Hart the Regulator 9

by John B. Harvey

  He washed and dressed slowly, each action as if he were doing it for the first time.

  Breakfast was strong black coffee and a piece of dry rye bread that he broke between his fingers and dunked down into the cup.

  Fowler sat opposite him and kept counsel with the depths of his beard.

  Finally, Hart pushed the cup away, sloshing some of his refill over the table. ‘You realize what we done last night?’

  Fowler’s voice was gruff and careful. ‘Sure I know what we done.’

  ‘We killed two, three kids less than sixteen years of age. Maybe more than that. Kids younger’n this one we’re supposed to be lookin’ for.’

  ‘What was we supposed to do? Pat ’em on the head and drop ’em a dollar?’

  ‘That ain’t the same as …’ Hart stood up sharply and sent more of his coffee flying. It was a considerable effort for Fowler to raise his head high enough to see his face. ‘We never tried to talk our way out. Never done nothin’ ’cept cut loose and blast ’em with everythin’ we had.’

  Fowler nodded gravely. ‘That’s damn right!’

  ‘An’ you feel okay ‘bout that?’

  ‘Okay? you betcha I feel okay. More’n okay. I feel pretty fuckin’ good about it!’

  ‘We—’

  Fowler jabbed a finger at him. ‘We let those punks think they were goin’ to walk all over us an’ leave us on the street for dead. They’d’ve stripped every bit of clothin’ off our backs and taken our scalps an’ hides as well if they reckoned there was any way of sellin’ ’em. Those bastards are worse’n vultures on account of they don’t wait till the blood’s turned cold. There ain’t one bit of feelin’ left in ’em and they got the whole of Frisco runnin’ scared. Runnin’ scared and we took ’em, the two of us. Blasted the punk bastards till they couldn’t get out of there fast enough. An’ we didn’t take a scratch either one of us.’

  The finger relaxed, ‘Don’t you waste no sympathy on scum like that, Wes. Just don’t, that’s all.’

  ‘Damn it, Fowler! They was kids!’

  The detective threw back his chair so vehemently it crashed against the back wall, splintering one leg. Everyone else in the dining room was staring at them now, the waitress clutching her apron to her chest and breathing open-mouthed.

  ‘They was killers, Wes. Killers, pure an’ simple. You saw ’em. Razors and guns an’ every damn weapon you can think of. They’d have cut your throat as soon as spit in your face. You think they’d’ve felt sorry for that? Think they’d have felt sorry for anythin’?’ He gave his head a vigorous shake that made him wince. They don’t know what feelin’ is. Not any longer.’

  They did once, Hart was thinking, every one of them.

  He didn’t say it; he didn’t say a thing. Turned on his heel and stomped out into the street and had to shield his eyes against the light. He knew most of what Fowler had said was right, but that still didn’t make him forget the momentary look of realization and terror on the face of a boy of no more than fifteen immediately before he’d sent a bullet tearing through his body.

  Fowler being right didn’t wipe that out, didn’t make the whole thing any better. He began to walk down the sidewalk, not really looking where he was going, men and women stepping out of his way rather than argue with his determination or the gun at his side. Half a mile on, he stopped and wiped the sweat that had gathered in the center of his palms on to the sides of his pants. He knew where he was going and what he was going to do. He was feeling so damned bad that there wasn’t anything in that letter that was going to make him feel any worse.

  He turned fast and collided with a man who began to complain until he looked into Hart’s face and moved on his way with the words frozen in his mouth.

  Fowler wasn’t downstairs and the door to his room was shut fast. Hart let himself into his own room and tore open the drawer, hurling the spare shirt on to the floor. The writing on the envelope was sharp against his eyes and when he picked it up, the rough paper burned his fingers.

  Her eyes were hazel tinged with green; the skin on her arms was warm and smooth and he wanted to feel it against him one more time and knew it was impossible. He searched her face for a sign of tears and found none; his pleading washed back off her like water from the smoothest stone.

