A key ground into the lock of the iron cage, and when the door squeaked open, Fallon’s eyes opened.

  The light still caused him to squint, but he heard the gasps from the two younger guards, one Mexican, the other blond and wearing a black patch over his right eye, who flanked Allan.

  Allan came to a stop and straightened, his eyes registering surprise. “How in the hell . . .” he started, but Fallon was raising both hands, the long tails of the serpents dangling in the air. And before any of the guards could react, two dead snakes were flying across the tiny cell.

  “Want these back, Allan?” Fallon asked as the guards scattered and screamed.

  * * *

  They dragged Harry Fallon, known in Yuma as Hank Fulton, out of the Snake Den and into the prison yard, bleeding from his head, nose, lips, but smiling all the while. It had been worth it, and, though groggy from the beating and the bruises and the stiffness of muscles and a sleepless night hanging like a piece of drying beef, Fallon was aware of the inmates staring at him and Allan. He could imagine their whispers.

  “Captain Allan!” a voice bellowed. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “It’s that son of a bitch from Tucson, Mr. Gruber.” So, Allan was a captain of the guards. Yuma, Fallon decided, was really hard up for men. Allan’s voice remained an octave or two higher since he had ducked underneath a dead snake.

  Of course, Fallon had reminded the three men when they realized the snakes were dead: “My pa has known many a man who died after being bitten by a dead rattlesnake.”

  The prison superintendent called out, “Allan, I don’t want to have to explain why a prisoner died from multiple rattlesnake bites again, or answer to some Red Cross lady about certain bruises and broken bones. Get back to your post. Pinky, take Fulton to see the ‘Killing Sawbones.’”

  * * *

  Fallon remembered Pinky. The bony little cuss with the flowing white hair knelt and slowly raised Fallon, who let out a slight chuckle that held little mirth.

  “You all right, boss?” the old man asked.

  Running his fingers across his hands, Fallon said, “I think so.”

  “Well,” Pinky said, “Pinky had best get you to the hospital. Mr. Gruber said so. So Pinky’s gonna help you up. If you start hurtin’ bad, you just let ol’ Pinky know.”

  * * *

  “You can put your shirt back on, Fulton.”

  Stiffly, Harry Fallon obeyed the doctor’s orders. He sat on a hard table, his legs dangling over the side in the spartan quarters that served as Yuma’s prison infirmary. In a prison the size of the territorial pen, Fulton expected to see several inmates filling sick bay, some with good reasons, others just being the typical shirkers, but the only men inside were Fallon, Pinky, and the coughing, silver-headed doctor with the pasty skin and bloodshot eyes.

  With trembling hands, the doctor rolled a cigarette. His fingernails looked rotted, and he coughed again like a man suffering from consumption. He wore gray pants, black boots, and a dirty white shirt. Beard stubble covered his face. The man lit his cigarette with a candle, and lifted a bottle of clear liquid.

  The label read ALCOHOL.

  The doctor drank from it, coughed, and stuck the cigarette back in his mouth.

  “Allan’s getting better . . .” Another savage round of hacking interrupted the doctor’s comment. He flicked ash, caught his breath, and smiled at Fallon, who had his shirt back on but did not slide off the table yet.

  “Better at what?” Fallon asked.

  The man took another drink. “Not beating a man to death.”

  Fallon shrugged. “Is that how most people die in Yuma, Doc?” he asked.

  The deathly looking physician smiled and shook his head. “I, my good man, have kept studious notes of those who have died here. Shot while trying to escape is not as common as you might think. Suicide is fairly popular. Pleurisy of effusion might be the least known way out of the Hell Hole. Heart failure, which might have been caused by a sound beating. Typhoid. Phthisis. Bronchitis even. Diarrhea. Watch what you eat, my good man. Acute catarrh. Dropsy. Cholera. We have, if you can believe this, very good water at the prison, but the town of Yuma . . . well . . . just thank whomever you pray to that you don’t have to eat and drink and work in that blight on our fine territory.

