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DISCLAIMER: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by ah… various corporations and television stations whose names I can't recall at the moment. I think CBS may be in there somewhere. No money is being made and no offense is intended.
Fandom: Magnificent Seven (Old West)
Main characters: Ezra, JD, Nathan.
Warnings: This still-PG-13-rated section of "Another Fine Mess" contains drinking, gambling, profanity, yet more Nathan torture, an unflattering portrayal of law enforcement officials, and insulting remarks about President Grant. It still does not contain hot sex. Sorry.
Part Two:
Julestown might be smaller than Ridge City, and it's saloons—even the finest of them, which the Morning Star undisputedly was—might not measure up to the better establishments the larger town offered, but there were still plenty of men on hand eager to try their luck and skill at poker.
And Ezra was more than happy to accommodate them.
His current opponents, two middle-aged ranchers and a sharply-dressed young man who worked as a surveyor for a mining company, were just skilled enough to be entertaining, but not skilled enough to keep Ezra from winning at least two hands out of every three. His injured left arm proved no hindrance at all; he didn't even have to cheat to keep his winning streak going. Not that he couldn't palm cards or deal from the bottom of the deck one-handed when he needed to.
Ezra rarely needed to resort to such tactics, however, despite the accusations of card-sharping the rest of the Seven were so fond of tossing his way. Poker was all about numbers and manipulation—of people, not cards. About calculating the odds, and keeping track of which cards had been played and which were still in circulation, and reading the other players' tells. The mining surveyor stroked his carefully waxed mustache when he wasn't sure what action to take, a minor tic that telegraphed an indifferent hand, and a player willing to be bluffed. The stockier of the two ranchers frowned ever so slightly every time he had a good hand, trying to conceal his luck, which didn't work, since he didn't frown when his cards were bad.
He wasn't frowning now, and his calm poker face meant that his hand was poor at best. The surveyor was stroking his mustache. The other rancher had already folded, and was now watching the game merely out of curiosity. Ezra glanced down at his cards, which held nothing more promising than a pair of sevens, and smiled cheerfully. "I raise, gentlemen."
He set a gold half-eagle on top of the stack of money in the middle of the table, and turned expectantly to the surveyor.
The young man studied his cards and frowned, still stroking his mustache. "Hmmm. I think I'll fold, if that's all right with you, sir."
"Perfectly all right," Ezra said. "And you, sir?" He turned to the rancher expectantly.
The rancher sighed, and laid all five of his cards face down on the table. "I fold."
"Ah. How fortunate for me." Ezra grinned, his cheerfulness real now, and laid his own cards out for the others to see. "A pair of sevens. Truly, a lucky number at the moment." And he pulled the small pile of coins in the center of the table towards him, stacking them in a neat column at his elbow. That was one thing the Morning Star had over Ridge City's Cosmopolitan. One played for cash, not poker chips. Chips might be classier, but money made leaving in a hurry with one's winning much easier, and there was nothing quite like the feel of cold, hard cash in one's hands.
Except that at the moment, the feel of those gold coins made Ezra's thoughts return to that damned ten thousand dollars, which was utterly nonsensical, since Stutz's money had been in bills, not coins.
A thick, freshly printed stack of bills, thick enough to save his life. And cost him his associates'—his friends'—trust in the process. Such a stupid, stupid thing to do, Ezra thought in disgust. No wonder Chris and the others hadn't trusted him with the money. He couldn't be trusted with it. After all his protests at having his honesty impugned, the first thing he'd done when Josiah had handed the money over to him—knowing full well what Ezra would do with it, or why else would he have made that comment about apples—was to prove all of their doubts right.
It wasn't as if he would even have gotten to spend more than a fraction of it, anyway. Chris Larabee would have hunted him down within a week and hauled him in front of Judge Travis for… well, not stealing, technically. The money had belonged to a dead man, so taking it hadn't exactly been stealing. Maybe for dereliction of duty? Which was really just fancy legal talk for running out on people.
Ezra set the last coin on top of the stack and pushed such thoughts firmly to the back of his mind. He picked up his half-full shot glass and drained it, hoping the whiskey would keep them there, and looked up at the full poker table. "Another round, gentlemen?"
"Hell, might as well." The stockier rancher grinned, and sipped at his own whiskey. "You've got to start losing sometime."
"Perhaps," Ezra said. He signaled the bartender for another shot of whiskey, taking a sort of rebellious pleasure in ordering another drink, now that Nathan wasn't here to watch him like a hawk, and started dealing cards. Mr. Jackson ought to be back from his auction, JD in tow, and minute now, and Ezra intended to enjoy himself in their absence as long as he could. Enjoy himself, and forget all about that damned assassination attempt, and that wretched, goddamned money.
* * *
"We're not road agents, I swear," JD said, for what felt like the tenth time. "We're lawmen from Four Corners. You have to let us out and get a doctor in here for his leg! There's got to be a half dozen of them in town."
"So first your friend's a doctor, and now he's a deputy, that right?" Sheriff Aiken, sitting behind his desk with a partly-disassembled shotgun across his lap, shook his head with grim amusement. "The two of you really need to run your stories past each other." He put down the shotgun he was cleaning and looked up to meet JD's eyes. "If you make a full confession, could be the Army'll go easy on you. Green kid, fresh from back East," he waved a hand at JD's brown suit, "fallen in with bad company. It was your friend there who murdered those two guards, not you. If you help us out, testify against him, you might not end up being hanged as an accomplice."
"I'm not an accomplice!" JD shouted, completely losing his last shreds of patience. "I'm the sheriff of Four Corners. Wire Four Corners and you'll see it's the truth!"
Aiken said nothing for a moment, just looked at him, and JD found himself wishing he were a little more intimidating, maybe taller. Chris and Buck didn't get those sort of patronizing looks.
Behind Aiken, the shorter of the two deputies didn't even bother to hide his snickers. "Sure," he muttered. "Yer a sheriff. And yer friend there isn't a wanted murderer, he's the town doctor." He rolled his eyes. "Like buyin' a bag o' medical tools'll make that one work."
"Andy," Aiken said, his voice a warning.
Andy shut up.
"Kid," Aiken started, "number one," he held up one finger, "Four Corners doesn't have a sheriff. It's got seven regulators hired on by Judge Travis. Everybody in this half of the territory knows that, so I suggest you find a new story. Number two," he held up a second finger, "I'm not wiring Chris Larabee to ask whether he's got a negro and a kid working for him, because I'm not gonna waste his time, and number three," a third finger, "all of the doctors that came in for that auction left on the afternoon stage, and Doc Milburn went out with them, so your pal will just have to tough it out."
"Yeah," Andy said. "If he's really a doctor like ya say, maybe he can fix himself up." He laughed, and JD glared at him, longing to wipe the mocking smirk off his stupid, pock-marked face.
"You can go to hell," JD informed him. "Come on," he said, trying to appeal to Aiken's sense of decency, if he had one, "at least give me his medical bang and let, um, and let me try to do something." His voice had dropped nearly to a whisper by the end of the sentence; even the thought of trying to treat Nathan's leg making him feel sick. He had no idea what to do, outside of the very basic 'get-the-bullet-out-somehow-and-put-a-bandage-on-it,' and anything he did to try and help might just make things worse.
