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aeroport_artTitle: The West Coast Two-Step (3/9)
Characters: Brad/Nate, Ray, Poke, Walt, Rudy, etc.
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aeroport_art
Rating: Eventual NC-17
Warnings: western!AU
Word Count: 36k (4,900 this part)
Summary: 1888, Reno, NV. Sheriff Brad Colbert used to get along just fine...that is, until a morning shootout broke out in his town leaving three men dead. A babyfaced stranger by the name of Fick rolls in around the same time, and Brad ain't convinced the two events aren't related.
The next day breaks with a fucking dust storm.
When Brad ducks into the stable, the rays of dawn are just pulling up over the horizon, but his horse is already up and alert. Howling wind must’ve woke him up.
Hummer greets Brad with a snort and shoots the dirtiest damned look at the saddle Brad's trying—unsuccessfully—to hide behind his back.
“Oh come on, you dumb beast. I gotta get to work,” Brad growls.
Hummer’s a funny creature. Doesn’t so much as blink in the middle of a firefight, but once you get a little breeze going, the slightest hint of a storm, he spooks so hard you practically have to sucker-punch the damned beast to get anything done.
After three failed attempts to get the saddle on, Brad finally distracts his horse long enough to slap the gear on and strap it in, even as Hummer half-heartedly tries to buck the seat off.
Brad goads, “Nice try, Humvee. Better luck next time.”
He swings up to the saddle and makes himself comfortable, then pulls his bandanna right up to his eyes to ready for the storm.
It takes a good twenty minutes longer than usual to get to the station, Brad’s eyes stinging with sand, but get there they do. Brad leaves Hummer in the stable, then fights through the horizontal wind until he gets to the front door of the shuddering joint. He busts in and throws himself forward, wind scrabbling at his back until he wrestles the door shut behind him.
The howling sounds die down to a muted whistle. There’s grit in Brad’s eyes, his mouth, his ears. Hell, there’s grit in all areas of unmentionables, and Brad’s foul mood only worsens when he looks up to find the building as empty as a ghost town.
Striding over to his enclosed office, Brad shakes his head both to expel sand from his bristly hair and also to express dismay at the utter failure of his team to even pretend to show up—
“Oh, hey Brad.”
Sitting in Brad’s chair like it’s his own, Deputy Person leans back in his seat and rolls a pencil back and forth between his palms. The grin he shoots Brad is crooked and a little deranged.
Ray’s like a bad case of herpes—no darned way of getting rid of him. “Shame the wind didn’t blow you into a ditch somewhere west of the Pacific,” Brad greets.
“My monster prick weighed me down. I dragged it all the way down to the office, yessiree.”
“On the way to my office, you mean.”
After a pause, Ray offers by way of explanation, “Your office has pencils.”
“Get out.”
Ray obliges, but not before snagging another pencil out of the tin on Brad’s desk.
With his last remaining stylus, Brad sits down and quickly fills out some paperwork to ready for his visit to the jailhouse. He’s got a lead to pursue…a lead with cool green eyes, an expressive mouth, and a smarter left hook than a cornered Irish scrapper.
As Brad flips through pages of his notebook, he realizes there are some other contacts in the area who might prove helpful to the case. He murmurs to himself, “Lot of places to hit up.”
Outside his door Ray yells, “Where are we going?”
-----
The wind dies down quick and by the time Brad and Ray strike out, you wouldn’t even know there’d been a fierce dust storm just that morning.
They split up to cover more ground. Brad refrains from telling his deputy about his altercation with Nate for reasons that elude himself, but quickly rationalizes that there’s no point in talking up a lead before it pans out.
The city police department looms up from the street, but Brad skips the entrance and winds around back. There, the small brick cell juts out into the alleyway, completely impenetrable but for the tiny, barred window.
He dusts himself off one last time, then cranes a look inside.
The cell is empty.
Fuck.
Brad takes a deep breath to calm himself, but it doesn’t work.
Fuck, of course the cell’s empty. Hell would sooner freeze over than Schwetje handle a task without fucking it up the ass.
Brad makes his way back to the front of the department and lets himself inside.
“Schwetje,” Brad barks.
He sees the chief of police turn around in one of the back corners, his bulky frame dwarfing the shorter man beside him who suddenly finds himself unduly absorbed in the walls, as do the other five or six grunts in the office.
“Schwetje,“ Brad hisses, stalking over. “Can you inform me as to why my prisoner—a prime suspect in yesterday’s shooting—seems to have vanished into thin air since I left him so happily occupying the jailhouse last night?”
Schwetje’s eyes dart around uncertainly, before meeting Brad’s own. He replies, “There wasn’t enough reason to hold him, Sheriff.”
“Not enough reason?” Brad shoves his hand into his work bag and pulls up a fistful of papers. “Does this look like not enough reason? These are Doc’s findings from the examinations of the corpses. They link Nate Fick’s gun directly to the scene of the crime. Does that sound like not enough reason?”
Aggression seems to be the wrong tack to take, as Schwetje furrows his brow and visibly steels himself. “Sheriff,” he says slowly. “I’m sure it’s as you say it is. But I didn’t have those papers and we had to let him go.”
“I told Hannigan I’d come by in the morning with them,” Brad practically shouts, eyes scanning the room for that yellow-bellied pissant.
“We’re required to release prisoners by 10 o’clock in the morning if there’s nothing to hold them—”
“—it’s five minutes past. You saw the storm this morning. Couldn’t give me an extra—”
“You made the rules, Sheriff. I was only following the county department’s lead.”
Brad wishes he could knock his head against the wall. Trust this cretin to twist Brad’s words around until they resemble buttfuck none of their original intent.
Unfortunately, no amount of logic will unfuck the colossal ineptitude of Reno’s chief of police, so Brad will have to cut his losses. There’s still a full day ahead of him, and it ain’t like Brad’s lost his ability to track a man down overnight.
-----
Brad heads back to the office to pick up Hummer, then steers his way towards the seedier side of town. He aims for Chinatown which is a bit out of the way, beyond of the small tributary of Truckee River that cuts through the southern edge of town.
As he crosses the footbridge, the streets of spaced-out, flat wooden buildings quickly turn into ramshackle dwellings that crowd the riverbank. Overhead, drying laundry suspends from window to window like banners of clothing while Chinese men—just men, as the ratio of women is abysmally low here, even for a frontier town—gather in the streets, spitting and smoking and jabbering at each other in foreign, consonant tones.
