Steal Me, Sweet Thief Read online

  Macalester felt oddly detached, as though watching the drama unfold from another part of the room, or as if it were a picture in a museum, complete with a heavy, ornate frame. He did not think for one minute that Garland Humble would hesitate to shoot him where he stood, with or without further provocation.

  He also sensed that the next one of them who spoke had lost.

  Garland Humble's barrellike chest rose and fell, and his breathing grew labored. Macalester felt as though he himself had frozen to the floor. His booted feet had not moved in several minutes, and he wondered, fleetingly, if they would ever move again by his own direction. He heard his heartbeat, surprisingly slow and regular, as though the organ was blissfully unaware of the proximity of death. He did not fear death, he realized, nor even the act of dying. The only thing he regretted, deeply, was that he would not see Geneva again.

  No doubt of it, he thought, feeling a faint grin tease the corners of his mouth. He was in love with her. At least he could take that with him. Maybe it would be enough, in the eyes of whatever God there was, to cleanse him of his terrible lie.

  Humble's stare became vacant, as though he was looking at something beyond Macalester, or perhaps as though Macalester himself had abruptly ceased to exist. A loud clatter broke the stillness at last. Glancing down, Macalester saw the derringer on the black-and-white marble floor. Humble's hand flexed once. Macalester saw it tremble just before the old man pressed it to his chest. Humble looked surprised, then shocked. Before Macalester could quite make out what was happening, Humble staggered forward, first with one leg, then the other. Then he fell to his knees, hard.

  "Mac—" Garland's blue lips formed the name three times before any sound actually emanated. Macalester still could not move, although he suddenly wanted to. It seemed an invisible wall had gone up between himself and the afflicted man, preventing his comprehension of the situation for another moment. Then Humble fell forward onto his face, and Macalester heard his own voice break the stillness.

  "Hallis!" he shouted, holstering his gun as he found his legs and sprang forward. "Hallis! Come quick!"

  Macalester knelt beside the prone man and turned him, with great effort, onto his back. Humble was still breathing, but the breaths were shallow and rapid. His nose was bloodied. He'd probably smashed it on the floor when he fell. He tried to moisten his cracked blue lips with the tip of his dry tongue. He regarded the younger man with a weak, pleading look. Macalester was stunned by the unexpected pity he felt for the suddenly helpless, and apparently dying, man.

  Hallis appeared and dropped the tray with the brandy bottle upon it. The service fell to the floor with a loud crash. Macalester, irritated, glanced up at him.

  "Does he have medicine?" he challenged the mortified butler tersely.

  Hallis nodded.

  "Then get it!" the outlaw ordered. "And send someone for the doctor. Hurry up, Hallis, or he's a dead man!"

  Hallis disappeared.

  "Don't you die on me, you ornery son-of-a-bitch." Macalester tapped on Humble's pale and papery cheeks. "Not before you tell me where Geneva is!"

  Garland's puffy eyes fluttered open, and his lips moved soundlessly. Eager, Macalester bent his neck and pressed his ear near Humble's face.

  "Go to hell," he heard the old man rasp.

  Hallis returned and, with badly shaking hands, held a small brown bottle out to Macalester. Hallis, Macalester noticed with some disgust, seemed to be virtually useless in an emergency.

  "The doctor, Hallis!" he reminded the mute butler sternly. "Get the doctor!"

  The smaller man nodded and disappeared again. Surprised at his own calm, Macalester deftly uncorked the bottle and shook one small white pill into the palm of his hand. Humble, still struggling for breath, watched him from the floor. It was an odd sensation, to see the ruthless and powerful Garland Humble utterly helpless, waiting for his life-saving medicine.

  Macalester closed his hand on the pill, staring hard at the fallen millionaire.

  "I wonder," he said quietly, "if you'd rather die than tell me where she is."

  "You bastard!" Humble mouthed.

  Macalester's only emotion, staring down at him, was a profound hope that the old man would live long enough to tell him what he wanted to hear.

  "You taught me everything I know," Macalester assured him. "Now where is she, Gar? You don't have a whole lot of time, judging by the color of your lips."

