by Ed Gorman
She stayed in the bedroom until she heard Bobby dumping out the water he'd used to bathe in.
Then she hid the gun in the folds of her farm skirt and went out to face him.
9:30 P.M.
"You did that well."
"My hip hurts."
"Well, I just wanted you to know that I appreciated it."
"I just hope we're not too late."
Serena was hobbling. She'd gone out the back door of the hotel first. She made a big thing of being drunk and falling on her face. The deputy—never one to pass up a cheap feel—went to her assistance immediately. Filling his hands with her swelling breasts, he managed to get her to her feet and steady her. For which she was appreciative enough to touch her lips to his in a pretense of lusty drunkenness.
The splendid performance allowed Ben Gregg to sneak out the back door and clear of the deputy. Serena, hobbling because of the hip injury she'd suffered when she'd thrown herself gallantly to the ground, caught up with Ben ten minutes later.
Now they were near the railroad tracks that ran north-south. Far in the distance you could hear a train thundering down the tracks like some mythic nocturnal beast. Indian art often depicted trains with the totem-like faces of monsters, all red glowing eyes and steam pouring from nostrils and mouths. Indian children were no doubt told that if they did not behave, the train monster would get them.
'Trains scare me," Serena said.
"Why?"
She shuddered. "My uncle once saw a woman get her head cut off when she fell underneath a train. He used to tell us over and over about it."
"Just the kind of fella you'd like to have around."
They climbed a small, sandy hill. Below them, in a small, tree-ringed valley, lay the small, tree-ringed house of the Turney family, window-dark in the starry night.
Somebody was coming out the front door.
Ben had one of those moments when the brain refuses to accept the information the eyes are relaying.
Yes, this was a young man who did bear some resemblance to his brother Bobby. Yes, that strange kind of lope was the distinctive walk of the entire Gregg family. And true, the flat-brimmed dark blue Stetson looked unique even half-lost in the shadows this way.
But how could it be so easy? As a Pinkerton man, Ben Gregg was used to things being done the hard way. You walk to the rise of a small hill and there, not a hundred yards away, is the brother you've been desperately searching for?
No. Impossible.
But it was Bobby. No doubt about it. And the way Serena clutched Ben's arm confirmed what eye was telling brain.
And then something even more unlikely happened: Jean Anne Turney, devout Christian woman that she was, flung herself through the cabin door and screamed, "Bobby!"
Her intentions were as clear as the six-shooter in her hand. Just as Bobby was turning toward her voice, she was firing.
Then Ben heard himself shout: "Bobby! Bobby!" and was running down the hill with his gun drawn, firing at Jean Anne Turney before she could squeeze off any more shots.
Then Richard Turney ran out the front door crying, "Jean Anne, what're you doing? What're you doing?"
By now, Ben Gregg had reached the cabin and was kneeling down next to his brother. He shouted to Turney, "Get me a lantern!"
Turney didn't have to take the six-shooter from his wife. In a deep state of shock, her eyes looking off into some distance only she could see, she let the weapon drop from her fingers. He picked it up.
While Turney was getting a lantern, Ben said to Serena, "Would you go get Virgil Earp? Turney won't mind if you take one of his horses."
She hurried away.
Turney returned moments later with a glowing kerosene lantern.
Jean Anne rushed up to him as he stood over Bobby's body. "Is he dead? Did I kill him? Oh, Lord, I'm so sorry."
Turney handed the lantern to Ben. "She was doing it to protect me. I killed Suzie Proctor. But since everybody thought Bobby did, she thought nobody'd question her killing him."
Ben only half-heard what Turney was saying. He was more interested—at least for the moment—in Bobby's wound. It was high, in the shoulder. The blood flow was warm and thin. You could smell it on the chill night.
"How is he, Mr. Gregg?" Jean Anne said. "Oh, Lord, I'm so sorry. He was our best friend."
Bobby's eyes came open then and he said, "Yeah, best friend, all right. Some best friend." Ben had seen this many times. Somebody is shot, slips into unconsciousness, then suddenly comes to again after a few minutes.
