The Murdock's Law (15 page)

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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

BOOK: The Murdock's Law
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“It must of.” His voice was a harsh whisper. “Else the arm would of dropped off right then.”
I smiled in spite of myself. One-armed he'd have taken on all hell's host if he smelled a ruckus in it.
“Now's as good a time to tell you as any,” he said then. “Day you taken over you said something about a deputy selling information to the Frenchie.”
“I knew it was you the minute we met,” I put in.
He looked puzzled. Then his face twisted into a mask of agony. Ballard was using a short pair of scissors to cut his shirtsleeve away from the wound.
“It stood to reason,” I went on. “Périgueux could afford to pay a stiff price for intelligence. Randy was too loyal and Earl was too stupid. You were the only one left.”
I had to bend closer to hear what he said next. “It was just that one time. I only done it 'cause I was bored. I ain't been bored since you come.”
“Forget it. You did a damn fine job tonight. Without that Peacemaker we'd still be dodging lead.”
The bewildered look returned. “Hell, I was reloading
when they decided to chuck it. I thought it was you.”
I let my hands dangle between my knees. “That doesn't make any sense. I was banging away like an idiot under the boardwalk. Yardlinger was down and Cross only fired one barrel. I …”
My silence alerted the doctor, busy trying to staunch the flow of blood from Brody's mangled shoulder. He glanced up at me, then followed my gaze. Chris Shedwell was crossing the street in our direction.
His face meant nothing to the doctor, who resumed his labors at the Major's side. I stepped off the boardwalk to meet the mankiller. He was wearing his Confederate coat.
“Why?” I asked. “Or don't you shed enough blood in your work?”
His eyebrows went up a quarter inch. He had an expressive face, not at all the kind you'd expect a professional gunman to possess. “I figured gratitude was too much to hope for,” he said. “I didn't expect to be called out, though. Next time I'll maybe mind my own business.”
“I wish I knew what your business was.”
He favored me with the famous Shedwell smile. “Don't jump to conclusions. The fact is I decided to make an early night and I got sort of smoked with all that noise under my window. Thought I'd pick off an ear or two just to spread some education.”
I watched him. I've said he didn't have a poker face, but his expressions didn't necessarily match his meaning. “Well, thanks for the help. You wouldn't care to carry the lesson out of town?”
“That'd be vindictive,” he said. “I mean, just over a few minutes' sleep lost.”
“Suit yourself.” I left him, approaching the fallen horse. Its eyes were frozen with the whites showing and its tongue was dusty between its teeth. The saddle blanket covered the flank. I flipped it up to get a look at the brand. A vertical bar with a numeral 6 burned on either side—Mather's Six Bar Six. What else? I spotted the Negro who ran the livery standing among the spectators nearby and called him over.
“Yess'r?” His face was like dull, crumpled foil under a floppy hat and he was wearing three shirts over dingy flannels, the tails hanging outside his gray, shapeless trousers.
I nudged the dead horse with the toe of my boot. “Drag this carcass into the stable and hold it till someone comes for it. It's evidence in an assault case and possibly a lynching.”
“I gots to talk to the boss,” he said, rubbing his chin with a big horny hand. “We ain' never kep' no dead aminuls in the stable before. I wouldn't know what to charge.”
“It ought to be half. You won't have to curry or feed him. I'll pay double the regular rate. See Yardlinger for your money when he's on his feet.”
The doctor hailed me. “I'll need help getting these men over to the Freestone. I can't treat them out here.”
“Devil take the Freestone.” Yardlinger gathered his legs under him, attempted to rise, lost his footing and slammed down on his tailbone with an impact that shook the saloon's porch. He blinked dazedly. A nervous titter rippled through the growing crowd.
“Concussion,” said Ballard, adjusting the deputy's bandage. “Couple of days' rest will fix that up.”
I designated a number of townsmen to help with the injured pair and started walking. I was striding as I turned onto Arapaho Street, my boots clomping on the boardwalk and echoing like shots in the porch rafters. People who had come out to see what was going on made way for me when they saw my face. Sensing excitement, some of them followed me, and then some more, so that by the time I reached Martha's place I was heading a motley parade. On the strip of grass that separated the house from the street I turned around, glaring. They stopped and I mounted the steps to the door alone.
The door crashed against the wall as I went through it without knocking. A vase of flowers fell from a window sill and broke, water darkening the floral print carpet. An overripe blonde in a thin cotton shift threw me a startled glance from the settee. Her eyes traveled over me, and then she smiled, fingering back a stray tendril of yellow hair gray at the roots. She had freckles on her teeth like an old horse. Seated next to her, a thickset man in a prickly suit and a paper collar too small for his bull neck started to rise, then sat back down. He had a tea cup and saucer balanced on one knee and his lips were pursed under a bristling moustache. I recognized
him as the town barber and a member of the city council.
“Evening, Marshal.” He transferred the crockery from his knee to the arm of the settee. It rattled slightly. “What was all the shooting about? This young lady was kind enough to invite me in out of the line of fire
.
”
I wasn't paying attention to him. Martha was standing before the beaded doorway leading into the next room, all six feet of her, the good eye cocked in my direction. “Where's Colleen?” I demanded.
She said, “This carpet was woven in Asia two hundred years before I was born. If you've stained it—”
I repeated the question, advancing on her. She placed a hand over the brooch at her neck. Another woman might have swooned or begun screaming. “Upstairs. First door on the left.” She moved away from the opening.
I dashed aside the beads, found the staircase, and vaulted up two steps at a time. The door was locked. It flew open on the second kick, overturning a pedestal table and an earthenware pot containing a fern whose fronds hung to the floor. My heels ground the spilled black dirt into the rug. I'd graduated from horses to plants.
