By the Neck Read online

  Instinct drove Rollie to spin, to face the source of this sudden flowering of pain as his left hand shoved away the hanging coat, then grabbed at the holstered Schofield. But he was already addled enough that his gun never cleared the stiff leather sheath. He made it halfway around as the knife slipped free of his back a third time and plunged in a fourth, into the meat of his left thigh.

  The spin lacked strength. Hot pain bloomed inside him with eye-blink speed. As Rollie’s slow dervish spin gave way to collapse, he saw a dim specter—a thin, dark, wavering flame drawn upward. Red, not from rage but from spattering blood, washed before him, over him, becoming a choking black curtain.

  Rollie “Stoneface” Finnegan would not get to taste his sweet pecan pie and hot coffee.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The room smelled of camphor and unwashed hair. But the worst stink was the base smell, the one that would not leave, no matter the washing, the cologne, or the window he insisted stay open, all day, all night, despite Nurse Cherborn’s constant underminings.

  It was that smell he could not disguise that haunted Rollie Finnegan the most. It reminded him of his father at the end. It was the stink of old man. Problem was, Rollie didn’t think of himself as old. He was not a young man, but it’d be a damn long time before he was ancient. At least he’d felt that way before some gutless being knifed him in an alley two months before.

  As long as he had the Schofield within reach, which he’d made certain of as soon as he regained his senses a week into this mess, Rollie would do his best to keep the window open and the nurse from treating him like a gimped old man. A stinking, gimped old man. That morning, he’d had to reinforce his intent where the window was concerned by cocking his pistol.

  “Mr. Finnegan, you are impossible.” The nurse rested her dimpled knuckles on her broad waist and tried to rile him with her sharp blue eyes, fierce specks in her doughy face. It didn’t work.

  “Not yet,” he said. “But I’m getting there.”

  “The fresh air could well set you back a week or even two, if it doesn’t kill you outright.”

  He stared at her. She stared back and after a full minute, he gave up, looked out the window at the blue April sky. The hard stare had always worked with his captives, why not with this dress-wearing devil?

  “You have the best part of a month, I believe, before you will be fit enough to venture out-of-doors.”

  He didn’t bother responding. She was almost done for the day anyway. What good would another argument with her do? Besides, he felt he owed her some sort of obedience, at least for a time. She’d nursed him the entire spell, from the day he’d been brought back to his rooms after a week in the doctor’s office.

  Without Nurse Cherborn, Rollie knew he’d have been dead months ago. He also thought she’d taken a shine to him. Otherwise why would a knowledgeable woman such as herself, all but a full-bore doctor, despite the fact she was a woman, tend him all this time for the paltry weekly sum he could pay?

  Weeks in, Rollie saw how quickly his medical and nursing bills were gnawing through his modest wad of banked savings he’d managed to amass over the years of tracking criminals in and out of all manner of foul deed and nasty last-stand gun down.

  It hardly seemed necessary, but he’d dictated a letter and had it sent to the boss requesting the agency cover his medical and nursing fees while he convalesced. He’d been surprised they hadn’t stepped in to help him sooner. He explained that if he had good care he would be able to return to work sooner than with poor care. The boss had not agreed with him in saying he had been attacked because of his work. Instead, the skinflint had said it had happened while Rollie was off the clock, that it had doubtless been a random mugging.

  How can a man be mugged when his wallet and six-gun are left behind, untouched? Rollie stewed over this for a couple of days, and was in the midst of a second letter to the boss when a messenger delivered a package. It contained a fancy-worded document that amounted to a brief and unconvincing “thank you for your service” note. The package also contained a small wooden box. Rollie opened it and saw a silver pocket watch nested in a bed of green silk. He lifted it free and clicked it open. Inside the cover was inscribed with his name, followed by the words Indispensable, steadfast, and true.

  “Apparently not,” said Rollie, not for the last time, and clicked shut the watch.

