Written in Time (50 page)

“And you’s the sonofabitch fuckin’ town marshal what bushwhacked my brother.”
 

In the light from the lamp Ellen held—to Ellen’s considerable credit, it wasn’t shaking—Jack’s eyes were able to focus with perfect clarity on two features of Steve Fowler: the burning hatred that was like a spark in his unwavering coal-black pupils and the twin muzzles of the side-by-side twelve gauge shotgun in his hands. The eyes were definitely, almost preternaturally, black, and the shotgun’s barrels were nickel or chrome plated. “You know, the famous Chiracahua Apache chief, Cochise, carried a nickel-plated shotgun, kind of like that, I understand. And I didn’t bushwhack your brother, although I’d intended to, since he’d tried murdering my entire family. As it turned out, he bushwhacked me. But he died in a fair fight; I even let him go for his gun first. Now put that scattergun down.”
 

“I knows ya’ pret’ good from some ol boys talkin’ up ya’ bein’ handy with that shooter. And, ya’ got ya derringer sneak gun, too. But guess what this heah scattergun is a aimin’ at! Yo’ right arm, Naile. An’ both ya’s shooters is for right hand work.”
 

At the distance, Jack realized, the minimal damage the shotgun would do if only one barrel were discharged would be to rip away the right arm, shoulder and much of the chest. Even if a gun could be gotten to with his left hand, there wouldn’t be enough of him left to use it. And Ellen, standing close beside him, would be killed instantly.
 

To outdraw the hammer fall of a shotgun was a physical impossibility for anyone except, perhaps, the legendary Border Patrolman and gunfighter Bill Jordan, or maybe quickdraw artist and trick shooter Bob Munden. No man with ordinary reflexes, however good, stood a chance.
 

Jack bluffed. “I’ll get you as I fall, Stevie. Sure as anything. Let my wife step aside.”
 

The black pits that were Steve Fowler’s eyes wavered almost imperceptibly.
 

“The bitch can move if’n ya’ drops yous shooters where ya’ stand.” And the twin muzzles of the shotgun slowly shifted to cover Ellen Naile.
 

A lot of standup comedians in the twentieth century had made/would make a good living with cracks about their wives, pursuant to the idea that they—the comedians— would have been well-rid of their spouses. Steve Fowler had guessed that Jack would be more reluctant to try anything if Ellen were certain to be killed if he did; Jess Fowler’s badass little brother had guessed right.
 

Jack started to unbuckle his gun belt. “Left hand, no right!” Fowler ordered. Jack had been hoping for that, to get his left hand into motion. For much of his adult life, he’d carried the little Seecamp in his right front trouser pocket. But the big Colt’s gun belt precluded easy access to that pocket, so he’d switched the Seecamp to his left side.
 

Jack unbuckled the gun belt and eased it to the barn floor. Fowler, although the shotgun was trained on Ellen, watched him. Jack caught his wife’s pretty gray-green eyes. There was a slight tightening of the muscles around them, a look he knew signaled that she guessed—hoped— he had something in mind and she would back him up.
 

“Thet hidey-out sneak gun—drop it, too!”
 

The derringer was in a specially built deep riding inside-waistband holster positioned in the general vicinity of his appendix. “I’ve gotta fish it out from behind my pants belt, so don’t get jumpy.” But, of course, unless Steve Fowler was an asshole, he would get jumpy, focusing intently on the right-hand movement lest the derringer should be brought into play in some cleverly lethal fashion.
 

Jack fished out the derringer, held it between two fingers and announced, “If you know guns, you know dropping a loaded derringer is an easy way to get it to go off. You could get shot, as if I cared. But my wife might get shot instead, or me. I’m setting it down nice and easy. Just watch me.” Jack hoped that Steve Fowler would watch him intently.
 

Still holding the derringer gingerly between two fingers, not daring to risk even a glance to his wife’s face, Jack flexed his knees a little and slowly bent downward, his left side facing away from Fowler’s eyes. He had to do it smoothly, get the Seecamp into action, because this would be the one and only chance to kill Steve Fowler and live.
 

