A Jensen Family Christmas

by William W. Johnstone

  Banjo, so called because he had played that instrument in music halls when he was younger and his fingers were more nimble, had dealt Doc a three and an eight, which didn’t fill his full house but left him with two pairs, threes and sixes.

  “It’s a nickel to you, Doc,” Banjo said.

  “I’ll see that and raise a nickel,” Doc said as he pushed the two coins into the small pile in the middle of the table. The table was square, which just seemed wrong to Doc. He had spent so many thousands of hours playing poker at round tables. But in a situation like this, you took what you could get and were grateful for a pleasant way to pass the time.

  Hubert Guinn, to Doc’s left, saw the raise, as did Williams, and Banjo called. Doc’s two pairs took the pot, if you could call it that when it added up to less than a dollar. But they were only playing for fun, Doc reminded himself yet again.

  Sometimes it wasn’t easy for him to remember that. Too many times in his life, hundreds or even thousands of dollars had been riding on the turn of a card, or a man’s business, his entire livelihood. That had happened too many times for Doc to take the game less than seriously....

  “I’ve had about enough,” Williams said. He put his hands on the edge of the table, clearly ready to push back his chair and stand up.

  “But we can’t play with only three,” Banjo protested.

  “That’s not my lookout.” Williams got to his feet and turned toward the other side of the big parlor, where flames danced and crackled merrily in the fireplace.

  Hubert Guinn said, “I suppose we can go ahead and play, but it’s not really the same with only three.”

  “Just doesn’t feel right,” Banjo complained.

  “Maybe we can resume the game later,” Doc suggested. “Perhaps Bill will feel like playing again then, or someone else will.”

  “But what’ll we do between now and then?” Banjo asked plaintively. For the sick and elderly, filling the hours was a challenge.

  Hubert said, “We could play checkers.”

  That made Banjo brighten. He sat up straighter and said, “Yeah, we could.” Then he looked at Doc and added, “Unless you’d like to play, Doc . . .”

  “No, no,” Doc said. Waving his hand back and forth a little over the table, he added dryly, “That game’s too exciting for me.”

  “I’ll get the board,” Hubert said. Doc began gathering up the cards, since they belonged to him. He put them into their box and slid it into an inside coat pocket.

  Bill Williams stood near the fireplace, warming himself. Several of the sanitarium’s residents sat in chairs they had pulled up close to the flames, in the hope that the heat would ease the chill time had settled into their bones.

  Doc knew from experience it was a forlorn hope. Flesh and bone could be warmed, but the pall that impending mortality cast over a man’s soul could not be lifted. Every man reached the point where he went to bed each night no longer able to avoid the knowledge that he was one day closer to the grave.

  “My God, man, stop brooding,” he muttered to himself. “Surely you can find something better to do.”

  He had a fairly recent novel in his room, he recalled, a tale of pirates or some such by a man named Stevenson, so maybe he would start it. Reading about tropical islands might be just the thing on a cold, gloomy day like this, he thought as he got to his feet and left the parlor.

  He was walking along the corridor where the patients’ rooms were located when the door to one of them opened and a wizened face topped by fluffy white hair peered out at him.

  “Oh, Dr. Monday,” the woman said, “it’s you. I’m so glad to see you.”

  “And, as always, I’m glad to see you, too, Mrs. Bennett,” Doc said as he paused to greet the elderly woman. “But I’ve told you, I’m not a physician. ‘Doc’ is just what some people have called me over the years.”

  “I know that. I do. I just have trouble remembering sometimes . . .”

  “We all do,” Doc assured her. “How are you today?”

  “Frightened,” Mrs. Bennett said.

  Doc frowned and asked, “What in the world are you frightened of?”

  “When I heard footsteps out here in the hall, I thought it might be that horrible Mr. Williams.”

  “He’s not the most pleasant company, I grant you—”

  “I was afraid he might be coming to kill me. He has a gun, you know.”

