by Matt Braun
“From the look on your face,” Earp noted dryly, “you must’ve heard Santy Claus died.”
There was an odor of fear about Clum. His composure, already strained, suddenly deserted him. Under Earp’s level gaze, his voice was shaky and his features pallid.
“You remember Dave Parker?”
“The mining engineer?”
Clum nodded. “He laid over in Benson last night. Walked into a saloon and there was Curly Bill Brocius, big as life.”
Earp’s face grew overcast. “Alone?”
“Ringo and some of the others were with him. Parker said he was drunk as a lord, and not even Ringo could get him to keep his mouth shut.”
“About what?”
“A death list,” Clum said hesitantly. “He’s drawn up a death list, Wyatt. Our names are right at the top, followed by Doc and your brothers and Judge Spicer.”
“That a fact?” Earp asked, open scorn in his eyes. “And the minute you heard it, you come runnin’ over here like your pants was on fire.”
Clum hunched forward in his chair. “I’m serious, Wyatt. Parker was right there, heard it himself.”
“Maybe so,” Earp said crossly. “But it’s a barroom brag, whiskey talk! Nothin’ to it.”
“You don’t understand. He had an actual list! All our names down on paper! Parker said he was waving it around, and telling everyone within earshot how we were as good as dead. To me, that sounds like Brocius talking, not whiskey.”
“You’re easy spooked, aren’t you, John?”
Clum was a squat, fat man with sagging cheeks and heavy jowls. He lived by his wits, and because of his glib way with words, he had achieved some small success both as a newspaper editor and a politician. But he abhorred violence, and possessed almost nothing in the way of physical courage. His own fear repulsed him, and with increasing frequency, he damned himself for allowing Earp to dominate his life. Today, however, he mustered one last spark of defiance.
“I’m thinking of selling the newspaper.”
“Whatever gave you a damnfool notion like that?”
“Bill Brocius,” Clum. confessed. “Or at least he tipped the scales. I’ve been considering it for some time.”
“Not thinkin’ of leaving Tombstone, are you?”
“Yes, I am,” Clum muttered, lowering his eyes. “The Indian Agent resigned over at the San Carlos Reservation. I had an idea I might apply for the job.”
“You’d have to pull some strings, wouldn’t you?”
“I’ve still got a few connections left.”
Earp rose from his chair. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and stumped to the window. He stood looking down Fremont Street toward the center of town. But his eyes were fixed upon distance, and events.
In the main, Earp relied on the flaws and frailties of other men. He was ambitious and bold, and he believed that the weakness of others forever gave him an edge. Once, in a rare moment of candor, he had remarked, “There’s only two kinds of people in this world. Them that takes and them that gets took.” He had lived the better part of his life by that very code. He used people to his own ends, and then discarded them.
Yet his lodestone was not power alone. It was, instead, the fruits of power. He craved respect, and he was obsessed with the need for respectability. In the cowtowns of Kansas, he had lost the struggle to achieve that goal. His brothers were notorious as whoremongers, and he himself had never risen above the status of common policeman. Uprooting the entire family, he had traveled to Tombstone, searching for a fresh start. From the onset, nothing had gone as planned, and the killings at the OK Corral had further undercut his position. Still, for all his business and political setbacks, he wasn’t yet willing to call it quits in Tombstone. Nor was he ready to discard John Clum.
At length, he turned from the window. His face congealed into a scowl, and his tone was hard. “I don’t like that idea, John. I want you to stick with the newspaper till I say different.”
“To what purpose?”
“The purpose we had in mind from the start. Behan and his crowd have got the upper hand right now, but that’ll change. One way or another, I still intend to get control of the county.”
Clum shook his head doubtfully. “Wyatt, we’re through in Tombstone and we’re through in Cochise County. I saw the handwriting on the wall when the town council overrode me and fired Virge as marshal. I stuck by you, but now”—he faltered, toying nervously with his hat—“Brocius means to kill us, and I haven’t got the stomach for it. I just want out.”
