Rattler's Law, Volume One

by James Reasoner

  O’Sullivan was holding one of the men and was shaking him like a rat. Drawing on the strength of desperation, the man tore himself free and dropped to the ground, falling into a staggering run after his cronies. Price was leading the group, and when he glanced back over his shoulder, he saw Talmage hurry up to O’Sullivan. For a moment, Talmage leveled his gun at the fleeing men, but then O’Sullivan caught his arm and pushed it down. Price gulped a deep breath and ran harder, wanting to vanish into the shadows before Talmage got any more ideas about shooting.

  Price gasped curses as he ran. Everything had gone wrong, and he had been humiliated even worse than before. Now there was also the chance that someone might decide he and his friends had been responsible for the fire. That could bring the law down on his head for sure.

  "I'll just...shoot the son of a bitch...next time!" Price vowed as he ran. "Damned if I won't!"

  Brett Easton lifted a hand to his face and wearily rubbed his eyes. He was tired, and it was hard to sleep in the smoky, noisy railroad car. Easton was starting to feel the effects of a couple of weeks of living like a hunted animal pursuing his quarry. Always on the move, always searching... But he had a feeling his search was almost over. And when it was, Quincy O’Sullivan would die.

  Easton was riding on a westbound train from Kansas City; a place called Abilene was one of the stops. Easton had heard of the town before but knew nothing about it except that it had once been a wild, booming cattle town several years earlier when the railhead was located there. Over time the Kansas Pacific had been extended west, but Abilene was still a center for cattle shipping, although a succession of tough frontier lawmen had tamed it. Various people had told Easton these things, but they didn’t prepare him for the veritable wilderness he was encountering now. In his entire life, he hadn’t traveled any farther than twenty miles from downtown Chicago.

  Had he been in Chicago right now, though, he might well be in jail—or dead. He knew a detective named Talmage had an eyewitness who would testify against them in the murders of Morgan Randolph and Bernie Campbell. Like Dane Savage, he had received a tip from one of their informers within the police force that the cops were closing in on him. However, Easton had moved faster than Savage—and had been luckier, too. He didn’t mind admitting that.

  Knowing where to run hadn’t been a problem. A man named MacDonlevy ran a tavern in a town on the outskirts of Chicago, but the place was actually owned by Dane Savage. MacDonlevy had hidden wanted men in the tavern more than once, and the police had no clue as to its real purpose. Easton knew he would be safe there, at least for a while.

  He had been staying in a room above the tavern for two days when a visitor arrived. The man was a clerk in the Chicago prosecutor's office but actually had been working for Dane Savage for years, accepting payments for tidbits of interesting information that he could pass along. The news he brought to Easton was considerably more than a tidbit. The clerk had gathered the information from several sources within the police force, and it told the whole story of how Quincy O’Sullivan had survived the attempt to kill him. Inspector Talmage had left the city, according to the clerk, along with O’Sullivan, in an effort to hide the prizefighter until it was time for him to testify in court.

  Easton digested this and then asked, "Does Mr. Savage know about this?"

  The clerk nodded. "I gave the information to one of the officers who works as a guard in the city jail. He saw to it that Mr. Savage heard the news. He sent a message back out, too."

  "And what was that?"

  "Mr. Savage says for you to find Talmage and this boxer O’Sullivan," the clerk told him. "He wants you to kill both of them."

  Easton nodded. The orders were certainly not unexpected. Getting rid of O’Sullivan and Talmage—but especially the prizefighter—was the only way to be sure that the prosecutor would have no case against them. Easton looked around the squalid room where he had been hiding and thought that it would be a relief to get out of there, even on such a desperate mission.

  He didn’t think he would have any trouble tracing O’Sullivan and Talmage. Dane Savage had contacts all over, people who would be anxious to provide assistance in hopes of putting a powerful man like Savage in their debt. Despite that, for several days Easton found the trail cold. He knew that his quarry had left Chicago and was even able to learn they had boarded an eastbound train. But he could trace them no farther.