  Doc’s frown deepened. He said, “No, I didn’t know that. How do you know about it?”

  “I saw it one day,” Mrs. Bennett said. As if to check that no one was lurking nearby, she glanced up the hall toward the window at its end, then down the other way to where the corridor opened into the parlor. Then, satisfied that she and Doc were alone, she leaned forward and went on quietly, “I was walking past his room, and the door was open a little, and I looked inside . . . not prying, you know, just a glance, like people will do . . .”

  “Of course,” Doc murmured.

  “Anyway, I saw him standing there holding it! It was a big ugly thing. He was turning something . . . the place where you put the bullets in, I think . . .”

  “The cylinder.”

  “I suppose. And I could see there were bullets in it. He closed the part where he was looking, and then he opened one of the drawers and put the gun inside, and he laughed. I never heard such an evil laugh, Dr. Monday. I really haven’t.”

  Doc didn’t doubt that. But he didn’t believe that Williams was plotting to kill Mrs. Bennett, either. As for the gun, Doc had one himself, a small pocket pistol, which currently was in his room. However, he didn’t think it would be a good idea to mention that to Mrs. Bennett.

  She went on, “Could you do something for me, Doctor?”

  He didn’t bother trying to correct her this time. Instead, he said, “I can certainly try. What is it you’d like for me to do?”

  “Take that horrible gun out of Mr. Williams’s room and get rid of it!”

  Instantly, Doc regretted indulging the old woman’s fantasies. He said, “I can’t do that. I have no right to invade Mr. Williams’s privacy and do anything with his personal property.”

  “But he’s going to kill me!” she wailed. “I know he is. You see, when I was passing by his room and saw the gun, he . . . he looked up and caught me watching him. The expression on his face at that moment was murder, Doctor. Pure murder!”

  CHAPTER 5

  Doc reached out to pat the frightened old woman on the shoulder and try to reassure her. His hand trembled a little as he did so.

  “Now, now, Mrs. Bennett, I’m sure it wasn’t that bad. Mr. Williams was probably just surprised to see you standing there, that’s all.”

  “He’s a killer,” insisted Mrs. Bennett. “A cold-blooded killer! I could see it in his eyes. That’s why you have to get the gun away from him.” She moaned. “If you let him keep it, he’s going to slaughter us all in our beds!”

  Doc saw now that he was going to have to have a talk with Dr. MacMurphy. Clearly, Mrs. Bennett needed more help than she was getting.

  “I think you should probably go lie down for a bit—” he began.

  “You won’t help me?”

  “I can’t—”

  “Then I’ll do it myself! I’ll get that gun and throw it out the window!”

  With surprising speed and agility for such an elderly lady, the birdlike Mrs. Bennett darted past Doc. He reached for her arm to stop her, but she was already headed for Williams’s room. Doc turned quickly to go after her.

  Normally, he wouldn’t have had any trouble catching up to her. But when he turned, the whole corridor suddenly seemed to spin around him, crazily out of control. This had happened to Doc before, usually when he bent over or turned too quickly, but in those cases, the sensation had lasted only a few seconds.

  This time, the wild spinning continued, and it was made even worse when his muscles seemed to lock up for no reason and refuse to do what his brain was telling them to do. He wasn’t able to stop the moment
um of his turn, and before he was fully aware of what was happening, he was down, sprawled on hands and knees on the hallway floor.

  He raised his head and saw Mrs. Bennett disappearing through the open door of Bill Williams’s room.

  Gritting his teeth, Doc forced himself up. He felt himself shaking inside and rested a hand on the wall to steady himself. While he believed that Mrs. Bennett was imagining things about their fellow patient’s sinister plans, he knew that Williams would be angry if he came along and found the old woman in his room, rummaging among his belongings in search of a gun that might or might not exist.

