White Lightning (14 page)

“Reselling it, you mean.”

Luke nodded. “Sure. Stretch the supply and multiply the profit three, four times. Why not.”

“Like through saloons,” Slade said.

“Best place that I can think of.”

“Till somebody checks for tax stamps.”

“Make your own. You’d only have to have one honest sample and a printer who can counterfeit them.”

“With a label from a recognized distillery,” said Slade.

“Whose gonna question it, once you start sellin’ in another state?”

“So we don’t need to find the still first thing,” Slade offered. “Any good-sized cache could do.”

“Mount a watch on it. Find out who comes and goes. I like it,” Naylor said.

“Now all we have to do is
find
it,” Slade reminded him.

A smile flashed in the night as Naylor said, “What are we waitin’ for?”

The knock made Percy Fawcett jump, although he’d been expecting it. Was dreading it, in fact, still not convinced that Grady Sullivan had his best interest in mind. He might be regarded as a danger now, something to be disposed of, and he wasn’t taking any chances. Tucked inside his belt, around in back where it was covered by his jacket, Fawcett wore a Colt M1889 revolver chambered for the .38-caliber Short Colt cartridge. In the right-hand pocket of his trousers, he was also carrying a clasp knife with a four-inch blade.

Now, if he only had the nerve to use the weapons, Fawcett thought he should be safe.

Or would he?

Sullivan was known to be a gunman, and the rowdies whom he hung out with were all cut from the same rough cloth. Fair bodyguards, he would imagine, but if they had devilry in mind, he could not hope to best them.

Worried as he was, Fawcett had nearly slipped away from town that afternoon, after his shift was over, but his nerve had failed. He pictured Sullivan and company pursuing him, catching him somewhere on the plains, taking his flight as proof that he’d betrayed them. They would surely kill him then, and no mistake. Playing along with them, at least he had a fighting chance to stay alive.

Now he was answering the door, saw Sullivan and two
more men he didn’t recognize standing in darkness on his doorstep. Fawcett backed away and beckoned them inside. The little living room of his apartment suddenly felt claustrophobic, redolent of unwashed bodies. He was tempted for a suicidal moment to inquire when they had bathed last, but he bit his tongue instead.

“You packed?” asked Sullivan.

“I am,” Fawcett responded, nodding toward a trunk and portmanteau that sat together in the middle of the floor.

“That’s ever’thing?”

“It is.”

“Go on and shift that to the buggy,” Sullivan told his companions. Each man took a handle of the trunk and hauled it out into the night, where Fawcett saw a horse-drawn carriage standing, two more animals secured behind it by their reins. Sullivan took the portmanteau and ordered Fawcett, “Kill the lamps and lock ’er up. You’ve got a ways to travel.”

Fawcett did as he was told, locking the door behind him as he left, and wondered if he’d ever see the place again. He’d grown accustomed to the rooms, but now supposed that even if he managed to survive his trek with Sullivan, it would be hazardous to show his face around Stateline again. After he’d run out on the marshals, they’d be looking for him high and low, assuming he had information they could use.

And they’d be right, of course.

Which made him dangerous—but dangerous enough to kill?

Outside, before he climbed into the carriage, Sullivan told Fawcett, “This is Jeb and Dooley. They’ll be takin’ you to someplace you’ll be safe awhile.”

“You won’t be coming with us?” Fawcett asked, uncertain whether he should he relieved or worried.

“Not just now,” Sullivan said. “I got some things to do for Mr. Rafferty before I come and tuck you in.”

“I see.” But
did
he? Was the handoff to his cronies simply Grady’s way to rid himself of Fawcett while establishing an alibi in town? Did it portend his murder, somewhere in the dark outside of Stateline? And if so, would he be better off with two assassins than with three?

Sullivan helped him up into the buggy, such a gentleman. Once he was seated, Fawcett took advantage of the dark and the distraction of his escorts, reaching underneath his coat to slip the short revolver from his waistband, bringing it around in front where it was easier to reach.

A little life insurance, just in case.

He might not match the speed or skill of Sullivan’s companions, but at least he could defend himself and let them know that they’d been in a fight. Whatever happened next, Fawcett would not be led to slaughter like a sheep.