Brad knows the area well. Shit lot of action heats up around here, illicit money exchanged more frequently than handshakes while the men compete for work now that the Southern Pacific’s done and laid out. The red light district’s just north as well, and the bleed from that adds up to a whole lot of potential trouble festering in just a few square blocks of space.
Brad treks his way through the streets, tipping his hat at a familiar face or two, but he’s mostly occupied with avoiding piles of stinking horse shit on the way to the edge of town.
Once there, Brad stops and looks out. His gaze runs across the large, canvas tents that dot the landscape like the circus has come to town. Ain’t no circus, though; other than bare-bones shops and grocers, who mainly cater to their own Oriental clientele, Chinatown’s good for just about one thing.
Gambling.
-----
Inside one of the tents, where the roar of drunken voices is almost as obnoxious as the awful stench of too many men in too small a place, Brad finds Manimal at a blackjack table off to the side. Scurrilous creature, no doubt, but Manimal’s always got one ear to the ground and loose enough lips to transmit the information in exchange for hard cash. Someone’s got to finance his outrageous gambling addiction, anyhow.
“A real Mary, you say?” Manimal laughs loudly and slaps down two cards onto the table. A jack and an ace. His gap-toothed smile grows as he scoops up three dollars and a pocket watch, the contents of the pool. “What, did you hook yourself a surprise when you last visited the whorehouse?”
“I didn’t say he was a Mary,” Brad says exasperatedly. “Just that he kinda looks like a girl. Big eyes, long eyelashes. Real pretty, you know.”
Manimal turns in his seat and stares at Brad.
Brad rolls his eyes. “So you heard anything or not? Unlike some rocks-for-brains cuckolds who got nothing better to do than waste gold dust on shit like—” Brad reaches over, ignoring Manimal’s protests as he picks up the pocket-watch. “—fucking tin machines that don’t fucking work—” He throws it against Manimal’s barrel chest. “I got shit to do. So stop wasting my time.”
Manimal blinks at him. “Shit, Brad. That's cold. Diane just left me yesterday.”
“Well maybe if you started talking earlier, I wouldn’t have had to say nothing mean at all.”
Manimal starts talking. As he dutifully explains how Pastor Jim saw a bowlegged drunk amble into a hardware shop, asking for a map of San Francisco only to accidentally mention they were for some carrot-top willing to pay double for it and etcetera, a sudden chill tickles the back of Brad's neck.
He jerks his shoulders up, trying to shake off the sensation, but it's no help—the feeling lingers. Finally, he turns around to look.
Brad scans the joint, but there ain’t nothing out of the ordinary. Just the expected rickety tables, the expected weathered gamblers. Something like twenty men packed into this particular tent, only half of whom Brad recognizes in a trafficked place like this.
Must've been an odd breeze, perhaps. Brad faces forward again and gestures for Manimal to continue, but then the odd feeling returns.
Behind the Chinese dealer, who’s shuffling cards with the speed of a barreling train, a line of dustpans and gold-digging tools decorate the otherwise austere canvas tent. Brad narrows his gaze, focusing on the reflections in the dustpans.
While the image is hardly ideal, dirty and scratched up as the pans are, it’s nonetheless with exacting surety that Brad sees, a couple tables behind him, a dark-haired stranger turn around in his seat. As Manimal goes on obliviously, the stranger openly watches them.
-----
There’s a two-story building in Reno, tucked into a side street just off Commercial Row, which used to go by the name of ‘The Gold Tavern’. The signage was done up in bright, shiny brass, but after the gilded signs got nabbed a good eight times in as many months, the innkeeper swapped it out for a less tempting title: The Copper Tavern.
That’s where Nate’s staying.
This bit of trivia makes Brad a happy Sheriff. It’s also probably made Manimal a happy informant, since he was paid handsomely for his troubles.
Brad has all afternoon to stake the place out. Other than the usual team meeting at sundown, his schedule’s clear and he’s got one hell of a lead to pursue.
It takes less than twenty minutes to ride from the gambling tents to The Copper Tavern.
“I’m taking this,” Brad says to the clerk, stretching over the counter with long arms to pluck a room key off one of the wall hooks.
“Hey now, Sheriff,” the clerk protests, pushing his spectacles up onto his graying head. “That’s my only spare, and I need it for emergencies.”
“Then consider this an emergency.” Brad smiles, showing all his teeth. With a small toss of the key, Brad jauntily swipes it out of the air and proceeds to climb the only staircase of the small boardinghouse.
Nate’s lodging is on the second floor, the corner room. It’s the one with the most space and the biggest windows.
Brad inwardly rolls his eyes. Fucking tea-drinking rich boy with his hoity-toity standards and his fancy, expensive toys (the best of which Brad’s still got in the form of Nate’s Outlaw sticking out the back of his jeans). He can’t tell if he’s amused or exasperated by Nate’s old-money stink.
Well, no matter. Brad ain’t here to ponder the history of a baby-faced Easterner, and neither has he got time to let his guard down because downstairs, in plain fucking view, the man from the gambling tent is still trailing him.
Brad glances over the edge of the balcony and watches the dark-haired man get a beer to sit down with.
Nobody trails Brad but a walking target with a fucking death-wish.
In the meantime, Brad's got better things to do with his time than worry about a third-rate spy.
Brad continues down the balconied hallway until he hits the wall at the end. The door to his left leads to the room Nate’s staying in.
Brad leans towards the door, checking for sounds within. Chances are his boy Nate’s about town, as it’s smack-dab in the middle of the day, so the room should be empty.
He listens for a bit, hand reaching for the knob when the tiniest sound permeates through to the hallway. Brad freezes, ears pricking alert. So much for that theory.
He quickly switches to Plan B. Gingerly presses his hands and one ear flat against the door until the small sounds sharpen into separate voices—there are two people inside, at least.
They’re speaking too softly for Brad to pick up any individual words, but he can still tell one of them is Nate. Something about the cadence of his speech, clipped and sure…couldn’t be anyone else.
An unmistakable sound rings out, of someone landing on bedsprings. They squeak loudly, bouncing a bit even as the talking continues.
Frowning, Brad keeps his ear against the door. Below the balcony, he notices the dark-haired stranger watching him from the first floor, but that guy can go to hell. Brad ain’t missing this conversation.
