by Ed Gorman
We wasted no time, found the hall that led to the voices.
I knew damned well there was only one way in and that was straight in. Stamp the door in and run in behind a burst of gunfire. Preferably, I’d get Grieves out of there alive. He might be useful to Washington. As would—though he didn’t seem to realize it yet—Turner.
But at that moment all that mattered was getting in the room.
“Why the hell haven’t they come back yet?” a harsh male voice said.
“Look, Mr. Grieves, they know what they’re doin’. This is a big hotel.”
“All that gunfire, they should have been back by now,” Grieves snapped. “And don’t tell me otherwise.”
“Just because there was gunfire doesn’t mean anything. They had a shootout with Ford. Maybe Ford got away and they’re lookin’ for him, is all it means.” This was a third male voice.
“What the hell’s going on here? I lost half my men tonight.” Grieves again.
“You’re forgettin’ what else you got, Mr. Grieves,” one of his men said. “You got them grenades.”
We were too close to the door to allow for even a whisper. I pointed to it and nodded my head. I was ready to move.
Turner nodded back.
Deep breath. Gripped my gun even harder. Raised my foot.
And then damned near put my foot and half my calf through that door. Shouts, curses, scrambling noises all erupted before the door even started to fling backward. The gunfire was instant on both sides. We’d had the benefit of surprise. They wanted to even things up with a barrage of bullets.
By the time I was across the threshold, I’d taken out the one just inside the door. By the time Turner got across the threshold, the one over by the window was down, too.
But something had happened. I’d only gotten a glimpse of Grieves as he was virtually diving through the door that opened on the hotel corridor.
A cry went up from Turner, distracting me from Grieves momentarily.
I only needed a quick glance to see why he had cried out. The nude body of his wife, her throat slashed, lay next to a couch, as if simply dropped there and forgotten.
I could hear Grieves running down the corridor. He was firing a gun for no special reason. I wasn’t chasing him as yet. Maybe the sound of the gunfire reassured him that he was going to get away after all.
Turner was useless now. And I was glad to see it. Whatever love he’d once felt for his wife had returned in this terrible moment and he knelt next to her, holding her hand as if he was once more her true and faithful husband.
I went after Grieves.
By then, he had a pretty good lead. But he was still in sight as he neared the staircase leading downstairs.
He fired on an empty cylinder and tossed the gun away. He jerked another Colt from his belt and got off one more shot before disappearing down the staircase.
He was on the bottom step just as I reached the top one. He turned right and vanished.
I took the steps two at a time.
He’d run into something in the darkness. I heard a heavy object scrape across a piece of uncarpeted floor. And then I heard him curse the way you do when you’ve accidentally hurt yourself.
He fired off another angry shot. He was reassuring himself again, I guess. I was nowhere within range. In fact, I couldn’t even see him.
Then I turned the corner and confronted a small nook filled with overstuffed chairs. One of them stood at an angle in the pathway. This was apparently what he’d run into in the darkness.
He damned near killed me.
The bullet came so close to my left ear that I felt the heat of it sear past me.
He was hiding behind a heavy couch down at the opposite end of this nook where people came to read magazines and gaze outside at the dock. When a steamboat or a schooner came in, I imagined it was quite an elegant sight.
Then it happened. Grieves saw him way before I did. Terhurne had heard all the noise of the chase and gunfire. He had also managed to find a firearm somewhere. He’d followed the gun battle by ear and then come to join me.
But he hadn’t been careful.
He got about six feet from me, in a crouch but not enough of one, and Grieves picked him off clean.
Two shots.
As I started to turn around, the top of his head came off in a chunk of white hair and blood.
Liz screamed. She was back there at the bottom of the stairs.
“Stay back!” I shouted.
Grieves must have thought I was distracted because he started pumping shots my way. Liz was out of range as long as she stayed where she was. None of his shots did much but rip up the top of the squat chair I was crouched behind.
There were two more exchanges of gunfire. Neither of us scored.
I finally said: “You’re going back to D.C., Grieves, and you know it. Why don’t you go back on your feet?”
His response was another bullet.
I responded in kind, of course, and that was when I heard it. It’s a very distinct sound and I’ve never heard it mimicked with any success. It doesn’t necessarily mean death but it certainly means serious injury.
And it’s rarely loud. It’s just this sound of pain as a bullet sinks deep into flesh or smashes bone. A ragged intake of breath and something like a moan.
I’d hit him and maybe bad.
Waiting.
Trying to figure out if he was wounded or dead or just faking it to make me do something stupid, like stand up.
No sound at all from down there.
I started calculating my chances of moving through the nook itself, crawling my way between the pieces of furniture until I was within a few yards of him.
He’d hear me coming. No doubt about that. And there would be times when I’d be in the open, between furnishings.
But it still seemed less of a chance than trying to reach him in the open path between us then.
I started moving. Every inch I crawled seemed to resonate off every wall.
