Sliphammer

by Brian Garfield

  Tree glowered down at the man in the rocking chair. “What’d he do?”

  “Came right up here and told me he wasn’t scared of me. Now, I don’t mind a man not being scared of me. I never asked him to be scared of me, did I? But I don’t like it when a man sneers at me.”

  “You won’t kill him for a sneer.”

  Earp gave a loud bark of laughter. “Hardly—hardly. But I’ll tell you something, it’s the kids you always have to watch. They’re the ones who haven’t got a layer of sense grown onto their hides. At thirty you start counting up the odds, you start recognizing consequences. At twenty you don’t believe a damned thing can ever happen to you. A tough kid is a lot more dangerous than a tough grown-up man. Which is to say I won’t give your brother as much leeway as I’d give you, because I don’t trust him half as far as you. If that kid makes the wrong move in front of me I won’t wait to find out whether he’s bluffing. I state that as a warning between friends, not a threat to scare you. Understand me?”

  “Aeah.”

  “Then hobble him,” Wyatt Earp said, got up from his chair and went inside.

  Tree stayed put, scowling. Across the street, Sheriff McKesson ambled into sight and gave him a courteous look of mild inquisitiveness. Tree yanked his hat down tight and strode away up the street, breaking out into the brass afternoon sunlight with long-legged strides, tramping his shadow into the ground, heading with enraged aimlessness toward the telegraph office, where he knew there would be no message for him.

  Eight

  “Look at him,” Rafe complained. “Sittin’ up there on that porch like an old lizard lazy in the sun, actin’ like he owned all of Creation. I’d like to bring him down a peg.”

  Caroline said, “You couldn’t beat him in a fair fight and you know it. It’s not smart to needle him, Rafe.”

  “What the hell am I doing here if I can’t lick him? Hell yes I can lick him. He ain’t so tough. Look at him, he’s half asleep—he’s tired and he’s gettin’ old.”

  “He’s thirty-four years old, Rafe.”

  “Which means I’m a dozen years faster than he is. Listen, whose side are you on?”

  They sat at the window table in a miner’s lunchroom. Empty plates sat before them gathering flies. They had wiped up every last drop of gravy with hunks of stone-ground bread. They had almost no money and they had eaten meagerly the past three days, sleeping outside town underneath their wagon; luckily, the afternoon they had arrived the rain quit.

  “I’m on your side, Rafe,” Caroline said. She was using that persuasive tone of voice that always made him pay attention. He took his eves off Wyatt Earp across the street and settled his attention on her face. She said earnestly, “You’ve got to be realistic. You’re no gunfighter. But if Jerr decides to arrest Earp, he’ll know how to go about it so there won’t be a big gunfight. Hell get the drop on the Earp brothers somehow.”

  “He would,” Rafe said flatly.

  “It’s the only smart thing to do. And that’s where you’ll come in. Jerr hasn’t got a soul in this town to take his side, outside of you and me. Once he arrests them he’ll need someone to guard his back against the Earps’ friends. He can’t get them out of town without help. And once you’ve helped him that way, they’ll have to pay you the reward.”

  “Yeah,” Rafe said. “Sure, I guess you’re right. I was just making bluff talk anyway. I know my limitations. I wouldn’t really pick a fight with Earp. Jesus.” He grinned at her. “But by Christ I’m not scared of the bastard either.”

  “I never thought you were.”

  A fat waitress brought two cups of coffee to the table and waited to be paid for the meal. Rafe dug in his pocket and counted out coins with care. The waitress took the money impassively and waddled away. Rafe picked up the steaming cup of foul brew and held it in both hands, blowing across the surface and looking out the window. A small group of men—three or four—had come out onto the porch of the Inter Ocean and ranged themselves alongside Wyatt Earp. He recognized Warren Earp and the mountain-sized strikebreaker, Reese Cooley. A bartender had told Rafe about the big fight in the Inter Ocean Hotel bar, where Sliphammer Tree had wrestled Cooley down. Rafe didn’t like Cooley’s looks at all.