  Then a break had come his way. A railroad porter in Indiana who was burdened with heavy gambling debts had reported seeing two men traveling together who answered the descriptions of O’Sullivan and Talmage. They had been heading west this time, no doubt changing their direction in an attempt to throw off any pursuers. Easton followed them, and in every town along the rail line, he stopped to ask questions. Usually there was someone who remembered seeing a big Irishman.

  The trail continued to lead west, and then in Kansas City, Easton encountered a gambler whom he had known briefly in Chicago several years earlier. The man remembered Easton and was only too happy to tell him that he had heard stories about some prizefighter who was training in the town of Abilene. The gambler had been thinking about taking a trip out there himself, in hopes of getting a line on some upcoming bout. Easton persuaded him not to. If the man in Abilene was Quincy O’Sullivan, as seemed likely, Easton didn’t want to do anything to scare him into running again.

  Now, as Easton sat in one of the passenger cars of the westbound train, he thought back over the long days that had led him here and hoped that his journey to Abilene would pay off.

  If O’Sullivan and Talmage were really there, it would be a payoff in blood, Easton thought, smiling in anticipation.

  Marshal Lucas Flint didn’t regularly meet all the trains that came into Abilene, but if he happened to be near the depot when one was scheduled to arrive, he would walk onto the platform to take a look at the passengers who got off. He believed that keeping track of such comings and goings was part of his job.

  Flint strolled through the station a few minutes before a westbound train was due to arrive. One of the porters was standing beside the door to the platform. "Hello, Marshal," the middle-aged black man said with a friendly smile.

  "Morning, John," Flint replied. He glanced at the big clock on the wall. "Or rather, I should say afternoon."

  "That's right, Marshal. Say, I heard there was some trouble last night. Something about a fire?"

  Flint nodded. He was tired today, and part of the reason was the events of the night before. "The old Trimble house on South Second burned down," he said. "We were able to keep the fire from spreading to any of the other houses, but we couldn't save the one where it started."

  The porter shook his head. "That's a shame. Anybody hurt?"

  "No, that was lucky. The house was vacant, but it looked as though somebody had decided to camp there and their cooking fire got out of hand."

  That was the theory advanced by the chief of Abilene's volunteer fire department, but Flint wasn’t so sure it was correct. While he certainly couldn’t prove it, he would have bet there was some connection between the fire and Woodie Price.

  Quincy O’Sullivan had told him that Price and his men jumped him while everyone in the neighborhood was fighting the fire. Talmage had confirmed O’Sullivan's story. Both men had gotten a good look at the man and were sure it was Price. Flint wondered if Price had purposely started the fire to create an opportunity to ambush O’Sullivan. If not, it had certainly been a lucky coincidence.

  Since he couldn’t prove his speculation at the moment, he shared his thoughts only with Cully Markham. The deputy had agreed that it was a possibility, given Price's history of violence.

  "I wouldn't mind having a little talk with Price," Cully had said.

  "Neither would I," Flint agreed grimly. "Keep an eye open for him."

  So far this morning, though, no one had seen Price around town. He had probably gone into hiding, afraid that he would be arrested for the attack on O’Sullivan. He mig
ht have even lit out of the area, and if that were the case, it would be all right with Lucas Flint.

  As the sound of a train whistle floated through the autumn air, John, the porter, straightened. "That's the westbound," he said to Flint. "Right on time." He went out onto the platform to wait for the train to pull in, and Flint followed him. Several passengers were already there waiting to board, their baggage stacked beside them.

  Flint leaned against one of the pillars that supported the roof over the long platform and looked to the east, where the tracks cut through the stockyards of the Great Western Cattle Company on the edge of town. This train wouldn’t stop at the stockyards since it was heading west. Spewing smoke and steam, the locomotive pulled into the station a few moments later, accompanied by the hissing and squealing of brakes. As the engine slowed to a stop the conductor leaped from the caboose and hurried up the platform. "Aaaabileeeene!" he bawled at the top of his lungs.

