Fatal Elixir

by William L. DeAndrea

  Which reminded me of something.

  “Make sure you can reach the ties on your ankles,” I said.

  Blacke was getting irritated. He was enjoying being up on Posy, and he didn’t want to be reminded of his infirmities.

  “I can reach them.”

  “Humor me,” I said patiently. “Try it.”

  He did, and he was right. Good. One less thing to worry about.

  “Hand me the rifle,” he said.

  Without a word, Clayton Henry handed the Winchester repeater to him. He seemed glad to be rid of it. Blacke stuck it in a scabbard on the right side of the horse. Peretti hadn’t had to add that. It was a relic of Blacke’s lawman days.

  I wasn’t used to looking up at Blacke’s face. He was commanding enough in a wheelchair. Now he was positively imperial.

  “Well?” he demanded. “What are we waiting for?”

  I mounted Domingo, and we rode out.

  29

  I’M NOT SURE I have ever fully understood how Blacke managed to arrange that night’s rendezvous in the first place. His years as a lawman provided him with a network of friends, spies, and informers that he still somehow managed to retain. I have asked him to make me more fully aware of the workings of these people, but he has always refused, for two reasons—to protect the people themselves, and to protect me from having to associate with the likes of them.

  When I consider the persons he has thrown me together with, that second reason becomes laughable, but I have never been able to budge him.

  Roughly, though, it worked like this.

  Blacke learned from one of his shadowy informants that Paul Muller had an informant of his own in town, not an accomplice exactly, but someone who could get messages to the man for a certain fee. Blacke’s man said he didn’t know precisely who this person might be, but he could think of four or five possibilities.

  Fine, Blacke had said. You get around and whisper to each of the possibilities that Booker is willing to give him a clear shot at the prisoners if he can figure out how to do it without getting his ass in a sling. He’s getting tired of trying to hold this town together, and I don’t blame him.

  Blacke’s informant said he would whisper in a few appropriate ears.

  “Wouldn’t it be interesting,” I said when Blacke had told me this part of the story, “if your informant and Muller’s informant turned out to be the same fellow?”

  “Mind your business,” Blacke said. “I told you you don’t want anything to do with these people.”

  Interesting or not, I received what I considered confirmation for my guess when less than five hours later, a note was stuffed in the door of the jail. It read simply:

  9 P.M. BISHOP’S ROCK. ALONE. M.

  Bishop’s Rock was an outcropping on the prairie east of town, not far from where Lucius Jenkins and I had been ambushed.

  When I showed the note to Blacke he said, “Written in ink.”

  “You weren’t expecting more carpenter’s pencil, were you?”

  He smiled. “Not this time, no. But I was expecting him to choose a meeting place something like Bishop’s Rock. You’ll get there early and wait on the south side of it. Don’t let yourself get moved from there.”

  “Why?” I demanded. “Is there something lucky about being killed on the south side of Bishop’s Rock? An old Indian superstition, or something?”

  “No,” Blacke replied. “There’s something lucky about having me on the top of the hill that faces the south side of Bishop’s Rock, covering you.”

  “You?”

  “Sure. You didn’t think I was going to send you out there alone, did you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did.”

  Blacke shook his head.

  “Booker, as a town lawman, you’re pretty adequate. As a writer, you are downright cogent. But as a strategist, you stink.”

  “But how are you going to get out there?”

  “I’ve got it all worked out. But it has to be me, don’t you see? I’ll be the last person in the world Muller would expect to be out there. His informant will have told him the whereabouts of everyone else who might help you, but even if he sees me leaving town, he’ll never get word to Muller in time. So you’ll meet Muller, and you’ll talk to him.”

  “Um, not wishing to sound bloodthirsty or anything, as long as you’ve got him covered, why don’t you just plug him as soon as he shows up? He is a killer, you know.”

  “Because,” Blacke said patiently, “I want you to talk to him.”

  At this point, things seemed so fantastic I almost forgot to be afraid.

  “What,” I said, “do you want me to say?”

  And he told me.

  If Muller was as good as his word, I had only a short time now before I’d be saying those words. I split up from Blacke some miles back, since he wanted to ensconce himself on the hilltop unseen. One thing I was worried about was the fact that Blacke would have to undo his ropes and belt and simply fall to the ground from Posy’s back. Another was that he would never be able to get remounted by himself.

  Typical, I thought. Here the man was sending me out to get killed, and I was worried about him.

  I checked my watch. Five minutes to nine. I clicked the cover shut and put it back in my pocket. Maybe, I tried to tell myself, he wouldn’t show up.

  That delusion lasted about thirty seconds.

  A voice came from the darkness, a strangely soft one. “Take off your gun belt and throw it away.”

  I was loath to do it, but Blacke had told me to go along with Muller as far as I had to.

  It occurred to me at this point that Blacke could be up on that hill with a Gatling gun and a regiment of cavalry, commanded by my father in person, and it would do me not the slightest bit of good if Muller took it into his head to shoot me from behind the rock. He must have ridden up so as to be blocked from my view by it, no doubt the reason he picked it for a rendezvous in the first place.