  As soon as Doc’s spinning head and trembling muscles had settled down some, he made himself move again. Stumbling only slightly, he went along the hall to Williams’s door and said, “Mrs. Bennett, please, you shouldn’t be in—”

  He stopped short when he saw her standing beside a chest of drawers with a big Colt .45 gripped in both hands. One of the drawers was open, so he assumed that was where she had gotten the gun.

  “I told you it was here, Doctor,” she said. “I told you!”

  Doc grimaced and stepped into the room. Like all the others in the sanitarium, it was plainly, even spartanly, furnished with a bed, a single chair, a small table, and a chest of drawers.

  The .45’s barrel was pointed in Doc’s general direction, close enough to make him nervous. The hammer wasn’t cocked, but the weapon was a double-action, so all Mrs. Bennett had to do to fire it was to pull the trigger. Doc didn’t know if she was strong enough to do that, but he didn’t want to find out.

  “Please, Mrs. Bennett,” he said as he started toward her, making calming motions with his hands, “put that gun down, or at least point it at the floor.”

  “I told you,” she said again. “I told you, Dr. Monday! See!” She shook the gun at him.

  Doc felt like his heart had climbed all the way into his throat. He took a step to his left, to get out of the direct line of fire, but she just turned and kept the gun pointed at him. Evidently, holding the weapon had increased her terror, because she wailed, “What are we going to do?”

  Doc eased closer. If his hands were shaking or if he was trembling inside, he didn’t know it, because all his attention was focused on the muzzle of that Colt, which looked as big around as a cannon right now. He managed to keep his voice calm and steady as he said, “I’ll take care of it, Mrs. Bennett. Just give the gun to me, and I’ll take care of it.”

  He was close enough to her now that he thought taking the Colt directly from her would be safer than trying to get her to put it down. He extended his right hand, hoping it would be as rock steady as it had once been.

  Instead, it shook back and forth, no more than a half inch either way, but definitely visible.

  “Oh, you’re frightened, too! See how your hand is trembling?”

  “It’s all right,” he assured her. “Nothing to worry about. Just . . . give me . . . the gun.”

  She turned the Colt and slipped it into his outstretched hand.

  Relief flooded through Doc. He was no gunman, certainly nowhere nearly as skilled with an iron as Ace and Chance, but he had handled enough of them that he knew what he was doing. He opened the loading gate and shook the bullets from the cylinder into the palm of his other hand.

  There were only five rounds in the gun, he noted. The hammer had been resting on an empty chamber. That told Doc that Bill Williams knew something about handling guns, too.

  “All right, it’s harmless now,” he told Mrs. Bennett. “You can go back to your room and not worry about a thing.”

  “But he can put the bullets in it again, can’t he? Throw it out the window, Doctor! Throw it in the snow, where he can’t find it!”

  The ground outside had only a dusting of snow on it, so Doc didn’t think that would do a very good job of concealing the gun. Anyway, it still wasn’t his property.

  “I can’t do that, Mrs. Bennett, but I’ll have a talk with Mr. Williams and let him know how frightened you are. Maybe he can sell it or send it to one of his relatives.”

  “But he’ll know I was poking my nose in his business. He’ll be mad.”

  Doc shook his head emphatically and said, “I’ll take all the responsibility. I’ll tell him that you’re under my special protection.”

  “You’d do that for me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Oh, thank you, Doctor.” She came closer to him, rested the fingertips of one hand on his forearm, and then—Lord help us! Doc thought—she batted her eyelashes at him and gave him a coy, girlish smile.

  Some things never changed, he supposed. And in some ways, that was good.

  “Run along now, back to your room,” he said.

  “Will I see you at supper tonight?”

  “Certainly. I look forward to it.”

  Still smiling, she left the room. Doc heaved a sigh of relief as he heard her door close a moment later.

  But he was still standing there with Williams’s gun in one hand and the bullets in the other, and he needed to do something with them. He turned toward the chest. If he reloaded the Colt and put it in that open drawer, Williams might notice that someone had disturbed it . . . probably would notice . . . but that was really the only thing Doc could do.

