Slocum and the Grizzly Flats Killers (9781101619216) Read Online Free PDF Page B

bitterness that put him on guard. “He killed my husband. Him and two other men. Or maybe there was more of ’em. Can’t rightly say.”
    â€œRobbery?”
    â€œSomething like that.”
    â€œHe was crazy as a bedbug. He killed your husband and stole what you owned?”
    â€œHim and others murdered my friends and Ike.”
    Slocum said nothing. She worked up the courage to keep talking, and he wasn’t sure why. Something had brought her to his room, but if the man responsible for murdering her husband was dead, what she thought to get from him was a poser.
    â€œYou have a name?”
    â€œMirabelle,” she said. “Mirabelle Comstock.” She almost choked on the name. Slocum introduced himself and then fell silent again.
    More often than not, folks spoke to fill a void. For his part, Slocum preferred silence. That was one reason he enjoyed traveling from one place to another alone, out on the range or in the mountains with only his horse and the wind as companions. Needless chatter bored him.
    â€œThere was at least three of them. I want you to find the other two that I know of.”
    â€œI’m not a killer for hire. That owlhoot forced my hand tonight. Otherwise, I would never have paid him a second glance.”
    â€œThen find who the other two are and I’ll do the chore.”
    â€œThis isn’t my fight. Tell the marshal.”
    â€œHe’s not reliable. I asked ’fore I came to you. Nobody in Grizzly Flats thinks much of Marshal Willingham.”
    â€œCan’t say I’d disagree either. Then find the sheriff and tell him.”
    â€œI don’t have any way of getting out of Grizzly Flats. I . . . I’m stuck here. Besides, where would I go? Ike was all the family I had. Him and the others were my friends.” Mirabelle looked off into the distance, focused on something beyond the wall with its peeling wallpaper. “They were Ike’s friends, but I got along all right with Cara.”
    â€œWere you moving here? Or were you on your way to somewhere else to homestead?” The way her attention snapped back to him made Slocum wonder what the men and women had been up to.
    â€œI can pay you.”
    â€œYou said you were flat busted, that the road agents stole everything you had.”
    â€œThey destroyed most of our gear. They didn’t even bother taking it. They raped Cara and Irene. Tortured and murdered the men. Hell, I don’t know. They might have raped them, too. They was animals what they did.”
    â€œSo how can you pay me if I was fool enough to agree?”
    She ran her fingers around the small hard circles pressed into her dress pocket. She reared back, fumbled a mite, then pulled out two gold coins. Even in the weak light from the oil lamp the twenty-dollar gold pieces shone with an inner radiance that caught Slocum’s full attention.
    â€œThat’s enough to get you to San Francisco or Virginia City or about anywhere you’d want to go. You could live for a couple weeks, catch a stagecoach, and still have one of those twenty-dollar pieces left to help you along.”
    She held out her palm. The two coins beckoned to Slocum. He took them, ran his thumbnail around the edge, and didn’t find any milling. Holding one coin close to the lamp let him examine it. The disk was worn smooth, erasing any hint of the coin’s origin. He bit down on the edge. His tooth sank into the soft metal, telling him this was gold.
    â€œMight be lead,” he said to her. He held the coin closer to the light. Where his tooth had scored the coin showed nothing but more gold.
    â€œIt’s real, isn’t it?” She smiled at the question. They both knew the answer.
    â€œI can’t take all you own. If it’s as you said—”
    â€œIt is!”
    â€œâ€”then you ought to think of this as your husband’s legacy to you. Take it and forget revenge.”
    â€œI