A Time to Slaughter (6 page)

Shawn O'Brien woke from sleep, immediately awake and aware.

From somewhere in the hotel he heard a clock strike two, then leave an echoing silence. He listened into the night and heard the wind shivering along the street outside and smelled the ever-present aroma of spices and the metallic tang of snow.

The clock hadn't wakened him, he was sure of—

There it was again! A soft fall of footsteps in the hallway outside, muffled by the rug. That's what had wakened him. A couple drunks returning late maybe? Or something else?

Shawn slid the Colt from the holster by his bed and rose to his feet. Pulling his pillow into the middle of the bed, he covered it with the quilt until it looked like a man deep in peaceful slumber. He padded across the room in his long-handled underwear and dragged the easy chair to the foot of the bed to serve as a barricade. Flickering scarlet light from the fire played across the white ceiling of the room and the burning log cracked and sent up a shower of sparks.

Shawn crouched behind the chair, a flimsy enough barrier, and waited, his eyes on the door. It had a lock, but no key, the proprietor of the hotel having long since decided there was no profit in continually replacing keys taken by careless guests.

There was faint thud as a booted toe accidentally hit the bottom of the door, immediately followed by a muted, “Shh . . .”

Shawn swallowed hard, then wiped the sweat from his gun hand on the leg of his long johns. Fear, sharpened by anxiety, spiked at him and his mouth was dry as mummy dust.

The door handle turned.

His revolver up and ready, Shawn kept a steady gaze on the door. Sweat beaded his forehead and suddenly the room felt hot. Snow drifted past the window.

Slowly . . . one low creak at a time . . . the door opened a couple inches. Then two more . . . then a few more . . .

In the ruby fire glow Shawn saw the barrel of a gun ease through the opening, then a man's hand, his finger on the trigger.

Shawn jumped to his feet, the Colt in his hand bucking and spitting flame like a blue dragon.

A man shrieked and the gun disappeared. The heavy thud of a body hitting the floor was followed by the pound of running feet.

Shawn crossed the floor in three long steps and threw the door open wide with his left hand, his Colt cocked in the other. Despite the darkness, it was easy to recognize the sprawled form of the man called Tabard, elegant even in death.

Doors opened along the hallway and a woman yelled, “Get the sheriff.”

Another screamed, probably thinking it was the ladylike response to a shooting.

Shawn took a knee beside the body. He'd hit Tabard twice in the chest, the bullets so close he could've covered them with the palm of his hand. His third shot had hit the doorjamb and driven a dozen splinters into the gunman's cheek that stood out like porcupine quills.

A plump man wearing a hastily donned dressing gown flapped past on carpet slippers. He looked in horror at the dead man and then at Shawn and hurried his pace.

“And good evening to you, too,” Shawn said after him.

But the man made no answer, his fat buttocks bouncing like pigs in a plaid sack.

 

 

“My name is Tim Woodruff. I'm Sheriff Shern's deputy,” said the man with the star on his chest and the iron on his hip. “Andy Shern is an early-to-bed man and he don't turn out unless I send for him.”

Shawn nodded at the body on the floor of the hotel hallway. “There were two of them and this one tried to kill me.”

“So you say.” Woodruff pointed out.

“Yes, so I say.”

Woodruff was a big man, heavy in the belly, and he didn't kneel beside Tabard, content to bend a little as he studied the body. “Good shooting.”

“He didn't give me any choice.”

Woodruff motioned for them to step into Shawn's room. He thumbed a match into flame and lit the oil lamp on the table by the bed. “Need some light in here.” He looked at Shawn, his eyes as dark and flat as chocolate buttons. “His name is Lou Tabard. Him and his sidekick Rance Bohan drifted into town a three-month ago and went to work for Zebulon Moss. Heard of him?”

“I reckon I have. He's a big man in this town.”

“He's a big man in any town.” Woodruff nodded in Tabard's direction. “That one killed a miner in the Lucky Lady a couple weeks ago. Everybody said the tinpan drew down on him first, so that was that. But folks said it was a real pity because Andy Brown left a real nice wife and a passel o' young ones.”

“Then he should've stayed out of saloons.” Shawn was full of advice.

Woodruff nodded. “There's always that.” He reached under his mackinaw and produced a tally book and a stub of pencil. He licked the lead, then said, “Name?”

“Shawn O'Brien.”

Woodruff seemed surprised. “You wouldn't be kin to Colonel Shamus O'Brien down to Glorieta Mesa way?

“I would. I'm his son.”

“Know a tough old reprobate by the name of Luther Ironside?”

“He's the colonel's segundo and close friend. They founded Dromore together, with my ma, of course.”

“Ironside's as mean as they come,” Woodruff said. “And he sure loves his whiskey and the ladies.” The lawman shook his head. “I swear when he sets his mind to it he can raise more hell than an alligator in a drained swamp.”

