The key rattled in the lock. He opened fire.
Four bullets splintered through the heavy door, exposing yellow wood under the brown varnish and knocking gold-papered plaster off the wall opposite. Pierce, flattened against the wall next to the door, grunted loudly and struck the floor rolling. His body made a convincing thud, but he came up again on the other side of the door and drew the long-barreled revolver.
Black, acrid smoke rolled through the room, obscuring the riddled door and burning Fred Dieterle’s eyes. He was rubbing his sleeve across them when he heard the groan and thud. Snatching up his cane, he vaulted forward, clawed at the knob, found the door still locked, cursed under his breath and turned the latch.
Pierce was grinning at him when he tore open the door. His Navy Colt barked twice, both times into the ex-sheriff’s belly.
The hotel detective slept through the opening salvo. He stirred in the louder silence that followed, and when the two spaced shots sounded a moment later he rolled onto his stockinged feet, rubbed both hands ever his puffy face, and reached for his battered bulldog pistol on the bedside table.
Lurching out into the lobby, he found the clerk standing at the foot of the stairs looking up. A glance at the young man’s pale features told him he was no source of information. The detective shoved him aside roughly, taking the steps two at a time as he hadn’t since he was a boy. He was still too groggy to be cautious.
There would be no miraculous recovery for Dieterle this time. Pierce knew that as he watched him writhing on the floor at his feet, dark blood welling between the fingers clasped on his midsection. But he had learned to take nothing for granted. Stepping aside to avoid soiling himself, the Sunday school teacher placed the Colts muzzle to his victim’s forehead and blew out his brains as he had his injured horse’s earlier.
He realized suddenly that he wasn’t alone. A heavyset old man stood shoeless and in his shirtsleeves at the end of the hall, staring openmouthed at the twitching body on the carpet. A blunt gray handgun dangled forgotten at his side. Pierce shot him through the chest at twelve paces. The old man hiccoughed and fell to his knees. Pierce walked past him, not bothering to turn to see him collapse the rest of the way.
There were no back stairs. Testament peered around the corner, saw no guns waiting for him, and walked boldly down the staircase gripping the Colt. The clerk raised his hands jerkily and backed away. He was all eyes and mouth and white shirt showing between his vest and belt. Covering him, Pierce backed across the lobby and sidled out the front doorâstraight into a crowd pressing toward the entrance.
Again the panic rose; again he forced it down by main will. Most of the people couldn’t see the gun, and those who could were unable to get away from it because of the pressure from behind. He pointed it skyward and loosed a shot. Shouts went up, a woman screamed. A path opened before him. He dived through.
The morning street traffic was at its height. He narrowly missed being run down by a brewer’s dray when he stepped off the walk almost into its path. The driver hurled a curse at him and sawed at his panicky team’s traces as it rocked past, spraying Pierce with mud and slush.
Out of the corner of one eye the fugitive spotted a flash of blue uniform between two horses passing on the street. Denver had an organized police force. Pierce lost his head and fired. A horse screamed and reared, struck behind the shoulder. Pierce started running down the street, splashing through puddles ankle deep. His boots squished.
Alerted by the reports, two uniformed policemen came sprinting along the walk toward the corner, guns exposed. One of them saw Pierce and shouted. Pierce pointed his Navy Colt and squeezed the trigger. The hammer snapped on an empty shell. The officers returned fire, one explosion echoing the other, kish-bang, like a musket report. A hot fist slammed into Pierce’s side. He gasped, faltered, and almost fell, but his momentum saved him; he caught his balance on the run. The walks were as busy as the street. The officers couldn’t risk shooting again for fear of hitting an innocent bystander.
Pierce’s side was wet. He felt himself weakening. His breath sawed in his throat and his chest ached. He bounded up onto the walk, nearly tripping over the edge, and ran into a slot between buildings scarcely broad enough for a man. For once in his life he thanked God for making him small. He threw away the useless Colt and clawed the two-shot derringer out of his pocket. His blood pattered on the alley’s unpaved surface.
