Burning Daylight

by William W. Johnstone

  Luke waved a hand toward the bodies. “I wrapped them up in blankets, Sheriff. That’s more than I had to do.”

  A pudgy young man wearing a deputy’s badge hurried up, puffing and panting.

  The sheriff snapped at him. “Go fetch the undertaker, Tom. Tell him there are four bodies for him to take charge of.”

  As the deputy trotted off, Luke said, “I hope that boy doesn’t have heatstroke.”

  “You let me worry about my deputies,” Sheriff Collins said. “What’s your name, anyway?”

  “Jensen,” Luke answered, his own voice harder and flatter in response to the lawman’s obvious dislike.

  “You had no call to do things this way,” Collins said peevishly. “Folks don’t like seeing such grisly displays.”

  “Are you serious, Sheriff?” Luke asked with a frown. “Fifteen years ago, the people who came this far west to settle had to worry about Apache war parties raiding through these parts, not to mention vicious gangs of outlaws and bushwhackers. No man ever stepped out his front door without taking a gun with him, and he was ready to use it to defend his family. The railroad was still just a dream. Are you telling me that the citizens have changed so much, have gotten so soft since then that the wrapped-up bodies of a few owlhoots are enough to give them the fantods?”

  Collins flushed, turning his face even redder than it had been to start with. “Don’t you go judging these townfolks. Not all of them were here during pioneer days. Most came in after the railroad did. Arizona is a civilized territory now, this part of it, anyway.”

  “Civilization is a wonderful thing,” Luke said, “but some things are lost with it, too.”

  The creaking of wagon wheels made him look over his shoulder. A big wagon with a black-painted wooden cover over its bed rolled along the street toward him. Six black horses were pulling it and a black-suited man was handling the reins. That would be the undertaker.

  Luke dismounted and watched while the man, another thin and gloomy sort, supervised a couple of strong-backed assistants as they lifted the blanket-shrouded bodies from the horses and deposited them in the wagon. Collins, still seething, watched, too, as did the crowd that had gathered.

  Luke said, “That’s Son Barton, Ed Logan, Jimmy McCaskill, and Deuce Roebuck. I caught up to them yesterday in a place south of here called Summerville.”

  “I’ll wager that Oren Hennessy wasn’t any happier to see you than I am.”

  “He didn’t fall all over himself slapping me on the back in good fellowship, but he did give me a cup of coffee.”

  “Don’t expect the same here,” Collins said. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got dodgers on all four of those names you mentioned. I’ll take them down to the undertaking parlor here in a few minutes and confirm your claim, Jensen. You can come by the office later this afternoon and I’ll sign the paperwork for the rewards. You can take it over to the bank and they’ll handle things from there.”

  “I’ve done this a time or two before, Sheriff. I know how it works.”

  “It may take a day or two to get the money. While you’re waiting for it, you’ll stay north of the tracks unless you’re down here on official business. There are places up there for the likes of you.”

  Luke had to bite back an angry response. He didn’t like the sheriff any more than Collins liked him, but the lawman had the upper hand. He could hold up those rewards if he wanted to be a bastard about it.

  Anyway, Luke had an idea how he was going to deal with Collins’s obnoxious attitude, but that could wait. He just nodded noncommittally and said, “I’d like to sell these horses and rigs. Can you recommend a stable where I might do that?”

  “Harwell’s,” the sheriff said with grudging cooperation. “Two more blocks north on the other side of the street. You’ll see the sign. Once you’ve done that, keep going until you’re north of the tracks.”

  “Because having the citizens of your fair town exposed to a dangerous ruffian such as myself might make some of them faint dead away.”

  Collins scowled and turned away, no longer willing to continue the conversation.

  Luke would have let the lawman go, but something else occurred to him, and he gave in to his curiosity. “Just one more thing, Sheriff.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the folded piece of butcher paper. He unfolded it and held it out. “What do you know about this?”

  Collins looked over his shoulder, then swung to face Luke again. He stepped close enough to snatch the paper out of his hand and demanded, “Where did you get this?”

