THE DEVILS DIME Read Free Page B

you’re likely to get shot. Just a friendly warning, you know.”
    He resumed his tour and Jess followed, taken down a notch by the ominous statement the old man had just spoken as calmly as he might voice an invitation to dinner.
    A few paces further they stepped into an alcove created by shelves surrounding a battered desk and chair. From the layer of dust on the table, it was apparent the area was not much used.
    “I believe you might find what you’re looking for in here.” Twickenham pulled back the chair and used his own muslin cuff to banish the worst of the dirt collected there.
    He spent a few moments identifying the various piles as to what Jess might find in each, until he reached the far end of a cluttered shelf. He reached a hand toward a thick file bound with string and seemed to hesitate. Twickenham chewed his bottom lip, glanced sideways at Jess, took in a long, rattling breath and at last made up his mind. He tugged it from the shelf and plunked the tattered blue folder onto the table.
    “This is a bit outside the scope of what you asked for,” he began, his face crinkling into a clandestine grin, “but it’s some of our best stuff. All that,” he said, as he swept his short arms out toward the orderly piles on the surrounding shelves, “is mostly appetizers and the occasional main course. But this,” he beamed and plucked the frayed brown shoelace that held the bulging folder together, “is better than Christmas pie.”

Chapter Two
     
    If there were mice, they knew enough to stay away when Deacon Trumbull took the back stairs to Heaven. The men who joined him might have profited from that wisdom. But it was greed and nothing more that had brought them to the table in the abandoned room above McGlory’s. And it was greed that kept bringing them back.
    “He won’t last long.”
    The hard voice and clipped words hushed the whining tones that had escalated around the crude table. Deacon Trumbull’s malignant self-assurance hovered about them, silencing any objection the three men might have offered. His crisp, pristine shirtsleeves rested on the scarred surface, diamonds glittering in the opulent studs of his cuffs. The cigar he nursed covered the room’s shabby mustiness with its rarefied aroma.
    Below the table, supple gray leather shoes bespoke the man’s wealth, their white linen summer-weight spats ornamented with understated elegance. They weren’t such a vast step above those of the other three men, but there could be no doubt that their Italian felted leather linings made them the finest to be had in New York City.
    The man they called Cash cleared his throat and flicked an ash from his own Havana Partido. “He completely shut down that Denver operation, Deac. He’s no slouch.”
    Trumbull glared, his blue eyes hooded. The nickname annoyed him, had ever since boarding school days when Cash had begun to shorten his name. It had been a power play, purely designed to make the pampered brat seem an equal with Deacon. As if that could ever happen.
    He waited a beat, and let his companions work equally to hide their nervous swallows. He would have laughed outright, if there had not been such a strong element of truth in Cash’s warning. He was absolutely correct. Jess Pepper was no slouch. But Deacon had already resolved that the man’s luck at uncovering a Denver syndicate that had been selling young, nubile boy-flesh to a hungry European market would be his own undoing.
    Jess Pepper might have brought a million-dollar enterprise to its knees in that cow town, but he was in New York City now, lured by the fame a byline in the Times offered. And not only was he in New York, but he’d planted himself right in the center of the cross hairs. The offices of the Times were, after all, in Chief Deacon Trumbull’s precinct.
    “You leave Pepper to me, gentlemen.” He swept his gaze around the table, pausing just long enough to see the subtle submission he required before changing the