He clasped Corey’s shoulder. “You will tell me what happened, or I’ll beat you until you do.” He glanced at Lorelei. “Even if I have to tie your sister up to do it.”
Lorelei gazed at him as if she didn’t know him. “Why are you doing this?”
“I have to get the truth out of him so I can figure out what to do next. I’m trying to save all our necks.”
She glanced at Corey. He plastered a pleading expression on his face but remained silent.
She turned away from both of them and unstrapped her flowered valise from the pinto. “I’m going to get dinner started. Just don’t break any bones.”
Braddock gripped Corey’s arm. “I’ll take him far enough away so you can’t hear him scream.”
“Lori,” the boy called before Braddock could drag him behind the tall rock shelter. “Don’t leave me alone with him. He’s crazy. Lori!”
When Braddock had him far enough from Lorelei so that she couldn’t overhear their conversation, he shoved Corey, sending him sprawling. “Start talking.”
“You’re not getting me near Mulcahy. You can beat me all you want. Mulcahy will kill me.” Corey pushed himself to a sitting position. He locked his hands protectively around his knees.
Braddock folded his arms over his chest. “So you were in on the robbery.”
Corey stared into the night as if looking for help to ride up from the darkness. “I guess.”
“Either you were or you weren’t.”
“You gonna tell Lori about this?”
“It depends. I doubt she’d believe me anyway.”
Corey turned back to him and cocked his head. “She might. She’s pretty trusting.”
“So why’d you let her believe you’re innocent?”
“ ’Cause I care about her. I care about what she thinks.”
“I don’t care what she thinks as long as she stays safe. Thanks to you, she’s far from that.”
“You don’t know anything about us. You’re just like the others. You take what you can get while you can get it. You might fool Lorelei, but you’re not fooling me.”
Braddock had been grinding his teeth without realizing it. He had to unhinge his jaw to get his words out. “Tell me smart ass, what the hell am I getting from being out here with you? Tying up a marshal and stealing his horse makes me a goddamned outlaw. So what’s in it for me?”
Corey rocked, bringing his legs closer to his body. “Me. Mulcahy, whose bounty is triple mine. And Lori, when you’ve a mind to. I might have picked the wrong bunch to hook up with, but what I did, I did to myself. I didn’t get some poor woman all twisted up in the process.”
Braddock took three deep breaths through his nose. “Don’t forget who sent her to me in the first place.”
Corey pushed piles of soft sand around with his boot. “I met Mulcahy in a saloon outside Santa Fe. I’d been catching wild horses and selling them once I got them trained. It kept me fed, but it wasn’t enough to send for Lorelei.” He glanced up, checking for interest, seeing how his story was going over.
Braddock nodded. If he kept Corey talking long enough, he was bound to stumble onto some part of the truth. He nodded again for the boy to continue.
“Lorelei wrote to me when our ma died. She’d been taking care of her, and I promised Lori we’d be together after she passed on. Kentucky had too many bad memories. The war was—”
Braddock interrupted. “You can skip that part. I was there.”
Corey picked up a rock and tossed it. “I didn’t have enough to bring Lorelei out, so I took what I had and got in this poker game. I’m usually lucky with cards.”
“Yeah. I heard you cheat.”
Corey glared, but didn’t deny it. “Anyway, I lost that night. This fella heard my name and decided to buy me a drink ’cause I was Irish. Or at least my parents were. I didn’t bother telling him my pa dropped the O from O’Sullivan because he didn’t have any use for Irish or Ireland. That man was Mulcahy, and he said he could use a hand like me for this job they had.”
“So you knew you’d be robbing the stage.”
Corey hesitantly nodded. Night had pushed out the last of the sunset, but the quarter moon and stars were as bright as white fire in the desert’s black sky.
Braddock could see Corey’s bottom lip jut out and tremble slightly. “I didn’t know they were going to kill people. That I won’t do. When the shooting started, I put my gun away. Mulcahy got hit, and he blames me. He said he was going to kill me, but I just ran away.”
Braddock rubbed the stubble on his chin. It made sense. None of Mulcahy’s jobs had ever gone so wrong. “Looks like you got a hell of a lot more trouble than the law. If Mulcahy said he was going to kill you, he will.”