  He would later credit his recuperation not wholly to the most-deserving Nurse Cherborn and her ample bosom that had threatened to suffocate him each time she fluffed his pillows and adjusted his sheets, but ultimately to Allan Pinkerton, whose miserly treatment of him left Rollie ticked off, near broke, and more determined to live than he’d been since he woke in the doctor’s office, bandaged like an Egyptian mummy and too stiff and sore to move anything but his eyes.

  And so it was in late April 1881 that Rollie “Stoneface” Finnegan, former top operative for Pinkerton Detective Agency, found himself pacing the largest of the three rooms he could afford for less than a week longer before resorting to asking favors, something he had never done and would never do. One, two, three and a half paces forward, turn in a wide arc on the board-stiff left leg, lean on the sturdy oak cane, one, two, three and a half paces back toward the door, for hours a day. His left lung whistling in time, and increasing in intensity and pitch, with his efforts.

  While he paced he formed a plan, one step at a time, as methodical as he had ever been in dogging suspects and criminals. One clue at a time, one thought on another, then another, and by the end of the day, two days before his rent was due, Rollie had a solid plan. The newspapers had helped him as much as the nurse and Pinkerton had.

  He hadn’t let Nurse Cherborn shave his face as she had intended, each damn week. He’d let his beard grow rather than risk a stranger free rein with a razor blade over his face. Rollie had made a lot of enemies in his years as an agent, or as Pinkerton liked to call them, “his operatives.” Rollie wasn’t about to trust anyone any more than he had to. That was the ironic part of it all. He was beholden to strangers for saving him and nursing him back to life even as he plotted shrugging them off.

  Before he’d been able to pace, he’d spent most of his time in bed and then seated, slumped, in his wingback chair, wheezing and coughing, with that eerie whistle leaking through his parted lips. He found he could vary the pitch of the sound with his throat and mouth. It was a game he played when he’d wearied himself of raking over again and again in his mind the savaging he’d endured in the alley. So many people over the years who swore harm to him should they ever again taste freedom. Who was it? Or had it been someone new? Then why not rob him?

  The Denver City constabulary had come up with no clues, no answers. He’d read each edition of the Denver City Bulletin during his convalescence, and any mention of the attack had dried up after the first week.

  A most odd slice of news that at first had incensed him, then had brought a grim smile to his mouth was his obituary, a short, tight paragraph with no flowered phrases, and only the barest mention of his occupation. Erroneous information from the doctor? A drunken mistake by a hack reporter? Did it really matter?

  If Denver thought him dead, he could recover and reinvent himself somewhere else, anywhere else. As anyone else. And as much as the notion beckoned him, the one piece of such a plan he would not indulge in was giving himself a new name. He had been Rollie Finnegan since birth, and if the name was good enough for his sainted mother and red-faced father to bestow on him, by God, he’d carry it with pride . . . beyond the grave or come what may.

  With a day left on the rent of his rooms, he rummaged through his meager belongings, packed two old canvas war bags, and cleaned and oiled his Schofield, a two-shot derringer, a Colt Dragoon, and a Winchester repeater.

  If a stranger gazed on him they would see a medium-height-to-tall man, not overly muscled, but exuding confidence and solidity, despite the oak cane. He sported a full thatch of peppered hair, heavily silvered, and what was visible of his
face beneath the pepper-and-silver beard was lined, weathered from years on the trail. A full handlebar mustache, his one indulgence in daily vanity, rode proud beneath a sharp nose, nostrils always flared, as if forever sniffing out the truth in a matter.

  He had dressed once more in his favored work togs—black stovepipe boots, into which were tucked striped woolen trousers. He wore a short canvas work coat with a green corduroyed collar and ample pockets in and out, a tobacco-brown leather vest, and leather braces over a dark blue, low-collar work shirt. He topped it all with his sweat-stained fawn Boss of the Plains, tugged low. Inner pockets held various items including a Barlow folding knife, his two-shot hideout gun, an apple-bowl briar pipe, matches, and a leather tug-string sack of tobacco.

  Given the limp and the peppery beard, stable owner Pete Buddrell, busy mucking out stalls, didn’t recognize the man who shuffled in that day of April, working a cane, and followed by a stout lad lugging two war bags. The man paid the lad, who dropped the bags, took the coins, and bolted back out the big double doors.