  Behind them the place he’d built for them to live in, the room at the side for the kid they …

  The envelope was in half between Hart’s calloused fingers. Half and then half again. Again. Again. He tore and ripped until it was no more than flakes of paper that he made into a pile at the bottom of the enamel bowl on the wash stand and watched as the spurt of flame from the match caught and consumed. Bitter and black. He grabbed his things, checked his weapons, shouldered open his door and kicked the one to Fowler’s hard enough to shake it in the frame.

  ‘You ridin’ to Salinas or do I go alone?’ Feet crashing down the stairs before the detective had the chance to answer.

  Chapter Eleven

  They came down off the old stage road to Salinas, leaving the Santa Anas over their left shoulder. The valleys were broad and the land good, cottonwoods and pepper trees blotched across it like so many small splashes of darker paint. Indians and Mexicans and the occasional poor white worked the fields, broccoli and beans and fruit and all manner of squash, avocados and oranges. They passed a girl of maybe ten with a herd of off-white and shaggy-bearded Nubian goats, an old man, three-parts blind, hitting the ground with a long stick, moving cattle across a broad swathe of pasture.

  They never talked.

  Hart kept his thoughts to himself except where his scarcely suppressed anger showed in the lean lines of his face and the bitter blue of his eyes.

  Fowler wasn’t sure if what the other man was feeling was all due to what had happened back in the city, or whether there was something else he didn’t know about. Either way, he wasn’t about to ask. Firing questions at Hart in that mood would be like stepping up to a prize bull with your best red shirt on and shackles round your feet. Not that he would have had Hart anywhere else than where he was. Alone in that street the other night, he doubted if he’d have got out alive. No matter how well he tricked them pretending to be drunker than he was, there would have been too many for him. And the way the big man had cut loose with that stashed sawn-off of his was a sight to behold.

  He glanced at Hart’s face and said a quick prayer for anyone who was unfortunate enough to get on his wrong side that day. All that anger and bitterness building up inside him and how the hell was he about to let it out? If it had been Fowler himself, then a bottle of bourbon would have held most of the answer, but that wouldn’t do it for Wes Hart. Didn’t seem as though talking would either … and sure as hell something had to.

  Fowler shook his head and flicked the reins. Other men, he’d have figured it was some kind of woman trouble got him riled up that way. But Wes Hart? He couldn’t see that. Couldn’t see it at all.

  ~*~

  They rode into Salinas from the north-east, letting their mounts walk in slow and easy back of a high-sided wagon loaded to the brim with farm produce and drawn by a team of four overladen mules. There were quite a few folk on the street, some of them stretched out across the boardwalk, hats dipped over their eyes and legs straight. The sun was just shifting over the middle of a clear blue sky and sweat ran down both riders’ faces and stuck their clothes to their bodies like a second skin. The horses tossed their heads, flicked their tails at the inevitable flies.

  Fowler could feel his thirst building up inside him like a dam about to bust. He drew over towards a sign that said Livery and Feed and Hart followed suit.

  ‘Soon as we get the horses settled we’d best split up. Cover things quicker that way. You take whatever’s left of the main street, I’ll take right. Meet back at the Santa Rita in a couple of hours.’

  Hart followed the line from Fowler’s finger to the building down the street with a balcony jutting over the sidewalk and a black and white cat sunning itself on the
front corner of the rail. One false turn in its sleep and it would topple to the street below … except that cats didn’t do things like that.

  ‘Okay?’

  Hart gave the detective a quick nod and turned on his heels, striding across towards the mid-point between a barber shop and saddler’s, hat pulled down at a steep angle over his eyes and the curved fingers of his right hand almost brushing the pearl-handled grip of his gun.

