the jail with a desk, a stove, and a rifle rack, and Emmett Shaw kept it the way a man keeps a church he is no longer sure he believes in: swept, orderly, and mostly empty. He was forty-eight, going soft around the middle, and he poured Maren coffee from a pot that had been on the stove since some previous geological era, and he did not insult her by asking what she wanted.
"Arson," he said. "You'll be wanting me to call it arson."
"I'd be obliged if the law would call a thing by its name once in a while, Emmett."
He turned the cup in his hands. "Old man Herrera saw a rider west of your place that night, going hard. That's all I've got, and Herrera's ninety and sees his dead wife on the porch of a Sunday. I rode out myself. Ground's all churned where half the town came to look at the ashes. If there was sign, it's under a hundred boot prints, including mine."
"Then let me help you," Maren said. "The rider came through my fence, which was cut from the inside β weeks ago, and again that night. He watered at my far trough. He's done it before. So have others. In the night, regular, for over a year. And Garrett Sloan gave me two months to sell, and the first month isn't out, and already my fence is cut, my watcher shot a man out of my rocks who was waiting to see if I'd be an accident, and my barn is ash with my winter feed in it. That's the shape of it, Emmett. Now you tell me yours."
Shaw was quiet a long time. Then he did something she had never seen him do: he got up and closed the office door, and sat back down, and spoke like a man confessing in his own church.
"Bank's Sloan's. Held your note since he bought the bank off the territorial receivers in seventy-nine β you knew that part. Hotel's his, through a cousin's name. The Gazette is his β bought the press and the editor's debts in the same week, smart as paint. The livery. The freight contract. Half the mortgages on Main Street, one way or another. And Judge Webbβ" Shaw rubbed his face. "Webb owed gambling money in Tucson in seventy-eight that would've ended him. It went away. Nobody's ever proved whose hand wiped that slate, but Cornelius Webb hasn't ruled against a Sloan interest in six years, and that isn't a coincidence, Maren, that's a lease."
"And you," she said, not unkindly. "What's he hold on you?"
"Nothing but the county," Shaw said. "My salary's voted by commissioners he owns. My jail's roof leaks on his say-so. If I arrest Garrett Sloan on your say-so, Webb releases him by dinner and I'm a laughingstock by Sunday, and the next sheriff is a man Sloan picks out of a hat. I am one aging man with a tin starβ" he heard himself and winced, and Maren realized he was quoting her own thoughts back at her, which meant the whole town thought them β "and I have been spending what authority I've got like a miser, on the small stuff, hoping somebody bigger than me would someday take an interest."
"Somebody bigger," Maren repeated. "Prescott. Federal."
"Prescott," Shaw agreed, "is a long way off, and Sloan has friends there too. But federal marshals don't take orders from Judge Webb, and they don't bank at his bank. It's the only road I see. It's also a road that starts with proof a federal judge can't wave away β not suspicions, not a widow's grief. Deeds. Names. Paper. Men caught in the act."
She thought of the iron box under her floorboards and said nothing about it, because Emmett Shaw was an honest man in a bought town, and the kindest thing she owned was not making him carry her secrets through streets where Garrett Sloan counted every conversation. But she left his office knowing the true inventory, and it was worse than she'd feared and better than she'd feared in the same breath: the law in Dry Fork was not corrupt. It was surrounded.