Valley of the Lesser Evil

by Carl Dane

  He held up a hand, apparently saturated with my cleverness.

  “Thanks, I get it.”

  It came out, ahhhhh git it.

  Chapter 6

  Carmody, Mrs. Adler, and I sat in the back room of the Silver Spoon and had a couple whiskeys. She was still wary of me but for some reason warmed up to Carmody a few minutes after I’d introduced them.

  “Well,” she said, pouring another round, “it’s good to know there’s two of you around in case there’s trouble.”

  As if on cue, a bar girl stuck her head through the door.

  “There’s trouble.”

  I rested a hand on my Colt and jumped from the chair in which I’d been reclining; Carmody plucked up the lever-action rifle I’d given back to him at the jail and absently patted the revolver jammed into his waistband.

  “It’s the Durans,” the girl said. “Six of them and they’re all armed.”

  I shoved past her more roughly than she probably thought necessary, which I deduced from the fact that she called me an asshole and shoved me back. But I needed to get by her in a hurry and remove her from the line of fire. There was no point in being sneaky. They knew I’d be coming and probably knew where I was. If they were going to shoot without warning they would have just walked into the back room and ambushed me. They wanted to lure me into a trap where they could claim I shot first, should it come to the point where anyone asked any questions.

  Three of them were behind the bar and three were in a knot about ten feet away in front of a Faro table. They each wore two ammunition belts crossed over their chests. They all wore low-slung revolvers and one carried a rifle.

  And the tallest one held a gleaming knife across the throat of the barmaid.

  I stepped between the two groups, a seemingly irrational move that caught their attention and bought me some time while they contemplated the crazy gringo. It wasn’t an act of bravado. They would be less likely to shoot with me in that position because any rounds that missed or passed through me would hit their compatriots.

  They would see that and flank me in a few seconds, of course, which was the amount of time I had to figure out what the hell to do.

  I didn’t have to tell anyone in the place not involved in the fight to get the hell out. The handful of cowboys and bar girls all left their positions and poured out the front door like the place had been tipped on its side and they had slid out by gravity. In a few seconds it was just me, the six of them, the wide-eyed bargirl with the knife at her throat, and Carmody, who stood in the doorway.

  “Let her go and leave,” I said.

  The tall one with the knife smiled, and not in a nice way. He bared big teeth as white as sugar.

  “Señor,” he said, “vete la mierda.” He laughed long and loud, throwing his head back. He then spoke in thickly accented English.

  “I joos tell you to go fuck yourself.”

  “I seem to get a lot of that advice around here,” I said. “What exactly do you want? Money?”

  “I want all of you to pack up and leave, that is what I want. Or I cut dees lady’s tongue out from the bottom of her throat, wrap it around her neck, and then we do the same to joo.”

  Carmody cleared his throat.

  “I believe they have a point, Marshal,” Carmody said. “There’s six of them. And I’m afraid there’s only one of you because I didn’t sign up for nothing like this. I’m sorry. I’m gonna take my sorry flank to starboard and let myself out the porthole. I do regret letting you down, I sincerely do and I hope you understand.”

  The barmaid, hearing that, looked over at him, bewilderment and terror in her eyes.

  “Nobody here cares about your mountain-man bullshit,” I said.

  I mocked him with my best approximation of the peculiar lilt of East Tennessee, adding: “and ah hope you unnerstand. Get out of my sight. Now.”

  And then he slipped back through the door.

  I waited. The only sound in the room was the ragged breathing and sobbing of the girl. It grew louder by the second until she began to wail in despair and terror.

  The man holding the knife at her throat found her funny, apparently, and began to laugh again a second before I shot him in the forehead.

  Blood, brain matter, and shiny white bone splinters covered the mirror behind the bar, which immediately cracked into shards and dropped straight down, like a gory cloudburst. His arms splayed out, he fell back, and the barmaid shrieked. The knife cut her – but on the shoulder, not the neck, and not too deeply, from what I could see.