He hears someone say, “We’d better find the goods and quick. Who’s to say she hasn’t left town already?”
Another creak of the bed resounds, like someone’s joined it.
“Doubt it. She has to unload it first.” The second voice is definitely Nate’s. “The dope’s no good to her rotting away in a storeroom that no one can find. We have a couple days at least to look around, so long as they don’t hear we’re in town.”
Dope. They’re talking opium in there. Fuck, Schwetje just passed an ordinance a few months back to get the shit outlawed, and the trade’s already gone underground?
Brad rubs his eyes, adding that to the list of things he needs to look into when there aren’t unsolved murders and peace-keeping to occupy his time with.
Through the door, the voices start up again.
“It wasn’t your fault, Nate.”
“I had a clear shot. I should’ve taken it.”
“So why didn’t you?” The other man sounds resigned, like he knows the answer already.
The bedsprings make a loud protest—someone falling back on the mattress, probably. “I can’t let Ferrando down.” Nate’s voice sounds small and young. “He reached out to me specifically for this case. I have to respect that, Gunny. Don’t I?”
There’s a long pause where Brad nearly pulls a muscle trying to hear something, because if Nate’s words were anything but an entreaty for comfort and reassurance, Brad’ll eat his hat. The silence is unsettling.
Finally, he hears the other man—Gunny—clear his throat. “You think too much. Remember, we just need to bring her in dead or alive. Let’s focus on doing the latter.”
Two heavy feet suddenly clomp onto the hardwood and Brad starts a bit. He silently moves away from the door, stuffing himself into the corner with no time to spare. The door opens so that he’s covered for a brief second, but then quickly closes again to reveal a straight-backed man, bare-headed but for short hair bleached blond by the sun.
Gunny looks a bit older than Nate—thirty-five, give or take a few years. Judging from the conversation inside, he must be another U.S. Marshal; Nate’s partner, probably. The two seemed real close, at any rate.
As the man jogs down the stairs to exit The Copper Tavern, Brad makes a motion to make himself scarce. He’s not going to get the chance to search the room for more information while Nate’s still in there.
Unfortunately, the door takes that moment to fly back open, and Brad has to launch himself backwards again to avoid getting hit in the face.
Nate comes out.
He lets the door swing shut behind him, leaving Brad irrevocably exposed for interminable seconds as he stands there, fussing with the untucked tails of his shirt.
It’s practically a miracle Nate doesn’t notice him. Brad holds his breath, watching apprehensively as Nate tips down the brim of his black, ten-gallon hat before walking off towards the stairs, still buttoning up his vest with neat, deft movements of his arms.
Only when Nate’s disappeared down the stairs does Brad let his breath out.
Feeling a headache coming on, he rubs the crease between his brows with his thumb. There’s no use jumping to conclusions at this juncture—all he’s got to do is get in there and find some harder evidence than just a bad feeling.
-----
Brad lets himself in with the key he’d snagged, jiggling the loose doorknob to push his way inside.
The room’s as spacious inside as it looks from street-level. It’s kept pretty neat, too; no clothes laying about or dirty boots kicked onto the wooden plank floors. The only immediate sign of any occupant, in fact, is a traveler’s bag that lies open at the foot of the bed.
Brad aims for it but checks the closet first, yanking the slatted doors open.
There’s a second bag on the floor next to a pair of boots he doesn’t remember Nate ever wearing, and the shirts hanging on the wooden bar come in two different sizes.
Well, fuck me, Brad thinks. He pulls back, works his way through the rest of the small living space scanning everything with sharp eyes. He needn’t work hard, though; two bags, two sets of toiletries—even a blind man could see there’s a second person staying there, most likely Gunny.
That would be reasonable enough, seeing as how Gunny and Nate are probably partners, if not for a single, glaring detail that remains.
One bed, Brad wryly notes. He stares at the full-sized bed for a bit, then reaches over to strip the blanket back. Underneath, the second, thinner sheet is twisted up and kicked to the side, half-hanging off. The sight of it makes Brad’s chest clench unpleasantly.
Lord, but Brad knew there’d been something fishy about Nathaniel Fick. Boy that groomed don’t just join up with the Marshals Service, looking to make a living hunting robbers or anything so dangerous. Naw, Nate’s got a reason to be running. Maybe it’s the man he’s bunking with, or maybe it’s the woman he couldn’t bring himself to shoot—hell, maybe it’s both. Whatever it is, Nate’s blown into Brad’s town now, and he’s stirring up dirt faster’n a Washoe dust storm.
There are three dead men, which is bad enough already, but if the Service is involved and rooting around for opium stockpiles? There sure as hell’s something larger afoot. And Nate—oh, good ol’ Nate, the sweet-faced Marshal—he’s hovering around the edges of the whole mess like an all-knowing Injun spirit.
All of this is putting Brad in a right foul mood.
Throwing the cover back over the mattress, Brad returns to the bag at the foot of the bed.
He shoves the leather sides apart and really digs in, but there ain’t nothing in there besides some folded up clothes and odds n’ ends. He recognizes one of the shirts as the one Nate wore when he sauntered into Mathilda a day ago—just a day ago?—sunburned as a redneck hillbilly, thirsty as horse.
There’s a discarded belt holster tossed inside the bag as well, and the silver buckle in front is spit-shiny new. Must be the holster Nate had Percy Grant repair for him.
Brad pulls out the Army Outlaw from the back of his jeans and slides it into the holster bag, unsurprised when the iron sights perfectly align with the worn-out groove inside the leather.
Nothing else in the bag jumps out at him though. Brad keeps the gun but puts the holster back and leaves it alone, moves to the bag in the closet. Again, just some clothes, some extra ammo and empty clips. A couple of bandannas.
One of the handkerchiefs feels a bit stiffer than the rest. Brad pulls it out and unfolds the fabric to find a couple small photographs inside.
They’re both of the same woman. She’s dark-skinned with black hair, eyes wide-set and almond-shaped and at the bottom of the card, written in ink, is the title Cocheta the Unknown, 1883. She’s obviously a native, a fact made more clear by the second photo where she’s posing erect and proud beside an older man donning a chieftain’s traditional garb.