  ~*~

  Hart had tried three saloons and the barber shop without much luck. A few folk had heard of a gambler by the name of Jordan MacPhail but didn’t know where he’d got to. The man with a runny eye who was swabbing the floor in the California Dream Saloon and Bar thought there’d been a feller called Griff McPeters in town a month or more back, but on further questioning McPeters turned out to be under five foot seven inches tall, almost as wide and the possessor of a fine Scottish accent and a twitch whenever he was winning. The barber paused in stropping his razor long enough to check that Hart wasn’t mistaken in the name and didn’t really want to find someone called Jerry McCann, who was the sort of man who ought to be run out of town on account of something. It transpired that McCann had recently opened up his own barber shop in Salinas, after working in barbed partnership with his now rival for three years. Hart let the man go back to his strop and declined the offer of a cut-price shave.

  ‘Keep away from that butcher McCann,’ the barber called after him. ‘He’ll give you a cut-throat shave instead!’

  Hart moved on to a cantina back from the main street, set down towards a cluster of shacks that marked the Mexican end of town. There was no name above the door, no door in the frame. Flies hummed lazily a couple of inches below the low ceiling. There were maybe a dozen people inside and three-quarters of them asleep, but then it was still siesta time. The woman behind the bar had been pretty just long enough ago for her to remember the way men reacted to her appearance; she saw Hart enter and wondered what a handsome gringo was doing walking into her cantina in the middle of the day. Usually they came, when they came at all, when they were too far gone in drink to get served anywhere else in town.

  She smiled her once pretty smile and shrugged her left shoulder so that her loose white blouse slid down to show a few inches more plump skin.

  ‘Señor!’

  Hart pushed the hat brim back and she admired his blue eyes. He said: ‘Maybe you can help me?’

  She raised an eyebrow and looked a little too obviously at his body, as much to suggest, well, she might, she might.

  ‘I’m lookin’ for a man …’

  She pursed her lips and said nothing, but her eyes were smiling.

  ‘Name of MacPhail.’

  She surprised him; she didn’t shrug her shoulders to signify the name meant little to her as others had done; she didn’t gesture emptily with her hands; neither did she shake her head and say she had never heard of him. What she did was say: “Jordan MacPhail?’

  Hart started. ‘You know him?’

  ‘No, señor.”

  ‘But you know the name …’

  ‘You are not the only one looking for him.’

  Then Hart nodded, understanding. The boy, the boy.

  ‘When was he here?’

  She rubbed her plump fingers over her forearm, thinking. ‘Five, six days since.’

  ‘An’ you didn’t know nothin’ ’bout MacPhail?’

  She shook her head. ‘He said MacPhail was his father.’

  ‘That’s what he says.’

  ‘It isn’t true?’

  ‘His mother told him his father died. He don’t believe it. Don’t want to, I guess.’

  ‘A boy, he needs a father.’

  Hart nodded. His own father had brought Hart’s mother and Hart, quickening inside her belly, over the California Trail to Sacramento. They’d made Sutter’s Fort in time for the birth to take place there, his mother nearly dying with the strain of the journey weighing down so heavily upon her. But she’d survived and so had Wes and so, for a time, had his father. But Sutter, instead of striving to keep that part of California independent, had encouraged as many Americans as possible to settle there, the trade filling his pockets times over. Hart’s father had sided with the Californios and fought to keep the state independent. He had ridden out against General Kearny and not ridden back.

  Wes had been three years of age: the same age as young Robert MacPhail when he was told that his father, too, had died.

  Hart nodded: he knew all about sons needing their fathers.

  Knew, also, about the gut feeling that comes when you’re certain he isn’t really dead. Even though, in his case, he’d seen the coffin lowered into the ground and heard the cornet and the cannon, seen the flowers and the tears on his mother’s face.

  Still, he’d lived through his childhood with an expectation always at the back of his mind. One day the door would open and he would walk through, holding out his arms. Or a letter would come from Mexico or some far-off land Hart could only dream about. He had gone to sea on a whaler. Or trekked back over the Sierras and owned a ranch in Montana and any day now he was sending for his son so that they could work it together …

  Since his mother’s remarriage, much of this had been simple wish-fulfilment that would take him out of reach of his step-father’s fists when the prospector arrived back from yet another empty journey off into the heart of the mother lode.

