Cold-Blooded, page 19
“It’s not possible, Sheriff,” the carpenter said, blood on his cheek. “You want the damned thing boarded up, I’ll give you hammer and nails and you can do it himself.”
“Damn right,” the apprentice said and for talking out of turn got a cuff on the back of his head from the carpenter.
Jess’s short fuse was lit and he’d had enough. It was time to end this thing. A man in the crowd had a Colt stuck into his waistband and Jess said, “Let me borrow that.” The man willingly passed over the revolver, a .45, and Jess thumbed a round into the empty chamber that had been under the hammer. He drew his own Colt, loaded it the same way, and stood there with the guns hanging by his sides, a tall, lanky men who looked like General Custer and wanted to be anywhere else on earth but where he was.
“You folks move away from the alley or you’re liable to get shot,” he said. “Clear away there.”
Traffic on Main Street had come to a standstill. Horses dozed in the shafts of driverless wagons, street vendors had temporarily shut up shop and the usual cacophony of raised voices and trundling wheels was hushed to a whisper as everyone’s attention fixed on the alley.
Jess remembered Luke Short’s taunt and hoped he wasn’t about to make a bad situation worse and get his fool head blown off in the bargain. He stepped into the alley and then hugged a wall while his eyes got accustomed to the gloom. But he’d been seen.
“Who’s there?” a man’s voice called from the end of the alley. Then, “Do you see him, Clem?”
A second voice, the man called Clem, yelled, “Identify yourself and state your intentions.”
Jess took a chance. “This is Sheriff Jess Casey. I’m here to tell you that your demands are being met. The woman and the grub was easy, but rounding up two fast horses will take a little longer.”
“Come closer, let’s take a look at you,” Clem said. “And get your damned paws above your head. One fancy move from you, mister, and I’ll shoot the preacher.”
Jess trusted to the shadowed alley and the worn finish of his revolvers not to betray the fact that he was armed. And he almost succeeded.
A startled warning shout of “He’s heeled!” and a bullet came almost at the same time. A miss! But close enough that Jess heard its hornet whine. There were three shadowy figures at the end of the alley and one of them was a preacher, but Jess had no time to make a fine distinction about who was who.
He moved steadily forward and cut loose with both guns, knowing that the one in his left hand would be much less effective. His Colts hammering, bucking in his hands, ahead of him he saw a man clutch his belly and go down. But which one? A bullet tugged at the left sleeve of Jess’s shirt and a second splintered into the wall to his right. The thought flashed through his head that this was mighty poor shooting. He walked closer, firing steadily, and just one man still stood. The man’s knees sagged and his back was against the tall fence that closed off the alley and access to the rear of a furniture warehouse.
Jess and the man fired at the same time. The robber missed badly, several feet wide of Jess’s head, but the sheriff’s bullet hit the man square in the chest. The robber dropped his gun, turned and looked as though he was trying to climb the fence to escape. Finally he fell on his back, convulsed violently and lay still.
The alley was thick with gun smoke and Jess’s ears rang from the concussion of the guns in such a confined space. He found the body of Professor Carnes first. The man lay on his left side, a Colt Frontier .44-40 self-cocker in his right hand. He had no wounds in front, but when Jess examined the body he saw two bullet holes in the man’s back. Carnes had been walking away from the robbers when they shot him.
Jess took the gun from the professor’s hand. It was still warm. He swung out the cylinder, dropped the loads into his hand and found that two cartridges had been fired. He pieced it together. As he lay dying Carnes had gotten off two shots. But he had not fired at Jess. He’d dropped one of the bandits and the preacher, the latter no doubt by mistake.
Amid the roar and flash of his own Colts in the dark alley, Jess had not seen Carnes fire. But the professor had shot twice before he died. There was no doubt about that.
A man stepped to Jess’s side and said quickly and nervously, “My name is Frank Draper, Sheriff, and I’m unarmed.” He started at Carnes for a moment. “Is he dead?”
