Twilight
Kit Gardner
Contents
Prologue
Wichita, Kansas
May 1881
Rance Logan stared at the iron-barred window until the black grillwork melded into one unfocused plain of dusty waves. The weather-beaten landscape beyond dissolved until a hail of gunfire pierced the hot morning silence. Instantly the bars refocused, and what lay beyond that prison—one man fallen, the other, his killer, already leaving a short-lived trail in the dust as he ambled off toward town. His pace was one Rance knew well, that of a man whose scores had been duly settled, his grievance or disagreement resolved here, not ten steps from Wichita’s jailhouse, where the sheriff perhaps just now roused from his midmorning nap.
Through the black iron bars, Rance watched the man walk the length of Wichita, then disappear into one of the saloons crouching along the main thoroughfare. A free man—his shoulders unstooped from guilt or regret, his limbs unfettered of chains, his neck not twitching at the mere thought of hemp crushing his windpipe. After all, law, order and what was considered cold-blooded murder in many cities meant little enough on most days in Wichita. For most men. Even Rance, when it had suited his purposes. At one time. He’d built a reputation and what some might consider a tidy fortune on it. But no longer.
He should have seen it coming.
Many a man had walked that same path back to town, had turned his back with the same casual shifting of his shoulders, perhaps because he knew that dusty grave could just as easily have been his. With an experienced detachment, Rance’s gaze swept over the fallen man, lingering on the boots jutting skyward.
A trickle of sweat went ignored as it weaved a grimy path from his temple into his heavy beard. He tasted crud on his teeth and dried blood on his cracked lips, felt the shackles biting into his wrists and ankles. The pounding in his head hadn’t quit since they’d thrown him in here late yesterday. He needed a whiskey, the same mellow stuff he’d left on the table at Buffalo Kate’s, beside his cards. He’d taken only one long pull, his eyes trained over the glass on the man lunging from the chair opposite. Every instinct had demanded that he draw then...precisely then. He’d never ignored instinct before.
Most men would have drawn long before that, at the first hint of an accusation that they had cheated. Most men would never have waited to be drawn upon by some self-impressed cattleman from some no-name town east of Wichita, a man who looked as if he handled his pistol as sloppily as he did his cards. Any man in Wichita who owned a gun and called himself a man would never have thought twice about wiping a condescending smirk from another man’s face, or an accusatory leer from his eye, with one pull of the trigger. No, those men wouldn’t have spared a glance for the locket Mr. Frank Wynne from Twilight, Kansas, tossed into the pile on the gaming table, except maybe for the few moments taken to judge its worth as a wager. After spilling across the pile of coins, the locket had bumped against Rance’s hand and fallen open. No, those men would never have glanced at that open locket, at the tiny photographs pressed inside, at those two faces. Yet Rance had.
Why had he?
Rance closed his eyes and allowed his head to fall back against the cool stone wall, feeling his throat constricting. Those faces. They’d seemed to reach out to him even as he narrowed his eyes upon Wynne, gulping down whiskeys and fondling anything in skirts that came within three feet of the table. Those faces belonged to Wynne. Shooting the man suddenly didn’t seem the thing to do.
And yet he had. Kill or be killed. He’d built a fortune on that sort of philosophy.
Wynne’s shot might have missed, had he gotten one off. Rance’s never missed. This one had been intended to merely graze Wynne’s shooting hand, deflecting his gun before he could even think about squeezing off a shot. But Wynne had done something extraordinary and cowardly, something Rance could never have anticipated. At the precise moment Rance’s finger tightened on the trigger, Frank Wynne had lunged directly into the line of fire. Rance’s bullet had sliced through Wynne’s dandified black frock coat and red brocade vest, plunged through his chest and out his back, before embedding itself in one of Buffalo Kate’s green-velvet-backed armchairs from San Francisco. Only then had Rance lowered his whiskey glass to the table. And then he’d found his fingers twisting in the gold chain and curling around that open locket. The woman stared up at him, her expression passionless yet somehow accusatory, her face pale and bleak, devoid of all hope, as if she had somehow known her husband would meet such an end.
At his hand.
He closed his eyes, and she loomed in his mind. The squirming stirred in his gut. Odd for a man who had killed before. Even odder for a man just hours from the hangman’s noose.
Most men he knew, even the worst of the lot, would be praying, seeking absolution for all their misdeeds. And then they’d plot their escape.
The swish of bustled muslin skirts skimming dirt floor brought his eyes slowly open. The ceiling came into focus, and he listened to a woman’s shrill voice echoing down the jailhouse hall. It took only a moment for him to recognize the voice. After all, he’d spent the past three years in her husband’s