  The two behind the bar went for their guns but hesitated a split second, either because of shock or lack of a clear line of fire, or both.

  The one to my left made up his mind and began a cat-quick lunge to my left. He’d be able to shoot from there and not hit the three behind me. Unless I killed him immediately, which of course I did. I led him a couple of inches to account for his movement and he obligingly ducked his head into a slug that tore into his temple and blew out the side of his skull. Then I shot the one to the right before he could clear his holster.

  My shots had taken less than two seconds, I supposed, and I’d had the advantage of surprise, but I knew the three behind me weren’t going to stay frozen forever. I could hear what was happening. The rifle had already ratcheted and I could hear metal sliding on the leather of a holster. I could sense the guns raising to be trained on my back and had that prickly electric feeling you get right before a lightning strike, or the second before you think you are going to die.

  I ducked and began to spin, knowing I had no chance, unless...

  Chapter 7

  The two blasts from Carmody’s shotgun were deafening, literally. He’d shot through the glass and shards filled the room like a swirling hailstorm, but in virtual silence to my ears. The gunman who had taken the worst of the buckshot looked down, looked up, and screamed. It was a tiny, muffled sound to me, like the cry of a bird. I didn’t bother to shoot him again. He had pretty much been cut in half and could do no further harm and he toppled straight down, with what was left of the part of him that had taken the blast bending like a hinge.

  The one to his right had caught the other scattergun barrel and was lying on his side, digging his heels into the floor and turning in a small, pointless circle.

  To my left, one man remained standing. His left shoulder bloomed crimson from where he’d caught some overspray. His right hand held a gun, pointed toward the floor, but rising toward me in slow motion.

  I’d seen that before, many times. The uncertainty. The gray, fuzzy world of indecision where a cornered man is torn between dropping the gun or quickly raising it and firing and probably dying in the process.

  “Drop it,” I said.

  “Move and I kill you where you stand,” Carmody said, leaning in through the shattered window.

  The gun angled up perhaps a quarter of an inch, an absurd sloth-like creep toward death.

  What was going through his mind, I wondered? A trick on his part, thinking I’d hesitate until he could spring into action with a quick shot? A derangement induced by carnage and cacophony? Fear of the humiliation of surrendering? Fear that I’d kill him anyway? Or was he bent on slow-motion suicide?

  I played out the possibilities. Experience in killing hasn’t made me immune to morality; just the opposite, and I don’t think I am alone in that regard. So far, in my mind at least, everything I’d done had been justified. The tall one I’d blown away was holding a knife at a woman’s throat. The rest had been reaching for their guns after vowing to kill me and I have no doubt that would have been consummated had not I fired off three shots without hesitation.

  But the one in front of me was playing a slow-motion game. Should I shoot the gun out of his hand? An easy trick in dime novels. Not impossible – but damn close to it – in real life, even at close quarters. Wait for him to commit to raising the gun to shoot me? When the action was in progress, I might not be able to s
top him from killing me, even with my three remaining rounds.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said, even my own voice sounding muffled after the shock of the shotgun blast. “You can stall and think I won’t do anything because you’re moving so slow, and get that gun high enough where you can move quick and shoot me.”

  We were at the end of the game. He had only one move left if he wanted to continue the fight. And so did I. And we both knew it.

  The barrel of his gun rose a sixteenth of an inch more.

  Or maybe it was now an eighth.

  So I killed him.

  Chapter 8

  One of the less appealing aspects of lawing, at least the type I seem to gravitate to, is figuring out what to do with the bodies. Usually, I’d store them somewhere until the undertaker made his appearance. Shadow Valley didn’t have a full-time undertaker but, like a lot of towns, relied on one that made a circuit through the territory. The undertaker who had buried Billy Gannon would normally be back in a week but Mrs. Adler told me she’d heard that he died of a heart attack three days ago in the next county.

  Billy had been his last customer, and now I was in charge of a pile of bodies in a town so godforsaken that even the undertaker was dead.