  “Marshal Hennessy gave it to me. He said you’d sent it to him as a joke.”

  “Joke, hell! I was warning Hennessy to keep his eyes open for that crazy kid. He’s going to get himself or somebody else hurt riding around all over the county raising hell like he’s been doing!”

  CHAPTER 4

  Luke frowned at the red-faced lawman. “You’re going to have to explain that, Sheriff.”

  “I don’t have to explain anything,” Collins snapped. “I don’t see that it’s any of your business.”

  “Humor me.”

  “Why? Are you thinking about going after that bounty? The whole dollar and forty-two cents?”

  “And the harmonica,” Luke said with a wry smile. “Everyone keeps forgetting about the harmonica.” He paused. “I’m sure I can find someone else to tell me all about it if you don’t want to, Sheriff.”

  Collins looked disgusted, but he jerked his head toward the courthouse and said, “Let’s get out of the blasted sun. It gets hot in the middle of the day like this.”

  After tying the five horses to a hitch rack at the edge of the street, Luke followed Collins into the courthouse. Behind the building’s thick stone walls, the sheriff’s office was a lot cooler. A coffeepot sat on a stove in the outer office, but true to his word, Collins didn’t offer Luke a cup.

  He said, “Don’t bother sitting down. You won’t be here that long.”

  “Such hospitality,” Luke muttered.

  Collins hung his hat on a hat tree, revealing only a few lank strands of brown hair on a liver-spotted head. He pointed to a stack of papers on his desk. “I’ve got half a dozen more of the blasted things right there that folks have brought in, complaining about them. The kid tacked them up on walls and boardwalk posts all over town. He’s been putting them on trees along the roads and trails, too. He’s a damn nuisance, that’s what he is.”

  Luke recognized the butcher paper and the crude charcoal printing. With a slight frown, he asked, “Why do people have a problem with these posters? They seem harmless enough.”

  “Because nobody wants Three-fingered Jack McKinney to see something like that on his place of business or out front of his house. McKinney might get mad, and there’s no telling what he might do.”

  “Wait a minute. There actually is an outlaw named Three-fingered Jack McKinney?”

  “Well, I suppose the part about only having three fingers on his left hand probably isn’t written down in the family Bible, but the Jack McKinney part is. As for being an outlaw . . . he didn’t used to be, but he sure is now.” Collins sat down behind the desk and sighed. “Up until about five years ago, he had a place north of here, close to the county line at the edge of the hills. A ranch and a farm, both. He raised some crops, but he had nice little herds of cattle and horses, too. And a nice family. Mighty pretty wife and two fine boys.”

  “I have a feeling that this story isn’t going in a pleasant direction.”

  “One day McKinney rode off and didn’t come back. His wife insisted that something must have happened to him, like maybe his horse threw him and he was hurt. She asked me to lead a search party, and I did. We scoured the whole northern half of the county and never found a trace of him. His horse’s tracks led west from the ranch but petered out after a mile or two in a rocky stretch. I may not be the best tracker in the world, but I’m good enough I could tell he was being careful not to leave a trail. He wanted to disappear.”

&
nbsp; “If his life was as good as you say it was, why would he do that?”

  “Why in blazes does any man do anything?” Collins scowled. “Nobody ever knows what ugly things are crawling around in another man’s brain. Even a nice, friendly fellow like McKinney can have all sorts of secrets, and most of them would look like what you see wiggling around under a rock when you lift it up.”

  “‘A man may smile, and smile, and be a villain,’” Luke quoted. “Hamlet.”

  “Never heard of that fella,” Collins replied with a shake of his head, “but that describes Jack McKinney pretty well. Always had a smile on his face and a friendly word for anybody who crossed his path. Everybody who knew him liked him, including me. When he disappeared, none of us ever thought that the next time we heard of him, it’d be because he was leading an outlaw gang up in the Dakotas.”

  That explained why McKinney’s name had been unfamiliar to Luke. He hadn’t been up in that area for quite a while. Anyway, not even the most dedicated bounty hunter in the West could be expected to keep up with every owlhoot between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean.

