Part 7 (1/2)

”Morning, Tom.” Grigsby yawned. The air was cold; he felt its chill through his woolen s.h.i.+rt, his leather vest. Behind McKinley the houses were taking on form and color in the early morning light. There had been a time once when Grigsby had actually enjoyed this part of the day.

”Grady tole me to come talk to you,” McKinley said. ”He said you wanted to know if sumpin happens to a hooker.” He looked off warily to his right.

Grigsby was suddenly wide awake. ”What happened?”

”Molly Woods.” He looked off warily to his left. ”You know her? She got cut up sumpin awful, Grady says. They already sent for Greaves.”

”Molly Woods? Lives down by the river?”

”Yes sir. You hurry, you can get there before he does.”

Grigsby nodded. ”I owe you, Tom.”

McKinley shook his head. ”Jesus, Marshal, how'd you know?”

”Hunch.”

”Grady says he never saw anything like it. He says there was pieces of her all over the place, like-”

”All right, Tom. I'll be going now.”

McKinley remembered himself, looked furtively down the street again. ”Greaves asks you, it wasn't me what tole you. Right?”

”Absolutely. I'm obliged, Tom. You get on back now.”

As McKinley bustled off, obviously relieved to be leaving, Grigsby closed the door. He lifted his gunbelt off the coatrack, slung it around his hips, buckled it closed. Reflexively, out of years of habit, he adjusted the big Colt in its holster, slid it out a few inches, let it fall back, loose and ready.

He slipped his sheepskin jacket from the rack, wrestled it on.

Brenda wandered into the parlor. Grigsby had completely forgotten that she was in the house.

”Who was it, Bob?” she asked him. She drew the front of the robe more tightly around her heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

”Business,” he told her.

”You're leavin' now?”

”Yep,” he said, hooking the last of the leather loops over the topmost staghorn b.u.t.ton.

She nodded. ”'M I gonna see you later?”

He frowned. ”You already asked me, Brenda. I don't know. I got a lot of work.”

”Sure,” she said. ”Sure, Bob. I understand.” She shrugged. ”Well,” she said. ”You know where I live.” She smiled a small smile, somehow sad and hopeful at the same time.

Grigsby put on his hat. Sooner or later he had to end this thing with Brenda, once and for all. For her sake. ”Right,” he said. ”See you.”

It took Grigsby five minutes to reach the livery stable, another five to saddle up the big roan.

The shantytown along the North Platte was a part of Denver that the men of the Chamber of Commerce never mentioned in those advertis.e.m.e.nts they took out in the eastern newspapers. Most of the eastern travelers pa.s.sing through town never saw it, never knew that it existed. The locals knew, but except for those who lived in it, and who had no choice, none of them ever came here.

It was a neighborhood for people who had no choice-people who had run through all their choices, or tossed them all away, or people who had never had much of a choice to begin with. Italians recruited by the railroads, paid a starvation wage for a while, and then laid off. Negroes escaping the South and discovering, years after the War, a new kind of slavery. Swedes and Norwegians and their families who came looking for work and for clean mountain air, and who found typhoid, cholera, and pneumonia. And the women: widows, abandoned wives, unwanted daughters, farm girls who had once been pregnant and desperate and who now, after years of abuse, weren't girls any more and didn't have the energy to be desperate.

Gathered here, huddled in ramshackle shanties of tarpaper and sc.r.a.pwood, they were the refuse tossed aside by the city as it grew fat and sleek on the money from the mines and the ranches, the smelters and the stockyards.

Grigsby hated the place. Here the light never grew brighter than the bleakness of dusk: day and night a blanket of smelter smoke obscured the sky. Soot lay everywhere, clung to everything; in winter the snow was the color of ashes. In summer the winds brought the grime and the dust billowing up off the rutted roadbeds in choking black clouds; in spring and fall the same roads became narrow swamps of black glutinous muck.

The last rain had been a week ago, but the hooves of Grigsby's horse made dull sucking sounds as the animal plodded down Curlew Street. Trash littered the mud: tin cans, whiskey bottles, sc.r.a.ps of paper, a dead cat. Thin, whey-faced children, bundled up against the cold in tattered rags, watched him from the sidewalks with big dark eyes that were as s.h.i.+ny, and as blank, as marbles. The adults-some of them trudging slowly past, some stiffly leaning, arms folded, against the greasy wooden walls-had eyes that were blanker still.

Three Denver policemen stood huddled together on the sidewalk outside Molly Woods's small frame shack, the blue of their uniforms looking black in the murky light. They were silent, their hands buried in the pockets of their coats, their breath puffs of white in the chill, still air. None of them looked at the others.

A small knot of shantytown locals, four or five battered-looking men, two battered-looking women, everyone dressed in shades of gray, stood off to the left, watching and waiting.

Grigsby reined in the roan, swung himself down, felt the mud squirm beneath his boots. His right leg wobbled slightly-the hip was acting up again, pain knifing from the pelvis down the thigh bone. Pretty soon his riding days would be over. It would be buckboards for him then, and then the rocker on the front steps, and then the coffin.

He tied the reins to a sagging wooden rail and, holding himself deliberately upright, walking through the pain, climbed up onto the sidewalk.

The three policemen nodded; they all knew him.

”Gerry,” he said, nodding first to the oldest, Sergeant Hanrahan. Then, to the others, ”Zack. Carl.”

The sergeant spoke for all three: ”Bob. How'd you hear?”

”Little bird told me. Greaves get here yet?”

Hanrahan shook his head. His round face was red, but not from the cold. It was always red. ”Hill's a long way off,” he said. Capitol Hill, where Greaves lived, was Denver's most expensive residential district. ”'Specially this early of a mornin'.”

Grigsby jerked his head toward Molly Woods's shack. ”Bad?”

Hanrahan took in a deep breath, blew it out between pursed lips, shook his head. ”Jesus, Bob. He was crazy, whoever did it. Ye can't even tell who she was. What she was. Ye knew her, did ye?”

”To talk to.”

The sergeant shook his head. ”Makes it worse.”

Grigsby glanced at the other policemen. Zack Tolliver was all right-slow, no genius, but honest and dependable. And he hated Greaves. Carl Hacker was one of Greaves's pets, a bootlicker and a liar. But he was gutless. Without Greaves around, he was no threat and no problem. Grigsby looked back at Hanrahan. ”I'm going in.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hacker turn to the sergeant.

Hanrahan's face was expressionless. ”Now why is that, Bob?”

”Somethin' I'm working on.”

Hanrahan shrugged. ”City business, Bob. No federal jurisdiction, don't ye know. Greaves won't care for it.”

Grigsby smiled. ”Guess I just don't give a s.h.i.+t, Gerry.”

Hanrahan looked at him for a moment, finally nodded. ”Guess ye don't.” He pulled a small tin flask from his pocket, held it out. ”Better have yourself a taste first. Ye'll be needin' the help of it.”

Grigsby accepted the flask and unscrewed its cap. He drank some of the whiskey-Irish, and good-then screwed the cap back and handed the flask over to Hanrahan. ”Thanks. I won't touch anything in there.”