Hell's Gate

by William W. Johnstone

  But then Flintlock turned quickly as he heard a dull thump . . . thump . . . thump . . . that seemed to come from beyond the narrow, latticed window opposite the bed. Flintlock raised his revolver and padded across the creaking floor on bare feet. Cobwebs hung from the window frame like the thin, gray hair of a hag, and the diamond-shaped glass was old and opaque. A raven fluttered against the window, beating with its wings as though trying to force its way inside.

  “It was you making the noise, huh? Were you spying on me, bird?” Flintlock said.

  The lattice window frame was stiff from age and mold and Flintlock had to push hard on it to get it open. The raven had perched on a narrow ledge but the opening glass pushed it off and the bird cawed indignantly and flapped away on the blustering wind.

  Flintlock was not familiar with the ways of ravens and dismissed the incident as the bird’s attempt to get inside out of the wind and nighttime cold. He leaned forward to pull the casement back in place and then stopped as something outside caught his eye, a glint of yellow light on the ground below. Flintlock stuck his head out of the window, blinked and looked again. A human figure stared up at him that he finally recognized as a man wearing a floppy black hat and an ankle-length cloak. A lantern had been at the man’s feet and now he lifted it and raised it high so that half his face was illuminated. It was a long, narrow face, the eye sockets and the hollows of the cheeks in deep shadow. The man smiled, and in the lantern-lit darkness Flintlock saw the gleam of exceptionally white teeth.

  “Hey, what are you doing down there?” Flintlock yelled. “State your name and your intentions.”

  The cloaked man did something strange. Something very strange and unnerving. He reached under his cloak, grinned and produced a large carving knife that he proceeded to hone on a sharpening steel. Even from his perch at the top of the house Flintlock heard the harsh, rhythmic rasp of metal on metal, a sound Flintlock associated with a butcher’s shop, not a cloaked man in the wilderness in the middle of the night.

  “You wait right there!” Flintlock yelled. “I want to talk with you.”

  The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed three as he ran down most of the stairs and, as was fast becoming his habit, tripped and noisily fell the rest of the way. His Colt was dashed out of his hand and skittered across the marble floor. Hurting bad, Flintlock rose and retrieved the errant revolver. Above him on the stair landing he heard Lucy Cully’s sharp cry of alarm and O’Hara cursing in English and Apache.

  Flintlock didn’t pause to speak to them. He sprinted for the door, threw it open and ran outside into the night. But he slowed considerably when the soles of his bare feet came in contact with gravel not unmixed with vicious sandburs. As he grimaced in pain and danced a little jig, O’Hara, wearing boots, hat and gunbelt with his long johns, ran up to him and said, “Sam, what happened? I heard you fall down the stairs . . . again.”

  “Other side of the house,” Flintlock said. “Man in a cloak. Hurry.”

  O’Hara didn’t wait for further explanation—he took off at a run and Flintlock watched him go.

  “Sam, are you all right?” Lucy said. Her hair was tied back by a blue ribbon and she wore a demure cotton robe over a low-cut nightdress that showed considerable cleavage, and once again Flintlock was struck by how contrary was this woman.

  “Burrs,” Flintlock said. “I need my boots.”

  “What happened, Sam?” Lucy said. “You poor thing, I heard you fall down the stairs.”

  Using as few words as possible Flintlock told the girl about the man in the floppy hat and cloak. He didn’t mention the raven or the butcher’s knife.

  Lucy frowned. “This is a most singular mystery,” she said. “What would he be doing all the way out here on the crag in the dead of night? Oh, here is Mr. O’Hara come back. Maybe he can tell us.”

  O’Hara had little to say other than that the strange visitor was definitely a grown man wearing hard-soled moccasins. There were other tracks, possibly of two men, back toward the edge of the crag, both of them wearing moccasins.

  “The cloaked man had no way of knowing that I was in the room at the top of the house,” Flintlock said. “Why did he stand where he did?”

  “He hoped to be seen by anyone looking out a window,” O’Hara said.

  “Why?” Flintlock said.

  “To put a scare into him or her,” O’Hara said. “Whoever he was, I think he wants us out of the house.”