They’re not locals, though—Brad’s gotten used to seeing Injuns in deerskin tunics, their women in short skirts that show their legs all the way up to their knees, but in the photo both subjects are wearing what looks like cotton, and the girl’s got on a floor-length dress, puffy with layers that would be begging for a heatstroke in Washoe climate.
A scrabbling noise comes from the door and Brad quickly pockets the photos, scrambling to his feet so fast the blood rushes to his head in a fade of white.
He hears the door burst open but before Brad can blink away the haze from his eyes, a deafening gunshot rings out. Luckily, he’d stumbled back—the bullet misses him and soon after, his vision’s all clear.
Brad narrows his eyes. Standing before him is the fucking twerp from downstairs, who’d been following Brad all goddamned day like a frightfully good impersonation of Ray Person. The guy’s dark-skinned with chiseled features and full, black hair—another damned Injun, looks like.
Brad yanks his Colt out and fires back a warning shot, making sure to aim just a few inches high so the Injun can hear the zip of a close fucking call.
Doesn’t look like it’s gonna be enough. The Injun strides forward and shakily puts his gun in front of him, aiming for another shot. Brad ain’t gonna give him the chance, though.
He lunges backwards, thrusting his elbows behind him where he knows they’ll meet huge glass windows. He shatters them easily, the magnificent noise making his assailant flinch. Brad uses the momentum to hop out onto the roof of the first story, then swings himself over the edge to land on the packed dirt road outside.
The smattering of people on the street give Brad a wide berth as he picks himself up and dusts off his pants. He automatically reaches back to check for Nate’s pistol, relaxing when his fingers touch warm metal.
Up above, jagged-edged holes gawp like blacked-out teeth where windows used to be. Brad scans them to make sure the Injun ain’t thinking anything so foolish as to follow him to the ground, then dashes around to the front of The Copper Tavern and fights upstream through the panicked patrons fleeing the hotel.
Brad storms upstairs, two steps at a time and reaches the landing—
“Fuck!” Brad swears as a gunshot fires at him, splintering the wall just inches to his left. He swings his head around, but there’s nobody in sight so Brad charges on, keeping below the barred railing before pausing at the entryway of the corner room.
Brad ducks his head in and out, eliciting a premature shot from the Injun who’s waiting for him behind the bed.
From that angle, his attacker’s got a shit line of vision. The bed’s a four poster frame raised high off the ground, so if Brad gets prone to the ground and crawls his way in…
Keeping silent, Brad does just that. The Injun’s muttering to himself, completely oblivious to the way Brad’s gotten underneath the bed, his target’s jittery knees in plain sight. He almost feels bad about how easy this is.
Brad stretches his arm out and nudges the muzzle of his gun against his target’s buckskin trousers, right between the legs, and slowly, deliberately pulls down the hammer with a threatening click.
“Drop the gun,” Brad orders.
The pistol falls to the ground with a clatter.
Brad reaches out and shoves it away with his free hand, letting it skid all the way across the room until it hits the opposite wall. Keeping his Colt pointed right where it is, Brad flips onto his back and hoists himself out from under the bed.
“First things first,” Brad says conversationally as he gets to his feet. He moves his aim up to his captive’s face. “Who are you?”
The Injun stutters a little, but he eventually gets his name out. “Meesh.” He squeezes his eyes shut and sits back on his heels, hands raised in the air. “Sh-shit man, don’t shoot!”
“Then don’t give me a reason to. Why you been following me around all day, hm?”
Meesh’s eyes dart left and right, and Brad ain’t a fucking moron. He knows the Injun’s got back-up—someone took a shot at him out on the balcony, and it sure as hell wasn’t this ass-clown.
Brad’s only got so much time. He jerks his gun to the side and lets off a round, punching a quarter-sized hole into the floor with a bang that almost hides the sound of Meesh’s high-pitched yelp.
“Okay, okay! Look dude, it’s not personal. It’s those guys staying in this room, that’s who we care about.”
Fuck. He’s talking about Nate. “What do you want with them?”
“I …please, Sheriff. They’ll kill me if I tell you.”
Brad cocks the hammer again and the cylinder turns, reloading a fresh bullet. “I can save them the trouble.”
“Fuck, all right. Just…stop following those dudes, okay? They’re up to no good.”
“You mean you’re up to no good. It’s got to be something real bad if the Service is after you.”
“Wait, what Service?” Meesh furrows his brow, and Brad can practically see the gears turning in his head.
Shit. Way to go, Brad.
Meesh asks, “Are you talking about, like, U.S. Marshals?”
“I didn’t say shit,” Brad responds curtly. He reaches for the handcuffs hanging off his front belt loop and pulls it off with one hand, the other still aimed at his captive’s head. “Stand up and turn around.”
Meesh gets up and does as he’s told, but before Brad can cuff him the room swarms with bullets that close in on two fronts—half from the balcony outside their door and half through the windows, shattering whatever glass is left. Brad and Meesh both drop to the ground, holding their ears in poor defense against the bone-rattling clamor.
Meesh starts to crawl away and Brad grabs at his ankle, but it’s completely futile as two other Injuns burst into the room and aim their rifles at Brad, who’s still on the ground.
He quickly weighs his options—either cut through the hotel or dive out the window again. Both come with perils, but if Meesh’s friends are anything like the piss-poor shot he is, Brad’s got a good chance of making it out alive when they’re shooting from afar.
Window it is.
Brad rolls up against the wall and leaps to his feet too quickly for either gunman to shoot him in time, then hops the broken glass to the roof outside where he gets harmlessly sprayed with a few more missed attacks from snipers in the opposite building.
The street’s done cleared out by now, the telltale noises of an afternoon firefight the best blockade a Sheriff could ever ask for. It rankles Brad that he don’t have the means to take care these upstarts on his own, but he recognizes a fool’s mission when he sees one and has sense enough to retreat.
The Injuns try to pursue him, trailing out of The Copper Tavern but once Brad dashes to Hummer, who’s parked outside and unharmed, he jumps astride and easily gets away from the straggling shots. They fly down the street together, leaving a billowing trail of dust in their wake.
Brad’s heart races, adrenaline pulsing through his veins. There’s no way to tamp down his body’s overexcited reactions to the fight, but he forces himself to tether his mind to focus on next steps.
Above his head, the sky’s starting to darken. It’s about time he and his men convene, provided they finally made it into town after the morning’s dust storm. Brad steers his horse down the appropriate streets, leading them back to the department.