  Quite a few people got off the train. Businessmen and salesmen mingled with several families, some of whom came to visit relatives; others were immigrants who planned to make Abilene their home. Flint watched as they stepped down from the train and decided that all of them looked fairly innocuous. He was glad to see the immigrant families. Abilene was a growing town, and he liked to think that new folks were always welcome.

  Among the last passengers to disembark was a tall blond man who was wearing a city suit that was a bit rumpled from long travel. However, there was no mistaking the fine cut or the expensive fabric of the clothes. The man was handsome and in his twenties Flint estimated. As he got off the train, he nearly bumped into a young woman who had just left one of the other cars with her family. He stepped back lithely and flashed a gracious smile at the young woman as he reached up to tip his soft felt hat. She blushed, smiled nervously, and hurried on.

  Flint's eyes narrowed as he watched the incident. The newcomer was probably a ladies' man, accustomed to charming all the females he met with his good looks and that quick smile. There was nothing wrong with that. But something about the man alerted the instincts that Flint had developed in his years as a lawman. Something said that here was trouble.

  But he couldn’t arrest a man just because he didn’t like his looks, Flint thought. Still, he kept an eye on the blond newcomer as he claimed his bag from the baggage car and then strolled through the station and out into Railroad Street. The man headed for one of the saloons across the way, obviously intending to slake his thirst after a long train ride.

  Flint let him go. There was nothing else he could do.

  It didn’t take long for Brett Easton to discover that his search was indeed at an end. At the first bar he stopped in that afternoon Easton learned that Quincy O’Sullivan was in Abilene. Posing as a friendly, talkative stranger, Easton bought drinks for several townsmen, and in return they told him all about the famous prizefighter who had chosen Abilene as the place where he would train for an important fight.

  Easton saw through that ruse immediately. He knew that his gunshots had hit O’Sullivan, and the boxer couldn’t have recuperated enough from his wounds by now to be planning a prizefight. That was just the story he and Talmage were using to cover the fact that they were hiding out. Now all Easton had to do was make sure O’Sullivan and Talmage never left Abilene alive.

  After renting a room at the Grand Palace Hotel, Easton spent the afternoon sizing up the town. There were plenty of saloons and taverns in Abilene, and he visited most of them during the rest of the day. In each place, he would nurse a beer, buying drinks for the men he subtly pumped for information. He heard about the boxing exhibition between O’Sullivan and a local schoolteacher that hadn’t quite come off. Several men also mentioned the brawl at Angus's that had involved O’Sullivan and someone named Price. Easton got the impression that O’Sullivan had become a fairly popular man in Abilene; his presence had livened things up and given people something to talk about.

  His death would cause even more of a stir, Easton was willing to wager. But he would be gone by then, on his way back to Chicago to resume the life he had been forced to abandon.

  Early that evening as Easton was leaving the Bull's Head Saloon, he spotted a tall man standing on the boardwalk across the street. Instinct told Easton that he was being watched. He glanced over at the man and saw lantern light reflecting on the badge pinned to his vest.

  A grin tugged at Easton's mouth. The local lawman, obviously keeping an eye on the stranger in town. Easton wasn’t worried about that. No small-town badge-toter was going to cause him trouble. He remembered seeing the man watching him as he got off the train that afternoon. Easton had paid little attention to him then, and he gave him not much more notice now. Cheerfully, Easton turned and strolled down the boardwalk, ignoring the marshal.

  Later that evening, Easton found himself in a small saloon on Cottage Street near the stockyards. The lingering, pungent odor was familiar to him, growing up as he had in Chicago. However, this smell lacked the bloody undertones that hung in the air around the slaughterhouses.

  Out of habit, Easton kept one eye on his back, and he knew that the lawman who had been watching him earlier had gone on about his business. Easton had no idea why the man seemed to be suspicious of him. He had done nothing to attract the attention of the authorities since arriving, and he intended to keep it that way. It would be best for him to remain behind the scenes until the time came to strike at O’Sullivan and Talmage. Then he would hit hard and fast and be gone before anyone knew what had happened.

