Lone Star 05 (7 page)

“Why do you call yourself a Starbuck?” she asked directly. The kid's smile was half contemptuous, half humorous. Something was going on in his head, and she wanted to know what it was. She knew she'd have to sift through all his lies to get at the truth.

“Because that's my name.”

“What if I told you I don't believe a word of it?”

“Then why are you here?” The smile was a wide grin now, the tone of his voice smug. He sat down on a rough wooden plank that served as bed and chair and table, resting his shackled hands on his soiled knees. “I'd offer you a chair or a drink or something—but I'm not settled in just yet,
sis.”

“Don't ever call me that,” Jessie warned him. “I can see no one ever taught you any manners.”

“My ma was too busy drumming up business—she had to keep a roof over our heads. And my pa was out gallivantin' around from here to China. No, I guess nobody ever took the time to teach me fancy Starbuck manners.”

“Didn't you ever go to school?”

The youth spat out a bleak laugh. “I was workin' myself, before I was six. One thing Ma did teach me was how to pick pockets. Sometimes it was even easier when they left their pants on the floor. Nobody ever suspected a little boy. She did teach me some manners, I guess—bad manners.”

“What makes you think my father—”

“Shared a bed with a saloon woman like Ma?” he said, finishing her question. Again, bitterness frosted his speech. “She was pretty enough. And she was a smart woman in her own way. She said he appreciated her finer qualities. I don't rightly recall what those qualities were, but he must've seen them.”

Jessie's eyes narrowed. The boy was too casual with his revelations, and she didn't trust that. Yet he wasn't bending over backwards to prove his claim—which was what she had expected him to do. She had also expected him to beg her to help him get out of jail. Instead, he was fairly mocking her, scorning the man he claimed to be his father.

“Where were you born?” she asked him point-blank.

“Borneo, California,” he said. “At a gold-mining camp. Town don't exist anymore. They never did find much gold thereabouts. Anyhow, that's where I was born. Likelier question would be, where was I conceived?”

“I was getting to that,” said Jessie.

“Well, the answer is, San Francisco. Just about twenty-one years ago. Figure it out.” The kid laughed harshly. “What would you know about it? You grew up in a fancy ranch house and had servants and never went hungry a day in your life. I've been hungry, though—most days and nights. Nobody gave a goddamn about me. Especially not the old man.” Then, with a sneer, he said, “You know how the great Alex Starbuck came to sire this pup? You really want to know?”

Jessie lifted her chin and met his intense gaze. “Yes,” she said.

“It ain't a pretty story, but it's the truth. That's what you came after, ain't it—the truth?”

She looked at him now with unmasked anger, not believing a word. But she listened as he unfolded his tale.

“Ma was married—leastways she said she was married—to a fellow name of Bradford. They were living together, anyhow. He was a gambler. Stayed out West when the war broke out in the East. Smart, he figured, to stay out of the line of fire. A man don't get killed that way. But he didn't figure on a war coming to
him.
They was in San Francisco, the way she told it, when her man and Starbuck met up. Well, her man talks him into a friendly game of cards, and Starbuck don't see nothing wrong with that. So they sit down with a bottle and some cards and start drinking and playing. And Ma—she says she was there—says Starbuck all of a sudden gets the idea her man Bradford is cheating, and calls him on it. Bradford says hell no, he's not cheating, and takes a swing at the old man. No one takes a swipe at a Starbuck, right?”

He lifted his handcuffed hands and swung them through the air. He cracked a crooked grin, his eyes shining evilly, and went on.

“So Alex Starbuck is riled and Ma's man is riled, and they're swinging at each other, and suddenly Starbuck pulls a hideout gun and ends it all right there. He shot Mr. Bradford dead to hell. Then, Ma told me, he turned the gun on her and told her to keep her mouth shut—and then he forced her into bed and raped her, she says. And then Starbuck took off and Ma never heard from him again. Later, after she had me, she found out who he was and wrote to him, but he never answered her. Finally she gave up. She had to go to work to feed me. And there's only one kind of work a woman like that can do.”

Jessie heard his vicious words, but didn't for a minute believe the father she loved had done such a thing. She was more concerned with why this outlaw was fabricating such an outrageous story. What was he going to gain by it?