"That bag has a knife in it as long as my forearm," Aiken said. "Like hell am I giving it to you. Andy, get some of those rags we keep around to clean the guns with." The deputy pulled a handful of cloth from the bottom of the gun cabinet and handed it to him, and Aiken rose from his chair and crossed the room to stand in front of the bars of JD and Nathan's cell. "Here," he said, holding the rags out at arm's length for JD to take. "You can bandage him up with these."
JD frowned, looking at the strips of grimy fabric. Nathan was insistent on only using clean cloth to tie up wounds, and this stuff was a long ways from clean.
"It's the best you're gonna get, kid," Aiken said impatiently, looking down at JD with a frown stamped across his red face.
"Fine." JD snatched the rags, pointedly not saying 'thank you,' and turned his back on Aiken. This left him staring at Nathan, who was lying limply across the pallet in the corner of the cell, eyes closed and face tense with pain. JD swallowed hard, and wished desperately that one of the others were there to do this so that he wouldn't have to.
Speaking of which, where was Ezra, anyway? He ought to have come running in the moment he heard that JD and Nathan had been arrested, demanding to know what was going on. Unless he had decided to wire home and tell Chris and the others first. Or maybe he hadn't heard yet—maybe he was still in one of the saloons playing cards, with no idea that anything had happened to them.
Either way, he was bound to show up eventually, when JD and Nathan failed to meet up with him. And then, maybe he'd be able to convince this arrogant sheriff and his thug deputy—who couldn't even be bothered to keep their jail cells properly swept out—to let them go. He could at least get a message off to the others, which would have Buck, Chris, Vin, and Josiah here in less than two days. And then Aiken would have to let them out. Or Ezra could just break them out. The lock on the cell door wouldn't take him more than a minute or so to pick, and then they could all take off for home.
Except that Nathan might not be able to walk. And, a small voice deep inside JD's head that he tried hard to ignore pointed out, Ezra might not come to help them at all. He'd been ready enough to leave everybody in the lurch before. He'd always come back in the nick of time, of course, but this time, this time Ezra was angry and resentful, and might just decide to keep on playing cards or whatever it was he was doing and let them both rot in jail.
Telling himself firmly that that was a completely ridiculous idea, and Ezra would no more leave him and Nathan in trouble than Buck would, JD knelt down on the dusty floor next to Nathan and peered worriedly at his friend.
The right leg of Nathan's pants was dark with bloodstains, and there were lines of pain around his mouth and between his brows. It was pretty much impossible for Nathan to look pale, but somehow he managed to give the impression of being bloodless and drained of strength anyway.
He needed a knife, JD thought. Something to cut the leg of Nathan's pants open so that he could get a look at the wound. But there was no way Sheriff Aiken was going to give him anything with an edge on it. He took a deep breath, grabbed the edges of the small tear the bullet had made in the fabric, and yanked. Cloth was harder to rip than most people thought, though, so he was only able to rip the pants apart a little, just enough to see the small, neat hole in the outside of Nathan's thigh. There was no exit wound; the bullet was stuck somewhere inside Nathan's leg, lodged in the muscle.
A slow trickle of blood was seeping out from the wound, blood Nathan couldn't afford to lose. JD folded the cleanest-looking of the rags into a pad and pressed it against the bullet wound, trying to get the bleeding to stop.
Nathan groaned, and rolled his head to the side, his eyes blinking open. "JD?" He tried to push himself upright, but JD grabbed him by the shoulder to keep him laying flat.
"Don't sit up. You're still bleeding."
Nathan grimaced, and started to move a hand to touch his wounded thigh, then checked himself. "Is the bullet still in there?" he asked, his voice low and strained.
"Yes," JD admitted. "I tried to get the sheriff to give me your medical bag, but he won't let either of us have any of your tools, in case we try to stab him, or pick the lock with them, or something. I'm sorry."
"Oh." Nathan didn't ask why Aiken wouldn't let a doctor in to see to him. Maybe he'd expected it, or maybe he was just hurting too much to think of it. "That's… that's all right. Just keep pressing on it like you're doing."
"Okay," JD said. He put both hands of the pad of cloth, which had a slowly widening splotch of red in its center, and leaned his weight onto it, trying not to flinch when Nathan's breath hissed out through his teeth. "Sorry," he apologized again. "What else should I do?"
Nathan, whose eyes had been drifting shut, blinked, and considered that. "Clean it with something," he said after a moment. "See if he'll maybe give you one of the bottles of carbolic."
"They broke when you went down." It looked like the bleeding might be slowing a little. JD kept pressing, knowing he was hurting Nathan and hating it. He was almost relieved that Aiken had refused to give him anything to take the bullet out with—he knew, knew he wouldn't have been able to do it, not without hurting Nathan more—and that furtive relief made him feel horribly guilty. As long as that bullet was in there, Nathan was in danger of getting infected. JD knew that much about bullet wounds, at least.
"Okay," Nathan said, "that's okay." For some reason, he seemed to be trying to reassure JD.
JD set his jaw firmly, trying not to look as scared and worried as he felt. "I think the bleeding is slowing down," he offered. Then he switched the subject. "I tried to get Sheriff Aiken to let us out. I told him that we were peacekeepers from Four Corners, that we didn't have anything to do with any robbery, and that if he wired Four Corners Chris would tell him who we were, and that we couldn't have done anything, because we were in town last week when that payroll was robbed, but he wouldn't listen to me." He lifted a corner of the pad and checked the bullet wound, to discover that the flow of blood had nearly stopped. "But I bet when Ezra hears what's happened and comes to get us out of jail, he'll have wired Chris and gotten proof, and then they'll have to let us go. So it should all be okay, and we won't end up getting hung for killing those two soldiers they say you killed. And," JD had a sudden flash of inspiration, "when Ezra gets here, he can take the bullet out for you. I bet he could do it. He's got real steady hands." And unlike JD, Ezra's hands only seemed to get steadier when things went badly.
Nathan didn't appear reassured by any of this news, if he was even listening to it. "The bleeding's stopping?" he asked. When JD nodded, he said, "All right, then now… now you need to tie the bandage on. As tight as you can. Can't clean it out, so we'll just have to hope…" he trailed off, then closed his eyes for a moment, opening them to ask, "What are you using for bandages? Not the ones in my bag. You said they wouldn't give it to you."
"The sheriff gave me some rags," JD said. "They're clean," he added, before Nathan could ask. "It's the only half-way nice thing he's done so far." He picked up the longest of the rags, glad Nathan couldn't see the stains on it, and slid it under Nathan's leg, a procedure that involved a silent flinch on Nathan's part and a muttered apology on his. By the time he'd finished tying the bandage off—as tight as he could, like Nathan had told him to, Nathan's eyes were closed. JD thought he was asleep until he spoke again.
"Can you ask the sheriff for some water?"
"Sure. Water. I can do that." JD got to his feet again—kneeling had left dusty streaks across the knees of his trousers, he noticed absently—and approached the bars once more.
While he'd been tending Nathan, the short, mean-spirited deputy had left, and the big one who'd shot Nathan had taken his place. He looked up when JD reached the bars, tensing a little.
"Can we have some water?" JD asked. "Please," he added, even though the last thing he wanted to do was be polite to any of these people.
"Yeah, sure," the deputy said. He glanced at Aiken afterwards, but the sheriff was once again absorbed in cleaning the shotgun, and didn't even look up. "Just a minute." He went outside for a moment, out back to a pump or something, JD guessed, and came back with a tin cup full of water, which he handed to JD. It just fit through the bars.