  He leaned on the bar in the narrow, low-ceilinged tavern and ordered a whiskey from the bartender who was wearing a filthy apron. The building was constructed of weathered, unpainted planks that had warped from exposure to the elements. Night breezes whistled through large cracks in the walls, but the extra ventilation helped disperse the thick smoke in the air, so the cracks were not all bad.

  Easton had been sipping beer all day long, and he needed a real drink now. He picked up the glass the bartender set in front of him, frowning at the grimy smears on it, then tossed back the whiskey anyway. As the raw, potent stuff burned all the way down his throat, he grimaced but began to smile when a welcome fire started in his belly.

  Someone pushed up to the bar beside him, jostling him a little. Easton felt a sudden surge of anger and turned to see who had bumped him. The newcomer was a tall, broad-shouldered man with red hair who looked like a down-on-his-luck cowboy. "Whiskey," he growled to the bartender.

  The man behind the bar picked up another glass and splashed rotgut into it. "Here you go, Price," he said as he shoved it across the scarred hardwood. "You better be able to pay this time."

  "I can pay, I can pay," the redheaded man grumbled. He pulled a coin from the pocket of his greasy jeans and slid it across the bar. As he picked up the glass, his hand trembled a bit. His face was flushed, and Easton figured that he had probably been drinking most of the day.

  The man swallowed the liquor in one gulp and then dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. He glanced at Easton, saw that the blond man was watching him, and snapped, "What the hell's the matter with you?"

  At first Easton intended to make the man see the error of jostling him, by force if necessary, but then he decided to control his anger. He didn’t want to attract any more attention to himself than was necessary. When he heard the bartender speak the man's name, he was doubly glad of that decision, because he remembered what he had heard earlier in the day about a man called Price. From the looks of things, this could be the same man.

  Easton ignored the redhead's question and said, "You wouldn't be the same Price who just had a run-in with Quincy O’Sullivan, would you?"

  Price's fingers tightened around his glass, and for a moment Easton thought he was going to shatter it. "You ain't a friend of that son of a bitch, are you?" he demanded thickly.

  Easton shook his head. "Not at all. But I've heard of him. He's supposed to be quite a fighter."

  "I would have taken him if
folks hadn't kept buttin' in," Price replied with a contemptuous snort.

  Easton nodded, trying to convey sympathy and understanding. "I've heard that O’Sullivan can't fight his own battles," he said. "Surely you're going to even the score with him."

  "Already tried," Price grunted. "It didn't work out too good, though. I been lyin' low all day, 'til I couldn't stand it no more." He clenched one big fist and smacked it into his other palm. "That big Irishman's goin' to regret the day he met me, you mark my words."

  Easton tried not to grin too broadly. If he could get this simpleton Price to do some of the dirty work for him, his job would be that much easier. "Oh, I believe you, my friend," he said. "And maybe you and I can help each other out."

  Price stared at him in puzzlement. "How's that?"

  "You see, I have good reason to hate Quincy O’Sullivan, too."

  8

  O’Sullivan moved a little awkwardly around the sandbag hanging inside the stable. While his footwork was slightly off because he had spent too much time away from these workouts, the bag still shivered and swayed at the flurry of hard shots he peppered into it.

  "Take it easy," Talmage advised. He was sitting on a chair several feet away from the perspiring heavyweight. "You know what the doctor said about putting a strain on those wounds."

  "I'm being careful, Sam," O’Sullivan puffed. He shook his head in disgust. He had neglected his training for too long and let himself get into terrible shape. That was going to have to change from now on.

  O’Sullivan had talked Talmage into starting these mock training sessions again, but for the prizefighter the hours spent in the livery barn were more than a ploy. Sooner or later, this whole business with Dane Savage would be over. The trial would be concluded, and Savage and Easton would either be in jail or hanged, just as they should be. Then O’Sullivan would have to get on with his life. That meant going back into the prize ring. He vowed he would be ready—for his own sake, and for Bernie Campbell's.