  “What can I do for ya?”

  The stranger looked about him. He seemed to be sniffing in the rank smells of the stable then turned to Buddrell. “Rollie Finnegan’s big gray.”

  Buddrell leaned on his fork, nudged his hat back. “Oh, nah. He’s dead.”

  “The horse or the man?”

  Buddrell looked at the stranger a long moment. “Both.”

  The stranger walked closer, into the stall and within an arm’s reach. “Nope.”

  Buddrell couldn’t see the face, but something about the man was unnerving. He swallowed, ran a tongue tip over his dry lips. “Was told he’d died. Figured—”

  “Nope.” The man raised his eyes, looked into Buddrell’s.

  “But . . . you’re dead!”

  “Yep.”

  “You . . . you’ll want a horse, then.”

  “Yep.”

  Within half an hour, Rollie rolled away from the stable on the seat of a rugged little one-horse work trap, his bags lashed in the back, the entire affair pulled by a fine gray, a close second for old Tip, who he’d come to learn had been long sold. That pained him. He and Tip had shared many adventures. He hoped the old lad had fared better than Rollie himself had.

  Saddling up was not a possibility for him yet. Might never be again, but he reckoned the fairly new wagon was decent trade for his good saddle that Buddrell had also sold off. Rollie had been surprised to learn that the money he’d sent to the stable months before for upkeep of his horse and tack had gone to pay some mysterious bill for expenses accrued. By whom or for what, he never learned.

  He could have pushed the matter more, but he’d come out of it pretty well, considering the situation, what with the horse and the wagon. It felt to him like one more sign that the past was truly a dead thing and the future was his only concern from here on.

  Yes, this is fine with me, thought Rollie “Stoneface” Finnegan as he rolled down Denver City’s Quigley Street. He threaded a northwesterly route toward another discovery he’d made while reading each and every word of the newspapers, day after day, while he healed and grew stronger in body, harder in mind, and lighter in wallet.

  His destination . . . Idaho Territory’s Sawtooth Range and a little raw knob of a place mentioned once as an afterthought. Boar Gulch. Said to have promise of gold, though with little proof as yet. It had been referred to as brand new, wide open, raw, and rank. And that sounded, to Rollie Finnegan the right spot for holing up, healing up, and rebuilding his savings with easy placer pickings.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It had taken most of the first day moving northwestward from Denver City for Rollie to ease off on swiveling his head around every few seconds as if he were about to be set upon by road agents at every turn. Even on the flats, where turns were scarce, he had to resist the compulsion to scan the vista in all directions.

  He’d always been a cautious sort while on the road, but the attack in the alley peeled away whatever skin of chance he might have possessed. He didn’t mind. It would be one frozen-over day in the devil’s stomping ground before he was caught unawares again.

  This journey was different from any he’d been on in recent years. No one who’d done something they should not have done was ahead of him being dogged by him. There was no wrong to right, no one to chase, but there was a place to get to.

  He made camp that first night not far off the roadway, but tucked behind a cluster of boulders as big as a full-size buckboard and stippled with pines. He settled back with a tin cup of hot coffee dosed with a modest splash of Kentucky’s finest. Rollie wasn’t the sort to second-guess himself, but as he ruminated on the day, adjusting himself from one leaning position to sitting to pacing and wincing each time he moved, he began to reconsider his plan.

  What did he really know about Boar Gulch? And did he really think he was going to set to digging once he got there? He pondered as he sipped and, enjoying the warm trail the whiskey-tinged coffee left down his gullet, he added one more wee splash to the cup. He knew it wouldn’t have mattered what the brief article had been about—hell, it could have illustrated the virtues of being a sea captain or a saloon dancer—well, maybe not a dancer. He didn’t have the legs for that anymore. Rollie laughed, a slight, wheezing sound, nonetheless a laugh, surprising himself. Humor was something he hadn’t indulged in in a coon’s age. It felt good.