"Should we take him inside?" Jean Anne said.
"I don't want to ever step inside your house again," Bobby said. He was strong enough to express anger with real passion.
Ben took off his suit jacket and laid it across Bobby blanket-style. He put Bobby's hat underneath his head, propping it up slightly. At least it wouldn't be lying directly upon the cold hard earth.
Ben stood up. From the doorway of the Turney home, Ruth watched them. He wondered if she could hear what was being said. That her father was the killer.
"You'll need to take care of things, Jean Anne," he said.
She started to cry. Her face in her hands. Turney took her into his arms. "I'm so sorry for everything I've done," he said. "I've brought God's wrath down on myself—and now my whole family's suffering. I just pray that you can forgive me someday, honey. I just hope you can forgive me."
Ben kept putting off what he needed to do. Every time he was about to speak, one of the Turneys would say something very emotional and Ben would lay back again. During the last exchange, they moved downhill further, so that Ben couldn't hear them.
"I'm freezing my ass off down here, brother," Bobby said in the windy prairie night.
"Your girlfriend should be back with Earp and the wagon right away." He got down on his haunches and pulled his suit jacket up tighter around his brother.
"She ain't my girlfriend."
"She tells a different story. And anyway, you could do a lot worse. I like her."
Bobby grimaced with the pain from his shoulder. "Yeah, that's the hell of it."
"What is?"
"I like her, too. She kind of snuck up on me. I kinda knew Suzie was sneaking around on me, so I started spendin' time with Serena. I sure never figured it'd go anywhere, her bein' a whore and all."
"Mr. Gregg?"
He looked up. Ruth stood there. She said, "I'd like to talk to you."
"You be all right?"
Bobby nodded. "Can't get any colder than I am right now."
"You could always go inside."
"No way."
"All right. I'll talk to the young lady, then."
He stood up, knees cracking. Every once in a while he got the sneaking suspicion that one of these days he was actually going to get old.
You could see the sleep on her face. She'd apparently slept at least a while tonight. She was as pretty as her mother, her gentle face pale in the moonlight.
She said, "I killed her, Mr. Gregg."
He sensed the great grief in her. Her father a killer. The only way she could help him was to take the blame herself. An absurd story. But a profoundly touching one.
He drew her into the circle of his arm. "Your father wouldn't want you to go around saying things like that, honey."
"But I did kill her, Mr. Gregg. I really did." Her tone was as chill as the night. "I knew they were over there by the river. They went there a lot. Sometimes, I sneak out of the house and go for walks at night. And one night I saw them together. And then I saw them a lot of nights. You know, they say she was such a fine person and all. But she wasn't. She was destroying my family and she didn't care at all. That's why he strangled her. Because she wouldn't let him go. I watched him strangle her. I was hiding behind the tree where I usually did. And then after he ran off, I went down there. I'm not even sure why. I'd never seen a dead person before. Maybe I was just interested in that. But anyway, I went down there and when I was leaning over, she opened her eye
s and started to get up. And I just started screaming all these things at her. About how she was ruining my folks and everything. And then I just picked up this rock and I hit her with it. I hit her twice, as a matter of fact. And then I dropped it and ran back up to the house."
He'd wondered why she'd been both strangled and then hit with a heavy rock. Now he knew why. He also knew that Ruth was telling him the truth. He said, "You wore the shoes you usually do?"
"Yes, why?"
"Mind if I see your heel?"
"How come?"
"I need to see if there's a V imprinted there."
The V was there, all right. Imprinted in the heel itself.
"You think they'll hang me?"
The way she said it, so dispassionately, he wondered for the first time if she might be insane.
"No; no, they won't hang you, sweetheart."
"I just wanted my Dad to be home the way he should be."
"I know."
"My mom would never do anything like that to him."
"No; no, she wouldn't."
Then she was in his arms and starting to cry. "I know I shouldn't have hit her; I know I shouldn't have, Mr. Gregg."
He let her cry for a time, and then he called out to the people down the hill, "You need to come up here, Mr. and Mrs. Turney."