Back | Next
Characters: Brad/Nate, Ray, Poke, Walt, Rudy, etc.
Author:
aeroport_artRating: Eventual NC-17
Warnings: western!AU
Word Count: 36k (4,900 this part)
Summary: 1888, Reno, NV. Sheriff Brad Colbert used to get along just fine...that is, until a morning shootout broke out in his town leaving three men dead. A babyfaced stranger by the name of Fick rolls in around the same time, and Brad ain't convinced the two events aren't related.
The next day breaks with a fucking dust storm.
When Brad ducks into the stable, the rays of dawn are just pulling up over the horizon, but his horse is already up and alert. Howling wind must’ve woke him up.
Hummer greets Brad with a snort and shoots the dirtiest damned look at the saddle Brad's trying—unsuccessfully—to hide behind his back.
“Oh come on, you dumb beast. I gotta get to work,” Brad growls.
Hummer’s a funny creature. Doesn’t so much as blink in the middle of a firefight, but once you get a little breeze going, the slightest hint of a storm, he spooks so hard you practically have to sucker-punch the damned beast to get anything done.
After three failed attempts to get the saddle on, Brad finally distracts his horse long enough to slap the gear on and strap it in, even as Hummer half-heartedly tries to buck the seat off.
Brad goads, “Nice try, Humvee. Better luck next time.”
He swings up to the saddle and makes himself comfortable, then pulls his bandanna right up to his eyes to ready for the storm.
It takes a good twenty minutes longer than usual to get to the station, Brad’s eyes stinging with sand, but get there they do. Brad leaves Hummer in the stable, then fights through the horizontal wind until he gets to the front door of the shuddering joint. He busts in and throws himself forward, wind scrabbling at his back until he wrestles the door shut behind him.
The howling sounds die down to a muted whistle. There’s grit in Brad’s eyes, his mouth, his ears. Hell, there’s grit in all areas of unmentionables, and Brad’s foul mood only worsens when he looks up to find the building as empty as a ghost town.
Striding over to his enclosed office, Brad shakes his head both to expel sand from his bristly hair and also to express dismay at the utter failure of his team to even pretend to show up—
“Oh, hey Brad.”
Sitting in Brad’s chair like it’s his own, Deputy Person leans back in his seat and rolls a pencil back and forth between his palms. The grin he shoots Brad is crooked and a little deranged.
Ray’s like a bad case of herpes—no darned way of getting rid of him. “Shame the wind didn’t blow you into a ditch somewhere west of the Pacific,” Brad greets.
“My monster prick weighed me down. I dragged it all the way down to the office, yessiree.”
“On the way to my office, you mean.”
After a pause, Ray offers by way of explanation, “Your office has pencils.”
“Get out.”
Ray obliges, but not before snagging another pencil out of the tin on Brad’s desk.
With his last remaining stylus, Brad sits down and quickly fills out some paperwork to ready for his visit to the jailhouse. He’s got a lead to pursue…a lead with cool green eyes, an expressive mouth, and a smarter left hook than a cornered Irish scrapper.
As Brad flips through pages of his notebook, he realizes there are some other contacts in the area who might prove helpful to the case. He murmurs to himself, “Lot of places to hit up.”
Outside his door Ray yells, “Where are we going?”
-----
The wind dies down quick and by the time Brad and Ray strike out, you wouldn’t even know there’d been a fierce dust storm just that morning.
They split up to cover more ground. Brad refrains from telling his deputy about his altercation with Nate for reasons that elude himself, but quickly rationalizes that there’s no point in talking up a lead before it pans out.
The city police department looms up from the street, but Brad skips the entrance and winds around back. There, the small brick cell juts out into the alleyway, completely impenetrable but for the tiny, barred window.
He dusts himself off one last time, then cranes a look inside.
The cell is empty.
Fuck.
Brad takes a deep breath to calm himself, but it doesn’t work.
Fuck, of course the cell’s empty. Hell would sooner freeze over than Schwetje handle a task without fucking it up the ass.
Brad makes his way back to the front of the department and lets himself inside.
“Schwetje,” Brad barks.
He sees the chief of police turn around in one of the back corners, his bulky frame dwarfing the shorter man beside him who suddenly finds himself unduly absorbed in the walls, as do the other five or six grunts in the office.
“Schwetje,“ Brad hisses, stalking over. “Can you inform me as to why my prisoner—a prime suspect in yesterday’s shooting—seems to have vanished into thin air since I left him so happily occupying the jailhouse last night?”
Schwetje’s eyes dart around uncertainly, before meeting Brad’s own. He replies, “There wasn’t enough reason to hold him, Sheriff.”
“Not enough reason?” Brad shoves his hand into his work bag and pulls up a fistful of papers. “Does this look like not enough reason? These are Doc’s findings from the examinations of the corpses. They link Nate Fick’s gun directly to the scene of the crime. Does that sound like not enough reason?”
Aggression seems to be the wrong tack to take, as Schwetje furrows his brow and visibly steels himself. “Sheriff,” he says slowly. “I’m sure it’s as you say it is. But I didn’t have those papers and we had to let him go.”
“I told Hannigan I’d come by in the morning with them,” Brad practically shouts, eyes scanning the room for that yellow-bellied pissant.
“We’re required to release prisoners by 10 o’clock in the morning if there’s nothing to hold them—”
“—it’s five minutes past. You saw the storm this morning. Couldn’t give me an extra—”
“You made the rules, Sheriff. I was only following the county department’s lead.”
Brad wishes he could knock his head against the wall. Trust this cretin to twist Brad’s words around until they resemble buttfuck none of their original intent.
Unfortunately, no amount of logic will unfuck the colossal ineptitude of Reno’s chief of police, so Brad will have to cut his losses. There’s still a full day ahead of him, and it ain’t like Brad’s lost his ability to track a man down overnight.
-----
Brad heads back to the office to pick up Hummer, then steers his way towards the seedier side of town. He aims for Chinatown which is a bit out of the way, beyond of the small tributary of Truckee River that cuts through the southern edge of town.
As he crosses the footbridge, the streets of spaced-out, flat wooden buildings quickly turn into ramshackle dwellings that crowd the riverbank. Overhead, drying laundry suspends from window to window like banners of clothing while Chinese men—just men, as the ratio of women is abysmally low here, even for a frontier town—gather in the streets, spitting and smoking and jabbering at each other in foreign, consonant tones.