Nathan stayed awake long enough to drink it, and then closed his eyes and drifted off, leaving JD with nothing to do but sit, worry, and wait for Ezra.
* * *
Ezra shuffled the pack of house playing cards, cut the deck, and then shuffled again, a complicated maneuver that sent cards streaming from one hand to another. He was mildly proud that, despite the amount of whiskey he had consumed, his hands were still perfectly steady. Oops. Hands. He wasn't supposed to be using his left hand. He glanced around guiltily, half expecting Nathan to materialize at his shoulder to scold him for this injudicious use of his injured limb, but Nathan did not appear.
Which state of affairs was perfectly fine with Ezra. He had two hundred and sixty newly acquired dollars neatly stashed away inside his coat, a fresh glass of whiskey at his elbow, and a table full of talented opponents to play against. The mining surveyor and the thinner, older rancher had departed a good hour or more ago, but two men in coats just as flashy as Ezra's green jacket had arrived to take their places, presenting Ezra with a real challenge for the first time in weeks. He was only winning every other hand now.
Cards, unlike law enforcement, were something Ezra was very, very good at, and it had been far, far too long since he had been able to forget about bothersome little things like duty and patrols and everyone else's apparently-not-quite-as-high-as-he'd-assumed expectations, and just play.
Still. Nathan. Nathan should have shown up to haul him out of the saloon by now, shouldn't he? After all, can't leave Ezra on his own for too long. He can't be trusted not to run off, can't be trusted with other people's money. Ezra surveyed the green baize tabletop before him, covered in other people's money that was about to become his money, and decided that, in the interest of proving that he could, in fact, be trusted, perhaps he ought to go and find Nathan and JD. In a minute or so. Just as soon as he finished this hand.
Ezra shuffled the cards one last time, just for the fun of it, and started dealing, tuning out the noise of the saloon, which had filled up as sunset approached—and when had it gotten to be almost sunset? There was a loud argument about territorial politics going on on the other side of the room, which Ezra purposefully ignored—he 'd had enough of politics recently to last him a damn long time—and a red-headed man at the next table over with a deputy's star pinned to his lapel was boasting loudly about some dangerous miscreant or other he had apprehended.
"So the feller reaches into his bag fer a knife or something, and bang! Harnett drops him with a bullet in the leg. And a good thing, too, or he'd likely o' sliced us up like he did those two soldiers he killed robbing the Army payroll wagon."
Ezra turned his cards over, fanned them out, and discovered five black cards staring up at him. Four of spades, five of spades, two of clubs, six of spades, eight of spades. Only long practice kept him from smiling. One more spade, and he'd have a flush. Or a seven, a seven of any suit would be even better. A seven would make it a straight. "Ah'll take one card," he said, enunciating carefully to avoid slurring any of the words.
"Well, no, we only got two of 'em," the deputy went on in the background. "The third robber's likely holed up somewhere, nursing that gunshot wound he got when they pulled the job."
Could he get no escape from law enforcement? Wishing heartily that the man would just shut up, Ezra discarded his useless two of clubs and drew another card. Seven of spades. Seven did indeed seem to be his lucky number today. This time, he couldn't keep from grinning. "Shall we open the bettin' at, say, twenty dollars?"
" 'Course, they say they didn't do it. That's what they all say." The deputy, who really was quite obnoxiously loud, snorted in disgust. "Like there's gonna be two six-foot-plus black men running around the territory with a brace of knives an' a white accomplice." He laughed. "Got nerve though. The darkie says he's a doctor, and the kid keeps going on about how they're both lawmen, if you can believe that. Damn. Men'll say anything to try an' get out o' hanging."
Ezra froze, a terrible, sick feeling sliding through his gut. The man couldn't be talking about…
"Are you talkin' about Nathan?" he demanded, interrupting the deputy's blather. "Ah assure you, Mr. Jackson would never participate in anythin’ that smacked of criminality…"
The deputy swung about and stared at him, and Ezra realized that he'd just damn near incriminated himself by announcing that he knew Nathan. And if Nathan and JD really had been arrested…. Damn it all to hell. It was frustratingly difficult to think, now that his attention had been dragged away from nice, uncomplicated things like cards, the alcohol clogging up his thoughts like molasses and slowing them down. Wait, had the man said something about Nathan being shot? He had, hadn't he? "Ah mean," he stammered, trying automatically to fix whatever damage he'd done, "Ah rode in with this man you're talkin' about, and he seemed perfectly respectable. Said he was a doctor."
"An' you fell for that?" the red-headed man hooted. He grinned, the expression making his pock-marked face look like some sort of demonic mask. "A southern boy like you? Damn, son, you know there ain't no such thing as black doctors."
Lunging for the man and wiping that smirking expression off his face, Ezra thought distantly, would probably not be advisable. Not at all. Would likely get him arrested, too.
The men arguing politics had started shouting, he noticed, with the part of his brain that wasn't quietly panicking. He'd give it five minutes at most before a punch was thrown. Really, he ought to be laying bets on it.
"Hey. Hey, Reb. It's your move. You gonna raise, fold, or call?"
"Ah fold," Ezra said quietly. And he laid his straight flush on the table, face up, and stood, gripping the back of his chair as the room tilted around him for a moment. As soon as he was certain of his balance, he let go and started for the door, not even caring that he was leaving twenty dollars of his money—plus sixty dollars that had been moments away from being his—behind on the table. His mother would have been dreadfully disappointed.
"Come on, Ezra," he thought, barely noticing that he was whispering the words aloud, "think of somethin'. Have to get them out, somehow, sneak in or-" and then he lost his train of thought as he stumbled on the bottom step, nearly landing on his knees in the street before reflexes that even alcohol couldn't totally bury kicked in and he caught himself.
Maybe sneaking into the jail wasn't an entirely viable option. Sneaking into places required difficult feats of dexterity like not tripping over things and walking across the street in a straight line. Both of which were proving tricky at the moment.
Something else. He needed to think of something else. And he would, in just a moment, when the soft, clingy fog that was filling his head and sending everything slightly out of focus went away.
There was a loud crash behind him, and Ezra spun around, nearly losing his balance again, his hand automatically going to his gun.
"Goddamn Republican sonuvabitch! You're all in it together, right up to that corrupt bastard in the White House."
Really, Ezra decided absently, the man's assessment of President Grant was right on target, but it didn't follow that he therefore needed to fling his Republican adversary into a table.
And then, belatedly, inspiration struck. Smiling devilishly at the sound of the chaos beginning behind him, Ezra turned and ran for the jailhouse.
* * *
Nathan was still asleep, and JD wasn't sure if this was good or bad. Sleep might help him recover his strength, but then again, it might be a sign that Nathan's injury was more serious than either of them had thought. He hadn't even woken up when Harnett, the big deputy, had brought them dinner. If Nathan's wound started to go bad, there would ne nothing JD could do about it, without medicine of any kind, or even whiskey to clean the wound with.
How long did it take for infection to set in, anyway?
A day? Half a day? Two days? By that time, surely someone would have shown up to bail them out. If not, Sheriff Aiken and his two—what was that word Ezra used? Minions, wasn't it?—his two minions would string them up like the robbers and murderers they all believed JD and Nathan to be.
