Slocum's Breakout - Jake Logan [47]
“Including the warden?”
“Harriman’d never listen to me. He’d take too much pleasure throwing me in his darkest, deepest cell. No, there are others. Judges. Prosecutors.”
“The banker who brought the charges?”
“Hez Galworthy might be bought off, but I’m not sure of that. What’s your interest? You’re not one of them.”
“Them?”
“Murrieta’s little family. That village he runs. If Atencio gets out, what’s in it for you?”
“Justice,” Slocum said. He had a strong dislike for seeing men railroaded for crimes they hadn’t committed. From what he could tell, Murrieta and Maria were being honest when they said Atencio was innocent.
He didn’t much trust bankers either.
“You have tried and failed at this,” Maria said. “Why can you now find them?”
Slocum pursed his lips. He had gone over a dozen harebrained schemes since getting the stay of execution for Atencio using his knife on the rope, but none had produced any solid sense that they would work.
“I can find them,” he said. “The Valenzuelas are still in the area. That means they don’t think the law is on to them, and they might have other robberies in the works.”
“So?” Maria shrugged her shapely shoulders.
“So we need money for the lawyer. Durant hinted that he could bribe somebody into letting Atencio go. The judge, the banker, who knows? I suspect he has an inside track to the judge. Galworthy isn’t likely to go back on his testimony with Atencio so close to being hanged. That would make him look bad.”
“You have a plan to find them again?”
The woman’s barely concealed scorn stung him. Then he calmed down. She was right, and anything he did was likely to fail as it had before. Conchita had the sheriff’s ear and could turn out a posse to chase him down whenever it suited her. If he got too close—or found their loot—she would have Bernard on his trail in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.
“Wait and see,” he said with more confidence than he felt. But he did have a way to find her. She was likely to be the one going into Miramar for supplies or to speak with Sheriff Bernard. José was an escaped prisoner, and their father wasn’t likely to poke about town, even if he wasn’t on his deathbed.
“Wait and see,” Maria said, standing in front of him and lifting her peasant blouse to give him a flash of bare, nut brown breasts. And then she turned and hurried from the house. Slocum heaved a sigh. He knew what his reward would be. All it took was a bit of luck to claim it.
He went, saddled his horse, and rode down the road toward Miramar, then cut across country before he got within sight. The seacoast town brought a fair amount of traffic along the road through the coast hills that he wanted to avoid. If no one spotted him, nobody could tell the sheriff or a posse out combing the countryside.
When he found a spot on a rocky butte looking down at the road running through the center of town, he dismounted, got some jerky, and sat gnawing on it as he watched for Conchita. He knew it might be a long wait. If it stretched longer than a few days, Atencio would swing. Durant needed time to put the money to use, and Slocum had to believe a day or two might pass before he could even find where the Valenzuelas had stashed their ill-gotten gains.
Lounging back, propped on one elbow, he stared out over the endless sea, feeling a kinship with its restlessness. Always moving, never the same when he looked back, the ocean might have been his calling if he hadn’t grown up around horses on a farm. He preferred a sturdy horse under him and the vast plains or mountains stretching to the sky over the barren, always moving gunmetal gray ocean.
His mind drifted as he daydreamed about what life might be like with Maria. She was a fiery woman. But then he had wondered the same with Conchita, and she had used him to get her brother free from prison, then made sure the law would come down hard on him if he so much as showed his face. Conchita was a schemer, a planner, the competent crook. Not at all like Maria, she—
Slocum sat up, grabbed for a small spyglass he had brought along, and peered through