“Sometimes it makes me sick thinking of him—what he did, how he left my ma, never once answering her letters. Real gold-plated son of a bitch was our dear old pa.”

Jessie Starbuck shook her head. In the dim lamplight her tresses sparkled, the only clean and beautiful sight in the dingy cell. “You've spun a good, entertaining yarn. Too bad you never knew my father.”

“Never knew him!” This time the kid's eyes began to mist over. Suddenly he wasn't the cocksure young killer any longer. His shoulders drooped, and his voice dripped with quiet menace. “I never once met the bastard ... my father. Never once...” His shoulders shook.

Either he was a consummate actor or a grieved and wronged son, but not Alex Starbuck's son. Alex Starbuck had often had business that took him to San Francisco. She could easily check out the dates in her father's diary, in letters and reports that were in her possession. She had to find out what Alex had been doing and where, so she could prove for certain that the kid's story wasn't true. Even then, she would need more evidence.

Again, she wondered what purpose was being served by the young criminal's lies. Was the cartel somehow behind this scheme? If so, why such a farfetched attempt to deceive her?

Thomas Starbuck sniffed and wiped his nose on a dirty sleeve. He looked up at Jessie through crazed, pink-rimmed eyes. “I don't care if you and the rest of the world don't believe me. I'm going to hang anyways. Don't matter much what anybody believes anymore. I've already killed more than my share of men. Some say I've killed a man for every year I've lived. I like the sound of that, and I don't care if I die, as long as folks remember me for that.” He spoke in a low, even voice, belying the depravity of his statement.

“You're convicting yourself out of your own mouth,” she said. “I don't want to hear any more of your tall tales. I'll do what I can to see that you get a fair trial. That's the least I can do—until I prove you're not a Starbuck.”

“Everybody here wants to see me strung up—including those detectives and that marshal. The deputy tells me there's even some bounty hunters in Skyler looking to make a fat profit by taking me out alive. I'd rather go with them than swing from a telegraph pole. And then there's Mueller. When he—” The kid stopped himself short.

“You know Mueller?” This was something she hadn't suspected.

“I heard of him,” the kid said, looking down at the floor.

Jessie noted the kid's odd reply. There was something he was not telling her about Mueller. Was that the connection she was seeking? That would come out in time. She told him, “Marshal Scott is of the same mind as I am. He and I both want to get you moved to Provo. There the territorial court will hear your case. No one's going to hang you, and no one's going to make a bounty off your hide.”

The kid grinned, his eyes strangely alight. “Sure as hell is nice to have my Starbuck hide so cared-for after all.”

“Don't fool yourself. It's not going to be easy,” Jessie warned him.

“I've bucked the odds before. Three good hands can hold off two dozen men in a pinch. I've been there.”

“I'm sure you have,” she said. “You've had a busy life for someone so young.”

“Yeah.” He had recovered from his brief bout with uncertainty and fear. Again, he was the pugnacious hardcase with a wicked gleam in his eye. “And like I said, I'll die with a rep I can be proud of.”

“Can you?” Jessie asked. “Don't you ever think of those people you robbed and killed?”

“Sure, I think of them all the time. But I don't feel sorry for them. Everybody has to die sometime.”

It angered and saddened her to hear such a statement from this kid, when most at his age would be paralyzed with the thought of death so near. He had seen so much of it already, and caused so much himself. She remembered her father telling her that once the blood fever takes a man, he is not cured until he dies himself. Alex Starbuck had seen it happen to many men. Jessie had seen it too—embodied in the death-dealing cartel she had vowed to fight. Bloodlust was everywhere, a fact of life. And still she hated it and yearned for it all to end. Before that time came, however, she would see this boy, whoever he was, brought to trial for his crimes. It would give her time to disprove his wild story and, more importantly, to find out why he was doing it, and for whom.

“Not everyone is as eager as you are to die, Thomas,” she said.

He snapped at her, “Not everyone has had a life like mine. If I'd been brung up proper by my rightful father, given my birthright, I'd never be here in this hole. It's all his fault, Miss Fancy-ass Starbuck.”

“You've got a dirty mouth,” Jessie replied, wondering at the rapidity of the youth's changes of mood.