Why hadn't Ezra shown up yet? JD wondered desperately. Had something happened to him? Maybe Ezra's wound had gone bad, and he was sick somewhere, not able to come. Or maybe he'd been knifed by a gambling partner who was angry at the loss of his money. Or he could be in the middle of a winning streak, in which case he could stay at the tables until dawn and never notice that JD and Nathan hadn't shown up after the auction like they were supposed to.
If it was the latter, JD was going to personally strangle him. It shouldn't be very hard; Ezra wasn't that much bigger than he was, and his left arm was pretty much out of commission, which meant that he wouldn't be able to draw his derringer nearly as fast as he usually did.
JD was imagining this future confrontation with Ezra, right down to the surprised and innocent look Ezra would be wearing, and the Chris Larabee-type growl in which JD would accuse him of letting him and Nathan sit in a filthy jail cell for almost an entire day, when the door to the jail swung open with a bang, and Ezra himself exploded into the room, tripping over his own feet on the threshold and catching himself on the edge of Aiken's desk.
"Sir," he said, after regaining his balance, "are you the sheriff of this fair metropolis?" The words came tumbling out hurriedly, the southern accent twice as thick as usual, so that the sentence was a jumble of thick vowels and soft, slurred consonants. Ezra, JD realized, was doing a dead on impression of being falling down drunk.
Aiken gave Ezra a flat, contemptuous stare. "That's what the badge says. What do you want?"
Ezra drew himself up, the picture of offended dignity. "Ah thought you might like to know about the altercation in the saloon. But Ah suppose you don't." He waved a hand dismissively, the gesture much broader than it normally would have been. "Doesn't matter. Probably be over soon anyway. Your deputy's not likely to be gettin' up again after bein' hit with a bottle like that."
Even JD knew better than to fall for a con as obvious as this one, but Sheriff Aiken and Deputy Irving Harnett were pretty obviously well below the level of any of Four Corners' peacekeepers.
"Andy's been knocked out?" Harnett demanded.
"Ah don't know why Ah even bothered to come in an’ tell you," Ezra went on, as if oblivious. He blinked, swayed slightly, and then added, "This town has no law at all. There was a man shot in the street this afternoon." He made it sound as if he found this state of affairs personally offensive.
"Shut up," Aiken snapped.
"Which saloon?" Harnett put in, right on the heels of that statement. He was halfway to the door by this point, and Aiken had risen out of his chair, looming over Ezra and radiating annoyance.
"The one with all the shouting goin' on in it," Ezra said, as if it were obvious.
Aiken swore, shoved Ezra roughly out of the way, and took off out the door. Harnett was already gone.
As the door slammed shut behind them, Ezra straightened up, smirking. "They really shouldn't have fallen for that," he observed.
"Who cares," JD said joyfully, his earlier irritation with Ezra replaced by glorious relief. "Come over here and let us out!"
"You'll have to pick the lock," Nathan added from behind him. "I think the sheriff took the keys with him." JD turned around to see him sitting up, his back propped against the wall. "And I'm gonna need some help walking out of here."
"How badly are you hurt?" Ezra asked. His face was carefully blank, the expressionless poker-face that he wore when he was trying to hide something, but was too upset or tired to do it well.
"Gunshot wound in the thigh," Nathan said, summing up his injury with a detachment JD couldn't help but admire. "JD bandaged it, and it's stopped bleeding, but the bullet still needs to come out, and it'd be best if I did as little moving around as possible. Not like that's much of an option, though."
"They didn't even get you a doctor?" Ezra half-yelped, outrage clear in his voice. "Deplorable," he muttered, and he pulled his flask from within his jacket and thrust it through the bars to JD. "Here. My compliments."
Then he knelt down, a slim metal lockpick already in his hand from somewhere, to put himself at eye level with the lock. He overbalanced when his knee hit the floor, swaying forward and catching himself with his left hand. "Damn. Ow."
JD frowned, confused by this unusual clumsiness, and then Nathan asked, disbelievingly, "Are you drunk?"
"Yes," Ezra said icily. "Yes, Ah am. What business is it of yours?" He slid the pick into the keyhole, taking two tries to get it in, and began to move it around carefully, his eyes closed and a look of intense concentration on his face.
"What? Why are you drunk?" JD demanded. He crouched down so that he could see what Ezra was doing to the lock, inspecting the gambler closely. Ezra's face was flushed, and there was a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead. He was frowning, as if the task of opening the cell's lock was harder than he had expected. "Where have you been?"
Ezra cursed, opened his eyes, and hissed, "Stop distractin' me. This is hard enough as it is, Mr. Dunne." A long, silent minute went by while Ezra fussed with the lock, then two minutes. JD handed the flask to Nathan, who was glaring at Ezra with disgust, and glanced nervously at the door Aiken had departed from what now seemed an age ago.
"Hurry up, Ezra."
"Ah think Ah've got it," Ezra muttered. "Just a moment…"
Behind him, the door swung open, and Aiken stood framed in the doorway, both of his deputies behind him. "What in the name of-"
Ezra started, and swung around, reaching for his gun. He was half-way to his feet with the Remington in his right hand in less than a second, but by then all three lawmen were in the room, and Harnett made a wild lung forward and grabbed him by the elbow before he could bring the gun to bear on any of them.
Under normal circumstances, Ezra might still have had something approaching a chance, but his reflexes were working at half their usual speed, and his left side and arm were still recovering from Stutz's bullet. He managed to get off one roundhouse punch at Andy's jaw as the smaller deputy stepped forward to grab his other arm, and then Aiken clocked him over the head with the barrel of his shotgun, and he went down like a ton of bricks.
JD shouted, grabbing hold of the bars as if he could somehow get himself through them to come to Ezra's defence. But he hadn't been able to stop Nathan being shot, and he couldn't do anything to help Ezra now. The knowledge didn't make the sight of Ezra sprawled limply across the floor with three armed men standing over him any easier to take.
"Well, well," Aiken said musingly, rubbing with one hand at the grey stubble on his chin, "what have we here?"
Andy gave Ezra a vicious kick in the side, grinning at the choked-off growl of anger this produced from Nathan, and then slid the toe of his boot under Ezra's shoulder, flipping him over to lie face-up.
"Shit," he said, "it's that Reb card player from the saloon. I thought he took off in a hurry. First time I ever seen a gambler fold on a straight flush." He knelt down and stripped off Ezra's green jacket, then whistled. "Gunbelt and a shoulder rig. And whatever this thing is. Man's a walking arsenal." He stripped Ezra of both guns, and then yanked the derringer rig off his left arm. Ezra groaned, and his head lolled to one side.
JD's grip on the cell bars was white-knuckled now, and he felt an overwhelming desire to just flat out shoot the deputy, who seemed to get a cruel pleasure out of bullying them all. "Leave him alone."
Andy rolled his eyes, and stood, handing all three guns to Aiken. He kept Ezra's coat, rifling through the pockets and grinning in delight when he found a handful of money. "Look, boss. Think it's from the payroll?"
"The Army had gold stolen from them," Harnett said, "not greenbacks. And don't go trying to put those in your pocket."
"Give me the money, Andy," Aiken ordered. He held out a hand, and Andy grudgingly placed the wad of money in it--including the two bills he'd been about to tuck inside his shirt. "Thank you." Then he gave Ezra's unconscious form a long, measuring look. "So," he said dryly, "this one a lawman from Four Corners, too?"