  I knew he hadn’t been lying in wait for me, because I had walked around the whole thing when I first arrived.

  I went for the buckle of the gun belt.

  “Slowly, now,” Muller said.

  I did it very slowly. I raised it out to arm’s length so he could see it in the moonlight, then tossed it away.

  “Good,” came the voice, and it sounded as if it honestly approved of me, at least so far. “Now turn around and take off your coat.”

  “It’s going to get chilly now that the sun’s down,” I protested.

  “You’ll be a lot colder with holes in you. I just want to make sure you’ve got nothing up your sleeve.”

  I certainly hoped I did, but in the more literal sense in which Muller meant it, I was perfectly happy to humor him.

  In my white shirt and silver vest in the moonlight, I must have been a truly superb target.

  “All right,” I said. “Do I get to see you now?”

  “You get to see more than that,” he said, and to my surprise, out of the darkness flew the stumbling figure of a woman. Jennie Murdo had been flung from behind the rock and fell at my feet.

  I bent to help her. She looked up at me with a face that showed more misery than any I had ever seen. Whiter streaks in the grime that covered it made it look as if a constant flow of tears had eroded channels for themselves.

  She said nothing, and as soon as I helped her to her feet, she stood away from me, backing away until her husband told her to stop.

  “What is she doing here, Muller?” I asked. “I thought our talk was supposed to be private.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “This is decision night for me.”

  With that, he made his first decision, to step out from behind the rock. At last, after having read, heard, and written about him, after having seen a corpse of his making and almost been killed myself by him, there he was.

  My first reaction was to be shocked at how short he was. He was tiny. A foot shorter than I was, an inch or two shorter than his wife. This
was not the sort of man to terrorize the West.

  But that first impression held only for a second. Because however small, the buckskin-clad figure before me radiated power. It was there in the broad shoulders, in the aggressive, forward-leaning stance, and in the eyes that were visibly blue even in the pale light of the moon. Those eyes held anger and a trace of madness. They were the eyes of a man who had already done much, and who might do anything.

  I had been doing my best to convince myself that the proposition Blacke had told me to offer the man was logical, reasonable, and the best Muller could expect from the rest of his life, considering how he had lived it so far.

  Now I knew that none of those things mattered a damn to the man. Except while setting up and executing a crime, I doubt the man had ever looked forward more than five minutes.

  “This is decision night,” he said again. “This is the night I work it all out. What I do about the rest of the bastards who killed my son. What I do about my pretty little whore of a wife.”

  “Ben, I swear I never—”

  “Shut up,” he said. There was no rancor in his voice. He kept talking to his wife, though he never looked at her. “Maybe I even believe you. Who knows? That’s another one of the decisions I have to make. Along with what I’m going to do with Sheriff Booker here.”

  “Deputy,” I said.

  Muller grinned. “Doesn’t make any difference. Lobo Blacke was only a deputy U.S. marshal, and he’s the one put me in jail.”

  Keeping his gun aimed steadily at my midsection, he scratched his jaw with his other hand.

  “You may have noticed,” he said, “that I’m not pondering anything with regard to Blacke. You might be wondering why that is.”

  I was willing to play along.

  “Perhaps because now that he’s a cripple, he’s not worth the trouble,” I suggested.

  Muller shook his head in disappointment. “Hell, no. I’d dig up a corpse and shoot him if I had cause to. No. The reason I’ve got no quarrel with Blacke is that he played fair with me. I robbed the banks, and he tracked me down fairly, faced me, and caught me.

  “Not like the cowards who killed my son. You know, in the time I was around, I never had to whip that kid? He was a good little boy, he had a good ma, and he would have grown up to be something. Maybe I could be remembered as his daddy instead of as ‘the ace of bandits.’ Isn’t that what you called me?”

  The gun seemed to jump a little.

  “I made up a character,” I said. “I just had him do a version of some of the things you did.”

  Muller laughed. It was low and smooth like every other sound he made.

  “Don’t worry, Deputy. I kind of enjoyed it.”

  It occurred to me that he was “kind of enjoying it” right now; that he wouldn’t mind if we stood there chatting all night. I, on the other hand, hungered and thirsted to get to the point. I thought I ought to try to guide the conversation into the proper channel before Blacke went to sleep up there on his hilltop and this whole thing blew up in my face.

  “Well,” I said, “I know one decision you’ve made.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’ve decided what to do about Lucius Jenkins.”

  “Oh, yeah. I decided that long ago. And you saved his life. I’m a mite unhappy about that.”

  “Why did you want to kill him?”

  “Never mind about that.”

  I shook my head. “You’re not making any sense, Muller. You’re determined to kill him, and you’re still protecting him.”

  Muller pursed his lips. “Maybe you better keep talking.”

  “Glad to,” I said. “Jenkins has been the brains behind hundreds of crimes. Payroll jobs, bank robberies, stagecoach hijackings, train robberies. For a cut, he plans the action, arranges for bribes and other expenses, and helps the men who pull the jobs get rid of the loot.”

