.45-Caliber Desperado (18 page)

A few of the men smoked as they worked. Blanket-covered lumps that Spurr knew were bodies lay at an angle near the hole. A black-and-white collie dog lay near the bodies as if in attendance, one white paw curled beneath itself.

“Yeah, there was trouble, all right.”

A few minutes later, they stopped in front of a large, black mound of burned timbers and gray ashes—the remains of what had once been a rather large building and likely one of the most permanent structures in the camp. Smoke still curled from the ash piles, and here and there small, intermittent flames leapt and chewed at what remained of ceiling beams.

There was the heavy musk of coal oil all around.

Blood smeared the dirt in front of what had once been the front gallery, which Spurr could identify only by part of a door and some frosted glass, a couple of posts, and a few lengths of scorched floorboards. Tent shacks surrounding the place had also been burned, a few patches of gray canvas remaining amongst the ashes.

Spurr glanced at Mason, both men scowling, then booted their horses forward. On the left side of the broad main thoroughfare, with a train depot and tracks on the right, was a large tent with a board shingle stretching out from it announcing BURT HOMETREE'S BEER PARLOR. A smaller sign beneath the first read: NICKEL BEER, TEN-CENT BATHS, FREE LUNCH COUNTER. Another sign had a pointing hand painted on it and the words: GIRLS ACROSS THE STREET AT MAY'S—CLEAN AND CHEAP!

Out front of the saloon tent stood a man supported on crutches. He was dressed in a clean but worn brown suit and a brown bowler hat, steel-framed spectacles perched on his nose. His right foot and ankle were wrapped in a thick gauze bandage spotted with blood. In one hand, he held a beer schooner, and he was staring through the saloon tent's broad open doors, wobbling on his crutches.

The man was so intent on the doings inside the saloon that he didn't see Spurr until Spurr's roan gave a snort and shook its head and bridle. The man snapped his head toward the newcomers, his round spectacles reflecting the yellow and reds of the sunset.

“Well, hell!” the man intoned, slurring his words a little. “It's about time lawmen get here!”

“What happened?” Spurr growled.

“The de Cava gang is what happened. They set fire to a brothel and killed half of Ed Joseph's bounty hunters. The other half is in there.”

The little man, who had a hawkish face and two-days' growth of stubble on his cheeks, nodded to indicate the inside of the tent. Through the open flap, Spurr could hear sporadic groaning. The old marshal swung down from the roan's back, looped the reins over the hitch rail fronting the beer tent, then peered inside.

Rusty railroad lanterns hanging from posts offered the only light. They showed five men laid out on cots along the wall to Spurr's left. A plankboard bar flanked by several beer barrels ran along the rear wall. A stocky, aproned Chinese man stood behind it, washing dishes in two porcelain tubs against the canvas wall.

There were a half-dozen hammered-together timber tables, and three of these were occupied by burly, bearded men in suspenders and oily denims—track layers, no doubt. They paid little attention to the groaning men on the cots. The wounded were being attended to by a tall, severe-looking man in his early thirties wearing a black vest over a white shirt and a stethoscope. His heavy, brown brows mantled as he drew a wool blanket up over the inert face of one of the wounded men. He turned toward the doorway and nodded fatefully.

Behind Spurr, the little, hawk-faced man turned his head west and shouted, “Another one for the boneyard, Dempsy!” His voice was shrill and raspy, and it made Spurr's ears ache.

“Christ!” complained the aging marshal, turning toward the little man while rubbing his right ear. “You gotta yell like that?”

“How in the hell else is them gravediggers supposed to hear me?” The little man took a swig of his beer and looked down at his ankle. “Thanks to Mateo de Cava, I can't exactly run hoppin' and skippin' on out there with the news in person.”

Spurr looked the little man up and down, his salt-and-pepper brows furled critically. The little man smelled of sweat and beer and smoke from the recent fire. His eyes were dark and fidgety. Some men you didn't like from appearances and instinctively knew you would like even less the better you got to know them.

“Who're you, little feller?” Spurr asked him.

“T. Benson Grimley,” said the little man, glaring up at Spurr defensively, as though he knew the bad impression he made. “Folks call me T-Bone. I'm the constable here in Mayville.”