Part One
Part Three
Part Four
Fandom: Magnificent Seven (Old West)
Main characters: Ezra, JD, Nathan.
Warnings: This still-PG-13-rated section of "Another Fine Mess" contains drinking, gambling, profanity, yet more Nathan torture, an unflattering portrayal of law enforcement officials, and insulting remarks about President Grant. It still does not contain hot sex. Sorry.
Part Two:
Julestown might be smaller than Ridge City, and it's saloons—even the finest of them, which the Morning Star undisputedly was—might not measure up to the better establishments the larger town offered, but there were still plenty of men on hand eager to try their luck and skill at poker.
And Ezra was more than happy to accommodate them.
His current opponents, two middle-aged ranchers and a sharply-dressed young man who worked as a surveyor for a mining company, were just skilled enough to be entertaining, but not skilled enough to keep Ezra from winning at least two hands out of every three. His injured left arm proved no hindrance at all; he didn't even have to cheat to keep his winning streak going. Not that he couldn't palm cards or deal from the bottom of the deck one-handed when he needed to.
Ezra rarely needed to resort to such tactics, however, despite the accusations of card-sharping the rest of the Seven were so fond of tossing his way. Poker was all about numbers and manipulation—of people, not cards. About calculating the odds, and keeping track of which cards had been played and which were still in circulation, and reading the other players' tells. The mining surveyor stroked his carefully waxed mustache when he wasn't sure what action to take, a minor tic that telegraphed an indifferent hand, and a player willing to be bluffed. The stockier of the two ranchers frowned ever so slightly every time he had a good hand, trying to conceal his luck, which didn't work, since he didn't frown when his cards were bad.
He wasn't frowning now, and his calm poker face meant that his hand was poor at best. The surveyor was stroking his mustache. The other rancher had already folded, and was now watching the game merely out of curiosity. Ezra glanced down at his cards, which held nothing more promising than a pair of sevens, and smiled cheerfully. "I raise, gentlemen."
He set a gold half-eagle on top of the stack of money in the middle of the table, and turned expectantly to the surveyor.
The young man studied his cards and frowned, still stroking his mustache. "Hmmm. I think I'll fold, if that's all right with you, sir."
"Perfectly all right," Ezra said. "And you, sir?" He turned to the rancher expectantly.
The rancher sighed, and laid all five of his cards face down on the table. "I fold."
"Ah. How fortunate for me." Ezra grinned, his cheerfulness real now, and laid his own cards out for the others to see. "A pair of sevens. Truly, a lucky number at the moment." And he pulled the small pile of coins in the center of the table towards him, stacking them in a neat column at his elbow. That was one thing the Morning Star had over Ridge City's Cosmopolitan. One played for cash, not poker chips. Chips might be classier, but money made leaving in a hurry with one's winning much easier, and there was nothing quite like the feel of cold, hard cash in one's hands.
Except that at the moment, the feel of those gold coins made Ezra's thoughts return to that damned ten thousand dollars, which was utterly nonsensical, since Stutz's money had been in bills, not coins.
A thick, freshly printed stack of bills, thick enough to save his life. And cost him his associates'—his friends'—trust in the process. Such a stupid, stupid thing to do, Ezra thought in disgust. No wonder Chris and the others hadn't trusted him with the money. He couldn't be trusted with it. After all his protests at having his honesty impugned, the first thing he'd done when Josiah had handed the money over to him—knowing full well what Ezra would do with it, or why else would he have made that comment about apples—was to prove all of their doubts right.
It wasn't as if he would even have gotten to spend more than a fraction of it, anyway. Chris Larabee would have hunted him down within a week and hauled him in front of Judge Travis for… well, not stealing, technically. The money had belonged to a dead man, so taking it hadn't exactly been stealing. Maybe for dereliction of duty? Which was really just fancy legal talk for running out on people.
Ezra set the last coin on top of the stack and pushed such thoughts firmly to the back of his mind. He picked up his half-full shot glass and drained it, hoping the whiskey would keep them there, and looked up at the full poker table. "Another round, gentlemen?"
"Hell, might as well." The stockier rancher grinned, and sipped at his own whiskey. "You've got to start losing sometime."
"Perhaps," Ezra said. He signaled the bartender for another shot of whiskey, taking a sort of rebellious pleasure in ordering another drink, now that Nathan wasn't here to watch him like a hawk, and started dealing cards. Mr. Jackson ought to be back from his auction, JD in tow, and minute now, and Ezra intended to enjoy himself in their absence as long as he could. Enjoy himself, and forget all about that damned assassination attempt, and that wretched, goddamned money.
"We're not road agents, I swear," JD said, for what felt like the tenth time. "We're lawmen from Four Corners. You have to let us out and get a doctor in here for his leg! There's got to be a half dozen of them in town."
"So first your friend's a doctor, and now he's a deputy, that right?" Sheriff Aiken, sitting behind his desk with a partly-disassembled shotgun across his lap, shook his head with grim amusement. "The two of you really need to run your stories past each other." He put down the shotgun he was cleaning and looked up to meet JD's eyes. "If you make a full confession, could be the Army'll go easy on you. Green kid, fresh from back East," he waved a hand at JD's brown suit, "fallen in with bad company. It was your friend there who murdered those two guards, not you. If you help us out, testify against him, you might not end up being hanged as an accomplice."
"I'm not an accomplice!" JD shouted, completely losing his last shreds of patience. "I'm the sheriff of Four Corners. Wire Four Corners and you'll see it's the truth!"
Aiken said nothing for a moment, just looked at him, and JD found himself wishing he were a little more intimidating, maybe taller. Chris and Buck didn't get those sort of patronizing looks.
Behind Aiken, the shorter of the two deputies didn't even bother to hide his snickers. "Sure," he muttered. "Yer a sheriff. And yer friend there isn't a wanted murderer, he's the town doctor." He rolled his eyes. "Like buyin' a bag o' medical tools'll make that one work."
"Andy," Aiken said, his voice a warning.
Andy shut up.
"Kid," Aiken started, "number one," he held up one finger, "Four Corners doesn't have a sheriff. It's got seven regulators hired on by Judge Travis. Everybody in this half of the territory knows that, so I suggest you find a new story. Number two," he held up a second finger, "I'm not wiring Chris Larabee to ask whether he's got a negro and a kid working for him, because I'm not gonna waste his time, and number three," a third finger, "all of the doctors that came in for that auction left on the afternoon stage, and Doc Milburn went out with them, so your pal will just have to tough it out."
"Yeah," Andy said. "If he's really a doctor like ya say, maybe he can fix himself up." He laughed, and JD glared at him, longing to wipe the mocking smirk off his stupid, pock-marked face.
"You can go to hell," JD informed him. "Come on," he said, trying to appeal to Aiken's sense of decency, if he had one, "at least give me his medical bang and let, um, and let me try to do something." His voice had dropped nearly to a whisper by the end of the sentence; even the thought of trying to treat Nathan's leg making him feel sick. He had no idea what to do, outside of the very basic 'get-the-bullet-out-somehow-and-put-a-bandage-on-it,' and anything he did to try and help might just make things worse.