Earp dismissed his objection with a brusque gesture. “You keep thinkin’ like that and you’ll be scratchin’ a poor man’s ass all your life.”
“Better a poor man than a dead man, and that seems to me the only choice.”
“Well, by God, it’s not your choice to make! You’re gutless but you’re not stupid. So get the wax out of your ears and pay attention.”
Clum looked ill. “Are you threatening me, Wyatt?”
With an unpleasant grunt, Earp crossed the parlor and resumed his chair. “I’m tellin’ you I need the mayor’s office to back my play, and I need that newspaper to influence public opinion. Like it or not, that means I need you. So let’s don’t hear no more talk about you hightailin’ it out of town. Savvy?”
“What happens when you don’t need me any longer?”
“Aww for chrissake!” Earp groaned. “Stop worryin’ so much. We’re all gonna come out of this rich as Midas.”
“I hope you’re not talking about stagecoaches.”
“You just tend to your knittin’ and let me handle the details.”
“Wyatt, listen to me, please! We can’t afford any more trouble. One mistake and we’ll all wind up in prison … or worse.”
“There you go again, borrowing trouble.”
“I’m simply stating a fact. Behan is watching us like a hawk, and Brocius has put our names on a death list. Good God, we’re in too deep already! Why dig the hole any deeper?”
“The only holes I mean to dig are the kind with headstones. One for Brocius, and maybe even one for Behan—unless he stays clear of my business.”
“No more,” Clum pleaded. “I have nightmares about it, Wyatt.”
“Nightmares about what?”
“Marsh Williams,” Clum said hollowly. “There was no need … you shouldn’t have—”
“Close your trap!” Earp glowered at him, motioning toward the kitchen. “The women are in there, so button up and stay buttoned up.”
“Sorry. I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
Anger flashed in Earp’s eyes, then his gaze narrowed and his look became veiled. “Don’t lose your nerve on me, John. You might recall that’s why Marsh Williams—disappeared.”
“I know,” Clum said in a resigned voice. “It won’t happen again. You can depend on me, Wyatt.”
“Never thought otherwise. Now, since you’re here, let’s talk a little business.”
Earp leaned forward, elbows on his knees. The timbre of his voice dropped, and he began speaking in measured tones. John Clum listened, nodding attentively, all the while gripped by a numbing thought. He wondered if he would ever leave Tombstone alive.
In the kitchen, Alice Blaylock tried to close her mind to the drone of voices from the parlor. She had heard Earp’s sudden outburst, and sensed that the mayor’s visit had put her brother-in-law in one of his foul moods. Any hope for a pleasant Christmas dinner was now lost forever.
She was seated at a work table, peeling potatoes. Her sister, Mattie, stood at the sink, washing dishes left over from a late breakfast. The heat from an iron woodrange kept the kitchen toasty warm. A plump hen, already stuffed and in the oven, flooded the room with a savory aroma. It was, Alice told herself, the best of all times in the Earp household. A tranquil interlude, performing domestic chores, when she and Mattie could pretend the outside world didn’t exist. Yet she knew it was only that—an interlude.
She glanced at Mattie, and a deep feeling of pit
y washed over her. Once attractive, Mattie was now worn and frail. Her complexion was prematurely lined by too many years in the harsh western climate. Her eyes, wrinkled at the corners by crows’ feet, bore a perpetually worried expression. On her face were stamped the ravages of a cruel and unmerciful life. She was thirty years old, and looked at least forty.
Alice, who was four years younger, sometimes felt guilty about her own looks. Her black hair was drawn sleekly to the nape of her neck, accentuating the smooth contours of her face and the healthy glow of youth. Her eyes were dark and expressive, and she had a sunny, vivacious smile. She wasn’t tall, but she carried herself well, dressing to compliment her slender figure. The overall effect was disarming and somehow provocative. A curious blend of innocence and minx-like worldliness.
Appearances aside, few people suspected that she was indeed an innocent. By contrast, the women of the Earp family were inured to the harsher realities of life. She had learned, much to her dismay, that vice had been their livelihood, almost a family enterprise. At times, she still had difficulty reconciling herself to the fact that Mattie was a retired prostitute.