  “You seem to know a lot,” Muller observed.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jennie Murdo’s hand steal to her mouth. After all she’d been through, there was still something that could shock her.

  “You worked for him, too—”

  “Not for him,” Muller interrupted. “With him. I made my own plans. He helped with some inside knowledge. And as you say, he could turn certificates into hard money faster than any of us could.”

  “When you got caught, you could have sold him out—with evidence—and probably have gotten a lighter sentence. But you didn’t.”

  “No, I did not. Jenkins said he’d see that Jennie and little Buck never wanted for anything. He said he’d see the boy set up in business, or put through a fancy college back east, if he had it in him to go. He said he’d look out for both of them. Instead, he let some bastard trick my wife into giving poison to my son.”

  Jennie Murdo made a sharp intake of breath, like someone who’s just been stabbed.

  “For that,” Paul Muller went on, “he’s going to die.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But he’s got an army surrounding him now, and lawmen from all over the territory are searching for you. There’s only one chance for you to get him now.”

  Muller grinned. “Oh. So you’re the mastermind now, huh?”

  “You don’t need to be a genius to see this, Muller. The one and only way for you to get your revenge on Jenkins is to turn yourself in and testify against him. You know enough about what he’s done to make him die at the end of a rope, money or no money. I’ll bet you do.”

  “Oh, I’ve got plenty enough for that, and I can tell you where to find evidence to back it up. There’s just one trouble with your plan, Deputy. I die at the end of a rope, too. I don’t hanker after that”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t. I can recruit a lot of influence in this territory. Could probably get it commuted to life in prison.”

  “As if that would be any better. Hah.”

  “Would you rather be backshot by some posse member out after a reward?”

  He ignored that. Instead, he said, “This influence you can recruit. You talking about Lobo Blacke?”

  “Him and a few others.”

  “Blacke. And you work for him. I’ll bet this was his idea.”

  “I’m the law in Le Four just now,” I said. “This is my responsibility.”

  “Bull. Blacke is calling your tune. I guess now that he’s only half a man, he’s got to play tricks, not face a man square like he did before.” He sighed. “I guess I’ll have to add him to my list after all. I’ll leave a note on your body that says so.”

  Before he could do anything about it, though, Jennie Murdo said, “No!”

  Again, he spoke to her without ever taking his eyes off me. “Don’t tell me no, little darlin’. I’m still torn about what I’m going to do about you.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know. I’ve been crying and weeping and so weak, you’re afraid to take me along, and you won’t leave me behind, so you figure you have to kill me.”

  “And you gave the poison to my son, don’t forget. Accident or not, a ma’s not supposed to do things like that.”

  “Yes, Ben, you’re right, of course, but at least let me show you I won’t be weeping anymore; let me show you I can be strong.”

  “How?”

  “Let me kill Booker.”

  30

  SHE HELD OUT HER hand and took a step in the direction of her husband.

  “They hang women, too, you know,” Muller said.

  My sentiments exactly. I decided that it was time for Blacke to use his Winchester, but apparently he didn’t. Of course, he couldn’t hear what was going on, and there was nothing about the tableau we made that would look any more dangerous to me from a distance.

  “I know, Ben—Paul. I know that. Once I shot Booker, I would hang if they caught us. You’d know you could trust me. I’d have to stay with you forever and ever, and whatever crazy things I’ve said from hurt and grief, that’s where I’ve always wanted to be.”

  Muller made a face, then shrugged. “
All right, you shoot him. But I’ll hang on to this gun. You use his. It’s over there behind you.”

  She went and picked it up, held it in two hands, and stepped toward me.

  Would Blacke shoot a woman? Could he get two armed people before one of them shot me? I had trusted in the man’s genius, but the genius seemed to be slipping.

  She took another step.

  “Don’t get too close,” Muller said in a tone of friendly advice. “You don’t want him grabbing you, or I’d have to shoot you both. You can’t miss him from there, anyway.”

  She took a tighter grip in the gun and said, “I’m sorry.” For a second, I was looking down the barrel as it came past my face, then spun around rapidly and fired at Muller.

  Hit him, too, in the gut, just below the sternum. From the way the blood gushed out, I knew he’d be dead in seconds, but in those seconds he could do plenty of damage with the gun he still clutched in his hand.

  In fact, with his rapidly glazing eyes, he was trying to draw a bead on his terrified wife, who could now be a statue entitled Horror.

  I ran over and knocked her down, and Paul Muller’s last bullet roared over our heads.

  When the echo of the shot died away, Muller snarled, “Bitch,” and collapsed for the last time.

  I left Jennie Murdo sobbing on the ground and went over to check Muller, just to make sure the ace of bandits didn’t have one last trick up his sleeve.

  He didn’t. I got there just in time to hear his death rattle. I took the gun from his hand (even the grip was astonishingly tight) and turned back to his wife.

  I’d made another mistake, one that, under different circumstances, might have killed me. I had forgotten to take the gun away from her.

  She was on her feet now, still holding the gun. She was pointing it at her head.

  Fatigued from a night of tension, fear, and violence, I was reacting now with exasperation.