By the time I’d gone several feet, working myself behind a long couch and then scurrying quickly to reach a chair three feet away, I expected him to start firing.
Maybe he really was wounded badly. Or dead.
I got closer by maybe another ten feet when I heard him shift position. My movements were loud in quarters that close but so were his.
The heaviness of the movement convinced me that I’d hit him. He was dragging himself across the floor. I wasn’t sure where he was planning to go but wherever it was, he wasn’t going to get there easily.
I pumped two shots at him. Unhinge him a little. Make him know that I was ready to hit him again the first time he gave me any opportunity at all.
The heavy dragging again. I crawled closer. He almost hit me again, the bullet shattering a vase on a table less than a foot from my head.
But given the sound that came after that, I realized he’d fired more as a diversion than to try and kill me.
It took me a few seconds to recognize the sound.
Stairs behind him. Going down them carefully. The wound probably making him cautious. Falling down stairs would be the end of him. I could get to him with no problem.
I jerked myself to my feet and took the chance of charging his position behind the chair.
From there I was able to see two things—the short flight of stairs leading to the casino and the heavy blood trailing behind him like a dark wiggling snake shining in the moonlight.
I had to be more careful as I approached the top of the stairs. He wasn’t making any sound then. He could pick me off with no trouble if I just popped up like a target on the top step.
I stopped a few feet short of the step. Listened again. Then—the dragging sound. A heavy door being opened.
I jumped to the third step and started jumping every other one.
Just as I reached the door at the bottom of the stairs, he put three bullets through the wood, forcing me to throw myself back against the wall. Any one of them could ha
ve killed me.
I waited until I heard him moving on the other side of the door. I also heard something else this time—him slumping against something, most likely a wall.
The blood was even thicker down there than it had been upstairs.
This time, it was my turn to put a couple of slugs through the door, after which I slammed through it, hitting the floor as soon as I crossed the threshold.
He was crouched down in the entranceway to the casino. The walls around the doors were covered with designs of dice, poker cards and chips, and a squirrel cage.
In the moonlight I could see that he was holding something in his hand.
He was only too eager to tell me what it was. “You’ve never seen a grenade like this one, Ford.”
“Don’t be stupid, Grieves. You need a doctor.”
“Oh, sure, I need a doctor. Then he’ll fix me all up so you can take me back to Washington.”
“You made your choice, Grieves. You didn’t give a damn about selling out your country.”
He laughed. It sounded pained. “Hell, you’re no more of a patriot than I am. You went through the war. It’s all bullshit. All governments are bullshit.”
“Maybe some are less bullshit than others. Now put the grenade down before I shoot you.”
The pained laugh. “Won’t work, my friend. You have to reload and I know it. And by the time you even start, I’m sailing this right over to you.”
He’d counted bullets, a trick you learn from the agency. In mellerdramas, shootouts go on forever without anybody reloading. Real life is a little different.
What he hadn’t counted was the Colt I’d taken from one of the dead men in Grieves’s own suite.
I dropped my Colt into my holster. And then I reached behind my back and took out the other Colt.
I showed him the gun.
“Maybe there aren’t any bullets in that one, either.”
He had started to wheeze. Blood was in his throat.
“You wouldn’t have time to stop me, anyway,” he said. And then he pulled the pin.
From the door behind me, Liz shouted, “Noah!”
I killed him just as he started to hurl the grenade. Two quick bullets through his forehead.
His head slumped to his chest. The hand with the grenade opened and—
I started running back toward the door, Liz shouting all the time.
I didn’t make it, of course. The explosion came just as I saw Liz hold the door open. But I still had a long way to go.
In the fury of flame and smoke, I felt the floor begin to sway beneath me. In an instant I remembered things people had told me about being in earthquakes. How the very ground beneath you gave way.
And it was giving way them as the floor between the casino and me started to rip apart and the ceiling down by the casino start to rip and crumble and crash.
All this in a few seconds.
And then the concussion of the explosion itself did me the favor of hurling me through the door Liz was holding open…
We huddled on the stairs leading to the casino as the destruction continued. Powerful as the explosion had been, its major impact was confined to the area of the casino. The structure had been built so well it was able to limit the breadth of damage.
But no amount of sound architectural planning could do much about fire. There would be no limiting this damage.
Liz helped me to my feet, trying to get a look at a long gash on the side of my head. But there wasn’t time for that.
We made our way up the short stairs to find another way out of the building before the flames took it entirely. Unlike the previous fire, this one wasn’t going to leave anything intact.
By the time we found a back stairway and had reached the moat, the fire was on the third floor. I was pretty sure that the rest of the grenades were somewhere in the double suite Grieves had occupied. We needed to be even farther away before the fire reached them.
We dove into the chilly water of the moat and swam to the other side. I dragged myself up to the grass and then reached down and pulled Liz up.
We started running for the forest. She stumbled twice and I half-dragged her after that.