“Hold on. You smell that?” Naylor asked.

“I do,” Slade said.

They’d reached the southeast corner of a good-sized building on the Oklahoma side of Border Boulevard, a few doors short of Stateline’s western boundary, where the town ran out and open plains began.

“It smell like a saloon to you?” Naylor inquired.

It did, but they were well beyond the Swagger Inn and slightly farther from the Sunflower. There was no breeze to speak of, and the little that Slade felt was blowing from the west, back toward the town’s saloons.

“Worth looking into,” Slade suggested.

There was nothing painted on the backside of the
building to suggest its function or identify its owner. Slade tried the back door and found it locked or bolted from the inside.

“Try around the front?”

“But carefully,” Slade answered. “It’s not late enough for all the neighbors to be sleeping.”

Naylor led the way along a narrow alley set between the aromatic building and a feed store to its right. Their footsteps crunched on dirt and gravel all the way, Slade wincing at the way the alley’s confines seemed to magnify the sound. A moment later they were at the alley’s mouth, emerging onto Border Boulevard, no street lamps to reveal them, although someone covering the block could see them easily enough.

Turning left, they passed before the building, named up front as Stateline Storage. Sniffing as he passed the padlocked entrance, Slade smelled nothing to provoke suspicion.

“Only round in back,” Naylor observed.

“We’d better try to have a look inside,” Slade said.

“Suits me.”

The problem was legality, of course. Slade hadn’t been to law school, but Judge Dennison had quizzed him on the Bill of Rights when he became a marshal and reminded him specifically that searching private property without a proper warrant could result in vital evidence being excluded from a trial. If he and Naylor found a hoard of untaxed whiskey in the warehouse, they could neither confiscate it nor refer to it in any charges later filed against the stockpile’s owner—whoever that turned out to be. Still, they were at a dead end as it was, and Slade needed a break to move the case along. Right now, a quiet look-see struck him as the only way to go.

They doubled back along the alley, checked both ways for passersby before they sidled toward the rear approach to
Stateline Storage. Naylor tried the door again, as if he thought it might have magically unlocked itself, then raised the right cuff of his pants and drew a long knife from his boot.

“Lucky I brought the key,” he said, grinning.

“We’re on the wrong side of the law with this, you know,” Slade cautioned him.

“The Fourth Amendment, was it?”

“Right.”

“You gonna tell on me?”

“I doubt it.”

“Well, then.” Naylor slipped his blade between the door and jamb, worked it around till something snapped inside, and then withdrew it. When he tried the door again, it opened at his touch. “Easy,” he said and tucked his knife away.

Inside the warehouse, there was no denying the pervasive smell of liquor. Slade was cautious as he struck a match and held it high, then found a lamp residing on a shelf beside the door and lit it. With the wick turned down to minimize its glare, he turned to face a wall of barrels. Counted seventeen across the bottom, same across the second tier.

“How far back do they go?” asked Naylor.

Edging to his right, Slade raised the lamp and counted quickly. “Six rows back,” he said, “before you hit some other kind of boxes.”

“So that’s…what? Around two hundred?”

“Close. I make it two-oh-four,” Slade said, “if all the rows are equal going back.”

“And would you call those fifty-gallon kegs?”

“I’d say that’s pretty close.”

“Over ten thousand gallons, then. You want to check for tax stamps?”

“Guess we’d better, since we’re here,” Slade said.

The double row of barrels stood around Slade’s six-foot height, too tall for him to simply peer over the top. Naylor produced a short stepladder from a shadowed corner, set it up, and took the lamp from Slade as he ascended. Seconds later he reported back, “No stamps on these, as far as I can see.”

“Nothing to say who owns them?”

“Nope.”

“All right,” Slade said. “Let’s clear on out and close it up the best we can. I need to think on this a bit.”

Grady Sullivan was passing on his buckskin gelding when the marshals eased out of the alley next to Stateline Storage. Startled as he was, he managed not to gape at them but kept his eyes straight forward, more or less, and rode on by. His stomach churned, though, and he nudged the gelding to a trot, putting more ground between himself and the two lawmen, heading toward the Sunflower Saloon.

