"Why do I feel like I'm going to regret this?" she muttered, walking back over to the desk. She rustled around in the desk for a moment then shook her head.

"Must have the keys with him," she said, taking her coat off and pulling a lock pick out of a small pocket in her shirtsleeve. She crouched down and messed with the lock for a few moments, and it finally groaned and gave way. She turned and walked back over to the desk, putting the pick back in its pocket and tossing her coat back on.

"Here." She tossed his Tesla Electra 9000 across to him as he stepped out of the cell. "Don't make me regret this."

At that exact moment, someone who would highly disapprove of this new development marched down the stairs. Hat on, badge shining. His Colt Equalizer 5000 firmly secured against his hip. "What do you think you are doing, Marshal?" Jed asked, his hand resting on the grip of his weapon.

"Darlin', I will never leave you alone that long again," Caldwell said, practically petting his rifle after the Marshal tossed it to him.

"Something that you would never have a cool enough head to do on your own," she said, turning just slightly to look at him. "Collecting resources. We may need a good hand with a good gun and good aim. Unfortunately that's a little hard to find in these parts."

"Don't preach to me about his aim, Marshal. I know it well enough. It's not his hands I'm worried about, it's the man attached to them. Mark my words, this isn't going to end well." While he never was going to like it, Jed accepted that nothing he said was going to change the Marshal's mind. "So, while you were making buddies with this bag of fleas, have you had any ideas on the whereabouts of my sister?"

"Where's she go when she goes outside of town? Any special places?"

"The graveyard. Pop's there, so is Cane. That's where'd she would go. I haven't been out there, well. Since we buried him. But she goes out every now and again. Its the only place I can think of."

"Then that's where we'll start," the Marshal said firmly. "Go get the horses, and meet us out there. Caldwell, you're with me."

"That's fine with me," Caldwell said. He hoped they found the girl soon and then got right down to the shootin' part. Right about now he really wanted to shoot something.

--------

Caldwell surveyed the town's graveyard with a dissatisfied look on his face.

"Last time I was in one of these things, a crazy old woman was making half-robot, half-human soldiers with corpses she dug up. The time before that, it was weird cultists worshiping some kind of squid god. Nothing good ever happened in a graveyard."

"...I'm pretty sure you're making that up," the Marshal said, giving him a strange look. "And please keep me out of your daydreams; they're disturbing."

The Marshal knelt by Ezekiel's grave and examined it. There were some dying flowers by the headstone, but no marks showing anyone had been around recently.

"Nothing here," she said, shaking her head. "I've no idea how this girl can leave such uneven tracks. Either that, or someone tried to clean up after her. Her father's grave is farther down."

Going back to those graves, it would be a challenge in and of itself to Jed. Truth is, he hadn't been back to grieve. He'd bottled all that pain up inside and used it as fire to fight crime. But he'd been burned along the way. And now five years later, when the fire was just a pile of ashes, he'd spend nights curled up in a ball. Just waiting for dawn to come to extinguish the embers.

But there he appeared, riding up to the Marshal and Caldwell in a cloud of dust. Holding the reins of two beautiful horses. "Find anything?

"It'd help if you weren't making things worse by trampling the tracks," the Marshal replied frostily. "She was here, but she wasn't alone. Someone else was here--more than one--but they tried to cover up the tracks. They did a decent enough job, for an amateur. They're down past where the railroad tracks blew, probably close to the river."

"Plenty of cover down there, loads of hiding places. Who ever they are, they sure as heck picked a decent spot to make a stand." Jed was doing his best not to look at the grave, instead his eyes focused on the one thing he hated more than that headstone. The man who put Zeke in the ground, Caldwell.

"You don't know the half of it," the Marshal muttered, standing and taking the reigns of the tall black beauty from Jed. "If you don't know where to look, a small gang could hide down there for weeks and never be found. From what Caldwell's saying, there's too many of them for that, but it'd still be a near impossible place to take."

Caldwell kept a nervous eye on Jed as he watched the Marshall work.

"Don't forget they have the walker. Who knows if those idiots have managed to repair it yet or not, but with a halfway competent pilot runnin' it, they could tear up any posse that came after it."