"That bag has a knife in it as long as my forearm," Aiken said. "Like hell am I giving it to you. Andy, get some of those rags we keep around to clean the guns with." The deputy pulled a handful of cloth from the bottom of the gun cabinet and handed it to him, and Aiken rose from his chair and crossed the room to stand in front of the bars of JD and Nathan's cell. "Here," he said, holding the rags out at arm's length for JD to take. "You can bandage him up with these."
JD frowned, looking at the strips of grimy fabric. Nathan was insistent on only using clean cloth to tie up wounds, and this stuff was a long ways from clean.
"It's the best you're gonna get, kid," Aiken said impatiently, looking down at JD with a frown stamped across his red face.
"Fine." JD snatched the rags, pointedly not saying 'thank you,' and turned his back on Aiken. This left him staring at Nathan, who was lying limply across the pallet in the corner of the cell, eyes closed and face tense with pain. JD swallowed hard, and wished desperately that one of the others were there to do this so that he wouldn't have to.
Speaking of which, where was Ezra, anyway? He ought to have come running in the moment he heard that JD and Nathan had been arrested, demanding to know what was going on. Unless he had decided to wire home and tell Chris and the others first. Or maybe he hadn't heard yet—maybe he was still in one of the saloons playing cards, with no idea that anything had happened to them.
Either way, he was bound to show up eventually, when JD and Nathan failed to meet up with him. And then, maybe he'd be able to convince this arrogant sheriff and his thug deputy—who couldn't even be bothered to keep their jail cells properly swept out—to let them go. He could at least get a message off to the others, which would have Buck, Chris, Vin, and Josiah here in less than two days. And then Aiken would have to let them out. Or Ezra could just break them out. The lock on the cell door wouldn't take him more than a minute or so to pick, and then they could all take off for home.
Except that Nathan might not be able to walk. And, a small voice deep inside JD's head that he tried hard to ignore pointed out, Ezra might not come to help them at all. He'd been ready enough to leave everybody in the lurch before. He'd always come back in the nick of time, of course, but this time, this time Ezra was angry and resentful, and might just decide to keep on playing cards or whatever it was he was doing and let them both rot in jail.
Telling himself firmly that that was a completely ridiculous idea, and Ezra would no more leave him and Nathan in trouble than Buck would, JD knelt down on the dusty floor next to Nathan and peered worriedly at his friend.
The right leg of Nathan's pants was dark with bloodstains, and there were lines of pain around his mouth and between his brows. It was pretty much impossible for Nathan to look pale, but somehow he managed to give the impression of being bloodless and drained of strength anyway.
He needed a knife, JD thought. Something to cut the leg of Nathan's pants open so that he could get a look at the wound. But there was no way Sheriff Aiken was going to give him anything with an edge on it. He took a deep breath, grabbed the edges of the small tear the bullet had made in the fabric, and yanked. Cloth was harder to rip than most people thought, though, so he was only able to rip the pants apart a little, just enough to see the small, neat hole in the outside of Nathan's thigh. There was no exit wound; the bullet was stuck somewhere inside Nathan's leg, lodged in the muscle.
A slow trickle of blood was seeping out from the wound, blood Nathan couldn't afford to lose. JD folded the cleanest-looking of the rags into a pad and pressed it against the bullet wound, trying to get the bleeding to stop.
Nathan groaned, and rolled his head to the side, his eyes blinking open. "JD?" He tried to push himself upright, but JD grabbed him by the shoulder to keep him laying flat.
"Don't sit up. You're still bleeding."
Nathan grimaced, and started to move a hand to touch his wounded thigh, then checked himself. "Is the bullet still in there?" he asked, his voice low and strained.
"Yes," JD admitted. "I tried to get the sheriff to give me your medical bag, but he won't let either of us have any of your tools, in case we try to stab him, or pick the lock with them, or something. I'm sorry."
"Oh." Nathan didn't ask why Aiken wouldn't let a doctor in to see to him. Maybe he'd expected it, or maybe he was just hurting too much to think of it. "That's… that's all right. Just keep pressing on it like you're doing."
"Okay," JD said. He put both hands of the pad of cloth, which had a slowly widening splotch of red in its center, and leaned his weight onto it, trying not to flinch when Nathan's breath hissed out through his teeth. "Sorry," he apologized again. "What else should I do?"
Nathan, whose eyes had been drifting shut, blinked, and considered that. "Clean it with something," he said after a moment. "See if he'll maybe give you one of the bottles of carbolic."
"They broke when you went down." It looked like the bleeding might be slowing a little. JD kept pressing, knowing he was hurting Nathan and hating it. He was almost relieved that Aiken had refused to give him anything to take the bullet out with—he knew, knew he wouldn't have been able to do it, not without hurting Nathan more—and that furtive relief made him feel horribly guilty. As long as that bullet was in there, Nathan was in danger of getting infected. JD knew that much about bullet wounds, at least.
"Okay," Nathan said, "that's okay." For some reason, he seemed to be trying to reassure JD.
JD set his jaw firmly, trying not to look as scared and worried as he felt. "I think the bleeding is slowing down," he offered. Then he switched the subject. "I tried to get Sheriff Aiken to let us out. I told him that we were peacekeepers from Four Corners, that we didn't have anything to do with any robbery, and that if he wired Four Corners Chris would tell him who we were, and that we couldn't have done anything, because we were in town last week when that payroll was robbed, but he wouldn't listen to me." He lifted a corner of the pad and checked the bullet wound, to discover that the flow of blood had nearly stopped. "But I bet when Ezra hears what's happened and comes to get us out of jail, he'll have wired Chris and gotten proof, and then they'll have to let us go. So it should all be okay, and we won't end up getting hung for killing those two soldiers they say you killed. And," JD had a sudden flash of inspiration, "when Ezra gets here, he can take the bullet out for you. I bet he could do it. He's got real steady hands." And unlike JD, Ezra's hands only seemed to get steadier when things went badly.
Nathan didn't appear reassured by any of this news, if he was even listening to it. "The bleeding's stopping?" he asked. When JD nodded, he said, "All right, then now… now you need to tie the bandage on. As tight as you can. Can't clean it out, so we'll just have to hope…" he trailed off, then closed his eyes for a moment, opening them to ask, "What are you using for bandages? Not the ones in my bag. You said they wouldn't give it to you."
"The sheriff gave me some rags," JD said. "They're clean," he added, before Nathan could ask. "It's the only half-way nice thing he's done so far." He picked up the longest of the rags, glad Nathan couldn't see the stains on it, and slid it under Nathan's leg, a procedure that involved a silent flinch on Nathan's part and a muttered apology on his. By the time he'd finished tying the bandage off—as tight as he could, like Nathan had told him to, Nathan's eyes were closed. JD thought he was asleep until he spoke again.
"Can you ask the sheriff for some water?"
"Sure. Water. I can do that." JD got to his feet again—kneeling had left dusty streaks across the knees of his trousers, he noticed absently—and approached the bars once more.
While he'd been tending Nathan, the short, mean-spirited deputy had left, and the big one who'd shot Nathan had taken his place. He looked up when JD reached the bars, tensing a little.
"Can we have some water?" JD asked. "Please," he added, even though the last thing he wanted to do was be polite to any of these people.
"Yeah, sure," the deputy said. He glanced at Aiken afterwards, but the sheriff was once again absorbed in cleaning the shotgun, and didn't even look up. "Just a minute." He went outside for a moment, out back to a pump or something, JD guessed, and came back with a tin cup full of water, which he handed to JD. It just fit through the bars.