“Well, you better start believing me, or you'll be sorry.” He stared at her defiantly, his features hard-lined with contempt. Yet what threat could he pose to her, this kid with a murderous reputation, chained to a dungeon wall in a lonely Mormon town? He seemed to think he could do her plenty of damage.

“There's a lot of people that want me, for a lot of reasons. If I decide to get busted out of this stinking jail, I can get busted out, and don't you forget it. And once I get my guns back, there ain't nobody gonna stop me ever again.”

The strange, mercurial young gun-tough was full of venom, all right. Damn! She rubbed her sore eyes. The boy, the cell, the accusation against her father—the falsity and injustice of the whole thing was making her sick. She had to get out.

“I'll come and see you again,” she said flatly, moving toward the door. “I don't wish you any harm, I want you to know that.”

The kid turned away sullenly.

“I'm interested only in justice,” Jessie added.

“Maybe you can afford to be,” Thomas Starbuck mumbled. “Me, I can't.”

She left him and climbed the stairs. She hurried through the courthouse and made her way out into the street. The sky was gray, a film of clouds blotting out the rays of the declining sun. It had been a long day, and it wasn't over yet. Her lungs heaved, struggling for fresh air. The stink of the jail, though, clung to her thoughts.

She turned and strode across the plankwalk, not looking where she was going, her mind racing with questions, trying to formulate a plan. She hurried in the direction of the hotel. Perhaps Ki would be there; she had to talk to someone.

 

The three men sat in the dingy room, a half-empty bottle of whiskey circulating among them, listlessly playing seven-up. The room was in the American Hotel, Skyler's other, less expensive accommodation for travelers. Unlike the Skyler Inn, the American Hotel featured a bar in a back room downstairs, the only place in this strict Mormon community where a man could buy a drink. Upstairs, six rooms, partitioned off by flimsy walls, were set aside for the weary. Now, as these men gambled and drank, it was quiet throughout the hotel. It was late afternoon and the sky had turned an ugly gray, clouds drifting over the face of the sun and threatening rain, or at least promising a cool night.

Thad Hill dropped out of the game. He took a long swallow from the bottle and lit a cheroot. The tobacco tasted good and sharp in his lungs. He released a column of blue smoke and lifted his boots onto the bed.

“Tired of losing?” the wiry, hawk-nosed man named Fagan said, tilting back his flat-crowned hat.

“You might say that,” replied Hill wearily. He took another drag from the cheroot, held it, then exhaled. In truth, his mind wasn't on the game, or on the reason he had come to Skyler in the first place. His thoughts were fixed on the girl.

“Hell, the boy's been daydreaming since this morning. He's lost his edge. I hate to take money from a man when he's in that state.” The speaker was a pole-thin man in a blue cotton shirt and leather leggings; his name was McKittrick.

“Suppose you're right, Mac,” said Fagan. “Ain't right to take advantage.”

But Hill wasn't hearing them. At six-three, two hundred pounds, he cut an impressive figure himself. He wore his auburn hair long and swept back from his tanned, angular face. His brown eyes were clear despite the heavy drinking of the past several days, his mouth straight and even. A bounty hunter like the other two, he wore trail clothes: a checkered shirt, dark heavy pants, low-heeled boots, and cowboy's spurs that raked along the smelly blanket on the bed. A blue bandanna hung loosely around his neck, revealing a growth of whiskers several days old. In all, he was a rugged, handsome man.

Only coincidence had brought him into contact with the other two, Fagan and McKittrick. The three of them, professional manhunters, had come to Skyler in pursuit of the same bounty: Thomas Starbuck.

Thad Hill shifted uneasily, fingering the butt of his Smith & Wesson American Model .44 revolver. He wanted a bath, but he couldn't afford to pay for one—a very unpleasant condition to be in. He recalled how frustrated he'd felt when he first arrived here, broke and dispirited. Then he had run into these two. For the first few days they had eyed each other warily and sparred verbally, testing strengths and weaknesses, probing to see whether the most profit lay in eliminating the competition or in joining forces. For now, they had agreed to stick together. With the prisoner under heavy guard in the jail, and several other parties interested in him, they found strength in numbers.