We hadn’t quite reached the woods when the fire found the extra grenades. We ran to the cover of the forest and then watched the explosion. Or explosions, plural.
Each one ripped away part of the castle façade. And each one lowered the height of the castle, too. It was exploding and imploding, part of a turret being flung afire into the night, the castle sinking even more.
It was too big a structure to be completely demolished but over the course of the next half hour it was broken and seared into chunks and sections of smoldering ruin.
Liz decided to tear off a piece of my wet shirt and treat the abrasion on the side of my head.
“You could always tear your own shirt,” I said.
“Yes, but that just might give you ideas.”
“The way you tell it, I’m too old to have ideas.”
“Yeah, but you just might surprise me and then what would I do?”
Chapter 28
Knut wanted to have a meeting with the mayor and the rest of the town council so that I could explain what had happened. I also told him to ask Will McGivern, the man who represented the miners.
Knut set the meeting up at the Rotary dining room for that night. It was a long, narrow place with a wine-colored rug and a lighter red shade for the walls. The three paintings were imposing enough, three stout and true men of the West, each of whom had his right hand on his right lapel just the way the painter had told him to. They probably would have been more impressive if I’d had any idea who they were.
I sat next to McGivern. On the other side of me was Liz.
“I know it was you got me invited here. Thanks.”
“My pleasure.”
Just before I was to stand up and discuss everything that had happened—I owed it to the town after Grieves gave the agency such a bad name—Ella Coltrane and Swarthout came in.
They both looked angry. Swarthout said, “I’m not happy, Knut. We should have been invited.”
I said, “I told them not to invite you.”
“You’ve got nerve, if nothing else,” Ella Coltrane said.
“If you’re going to stay, sit down and shut up,” I said to her.
They both looked as if they wanted to express their great indignity at being treated this way but then they decided to just sit down instead.
“Well,” Knut said, “I’m going to turn things over to Mr. Ford here. He’ll explain everything. And after we’ve all discussed it and asked him our questions, they’ll be serving the food. It’s excellent here. Porterhouse steak and mashed potatoes and fresh vegetables and apple pie.”
I’d planned on cutting my explanation short, anyway, but the mention of porterhouse steak and apple pie made me keep my little speech even shorter than I’d planned.
Amazing what you can accomplish in eight minutes if you really put your mind to it. When I was finished, I smiled in the direction of Ella and Swarthout. “There were a few other people who tried to get the grenades and sell them so they could make up for certain business losses—you know, like a mine tapping out—but they didn’t have much luck.”
Swarthout pounded the table with his fist. “You’ll regret those words.”
“No, I won’t, Swarthout.”
One of the council members said, “With the sheriff dead, who’ll be taking his place?”
Another council member said, “Why, Knut, of course. Isn’t that right?”
Knut blushed. I didn’t blame him. Sometimes praise is even more embarrassing than insult.
He stood up when they started applauding. “This is all because of Noah Ford here. We’d all gotten the impression that all federal men were as bad as Grieves. But Noah taught us better.”
Now it was my turn to blush.
And my turn to stand. I gave them ten seconds of applause then waved them off. “
There’s one thing I’d like to finish with.” I nodded to McGivern sitting next to me. “There’s a reward for helping bring Grieves in. We sure wouldn’t have wanted the grenades in enemy hands. And I wouldn’t have known what we were looking for if McGivern here hadn’t given me the information about the explosions Grieves was causing out in the woods.” I knew what I was saying was a bit of fact-twisting—I certainly would have come to the same conclusion without McGivern pointing me in that direction—but given the state of the mines and the miners, I wanted to help them in some way.
“The reward is $10,000 and I’m asking Washington to give it to McGivern here to set up a fund so that the miners can feed their families while they’re looking for a silver strike of their own.”
Swarthout and Ella both looked suitably pissed off, which was enjoyable to see. They’d be pushing on, now that they were broke, to find other silver strikes—if somebody would loan them the money.
“So let’s hear some of that applause for McGivern here,” I said.
The meeting broke up then. The entire town council took turns shaking McGivern’s hand. They were all on the same side now. The town needed a silver strike to survive.
Liz had taken notes throughout the meeting. When she finally put her pencil down, she said, “You know something, Noah?”
“What?” I said, expecting that she’d decided I would be a suitable lover after all.
“If you were even six or seven years younger, I think I’d sleep with you.”
“Well, gosh, thanks.”
“But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’m going to make you a supper tomorrow night you’ll never forget.”
I laughed. “You may have to handcuff me to keep me in line.”
“A man your age’ll probably be asleep halfway through the meal, anyway.”
Then she poked me in the side. “There’s always the chance you could get me drunk and I’d forget my principles.”
Chapter 29
I enjoyed the cold air. I sat on the edge of the wooden sidewalk and rolled myself a cigarette and watched the last of the stragglers empty the saloons. The only ones who’d hang on till closing time were the drifters and the town drunks. The stragglers were working men. And dawn came early.