  Luckily, I was able to hand off two of the bodies to Felix Duran, who showed up to claim his brothers. One brother was the lunatic with the knife and the other the one with the slowly rising gun.

  The gang was not made up exclusively of Durans, and from what I gathered Felix was actually the last of the brood. According to Felix, who spoke very little and glared at me with a flinty hatred, the rest of the dead men were ranch hands for Eddie Moon, who kept some cattle on the land in back of his bar.

  The fact that Moon was their employer in no way obligated him to dispose of the bodies and the longer I debated the problem of what to do with them the more they would stink, so Carmody and I dumped them in the cemetery without ceremony. We wrapped them in some blankets I found in the jail and buried them, as they say, with their boots on.

  Carmody dug the graves expertly and in surprisingly short order. I surmised he’d had a lot of practice and commented on his peculiar ability but he didn’t respond.

  He did, however, compliment me on how quickly I’d caught onto his nautical code-talking. He’d assumed, rightly it appeared, that the Duran gang would never have seen a porthole nor probably have ever heard the word. Likewise for their understanding of port and starboard, a distinction which, despite all the time I’ve been forced to spend on boats and ships, I’m still not sure I remember correctly.

  While I had it on my mind, I thanked him for saving my life.

  Mrs. Adler, who seemed to have started to tolerate me, reverted to giving me a very wide berth. She’d not handled the carnage well, and after vomiting several times had openly expressed her doubts that it was, in her unusual phraseology, “necessarily necessary.”

  I reminded her, with some anger rising in my voice, that I’d warned her that such things would be inevitable, given the circumstances, but I can’t say that I blame her for her reaction to the fact that I’d just turned her bar and brothel into a slaughterhouse.

  Having said that, the Silver Spoon almost instantly became a very popular slaughterhouse. Perhaps out of morbid curiosity, or possibly because they felt safer now that some outlaws were flower food, dozens of customers elbowed in the next day, and the Faro and poker tables hummed with activity. I dealt some Faro myself early in the afternoon, and won a bit, which is not easy when you don’t cheat. Faro is a game that is not particularly advantageous to the house, which, of course, is why so many dealers cheat.

  I’d also spent some time trying to strike up conversations with the locals. But they were a tight-lipped group who seemed largely unconcerned with who shot Marshal Gannon. Some thought I was here to find out what happened to the mysterious Bannister Adler, something about which I was curious, but a topic that Mrs. Adler would avoid every time I broached it.

  The druggist did spare me a few words but like most of the other people I talked with, he was circumspect in his conversation with me. I couldn’t blame him or them, considering I was a stranger who had, in the space of one day, significantly reduced the population of the town. Bannister Adler, he told me, was a sharp businessman who, even after marrying Elmira, had been known to sample the merchandise at the bordello. And he liked them young. And there had been trouble in his family.

  That’s all he would say, and he summarily turned back to his task of putting pills from big bottles into little bottles, or whatever it is, exactly, that druggists do.

  The barber speculated about the disappearance of Mr. Adler too, and wondered if Eddie Moon, who not only owned a competing bar but was had land holdings in the area, was somehow involved. Moon, said the barber, ran a reasonably clean house and treated his girls well, but behind that quick smile he as was ruthless as any other pimp.

  The barber said he knew nothing about the death of Billy Gannon other than what everybody in town knew: That he was shot in the side of the head while making his rounds the night before he was leaving for Austin.

  I didn’t know about the Austin trip, and asked why Billy was headed there, and the barber shrugged and clammed up.

  I wanted to talk to Eddie Moon, but not yet. There was some subtle subtext here that I wasn’t picking up and I needed to know more before I confronted the man who was trying to run Mrs. Adler out of town and presumably had dispatched the six outlaws who damn near punched my ticket.

  I said as much to Mrs. Adler when I finally tracked her down an hour later. She’d been out riding in the property in back of the Spoon, and when she finally came back to the office her face was sweaty and streaked with dust.

