Relentless Read Free

now.
        “What’s the good news?”
        “I got the county assessor to re-appraise her property. He cut the tax assessment in half and agreed to accept quarterly payment for the next four years.”
        “Lucy’s going to be saying a whole lot of masses for you, Lane.”
        “I could use them.” Lucy probably would, too. She was a devout woman.
        “Any prisoners upstairs?”
        He shook his head. “I got them over to the courthouse. The judge fined all three of them and let them go.”
        “Good. I want to open the doors and windows up there and air the place out.”
        “You sure do run an accommodating jail. Clean, good food, the guard gets fined if he gets too rough.”
        The slight sarcasm in his voice edged upward when he came to the last part, about the guards being fined. Very few townspeople, including my deputies, liked my idea of running a clean, safe jail. They especially didn’t understand why I’d fine a guard who got too rough with a prisoner. But to me, it was all part of being a professional lawman. There’s nothing in the law that gives a peace officer the right to brutalize a prisoner. On the other hand, I have a rule that says that any prisoner who lies about a guard hurting him gets the exact punishment he lied about. If he said the guard hit him three times in the face, he gets hit by that guard three times in the face.
        “Oh, I got Conroy on the stage,” Ryan said. “He gave me quite a tussle. Didn’t want to leave. Seems he liked our little town. Drew a nice little crowd when he started fighting me in front of the stage.”
        “Thanks, Tom.” Conroy was a confidence man who’d just started working Skylar. We managed to catch him fast. And get him on a stage and get him out of town.
        I hadn’t had time to sort through the mail stacked on the far right comer of my otherwise clean desk.
        Seeing the mail there, I thought of the envelope Callie had stuck between two of her schoolbooks. The letter from the Royalton Hotel in Chicago. I wondered what she was going to tell me tonight. Something I probably didn’t want to hear, to know. Something that just might alter our marriage forever.
        I slogged through the mail. There was a time when I thought illiterate people were stupid. I’d graduated high school myself. But I’d been out on the street long enough now to know that the opposite was true. Illiterate people could be awfully smart and literate people could be awfully dumb. A lot of the letters of complaint I get are in a kind of pidgin English. I’d gotten pretty good at translating. What all these letters came down to was that they wanted help. Most of them were immigrants, Germans, Irish, a handful of Jews and Swedes, who were finding America less accommodating than they’d expected. The problems they described weren’t monumental, but it was easy to see that they were ongoing and frustrating problems-mostly having to do with getting hired and getting a line of credit and finding a neighborhood that would accept them-and so I helped any way I could. I usually went to the party they were having trouble with and pleaded the immigrants’ case for them.
        And got some satisfaction. If you approach most people reasonably, they’ll respond reasonably.
        I was halfway through the pile when Tom Ryan said, “That Hastings kid is still looking for you. He’s been here a week now.”
        “Aw, shit,” I said.
        “Says he wants to ‘fight the man who outdrew Sansom.’ ”
        “I didn’t outdraw Sansom. He was so damned drunk he fell into the path of my bullet.”
        Tom grinned. “Well, that still hasn’t stopped people from turning you into a legend. Peace-loving lawman kills notorious killer. That kind of thing.”
        “And Hastings traveled all the way from Mesa, Arizona, to fight me?”
        “That’s what I’m told. I guess some