Infamous Read Online Free PDF Page B

effortlessly rising and starting to pace from one end of the tiny room to the other and back again. “Youmight also want to point out that Quinn was a lousy shot. He couldn’t hit the side of a barn, even if he was standing inside of the damn thing, firing off a cannon.”
    “Jamie Gallagher’s death was documented only by Silas Quinn, and by people who’d heard about it
from
Silas Quinn.” A.J. sat forward, on the edge of the couch. “The marshal was pretty good at telling tall tales.”
    Alison laughed—a short burst of delight. “In other words, you’re saying Silas Quinn was a liar.”
    “Silas Quinn was an asshole,” Jamie interjected, “but we can go with liar for now.”
    “According to my great-grandfather,” A.J. said evenly, trying to ignore the increasingly agitated ghost, “Quinn never caught up with him and Melody in the desert, after they left Jubilation, so yeah. That would make him a pretty big liar.”
    “The man was filth,” Jamie said. “A ruthless, nasty, ugly piece of excrement.”
    Alison couldn’t keep her amusement off her face as she stood up, unaware that she was neatly blocking Jamie’s path. “So I’m supposed to take the word of a man who kidnapped and murdered another man’s wife? Over the American West’s most well-known hero?”
    “A walking turd, he was,” Jamie said, pulling up short to avoid going directly through her. “Conniving and cruel. Plus, he smelled bad. Didn’t bathe often enough.” He examined Alison’s face from his up-close vantage point, then glanced back at A.J. “She
is
oddly attractive for such a tall woman, isn’t she?”
    “Yes,” A.J. said, answering both of them. “You have to wonder about the fact that no one besides Quinn ever saw Jamie’s body. Or Melody’s, for that matter.”
    “Because there were no bodies,” Jamie said. “She’s a little too skinny, but those legs must be a mile long. Gotta love that, especially when she wraps them around—”
    “Don’t,” A.J. stopped him, unwilling to hear anything having to do with sex come out of his gramps’s mouth. But of course, now Alison was looking at him oddly, so he quickly added, “Get me wrong. I appreciate the amount of researchthat you’ve obviously done, but much of what you included in your book can be traced back to a single source—Quinn himself. I know he said he buried them both up where he said he killed Jamie.”
    “It was near the Painted Desert, where he caught up with them,” Alison said, unaware that Jamie had given her physical appearance a hearty thumbs-up. “It was summer. There was no way he could bring the bodies all the way back. Not in that heat.”
    “Not to Jubilation,” A.J. said, resisting the urge to tell the ghost, who was still too close to her, to back off. “You’re right, that would’ve been too difficult. But there were other towns nearby. At a time when a strategy for keeping men from breaking the law was to drag the bodies of outlaws into town behind your horse …? A time when lawmen would display the men they’d killed, like heads on a pike on a castle wall, as a warning to stay in line …? When newspapers would pay good money to snap a picture of a dead outlaw like Billy the Kid …?”
    “Quinn was heartbroken,” she countered. “He stayed in the desert for months. His wife was dead—”
    “Nope,” A.J. said. “You got that wrong, too. Great-grandma certainly wasn’t anywhere close to dead.”
    “Nice!” Alison laughed. “I didn’t see
that
one coming. Although I probably should have.”
    “It’s true.”
    “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’re saying that Melody Quinn left her famous, important husband and ran off with some two-bit, vicious gunfighter.” Her sarcasm made it clear she was highly skeptical of A.J.’s claim. But he had to give her credit for hearing him out.
    “Vicious,” Jamie said. “That’s a good one. He was a vicious, conniving, stinking, walking turd. Thank you,