  “Was he a ghost, a restless spirit?” Lucy said, her pretty eyes wide.

  “Ghosts don’t leave behind moccasin prints,” O’Hara said. “Depend on it, he was as human as you or I, Lucy.”

  The girl shivered in the night air, the thin stuff of her robe no protection against the cold and keening wind.

  “I think we’d better get inside,” Flintlock said. “Whoever he was, I ran him off and he won’t be back tonight.”

  O’Hara helped Flintlock back into the house by clearing gravel and burrs out of the way with his boots. Lucy went to bed immediately, making her way with a candelabra that cocooned her in a rising halo of light.

  “I need to talk with you, O’Hara,” Flintlock said after the girl’s bedroom door closed. “Come into the kitchen.”

  Both men sat at the table and Flintlock took time to build and light a cigarette before he told O’Hara about the cloaked man’s butcher’s knife and sharpening steel.

  O’Hara took in this information without a visible reaction and then said, “Those boys we buried under the rockfall—”

  “Had all the flesh cut from their bones,” Flintlock said. “Maybe the man with the big knife is the ranny who done the cutting. It may have been Jasper Orlov himself I saw out there. And you saw hard-soled moccasin tracks, the same ones that were at the killing of Pike’s boys.”

  “The Tanner kid says Orlov might be a legend,” O’Hara said. “But maybe he’s not. He could be as real as you and me.”

  “If Orlov is real and not just a big story, I’m willing to bet there are dodgers on him. He killed a Ranger, and the Texas rewards could be huge,” Flintlock said. “When we get done here we’ll go look him up.”

  O’Hara rose to his feet. “We’ll talk about that another day, Sam,” he said. “I’m going back to bed.”

  “You got a thin, lumpy mattress like mine?” Flintlock said.

  “No. Mine is about a foot thick and soft as swan’s down,” O’Hara said. “When Lucy showed me to my room she said the bed was a four-poster and had the second-most comfortable mattress in the house, hers being the first.”

  “Am I hearing right? She showed you to a room that has her second-best bed and a mattress a foot thick?” Flintlock said.

  “She sure did,” O’Hara said. “And a feather comforter. She said a cavalier like me needs his rest.”

  Flintlock was silent and glared at O’Hara, too damned irritated to speak.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Everybody in Mansion Creek knew about Tobias Fynes’s kept woman and how he abused her, but he was too rich and powerful to be openly criticized. Half the people in town owed him money, including the publisher of the Apache County Herald, the newspaper that could have given any such censure a voice. Editor and reporter Roland Ives was a hopeless morphine addict, a dependency he’d carried home from the War Between the States after he lost his left arm at Vicksburg, and he stepped warily around the fat banker. Fynes had the power to break him by ordering the town merchants to withhold their advertising. Such as it was, the income from adverts announcing ice cream socials or women’s shoes at cost was a pittance, but it covered Ives’s simple needs. The town physician, Dr. Theodora Weller, like Ives, a piece of driftwood cast up on an uncaring frontier shore, supplied him with his morphine and when their separate pains became too much for either of them to bear, got drunk with him.

  “It was the usual thing, he told me, to tend to Estelle and then keep my mouth shut,” Dr. Weller said. She was a tall woman, somewhere in her midthirties, with beautiful, wonderfully
expressive black eyes and a finely boned face that was too gaunt to be pretty. “Someday I’ll kill him, Roland.”

  “Not that, Theo,” Ives said. “Why would you hang for such a man?”

  Theodora managed a thin smile, showing good teeth. “What do I have to lose? My brilliant career as a failed female physician?”

  Ives let that go and said, “Was Estelle hurt bad this time?”

  “He never hits her where it shows. Her ribs were badly bruised and she had trouble breathing.”

  “What was the excuse, this time?”

  “Fynes accused her of making eyes at Hogan Lord. But he doesn’t need an excuse. The fat hog beats her because he enjoys it.”

  The interior of the newspaper office smelled musty, of ink, newsprint and dust. “Estelle can never return your feelings, Theo,” Ives said. “She’s not . . . what you are.”

  “My love, you mean? I know that. Sometimes I drink too much because I know that.”