  The group on the porch was looking across the street at something Rafe couldn’t see, something on this side of the street but down the block in the other direction. Cooley and Warren Earp were talking. Wyatt Earp hadn’t stirred in his rocking chair. Cooley walked forward and stood on one leg with the raised second boot propped against the porch rail; only a very big man could do that without losing his balance. Cooley’s right hand wag thumb-hooked over his holstered revolver. His face had narrowed down to a mean stare directed at whatever was on the sidewalk down the street.

  Rafe gulped his coffee down and stood up, pushing his chair away with the backs of his knees. “You stay put,” he said. “I want to see what the fuss is all about.”

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “Sure—sure.” He-headed for the door, weaving a threaded path among tight-crowded tables.

  Warren had come out onto the porch feeling sour-mouthed and unhappy. He was remembering last night, and still feeling hung over from it. He’d made a fool of himself, he’d admitted that, but he still felt rage against the world in general.

  Last night Wyatt and Josie had gone upstairs early. There was no mistaking what they had in mind as a way to pass the time for the rest of the evening. Those two spent a hell of a lot of the time balling it in the sack. It didn’t make Warren angry; it made him envious. Just thinking about it got him horny. He’d had a steady girl back in Ohio, a mousy little seventeen-year-old with underdeveloped breasts and buck-teeth. She wasn’t any world-beater but in the farm country where he lived there wasn’t much choice; there were damned few girls around and not many of them would put out. An awful lot of Bible-thumping back there, patriarchal farmers protecting their daughters’ virginity as if it was crown jewels. But he’d found this one buck-toothed girl and he’d got used to doing it with her every week or two. Now he’d been gone six or seven weeks from Ohio, maybe more, it was hard to remember, and he wanted a woman badly.

  So last night after Wyatt and Josie had gone upstairs grinning at each other, Warren had gone on the prowl, and after he’d panned no pay dirt in three saloons he hit the real mother lode in the fourth: a big cow of a woman she’d been, but she looked ripe and ready, for it, and when he’d sat down next to her she hadn’t objected. It was one of the foul-smelling saloons the miners used; there were half a dozen used-up women in the place, but this one somehow didn’t look like a whore. She sat with heavy thighs spread loose, her big breasts lying on the table, moistening her lips when she looked at him, and after he’d bought her two drinks she’d told him her sad story—she was married to a miner on the night shift; he worked all night underground, and by the time he came home he was too tired to do anything but eat and sleep, and she was sick of it, drinking down here trying to work up the courage to leave him and go back home to Kansas where her folks had a soddy homestead.

  They had both got very drunk together and she had let him take her home. He had no idea what time it was. They had gone into the dismal little shack and made love with hurried urgency on the filthy straw-tick mattress on the floor. It was after that he made the mistake: head wheeling with drink and exhaustion, he had fallen asleep, sprawled across her great mound of a snoring body.

  Maybe it was something that was born into you if you were an Earp—an automatic warning signal built into the brain, like eyes in the back of the head. Wy att had it, he knew; Wyatt always seemed to know everything that went on in back of him. But whatever it was, it had saved his life this morning. He’d woken up, not completely aware of what had awakened him, but instantly and totally alert. He’d looked up and he’d seen the door creak open. The bright shaft of morning sunlight came cruelly inside the shack. The miner stood silhouetted, chest expanding to let out a roar, hefting his miner’s pickax and ch
arging into the shack.

  If Warren hadn’t been awake and alert, he’d have taken the head of that pickax through the back. As it was, he managed to roll off the far side of the mattress and scramble to his feet.

  The miner roared in agonized howls, rushing forward and swinging the ax—but he’d tripped over the big woman and almost lost his balance. The pick came down and hit the floor.

  Warren grabbed the pick by its head; jerked it out of the miner’s fists and thudded the handle into the miner’s belly, pushing with all his weight. The miner let out a whooshing wheeze of breath and sat down, hard, on his wife’s legs. The woman uttered a groggy howl and squirmed. The miner tried to get up. His face was murderous. Warren slammed him across the side of the face with the handle of the pickax. It knocked the miner over on his side. Warren dropped the pick and jumped over the sluggishly stirring woman and ran out of the shack. He hadn’t stopped running till he was all the way back to the Inter Ocean.

  He’d tried to sneak up to his room but of course his luck hadn’t held. Wyatt had intercepted him on the stairs and he’d had to tell Wyatt the whole thing. Wyatt had surprised him by bursting out in a peal of bull-lunged laughter that had shaken the walls; Wyatt had pounded him uproariously on the back and taken him downstairs to breakfast, and insisted on him telling the whole story over again to Josie. She too thought it was the funniest damn thing she’d ever heard.

