Wyoming Slaughter by William W. Johnstone

Author:William W. Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2012-08-21T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

One by one, those madams pulled out, wagons of stuff and a few girls in hired coaches with the shades drawn, so no one in Doubtful got a peek. Whoever was inside those coaches sure didn’t want to be seen in bright sunlight. They usually pulled out at dawn, before the town was awake, and next anyone knew, another parlor house was shut down tight.

By March one, the day the new ordinance took place in Puma County, they were all gone. Word was that some had gone to Cheyenne, but most of the gals headed for Montana, especially Butte, where there were lots of miners and plenty of business.

Doubtful sure was peaceful, or so it seemed. The county had some way of condemning all those buildings and putting them up for auction, so the gals who owned them didn’t see any return on them. I wasn’t sure how that was done and meant to ask Lawyer Stokes about it, because he did it, and the auctions all took place about two or three days after the madams and the ladies left town.

But there was the new boardinghouse owned by the madam who called herself Denver Sally before, and now called herself Sally Sweet. It was mostly empty. She’d rented to a few vagrants for two bits a night, but she wasn’t getting much trade. The gals had gone, and she was alone in her suite on the first floor. But she wasn’t budging, and she owned the building, and she was legal, and she wasn’t violating any law that I could think of. It sure wasn’t illegal to run a boardinghouse and rent out rooms and serve up breakfasts and suppers, which is what Sally did.

I didn’t have any notion that there was trouble afoot until Amos Grosbeak called me in one day, maybe two weeks after all the ladies of the night had fled Doubtful and were gone forever.

“What are you doing about the boardinghouse?” Grosbeak asked.

“Not a thing. Sally’s as legal as anyone can get.”

“I think you should put a little heat on her. We don’t really want her kind in Puma County.”

“What’s she doing wrong?”

“Just being here, with her reputation, gives the town and the county a bad name, Cotton. We don’t want that sort of female anywhere around. We’ve got a real nice little paradise going here, and she sort of sits there like a reminder of the past. Get rid of her.”

“You tell me what law she’s violating, and I might have something to pin on her.”

“Find a way, Sheriff.”

“Not if she’s legal.”

“I said, find a way.”

“And I said, she’s legal.”

I was getting a little huffy about it. If anything graveled me, it was abusing justice. Maybe I wasn’t the brightest light in Puma County, but I knew an injustice when I saw one, and I wasn’t going to permit it if I could help it.

Oddly, Grosbeak didn’t press it. Instead he settled back in his quilted leather chair and gazed out the window. The snow was melting, and the promise of spring lay upon Doubtful.

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