  “Let’s see. Where was I? Oh yes. Well, there’s paralysis of the heart. Cancer. Remittent fever. One poor soul had the misfortune of being crushed to death by a cave-in while digging in the caliche hills. Remittent fever. Oh, wait, I’ve already said that. Drowning. They made it to the river but the river is quite wide and deep. Bright’s disease. Stomach ulcers. Pneumonia. Paralysis of the brain. Heat prostration. Can you imagine that, in a frigid winter wonderland such as Yuma, Arizona? An aorta aneurysm. Heart attack. One even came to us already a corpse. I wasn’t sure how to record his death, so I simply marked him, ‘Received dead at prison.’ But the most common way out of Yuma is . . .” He coughed savagely, and wiped the flecks of blood from his lips onto his sleeve.

  The doctor did not need to explain. Fallon figured consumption, or tuberculosis, killed more men in Yuma than the guard with the staff.

  “Mind if I ask you a question?” Fallon asked.

  The doctor drew another long pull on the cigarette, and shrugged as he blew white smoke toward the ceiling.

  “How long have you been here?”

  The doc grinned. “I figured you’d ask how I got my nickname. Most of my patients . . .” Again, the spell of coughing doubled him over, and this time he dropped the cigarette to the floor and staggered back to a shelf filled with bottles. This time, he drank from the bottle of dark liquid. Its label revealed that it was some brand of Scotch.

  Pinky went over and crushed out the cigarette that was smoldering on a Navajo rug.

  The doctor wheezed. Fallon slid from the table and found his hat. He nodded at Pinky, then at the doctor, and moved toward the door.

  “Aren’t you . . . curious?” the doctor called out to Fallon’s back.

  Fallon opened the door and turned back. “Why they call you the ‘Killing Sawbones’?” His head shook. “That’s obvious, Doc. You’re killing yourself.”

  Doctor Jerome Fowler raised the Scotch in salute.

  “Not fast enough,” he said, and sank into a chair in the corner, the bottle of whiskey clutched in a sweating, trembling left hand.

  * * *

  Fallon turned but before he could exit the infirmary, he had to back up and let another inmate inside.

  The prisoner came through so fast, Fallon couldn’t make out any features. He saw the back as the convict stopped in front of the Killing Sawbones and said, “Doc . . . Doc . . . Doc . . .”

  The rough hat came off, and long black hair fell to the shoulders as the prisoner turned.

  Harry Fallon straightened and stupidly removed his own hat. They taught young boys to do that back in Gads Hill, Missouri. You always remove your hat in the presence of a lady.

  A crow’s wing might not have been as dark as this woman’s hair. Likewise, her eyes appeared as black as midnight, and her face had been tanned deeply, which one would expect in Yuma. She wore the same uniform as the men in the prison, but her breasts pushed against the rough material. The breasts were big. Her waist was small, her nose delicate.

  “Don’t take your hat off to me, buster,” the woman said with a snarl. “I’ll break your neck.”

  “Easy, Gloria,” Pinky told her. “Allan done tried that and got nowhere.”

  The woman shot Pinky a glance, then looked back at Fallon.

  “So you’re the fresh fish, eh?” Now, she looked Fallon up and down, this way and that, and looked back at Pinky. “What’s his name?”

  Pinky answered, “Hank Fulton.”

  “This the one who tried to feed Allan some rattlesnake for breakfast?”

  “Two,” Pinky answered. “But ol’ Pinky ain’t figured out how Fulton here managed to kill two rattlers in the Dark Cell in the middle of the night.”

  She looked back at Fallon. This time, she did not look away. “Maybe he’s an owl.”

  “He ain’t that wise,” Pinky said. “Else he wouldn’t have gotten caught and come to stay with us.”

  “Maybe.” She had not looked away.

  Fallon wondered how she managed to keep her hair so shiny, so clean. Her clothes wore the dust and dirt, but her hair had been freshly washed. Fallon studied her small hands. She had the long fingers of a piano player, and even her fingernails were clean. He guessed her height to be around five-foot-seven. Tall for a woman. And even wearing a striped uniform meant for a man, a much smaller man, she would take most men’s breath away. She was a haunting woman, stunningly beautiful, yet mysterious.

  And cold. Very, very cold.

  “What’s he in for?” the woman asked.

  She was younger than Fallon. Younger, he remembered, than Renee. Their eyes held, and he refused to break, but Pinky gave her the reason to look away when he began answering her inquiry.

  “He robbed a store or something like that down in Tucson.”

  “A store?” She snickered.

  “Store had a strongbox,” Pinky said, “holding a lot of money. They gave him two years.”

  “A store thief.” Her head shook.

  “He didn’t just break in. He had a gun. And from what ol’ Pinky has learned, that owner was heeled, too, till this hombre took the gun away from him.”