  Quickly, he thumbed the cartridges back into the cylinder. As he did so, he couldn’t help but notice that someone had scratched something into the gun’s frame. A word . . . no, a name, he decided.

  MALKIN.

  The name meant nothing to him. He leaned closer to the drawer. There were several pairs of socks in it.

  He lifted some of them and started to slide the Colt underneath them. As he did, he saw that the socks also concealed a small bundle of envelopes tied together with string. The top one, the only one he could really see, had a name and an address in Laramie, Wyoming, written on it.

  The name was William Malkin.

  So maybe Bill Williams’s name was really William Malkin. One thing about the frontier: A man could start over, make himself a whole new life with a new name, if he wanted to. Again, it was none of Doc’s business.

  He arranged the socks over the gun in what he hoped was at least a semblance of how they had been, and eased the drawer closed. Then he went to the door and looked out carefully.

  No one was around. Good. He stepped out into the corridor, closed the door behind him, and, whistling softly to himself, went to his room to start reading that pirate novel.

  * * *

  At the end of the corridor where it entered the parlor, the man who called himself Bill Williams moved out from behind the bushy potted plant that had screened him from view. He had ducked behind it when he looked along the hall and saw that the door to his room was open. He had watched, waiting to see who came out of there.

  He hadn’t had to wait long. Less than a minute later, that damn gambler Doc Monday had peeked out, then emerged, closed the door behind him, and strolled on down the hall to his room.

  Monday had no reason to be in his room, Williams thought as anger began to bubble up inside him. No reason at all. He strode along the corridor, jerked his door open, and went inside. At first glance, everything looked normal, because there really wasn’t much in the room.

  The important things were in one of the drawers. Williams yanked it open and saw right away that things weren’t exactly as he had left them. He had gotten used to memorizing the layout and arrangement of everything, so he would know if somebody had come around snooping. He realized immediately that his gun had been moved, and he was pretty sure the little packet of letters had been, too.

  Somebody messing with his gun was bad enough, but if Monday had seen the letters, that was worse. Williams should have thrown away those letters, and he knew it. He cursed himself for not doing it before now. But anybody could have a little streak of sentimentality left in him, no matter how much of his humanity life had stripped away.

  He looked again at the letters, sighed, and pushed the drawer closed.


  Then he said out loud to himself, “There’s no getting around it. I have to kill the son of a bitch.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Denver

  The hotel dining room was already busy, even though it was a little early for supper. Three-fourths of the tables with fine Irish linen tablecloths on them were occupied, including one in a back corner of the room, where a man sat by himself.

  He wasn’t young, but that was about the only thing he had in common with the other diners. They were all dressed in expensive clothing, because this was a fine hotel—staid, dignified, almost pompous in its luxuriousness. The people who stayed here, who ate supper here, were wealthy and didn’t mind people knowing that. In fact, they would have been disappointed if everyone else didn’t know how rich they were.

  The lone man at the rear table, however, wore clothes that were clean and well cared for but looked more like an outfit somebody would wear to ride the range and chase cows: boots, jeans, a light brown shirt, and a darker brown vest. A dark brown hat with a round, medium-high crown rested on the table, next to a plate containing a rare steak and all the fixin’s. As the man ate, he paused between bites to wash down the food with sips of strong black coffee from a cup on the other side of the plate.

  He had asked the waiter to bring a pot of coffee and leave it so he could refill his own cup when he needed more to drink. The pot was in easy reach, sitting on a thick piece of leather.

  It wasn’t there just for drinking purposes, however. The hotel management frowned on guests packing iron in the dining room. So the man had made sure he got a table where he could see anybody who might come at him with trouble in mind. If that happened, he figured on throwing hot coffee in the fella’s face and then using the heavy pot to stave the varmint’s head in.

  There were plenty of ways to kill an enemy other than with a gun, and the man called Preacher knew all of them.