  When at last he had believed the truth about his father’s death, fourteen years of age and with the beginnings of a man about him, he had left home and never returned.

  Robert MacPhail was sixteen and still searching, though he’d left home to do it.

  ‘How come you’re looking for him too?’

  Hart looked at the woman, realizing that she’d spoken, without being certain what she’d said.

  ‘I said, how come you want to find him, this Jordan MacPhail?’

  He ignored her question and asked another in its place. The kid—he have any friends here? Anyone who might know where he’d gone?’

  ‘I don’t know, señor. He slept rough, ate what was thrown away behind one place or another. Begged for drinks. He had a little money, but he did not like to spend it. He thought it must last him a long time.’

  ‘An’ you don’t know where I’ll find this Jordan MacPhail?’

  She shook her head a little sadly, for she would have liked to have been able to help him, this tall gringo with the faded-blue eyes; would have liked to speak with him longer. But there was nothing more to say and Ramon was waiting at the other end of the bar for tequilla.

  ‘Good luck, señor. I hope you find him, this man you are searching for.’

  She gave him her best smile and walked slowly towards Ramon, who tossed a coin onto the counter and glared at the gringo’s back as he stepped through the door.

  ~*~

  Fowler had been in the back room of the Santa Ana for long enough to drink three good shots of bourbon and get good and hungry for a steak. As soon as Hart arrived he yelled an order for a couple of T-bone specials and poured himself another drink.

  ‘Take it easy, huh.’

  ‘What d’you mean, take it easy?’

  ‘Next time you walk into trouble I may not be there to pull you through.’

  ‘Yeah, but you will. I already made sure of that. So just relax an’ let me drink.’

  Hart scraped over a chair and sat down, leaning it back on its hind legs and resting one boot across the corner of the table.

  ‘What you find out?’ Fowler asked.

  ‘About Jordan, not a deal. But—’

  ‘But they remembered the kid, huh?’

  ‘Yeah, the kid.’

  Fowler shifted the bottle far enough for a plate of thick beef to be set down in front of him, another before Hart. They set to and ate for close to ten minutes without speaking. Fowler was in the act of spitting a piece of gristle from his mouth into the palm of his hand when he heard the tapping on the window. He ignored it at first, onl
y turning his head when the sound persisted. The face that peered through the glass was of a young Mexican kid with both front teeth missing and a dark question mark of hair falling down towards the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Got a friend?’ Hart commented, cutting through the last couple of inches of meat.

  ‘Yeah. Like my horse’s got fleas.’

  ‘Don’t you reckon you ought to see what he wants?’

  ‘Maybe what he wants is you?’

  ‘Uh-uh. You’re the one he’s starin’ at.’

  Fowler grunted something indecipherable and slammed his knife and fork down on the now empty plate. ‘Prob’ly only wants the bone.’

  But he was wrong. What the kid wanted was to trade a piece of information he thought might be of interest. Seems he’d run around with Robert MacPhail when he was in Salinas, the pair of them sleeping in the stables a couple of nights, probably rolling the odd drunk together though he didn’t go so far as to say so.

  ‘What you got that’s worth payin’ for?’ Fowler growled.

  ‘I know where he has gone, señor.’

  ‘Know that, huh?’

  ‘Si, señor.” The kid’s dark eyes were wide and expectant and his hand was already itching as he rubbed it against the worn patch on his knee.

  ‘So why don’t I knock it out of you, instead of payin’ for it?’

  ‘Because before you could do that, señor, I would have run away and then you will not find me. And if you do not find me you will not know where Robert has gone.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  The boy laughed and showed his missing teeth and held out his hand.

  Fowler grumbled low into his beard and tried the kid with a dime. The kid stared at the coin for a couple of seconds before spitting on it. Fowler laughed then and gave him a dollar piece.