  Riding helped her think, she said.

  It didn’t help her talk, though, because as we faced each other across the desk and she inched back in her chair and told me she had no idea what happened to her husband and changed the subject as deftly as a politician.

  It was the damndest thing, talking to her. She was something beyond my experience, and that’s truly saying something. On one hand, I didn’t think she was lying. At the same time, I didn’t think she was telling the truth. And while I couldn’t put my finger on it, I had the sense that maybe she wasn’t telling the truth to herself.

  Short of torturing the information out of her, a prospect that was beginning to exert some appeal to me, I would get nowhere by talking to her. I picked my hat up off the desk and was ready to leave when the door opened and a girl of eighteen or so entered the room.

  She had the same fine features as Mrs. Adler, but her skin was copper-colored and the hair coal black. The girl shared the same liquid eyes, but they were brown.

  I stood and waited for an introduction.

  The girl hadn’t expected to see me. Her face registered surprise, and then twisted into a mask of maniacal loathing.

  On Mrs. Adler’s desk was a letter opener made to look like a janbia, an Arabic dagger with a narrow, curving tip. Either that it was a real janbia pressed into service as a letter opener.

  The distinction became instantly irrelevant after the girl grabbed it and came at me hard and low.

  I caught her wrist and pressed my fingers into the base of her thumb – not too hard, and not to cause pain, although I’m sure it did – but to dig into the nerve that would numb her fingers and loosen her grip.

  She dropped the dagger and I let her go.

  She grabbed her wrist, rubbed it, and backed out of the room, hating me.

  Chapter 9

  “She’s a little high-strung,” Mrs. Adler said.

  “A little high-strung? She just tried to gut me like a trout.”

  “I’m sorry. She’s troubled. You don’t have children. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Up until a minute ago I didn’t know you had children, until that maniac I assume is your daughter introduced herself at knife-point,” I said.

&nb
sp; “I suppose I owe you an explanation,” she said.

  “Do you really think so?” I asked.

  Mrs. Adler, who comprehended sarcasm about as well as I understood this latest attempt on my life, looked at me soberly and concluded that she did.

  Her name was Cassie, she told me. She was born when Mrs. Adler was sixteen. The father was an Apache who was killed by marauding Comanches a year after Cassie was born and about a year before Mrs. Adler ran away from the Apache camp.

  Cassie was ten when Mrs. Adler married Bannister. Cassie and her stepfather had never gotten along, Mrs. Adler said, and after a while Cassie lost the ability to get along with anybody. Her mental health deteriorated to such an extent that she was eventually confined to a couple rooms above the Spoon. Most people in town didn’t know she had a daughter, Mrs. Adler said. Cassie rarely ventured out, except, apparently, when there were visitors to be stabbed.

  I turned the chair around and straddled it, resting my forearms across the top and leaning in on her.

  “Mrs. Adler…”

  “Call me Elmira,” she said, I suppose in an attempt to lighten my mood. It didn’t work.

  “Mrs. Adler, we have a business relationship that involves me putting my life at risk. So far, at your behest and in your service, I’ve been attacked by a gorilla who tried to snap me in half, jumped by a half-dozen armed men, and now damn near gutted by – no offense – a lunatic you let sneak up on me without warning. From now on, I need to know everything.”

  “All right,” she said, quickly enough that I knew she was lying. “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know what you know about Eddie Moon, and tomorrow I want you to come with me so I can talk to him and try to figure out what’s going on in this loony bin I’ve gotten myself into.”

  I realized I was screaming. My hearing had returned to normal after the shotgun blast but loud noises still hurt and I didn’t notice how loud I was until my own voice pained me. Truth be told – and I wouldn’t tell her – I was as rattled as a draftee farm boy on his first day of combat. It’s the unexpected things that throw you off balance. I knew there’d be trouble in the bar, and when it came it was sort of a natural progression of events, events that I’ve been trained to handle, maybe somehow born to handle.