“Yeah, he is,” Jess said. Then, unspeakably weary, he said, “Help me to my feet.” The man did and Jess saw it was the fellow who’d given him the Colt. He passed Draper his gun and said, attempting a smile, “I fired it left-handed. I don’t know if I hit anybody with it.”
“Well, it sure made plenty of noise,” Draper said. “I know the sound of my own gun.”
Jess stepped to the rear of the alley and Draper joined him. “They’re both dead,” the man said. “And so is Parson Hayes, shot through and through, poor old fellow.”
“Seems like,” Jess said.
More people crowded into the alley, jostling one another to see what there was to see. A woman held a handkerchief to her nose and sobbed over the body of the parson.
“One of you men bring Big Sal here,” Jess said. “Tell her she’s got work to do.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
“You don’t say?” Luke Short said. “Then maybe you didn’t do for any of them.”
“Carnes only fired two shots,” Jess said. “There were three dead men.”
“Why did he fire at them . . . them . . .”
“Returned citizens.”
“. . . in the first place?”
Jess said, “I think he realized that when the two cons robbed the bank and killed a teller they’d ruined his plans and his reputation so he tried to kill them both. And of course they’d shot him in the back and that can irritate a man.”
Luke wore a scarlet smoking jacket and a round, tasseled hat of the same color. Along with other items, Jasper Dunn had thrown out the garments, but one of Luke’s more loyal employees had salvaged them. The little gambler had made Jess’s chair his own and looked quite at home.
“Did you identify them two fellers?” Luke said.
“Sam Waters is over to the morgue right now.”
The little man showed up a few minutes later. He was eating a fried sausage on a bread roll and grease stained his mustache and beard.
“Big Sal give me this,” he said. “She said identifying dead fellers can put an appetite on a man. She’s right, you know.”
“Who were they, Sam?” Jess said.
“Well, I pushed and pulled them bodies this way and that, to make sure like.” Fat ran down Sam’s hand and he licked it way. “One of them was Clem Spinner and tother is a feller who went by the name of Spade Carver. As I recollect, both were cattle rustlers and hoss thieves. They rolled drunks on the side and murdered a few, but only one killing was ever proved.”
“They needed to work on their shooting,” Jess said.
“I guess that’s why they’re dead, Sheriff, huh?” Sam said. He shoved the last of his sandwich in his mouth, chewed for a while, then said, “Seen that Perfesser Carnes’s body, Jess. He’d been shot in the back.”
“I didn’t do that,” Jess said.
“I reckon you didn’t, not when I hear you tell it. But fer a while there it worried me some.”
Luke Short smiled. “Casey is too much of a gentleman to shoot a feller in the back. Ain’t you, Sheriff?”
The office door opened before Jess could answer that question and Kurt Koenig stepped inside. The big man wore his usual expensive broadcloth, frilled shirt and hand-tooled boots, but somehow he seemed smaller, deflated like a faulty toy balloon. Even the ivory-handled Colt on his hip failed to make its usual powerful statement.
Koenig’s angry eyes went immediately to Luke Short. “What the hell are you?”
“An invalid with a gun, Kurt,” the gambler said.
“Lost your place, I hear, and then got tossed out a window and got eaten by a bear or something.”
“Or something,” Luke said.
“Read that,” Koenig said, handing Jess a crumpled letter.
After scanning the words, Jess said, “Where are they?”
“I have no idea,” Koenig said. “That’s why I’m here.”
Jess gave the letter to Luke, who read it and said, “So now Jasper Dunn wants the Silver Garter.”
“Is that his name?” Koenig said.
“It sure is, Mr. Koenig,” Sam Waters said. “He’s a bad one, and if he’s made a threat he’ll carry it out.”
“Who delivered the letter?” Jess said.
“A man came into the saloon and handed it to Mark Lewis, one of my bartenders. Lewis says he’d never seen him before.”
“Well, we know where to find Dunn,” Jess said. “He’ll be at the White Elephant. Let’s go get him.”
“Not so fast, Sheriff,” Koenig said. “The chances are he won’t be there and if I make any move against him he’ll carry out his threat to kill Destiny and Joselita.”