  “Penny ante,” the woman said.

  “Maybe. But he has gotten the better of Allan. Twice. You should’ve seen the beating he put on that horse’s arse—and that was in Gruber’s office. He ain’t no fresh fish. Pinky’ll swear to that. Might be his first visit to Yuma, Gloria, but I’ll swear that this hombre has done some time before. Hard time. In a hard, hard place.”

  “Miss Adler,” Doctor Jerome Fowler said at last. “Your attention to Yuma’s latest guest is making me jealous.”

  Her face softened. Maybe, Fallon thought, even saddened. She turned away from Fallon and Pinky and looked at the sickly prison doctor.

  “How much have you had, Doc?” Gloria Adler asked.

  He lifted the bottle of Scotch and smiled. “My first of the day.”

  “Most prisoners haven’t even finished breakfast yet,” she told him.

  He laughed. “And I’m still working on mine.” He pulled hard on the Scotch, but another coughing spell sent whiskey and saliva spraying the dusty floor.

  The Killing Sawbones fell to his knees, and Fallon and Gloria Adler were by the doctor. Fallon saw the flecks of blood on the man’s lips and realized that he had been right. This wasn’t the cough of a man with pneumonia or some cold.

  It was the rasping, lethal cough of a man suffering from tuberculosis. The doctor was dying of consumption, if the whiskey and the cigarettes did not claim him first.

  Fowler turned his head and coughed and gagged. Globs of mucus and blood splattered on the floor. His breathing turned ragged, short.

  What Harry Fallon smelled was not the stink of the doctor, the whiskey, the sweat, the sourness, the sickness, the dying breath of a man who was taking a damned long time to die. He smelled the scent of a woman. Gloria Adler had washed recently, her body, and her hair. He had almost forgotten what a woman smelled like.

  “Help me get him up,” Gloria Adler said.

  They lifted him. Doc Fowler weighed next to nothing. They looked around the empty room, and Fallon nodded at the examining table.

  “No,” Gloria Adler said. Her chin jutted out toward a closed door.

  “All right,” Fallon said. “Let go. I’ll take him.”

  She listened, and moved to the door. Fallon followed with the gasping doctor in his arms. Pinky trailed Fallon. The woman opened the door, revealing other beds, also empty of patients. She pulled back the sheets on the closest bed, and Fallon lay the man atop. Fowler started to bring the bottle of Scotch back to his lips, but Gloria Adler snatched it from his weak hand. The bottle came out easily and she tossed it onto another bed.

  “You are . . . no . . . fun . . .” the doctor wheezed.

  “Shut up,” she said. “Close your eyes and go to sleep.”

  “I’ll never sleep, my darling,” Fowler said, “till I’m dead.”

  “Shut up,” she told him, and brought up the covers. She wiped his lips with a handkerchief she pulled out of Fowler’s breast pocket, ignoring the bloodstains. She ran her fingers through his sweat-soaked hair, before placing the back of her hand on his forehead.

  “That’s cool,” Doc Fowler whispered in a faraway voice. “That’s so cool. So pleasant.” His eyes were closed, and Gloria Adler kept the hand there.

  She stared at him, and now her dark features softened. She was tough. Hard. Bitter. But only when she had to be. Only to survive this hell on earth called Yuma Territorial Prison. But she had some feelings. Yuma had not robbed her of everything she had been taught growing up. She had not lost all of her humanity. She cared for at least Doctor Jerome Fowler, the “Killing Sawbones.”

  “Get out of here,” she said without looking at Pinky or Fallon. “I’ll take care of him.”

  “You always do, Gloria,” Pinky said.

  “Get out,” she repeated.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Doc Fowler’s all right.” Pinky had caught up with Fallon as he stood in the center of the compound, looking at the convicts milling around, the guards in the towers, others walking around the interior escorting some inmates to the giant sally port secured into the thick adobe walls.

  “I don’t mean his health. He’s a sick, sick man. But a good man.”

  “How about the woman?” Fallon asked.

  “Well . . .” The thin, ancient man grinned. “She ain’t sick. Ain’t sick at all. No, sir. Ol’ Pinky would say she’s as healthy and as fine and as . . .” He turned and winked.