“Who the hell do you think you are?”
She stood next to a vanity, wearing a thin flannel nightgown and holding a tortoiseshell brush. Her red-brown hair flowed loose over her shoulders, glowing in the lamplight from the fresh stroking.
My anger had been building from the moment I'd
exposed the Six Bar Six brand on the dead horse's flank. Face to face with its source, my rage leveled off. I closed the door almost gently and stood with my back to it.
“Nice touch, brushing your hair,” I said. “Salome danced.”
Something fluttered over her face, I couldn't tell what. When she spoke again her voice was no longer shrill. “What are you talking about? What was happening downtown? I heard the shooting. I thought some cowhands were blowing off steam.” Fear gripped her then, draining the color from her features. “Why is your face black?” It was almost a whisper.
“Who'd you take up with?” I said calmly. “Mather or Turk? Whose idea was it to tell me that Mather was hitting Terwilliger in the morning so that I wouldn't expect him to attack me tonight? Pick one or all three. Just give me an answer.”
Her fingers went to her mouth in admirably feigned fright. If it was feigned. I was in no condition to judge. “I didn't know.” This time I barely heard it.
I didn't say anything. I hadn't the faintest notion of what to say or do. What had I been thinking all the way there? It angered me that she wasn't a man, and it angered me that that angered me. A few years earlier I'd have shot her where she stood without regard to her sex, but that was before the dime novels came and ruined me along with every other Westerner who read one just because there was nothing else to do in the middle of all that emptiness. Life was hard enough on the frontier
without having to conform to a creed. I started to leave.
“You're not hurt.” She was barefoot and made no noise hurrying across the rug. The top of her head barely reached my chin. Her hands grasped my shoulders. Tiny hands. It was hard to imagine them palming an ace. Her hair smelled of the scented soap they used downstairs, and something else.
I might have been gnarled wood in her hands for all the response she got. “One of my deputies is down with what might be a cracked skull,” I said quietly. “The other one may lose his arm and probably his life. Me? I'm indestructible.”
Her nails dug into my skin. “It wasn't a lie, Page. I did hear them planning to raid the Circle T. They didn't say anything about attacking you. They didn't. I'd have told you if they did.” The gold flecks swirled in her eyes.
I shook off her hands and grasped her wrists. I could have broken them both with little effort.
“Maybe you weren't lying. Maybe Mather's men knew I depended on Martha for information and spread that story knowing it would reach me sooner or later and put me off guard when they hit town. But I can't chance it, understand? I can't chance it.”
She grimaced. I was hurting her wrists. I slackened my hold. The smell of her made my head swim.
“I'd never be able to relax with you,” I continued. “I couldn't hold you without wondering if you were signaling someone over my shoulder. We couldn't go riding but that I'd think you had a sniper laying for me along the road. It wouldn't last a week, and when it was over we'd carry away the bitter taste.”
She lowered her eyes. I released her wrists and she turned away. Then she faced me again, across a distance of four feet.
“When I was three years old my father took me from Ohio down to the Nations and married a Cherokee woman for her land,” she said huskily. “He called himself a farmer, but he spent most of his time gambling at the trading post. At night he'd teach me to play poker, and when the other players complained about his dealing he'd have me sit in for him. At thirteen I could shave an ace in full view of a roomful of people and no one would notice. A year later my father sold me to a whiskey peddler named Bower for his route and a four-horse team.
“The reason Bower got rid of his route was he was his own best customer. He went crazy when he was drunk, and since I was always close by, he'd beat me until his arms got tired. One night after he'd done an especially good job of bloodying me I waited until he was snoring face down in the back of our wagon, and then I dug his Dragoon Colt from under a feed sack and emptied it into his back. I went clear around the cylinder and squeezed the trigger three times on empty chambers.”
Lamplight haloed her head and painted shadows in the folds of her nightgown. With her hair loose and her feet bare, she looked like the thirteen-year-old girl she was talking about.
“He had three hundred dollars in gold in a strongbox,” she went on. “I grabbed it, put on his riding clothes, unhitched a horse from the team and lit out. No one ever came after me. I don't think anyone much cared who had killed him as long as he was
dead. When I got to Arkansas I invested in a new wardrobe and a finishing course in Little Rock. I was young, but I knew that without an education I'd never do better than Bower for a husband.
“I soon learned that rich husbands were out unless your family was old and established, and mine stopped at an unmarked grave outside Muskogee where they buried my father after he was murdered by a drunken Osage. So I came back to Miss Jessup's School for Genteel Young Ladies and took a job teaching. For a year I helped mold a dozen little Colleen Bowers until I couldn't stand it any more and left. By the time anyone missed me, I was twenty miles inside the Nations.
I was seventeen years old.”
Someone was calling my name on Pawnee Street. It sounded like Cross, back from the Circle T. I heard horses outside, a lot of them. “Why tell me?” I asked her.
“Can't you see I'm sick to death of crime and treachery? Are your instincts so deep you can't put them behind you long enough to believe that? What else do I have to do to buy your trust?” Her hands were curled into tight little fists in front of her.
“I don't know.” I fished for words. “I don't know that it can be bought. If I were a bootmaker or a farmer or even a whiskey peddler in the Nations, it might be for sale. But I'm not and it's not. The price is too high. I wish it weren't.”
“It doesn't have to be.” Her eyes were shining in the darkness on her face. “You don't have to stay a lawman.”
I opened my mouth. I almost agreed. Then I
remembered the two dead half-breeds in Yankton and wondered if they'd heard this speech. I closed it. “I'm sorry it didn't work out.” I pulled open the door.
She might have said, “So am I.” I couldn't be sure. The door closed on whatever she did say.

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