“He will fer sure,” Sam said.
Koenig’s anger flashed. “Don’t agree with me anymore, old-timer, huh?”
“Sorry, Mr. Koenig, but a natural fact is a natural fact.”
“Kurt, how about the Panther City Boys?” Jess said. “Can you get them to help us conduct a search?”
“Don’t you think a bunch of men searching the city will be noticed?” Koenig said. “It’s too dangerous. I can’t take that chance.”
The big man looked at the faces of the three other men in the office. Jess Casey was troubled, Luke Short puzzled and Sam Waters’s face was empty, as though he’d said his piece and had nothing else to add.
Finally Koenig said, “My entire life I never cared enough about a woman to love her. Hell, I didn’t give a damn for anybody, male or female. The whole world revolved around Kurt Koenig and I believed that was the way it should be, the natural order of things. Then I met Destiny and everything changed.”
Sam, always one to talk when he should keep quiet, said, “Woman can do that to a man. Sometimes it’s for better, sometimes it’s for worse, but she’ll change him just the same.”
“Destiny changed me for the better and for the first time I knew what it really meant to love somebody heart and soul,” Koenig said. “And then Joselita came into our lives and it was like holding a little wounded bird in our hands, willing her to live. As for me, I’d found another human being to love and it felt just fine.”
Luke Short, who’d listened to Koenig with growing and obvious discomfort, clapped his hands and said, “So how do we find this Jasper Dunn feller and shoot him in the belly? He wants the deeds to your joints by midnight, Kurt. I’d say time is running out on us.”
“If we don’t know where Dunn is, how can we give him the deeds?” Jess said.
“The man who delivered the letter said to leave them at the White Elephant,” Koenig said. He stared into Luke Short’s eyes. “I’m getting out, Luke.”
“That doesn’t sound like the Kurt Koenig I know,” Luke said. “You got to choose your ground and fight.”
Koenig shook his head. “I won’t risk losing Destiny and the girl, and there’s nothing you can do or say will convince me otherwise.”
“Then maybe I can convince you,” Jess said. He glanced at the clock on the wall. “It’s now five after three. Give me until eleven thirty tonight. If I don’t find out where Destiny and Joselita are located by then, you can hand over the deeds to the Silver Garter and the Green Buddha to Jasper Dunn.”
“I don’t want to put the women in any danger, Jess,” Koenig said.
“I don’t, either,” Jess said. “I’ll be real careful.”
“Tall order, Casey,” Luke said.
“Risky fer them women,” Sam Waters said.
“Yeah, well it’s better than just sitting here doing nothing,” Jess said.
“Maybe just sitting here is the way,” Koenig said.
“It’s not my way,” Jess said.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Word of Professor James Carnes’s death came as bad news to Jasper Dunn. The loss of such a valuable ally had weakened him worse then the desertion of so many of his men.
The blacks and Mexicans had quit early and that had come as no surprise. Dunn had little regard for inferior races and he was glad to see them go. But he’d lost good white men to gunfire and others had lit a shuck, the close confines of the warehouse basement too much like the prison they’d just left. Counting Silas Topper, his fastest gun, Dark Alley Jim Turner and the questionably loyal Ford Talon he was down to a dozen men, and most of those were rapists and murderers, not gunhands.
Dunn had confided his fears to Topper and now waited for what the little gunman had to say. Topper, as always, did not disappoint him.
“The way I see it,” he said, “Koenig either values his woman highly or he doesn’t. If he does, we’ll have those deeds by midnight and the town is ours.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Dunn said.
“We keep the women as insurance and I go after Koenig.”
“Can you shade him, Silas?”
“Of course I can shade him. He’ll be the one to draw first and then he’ll be dead. It’s as simple as that.”
“And then we make the woman tell us where Koenig keeps the deeds to the Silver Garter and Green Buddha. We’ll say he willingly handed them over to us and then changed his mind and tried to kill you,” Dunn said.
“That about sums it up,” Topper said.
“It will work. If you make it look good, of course it will work. But let’s wait and see if Koenig loves his woman enough to hand over the deeds. Then we can kill him later.”