  Yes sir, he had chosen an odd path to follow, but once he set his mind to a thing, he didn’t like to give up on it until he’d dogged it to its end, killed it, or it killed him. Then why, he wondered, wasn’t he more concerned with tracking down whatever vermin had nearly laid him low?

  “Horse. You have an opinion?”

  The gray beast did not respond. It stood hip-shot, fed, watered, and dozing a few yards away, no doubt enjoying the dancing, reflected heat off the boulders around them.

  Rollie sighed. “I agree. I have made stronger decisions.” But he knew if he gimped his way around Denver City as he was, he’d end up dead for certain. The same gut feeling he’d relied on so many times over the years in tracking miscreants had told him back in his rooms that it was time to shed that town like a snake sheds its skin. It had been a home base of sorts for years, though he’d never intended to reside in a city, and never really considered himself a resident of that place.

  Heck, he was hardly ever there anyway. He’d made no time for the cultivation of friends, save for the acquaintances he’d made at the tobacco shop Dilbert and Dilbert on the corner. Twin brothers who bickered something fierce somehow managed their shop together. Same for Tully, the barkeep at his namesake pub.

  And Hazel, of Hazel’s Hash House, where he took a good portion of his meals when he was in town. Now that was a woman he could have loved, did love, in fact, for her heavenly cooking. And that pecan pie. If she hadn’t been thirty years his senior . . .

  Rollie smiled at the memory of the robust little Scotswoman, barking orders to her two kitchen staff, both equally as plump and red-faced as Hazel herself, and in no danger of losing their positions, though it was promised by ol’ Hazel on an hourly basis. The old bird loved the girls as if they were her own, and was teaching them through example, no doubt, the skills of her culinary artistry.

  He considered the thin meal he’d prepared for himself—a toothsome repast of elk jerky, two corn cakes that needed soaking in water to make palatable, and a short can of sliced pears in syrup. He promised himself he’d do better the next day. His first day on the trail had been a bone-jarring ramble, and he was relieved to climb down out of the wagon for the final time.

  It had been an hour sooner than he wanted to stop, but the campsite looked ideal. Far enough off the road he’d hear anybody doing anything other than traveling on by. He wasn’t so sure they’d see him anyway, as the site was higher by several yards than the road.

  The gray didn’t appear to be bothered one way or the other by the day’s travel. He was solid, Rollie would give the horse
that. He intended to get to know him as he had his last. Only then would he work up a name for him. Seemed fair.

  He rubbed a hand in his thick beard, scratching his chin. He’d never been much for beards, but this one suited him. At least for the time being. It did make him feel as if he were trying to hide from the world, trying to disguise himself.

  “Bah,” he said and indulged in a long yawn, stretching one arm out, then the other as far as his wounds would permit. He wondered if there would ever be a day when he’d not be reminded of them with each breath, each movement. He tipped back the last of the cupful, banked the fire, and inched off his boots. That took two minutes, stiff as he was and with his wounds tender. He laid his Winchester by his right side, his Schofield at his left, and pulled the brown wool blanket up under his chin, rested one hand on each gun, and bid that day good-bye.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Two weeks after he began his trek from Denver City, Rollie Finnegan clucked his tongue and jostled the lines to let the gray gelding recently named Cap, short for Captain, know it was time for one last, albeit long, climb. They’d met a grubby man carrying a spade a few miles back. To Rollie’s question about Boar Gulch, the grizzled fellow had nodded and pointed with a jerk of his chin back up the rutted narrow trail disappearing behind him into the trees. Not a talker.

  Rollie had wanted to quiz him about the mine camp. He’d also like to have known why the man was walking away from the place with nothing more to his name than a near-useless shovel and clothes that were more hole than cloth.

  The brief newspaper article had used the words burgeoning and bustling, but Rollie had seen enough such spots to know it was likely more a cluster of tents (one housing an enterprising woman or two) and crude log shacks housing overworked rock hounds whose hopefulness outweighed their good sense. A tent saloon with rotgut gargle and a plank laid across a couple of crates seemed probable, too. It was about as far from what he’d already begun to think of as his “old” life as Rollie had been in some time. And so help him, he was looking forward to it.