  Ives said, “How is Fynes’s wife?”

  “Ruth is bedridden and wants to die, but she won’t give him the satisfaction. She hangs on even though her breast cancer is down to the bone and causes her unimaginable pain.”

  “She takes morphine?”

  “Yes, but to totally ease her suffering I’d need to inject her with five hundred milligrams every fifteen minutes. There isn’t that much morphine in the territory, so she suffers. Ruth will turn twenty-seven this month but she looks like a ninety-year-old woman. She won’t see her next birthday.”

  “When I first came to Mansion Creek I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen,” Ives said. He smiled. “I think I fell a little bit in love with her.”

  “She’s beautiful no longer and Tobias badly wants rid of her.”

  Ives reached into his desk drawer and produced a bottle of Old Crow and two glasses. He poured for Theodora and himself and then said, “There’s a new gal in town, Lucy Cully, old Mechan’s niece.”

  “I saw her, very pretty. Tom Singer over at the hardware store said she’s the new owner of the mansion out there on the mesa. Tom was pretty confused about what’s happening, but he said Fynes hired a couple of ruffians to guard the girl while she looks over the place and makes her mind up about whether or not she wants to live there. Apparently her intended is a musician or artist of some kind and he’ll join her later.”

  “Her husband-to-be is a poet, a friend of Walt Whitman, but he has a weak constitution and Lucy thinks the clean Western air will do him good,” Ives said.

  “Another patient,” Theodora said. “If he can abide seeing a female doctor.” She sampled her bourbon, lit a thin black cheroot and then said, “They say old Mechan’s troubled spirit haunts the place. Maybe the girl is afraid of ghosts.”

  “She needn’t be,” Ives said. “One of the ruffians Fynes hired is a well-known troublemaker by the name of Sam Flintlock. The other is a murderous half-breed who goes by the name O’Hara. According to what Hogan Lord says, Flintlock is a bounty hunter and sometime train robber. He ran with the James boys and then John Wesley Hardin and that hard Texas crowd and the moccasin talk is that he’s killed sixty white men, though Lord says he doubts that’s true.”

  “Why would a gunman like Hogan Lord tell you all this, the pot calling the kettle black, perhaps?” Theodora said. “I treated his broken ankle a while back and he said he doesn’t mind seeing a woman doctor. I thought that was big of him.”

  “It’s my job to interview everybody in town,” Ives said. “Especially a famous gunslinger like Lord, the man who put the crawl on Buckskin Frank Leslie.”

  “Did Lord ever tell you why he came to Mansion Creek in the first place?”

  “Only that he’s working for Fynes in an advisory capacity.”

  “Advising him about what?”

  Ives smiled. “Well, since Fynes is acting as Lucy Cully’s lawyer, maybe it’s how to find the treasure that’s rumored to be buried near her place.”

  “I treated Mechan Cully for an eye infection once and he didn’t have two pennies to rub together. I doubt there’s a treasure of any kind up on that cap rock,” Theodora said.

  Ives smiled. “Only an old, rickety house.”

  Theodora nodded. “That just about sums it up. Why anyone would want to live there is beyond me.” She shrugged. “Unless it’s for the view.”

  * * *

  When Tobias Fynes got there, red-faced and sweating, Hogan Lord was already seated in the office at the rear of the Mansion Creek Bank & Trust.

  The fat man threw himself into the leather chair behind his desk and wiped off his face with a red bandanna. “Sorry I’m late, Hogan,” he said. “I had some trouble with Estelle.”

  “Again?” Lord said.

  “She’s never learned that I will not stand for sass and backtalk from a kept woman.”

  “From a whore,” Lord said.

  “Yes, she was a whore before and she’ll be one again after I’ve had enough of her,” Fynes said. “And the way things are going, that will be very soon.”

  “If you don’t kill her first,” Lord said.

  “The thought has entered my mind a time or two, but I won’t swing for her.”

  Fynes nodded to the drinks trolley. “Pour yourself a whiskey, Hogan, and one for me. My damned women have me all used up.”

  “That’s the trouble of living with two of them,” Lord said as he poured the drinks. “I’ve always found one woman at a time is hard enough to handle.”

