Gut-Shot

by William W. Johnstone

  “Thin numbers,” Stannic said.

  “O’Rourke’s men are a bunch of stove-up old punchers who’ve probably never fired a revolver in anger in their lives,” Tweddle said. “You’ll have no trouble.”

  “Sounds easy,” Stannic said. “I don’t like riding into situations that sound easy. Look what happened to the James boys at Northfield. They thought that raid would be easy but it sure as hell didn’t turn out that way.”

  “The Circle-O isn’t Northfield, Mr. Stannic.”

  “You won’t be there.”

  “No, I won’t. But I’ve been there many times in the past.”

  Steve McCord grinned. “Hell, that’s hard to believe.”

  Tweddle lifted an eyebrow. “Are you calling me a liar, young man?”

  McCord quickly plowed around that stump. “Not at all, Mr. Tweddle,” he said, blinking. “I mean, I—”

  Stannic considered any conversation with Steve McCord a waste of time and effort.

  “I’ll take on the job, Mr. Tweddle,” he said, cutting across anything further McCord had to say.

  “Excellent, excellent, Mr. Stannic,” Tweddle said. “Now the success of this venture is assured.”

  “When?” Stannic said.

  “Stay in Open Sky tonight and enjoy the whiskey and whores,” Tweddle said. “Nancy will point you in the right direction for both.”

  “I’m married and I don’t drink,” Stannic said. “But I feel like bucking the tiger.”

  “There you go, Mr. Stannic,” Tweddle said. “Each to his own I always say. Then relax this evening. The raid will take place tomorrow night at an hour of your choosing.”

  Stannic got to his feet. “I guess our talking is done for now.”

  “Indeed it is,” Tweddle said, smiling.

  He looked like a smug Humpty Dumpty before the fall. “Come to the bank tomorrow morning and I’ll pay you the first part of the retainer,” he said.

  Tweddle made no attempt to leave his chair.

  “Now, gentlemen, I’ll bid you good night,” he said. “I grow weary from the business of the day.” He waved a hand. “You stay, Mr. Hunt. I need a quick word.”

  After Stannic and the others filed out, Tweddle said, “Mr. McCord, have you heard of Captain William T. Anderson?”

  Steve McCord stopped and grinned. “Bloody Bill? Sure I have. He killed plenty.”

  “I had the honor to ride at his side,” Tweddle said.

  McCord stood silent, uncertain of what to say.

  Beau Hunt helped him through that particular doorway. “Stay close to Stannic tonight,” he said. “You may learn something.”

  After the youth left, Tweddle said, “Mr. Hunt, I have no intention of paying Stannic all that money. You may have to get rid of him.”

  “That’s what you pay me for,” Hunt said.

  “You don’t seem shocked.”

  “Stannic is in a hard business. He knows the risks.”

  “Jamie McPhee and that Flintlock person are still thorns in my side,” Tweddle said. “I want them out of the way.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Hunt said.

  “The Pinkerton who was on McPhee’s side and the lawyer who hired him are both dead, the latter thanks to pretty Nancy here. Isn’t that so, my dear?”

  “He gave me no choice,” Nancy Pocket said.

  “No, none at all,” Tweddle said. “You did us all a service.”

  “Lucian, was Frank Constable right?” Nancy said.

  “About what?”

  “Did you murder Polly Mallory because she was pregnant with your child?”

  “No, dear girl, I didn’t. I murdered Polly Mallory because she was pregnant with someone else’s child.”

  Beau Hunt and Nancy exchanged a glance that Tweddle intercepted. “What will you do, turn me over to the law?” he said.

  “I killed a man to save you from the rope, Lucian,” Nancy said. “I won’t turn you in and play traitor.”

  “And I won’t forget it. And you, Mr. Hunt, what about you?” Tweddle said. “Under all that fine linen are you a Judas at heart?”

  “I’m loyal to the man who pays my wages,” Hunt said. “I don’t examine my conscience any closer than that.”

  “A gentleman’s answer and the one I expected,” Tweddle said. He looked around him and then smiled broadly. “My, my, aren’t we a fine trio of rogues?” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Jamie McPhee stumbled backward and Sam Flintlock eased him to the floor, then gun in hand charged into the street.