The passage opened into a courtyard ringed solidly with brick buildings.
He paused, looking around wildly. Then he dashed across, his boots slipping and sliding on loose gravel, seized the tarnished brass handle of a delivery door, and yanked. It didn’t give. His side tore open and more blood dumped down his hip. He fell against the door, whimpering.
Gravel crunched behind him. He wheeled, fired. The .41 slug sped past an old man in a greasy white apron standing in an open doorway off the alley holding a full trash can. The old man froze, gaping at the armed and bloody stranger. Pierce cried out and started for the opening. Releasing the can with a crash, the old man leapt back inside. The door slammed. Testament was halfway across the courtyard when he heard the lock snap. He came to a stop in the middle, head down, the belly gun hanging loose in his hand. He scarcely had strength to hold it.
Rapid footsteps entered the alley. He lifted his head and saw blue at the other end.
“‘And it came to pass, when all the kings which were on this side Jordan, in the hills, and in the valleys, and in all the coasts of the great sea over against Lebanon, the Hittite, and the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite, heard thereof; that they gathered themselves together, to fight with Joshua and with Israel, with one accord….’”
He mouthed the words, unable to give them voice as he raised the derringer in both hands to his mouth. He had one bullet left. It was enough.
At the livery stable, the doctor awaited his escort.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Blood Trail
They rode hard for almost ten miles in a wide swing north before Race felt safe enough to dismount and see to his cousin’s injury. By that time Merle was dizzy from loss of blood and hugging his horse’s neck to keep from pitching off. The saddle and the animal’s right flank glistened glaring red from the leakage.
While Shirley and the squaw watched, Race cut open Merle’s gory pants with a knife and used his kerchief to clear the wound. He cut away some more material, did some more cleaning, and laughed. His voice was high and nervous.
“Uncle John always said there wasn’t nothing wrong with you that getting shot in the ass wouldn’t cure,” he said. “Reckon now we’ll find out if he was right.”
“Didn’t get it in the ass.” Merle sounded drunk. His words were slurred and hard to understand.
“That’s where it come out, then. Same thing. Lean on me and we’ll see to getting you down. I got doctoring to do.”
“No, leave him there.”
Race glared at Shirley, who had spoken. Woman Watching was readjusting the reins around the cripple’s right stump. “You want him to bleed to death?”
“You want him to get shot again when that posse shows up and finds him still here?” countered Shirley. “You take him off that saddle, he’ll stiffen up and you’ll never get him back on.”
“He’s right,” Merle said. “Do what you can for me here.”
The squaw got down and helped clean the wound. Merle shuddered when they poured whiskey directly into the raw hole but didn’t cry out.
“You shouldn’t of shot the lawman, Merle.” Race poked a strip torn from his shirt into each end of the wound to staunch the bleeding and tied a makeshift bandage around the thigh. “Now it’s the knot if they get us.”
“They won’t get us.”
His speech was almost normal. Race looked up at his cousin. Merle’s eyebrows and moustache stood out startlingly against his pale face. But his eyes were clear and direct.
“They won’t get us,” he repe
ated.
“Goddamn Colorado weather,” said George.
It was growing warmer. The snow seemed to recede before the Indian’s eyes. What looked like hoof prints from a little distance turned out close up to be bare clumps of earth and grass around prairie dog holes, and the hoof prints themselves were losing shape so that when they did appear, he had to step down and study them before he could decide in which direction they were going. The pink drops of blood helped where they had landed on snow, but against the dead brown grass they were all but invisible. Such things had been much easier to see ten years ago.
Edwards pondered their surroundings. There were more buttes and the Continental Divide was taking definition to the west. “Chinooks blow in warm from Utah this time of year.”
“Goddamn Utah weather, then. This way.” George mounted and swung his horse’s head northwest. The Mexicans followed morosely, Diego dwarfing the light pony he preferred to Paco’s big American stud.
“They got to stop sometime,” Edwards observed. “Wounded one’s about bled out.”
