Infamous (20 page)

So there I was, the notorious gambler and gunslinger, Jamie Gallagher. I’d spent all those years stealing a night with one woman here and another woman there and never looking back when I left town the next morning.

Then one day, what the hell? I’m in some piss pot of a town called Jubilation in the Arizona Territory, and I look into this one girl’s eyes, and my life takes a total hairpin turn.

Without rhyme or reason, I’m on my knees, struck dumb by Cupid’s arrow.

Go figure.

Of course, I tried to deny it at first. Made excuses for why I was hanging around. My horse needed another day of rest. And then another. Then, there was money to be made at the
poker tables in the Red Rock—miners with silver to spare, and relieving them of it was like taking candy from a baby. Except I didn’t win all the time. And then I didn’t win at all. And then I couldn’t leave until I’d earned back enough to pay for the supplies I’d needed to get me across the desert.

And by then, I was in too deep. By then, I had to stay.

More than a hundred years after I’d first laid eyes on Mel, I stood out in the brilliant sunshine and watched as much of the fictional scene—vicious killer meets cherished wife—as I could stand. Curiously, it wasn’t the fact that they portrayed Melody as being terrified of me that was hard to take, despite there having been a time when she was, indeed, horribly skittish around me, as she was around all men.

No, it was the reminder that, for quite a few years, I’d filled up her lungs with my secondhand smoke. It was those same lungs that failed her, decades later, and she’d slipped away from me.

Cause and effect? We’ll never really know.

And don’t worry, I’m not going to wallow. You don’t have to skip ahead. In fact, you shouldn’t, because after I bid A.J. farewell and left the moviemaking to wander around a bit on my own, I ran into my old friends Rob and Lombardi—whose first name was Charlotte.

This I knew, because she was wearing one of those name badge stickers that said
Hello, my name is
 … as she helped set up the noon meal in the huge air-conditioned caterers’ tent.

I almost didn’t recognize her, because her hair—thick and red—was out of the brain-squeezingly tight chignon that she’d worn when I’d first noticed her out by the Circle K’s pay phone. She’d also traded her dark suit for shorts and a T-shirt that fit her very nicely.

Rob was nearby wiping down tables, also dressed down for the occasion.

They were obviously undercover. Just a coupla thirty-year-old college kids working a minimum-wage summer position.

But people saw what they expected to see, and there were certainly all types working the equally wide variety of jobs connected to
Quinn
’s production.

“This is a giant waste of time,” Charlotte murmured to Rob as she carried a tray of condiments to the table he’d just cleaned, and began setting them out.

“Yup,” he said, clearly resigned to it.

“Hey, when you go back to the trailer,” she said, “will you pick up my phone charger? My battery’s flipping out. It’s dying after about only an hour. I don’t want to be caught without it.”

“Sure thing, pumpkin,” he said, and she gave him a disbelieving look.

“What?” he added under his breath. “We’re supposed to be together.”

She just walked away, shaking her head.

“You don’t call a redhead pumpkin,” I lectured as I sat up on the table across from him. “My son Jim’s eldest granddaughter was a redhead, and she was on the stout side, with a round face, kind of like her father’s. So all through grade school the other kids—the mean kids—called her
pumpkin head
. Of course, she had the last laugh when she grew up and turned into the prettiest girl in town and wouldn’t give those fools who’d teased her the time of day.”

Clueless Rob couldn’t hear me. He just kept on grimly wiping down tables, and I realized that he was bone-weary exhausted. He probably hadn’t slept well in days, and probably wouldn’t in the near future, because he was sharing a trailer with his beautiful and smart partner who was also, if I remembered correctly, his foolish brother’s ex-girlfriend.

“You’re going to have to snap out of it,” I advised him. “Because the men you’re after are dangerous.”

Of course, he did not respond.

Lunch wasn’t due to start for another hour. I figured I’d return at that time, see what questions they asked the cast and crew as they dished out the food and replenished the salad bar. Because that’s why they were here, working this particular job. As part of the catering team, they could talk to everyone. Provided everyone came into the tent to eat.