Bad news, this was, and the big man would want to hear about it sooner, rather than later. Sullivan hoped that Rafferty was still at the saloon and not in bed with one of his doxies. Interruptions weren’t appreciated when the boss was rutting, but he’d have to bust in anyhow if they were on the verge of being raided. More time wasted if the big man had gone back out to his spread, six miles northwest of town, and Sullivan was forced to follow him. Who could predict what damage might be done before they got back into Stateline?

Grady cursed his four men lying stretched out at the undertaker’s, waiting for their last trip to the bone orchard. And count Eddie Gillespie with them, planted early in a hole on Rafferty’s twelve hundred acres. If they’d done their job correctly in the first place, he’d be sitting down to supper
and a few drinks now, instead of rushing to confront the big man with his stomach-churning news.

Goddamn the law dogs, anyhow. If they had found the liquor, he supposed that hustling Percy Fawcett out of town had been another waste of time and effort. Sullivan could just as easily have tracked the marshals, laid an ambush for them in the heart of Stateline, and removed them that way, even if it raised a ruckus. Who among the townspeople was likely to complain—or testify, if it came down to that?

The big man owned this town—well, most of it, at least—but that could change like lightning if the marshals linked him to the moonshine sold to Indians and to the murder of their fellow lawman. One would send him up to Leavenworth; the other would abbreviate his trip and see him hanged in Enid, if convicted.

Either way, what would be left for Grady Sullivan without Flynn Rafferty? More drifting, if he managed to slip through the net and dodge a noose himself. If not…well, then his worries would be over, wouldn’t they?

Sullivan had given thought to how his life might end, from time to time. He’d never planned on growing old and gray, riding a rocker on a shady porch somewhere. More likely snuffed out by a faster gun one day, or cut down by a coward while his back was turned. That was the life he’d chosen, with the shadow of a gallows always lurking in the background, but it struck him now, riding through darkness, that he didn’t want to hang.

Dancing on air and strangling slowly while a crowd of gawkers laughed at him? No, thanks. Given a choice, the lesser of two evils, he’d face down the lawmen on his own and let them finish him.

Or maybe they would die in the attempt. Why not?

Hell, stranger things had happened.

Sullivan knew that he was reasonably fast. Not Black Jack Ketchum fast, Wes Hardin fast, or anything like that. But he was still alive, and he could name eleven men who weren’t after they’d faced him in a showdown. Plus a few he’d taken care of for the big man, with the wheat-haired deputy among them.

Go down fighting if he had to make the choice, damn right. But in the meantime, if there was an opportunity to head that off, he’d risk upsetting Rafferty and his companion for the evening to save them all.

It was the smart thing, and he always tried to think ahead.

Captain Brody Gallagher was sipping a glass of whiskey—his third by actual count—when the Western Union rider found him in the officers’ mess. The young man looked winded, though Gallagher knew his horse had done all of the running from Enid to reach Fort Supply. Traipsing around a military base had that effect on some civilians, intimidated by the presence of so many guns and men in uniform.

The rider spent an awkward moment in the doorway, half a dozen soldiers staring at him while he eyed them one by one, in silence. Gallagher wondered how knowledgeable he might be, concerning officers’ insignia, and soon decided that the answer was: not very. Even so, the bars Gallagher wore might not have helped the stranger, since there was another captain in the room, along with three lieutenants and a major.

When the best part of a minute had elapsed, the major—Joseph Nussbaum, often called “Joe Nosey” in his absence—raised his gravel voice to ask, “What brings you here?”

“A cable, sir,” the rider answered.

“I’d have guessed it from the cap you’re wearing,” Nussbaum told him. “Who’s it
for
?”

The rider glanced down at the paper in his hand, suggesting he’d forgotten who he came for, then replied, “A Captain Gallagher, if he’s available?”

“I am,” said Gallagher, not rising from his seat.

The young man hurried over, passed the telegram inside a Western Union envelope with
CAPT. GALLAGHER
printed in block letters across its front. Job done, the rider stood by for another moment, long enough for Gallagher to think he might be waiting for a tip.

Not likely.

“Well?” Gallagher challenged him, the envelope still resting in his hand unopened.