  "Galveston," Humble struggled, closing his eyes. "Give me…"

  Galveston! Why the hell would he send her there? Macalester wondered, mystified. Well, no time to ask now. He held tightly to the pill.

  "One more thing." It was a struggle to prevent himself from giving the wretched hulk his salvation, but he managed. "The money. Where is it?"

  Too late. Humble had passed out again. Macalester muttered a brief curse under his breath and slipped the pill between Humble's dry lips. He got up then, leaving Humble on the floor where he was.

  Galveston. Could Humble have been lying? Macalester wondered, staring down at the pale, virtually lifeless bulk on the floor. Possible, he thought. But not likely. Garland Humble, who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing, would not gamble with his own life.

  Macalester stirred himself Time was short. He abandoned the unconscious, or dead, man in favor of a search of the study. The first place he tried was Garland's enormous rosewood desk, which he had once heard Garland refer to as his "Louie Katorze." Macalester had no idea what that meant. The desk was, in his opinion, garishly ornate and impossibly cumbersome, typical of the ostentatious trappings with which Garland Humble enjoyed surrounding himself.

  The top drawer was locked. Macalester withdrew a sword-shaped letter opener from a crystal well on the desk and pried it open, leaving a deep, jagged gouge in the tender wood.

  Macalester could never understand why rich people like Garland Humble would leave so much cash lying around the house, where anyone could just come in and steal it. He did not bother to count it out. He merely stuffed two bundles of bills into his shirt, leaving the rest. There was a time when he would have taken it all, he mused, allowing himself a bitter smile as he closed the damaged drawer on several additional bundles of wrapped greenbacks.

  Hallis was kneeling over Humble in the foyer when he returned, fussing in a most annoying and ineffectual manner.

  "What do you know about Garland's business in Galveston, Hallis?" he challenged the butler, whose gray head jerked around. Macalester was surprised that the man's sharp eyes were wet.

  "Mr. Humble sent his foreman to Galveston to meet a man." Hallis frowned as if trying to recall. "A foreigner, I believe."

  Humble hadn't lied, after all. So nice, reflected Macalester, glancing at Humble's motionless, amorphous mass, to discover unexpected qualities in one's business associates.

  "A foreigner?" Macalester challenged him, mystified. "From where?"

  Hallis waved his hand, returning his attention to his master. "Arabian," he replied impatiently. "I believe Mr. Humble was purchasing horses."

  Macalester stared, trying to analyze. What connection could there be between Geneva Lionwood and Arabian horses? The more he thought about it, as he headed back to Irving for Billy, the less he liked the sound of it, although he could not fathom why.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  A cold rain accompanied Kieran Macalester and Billy Deal out of Irving, but Billy was glad to be going anyway. He didn't minded telling Mac that he'd worried some in the day and a half the older man had been gone. He'd seldom seen his partner in such a grimly determined state, and never over anything involving a woman. The Senator was quiet, too. Abnormally so. Although, Deal reflected, watching puffs of steam issue from beneath his own new mustache and dissipate in the steady rain, the weather was not much of an inspiration to one's eloquence, even Mac's.

  But the weather, he suspected, had little, if anything, to do with Mac's taciturn humor.

  Mac rode a little ahead of him, his back ramro
d straight. His poncho flapped about his boot tops and rainwater ran in a stream off the back of his hat as he cantered the big roan along the muddy road. He'd returned from Humble's early that morning without saying much. He'd merely handed him a bunch of greenbacks and indicated he was going out to provision them for a hard ride. Billy had guessed that right along, but there was something about the way Mac had avoided his eyes as he told him that made Billy refrain from questioning his partner further at the time. But all of that had taken place several hours ago. Billy's stomach was growling for lunch, and he had a yen for hot coffee and conversation.

  They'd put about twenty miles or more behind them, and at the rate Mac was pushing, they'd make Galveston Island in two days' time. A train, with all of its stops in between, could not make it any faster than that. And he was damned if he'd go on riding in the rain without even the diversion of a little conversation; he didn't care what might be on Mac's mind. Enough was enough. With a "G'yip" and a nudge with his heels, he urged his own gray gelding ahead until he was pacing his partner.