Which everyone didn’t always do.

I was just about to drift away, see if I couldn’t try to identify
the mysterious Gene—who would be new in town and thus, hopefully, stand out—when Charlotte came back.

“I’m delivering his lunch tray,” she quietly told her partner, who instantly woke up. “In twenty minutes.”

“Come on, kids,” I urged them. “Give us a name. Who’s your suspect? Because I can watch him when you can’t.”

But Rob didn’t tell me. He didn’t say a word.

“He asked for me,” she said. “I made sure he saw me at breakfast. Guess we’ll see if the rumors are true.”

“Rumors?” I said. “What rumors? You mean like your suspect is some VIP like Trace Marcus or Henry Logan himself, with a reputation for ruining the reputation of every pretty young girl on set?”

Although the movie’s star and director weren’t the only men in positions of power. There were probably dozens of others, less well known—and one of them, I believed, went by the nickname Loco.

My friend Rob didn’t say a word. He just nodded an affirmative, the muscle jumping in the side of his jaw.

His beautiful partner nodded, too, and walked away, shoulders back, head high, like she was heading for her execution.

But then Rob straightened up and called after her, “Charlotte.”

She turned back, her heart in her eyes. How he didn’t see that, I’ll never know.

Because all he did was shake his head. “Nothing. Never mind.”

She nodded. “Don’t bother getting my charger. I’m going to get it myself.”

“Okay,” he said.

And now she practically ran away, heading out of the tent.

“Rob,” I said, “you big dope.”

He muttered profanities to himself as he wiped down the next table.

I didn’t want to follow Charlotte, because I figured she hadn’t just gone to their trailer to make sure her cell phone worked. If I knew strong women—and I did know my share of
strong, stoic women—she was also going there for the privacy, so that no one would see her if, despite her best efforts, she leaked a tear or two.

She deserved that privacy, so I headed to the kitchen. I’d meet her there. But twenty minutes was a long time, so I did a quick check-in with A.J., who was back to lugging a piece-of-crap saddle down the street, over and over and over again while the movie cameras rolled.

I walked beside him for a bit. He was the one who was sweating like a stuck pig, his shirt glued to his back, rivers running down the side of his face, but as soon as the director called “Cut,” he muttered to me, “Are you all right?”

“Don’t ever smoke,” I told him.

He smiled as he used his arm to wipe the sweat from his brow. “You know, you said that to me every single night, when you tucked me in.”

“I wanted to make sure it would stick,” I said.

“It did,” he told me, “although I wish you’d said
or drink.”

I wished I’d said that, too. But it was then that I saw him.

Gene.

Had to be.

He was standing back behind the cameras, with the same kind of dangerous edge as his friend, Tall-Man-with-Ponytail, aka Killer-of-Wayne.

He had a baseball cap on his head, and sunglasses covered his eyes. His shirt was long-sleeved, so I couldn’t tell if he was tattooed the way Wayne had been. Which I suppose wasn’t really any kind of a clue, since most of the cast and crew were permanently decorated in some way or another.

Used to be a tattoo was a way to tell that a man’d been to jail or served in the navy. Those days were long gone.

“Excuse me, son,” I said to A.J. and headed over toward the man.

He was nervous. That was for sure. He kept tapping his foot, and shifting from side to side.

His shirt was definitely large enough to conceal a weapon beneath.

But before I reached him, Alison stepped in front of me. I
had to stop short or I would’ve gone right through her. Which would have been a shock to both of us.

“Mr. Sylvester,” she said, holding out her hand to greet him. “Welcome, sir. Nice to see you again. How are you?”

“I’ll be damned,” I said, adding, “not literally,” because be careful what you wish for and all that.

This dangerous-looking man was Neil Sylvester, as in Silas Quinn’s great-great-grandson—the man who still owned most of Jubilation, and was ponying up the cash to build more hotels and motels after
Quinn
put the town back on the map.

He was small and wiry and looked nothing like the marshal.

I was usually pretty good at reading a man, and this one obviously had secrets, but even I wasn’t paranoid enough to think that one of Neil Sylvester’s was that he moonlighted as a hired killer named Gene.