  The chair creaked as Fynes shifted his massive bulk, his stomach as big and round as a beer barrel. He mopped his face again, his breath wheezing. The thick gold watch chain across his belly could have supported a farmer and his family for several years. “Estelle does little things for me,” he said. “It’s the only reason I keep her around.” A brewer’s dray rumbled past the office window and from somewhere children yelled and screamed in play. Fynes took a glass from Lord and said, “I’m not a patient man, Hogan. I want the Cully house torn apart and the treasure map found.”

  The gunman smiled. “Tobias, it’s only been one night. Give it a few days. Lucy Cully hasn’t had time to get scared yet.”

  “She’s stubborn, Hogan.” He jabbed a finger at Lord. “I warn you, I’ve read the signs and I think she’s stubborn.”

  “She’ll come around. A few days and nights in that place and she’ll be running to you, begging you to buy it. The only person crazy enough to live on the top of that crag was old Mechan. Hell, come a big storm and the place might blow away.”

  “Not before I find the map,” Fynes said. A pretty woman in a plain cotton day dress who held a parasol above her blond head against the afternoon sun, walked past the window, hesitated for a few moments, long enough to force a smile for Fynes, and then walked on, her face flushed with humiliation. The banker touched the tip of his tongue to his thick top lip. The woman’s name was Edith Cooke and she lived a mile out of town with her sodbuster husband. Fynes held the mortgage on the farm and after two bad growing seasons and no payments he’d threatened to foreclose. Desperate, Mrs. Cooke had traded mattress time for a few more months to pay. Fynes smiled as the woman continued along the boardwalk. He’d enjoyed the dear lady for a while but now was getting bored with her and he planned to foreclose anyway.

  “Tobias?” Hogan Lord said.

  The fat man turned his attention to the gunman. “Sorry, I was woolgathering. Now, where was I?”

  “The treasure map,” Lord said.

  “Ah, yes, the treasure map. As I told you I’m an impatient man and giving Lucy Cully seven days to make up her mind is too long. Another couple of days will suffice, and if she doesn’t come screaming back to town by then I will take other measures.”

  Lord knew exactly what Fynes meant by “other measures,” but he asked the question anyway. “You mean kill her?”

  “There may be no other way, Hogan.” Fynes steepled his fat fingers and said, “We searched and searched and failed to find the map, remembe
r?”

  “I remember.”

  “Why, of course you do, Hogan. It was a waste of time. The only way is to start at the top of the house and dismantle it board by board until the map is found. There are plenty of loafers we can hire for that kind of work, especially when I offer a substantial bonus to whoever finds it.”

  “You’re taking a lot on trust, Tobias,” Lord said. “A man could find it and just stick it in his pocket.” Without a trace of irony, he said, “Plenty of crooks out there.”

  “Every worker leaving the job for the day will be searched,” Fynes said. “That will be a condition of employment and where your friend Nathan Poteet and his cutthroats come in. They will do the searching. Any man who objects or looks suspicious will be shot and his body thrown from the crag.” The banker’s grin was not pleasant. “The luckiest one will land on top of Lucy Cully. Hah!” He waited a few moments and frowned at Lord. “Hogan, I made a joke.”

  “And a good joke it was, Tobias,” Lord said, smiling. “I’m laughing inside.”

  Fynes’s scowl betrayed the fact that he was not satisfied with the gunman’s answer, but he had to move on to other, more pressing business. “Of course Flintlock and the other thug, the breed, will have to go before demolition starts. That is very important, don’t you think?”

  “Important enough that I was about to mention it,” Lord said. “But Sam Flintlock is no bargain and neither is O’Hara.”

  The banker’s impatience grew. “Will Poteet take care of things?”

  “If the money is right.”

  “He’ll be well paid.” Fynes made a gun of his forefinger and said, “Bang, bang.” He performed a credible throwing motion. “And then it’s over the side for Mr. Flintlock and the breed.”

  Lord nodded and rose to his feet. “I’ll get in touch with Poteet.”

  A moment later Hogan Lord proved to Tobias Fynes that he was worth every penny of the money the banker paid him.

  * * *