Wild Country

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Quantrill's belly growled, reminding him that it was lunch-time and that Faro had many a remedy for that. He parked the rented cycle on the second level, noting that the place didn't seem to be overcrowded as it had been on his first visit. Guests usually elected to wait for the stagecoach — after all. it was free — but Quantrill preferred to hoof it, stretching the kinks from his legs. He wore the low-heeled western boots Sandy had bought him for Rocksprings dances, finely crafted footgear with uppers of burgundy sharkskin. Their fit and their elastomer soles were suitable for anything short of rock climbing. Sandy had refused to tell him the price of those hand-crafted beauties, lovingly put together by a man who'd learned his trade in Lubbock from the master, Willie Lusk. Perhaps they were not quite a match for the boots he'd worn with Search & Rescue, but those lugged gunboats would have given him the look of a man who expected a workout. He had dressed the part of Sam Coulter, fresh from Monahans in his best suede jacket, with a fat cash bonus and the urge to spend it. With those contact lenses and the hasty dye job on his hair, he felt anonymous enough to relax and enjoy this little junket. And that was the emergent tip of a profound mistake.

For the first time in his adult life, Ted Quantrill actively looked forward to a fruitless few days at his post. He intended to spend much of the time exercising his cover, trying his luck at the games, meeting stagecoaches and being unobtrusively on hand when the big delta came sliding to or from its moorage at the airstrip. But this was also a chance for introspection, a retreat for the inner man, where he could reexamine the facets of Ted Quantrill at leisure and consider recutting his stone, so to speak, to exclude some of its outstanding flaws. There was much to consider, now that Sandy was trying to cut half a million dollars straight down the middle with him.

Yet in entertaining these thoughts, Quantrill was letting vital bits of his old T Section training slide. That training had kept him alive because the army had grabbed him so young that he'd taken their words at full face value. And virtually all his instructors, at one time or another, had insisted that nothing was more important, or more difficult, on a stakeout than constant alertness. They'd phrased it in various ways, but always it amounted to what that sublime sonofabitch Seth Howell had drawled once, in that soft whiskey tenor of his: "When your life rides on the game, keep your eye on the goddam ball."

Quantrill had received no refresher courses of any consequence for nearly four years. Instead of thinking in terms of honing those skills, he was well on the way to setting them aside — after this last mission, of course. Neither Sandy nor Marrow had the expertise to understand, and to say, what Quantrill most needed to hear: in the manhunting business, the only way to quit is cold turkey. If you try to ease out, you'll most likely get carried out.

Instead, Quantrill wandered into the Last Chance, surveyed the tourists, then walked past a hardware store and a jewelry store flying the false flag of an assay office before crossing to the Long Branch. Virtually the first man he saw inside was Felix Sorel.