  All he wanted was to go upstairs, take a bath, put on clean underwear, and sleep off his hangover, but he hadn’t had a chance to do that for another hour: first, nothing would do but that Wayde Cardiff, Reese Cooley, and everybody else in the Inter Ocean had to have the whole story of Warren’s big adventure. Finally, tasting foul and feeling sick and headachy, he’d managed to break away and go upstairs. He’d cleaned up and slept for a few hours and he’d just now come back downstairs, still feeling hung over but believing he might live.

  It was Cooley who caught him at the saloon door, coming through the dining room; Cooley had grabbed him by the arm and hustled him out to the porch.

  Wyatt was there, in the rocking chair. A couple of Cooley’s thugs wen tout just ahead of them and by the time Warren stepped onto the porch the thugs were standing by the porch rail. Cooley said, “Look over yonder, boy.”

  Warren looked downstreet and saw, across the street half a block away, a little group of grim men standing with rifles and shotguns. He recognized Floyd Sparrow and he recognized the miner who’d almost pickaxed him this morning. The other four or five were miners too, one or two being the same ones who had mixed into the fight in the saloon a couple of weeks ago.

  Cooley said, “They lookin’ for war, they gonna git one.”

  Wyatt Earp, without stirring in his chair, said, “I imagine they intend to avenge that woman’s honor. Or at least that’s what one of them has in mind. Sparrow’s just using it for his excuse to get the war going. Warren?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What do you think, boy?”

  “I didn’t rape the bastard’s wife. I only gave her what she asked me for. Man can’t keep his own wife in line, it’s his fault, not mine.”

  “All right. But what do you think you ought to do about this?”

  Sparrow had finished giving instructions to the miners down the street; they fanned out in a line abreast and began to walk forward along the opposite boardwalk, holding their rifles and shotguns ready. Reese Cooley took his boot down from the porch rail and lifted the six-gun out in his fist; Cooley said, “If they aimed to make advantage out of them rifles, they made a mistake comin’ inside handgun range.”

  Wyatt said to his brother, “Well, boy?”

  Warren shook his head. “I’ve gotno fight with them. I’m not afraid, but I don’t want a fight.”

  “Good man,” Wyatt breathed. “Cooley, don’t use that thing unless you have to.”

  Without taking his eyes off the miners, Cooley said, “Fuck that noise. They want their balls shot off, they can have it.”

  “You’ll hold your fire, by God,” Wyatt Earp murmured in a very soft, grating voice. It was enough to make Cooley hesitate.

  Wyatt got out of his chair and walked over to the pillar that supported the veranda roof. With half his body concealed behind it from the miners, Wyatt opened his coat to display the handle of one revolver. With slow motions he lifted the gun into his fist and cocked it. It wasn’t pointed at anyone in particular. Across the way, the miners were looking at each other in confusion, all except the enraged husband, whose face was black and blue; one eye was bruised shut. He had a shotgun locked in two fists the knuckles of which were white. The shotgun came around toward the veranda and the miner stopped with both feet braced. Floyd Sparrow’s piping thin voice reached harshly across the street: “We want Warren Earp for a miners’ court. Turn him over to us.”

  It made Reese Cooley laugh with crude wickedness.

  Wyatt Earp didn’t raise his voice; he didn’t have to. He said, “All right, Sparrow, you wanted to test us, you’ve tested us. You can’t have him. Now put down those cannons and get off the street before all of you end up with dirt in your faces.”

  It was the wronged husband who made it inevitable: the miner uttered a shrill cry of inarticulate desperation and yanked both triggers of the shotgun.

  The roar was deafening. The miner clearly knew nothing about weapons; he was eighty feet away from his targets and he hadn’t aimed. The buckshot pellets made spouts and creases in the street below the porch of the Inter Ocean; a few stray pellets from the charge rattled against the boards, and one of them stung Cooley in the foot, which made him howl and made him shoot. Cooley’s first bullet hit the miner somewhere in the upper body and knocked him back against Floyd Sparrow, who wind-milled his arms and fell down under the wounded man’s weight.