“Either way, I claim his women,” Topper said.
“And they’ll be yours, Silas.” Dunn smiled. “At a minute after midnight.”
* * *
Ford Talon heard the entire conversation and considered its implications. Dunn had brought in food and Talon made a sandwich of bread and beef and ate while he figured his next move. He could not leave the basement without raising suspicion and must remain where he was.
Then it came to him.
If the deeds to Koenig’s properties were not delivered at midnight Silas Topper would go after him and goad the man into drawing. While Topper was gone, Talon would make his move.
He’d kill Jasper Dunn and take his chances that the other gunmen would be too stunned to react quickly and might listen to reason when he told them the game was over.
His plan was as thin as a whisper but it was all he had.
Major Ford Talon looked across the room at the frightened young women and the sight of their drawn, beautiful faces touched him to the quick . . .
Maybe some causes were worth dying for.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
A strange little man with a stranger tale to tell stepped into the sheriff’s office at four in the afternoon and gave Jess Casey a ray of hope that he had not expected.
Pleasant Woodis, dressed in his usual buckskins, the huge Holland & Holland in his right hand, stopped in the middle of the floor and eyed Luke Short with little enthusiasm.
“I heard you’d been et by a bear,” he said. “And then got tossed out a window. Or was it the other way around? No matter. You look hale and hearty enough to deal from the bottom of the deck.”
“You need a horse to drag that cannon around, Pleasant,” Luke said. “Otherwise you’ll give yourself a hernia.”
“I already got one o’ them,” Woodis said. He looked at Jess. “I was out day afore yestiddy huntin’ for winter meat and I saw a peculiar sight. Later I said to myself, ‘Pleasant, you’d best go tell that young sheriff feller what you seen.’ So here I am.”
“I’m kind of busy right now, Mr. Woodis,” Jess said. “Maybe some other time.”
“You ain’t too busy to hear this,” Woodis said.
“Let the man talk,” Luke said. “I like a good story.”
Woodis said, “It ain’t a good story. But it’s a mighty peculiar story. Makes a man wonder if he can believe his own eyes.” The old man propped his rifle against a wall then sat on the corner of the desk and said to Jess, “You got coffee on the bile, sonny? I could sure use a cup.”
After he had a cup in his hand, Woodis said, “I got to backtrack a ways to the morning of the day when I seen what I seen. My woman says, ‘Mr. Woodis, don’t you go out there today. Last night I seen blood on the moon and this morning afore you woke up a crow came tap-tapping on the bedroom window. The crow told me the dead are walking and to stay close to home.’”
Luke nodded. “In my younger years I spent some time up Nebraska way selling whiskey to the Indians. The Sioux believe crows carry messages from a world beyond this one.”
“And maybe they do,” Woodis said.
Jess glanced at the clock. He should be doing something, not listening to a wild tale about crows and Indians and the walking dead.
“Well, sir, I ignored my woman’s advice and rode out anyway,” Woodis said. “It was a fine morning, sunny and warm with just a breath of fall in the north wind. My hoss was glad to be outdoors so everything was fine atween him and me.”
“Mr. Woodis, I—”
“Hold on, Sheriff, I’m getting to the point here,” the old man said. Then to Jess, “You mind that draw fighter you shot, the one they called the Second Horseman?”
Now Jess was wary. “Hiram Hartline. Yes, I remember. What about him?”
“Like I said, my hoss had been cooped up and suddenly he started acting crazy on me, buckin’ and rearin’ as through he’d just caught wind of a pack of wolves. He’d done that afore and I thought nothing of it, that is until I looked ahead on the trail. You make good coffee, sonny.”
“What did you see, for God’s sake?” Luke said. “Apaches?”
Woodis shook his head. “Nope, something far worse.”
Jess was so irritated he slapped his thigh. “Then tell us, damn it.”
“All right, so be it,” Woodis said. His eyes took on an odd shine. “The Horseman’s grave was open and I saw four women carrying his body to a wagon, drawn by the skinniest, mangiest white horse you ever saw.”