“Constable, huh?” Spurr said with a chuff.

Dusty Mason said, “Mayville?”

“That's the name we come up with and are now calling the camp though it ain't official yet. Mayville . . . after May over yonder. She was the first businessman here, even before the rails got here.”

T-Bone glanced at the narrow, two-story building near the depot and railroad tracks whose front oil pots were now being lit by a man in a black, floppy-brimmed hat and a torn blue blanket coat. Blue curtains hung over the lantern-lit windows. A shingle on two posts reached out from the place as though to physically waylay prospective customers passing on the street; it read simply MAY'S.

“Thank god they didn't burn that, too,” said the little man before taking another quick sip of his beer. “We'd have only one brothel in town, though there's still plenty of whores. Homeless whores, thanks to de Cava's bunch. They're in tents down by the creek. Rail layers're givin' 'em plenty of business, though.”

The little man snorted and drained his beer glass.

“How long since de Cava pulled through here?” Spurr asked the man.

“Yesterday around noon. Helluva dustup. I got caught right in the damn middle of it, too. Took a ricochet.” T-Bone looked down at his ankle. “Doc says the bone's shattered. I might never put full weight on it again . . .”

Mason was looking into the tent saloon, thumbs hooked behind his cartridge belt. “Who're the bounty hunters?”

A voice behind the two lawmen and the constable said, “Ed Joseph's bunch.”

Spurr swung around to see a man in a long tan duster and tan hat walking toward him from May's. He adjusted his hat on his head. Long black hair dropped to his shoulders. He wore a deerskin vest adorned with large silver buttons beneath the duster.

“Where's Joseph?” Spurr asked the man approaching the beer tent.

“You're lookin' at him.” Joseph stared out from beneath the brim of his tan slouch hat at Spurr. “You're Spurr Morgan, ain't ya?”

“Well, I'll be damned,” Spurr said. “You're Joseph?”

“I told ya you was lookin' at him.” Joseph stood beside Spurr, peering into the beer tent at his wounded men. “Shit, I lose another one, Doc?” he called.

“You might haul your friend out of here, Mr. Joseph,” the harried sawbones said crisply as he washed his hands in a stone bowl on a table near his patients.

“That's what T-Bone's boys get paid for, Doc.”

To Joseph, Spurr said, “Where the hell'd you come from, Joseph?”

“Bonner. Just east of here. Just got done running a bunch of claim jumpers out of Reynold's Park, and we was holin' up and waitin' for some new horseflesh from Amarillo. T-Bone there's my brother-in-law, and he knew where I was from my sister, and he cabled me just after de Cava rode in. We hired our own special train, don't ya know.”

“How many men you start out with?”

“Seventeen.”

“And these are all you're left with?”

“Them five . . . er . . . four, I reckon, since ole Jimmy-John seems to have kicked off, now, too.” Ed Joseph shook his head and fingered his long black hair hanging down over his left shoulder—an oddly girlish gesture. He had a thick black beard and amber eyes, a knife scar reaching an inch down from the right side of his mouth. His face was like a roughly carved hunk of mahogany.

Spurr had heard he'd been raised in Tennessee, and the old marshal detected the faintest of Scottish accents mixed with the petal-soft drawl of the Appalachians. Joseph's gang, made of mostly ex-Confederate bounty hunters, was—or had been—notorious across the frontier.

Joseph looked at Spurr, then slid his eyes to Mason. “Where'd you come from?”

“The prison,” Mason said.

“What prison?”

“The one de Cava broke Cuno Massey out of.” Mason looked incredulous. “The one where he lifted the hair of Warden Castle, blew the man's nose off, and left him a howlin' cripple.”

Joseph and T-Bone shared a glance. Then the ferret-faced, bespectacled little constable said, “We didn't hear about a prison break. We figured they heard about the whores in Mayville and was just here to raise hell. They done already had plenty of bounty on their heads for Ed here to be interested.”

“Reckon they raised that hell, didn't they?” Mason said, rolling a quirley as he looked back down the street toward the charred brothel ruins.

“Look—all I want to know,” Spurr said, “is how many rode out of here and in which direction.”

