The Last Hard Men - Brian Garfield [9]
“Hot enough for you, Sam?”
Gus Leggett’s abrasive voice brought him out of his reverie. He looked up in resignation: Gus Leggett was the town bore. But Gus was also the accountant who had invested Burgade’s money for him, mostly on the advice of Burgade’s former employers, and Gus was good-hearted.
“Hot enough,” Burgade said judiciously, and Gus seemed to take it as sufficient invitation. Gus pulled up a chair and sat down.
“I see you’ve been reading the paper.” Gus had a narrow body, thinning blond hair, the rheumy eyes of a bloodhound, and an infuriating tendency to chuckle at everything he said—a nervous habit; every sentence ended with an awkward, neighing laugh.
Gus beamed. “Funny thing about old Zach Provo, isn’t it? You’re the one who captured him way back in the Dark Ages, aren’t you, heh? I hear they captured that bunch in the farmhouse downriver from Quartzsite, but there’s still nine at large, and Provo’s one of them, heh. What do you think of that, now?”
“They’ll get run down. They always do.”
“Maybe they got across into Mexico by now, what do you think, heh?”
“Maybe they did.”
“Not like the old days when you and the Rurales had to make a private deal because there wasn’t any extradition treaty between the States and Mexico. You ever wish it was the old days again, Sam?”
“No,” he lied.
His unenthusiastic monosyllables finally penetrated Gus’s awareness, and Gus stood up. “Well,” Gus said, and trailed off, and started again, “Well, I got to get up to the office, lot of work to do these days. Things are booming all over. You ought to stop up sometime and we can go over your portfolio, heh.”
“I’ll do that.”
Gus went, hobbling a little; a colt had stomped his foot once, he had lost a toe, and after that he had taken up desk work. He hated horses—“One end bites and the other kicks”—and hadn’t ridden one in thirty years. But then, Burgade thought, How long since I got aboard a horse? Last year, the statehood parade. He couldn’t remember a time since then.
He looked at the paper again and then, with sudden resolve, stood up and marched out onto the boardwalk, full of dignity, with the folded newspaper under his arm. He tugged his hat down and walked around the corner, where a blast of dry hot wind struck him across the quarter; tucked his face toward his shoulder and let the wind blow him down the street past the old, disused whipping post to the courthouse.
God had made Sheriff Noel Nye as ugly as He could and then hit him in the face with a shovel. Nye had arrived in Tucson twenty years ago like a whipped dog, a down-at-the-heels Nebraskan with one bad lung. Burgade had taken him on to do desk work and run chores. Nye had followed him onto the Territorial Police, learned the work diligently, grown robust in health, made headlines by shooting it out with one of the Clanton offshoot gangs, and got elected sheriff of Pima County on a wave of hero-worship. He had kept the job through subsequent elections by maintaining a superb record of peace-keeping, arrests, and convictions. Nye was loud and blasphemous; shaggy and folksy and garrulous on the surface, but in fact he was whip-smart. The long hair fell all over his malformed face in an effort to conceal the cauliflowered ears and forceps-elongated head; it exposed the squashed pug nose and the long pointed chin. The eyes were good eyes, warm, intelligent, the color of rusty iron.
Nye got up and came around the desk to welcome him. “Hot damn. Good to see you, Captain. Come on in and set.” Nye had called Burgade “Captain” since the Territorial Police days.
“I don’t mean to take up your time, Noel.” Burgade stood stiffly, embarrassed by the knowledge that he had no official capacity here any longer. The sad realization tended to emphasize his austere demeanor; he was distant and aloof anyway, it had always been difficult for him to establish close human contacts—his closest friends were all dead and he had not made new ones. Only Burgade’s daughter, Susan, remained inside