As Jack crouched, his left hand slipped into the left pocket of his trousers, his fingertips finding the worn butt of the Seecamp .32. Setting the derringer on the barn floor, Jack hesitated for a microsecond before taking his hand away from it, enough time for Fowler to start swinging the shotgun toward him.
 

Jack glanced toward the open barn doors and shouted, “David! Clarence! He’s got a gun on Ellen!”
 

Ellen screamed, “It’s Jess Fowler’s brother!”
 

It was not enough to get Steve Fowler to turn around, which used to happen with considerable regularity in the old westerns, but was just enough to get Fowler to hesitate for an instant. Jack saw a blur of motion from Ellen’s direction as the Seecamp cleared his pocket and he threw himself flat to the floor, under the level of Fowler’s shotgun.
 

Something—Ellen’s lamp?—went flying past Fowler’s face.
 

One of the double’s barrels discharged as Jack pulled the Seecamp’s trigger, then pulled it again, the distance between the little pistol’s muzzle and Fowler’s body less than ten feet.
 

Two shots in Fowler’s midsection, one at navel level, the second below the sternum.
 

Not good enough to keep the second barrel from getting him or Ellen. Jack began to empty the remaining five shots, letting the muzzle rise as the pistol discharged.
 

Fowler’s body arched back slightly.
 

The shotgun was vectoring downward, almost in perfect alignment with Jack’s face as Jack fired the last round. Fowler’s left eye and the bridge of his nose took the bullet.
 

A blur of motion, black skirt and white petticoats, the second shotgun barrel discharging, its shot load tearing a chunk out of the barn floor to Jack’s right.
 

Ellen was on top of Fowler, her fingers gouging at Fowler’s face, her knees planted in his chest, hammering up and down on him.
 

“He’s dead, kid!” As Jack bent down toward her and Ellen stood up, they bumped their heads together. “Ouch!” Jack stammered.
 

“Ouch?! You’re the one with a head like a—” Jack could barely hear, his ears ringing from the two shotgun blasts as Ellen threw her arms around him and started to cry.
 

Almost worse than the attempt on their lives was the precious time—an irreplaceable commodity in whatever era—that Steve Fowler’s murderous intentions had cost them.
 

Ellen Naile cautioned her husband. “If you break an axle or something, we’ll never get to Reno in time for the train. Slow down.” Seat-belted in, holding on to the overhead grab handle, she would still bounce so high that her stupid hat was almost constantly striking the Suburban’s headliner. Jack had never done a great deal of off-road driving and had several times admitted that dirt roads creeped him out at any sort of speed. “How fast are you going, Jack?”
 

“Forty or so, unless I hit a bad stretch. Sometimes a little closer to fifty when the road looks okay.”
 

“Your brights are on?”
 

“Brights are on.”
 

“I almost wish we had airbags in this.”
 

“I can’t even remember if they were an option on the ‘89 models. Relax, anyway. I’m taking it nice and easy. If that rain hits, it’ll slow us down a lot.”
 

The storm clouds made it seem well past twilight, and the interior of the Suburban was in deep shadow, save for the glow from the dashboard lights. “I’m glad it’s dark for once.”
 

“Why?”
 

“Then I can’t see the whiteness of your knuckles on the steering wheel.”
 

Jack laughed, but his laughter sounded a little less than sincere.
 

While Jack had still been holding her in his arms and the smell of the shotgun’s twin discharges was still heavy in the air of the barn, Lizzie—rifle in hand—had run in, Alan and Peggy just behind her.
 

Jack—Ellen knew that he must have been talking overly loudly because he couldn’t hear properly yet—had given a quickie version of what happened, leaving off his own daring, emphasizing how she had distracted Fowler. She’d brushed herself off, Lizzie helping her, then found her dumb hat and her purse, the purse like one of those little blue sacks small bottles of Crown Royal came in. Only, it was the wrong color.
 

Peggy and Alan cleaned up the blood on the barn floor. Lizzie taking one leg, Ellen taking the other, Jack took Fowler’s wrists and they carted the body out of the barn and toward the stream. They pitched it off the embankment and as far out into the current as they could, well past where any water for the house would be sourced. “After a while, he’ll bloat up and float off—probably. If he doesn’t,” Jack advised Lizzie, “you send for my deputy—not the damn crook county sheriff—and tell him you discovered the body and don’t know how it got there. Get him to get it out of the water and haul it into town. Hopefully, like I said, Lizzie, the corpse will just float away.”
 

