Slocum's Breakout - Jake Logan [54]
Slocum held up the stack of bills, riffled through them, then held them out. Durant made the greenbacks disappear as if by magic.
“It might take a few days for me to put this money to good use.”
“Don’t go taking too long,” Slocum said. “Atencio is due to swing real soon.”
“Yes, there is that,” Durant said. “I’ll do what I have to for him.”
“You’ll get him out,” Slocum said, an edge coming to his voice.
“Sir, that might not be possible. For this amount of money, stopping the hanging might be the full extent of what I can do. Better to be sentenced to life in San Quentin than to die within those walls.”
“No!” Maria cried out and started around the table. Slocum stopped her with an arm around her waist.
“Let him do what he can. If Atencio’s sentence is changed, we can work on a pardon later.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Durant said, his face still an emotionless mask. “There’ll be all the time in the world then.”
The lawyer nodded brusquely, pushed past Murrieta, and in a few minutes the clatter of his buggy along the rocky road disappeared, leaving only the normal sounds of the farming village behind.
“All we can do is wait,” Slocum told Maria and Murrieta. The words tasted like ash on his tongue. He wasn’t one for waiting. He wanted to be doing something, but for once he had to let someone else do the work even if he didn’t like it.
15
“He is gone,” cried Procipio Murrieta. “I have looked, others have sought him, but he is gone!”
“What are you talking about?” Slocum had the cold knot in his gut that he knew what Murrieta was saying but needed to hear it spelled out.
“Durant has taken the money and left. He sold his buggy and horse, took the ferry to Oakland, and is gone!”
“Son of a bitch,” Slocum muttered. He ground his teeth together as he let anger wash over him. Never trust a shyster. By now he ought to know that and yet had let Durant waltz away with the money that might have sprung Atencio from prison if they had bribed a guard. Now they had nothing, and Atencio again was due to hang in two days.
“We should never have trusted him,” Murrieta said.
“He was your lawyer,” Slocum pointed out. He immediately regretted having spoken. It wasn’t Murrieta’s fault. It was Durant’s for being a slimy maggot. By now, Durant could be a hundred miles away. More. He could have caught a train and be on the other side of the Sierras by now, far out of reach of retribution for his theft.
“There is no chance he goes there to find a way to free Atencio?” Maria asked. She had been working in the field and was covered with fresh earth.
“Gomez told me of the sale of the buggy and horse. Durant said he had important business back East.”
“He might have needed the money to add to what John gave him,” Maria said.
She fell silent when she saw the expressions on Murrieta’s and Slocum’s faces.
“How do you get him out?” Murrieta asked.
Slocum had no answer. San Quentin was a fortress filled with guards. He had sneaked in once as a prisoner and another time as a guard. There wasn’t any way in hell he’d try either of those subterfuges again. Unable to pace as he thought, he left the small house and went out into the bright sunlight. A few white clouds worked their way in from over the ocean. Otherwise nothing disturbed the broad blue expanse overhead. A few seagulls vented their wrath at not having enough to eat—they never got enough.
They never got enough rattled over and over in Slocum’s head. He had to stop now. If he kept on, he would not only fail to free Atencio but would end up a prisoner again. It didn’t matter if Wilkinson locked him up as Jasper Jarvis or John Slocum. To be in San Quentin again would mean his eventual death.
“John, where are you going?” Maria came from the house, wiping her hands on a rag.
“I need to think.”
“Of ways to free Atencio?”
She recoiled at his black look. He began walking, not sure where he went but wanting to be away from the village and all its hardworking men and women. They struggled to grow their beans and wanted nothing more than