  Under a dazzling sun that cast no shadows, events piled one atop the other very quickly.

  A rifleman in a plug stood behind an abandoned fruit and vegetable stand that stood tipped over on one wheel opposite the saloon. The man threw a Winchester to his shoulder and fired at Flintlock.

  He hurried the shot and Flintlock heard the round split the air close to his right ear.

  Flintlock fired and his bullet hit the wood frame of the stand with a venomous smack. It was close enough that Plug Hat broke and ran.

  Flintlock went after him. The man ran for about twenty yards, then stopped and turned. He shouldered the rifle and fired, levered another round into the chamber and fired again.

  The first bullet tugged at the sleeve of Flintlock’s shirt and the second zinged through his hat and came mighty close to braining him.

  “Damn you!” he yelled. “Stand your ground and fight like a white man.”

  The man in the plug hat, a little fellow with yellow hair and heavy eyebrows, ignored that and cranked the Winchester again.

  Flintlock took his time. Now was the moment for a grandstand play. He two-handed the Colt to eye level, sighted carefully and fired.

  He and the rifleman shot at the same time.

  This time Flintlock took a hit, a sledgehammer blow to his right thigh. But his bullet scored. The man in the plug hat shrieked and fell, blood all over his shattered mouth.

  Stunned by the impact of the bullet that hit him, Flintlock watched the downed man writhe for a while, the heels of his boots gouging dirt, then lie still.

  Flintlock removed his hat, stared at the sky for a moment then wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his gun hand. He felt blood trickle down onto his boot.

  “You killed him! You killed my brother Tom!”

  The man called Ben stood outside the saloon door, his raised right arm glistening crimson blood from his knuckles to his elbow.

  Suddenly Flintlock felt very tired and sick to his stomach. He ignored Ben and stepped to the body. It had been an aimed shot but a lucky one.

  The .45 had crashed into the man’s open mouth, splintering teeth, and had passed through his head and exploded out the back of his skull, scattering blood, bone and brains.

  It was a fearsome, horrific wound.

  “No man should die like that,” Flintlock said, aloud, but only to himself.

  Ben still stood in front of the saloon, burning hatred in the eyes he pinned on Flintlock. But Flintlock brushed past him and stepped into the saloon.

  Slaton kneeled beside the groaning McPhee. “Shoulder,” the man said. “The ball is still in there.” He looked up at Flintlock. “Another dead man?”

  “Yeah. I should’ve remembered there were three horses in the corral.”

  “Get your friend away from here.”

  “Can you take out the bullet?”

  “No.”

  “How about the blacksmith?”

  “He can’t either.”

  “I’ll take him to Open Sky, find a doctor.”

  “There’s a cathouse closer.”

  “He needs a doctor, not a whore.”

  “Madame Josette runs the house and she’s good with wounds. God knows, she’s seen plenty.”

  “Where is this place?”

  “A mile north of Buzzard Gap. You can’t miss it.”

  Flintlock nodded. “I’m beholden to you.”

  “I just want you the hell o
ut of here. And him.”

  Flintlock raised McPhee to his feet, then said, “Can you ride?”

  The young man shook his head. “No I can’t.”

  “Hurting?” Flintlock said.

  “Yes I am.”

  “Good, that means you ain’t dead and you can still ride.”

  Flintlock helped McPhee outside. Behind them they left two thin trails of blood.

  The sky was an endless blue and overhead a single buzzard rode the air currents. A gusting wind lifted skeins of dust around Flintlock’s feet.

  Then a shot and a noise like an angry hornet close to Flintlock’s ear.

  Ben, his face twisted in fury, stood over his brother. The dead man’s smoking Winchester was propped up on his bloody right arm and he worked the lever awkwardly with his left.

  “My name’s Ben Ross!” he yelled. “And I’m gonna kill you for what you done to my brothers.”

  McPhee’s horse had pulled away from the hitching rail and stood at a distance, its head lowered, tail to the wind-blown sand.

  “Let’s go,” Flintlock said.