Returning to the barn, Lizzie gave them both last-minute hugs and kisses. Peggy wished them well and Alan promised, “I’ll look after things as best I can, guys.”
 

“You’re a fine great-great-grandson,” Jack had told him, laughing at the biological absurdity of a man of fifty having a great-great-grandson who was thirty-two years old.
 

Ellen envied persons who could sleep in a moving car. She could not. Instead, she peered into the deepening darkness beyond the headlights’ field of illumination, the reset dashboard clock showing only five minutes after five. But the darkness was from a cloud cover more dense than she could remember ever having seen before. A storm would make their marathon drive on rutted stage roads more than doubly dangerous.
 

As if the storm front were some sort of malevolent spirit capable of reading her very thoughts, a barrage of raindrops larger than she ever remembered seeing cascaded through the beams of the Suburban’s headlights and slammed against the windshield. In the next instant, their vehicle was engulfed.
 

The rain was cold, almost like ice where it pelted the bare skin of her hands and face. The goofy hat was gone, her hair covered with a heavy shawl that shielded her shoulders as well. Jack had let her out of the Suburban just past the outskirts of Reno, the equivalent, more or less, of a three city block walk from the train platform and the tiny station it fronted.
 

Women’s clothing of the period weighed an inordinate amount under the best of circumstances, but now that Ellen was soaked nearly to the skin, the skirt of her dress and the petticoats beneath it dragged at her, weighing her down.
 

Ellen Naile carried only her purse and a small carpetbag, both in her right hand. In her skirt pocket was the Seecamp .32 Jack had insisted that she carry. Her left hand alternated between clutching the rechargeable Maglite flashlight—which she would have to hide as soon as she was able to rely on the meager light from the station platform—and keeping the shawl in place. She could not have cared less if she got wet under normal conditions, never being the sort of woman who cringed with fear at the thought of rain damaging her hairdo. But with the lower half of her body drenched, if her hair and upper body too were soaked, she would become uncontrollably cold.
 

As she neared the platform, two sconced oil lamps emitted a pale yellow light, marginally sufficient to see well enough to ascend the four steps on the near end. Ellen shut off the anachronistic flashlight and slipped it into the comparatively cavernous outer pouch of the sodden carpetbag.
 

As she approached the steps, she raised her skirts; the ground was softer here, the mud stickier. For once, she would have counted herself happy for the high-topped shoes of the period, had they been even remotely waterproof. Feet soaked, toes numb, Ellen Naile ascended the steps. At the height of the platform, she was instantly below the extended roofline of the station. Reno was a terminus of sorts, serviced by the V&T and the Southern Pacific. The Southern Pacific Overland Limited was scheduled to arrive for passenger boarding in under fifteen minutes.
 

Stepping back from the platform’s edge and deeper into the shelter of the roofline, Ellen’s eyes strained to pierce the darkness for some glint of light from Jack’s smaller flashlight. He would turn it off sooner, of course, his night vision always vastly better than her own.
 

Shivering, telling herself that it would be more sensible to await his arrival in the comparative warmth of the station, she continued her numbing vigil.
 

At last, after what seemed an eternity, Ellen spotted her husband, his flashlight already extinguished. He was almost jogging, moving rapidly yet cautiously through the mud. As he came closer, she could see him with greater clarity, saddlebags slung over his left shoulder, a large carry-on in each hand, one a carpetbag, the other a leather suitcase, that almost looked modern.
 

Jack ascended the platform steps, and Ellen took the saddlebags from his shoulder as he lowered the carpetbag and leather suitcase to the platform.
 

“Hi, kid.” Jack grinned, a torrent of rainwater guttering from the brim of his black Stetson as he leaned forward to kiss her. “Oops! Sorry about that,” he amended, removing his hat, shaking it and taking her into his arms. “You freezing?”
 

“Aren’t you?” Jack wore only a black vested suit, no rain slicker thought to be needed as they’d left the ranch house.