Soon after, Virgil Earp and a hospital wagon for Bobby showed up too.
Next Day, 2:37 p.m.
Serena sat in a chair next to Bobby's hospital bed. Ben stood on the other side saying, "It's a good thing you're my brother. Otherwise I would've charged Pinkerton rates."
"He thinks he has a great sense of humor," Bobby said.
"I should charge you too for all the peach pie you ate," Serena said. "You finished off the whole thing."
Bobby looked as if he was about to say something in his own defense, then stopped.
"What were you going to say?" she said.
"I can't say."
"You can't say what you were going to say? What kind of crazy talk is that?"
"I gave my word," Bobby said, thinking of Deputy Sam wolfing down the entire pie.
Older brother Ben patted his hand and said, "I need to go. Allegedly, my train leaves in another half hour."
"Allegedly?" Bobby said.
"You ever know a train to leave on time?" Ben said.
On his way to the depot, he ran into Deputy Sam carrying a pie to the hospital.
"This," Sam said, "is for your brother. I had my wife work all morning. It's peach."
"That's funny," Ben said. "Serena was just saying that Bobby ate this whole peach pie that she fixed."
"It's a small world, isn't it?" Sam said, and then took of scuttling toward the hospital.
A strange little burg, the Pinkerton man thought as he began walking toward the depot again. A strange little burg indeed.
A Good Start
"The last important outlaw in Oklahoma, Henry Starr, was the first bandit to use a car in a bank robbery."
—Jay Robert Nash, Encyclopedia of Western Lawmen & Outlaws
Sam Mines, the high sheriff of Pruett County, Oklahoma, was known to be exceptionally proud of three things—the forearm scar left over from a shoot-out with Tom Horn, from which both men had walked away; his 1914 Ford Model T; and his lovely seventeen-year-old daughter, Laurel, whom he'd raised alone for the past twelve years, following the death of his wife from cancer.
Pruett City, the county seat, was Mines's fiefdom. Like many towns of 15,000 at this point in the new century, Pruett City was caught between being a noisy old frontier settlement and a by-god real town with telephones, electricity, and a newspaper that came out three times a week.
Mines wasn't a mean man, but he was a tough one. If he caught you carrying a gun in his town, he'd run you in no matter who you were. A saloon fight would get you anywhere between three and five days in jail. And you'd pay for every penny of the damages you'd caused or you'd rot in jail. And if you, God forbid, ever struck a woman, be she your wife or not, you'd get the cell with the drunks, most of whom were eager for a fight. The lingering death of his wife had taught him about the strength and spiritual beauty and courage of womankind, and if you did anything to defile a woman—
On this particular night in early autumn, Mines slept the sleep of the just, a deep and nourishing sleep that would enable him to be the kind of military-style lawman he'd long been. Khaki uniform crisp and fresh. Campaign hat cocked just so on his bald head. His father's Colt in his holster.
A part of his mind was hoping for another spectral visit from his wife, Susan. He'd never told anybody, not even Laurel, that the ghost of his beloved wife appeared to him from time to time. He did not want amusement or pity to spoil the visits.
And then something woke him up.
Something he'd only imagined in the fancies of his dreams? Or something real? A lawman had enemies, and every five years or so that seemed to be the cycle—somebody would get paroled out of prison and come back to town to start discreetly harassing the man who'd sent him up. Garbage dumped on the front lawn. Dirty words painted on the shed door. Threatening letters clogging the mailbox. All these things had happened to Mines.
Moonlight painted the windows silver.
A barn owl somewhere; the wind soughing the autumn-crisped leaves that crackled like castanets; a horse in the barn next door, crying out suddenly, perhaps in its sleep, perhaps out of sheer loneliness. Town people kept just one horse these days, that for the family buggy that was rapidly being replaced by Tin Lizzies. Mines imagined that the animals got awfully lonesome being the only one of their kind, unlike the old days when every family had two or three horses.
A sound.
A kind of . . . ticking sound.