  “The stories were bad,” Collins continued. “The McKinney gang held up banks, robbed trains, looted towns and then burned them to the ground. When folks around here first started reading about those outrageous things in the newspaper, nobody figured the Three-fingered Jack McKinney the stories talked about was the same man as Jack McKinney, the rancher who’d vanished. I mean, Jack McKinney’s not an unusual name.”

  “No, it’s not,” Luke agreed. “I take it something happened to let everyone know it was the same man?”

  Collins nodded and pointed to a bulletin board on one wall of the office. “A wanted poster showed up . . . a real one. The drawing on it of Three-fingered Jack didn’t leave any doubt. The outlaw was the man we’d known, all right.”

  Luke walked over to the bulletin board. A dozen or so reward dodgers were tacked to it. He needed only a moment to pick out the one for Three-fingered Jack McKinney. The drawing underneath the big word WANTED showed a man probably in his thirties, with dark hair, a close-cropped beard, and a lean face with quite a few wrinkles around the eyes. He appeared pleasant, even mild-mannered, certainly not like the sort of hombre anybody would expect to be guilty of murder, robbery, arson, and all the other crimes the wanted poster listed.

  But Luke knew from experience that you couldn’t go by appearances. He had seen too many baby-faced youngsters who’d turned out to be vicious killers.

  Gruffly, Collins said, “If it had been up to me, I might have put that in a desk drawer and kept it to myself, but one of my deputies saw it before I could do that, and he spread the word around town. By nightfall everybody knew about it, so there was no point in trying to hide it.”

  Luke turned back toward the desk. “Why would you have done that, Sheriff?”

  “For Amelia’s sake. McKinney’s wife. She’s a fine woman. Everybody likes her as much as they did him. And for the boys, too. Bad enough their pa disappeared like that. To find out he’s a no-good outlaw, to boot . . .” The sheriff’s voice trailed off as he shook his head.

  Luke dropped the homemade wanted poster on the desk. “That doesn’t explain this. What kid were you talking about who made these?” A possibility occurred to him and made him raise his eyebrows. “One of McKinney’s boys?”

  Collins nodded. “The younger one. Aaron. He was about seven, I guess, when McKinney disappeared. Twelve years old now.”

  “He’s offering a reward for his own father’s capture? Why would he do that?”

  “You don’t give up, do you? Haven’t you heard enough about that poor woman’s troubles?”

  “You mean Mrs. McKinney again.”

  “Who else would I be talking about?” Collins leaned forward and his voice took on some heat as he said, “Her husband runs off and becomes an owlhoot, her older boy chases after him, and now her youngest is riding all over the countryside, tacking up wanted posters and stirring up more trouble—”

  “Wait a minute, Sheriff,” Luke broke in. “What’s that you said about the older boy?”

  “You’re not going to be satisfied until you get the whole story, are you? I should’ve gone ahead and chased you north of the tracks and told you not to come back until I sent for you.”

  Luke had heard a note of admiration in the lawman’s voice when he spoke of Amelia McKinney. Maybe it was more than admiration, Luke mused. Maybe Collins had some other feelings for Mrs. McKinney, feelings he couldn’t do anything about while Three-fingered Jack was alive. Luke couldn’t be sure, though, and it was none of his business anyway.

  “I just figured you’d rather give me the straight story, rather than whatever gossip I could pick up around town, Sheriff. But I can think of only one reason somebody would offer a reward of a dollar forty-two and a harmonica. That’s all the earthly riches the boy has to his name.”

  Collins grunted. “You’d be right about that. Mrs. McKinney has tried to keep the spread going since her husband vanished, but it hasn’t been easy. She had to sell off their stock, bit by bit, just for the family to survive. They’ve scraped by doing that and raising a few crops, but I doubt if she’s got two nickels to rub together. Now, with Thad gone, too . . . Well, damn it, it’s just not right what that poor woman’s had to go through.”

  “You said the older boy ran away?”

  “Ran off to take up the owlhoot trail with his worthless pa. That’s what he said he was going to do, anyway, when he got mad and left.”