  Ben Ross fired and dust kicked up under between McPhee’s feet. “Sam, he’ll kill us,” he yelled.

  “No, he won’t. There’s already been enough killing.”

  “Tell him that,” McPhee said.

  Now Ross staggered forward, shortening the distance. His face was stony, determined.

  “I’ll get you to your hoss,” Flintlock said.

  Ross walked toward them, firing as he came.

  “Sam!” McPhee yelled.

  As though he hadn’t heard, Flintlock continued toward the horse.

  The blacksmith yelled something, but the rising wind took the words away. A dog trotted into sight and started to bark.

  Flintlock took a second hit. The thick bicep of his arm opened up and seeped blood as a bullet grazed him.

  McPhee, the entire front of his shirt red, yelped in frustration. “Damn you, Sam!”

  Then he did the unexpected.

  The move took Sam Flintlock by surprise. McPhee wrenched away from his supporting arm, did a half turn and his hand reached out and snaked the Colt from Flintlock’s waistband.

  Flintlock yelled and stretched to grab the young man. But his entire weight landed clumsily on his wounded leg and it gave way, tumbling him into the street.

  “Damn you, McPhee!” he cried out.

  But the young man paid no heed. He walked toward Ross, the Colt at waist level.

  “Leave us alone!” McPhee yelled. “You go back inside now.”

  Ross frantically tried to work the Winchester lever, panic glinting in his eyes. McPhee was now only five paces away and the hammer of his revolver was thumbed back.

  The two young men eyed each other. Both looked as though they’d been splashed by buckets of scarlet paint. The Swedish blacksmith stood in front of his forge and yelled something that nobody heeded.

  Four paces . . . three . . . spitting distance.

  Both McPhee and Ben fired at the same time.

  The Winchester’s forestock slipped on Ben Ross’s blood-slick forearm as he pulled the trigger. A clean miss.

  McPhee shoved the muzzle of the Colt into the other man’s belly. He fired. A gut-shot.

  Ross screamed, knowing he’d just got his death wound, and staggered back a step.

  McPhee fired again. A hit. Fired again. A hit.

  He triggered the Colt but the hammer clicked, clicked, clicked on the empty chamber and then spent cartridges.

  “He’s done,” Flintlock said.

  He wrenched the Colt from McPhee’s hand. “For God’s sake, how many times do you have to kill a man?”

  Jamie McPhee stared at Flintlock, his eyes unbelieving. “I killed him, Sam,” he said.

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “What do I do now?”

  “You live with it.”

  McPhee stared at the dead man. “I was crazy mad,” he said. “For a moment or two I went insane.”

  “We all go crazy at one time or another in our lives. That’s what helps us keep our sanity.”

  “Look at him, Sam. He was young once, just like me, and now . . . and now he’s just nothing.”

  “That’s what death does to a man.”

  “Sam, I swear, as long as I live I’ll never pick up a gun again.”

  “Guns don’t go crazy and kill folks. Only people do that. Let’s get you to your hoss.”

  “Look at us, we’re all shot to pieces, Sam,” McPhee said.

  “Seems like,” Flintlock said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  When Flintlock and McPhee reached the Gentleman’s Retreat the morning had given way to afternoon and rain clouds piled above the Sans Bois Mountains like meringue on a pie. The wind had risen and talked in the trees and the tattered French tricolor on the building’s roof looked as though it had been ironed flat against the graying sky. Somewhere close by chickens cackled.

  Cathouse doors, unless at times of civil unrest or natural disaster, are never locked and Sam Flintlock, aware that he and McPhee looked like victims of a train wreck, stepped into the cool, perfumed hall of the main building. A very large woman stood at a doorway and berated a half-naked girl who’d apparently referred to a paying customer as a “dickless john.”

  “A guest is a gentleman and always a gentleman, no matter the size of his equipement do you understand, mon chère?”

  The girl, her face full of dumb insolence, nodded.

  “Good. Now don’t let it happen again or I’ll use . . . ’ow do you say . . . your guts for garters.”

  The girl looked over the big woman’s shoulder and her face took on a horrified expression and the madam followed her stricken stare.