Almost like the sound large hail makes.
He grabbed his Colt from the holster on his bedpost, dangled his feet off the bed, straightened the nightshirt sleep had wound round him, pressed bare feet to the chilly wooden floor. And proceeded to find out just what the hell was going on.
As he left the bedroom, he glanced at the clock on the bureau. He'd just assumed it was the middle of the night. But it was barely ten o'clock. He'd been asleep less than an hour.
What the hell was going on, anyway?
* * *
Sully Driscoll, at nineteen, had done some pretty dumb things in his life. And this one, he realized as he heard the pebble striking Laurel's window, had to be just about the dumbest.
But he couldn't help himself. She hadn't spoken to him for three days, not since she'd seen him sitting on the town square park bench with Constance Daly—which he sure as heck shouldn't have been doing—and by now he was so desperate to speak to her, he'd resorted to this crazy idea.
He'd even scrubbed beneath his nails extra good tonight, just on the off chance that she'd hear the pebble against her glass and sneak down and see him. Sully worked at The Automobile Emporium, one of Pruett City's three gas stations and automobile repair shops. And also the best. Sully pumped gas because the owner made him. His real love was fixing cars. Second only to Laurel's beautiful, heart-shaped face, the sight of an engine in need of work was the most fetching thing Sully had ever seen. But a lad sure did get greasy and oily working in, around, and under a car. So he'd washed up extra good tonight.
Quiet street. Deep moonshadows. And the gink of a nineteen-year-old firing pebbles at a window. If her father ever caught him—
And that was when Sully saw the ghost.
Coming around the corner of the house. And moving faster than he'd ever heard of a ghost moving before. And Sully was something of a ghost expert, having practically memorized every single short story by Edgar Allen Poe.
But it wasn't a ghost, of course. It was big Sam Mines in his nightshirt. With his Colt out. Huge white feet slapping through the dewy grass like rabbits.
Sully's first inclination was to run.
Maybe Sam hadn't gotten a good look at him yet.
But, no. Nothing much ever got past Sam.
> Sully said, "Evenin', Sam." Trying to sound as casual as possible.
There were times when Sam was a splutterer. You didn't see it very often—usually Sam was so cool, ice wouldn't melt on him—but every once in a while he'd confront a situation that exasperated him so much he'd start a-splutterin', spittle flying from his lips, eyes bugging out, the true deep red of rage discoloring his face.
But before he even had time to form a semi-coherent word, Laurel's window flew open—Now she opens it, Sully thought miserably—and Laurel leaned out and said, "What's going on down there, anyway?"
* * *
"It was my fault," Laurel said at breakfast the next morning.
"How was it your fault?" her father asked around a piece of fried potato.
"Because I wouldn't speak to him for three whole days and he was going crazy."
"That still doesn't give him any right to start throwing rocks in the middle of the night at your—"
"It was only ten o'clock. And they were pebbles, not rocks."
"Still."
"I shouldn't have gotten so jealous over Constance. He broke off with her before he started seeing me. And I've always been afraid that maybe he thinks he made a mistake."
"He's a grease monkey. He doesn't belong with a rich girl like Constance, anyway."
"Her father offered to set him up in his own garage."
Sam Mines glowered. "If he's not careful, I'll set him up in his own jail cell."
He took out his pipe and started filling the air with its wonderful aromas. This was the scent Laurel would always associate with her father. It was a breakfast and dinner smell, a meal finished, strapping Sam Mines leaning back in his chair and smoking his pipe, maybe a thumb hooked into a suspender, a curled charred stick match sitting on the saucer of his coffee cup.
But the light of this autumn morning was no friend to aging flesh, and as she looked at him, she saw that he was no longer "becoming" old (the way she'd preferred to think about it these last six or seven years). He'd arrived. He was old. Not by normal human being standards, perhaps. But certainly by lawman standards. Arthritis crimped his hands and knees and feet. And his blue eyes were somewhat vague when they looked at you. They weren't even as startlingly and deeply blue as they'd once been, as if age preferred to paint in pastels.