“Not the man I know,” Shawn said. “Luther spends more time with his Bible and doing good works than anyone else in the territory.”

Woodruff smiled. “Yeah, and that's the biggest big windy I've heard in a coon's age.”

“You plan to arrest me, Woodruff?” Shawn was tired of the conversation.

“Well, that's up to Sheriff Shern, but I reckon not. It's as clear as mother's milk that it was self-defense, or so you say.”

“You don't believe me?” Shawn said, his anger flaring.

“You say it was. Who's to say otherwise? You were the only witness.”

“Not the only one. There's Rance Bohan for a start.”

Woodruff shook his head. “Then he'd have to confess that he was here, outside your room, when the killing went down. No, ol' Rance will claim he was asleep in bed with a whore when this happened.”

The deputy stuck his head into the hallway and said to the wide-eyed crowd that had assembled, “One of you men get Masheck Pettwood over here. Tell him I've got business for him.” To Shawn he explained, “He's the undertaker, and a damned good one, too.”

“I'm sure Lou Tabard will be happy about that,” Shawn said. “Wherever he is.”

Pettwood, a scrawny crow of a man wearing a clawhammer frock coat and a somber expression, removed Tabard's body and told Woodruff that he'd charge the city at his normal rates and supply a planed pine coffin “at cost.”

“Damned robber,” Woodruff said after the man had gone. “I'd lock him up, but I might need him my ownself one day.” He stepped to the bottle of whiskey Shawn had left on the dresser and poured a glass. “I don't know if it's too late or too early, but I need a heart-starter.” Over the rim of the glass, he said, “Get out of town, O'Brien.”

“Are you telling me to leave, Deputy?” Shawn said.

Woodruff refilled his glass. “No, not me, but you've killed one of Zeb Moss's boys and he won't let that go. Son, when you gunned Tabard, you ran out of room on the dance floor.”

Shawn let that go. “I'm looking for Trixie Lee.”

Woodruff's eyebrows crawled up his forehead like a pair of hairy caterpillars. “What do you want with Trixie?”

“It's a long story.”

“She ain't here. I mean, she isn't in Santa Fe.”

“Where is she?”

“Hell if I know. Whores are like gamblers, they stay for a while, then drift.”

“Zeb Moss kidnapped her from our ranch,” Shawn said.

“Is that so? It don't seem hardly possible since he hasn't left town in months.”

“It was one of his men, tall skinny feller by the name of Silas Creeds.”

A less steady man would've spluttered whiskey all over the front of his vest. As it was Woodruff contented himself with an unbelieving shake of the head. “O'Brien, when you go after folks you believe in starting at the top, don't you?”

“When I find Creeds, I'll have found Julia . . . I mean Trixie.”

“When you find Creeds he'll gun you for sure. He's always on the prod.”

“Where is he, Deputy?”

“I don't know and if'n I did know I wouldn't tell you. Boy, you're not in Creeds' class when it comes to the draw and shoot.”

“I'll take my chances,” Shawn declared.

Woodruff shook his head. “Not in my town you won't. Come first light get out of Santa Fe. And I don't mean after your pork chops and eggs. I mean I want to see a heap of git between you and this town come midday.”

“I'll take that advice under consideration.” Shawn folded his arms across his chest.

“I'm not advisin', boy, I'm tellin'. I'm an easygoing man and I probably won't gun you if you ain't left by sunup, but Zeb Moss sure as hell will.”

Woodruff laid his glass on the dresser and stepped to the bullet-holed door. “You heed me, boy, or Mash Pettwood and you will become real good friends.”

The mighty sea wolf Abdul-Basir Hakim stood at the port rail of his anchored schooner and studied the curving Mexican coastline a hundred miles north of the city of Mazatlan and the Tropic of Cancer. Protected by the Baja Peninsula to the west and the Sierra Madre to the east, the Gulf of California was dead calm, the cobalt sea shimmering in hard winter sunlight. His skin was tanned almost black by the sun and his great beak of a nose and hazel eyes gave him the look of a piratical hawk. He took the telescope from his eye and said, “They return.”

A dory rowed by two men crossed the sparkling sea at a fast clip toward the
Nawfal
and its waiting commander.

Hakim put the glass to his eye again and studied the village on the shore. Yes, he decided, there was some kind of fiesta going on. The plaza was full of people, their clothes a riot of color against the drab stucco buildings. Faintly, almost lost in distance, he heard a band play with more enthusiasm than skill.

He nodded. Where there was a fiesta there would be women, and at least a few of them would surely be pretty and shapely of body enough to command a good price. The sheik turned to his second-in-command, a scar-faced rogue he'd saved from a French gallows. “A fiesta, Najid.”

The man smiled, showing few teeth and all of those black. “Good news, lord.” Hassan Najid had no need to say more. He, like his master, knew the implications of such a celebration.