Nathan stayed awake long enough to drink it, and then closed his eyes and drifted off, leaving JD with nothing to do but sit, worry, and wait for Ezra.
Ezra shuffled the pack of house playing cards, cut the deck, and then shuffled again, a complicated maneuver that sent cards streaming from one hand to another. He was mildly proud that, despite the amount of whiskey he had consumed, his hands were still perfectly steady. Oops. Hands. He wasn't supposed to be using his left hand. He glanced around guiltily, half expecting Nathan to materialize at his shoulder to scold him for this injudicious use of his injured limb, but Nathan did not appear.
Which state of affairs was perfectly fine with Ezra. He had two hundred and sixty newly acquired dollars neatly stashed away inside his coat, a fresh glass of whiskey at his elbow, and a table full of talented opponents to play against. The mining surveyor and the thinner, older rancher had departed a good hour or more ago, but two men in coats just as flashy as Ezra's green jacket had arrived to take their places, presenting Ezra with a real challenge for the first time in weeks. He was only winning every other hand now.
Cards, unlike law enforcement, were something Ezra was very, very good at, and it had been far, far too long since he had been able to forget about bothersome little things like duty and patrols and everyone else's apparently-not-quite-as-high-as-he'd-assumed expectations, and just play.
Still. Nathan. Nathan should have shown up to haul him out of the saloon by now, shouldn't he? After all, can't leave Ezra on his own for too long. He can't be trusted not to run off, can't be trusted with other people's money. Ezra surveyed the green baize tabletop before him, covered in other people's money that was about to become his money, and decided that, in the interest of proving that he could, in fact, be trusted, perhaps he ought to go and find Nathan and JD. In a minute or so. Just as soon as he finished this hand.
Ezra shuffled the cards one last time, just for the fun of it, and started dealing, tuning out the noise of the saloon, which had filled up as sunset approached—and when had it gotten to be almost sunset? There was a loud argument about territorial politics going on on the other side of the room, which Ezra purposefully ignored—he 'd had enough of politics recently to last him a damn long time—and a red-headed man at the next table over with a deputy's star pinned to his lapel was boasting loudly about some dangerous miscreant or other he had apprehended.
"So the feller reaches into his bag fer a knife or something, and bang! Harnett drops him with a bullet in the leg. And a good thing, too, or he'd likely o' sliced us up like he did those two soldiers he killed robbing the Army payroll wagon."
Ezra turned his cards over, fanned them out, and discovered five black cards staring up at him. Four of spades, five of spades, two of clubs, six of spades, eight of spades. Only long practice kept him from smiling. One more spade, and he'd have a flush. Or a seven, a seven of any suit would be even better. A seven would make it a straight. "Ah'll take one card," he said, enunciating carefully to avoid slurring any of the words.
"Well, no, we only got two of 'em," the deputy went on in the background. "The third robber's likely holed up somewhere, nursing that gunshot wound he got when they pulled the job."
Could he get no escape from law enforcement? Wishing heartily that the man would just shut up, Ezra discarded his useless two of clubs and drew another card. Seven of spades. Seven did indeed seem to be his lucky number today. This time, he couldn't keep from grinning. "Shall we open the bettin' at, say, twenty dollars?"
" 'Course, they say they didn't do it. That's what they all say." The deputy, who really was quite obnoxiously loud, snorted in disgust. "Like there's gonna be two six-foot-plus black men running around the territory with a brace of knives an' a white accomplice." He laughed. "Got nerve though. The darkie says he's a doctor, and the kid keeps going on about how they're both lawmen, if you can believe that. Damn. Men'll say anything to try an' get out o' hanging."
Ezra froze, a terrible, sick feeling sliding through his gut. The man couldn't be talking about…
"Are you talkin' about Nathan?" he demanded, interrupting the deputy's blather. "Ah assure you, Mr. Jackson would never participate in anythin’ that smacked of criminality…"
The deputy swung about and stared at him, and Ezra realized that he'd just damn near incriminated himself by announcing that he knew Nathan. And if Nathan and JD really had been arrested…. Damn it all to hell. It was frustratingly difficult to think, now that his attention had been dragged away from nice, uncomplicated things like cards, the alcohol clogging up his thoughts like molasses and slowing them down. Wait, had the man said something about Nathan being shot? He had, hadn't he? "Ah mean," he stammered, trying automatically to fix whatever damage he'd done, "Ah rode in with this man you're talkin' about, and he seemed perfectly respectable. Said he was a doctor."
"An' you fell for that?" the red-headed man hooted. He grinned, the expression making his pock-marked face look like some sort of demonic mask. "A southern boy like you? Damn, son, you know there ain't no such thing as black doctors."
Lunging for the man and wiping that smirking expression off his face, Ezra thought distantly, would probably not be advisable. Not at all. Would likely get him arrested, too.
The men arguing politics had started shouting, he noticed, with the part of his brain that wasn't quietly panicking. He'd give it five minutes at most before a punch was thrown. Really, he ought to be laying bets on it.
"Hey. Hey, Reb. It's your move. You gonna raise, fold, or call?"
"Ah fold," Ezra said quietly. And he laid his straight flush on the table, face up, and stood, gripping the back of his chair as the room tilted around him for a moment. As soon as he was certain of his balance, he let go and started for the door, not even caring that he was leaving twenty dollars of his money—plus sixty dollars that had been moments away from being his—behind on the table. His mother would have been dreadfully disappointed.
"Come on, Ezra," he thought, barely noticing that he was whispering the words aloud, "think of somethin'. Have to get them out, somehow, sneak in or-" and then he lost his train of thought as he stumbled on the bottom step, nearly landing on his knees in the street before reflexes that even alcohol couldn't totally bury kicked in and he caught himself.
Maybe sneaking into the jail wasn't an entirely viable option. Sneaking into places required difficult feats of dexterity like not tripping over things and walking across the street in a straight line. Both of which were proving tricky at the moment.
Something else. He needed to think of something else. And he would, in just a moment, when the soft, clingy fog that was filling his head and sending everything slightly out of focus went away.
There was a loud crash behind him, and Ezra spun around, nearly losing his balance again, his hand automatically going to his gun.
"Goddamn Republican sonuvabitch! You're all in it together, right up to that corrupt bastard in the White House."
Really, Ezra decided absently, the man's assessment of President Grant was right on target, but it didn't follow that he therefore needed to fling his Republican adversary into a table.
And then, belatedly, inspiration struck. Smiling devilishly at the sound of the chaos beginning behind him, Ezra turned and ran for the jailhouse.
Nathan was still asleep, and JD wasn't sure if this was good or bad. Sleep might help him recover his strength, but then again, it might be a sign that Nathan's injury was more serious than either of them had thought. He hadn't even woken up when Harnett, the big deputy, had brought them dinner. If Nathan's wound started to go bad, there would ne nothing JD could do about it, without medicine of any kind, or even whiskey to clean the wound with.
How long did it take for infection to set in, anyway?
A day? Half a day? Two days? By that time, surely someone would have shown up to bail them out. If not, Sheriff Aiken and his two—what was that word Ezra used? Minions, wasn't it?—his two minions would string them up like the robbers and murderers they all believed JD and Nathan to be.