A year ago, never once suspicioning the truth, she had come West to join her sister. Their parents, killed that spring in one of Ohio’s perennial floods, had left her with meager resources. She had several suitors, hometown boys who bored her to distraction, and she briefly entertained the idea of marriage. But wedding a man for security rather than love was foreign to her character. Filled with romantic notions about the frontier, she had entrained for Arizona Territory.
Once in Tombstone, her schoolgirl illusions were quickly disabused. She found life in the mining camp coarse and uncivilized, with none of the colorful adventure she’d read about in dime novels. But her greatest letdown by far was Mattie’s husband. She discovered her sister had married a monster.
By stages, a word here and a word there, she gradually learned the whole truth. Mattie, traveling the Kansas cowtowns with a troupe of entertainers, had been stranded in Wichita. Fallen on hard times, she was befriended by the Earps and lured into a life of prostitution. A year or so later, when the family departed for Dodge City, she went along as Wyatt’s woman. Then, shortly before the move to Tombstone, they were married. Wyatt needed a wife to help him create a respectable front, and Mattie saw him as her last chance to outdistance the cowtowns. It was calculated and mutually advantageous. An arrangement.
Over the past year, Alice had learned all this and more. At first appalled, she slowly came to understand Mattie’s reasons, and with understanding came acceptance. To her sorrow, she also came to understand that Wyatt Earp was, by nature, an insensitive brute. He was devoid of compassion, and in the privacy of his home, he sometimes displayed a sadistic streak. All the worse, he was corrupt and conniving, unscrupulous with Anyone outside the immediate family. The killings last October—three men callously gunned down at the OK Corral—had left her chilled to the very marrow. She knew virtually nothing of death, and found it all but incomprehensible that she lived under the same roof with a killer. There was a sense of terror and unreality about it. The terror of awakening from a bad dream—and finding it true.
Insofar as her personal life was concerned, it had simply ceased to exist. The Earps were pariahs, and their women were the stuff of vicious gossip. In Tombstone, no decent man would tip his hat to an Earp woman, much less pay her court or invite her to a social. Apart from Doc Holliday, and Wyatt’s business cronies, few men ever came to the house anyway. She had no opportunity of meeting anyone worthwhile, and even less chance of being accepted by the respectable members of the community. Her name was Blaylock, and she’d done nothing to deserve censure. But to the townspeople, she was nonetheless one of the Earp women.
Alice often wondered how she had allowed herself to become trapped. Her own naivete was certainly one element, and her love and concern for Mattie was another. Yet she recognized all that as being more excuse than justification. On days like today, when she dwelled on it at any length, the situation seemed particularly noxious. Unless she was careful, she slipped into fits of self-loathing, and bitter regret. She searched for the strength to walk out the front door and never look back. Then, struck by the fact that she had no money and no prospects, she was reminded of a greater fear. Fallen on hard times, stranded in a remote mining camp, she too might resort to that older profession. The thought left her queasy, and desperate.
Mattie’s voice intruded on her trancelike lapse. She suddenly realized she was sitting with the knife in one hand and a potato in the other, and staring blankly at the tabletop. She looked up and found Mattie watching her with a puzzled frown.
“I’m sorry,” she said lightly. “I must have been star-gazing.”
“We all do, honeybun. It’s about the only form of entertainment the womenfolk in this family ever get.”
“Did you ask me something?”
“After a fashion,” Mattie observed, nodding toward the parlor. “When Wyatt and the mayor get through, I want you to be careful what you say.”
“What would I say?”
“The less the better. And most especially, don’t let on that we overheard what they were talking about.”
Alice shuddered. “I overheard nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
Mattie drew a deep, unsteady breath. “I’d give the world to say the same. Sometimes it’s more than a body can stand.”
“I know,” Alice said darkly. “Every night I pray it just doesn’t get any worse. Surely it won’t, not after all this time.”