  "Hey, Mac, you got any jerky? Mine's all wet."

  The ruse, he knew, never fooled Mac, but it always got his attention. The older man laughed briefly. It was a hollow sound, though, like the report of a shotgun in a box canyon.

  "The hell it is." Mac's hooded eyes scanned the road before them. "What's on your mind, William? I got time for three questions."

  He reined the roan to a trot, slow enough for a brief dialogue.

  "Hot damn, three whole questions?" Billy teased, hoping to lighten the mood a little. "I got time for about a dozen answers!"

  "Two, now," Macalester amended, shrugging the rain off his shoulders. "That was one."

  Billy allowed the laconic jest to pass without reacting. "What happened at Humble's?" he asked bluntly.

  Macalester glanced at his partner and saw at once that Deal was serious. He answered the younger man with neither omission nor embellishment. Deal remained silent during his reply and for several minutes thereafter.

  "What do you suppose they plan to do with her?" Billy wanted to know next. Billy, Macalester was somewhat amused to note, was choosing his questions carefully. He began to dread the final question.

  "I don't know," he replied, aware of the uneasiness that had not left him since his parting conversation with Hallis. "That's what worries me. I wouldn't put anything past Gar, after this."

  They covered another half a mile before Billy exercised his right to the final query. "What, exactly, happened to you, Mac? On this job, I mean? I never seen you like this before." Macalester sucked in a hard breath, held it, then let it out all at once, still not looking at his partner. "Ask me another question," he said.

  "Aw, come on, Senator!" Billy sounded annoyed. "You said three questions. That's my third. I spent a month of my life holed up in Humble's fancy-ass prison, and now you got me chasin' some skirt halfway to Bejeezuz when we should be gettin' set to winter in Mexico, and I guess I'm entitled to know why."

  Macalester stared at the wet, matted dark hair of the roan's mane. Billy, he knew, was entitled to an answer. Given his own admittedly odd behavior, and the demands he was making, he knew he certainly owed the younger man that much. But, damn it, he was—ashamed. There was no other word for it. He was appalled by his own behavior, from his arrival in New York to the night of madness in Memphis when he'd lost his will to stay away from Geneva. Behavior that, he realized to his chagrin, would have made him and Billy laugh before. But somehow, some way, something had happened to him. And that something, he knew, feeling the ever-present tightness in his breast, was Geneva Lionwood.

  "Did you ever meet anybody," Macalester began, seeing her so clearly in his mind's eye that he ached to touch her, "who made you wonder about everything you thought you knew, as if suddenly the sun came up in the west one morning instead of the east? Somebody who made you wish, just being near them, that you could live your life over again in a flash and be somebody, really be somebody, in their eyes? Somebody who could make you feel like the biggest, smallest, smartest, dumbest, highest, lowest son-of-a-bitch that ever drew breath, just by looking at you sideways? Somebody who could turn you inside out, string you up, slice your heart into little paper dolls and beat you like an old carpet, and make you wish they'd beat you some more?"

  "By 'somebody,' I guess you mean a woman." Billy sounded cautious. Macalester smiled to himself Billy knew when to walk on eggs around him. "No, I don't just mean a woman," he retorted, feeling his face grow warm. "I'm talking about the woman. Did you ever meet the woman, Billy?" Billy laughed, a trifle nervously, Macalester thought.

  "Well, hell, sure, I met a lot of women," he answered easily. Too easily. A man who had found that woman, Macalester realized, could never be easy again, until she was his.

  "It's not the same. Not the same at all." He shook his head slowly, wondering at the change in himself since a month before. It was as if he'd found something, something so vital, so fundamental to his existence that he could not begin to comprehend how he had lived without it all of those years. And, having lost it again, he wondered hourly how he could be expected to continue drawing breath…

  His face was wet. He put his head back, looking up at the slate-gray sky, welcoming the raindrops that would camouflage his tears.