T-Bone opened his mouth to speak, but his unlikely brother-in-law, Ed Joseph, shoved him brusquely back with an arm across his chest and stepped between the smaller man and Spurr. “Hold on. You don't get that information until we come to an agreement.”

Spurr tipped his head to one side and scowled. He didn't like bounty hunters. And there was something particularly foul and morbid about the long-haired one before him.

“I'll be ridin' with you two lawbringers. And I get the reward on them I bring down. Or, like the deal I had with my bunch, we split it up even between the three of us.”

Mason turned to Joseph, frowning and removing his quirley from between his lips. “We don't ride with bounty hunters, Joseph.”

“Speak for yourself, Mason.” Spurr's voice was toneless.

He was still staring at Joseph distastefully, taking in the two gutta-percha-gripped Smith & Wessons on the man's belt, a LeMat in a shoulder holster, and the two knives jutting from his high-topped black boots. Oddly, the man had a silver crucifix dangling down his chest. Few stranger men had Spurr ever seen, but he knew Joseph's reputation.

Mason switched his incredulous scowl to Spurr. “What're you talkin' about?”

“I mean, Joseph has a deal. We ride out tomorrow at first light, and we split the reward three ways. If we manage to run down de Cava's bunch, that is. And that's one hell of a ‘that is.'”

Mason started to speak, but Spurr cut him off with: “Ah, shit, their trail'll be plain enough come sunup. But we can use all the help we can get, Mason. I don't like this man any better than you do, but if he wants to help us run down them killers, we'd be fools to refuse him, short-handed as we are.”

He gave Joseph a pointed look. “But you play by our rules—understand? This is law business. You break the law, do anything whatsoever to set fire to my britches and burn my dick, we'll throw the cuffs on you and drop you off in the nearest hotbox to wait for a judge.”

“Hell, Spurr,” Joseph said, dropping his chin and bringing a shrewd look to his dark, devilishly slanted eyes. “You've got a reputation yourself. Tough as an old Texas boot with a sidewinder tucked inside. I won't cross you.”

He held up a long, slender finger. “But you don't cross me, either, when it comes time to split the reward money. You see”—he stretched an even more cunning grin—“I don't trust lawmen anymore than you trust bounty killers.” He returned the finger he'd been pointing with to his hair, absently smoothing it down against his shoulder. “And I'm a bad enemy to make.”

Mason balled his fists as he stepped toward the bounty hunter. “Why, you—!”

Spurr threw a hand up, palm out, bringing the sheriff up short. “All right, then,” he barked, impatience in his raspy, gravelly voice. “We're all partnered up. Friends for fuckin' life!”

He hitched his pants and cartridge belts up on his lean hips and sauntered into the beer parlor. “Now that that's settled, I believe I'll have a drink, then find me a whore to pound a pillow with.”

“WHOO-EEE, DOGGIES, BOYS! Grab your gals and lead 'em on out there, cause we're gonna have us a roarin' good time this evenin' in Mayville!”

The half holler, half howl had risen from a half-finished frame saloon not far from May's. It was followed by a washtub base and concertina backing up a feisty fiddle. Spurr, lounging in the suds of his steaming bathtub while awaiting a girl, heard the hoof stomps and hand claps of a raucous barn dance.

Even the burning of a brothel and the turning out of a dozen whores could not keep the proverbial lid on the fledgling little railroad camp. The track layers and gandy dancers, not to mention the homeless whores themselves, were going to have a hoof-stompin', tail-raisin' good time no matter what.

Spurr felt a smile touch his mouth as he grabbed his whiskey bottle off the chair beside the tub. He had the bottle only half raised to his mouth when he heard the squawk of a loose floorboard in the hall beyond his closed door. He set the bottle back down on the chair and rose in the tub, pricking his ears.

Above the din of the barn dance and the moans and groans of lovemaking in Miss May's rooms all around him, Spurr heard nothing now. The old whore, Miss May herself, weighed a good three hundred velvet-and-crinoline-ensconced pounds and had been lounging, half drunk, on a red plush settee in the first-floor parlor, with a wooden cash box and a pistol beside her, when Spurr had entered her domain, introduced himself, and announced his desire for a bath and a woman.