Brad knows the area well. Shit lot of action heats up around here, illicit money exchanged more frequently than handshakes while the men compete for work now that the Southern Pacific’s done and laid out. The red light district’s just north as well, and the bleed from that adds up to a whole lot of potential trouble festering in just a few square blocks of space.
Brad treks his way through the streets, tipping his hat at a familiar face or two, but he’s mostly occupied with avoiding piles of stinking horse shit on the way to the edge of town.
Once there, Brad stops and looks out. His gaze runs across the large, canvas tents that dot the landscape like the circus has come to town. Ain’t no circus, though; other than bare-bones shops and grocers, who mainly cater to their own Oriental clientele, Chinatown’s good for just about one thing.
Gambling.
-----
Inside one of the tents, where the roar of drunken voices is almost as obnoxious as the awful stench of too many men in too small a place, Brad finds Manimal at a blackjack table off to the side. Scurrilous creature, no doubt, but Manimal’s always got one ear to the ground and loose enough lips to transmit the information in exchange for hard cash. Someone’s got to finance his outrageous gambling addiction, anyhow.
“A real Mary, you say?” Manimal laughs loudly and slaps down two cards onto the table. A jack and an ace. His gap-toothed smile grows as he scoops up three dollars and a pocket watch, the contents of the pool. “What, did you hook yourself a surprise when you last visited the whorehouse?”
“I didn’t say he was a Mary,” Brad says exasperatedly. “Just that he kinda looks like a girl. Big eyes, long eyelashes. Real pretty, you know.”
Manimal turns in his seat and stares at Brad.
Brad rolls his eyes. “So you heard anything or not? Unlike some rocks-for-brains cuckolds who got nothing better to do than waste gold dust on shit like—” Brad reaches over, ignoring Manimal’s protests as he picks up the pocket-watch. “—fucking tin machines that don’t fucking work—” He throws it against Manimal’s barrel chest. “I got shit to do. So stop wasting my time.”
Manimal blinks at him. “Shit, Brad. That's cold. Diane just left me yesterday.”
“Well maybe if you started talking earlier, I wouldn’t have had to say nothing mean at all.”
Manimal starts talking. As he dutifully explains how Pastor Jim saw a bowlegged drunk amble into a hardware shop, asking for a map of San Francisco only to accidentally mention they were for some carrot-top willing to pay double for it and etcetera, a sudden chill tickles the back of Brad's neck.
He jerks his shoulders up, trying to shake off the sensation, but it's no help—the feeling lingers. Finally, he turns around to look.
Brad scans the joint, but there ain’t nothing out of the ordinary. Just the expected rickety tables, the expected weathered gamblers. Something like twenty men packed into this particular tent, only half of whom Brad recognizes in a trafficked place like this.
Must've been an odd breeze, perhaps. Brad faces forward again and gestures for Manimal to continue, but then the odd feeling returns.
Behind the Chinese dealer, who’s shuffling cards with the speed of a barreling train, a line of dustpans and gold-digging tools decorate the otherwise austere canvas tent. Brad narrows his gaze, focusing on the reflections in the dustpans.
While the image is hardly ideal, dirty and scratched up as the pans are, it’s nonetheless with exacting surety that Brad sees, a couple tables behind him, a dark-haired stranger turn around in his seat. As Manimal goes on obliviously, the stranger openly watches them.
-----
There’s a two-story building in Reno, tucked into a side street just off Commercial Row, which used to go by the name of ‘The Gold Tavern’. The signage was done up in bright, shiny brass, but after the gilded signs got nabbed a good eight times in as many months, the innkeeper swapped it out for a less tempting title: The Copper Tavern.
That’s where Nate’s staying.
This bit of trivia makes Brad a happy Sheriff. It’s also probably made Manimal a happy informant, since he was paid handsomely for his troubles.
Brad has all afternoon to stake the place out. Other than the usual team meeting at sundown, his schedule’s clear and he’s got one hell of a lead to pursue.
It takes less than twenty minutes to ride from the gambling tents to The Copper Tavern.
“I’m taking this,” Brad says to the clerk, stretching over the counter with long arms to pluck a room key off one of the wall hooks.
“Hey now, Sheriff,” the clerk protests, pushing his spectacles up onto his graying head. “That’s my only spare, and I need it for emergencies.”
“Then consider this an emergency.” Brad smiles, showing all his teeth. With a small toss of the key, Brad jauntily swipes it out of the air and proceeds to climb the only staircase of the small boardinghouse.
Nate’s lodging is on the second floor, the corner room. It’s the one with the most space and the biggest windows.
Brad inwardly rolls his eyes. Fucking tea-drinking rich boy with his hoity-toity standards and his fancy, expensive toys (the best of which Brad’s still got in the form of Nate’s Outlaw sticking out the back of his jeans). He can’t tell if he’s amused or exasperated by Nate’s old-money stink.
Well, no matter. Brad ain’t here to ponder the history of a baby-faced Easterner, and neither has he got time to let his guard down because downstairs, in plain fucking view, the man from the gambling tent is still trailing him.
Brad glances over the edge of the balcony and watches the dark-haired man get a beer to sit down with.
Nobody trails Brad but a walking target with a fucking death-wish.
In the meantime, Brad's got better things to do with his time than worry about a third-rate spy.
Brad continues down the balconied hallway until he hits the wall at the end. The door to his left leads to the room Nate’s staying in.
Brad leans towards the door, checking for sounds within. Chances are his boy Nate’s about town, as it’s smack-dab in the middle of the day, so the room should be empty.
He listens for a bit, hand reaching for the knob when the tiniest sound permeates through to the hallway. Brad freezes, ears pricking alert. So much for that theory.
He quickly switches to Plan B. Gingerly presses his hands and one ear flat against the door until the small sounds sharpen into separate voices—there are two people inside, at least.
They’re speaking too softly for Brad to pick up any individual words, but he can still tell one of them is Nate. Something about the cadence of his speech, clipped and sure…couldn’t be anyone else.
An unmistakable sound rings out, of someone landing on bedsprings. They squeak loudly, bouncing a bit even as the talking continues.
Frowning, Brad keeps his ear against the door. Below the balcony, he notices the dark-haired stranger watching him from the first floor, but that guy can go to hell. Brad ain’t missing this conversation.