“Blood’s like milk; you spill a pint and clean up two. If that bullet clipped an artery or anything else important, we’d have come across a corpse by now.”
They rode for a time without conversing. The cloud cover was ragged and the sun slid in and out of view, warming the grassland and coaxing steam from the horses’ withers. Finally Edwards spoke.
“Ain’t you the least bit curious as to why the Cap’n turned the works over to you and stayed behind?”
“He’s got a wounded man, or didn’t you notice?” The Crow kept his eyes on the trail ahead.
“He’s had wounded men before. He never elected hisself to stay with any of ‘em.”
“If I had a choice between slapping this saddle with my ass for the next God-knows-how-many days or warming it next to a campfire, I’d do the same.”
“The hell you would. And neither would the Cap’n.”
Reluctantly George looked at him. Edwards was the only man in the world capable of needling the Indian into doing something he didn’t want to do. “All right. Why?”
“You know why,” said the sharpshooter, grinning, and fell back.
George didn’t press the point. Most of his life had been spent in the company of white men, and yet he was no closer to understanding them now than he had been the day he was kicked out of the mission school.
St. John kindled a fire out of the wood the Buckners had left behind and watched Rawlings turning his head this way and that in its orange glow. His breathing was rapid but strong, his pulse steady. He had stopped bleeding. His forehead was cool to the touch, but it was still too early for the fever of infection to set in if it was going to. St. John had his flask ready in case the Pinkerton awoke. His strict rule against drinking on manhunt didn’t apply to medicinal use.
The sun was climbing. He wondered where Pierce was with that doctor. Already he regretted bowing to Edwards’ wishes and sending the Sunday school teacher in his place. Testament was a killer, not an angel of mercy. But St. John had been too angry with himself for hurling the detective into danger to think straight, which was evidence enough that he was no longer the man for this work. Earp and Masterson had recognized the signs in themselves and retired East. Heck Thomas hadn’t been heard from in a spell, and Bill Tilghman was riding a desk in a sheriff’s office in Oklahoma. Only he, St. John, was still sitting posse. It made a man feel alone. He sipped at the flask for company. He sipped again, and then he stopped sipping and started drinking.
The container was empty by the time the doctor showed up, without Pierce.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Magdalene’s Children, II
Direct sunlight was cruel to Chloe Ziegler, plowing deep furrows between her nose and mouth and under her eyes faded to a glass blue, exposing the roughness of her complexion and the taut strings beneath her chin. Race, who knew what she was like between sheets, had never thought of her as an old woman, and in fact she was only ten years his senior, but in her plain blouse and skirt with the peeling paint of her country establishment at her back she looked like one of those frontier matrons he remembered from his Kansas childhood, worn out while still in their twenties from work and poverty and bears in the garden. Or maybe it was just him, and the fact that he had left his youth in the wash along with his provisions and camping equipment.
A few of her girls had started to come out with her when the mounted quartet came to a stop in front of the porch, but she had shooed them back inside and now they were watching from the doorway and through the curtains on the ground-floor windows. Merle, slumped over, half conscious, kept his seat with the support of Jim Shirley on one side and the Cherokee woman on the other. Their horses’ sides heaved, slick with lather.
“I can’t take any of you inside if you’re being chased,” Chloe told Race. Her head barely reached above his stirrup. “No one, not even Merle. You know that.”
“I know. I don’t want that.” But he did, even though he knew it would be unwise to accept. The offer would have been enough to bring back some of his former confidence. “I need stores, enough for ten days. We had to leave most of what we had.”
“Four people. You’ll be needing a packhorse too.”
He shook his head. “Slow us down. We’ll get what we can in the saddlebags and carry what’s left in our pockets. Small stuffâsardines and like that. No flour or bacon.”
“You can get fresh horses down the road. Erik Meyer’s ranch. But don’t say it was me sent you.” She called for one of the girls and sent her to the storehouse out back for the requested items.
Race said, “We can do with alcohol too, and stuff for bandages.”