Why hadn't Ezra shown up yet? JD wondered desperately. Had something happened to him? Maybe Ezra's wound had gone bad, and he was sick somewhere, not able to come. Or maybe he'd been knifed by a gambling partner who was angry at the loss of his money. Or he could be in the middle of a winning streak, in which case he could stay at the tables until dawn and never notice that JD and Nathan hadn't shown up after the auction like they were supposed to.
If it was the latter, JD was going to personally strangle him. It shouldn't be very hard; Ezra wasn't that much bigger than he was, and his left arm was pretty much out of commission, which meant that he wouldn't be able to draw his derringer nearly as fast as he usually did.
JD was imagining this future confrontation with Ezra, right down to the surprised and innocent look Ezra would be wearing, and the Chris Larabee-type growl in which JD would accuse him of letting him and Nathan sit in a filthy jail cell for almost an entire day, when the door to the jail swung open with a bang, and Ezra himself exploded into the room, tripping over his own feet on the threshold and catching himself on the edge of Aiken's desk.
"Sir," he said, after regaining his balance, "are you the sheriff of this fair metropolis?" The words came tumbling out hurriedly, the southern accent twice as thick as usual, so that the sentence was a jumble of thick vowels and soft, slurred consonants. Ezra, JD realized, was doing a dead on impression of being falling down drunk.
Aiken gave Ezra a flat, contemptuous stare. "That's what the badge says. What do you want?"
Ezra drew himself up, the picture of offended dignity. "Ah thought you might like to know about the altercation in the saloon. But Ah suppose you don't." He waved a hand dismissively, the gesture much broader than it normally would have been. "Doesn't matter. Probably be over soon anyway. Your deputy's not likely to be gettin' up again after bein' hit with a bottle like that."
Even JD knew better than to fall for a con as obvious as this one, but Sheriff Aiken and Deputy Irving Harnett were pretty obviously well below the level of any of Four Corners' peacekeepers.
"Andy's been knocked out?" Harnett demanded.
"Ah don't know why Ah even bothered to come in an’ tell you," Ezra went on, as if oblivious. He blinked, swayed slightly, and then added, "This town has no law at all. There was a man shot in the street this afternoon." He made it sound as if he found this state of affairs personally offensive.
"Shut up," Aiken snapped.
"Which saloon?" Harnett put in, right on the heels of that statement. He was halfway to the door by this point, and Aiken had risen out of his chair, looming over Ezra and radiating annoyance.
"The one with all the shouting goin' on in it," Ezra said, as if it were obvious.
Aiken swore, shoved Ezra roughly out of the way, and took off out the door. Harnett was already gone.
As the door slammed shut behind them, Ezra straightened up, smirking. "They really shouldn't have fallen for that," he observed.
"Who cares," JD said joyfully, his earlier irritation with Ezra replaced by glorious relief. "Come over here and let us out!"
"You'll have to pick the lock," Nathan added from behind him. "I think the sheriff took the keys with him." JD turned around to see him sitting up, his back propped against the wall. "And I'm gonna need some help walking out of here."
"How badly are you hurt?" Ezra asked. His face was carefully blank, the expressionless poker-face that he wore when he was trying to hide something, but was too upset or tired to do it well.
"Gunshot wound in the thigh," Nathan said, summing up his injury with a detachment JD couldn't help but admire. "JD bandaged it, and it's stopped bleeding, but the bullet still needs to come out, and it'd be best if I did as little moving around as possible. Not like that's much of an option, though."
"They didn't even get you a doctor?" Ezra half-yelped, outrage clear in his voice. "Deplorable," he muttered, and he pulled his flask from within his jacket and thrust it through the bars to JD. "Here. My compliments."
Then he knelt down, a slim metal lockpick already in his hand from somewhere, to put himself at eye level with the lock. He overbalanced when his knee hit the floor, swaying forward and catching himself with his left hand. "Damn. Ow."
JD frowned, confused by this unusual clumsiness, and then Nathan asked, disbelievingly, "Are you drunk?"
"Yes," Ezra said icily. "Yes, Ah am. What business is it of yours?" He slid the pick into the keyhole, taking two tries to get it in, and began to move it around carefully, his eyes closed and a look of intense concentration on his face.
"What? Why are you drunk?" JD demanded. He crouched down so that he could see what Ezra was doing to the lock, inspecting the gambler closely. Ezra's face was flushed, and there was a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead. He was frowning, as if the task of opening the cell's lock was harder than he had expected. "Where have you been?"
Ezra cursed, opened his eyes, and hissed, "Stop distractin' me. This is hard enough as it is, Mr. Dunne." A long, silent minute went by while Ezra fussed with the lock, then two minutes. JD handed the flask to Nathan, who was glaring at Ezra with disgust, and glanced nervously at the door Aiken had departed from what now seemed an age ago.
"Hurry up, Ezra."
"Ah think Ah've got it," Ezra muttered. "Just a moment…"
Behind him, the door swung open, and Aiken stood framed in the doorway, both of his deputies behind him. "What in the name of-"
Ezra started, and swung around, reaching for his gun. He was half-way to his feet with the Remington in his right hand in less than a second, but by then all three lawmen were in the room, and Harnett made a wild lung forward and grabbed him by the elbow before he could bring the gun to bear on any of them.
Under normal circumstances, Ezra might still have had something approaching a chance, but his reflexes were working at half their usual speed, and his left side and arm were still recovering from Stutz's bullet. He managed to get off one roundhouse punch at Andy's jaw as the smaller deputy stepped forward to grab his other arm, and then Aiken clocked him over the head with the barrel of his shotgun, and he went down like a ton of bricks.
JD shouted, grabbing hold of the bars as if he could somehow get himself through them to come to Ezra's defence. But he hadn't been able to stop Nathan being shot, and he couldn't do anything to help Ezra now. The knowledge didn't make the sight of Ezra sprawled limply across the floor with three armed men standing over him any easier to take.
"Well, well," Aiken said musingly, rubbing with one hand at the grey stubble on his chin, "what have we here?"
Andy gave Ezra a vicious kick in the side, grinning at the choked-off growl of anger this produced from Nathan, and then slid the toe of his boot under Ezra's shoulder, flipping him over to lie face-up.
"Shit," he said, "it's that Reb card player from the saloon. I thought he took off in a hurry. First time I ever seen a gambler fold on a straight flush." He knelt down and stripped off Ezra's green jacket, then whistled. "Gunbelt and a shoulder rig. And whatever this thing is. Man's a walking arsenal." He stripped Ezra of both guns, and then yanked the derringer rig off his left arm. Ezra groaned, and his head lolled to one side.
JD's grip on the cell bars was white-knuckled now, and he felt an overwhelming desire to just flat out shoot the deputy, who seemed to get a cruel pleasure out of bullying them all. "Leave him alone."
Andy rolled his eyes, and stood, handing all three guns to Aiken. He kept Ezra's coat, rifling through the pockets and grinning in delight when he found a handful of money. "Look, boss. Think it's from the payroll?"
"The Army had gold stolen from them," Harnett said, "not greenbacks. And don't go trying to put those in your pocket."
"Give me the money, Andy," Aiken ordered. He held out a hand, and Andy grudgingly placed the wad of money in it--including the two bills he'd been about to tuck inside his shirt. "Thank you." Then he gave Ezra's unconscious form a long, measuring look. "So," he said dryly, "this one a lawman from Four Corners, too?"
Part One
Part Three
Part Four