He hears someone say, “We’d better find the goods and quick. Who’s to say she hasn’t left town already?”
Another creak of the bed resounds, like someone’s joined it.
“Doubt it. She has to unload it first.” The second voice is definitely Nate’s. “The dope’s no good to her rotting away in a storeroom that no one can find. We have a couple days at least to look around, so long as they don’t hear we’re in town.”
Dope. They’re talking opium in there. Fuck, Schwetje just passed an ordinance a few months back to get the shit outlawed, and the trade’s already gone underground?
Brad rubs his eyes, adding that to the list of things he needs to look into when there aren’t unsolved murders and peace-keeping to occupy his time with.
Through the door, the voices start up again.
“It wasn’t your fault, Nate.”
“I had a clear shot. I should’ve taken it.”
“So why didn’t you?” The other man sounds resigned, like he knows the answer already.
The bedsprings make a loud protest—someone falling back on the mattress, probably. “I can’t let Ferrando down.” Nate’s voice sounds small and young. “He reached out to me specifically for this case. I have to respect that, Gunny. Don’t I?”
There’s a long pause where Brad nearly pulls a muscle trying to hear something, because if Nate’s words were anything but an entreaty for comfort and reassurance, Brad’ll eat his hat. The silence is unsettling.
Finally, he hears the other man—Gunny—clear his throat. “You think too much. Remember, we just need to bring her in dead or alive. Let’s focus on doing the latter.”
Two heavy feet suddenly clomp onto the hardwood and Brad starts a bit. He silently moves away from the door, stuffing himself into the corner with no time to spare. The door opens so that he’s covered for a brief second, but then quickly closes again to reveal a straight-backed man, bare-headed but for short hair bleached blond by the sun.
Gunny looks a bit older than Nate—thirty-five, give or take a few years. Judging from the conversation inside, he must be another U.S. Marshal; Nate’s partner, probably. The two seemed real close, at any rate.
As the man jogs down the stairs to exit The Copper Tavern, Brad makes a motion to make himself scarce. He’s not going to get the chance to search the room for more information while Nate’s still in there.
Unfortunately, the door takes that moment to fly back open, and Brad has to launch himself backwards again to avoid getting hit in the face.
Nate comes out.
He lets the door swing shut behind him, leaving Brad irrevocably exposed for interminable seconds as he stands there, fussing with the untucked tails of his shirt.
It’s practically a miracle Nate doesn’t notice him. Brad holds his breath, watching apprehensively as Nate tips down the brim of his black, ten-gallon hat before walking off towards the stairs, still buttoning up his vest with neat, deft movements of his arms.
Only when Nate’s disappeared down the stairs does Brad let his breath out.
Feeling a headache coming on, he rubs the crease between his brows with his thumb. There’s no use jumping to conclusions at this juncture—all he’s got to do is get in there and find some harder evidence than just a bad feeling.
-----
Brad lets himself in with the key he’d snagged, jiggling the loose doorknob to push his way inside.
The room’s as spacious inside as it looks from street-level. It’s kept pretty neat, too; no clothes laying about or dirty boots kicked onto the wooden plank floors. The only immediate sign of any occupant, in fact, is a traveler’s bag that lies open at the foot of the bed.
Brad aims for it but checks the closet first, yanking the slatted doors open.
There’s a second bag on the floor next to a pair of boots he doesn’t remember Nate ever wearing, and the shirts hanging on the wooden bar come in two different sizes.
Well, fuck me, Brad thinks. He pulls back, works his way through the rest of the small living space scanning everything with sharp eyes. He needn’t work hard, though; two bags, two sets of toiletries—even a blind man could see there’s a second person staying there, most likely Gunny.
That would be reasonable enough, seeing as how Gunny and Nate are probably partners, if not for a single, glaring detail that remains.
One bed, Brad wryly notes. He stares at the full-sized bed for a bit, then reaches over to strip the blanket back. Underneath, the second, thinner sheet is twisted up and kicked to the side, half-hanging off. The sight of it makes Brad’s chest clench unpleasantly.
Lord, but Brad knew there’d been something fishy about Nathaniel Fick. Boy that groomed don’t just join up with the Marshals Service, looking to make a living hunting robbers or anything so dangerous. Naw, Nate’s got a reason to be running. Maybe it’s the man he’s bunking with, or maybe it’s the woman he couldn’t bring himself to shoot—hell, maybe it’s both. Whatever it is, Nate’s blown into Brad’s town now, and he’s stirring up dirt faster’n a Washoe dust storm.
There are three dead men, which is bad enough already, but if the Service is involved and rooting around for opium stockpiles? There sure as hell’s something larger afoot. And Nate—oh, good ol’ Nate, the sweet-faced Marshal—he’s hovering around the edges of the whole mess like an all-knowing Injun spirit.
All of this is putting Brad in a right foul mood.
Throwing the cover back over the mattress, Brad returns to the bag at the foot of the bed.
He shoves the leather sides apart and really digs in, but there ain’t nothing in there besides some folded up clothes and odds n’ ends. He recognizes one of the shirts as the one Nate wore when he sauntered into Mathilda a day ago—just a day ago?—sunburned as a redneck hillbilly, thirsty as horse.
There’s a discarded belt holster tossed inside the bag as well, and the silver buckle in front is spit-shiny new. Must be the holster Nate had Percy Grant repair for him.
Brad pulls out the Army Outlaw from the back of his jeans and slides it into the holster bag, unsurprised when the iron sights perfectly align with the worn-out groove inside the leather.
Nothing else in the bag jumps out at him though. Brad keeps the gun but puts the holster back and leaves it alone, moves to the bag in the closet. Again, just some clothes, some extra ammo and empty clips. A couple of bandannas.
One of the handkerchiefs feels a bit stiffer than the rest. Brad pulls it out and unfolds the fabric to find a couple small photographs inside.
They’re both of the same woman. She’s dark-skinned with black hair, eyes wide-set and almond-shaped and at the bottom of the card, written in ink, is the title Cocheta the Unknown, 1883. She’s obviously a native, a fact made more clear by the second photo where she’s posing erect and proud beside an older man donning a chieftain’s traditional garb.