  Luke understood why Collins felt sorry for Amelia McKinney, whether there was any other reason for the sheriff’s concern or not. It sounded as if the woman had indeed had more than her share of troubles.

  “The older boy . . . Thad, you called him . . . he went to the Dakotas to try to find his father?”

  Collins shook his head. “No, McKinney is back in these parts, and his gang is with him. Has been for about a year. They raided some settlements the other side of the hills and held up a couple of stagecoaches. Witnesses got good looks at McKinney. They haven’t gone after the bank here or tried to hold up any of the trains, but I figure it’s just a matter of time until they work their way this far south. When Thad heard about that, he got the idea that he wanted to be an owlhoot, too.” Collins snorted. “I suppose he thought that would be better than the hard work around the spread. After he left was when his little brother started making those wanted posters and sticking them up.”

  “You don’t think that’s going to cause anyone to go after McKinney who wouldn’t already be doing so, do you? That seems pretty unlikely.”

  “Maybe not, but Aaron doing it keeps people worried and stirred up anyway. Like I said, nobody wants to draw the gang’s attention or get McKinney mad at them. He might decide to get even with them. But the worst of it is, McKinney might come after the boy himself. If anything happened to Aaron, I reckon that would be more than his ma could take. I don’t think Amelia could stand it.” Collins scraped his chair back and stood up. “There. You’ve wormed the whole blasted story out of me, and I don’t know why you’re interested unless you plan to go after McKinney yourself.”

  Luke looked at the actual wanted poster again. “There’s a regular reward on him. Twenty-five hundred dollars. I’m sure there are rewards out for some of the other members of his gang, as well. A man would clear a good payoff if he brought them all in.”

  “What a man would do is get himself killed like the damn fool he’d have to be. One man, no matter how good he is, can’t go up against fifteen or twenty bloody-handed outlaws and expect to survive.”

  “Those are pretty bad odds,” Luke admitted. “Anyway, I haven’t said that I’m going after anyone or anything, other than the reward money I’ve already earned. And now I really have to deal with those horses. Harwell’s Livery Stable is the best place to take them, I believe you said?”

  “That’s right. Give me an hour or so to find those wanted posters and check out the bodies
down at the undertaker’s, and I’ll fill out the claim forms so you can pick them up and take them to the bank later.”

  “I can save you some time,” Luke said. He pulled out more folded reward dodgers, these from one of the hip pockets of his trousers. He unfolded them and handed them to Collins. “I knew you’d need them, so I got them out of my saddlebags before I left Summerville this morning.”

  “You were prepared.”

  “Like I said, I’ve done this before.”

  Collins grunted as he unfolded the wanted posters that bore the likenesses of Son Barton, Ed Logan, Jimmy McCaskill, and Deuce Roebuck. “Give me a while anyway. If I’m not here when you come back by, I’ll leave the forms with whatever deputy is on duty out front.”

  “Thank you, Sheriff.” Luke left the courthouse and walked to the hitch rail where he had left the five horses.

  Twenty minutes later, he had arranged for his own mount to spend the night in one of the comfortable-looking stalls in Fritz Harwell’s livery barn, as well as selling the other four horses to Harwell for a decent price, along with their saddles and tack.

  Their business concluded, Luke asked the stableman, “What’s the best hotel in town, Mr. Harwell?”

  “Why, that’d be the Rycroft House, I guess,” Harwell replied as he scratched his head. “Just in the next block. But didn’t the sheriff tell you to stay north of the tracks? He don’t cotton to bounty hunters, and that’s what he tells every stranger in town he don’t like.”

  “The sheriff has misjudged me,” Luke said with a smile. “Good day to you, Mr. Harwell.”

  “Yeah, uh, good day, I reckon.”

  Luke was whistling softly to himself as he left the livery stable. He had some things to think about while he waited on that reward money, and he intended to do that thinking—and waiting—in comfort.

  He spotted the Rycroft House in the next block on the opposite side of the street, and his steps carried him toward the impressive, two-story hotel.