  “Mon Dieu! Qu’est-ce-que c’est?” Josette shrieked.

  Flintlock and McPhee ticked blood spots onto the polished wood floor. “Wounded men who need your help,” Flintlock said.

  Josette’s eyes summed up the two intruders and didn’t like what she saw. The thunderbird on Flintlock’s throat gave her a frowning pause for a moment.

  “We can pay,” Flintlock said, reading the madam’s face.

  She turned to the insolent girl, a shapely little brunette with wide brown eyes who had some fine lines of experience around her mouth. “Ruby, whiskey for the gentlemen and tell Charlie Park I want to see him right away,” Josette said.

  She indicated a stone bench in the foyer. “Sit there. I don’t want you bleeding all over my furniture.”

  The woman waited until Flintlock and McPhee were seated, then stepped gingerly toward them with all the caution of a cargo ship drawing alongside a dock. She cast an eye over the men’s wounds, smiled and said, “Soyez petits soldats courageux.”

  Seeing their baffled look, Josette said, “Be brave little soldiers.” She turned her head as footsteps sounded behind her. “Ah, here is Charlie at last.”

  The neat little bartender took in the situation at a glance. He examined McPhee’s shoulder wound first, then Flintlock’s leg. “The bullets must come out,” he said. He nodded to McPhee, who was ashen and in a lot of pain. “Him first.”

  His face expressing his doubt, Flintlock said, “Can you do that, Charlie?”

  “Yes. I was a doctor once.”

  “How come you ain’t one now?”

  “Sick people. Medicine is a fine profession, but sick people spoil it for everybody. Seems like every damned ailment they get is either horrible or catching and sometimes both. Who wants to even touch them?”

  Charlie had intelligent black eyes and a mouth too thin and hard to ever smile.

  “Back in ’78 I took one look at a necrotizing fasciitis patient and quit that very day,” he said.

  “Necro . . . necrotiz . . . what the hell is that?” Flintlock said.

  “It’s a flesh-eating disease. You don’t want to know any more than that.”

  Charlie turned to Ruby. “Bring my bag from my room, girl. And put some clothes on. You’ll be my
nurse.”

  Ruby hesitated and Josette said, “Do as you’re told.”

  The girl frowned and flounced away and Josette said, “I don’t know what to do with that fille.”

  “She’s young,” Charlie said. “She’ll learn. I’ll operate right here.”

  “On a stone bench?” Flintlock said.

  “Would you rather lie in a whore’s bed?” Charlie said.

  “Well, come to think of it. I—”

  “Right here,” Charlie said. “Take off your shirt and pants.”

  “I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m shot in the leg, Doc. And there are ladies present.”

  “Hell, man, this is a brothel. You’ve got nothing they haven’t seen before, bigger and better. I’ll give you a shot of morphine to ease the pain.” He nodded to the miserable, groaning McPhee. “And him.”

  After Flintlock stripped off his buckskin and pants, Charlie stared at him in amazement. “Dear God in heaven, man, how many times have you been shot and cut?” he said. He examined Flintlock’s chest and back. “I count three old bullet wounds and . . . one, two, three, four . . . five knife wounds,” he said.

  Flintlock smiled. “Like medicine, bounty hunting would be a fine profession if folks didn’t shoot at you and stick you with a blade.”

  “I think you maybe should try another line of work,” Charlie said.

  He stripped off McPhee’s blood-soaked shirt. The bullet wound in the young man’s shoulder looked raw, red and angry. “It’s deep,” Charlie said.

  He swabbed off McPhee’s upper arm then plunged a syringe of morphine into him.

  “This won’t hurt a bit,” Charlie Park, MD, said.

  Jamie McPhee was unconscious for most of the digging and cutting and after he extracted the bullet, Charlie proclaimed the operation a success. Or at least as far as he could tell.

  Flintlock, fearing the needle more than the knife, passed on the morphine and gritted it out. Luckily the bullet had missed bone and Charlie was able to remove the lead without too much difficulty. Only the fact that Ruby held his hand to her breast prevented Flintlock from crying out in pain during the surgery, and afterward she called him, “True blue and a right brave gentleman.”