It was right about then that I realized my twenty minutes were nearly up. I had to meet Charlotte in the kitchen, or I’d lose my shot at locating the FBI’s key suspect in the Headless Wayne murder case.

I couldn’t risk zapping myself to the wrong location, so I zoomed over to the caterer’s tent doing my not-really-flying thing, and went straight down through the canvas and into the kitchen area. Where, sure enough, trays were being prepared for the folks who were too important or busy to eat in the tent with the proletariat.

But Charlotte was nowhere to be found.

And I realized that, as the trays were made ready, a whole pack of young women and men were standing by to deliver them. They left on their assignments, one at a time, moving quickly so that the meal was delivered hot.

Charlotte, no doubt, had already left.

So I shot myself back up and out of that tent, giving myself an aerial view of the rows of trailers that were back there, behind the motel. I could see a number of trays being carried, but I didn’t see Charlotte’s blaze of red hair.

I scanned the area again, and then a third time. But she wasn’t outside.

Which was when I knew what I had to do.

She’d gone into someone’s trailer with that tray, and I could find her by doing a quick pass through—literally through—the rows of ’em. Starting with the fancier ones that belonged to the bigwigs.

It was an unpleasant idea—invading the privacy of all those people, some of whom were surely picking their noses, or having an argument with their boyfriend or girlfriend, or having the opposite of an argument with … You know what I mean.

But I wanted to find her, and I figured her hair would be easy enough to spot, so I could breeze through quickly.

I braced myself and I went for it. It didn’t feel like anything. It was just the same to me as moving through the air, but it looked a whole hell of a lot different, that was for sure.

I usually closed my eyes when I went through a wall or car ceiling, but this time I had ’em open because I was moving so fast, so I saw not just inside the trailers, but I also got an up close look at the wiring and the insulation and the spiders that lived in the insulation within the flimsy walls.

Now, I’m not a fan of spiders, particularly not the big hairy ones that thrive in hot climates, so I’ll be honest and admit that I may have vocalized a bit as I made my journey down that first row of trailers.

I got an eyeful—mostly of people doing the little boring things that they do when they’re on a break from work.

A dark-haired young woman read a book while her toenail polish dried.

A heavyset man sat on his commode, with his laptop, answering email while he took a dump.

A pair of girls were in the midst of trying on every piece of clothing in their little closet as they decided what to wear to lunch.

A woman was doing some kind of yoga-type stretches—naked. I had to slow down to double-check, but no, it wasn’t Charlotte.

A young man was in his shower, doing what most young men do in the shower, pretty much everywhere in the world.

Some people napped, some facedown on their bunks, some lying back on their sofas, arms up and over their eyes.

And many, many, many people paced their trailers as they talked on their cell phones.

I had to dodge them, which was hard, because they were moving targets, and I did yet more shouting when I missed and we collided—which happened more often than not, because I was moving pretty damn fast.

I left behind a trail of
What was thats
and
Holy shits
as I came out the far side, having not found Charlotte.

So I took a deep breath and searched the second row of trailers.

It was more of the same—
Holy shit, What the hell?
—until I caught a glimpse of red hair that made me hit my brakes and double back.

But it was only the production assistant. Alison’s friend. What’s his name. Hugh.

He was lying on his bunk on his back, staring sightlessly and expressionlessly up at the ceiling, and for one disturbing second, I thought maybe he was dead.

But then he blinked and he wiped his face between his eye and his ear, and I realized he was lying there, crying.

I knew the boy was gay. I’d lived a long time and had learned a thing or two about being human, and how it’s nature or even God, if that’s what you believe in, that makes that choice for us—whether or not we’ll be attracted to a woman or another man.

But I’d also learned that a man’s a man regardless of who he loves, and this one cried the same way most men cried—in silent, private pain. It was the way I’d cried, before loving Mel had made me feel safe and secure enough to be willing to share such intimate emotions with her.

“Sorry, son,” I told Hugh, before diving back in, and getting a face full of spider.