Chloe went inside. Waiting, Race revolved first one arm in its socket, then the other, working out the kinks. It was another holdover from his cowboy past, and anyway he’d pulled his right shoulder slightly swinging into the saddle that morning. He was conscious of the whores watching him. Then he glimpsed his reflection in one of the curtained windows and knew why. Haggard and unshaven, his eyes burning holes from lack of steady sleep, the face of a forty-year-old desperado glared back at him.
The girl who had gone out back returned dragging a clanking gunnysack filled with flat tins of fish in oil and cans of peas and beans and peaches. After the others had stuffed every available pouch and pocket, she brought the nearly empty bag to Race, who tied it around his saddle horn. The girl had tan eyes and natural red hair and a dust of freckles across the tops of her cheeks. Her gaze met his boldly and he sighed.
“No time, sweetheart.”
“Get back in the house.”
Chloe was back, carrying a bundle wrapped in a worn towel. The redhead turned startled eyes on her and fled up the flagstone path to the door.
“Bitches in heat,” muttered the madam, handing up the package. “Sometimes I think I’m running a kennel.”
“Thanks, Chloe.”
“We was out of alcohol so I put in a bottle of peroxide. Some of the ladies will just have to put up with black roots till I get to town.”
He put it away in his saddle bag. “What do I owe you?”
“A thousand dollars.”
He jumped. Startled, his horse snorted and fiddle-footed. He patted its neck.
“I could hold you up for a lot more, the risk I’m taking,” she said. “You’re lucky I like you. I could of sent you down the road in your long-handles or butted your face with the door when you came asking. Back in Leadville they’d of hit you over the head and trussed you up for the reward.”
“Appears I’m swimming in good fortune.” He got out his roll and peeled off a thousand. She accepted the bills without looking.
“I told you before to put them dime novels out of your head. If I had a heart of gold, someone would of cut it out and sold it for whiskey years ago.”
The four turned back into the road. Merle swayed in his saddle but hung on. Bringing up the rear, her loose hat brim covering the back of her n
eck and much of her long black hair, Woman Watching resembled a mounted Buddha in occidental attire. Chloe returned to the house without looking back.
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” St. John observed, “though I never expected Testament to be the one to bust the cap on himself.”
“Well, that’s the rumor. I heard the shots, but I wasn’t there to see it.”
A grayheaded man with a full white beard and slightly protuberant eyes behind bifocals, the doctor was built along simian lines, with a tremendous chest, long powerful arms, but very thin short legs that gave him a deformed look overall. He had hopped down from the wagon seat with a quick, apelike movement and squatted with his black bag next to the wounded man after scarcely a grunt of greeting to St. John. While unbuttoning Rawlings’ shirt to get at the injury he had described Midian Pierce’s fate in terse phrases. Death didn’t interest him nearly as much as the struggle to avoid it.
“What do you think, Doc?”
“I think you’re drunk. I also think I don’t like being called Doc.” He probed the flesh around the wound with alcohol-soaked fingers. “My Christian name’s Titus, but no one’s called me that since my wife left me. I answer to Dr. Urquhart, or, if you prefer, just plain Doctor.”
“All right then, Just Plain Doctor. What do you think?”
He cleaned and re-bandaged the hole. “He’s young and in good physical condition. He should survive the journey back to town. Beyond that I can’t say.”
“I’m paying you to say.”
Urquhart glanced up at the old lawman, standing over him with legs spread, his fists down at his sides. “I’m a physician, not a clairvoyant. The bullet is very close to his heart. I won’t know until I get inside what damage I might have to do to get it out.”
“I always figured it was a doctor’s job to repair other folks’ damages, not make new ones.”
“How can I explain it?” Urquhart sighed. “There is a network of major arteries leading to the heart. Picture a stone wedged between very thin glass vessels. I gather you’re some kind of peace officer, from which I assume your hand is steady. Yet could you predict with certainty that you could remove that stone without rupturing any of the vessels that surround it?”
Mr. St. John Page 16