Unlike his men, who were dressed in the striped shirts and black bell-bottom pants of English seamen, Hakim wore the blue robes of a Bedouin. At his left side hung a gold-hilted
saif
, the terrible curved scimitar of the Middle East. The sheik was proud to say that two score men had fallen to his sword in many battles.

The dory bumped alongside the schooner then a seaman scrambled over the rail. The man bowed and Hakim said, “Well?”

“A wedding, lord,” the seaman said.

“And the bride?”

“Very lovely, lord. And there are other pretty young women there.” The seaman smiled. “And some hags.”

“And the men? What about the men?”

“No more than thirty of fighting age.”

“Are they armed?”

“They are sheep, lord.”

Hakim gave that some thought. Like many successful warriors, he was a cautious man and carefully weighed the odds before entering battle.

Finally he turned to Najid and said, “Lower the longboat. You and eleven others will go with me. The men will use their swords and pistols this day.”

Najid gave a deep salaam, then turned away, shouting orders. Within minutes, the longboat was lowered and a dozen heavily armed seamen scrambled on board. Hakim, his naked blade across his knees, took his usual place at the bow.

That he was outnumbered did not enter the sheik's thinking. His men were the elite of his corsairs, tough desert warriors born and bred for war. They would make short work of a rabble of Mexican peasants.

 

 

The longboat followed the surf and ground to a halt on a narrow stretch of shingle beach between half a dozen upturned fishing boats. The village, a rambling collection of adobe buildings built around a central plaza, lay fifty yards from shore.

Hakim stood on the beach and studied the village through his telescope.

The plaza was crowded with people dancing to music the sheik did not understand or appreciate, a far cry from the sweet flute airs of his homeland.

One girl stood out above the rest. Dressed in white, she was obviously the bride, and her hair, as black and glossy as a raven's wing, hung unbound to her waist, swaying like a thick sable curtain as she danced.

Sheik Hakim nodded and smiled. Such a bride would bring a fine price at the Zanzibar slave market. He turned and addressed his men. “I want the girl in white and all the other women present. I will make my selection in the plaza.”

“And the men, lord?” Najid asked.

“Kill them all. Spare the hags and the
atfal
. We do not make war on children this day.” Hakim raised his sword. “Forward!”

 

 

The corsairs hit the village like a ripsaw through soft pine.

Women screamed in terror as their men were cut down one by one.

The groom, a slender, handsome young man, tried his best to protect his bride and got a sword in the guts for his attempts. He died hard, using the last of his strength trying, and failing, to come to grips with his attacker.

Shrieking, the bride kneeled beside her fallen husband and took him in her arms and soon her dress looked like blood on snow.

Hakim, huge and powerful, cut down three cowering peons one after the other, laughing, enjoying the slaughter. His sword was not a silent weapon. The steel blade announced its coming deathblow with a thin whisper, and for a dozen Mexicans it was the last sound they heard on this earth.

The village blacksmith, taller and more muscular than the others, made a stand at his forge and dashed out the brains of two of Hakim's men with a hammer.

Enraged, the sheik ordered him taken alive and lost a third man when the smith rammed a corsair's head into the anvil, splitting the man's skull so his brains spilled onto the floor. But finally the giant was wrestled to the ground where, bloody but defiant, he was bound hand and foot with ropes.

When the slaughter was over, the sand of the plaza was scarlet with blood from the sprawled, butchered bodies. The fountain in the middle of the square ran red, the legs of a headless corpse sticking out of the basin. Above the village the sky was blue, the sun bright, but the air was tainted with the metallic smell of blood, and the birds shunned the place.

Hakim's corsairs herded the bride and a dozen other girls to the beach. The women were terrified, some crying uncontrollably while others stood, stone-faced, in shocked silence.

The sheik ordered the women to be pushed into a line, then strolled past them, pausing at each one to study her face and figure. In the end he settled on the bride, a beautiful girl named Consuelo Spinoza, and three others.

“Take them to the ship, then return,” he ordered Najid, whose sword hand was crimson to the wrist. “See no harm comes to them or you'll pay with your head.”

The longboat pulled away with the hysterical women on board, grieving for lost fathers, husbands, or lovers.

Sheik Abdul-Basir Hakim watched them leave and was well satisfied. If that infidel dog Zebulon Moss had agreed to provide more, his trip would be profitable indeed.

He turned away from the shore. He had a score to settle.

He ordered the blacksmith brought before him and his corsairs forced the man to his knees. The Mexican was defiant; no fear in him. That was good. Hakim would not defile his blade with the blood of a coward.

One swift stroke of the sheik's sword and the blacksmith's head jumped from his body and rolled in the sand. Hakim's men cheered and Hakim acknowledged them by smiling and holding his bloody sword aloft.

By the beards of his forefathers, it had been a fine morning's work.