  All in a split fraction of a few seconds, the street erupted in battle. The miners hunched over their rifles, shooting without knowing how to aim. Cooley and his two thugs answered the fire deliberately. Wyatt Earp, lifting his gun, did not shoot; and Warren took cover behind the second post, his gun ready but unfired. One of the miners, hit in the shoulder, spun all the way around and fell flat; another broke it off and started to run, and Cooley shot him in the leg, spilling him down, skidding, onto the boardwalk.

  That was when someone came crashing out of the lunchroom door a few yards down the street from Floyd Sparrow. Reese Cooley wheeled that way, gun turning. Warren’s eyes snapped to the newcomer, saw young Rafe Tree come charging out onto the street, gun in holster, mouth open and working. Warren heard Cooley’s forty-five thunder and boom.

  When Rafe had got near the door, inside the lunchroom, he’d heard the shooting start. Startled and baffled, he’d climbed past two close-crowded tables and rushed the rest of the way to the door, flung it open and run outside to see what was going on. He took two steps, had no time to find out what the shooting was all about; the bullet hit him just below his belt buckle.

  It knocked him down, ignominiously on his ass, and sitting there he felt the warm sticky spread of wet blood filling his pants; he felt ashamed. He did not want to look at the wound the bullet had made. He looked at Wyatt Earp, across the street. Earp was-snarling at Reese Cooley. Earp swatted Cooley across the face with the barrel of his gun and Cooley fell back against the wall, amazed. Across the street Rafe dimly heard Floyd Sparrow’s voice, piping and panicky: “Christ, let’s get the shit outa here!”

  Warren Earp stepped into sight beside a porch pillar, his gun lifted but not firing, watching the miners run away down the street. Rafe tried to turn his head to see them but he seemed very tired all of a sudden, too tired to move his head. He felt surprise, not fear; he felt very little pain but the wet discomfort in his pants was embarrassing.

  He thought, I better get this tended to right away. They must have a doctor in this town. Hell, I ain’t dead, I’m okay, only if I don’t get it tended to I might bleed to death eventually.

  A quick cramp, more spasm than agony, m
ade him bend over. It felt like the aftereffect of a big meal spiced with hot chili peppers and coarse tequila—pressure of belly gas, a little pain beginning now, starting to spread through his abdomen, and he thought he would just sit here a moment longer until he felt alittlestronger, and then he would go find a doctor to patch him up so he could help Jeremy arrest those Earp bastards and collect the reward.

  Caroline beat a path through the lunchroom, screaming, knocking people aside. She pummeled her way to the door—people were crowding forward to find out what was going on. She elbowed past two men at the door, wrenched it open, and plunged outside.

  She took it all in with one glance. The little Knights of Labor agitator—Sparrow—running away down the street with a scuttling, scrambling gait, following the big miners who ran hard, two of them obviously wounded, their clumsy jackboots pounding the boardwalk; big Reese Cooley standing slumped under the veranda against the wall of the Inter Ocean, his face bleeding; Warren Earp and the two thugs with him, watching the miners run away, holding their guns ready but silent; and tall Wyatt Earp stepping down off the Inter Ocean veranda and dogtrotting forward toward the crouching man in the street—Rafe.

  An involuntary sound gurgled in Caroline’s throat. She started forward with numb steps. Earp crouched down by Rafe just as Rafe tipped over and fell on his shoulder. Caroline’s hand rose to her mouth. She saw Earp reach out to feel for a pulse; she said with a little cry, “How bad… how bad is it?”

  Earp looked up slowly, his eyes hooded by heavy over-hanging brows. “As bad as he can get.”

  She closed her eyes tight. Slowly her shoulders slumped. She dropped her face into her hands. After a moment she felt a hand on her arm and she looked up to see Wyatt Earp beside her.

  She said in a very small voice, “If you don’t take your hand off me right now I swear to God I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”

  Wyatt Earp dropped his hands to his sides and turned away and walked over to the Inter Ocean. Caroline watched him until he disappeared inside. Then, strength gone, she fell to her knees beside Rafe. A man was running forward, summoned somehow, carrying a black? ctor’s bag. It was too late for that. Caroline’s eyes misted and she began to speak with numb monotonous repetition: “Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God….”