“Oh Lordy!” Mattie said in a musing voice. “How I wish we’d never come to this town. I’d gladly kick it over and go back to Kansas.”
“No, don’t say—”
Alice stopped, glancing quickly toward the parlor. The men’s voices were louder now, and the creak of floorboards filtered through the house. A few moments later the front door closed, and everything went still. Then the sound of footsteps became apparent, a measured tread growing closer. Alice began peeling potatoes, and Mattie grabbed the pump handle, jacking a rush of water into the sink. Neither of them gave any indication they heard the approaching steps.
Earp halted in the doorway. “When the hell we gonna eat? I’ve got business uptown.”
“Damnit, Wyatt!” Mattie whirled around, hands on her hips. “Won’t your business keep till another time? It’s Christmas!”
“So what?” Earp said sourly. “It’s also a big gaming night, and in case you forgot, I’m a dealer.”
“Well, I’d think you could take the night off. Especially Christmas night!”
“Just get it on the table and don’t argue about it.”
Earp turned and stalked back into the parlor. Mattie waited, listening until he had moved out of earshot. Then she winked at Alice and lowered her voice in conspiratorial whisper.
“We’ll have our own Christmas! Just like old times, when we was kids and people still laughed.”
“Yes.” Alice smiled sadly. “Just like old times.”
CHAPTER 4
Starbuck went undercover that night.
Around eight o’clock he eased through the door of the Alhambra. He was tricked out in a black broadcloth jacket, set off by a white linen shirt and a fancy string tie. On his head, cocked at a rakish angle, was a slouch hat, and on his feet he wore kidskin halfboots polished to a dazzling luster. A blind man would have spotted him as a professional gambler.
The Alhambra was one of Tombstone’s finer gaming establishments. A mahogany bar ran the length of one wall. Behind it was a gaudy clutch of bottles with a gleaming mirror flanked by ubiquitous nude paintings. Along the opposite wall were keno and faro layouts, a roulette table, and a chuck-a-luck game. At the far end of the room were the poker tables, their baize covers muted by the cider glow of low-hanging lamps. The atmosphere was cordial and restrained, devoted solely to the pursuit of chance.
Halting at the bar, Starbuck ordered whiskey. After a couple of sips, he hooked one elbow over
the counter and turned to survey the room. The crowd, much as he’d expected, was a mixed lot. Tradesmen and drummers, spiffy in their townclothes, were ganged around the tables with miners and cowhands and rough-garbed teamsters. The action was fast and without pause, broken only by a low murmur of conversation and winner-loser calls by the housemen. To all appearances, the games were honest, relying on house odds to turn a profit. The amount of money exchanging hands indicated the Alhambra was doing very well indeed.
Starbuck’s inspection was casual but nonetheless exact. He spotted Earp at the faro layout and examined him with the fleeting curiosity of a fellow craftsman. His gaze drifted then to the back of the room, searching for Doc Holliday. From what Harry Woods, the newspaper editor, had told him, Holliday was an inveterate poker player and a man of distinctive appearance. The information was accurate on both counts. With no trouble, Starbuck located Holliday at the center table. Another glance confirmed that every chair at all three tables was occupied.
Turning to the bar, he took out a silver cigar case and selected a thin black cheroot. He struck a match, lighting the cheroot, aware of its strange acrid taste. As part of his disguise, he had chosen cigars over roll-your-owns, which was more in keeping with the image of a natty high-roller. He stuck the cheroot in the corner of his mouth, and stood for a moment reviewing the plan he’d decided upon earlier. He saw no reason to alter it now, for the physical layout of the Alhambra dovetailed perfectly with what he had in mind. He finished his drink and dropped a cartwheel on the counter.
Threading his way through the crowd, he walked toward the rear of the room. Several onlookers were clustered around the poker tables, and he casually moved through their ranks. Presently, after a brief inspection of each game, he took up a position near the center table. There were seven players, and it appeared to be a high stakes game. Out of the corner of his eye, he slowly scrutinized Doc Holliday. He was struck by the thought that here was a mankiller who looked the part.