They’re not locals, though—Brad’s gotten used to seeing Injuns in deerskin tunics, their women in short skirts that show their legs all the way up to their knees, but in the photo both subjects are wearing what looks like cotton, and the girl’s got on a floor-length dress, puffy with layers that would be begging for a heatstroke in Washoe climate.
A scrabbling noise comes from the door and Brad quickly pockets the photos, scrambling to his feet so fast the blood rushes to his head in a fade of white.
He hears the door burst open but before Brad can blink away the haze from his eyes, a deafening gunshot rings out. Luckily, he’d stumbled back—the bullet misses him and soon after, his vision’s all clear.
Brad narrows his eyes. Standing before him is the fucking twerp from downstairs, who’d been following Brad all goddamned day like a frightfully good impersonation of Ray Person. The guy’s dark-skinned with chiseled features and full, black hair—another damned Injun, looks like.
Brad yanks his Colt out and fires back a warning shot, making sure to aim just a few inches high so the Injun can hear the zip of a close fucking call.
Doesn’t look like it’s gonna be enough. The Injun strides forward and shakily puts his gun in front of him, aiming for another shot. Brad ain’t gonna give him the chance, though.
He lunges backwards, thrusting his elbows behind him where he knows they’ll meet huge glass windows. He shatters them easily, the magnificent noise making his assailant flinch. Brad uses the momentum to hop out onto the roof of the first story, then swings himself over the edge to land on the packed dirt road outside.
The smattering of people on the street give Brad a wide berth as he picks himself up and dusts off his pants. He automatically reaches back to check for Nate’s pistol, relaxing when his fingers touch warm metal.
Up above, jagged-edged holes gawp like blacked-out teeth where windows used to be. Brad scans them to make sure the Injun ain’t thinking anything so foolish as to follow him to the ground, then dashes around to the front of The Copper Tavern and fights upstream through the panicked patrons fleeing the hotel.
Brad storms upstairs, two steps at a time and reaches the landing—
“Fuck!” Brad swears as a gunshot fires at him, splintering the wall just inches to his left. He swings his head around, but there’s nobody in sight so Brad charges on, keeping below the barred railing before pausing at the entryway of the corner room.
Brad ducks his head in and out, eliciting a premature shot from the Injun who’s waiting for him behind the bed.
From that angle, his attacker’s got a shit line of vision. The bed’s a four poster frame raised high off the ground, so if Brad gets prone to the ground and crawls his way in…
Keeping silent, Brad does just that. The Injun’s muttering to himself, completely oblivious to the way Brad’s gotten underneath the bed, his target’s jittery knees in plain sight. He almost feels bad about how easy this is.
Brad stretches his arm out and nudges the muzzle of his gun against his target’s buckskin trousers, right between the legs, and slowly, deliberately pulls down the hammer with a threatening click.
“Drop the gun,” Brad orders.
The pistol falls to the ground with a clatter.
Brad reaches out and shoves it away with his free hand, letting it skid all the way across the room until it hits the opposite wall. Keeping his Colt pointed right where it is, Brad flips onto his back and hoists himself out from under the bed.
“First things first,” Brad says conversationally as he gets to his feet. He moves his aim up to his captive’s face. “Who are you?”
The Injun stutters a little, but he eventually gets his name out. “Meesh.” He squeezes his eyes shut and sits back on his heels, hands raised in the air. “Sh-shit man, don’t shoot!”
“Then don’t give me a reason to. Why you been following me around all day, hm?”
Meesh’s eyes dart left and right, and Brad ain’t a fucking moron. He knows the Injun’s got back-up—someone took a shot at him out on the balcony, and it sure as hell wasn’t this ass-clown.
Brad’s only got so much time. He jerks his gun to the side and lets off a round, punching a quarter-sized hole into the floor with a bang that almost hides the sound of Meesh’s high-pitched yelp.
“Okay, okay! Look dude, it’s not personal. It’s those guys staying in this room, that’s who we care about.”
Fuck. He’s talking about Nate. “What do you want with them?”
“I …please, Sheriff. They’ll kill me if I tell you.”
Brad cocks the hammer again and the cylinder turns, reloading a fresh bullet. “I can save them the trouble.”
“Fuck, all right. Just…stop following those dudes, okay? They’re up to no good.”
“You mean you’re up to no good. It’s got to be something real bad if the Service is after you.”
“Wait, what Service?” Meesh furrows his brow, and Brad can practically see the gears turning in his head.
Shit. Way to go, Brad.
Meesh asks, “Are you talking about, like, U.S. Marshals?”
“I didn’t say shit,” Brad responds curtly. He reaches for the handcuffs hanging off his front belt loop and pulls it off with one hand, the other still aimed at his captive’s head. “Stand up and turn around.”
Meesh gets up and does as he’s told, but before Brad can cuff him the room swarms with bullets that close in on two fronts—half from the balcony outside their door and half through the windows, shattering whatever glass is left. Brad and Meesh both drop to the ground, holding their ears in poor defense against the bone-rattling clamor.
Meesh starts to crawl away and Brad grabs at his ankle, but it’s completely futile as two other Injuns burst into the room and aim their rifles at Brad, who’s still on the ground.
He quickly weighs his options—either cut through the hotel or dive out the window again. Both come with perils, but if Meesh’s friends are anything like the piss-poor shot he is, Brad’s got a good chance of making it out alive when they’re shooting from afar.
Window it is.
Brad rolls up against the wall and leaps to his feet too quickly for either gunman to shoot him in time, then hops the broken glass to the roof outside where he gets harmlessly sprayed with a few more missed attacks from snipers in the opposite building.
The street’s done cleared out by now, the telltale noises of an afternoon firefight the best blockade a Sheriff could ever ask for. It rankles Brad that he don’t have the means to take care these upstarts on his own, but he recognizes a fool’s mission when he sees one and has sense enough to retreat.
The Injuns try to pursue him, trailing out of The Copper Tavern but once Brad dashes to Hummer, who’s parked outside and unharmed, he jumps astride and easily gets away from the straggling shots. They fly down the street together, leaving a billowing trail of dust in their wake.
Brad’s heart races, adrenaline pulsing through his veins. There’s no way to tamp down his body’s overexcited reactions to the fight, but he forces himself to tether his mind to focus on next steps.
Above his head, the sky’s starting to darken. It’s about time he and his men convene, provided they finally made it into town after the morning’s dust storm. Brad steers his horse down the appropriate streets, leading them back to the department.
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