“I’ll find out,” Lee said and put down the receiver to break the connection, then picked it up again. “Mary Catherine,” he said to the operator, “I want you to find my wife. Call whomever you have to, but find her as soon as possible. And don’t let anyone know you’re looking for her.”
“I’m not sure I should after what she said to me last week. She accused me of eavesdropping.”
“You find her, Mary Catherine, and I’ll see that she delivers all your children for free—and your sister’s. And I’ll remove those warts off your right hand.”
“Give me an hour,” the operator said and pulled the plug.
Lee was sure it was the longest hour of his life. He went back to surgery and was glad to see that Mrs. Krebbs had sewn the wounded gunslinger back together. She had a few things to say to him about leaving the operating room, but he didn’t listen. All he could think of was that he was going to kill Blair when he got his hands around her neck. No wonder she’d been so docile lately: she’d probably been planning something that was putting her life in danger.
He went back to the big entry hall of the hospital where the telephone was and smoked one cigar after another, until some of the nurses began to complain about the smoke. He growled so fiercely at the lot of them that they retreated timidly. He paced by the telephone, and when a proud new father started to pick it up, Lee threatened his life and his descendants if he so much as touched the thing. Every two or three minutes, he picked up the receiver to ask Mary Catherine what she’d heard. After the fifth such questioning, she told him she couldn’t find out anything if he kept taking her time.
He managed to stay off the phone for an entire five minutes before he reached for it again. It rang as his hand touched it. “Where is she?” he demanded.
“We should have been able to guess. Someone—and I am not at liberty to say who for fear this person’s reputation would be damaged forever—said they saw her down past the railroad tracks, pulling in behind the Aztec Saloon. Not that I know where that is, because I’ve certainly never been there, and Blair shouldn’t have been there—.”
“Mary Catherine, I love you,” Lee said as he dropped the telephone on the nurse’s desk and ran out the door.
His appaloosa was trained to move quickly, and the town was used to getting out of the way for Lee’s carriage, but tonight, Lee outdid himself as he tore through the streets and across the Tijeras bridge to the part of town that Blair should not have been in. He kept thinking that maybe someone had come to his house wanting help, and Blair’d stupidly gone with the person, but, for some reason, Lee was sure that she was into something more than just a medical case.
At the Aztec Saloon, he left his horse to stand, untied, as it had been trained to do, and went inside. One of the benefits of being a doctor was that he was well known, and that if someone didn’t owe him a favor now, they probably would very soon.
“I want to talk to you,” Lee said to the big man behind the bar.
Ignoring a customer’s request for more beer, the man walked out from behind the bar and nodded to Lee to follow him into a back room.
“Wait a minute!” a cowboy shouted as he was unbuckling his pants. A woman, dirty, bored-looking, lay on a filthy mattress.
“Get out,” the bartender ordered. “And you, too, Bess.”
Tiredly, the woman got up and started toward the door. “I thought I got lucky this time, and you was comin’ to me,” she said as she smiled at Lee and ran her fingertips across his jaw before leaving the room.
When they were alone, Lee turned to the bartender. “I heard my wife was waiting behind here tonight. I figure you have to know something about why.”
The man ran his hand over a three-day growth of beard, then toyed with one of his many chins. “I don’t like gettin’ mixed up with somethin’ like this. LeGault and that woman of his—.”
“What’s that piece of slime got to do with this?” Lee asked.
“He was the one she was waitin’ for.”
Lee turned away for a moment. He had hoped that he was wrong and Blair was only repairing somebody, but if she was meeting LeGault…“You don’t have a choice in-this,” he said to the fat man. “I don’t want to use blackmail or bring the sheriff into this, but I mean to use any method I can to find my wife.”
“The sheriff’s already in this, and he’s after LeGault and that woman. Course they’ll look innocent, ‘cause that feisty little wife of yours is doin’ all their dirty work.”
Lee leaned toward the man. “You’d better tell me all of it and fast.”
“It’s none of my business what they do. I just sell them a little whiskey and mind my own business. All right, don’t get so riled up, I’ll tell you. LeGault rented a room from me so he could hide a woman in it. I don’t know who she was and I only saw her once. Talked funny. A foreigner.”
“French?” Lee asked.
“Yeah, maybe. She was a looker, anyway.”
“So, LeGault was planning something with Frankie,” Lee said thoughtfully. “What else do you know?”
“I happened to overhear them sayin’ somethin’ about gettin’ the goods out of town, and that they was lookin’ for somebody nobody would suspect. They talked about this a lot.”
Lee turned around and slammed his fist into the wooden wall. The pain did him good. “So they found somebody stupid enough to be suckered in. Where did they go, and what did they want taken out of town?”
“I don’t know. I guess you could ask LeGault. He’s sittin’ in a bar down the street. I told him to get out of here, since I didn’t want no ladies in here ‘cause they do nothin’ but cause trouble.”