Wake of the Bloody Angel by Alex Bledsoe Page B

him?”
    “Don’t worry,” she said. But she didn’t explain. We tied our horses to the empty hitching post outside the gate. Behind us, only our tracks disturbed the sand. I couldn’t imagine they got many visitors. A guard in leather armor watched us through the gate’s thick iron bars.
    “Hey, Louie,” Jane said as she shook dirt and sand from her cape. “How’s tricks?”
    “Same as always, Captain Argo,” Louie the guard said. He spoke to her but kept his eyes on me.
    “I’m not a captain anymore, Louie, just a plain Jane. But we are here to see the Hawk.”
    Louie pondered this. “I’ll have to get the warden.”
    “You do that,” she said.
    The whole area was silent, except for a lone crow cawing somewhere in the mist overhead. Given the absence of trees, it must nest somewhere on the grounds. I asked quietly, “You ever been in prison?”
    “Nope. If I get arrested, I try not to stick around for the trial.”
    “Me, neither.” I’d been in jail on occasion, but never served a real sentence. Standing here in this ghostly silence, I suddenly wondered if I’d be man enough to handle it. I hoped never to find out.
    Louie returned with another man, this one in an official uniform. “Good morning, Captain Argo,” the newcomer said. “I hadn’t heard you were coming.”
    “There wasn’t time to send a message ahead. Hope that’s okay.”
    “Well, we do have protocols for visiting the prisoners, especially him. ”
    “I know. I came up with them, remember?”
    “I do, but it puts me in an awkward position.”
    Jane leaned casually on the iron bars. “Warden, really. You think I’m here to bust him out?”
    “I think we have rules for a reason, Captain.”
    “She’s not a captain anymore, sir,” Louie said helpfully.
    “That’s true,” Jane agreed. “I’m just here to visit a friend.”
    The warden smiled a little. “So he’s your friend now, is he?”
    Jane laughed. “Warden, in some ways I’m closer to Rody Hawk than to just about anybody else in the world.”
    The warden nodded at me. “Including him?”
    I stepped forward. “Eddie LaCrosse. I’m a business associate of ex-Captain Argo.”
    “Warden Jim Delvie,” he said as we shook hands through the bars. It was firm enough, but the skin was smooth. The warden had been pushing a quill so long that any sword calluses had faded.
    “Warden, either let us in or send us on our way,” Jane said impatiently. “Which in my case will be straight to the court of Queen Remy to get permission to visit the Hawk. You know she’ll give it to me. And you know what she’ll say when I explain why I have to bother her with it.”
    The warden thought this over, then turned to Louie. “Open up.”
    “Yes, sir,” Louie said.
    Through the gate there was nothing but more open space around the main jail building and celebrity tower. The ground was hard and cracked, with no grass anywhere. The building rose only one floor above the ground, well below the top edge of the outer walls. Most of its cells were deep under the hard- packed earth.
    Jane turned to me. “So who talks to him, me or you?”
    “We can’t both do it?”
    “No. Only one of us. Less risk that way.”
    “Risk of what?”
    “He has this knack of turning people against each other.”
    I looked up at the tower, or at least the part of it not hidden in the mist. “I suppose I should do it. It’s my case, after all.”
    “Are you sure? I know him.”
    “I’m sure.”
    She grinned. “You want to be able to tell Liz that you met Rody Hawk, is that it?”
    I ignored the dig and looked at Delvie. The warden asked, “So who’s it going to be?”
    “Me,” I said.
    Delvie and Jane exchanged a look I couldn’t interpret. He asked her, “Are you all right with this?”
    She shrugged. “He’s paying me, so he’s the boss.” The warden turned to me. “Have you had any prior dealings with Captain Hawk?”
    “No.”
    That seemed to satisfy him, if barely. “Follow