  “Gloria Adler. Come in six months ago. Ol’ Pinky, he don’t know that much about her, but she killed her husband or her beau or something along those lines. Put in for manslaughter. Ten years. But don’t you get no fancy notions about her. She takes care of Doc. And Monk Quinn. Well, he takes care of Gloria Adler. Last fella to get bit real bad by rattlers in the Dark Cell? He’d been seen talking real cozy-like to that fine figure of a petticoat. Seen by Monk Quinn.”

  “Monk Quinn?” Fallon pretended that he had never heard of the bandit.

  “That’s all Pinky’s gonna say about Monk Quinn.”

  They kept walking. Pinky had more to say.

  “He’s the big man here. Bigger than Gruber. Bigger than Allan and his big arse staff. You don’t get on Monk Quinn’s bad side.”

  “Maybe I have already.”

  The old man stopped walking and turned to stare at Fallon. “What you mean?”

  “I had two rattlesnakes visit me last night.”

  Pinky smiled again. “The last fella in the Dark Cell to get bit . . . he had six. But Monk ain’t one to touch no snake. Pinky ain’t neither.”

  Pinky’s thoughts about Monk Quinn and rattlesnakes did not interest Fallon. What Fallon could guess, though, was that dead man most likely had to be the Mexican operative for the American Detective Agency that Dan MacGregor had mentioned back in Chicago. Valdez. But had he been murdered by Monk Quinn or the guard with the biblical staff named Allan?

  Pinky started walking again. “Monk Quinn don’t know Hank Fulton. Those snakes that you kilt was Allan’s idear. Don’t have to even ask Monk Quinn about that. You had two rattlesnakes, not even big ones, although Monk Quinn had a couple of babies put in there with that greaser.”

  Which confirmed to Fallon that the dead man had been the operative named Valdez.

  “Baby rattlers. They’ll bite you just as bad as a big one. Anyway. You got two snakes, the greaser got six or so. That’s the difference between Monk Quinn and Allan. Allan, he ain’t scared of no snakes. Monk is. But it’d be Allan who dropped the bag of rattlers into the Dark Cell. But only because Monk Quinn made that bastard do it.”

  They took a few more steps before Pinky continued. “But you start sidlin’ up to Gloria Adler and you won’t finish your two years here. You’ll be out yonder.” He pointed toward the wall.

  Fallon started to ask—“What’s out there?”—although he already knew. He had seen it when the deputies had escorted him from the train depot to the prison’s main sally port. But he decided to let Pinky know that Fallon wasn’t blind, and wasn’t stupid.

  “The boneyard,” Fallon said.

  Pinky stopped to reconsider the bruised, bloodied fresh fish. Fallon stared right back into the old man’s eyes and grinned. “I’m not stupid. I’m not blind. And I’m not spending two years in this adobe hell.”

  Pinky wet his lips with his tongue. “Man who thinks like that gets hisself kilt.”

  “Or he gets out.” He nodded south. “Mexico’s just a hop and a skip away.”

  “You know Mexico?”

  “A little.”

  Pinky shook his head. “Don’t get notions. Notions get men kilt.”

  “Don’t you ever get notions, Pinky?”

  The old man grinned. “All the time. But Pinky . . .” He waved off the suggestion.

  They kept walking to the long rectangle building that had to be the mess hall. Inmates were slowly filing out.

  “It’s Sunday,” Pinky said. “Free day for most of the boys, ’ceptin’ those that gets hit up for outside work or latrine duty or gardenin’. Gardenin’?” He laughed. “In this furnace. It ain’t the best grub you’ll ever have inside your belly, but it’ll fill you up.” His head bobbed at a thought he just got. “We should bring Doc a plate after we’ve et our fill.”

  “What’s the story about Doc Fowler?” Fallon asked.

  “He’s been here forever,” Pinky said. “No, longer than that. He come right after they opened this hellhole. Too long for one man to have to patch up wounds, drain snakebites, and make sure the dead is really dead.”

  Fallon looked at the old-timer. “I asked the Killing Sawbones,” Fallon said. “He didn’t tell me anything. You know a lot.”

  Pinky grinned. “You remember what Mr. Gruber told you. ‘If you have a question, you go to Pinky.’ You asked about Doc Fowler. Doc, now he’s a bit close-lipped. Which is fine to ol’ Pinky. Don’t really want a lunger breathin’ on Pinky all the time. But you’re fresh here, Fulton. You’ll learn that you gots to ask Pinky.”