  "I have to get her back, Billy." A quick sigh caught him off-guard. "I promised her I wouldn't let anything bad happen to her. She's a smart woman. Damned smart. And resourceful, too. Hell, with everything she's been through in the last month alone, I'd say she could handle just about anything. But that scares me, too. She's so capable, what the hell does she need me for?"

  The two horses plodded along in the mud for a time. "Same reason you need her, I imagine," Deal offered at last. Macalester smiled, ruefully.

  "I don't know." He used his damp kerchief to wipe his face. "I told her the lie of my life, and I don't think she'll ever forgive me for it. I owe her, Billy. I owe her big. She was the one who got rid of Lennox. She killed him. It was an accident, but it happened. And that's my fault, too. She'd never have had to kill him, if it hadn't been for me. When I think about it, I've fouled up her life in just about every way possible, and I'm damned it I can come up with even a shabby reason why she should ever want to forgive me, let alone love me. So I have to do this, Billy," he wound up, feeling so bad again that he wished he'd never brought it up. "I can't even think about how she feels about me. I just know I couldn't live with myself unless I did everything in my power to help her now. Does that make any sense?"

  Macalester sure hoped it made some sense to Billy Deal, because he didn't feel as though anything made any sense to him, not since that night in Irving when she had gazed at him with those big green eyes of hers and spoken the first words she'd said in three days: What will happen to me?

  How could he have known when he promised her nothing bad would happen that her husband would have made some wild plan for them both at which he could only guess? "What the hell is that?"

  Macalester stared at his partner. Billy, craning his neck, was squinting at something in the road ahead. Macalester followed his stare and saw a buckboard stopped dead around a bend in the road with a man lying in the mud beside it. The horses were gone, and in the back was a big brown bundle. The bundle moved.

  Macalester's heart skipped. With a nudge and a cry, he spurred the roan to a gallop, forming a wordless prayer as he bore down upon the wagon. He pulled the roan up short, dismounting even before the animal came to a stop. He heard Billy's gray gallop up behind him, but he was already in the back of the wagon, reaching for the saturated burlap bundle.

  "Gen! Is it you? Are you all right?"

  He pulled the burlap with a final quick jerk and was crushingly disappointed to find not Geneva but a man, huddled, with the look of a scared rabbit on his unshaven face.

  "Don't hurt me," the man whimpered. Macalester recognized him at once as the last face he'd seen in Irving before waking up to Billy Deal's. Before the ou
tlaw quite knew what was happening, his own hands were fast around the man's scrawny neck, and he was shaking him like a hapless rag doll.

  "Where is she?" he demanded, his hoarse shout thundering through the soaked woods about them. "What happened to her? Damn you, answer me!" The man made a choking sound, and his eyes began to bulge out of their dark, sunken sockets. His head lolled as though his neck was broken. A strong, firm hand took hold of Macalester's arm, causing him to release the man abruptly. "He can't tell you nothin' if he's dead, Senator." Billy's voice was the quiet voice of re as on.

  Macalester stared hard at the cowering figure before him, panting for breath. He wanted to kill the man, and he would have, had Billy not intervened.

  "Tyrell's over here," Billy offered, and Macalester still did not look at him. "And another fellow. They're dead. Shot in the back of the head. A real mess. I'd guess they've been here a day or more."

  Two dead men and a live coward. But Geneva? She wasn't here. She wasn't dead. He'd know it, somehow, if she were. "Wouldn't he? "All right." Macalester panted, eyeing the man in the buckboard with disgust. "What happened here? "Where is she?" The man pulled the wet burlap about himself again with badly shaking hands, not taking his eyes off of Macalester.

  "We stopped for a rest," he stammered, his voice no more than a squeak. "I went into the woods to do my business, and next I know, there's shots. I got down and looked around, and saw these—I don't know—devil men. I never seen anything like 'em. They was all in black, with these black things on their heads and faces, and they was jabberin' in some language I couldn't make out. Wasn't no Injun that I ever heard. Then I hear the woman screamin', and I kept real still. They carried her off, I reckon. Humble's gonna be mighty pissed. We was supposed to pick up thirty Arab horses after we took her to Galveston. I don't know what we're gonna do. Hell, Wes is dead, and Tyrell…"