CHAPTER ONE

      SLOUCHED against the building, Jake watched the woman come down the street. With her yellow hair, she was pretty as a bald-faced heifer. Somehow Jake knew when he cut the right trail, although Michaels never told him.

      Michaels. No first name, just Michaels. The man looked like a greenhorn in his boiled shirt and derby. Jake thought of him as a kind of trail boss for the Almighty, but Michaels was unlike any bible-puncher Jake had known. Those preachers could plumb tucker a man out with their palaver about brimstone and damnation. Michaels, on the other hand, didn’t say much, but his piercing blue eyes told Jake that Michaels had experienced more than most men would know in a dozen lifetimes. Those same eyes saw right though a man’s hide and counted all his sins.

      Jake had plenty of sins to count, he thought, idly admiring the long, graceful legs striding toward him. No sashaying for this woman. Women rigged out in pants no longer startled him, and he studied her from head to toe with masculine appreciation. She was on the slender side, but she had enough womanly curves to please. Jake had never been partial to the big-bosomed women his brother Luther had liked hanging on him. He wished he could see the eyes hidden behind them dark cheaters—sunglasses, they called them now—that everyone wore. From the look on her face, the woman was making a powerful sight of thinking about something more than the tyke in her arms.

      Michaels said this was the tenth time. The tenth and last. Then Jake could present himself at the Pearly Gates. Jake was tired of evil and war and killing and stupidity and greed. Over a century had passed since Jake’s time, and mankind had learned nothing. Sometimes Jake thought he didn’t even care if he went upstairs or down below. He just wanted out of it. No more anger, sorrow, frustration, worry or caring. He wanted, once and for all time, to simply cease to be.

      He’d tried to tell Michaels how he felt, but the other man had already gone. Jake hated that. Michaels came and went like a ghost. Maybe Jake did the same. If this was ten, that meant he’d done nine jobs already, but those jobs, those people, had faded from his memory.

      His memories came from his real life.

      If people like him had memories.

      Funny, what he knew and what he didn’t know. Jake knew he’d been gunned down in 1886 while relieving a bank of the responsibility of storing so many banknotes. He didn’t know why he hadn’t been tossed in the hellfire down below. Michaels never answered questions. He simply sent Jake back to earth to help people.

      People like the woman drawing near. Jake straightened and tipped his hat.

      The August wind blowing off the high Colorado plains made a mockery of her once neatly combed hair. Gwen blinked the grit from her eyes as a crumpled piece of paper blew across the Trinidad street and bounced off her grimy canvas shoe. Dust coated her face. So much for bucolic fantasies. Someone should have warned her country living meant wind and dirt and grasshoppers. And smells. Not once had she seen a painting of cows which included cow