Otto Penzler (ed) - Murder 06 - Murder on the Ropes raw

by Unknown Author

  Gene didn’t know what to say. Let him leave with silence. Gene gave him time to get clear of the barbershop, swept open the curtain, and there stood Sheriff John Otis.

  “’Pears I didn’t have to hustle down here after all,” Texas John’s eyes pulled back from Gene to take in Billie, trembling Harry. Doyle. “Don’t see no trouble to put down.”

  “Could have been,” said the barber. “Why—”

  “My law ain’t about ‘could be.’ ’S about what I see with these two good eyes.” Those two good eyes rode Doyle. “Though just ’cause I size up a son of a bitch doesn’t mean I’ll give him what he deserves. But when he makes his wrong play, I drop the curtain.”

  “Just like you were in a movie, huh?” said Doyle. “Not out here in the real world.”

  The sheriff laughed and his suit coat coincidentally opened with his swinging arms. Gene saw the Colt Peacemaker holstered on Texas John’s hip like it had been in his Ranger days. Saw the wooden stock for the Mauser slung under Otis’ right arm, knew that thousand-yard sniper automatic hung near the sheriffs heart.

  “This ain’t the real world, this is Shelby.”

  “Imagine that,” said Doyle.

  “Don’t have to,” answered Texas John. “I’m here. And we got phones and everything. And when I called around about a curly-haired fancy-dancy with a Butte license plate who claims to be a boxing manager, the boys down there wondered how you ended up in an honest game.”

  “Just lucky, I guess.”

  “Luck is a fragile thing,” said Doyle. “Be sure to watch it close. You can bet I will.”

  The sheriff told Gene: “You in with some fine people, Hometown.”

  His black cowboy boots shook the barbershop as he tromped out to Main Street.

  “We’re back to the ranch,” said Doyle.

  Great by me, thought Gene. Every day his training ran him like a growing steel tiger. Every night he lay beside Billie. He needed less sleep and more of her. She gave him all she could reach. She’d ask questions, care about his answers.

  “What was the hardest thing to learn about boxing?” asked Billie.

  “Making yourself pull down into the fighter’s crouch where you could hit and where you could get hurt. Getting past the terror. Your mouth all dry, your stomach heaving in and out, and you look across the ring and see that steely stare coming back at you and you hope he doesn’t see your stomach fluttering and then you see his and it’s jumping like mad, too, and oh Christ, any second they’ll ring that bell.”

  He told her how easy it was to forget to keep your guard up. How his favorite combination was a lightning left-left-right, and when you throw the left jab, how you had to remember to bring it back at eye level, quick and straight. How after the second left, your dance had to move your left foot four inches to the left so your shoulders squared up and gave your right jab the snap that created power. How the uppercut was easy, go pigeon-toed and corkscrew your punch. How the hook took him months to learn, how he practiced a million times with each fist until he could keep his elbow up and whip it out tight and close, just eighteen inches of loop—two feet and it’s an arm punch, a pillow, a joke, a nothing and left you only with how lucky you were in dodging the other guy’s coming-in cannonball.

  “But besides being good at it, what do you like about boxing?”

  Took him all the next day to find the answer. That night they lay like spoons in the darkness, his face brushed by the perfume of her hair, her bare spine pressed against the mass of his chest, the two of them alone on the white sheet of their starlit bed.

  “In the ring,” he whispered, “what’s happening is real. True. Even the feints, the fakes and the cheats. You use every single bit of yourself and find more you didn’t know was there. No chain is gonna whip out of the sky and hang you dead and dropped before you know it. You’re not gonna need to shoot your own damn horse. You know exactly who you are. Where you are. It’s a fight. You’re a boxer.”

  She said nothing.

  Then told him: “This here with you is the closest I’ve got to that.”

  Told him: “You say the one special thing you can do is boxing. The one special thing 1 can do is make you love me.”

  Billie curled into a ball, away from him and into him at the same time, her head pulling away on the sheet from his kisses even as her round hips pushed back against his loins, pressed against him, rubbing, and Gene gave himself to her.

  Nine nights before the fight Doyle threw open their door, stood backlit in the entrance as Billie jerked the sheet over her nakedness and Gene snuck one bare foot down to the floor.

  “Wake up and dress, palooka. I need a driver.”

  “That’s not my job.”

  “The hophead’s too shaky, so it’s either you or the woman. If it’s her, the coming back to you will take a good while longer. That’s okay with me.”

  Gene made the time as midnight when he drove Doyle away from the farmhouse.

  “They say a woman weakens a boxer,” said Doyle. “Steeds his legs. His wind.”

  “Only way to find out is to get me a sparring partner. Why don’t you volunteer?”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, punchy?”

  “I’m just doing the job I said I’d do.”

  “No. Tonight you’re driving. Like I say you’ll do.”

  Doyle made him take a back road into Shelby. Music came from the joints on Front Street. Doyle had him park on an alley slope up from the drop-lit rear door of Taylor’s bank.

  “Shut off the lights and engine, but keep your hand on the starter.”

  “We meeting the man?”

  “Might say that if you weren’t supposed to keep shut up.”

  Doyle bent over to hide the strike of a kitchen match that let him check his watch: ten minutes to one. Doyle puffed out the blue flame. Sulphur smoke soured the darkness. He eased out the passenger door, flapped his suit coat so it was loose.

  “When I come running, you start the engine. Keep the lights out.” Doyle crept to a shed where the shadows hid him from the alley below, stood there like a rock.

  Gene knew time in three-minute increments. In the middle of the sixth round, way down the slope, between two Main Street buildings, Gene spotted the hulking figure of a man walking toward the alley. The man stepped out of the passageway: Sheriff Otis.

  From that distance, the car with Gene was an innocent shape, one of the new vehicles crowding into town for the oil rigs or the railroad spur they were building for the chartered trains from back East. Even if the ex-Texas Ranger spotted the car, its engine was off, its doors were closed. Shadows cloaked Doyle. Sheriff Otis walked along the flat stone wall of a building and into the cone of light dropping down over the bank’s rear door. Otis wrapped his gun hand around the bank’s doorknob to be sure it was locked tight.

  Gene barely heard Doyle’s whisper: “Draw!”

  Saw the shadowed man’s solo hand clear his suit coat and snap straight out toward Otis.

  Saw the flash of the pistol and heard its roar as a blast of crimson graffitied the bank’s cement wall below the doorknob and Otis flipped into the air and crashed to the alley.

  Doyle leapt into the car and they sped to the back road

  south.

  “Got the son of a bitch just like I wanted!” yelled Doyle.

  “Sucker shot!”

  “Depends on which side of the trigger you’re on. Besides, I could have put the pill through his black heart, but instead he’ll get to gimp around and play the local hero.”

  “What makes you so kind?”

  “A dead lawman brings heat from everywhere. A cripple is a joke.”

  “Hope he doesn’t bleed out.”

  They hit a bump.

  Doyle said: “Those are the risks you take.”

  Three nights later, six days to the fight, Taylor drove out, told Doyle: “Perfect job. The town fathers gave a local guy the badge. Otis is parked in his house on the east end, sitting on the porch w
ith his gun on his lap, his leg cemented up, watching the trains go by and cursing like a son of a bitch. Somehow everybody’s talking about two guys with Texas accents who blew into town and now can’t be found anywhere. Almost like they never existed, but they must have been the ones. A man’s past come back to haunt him. Happens all the time.”

  “Will he walk again?” asked Gene.

  “Who cares?” said Doyle. “The law dog’s not gonna be there to figure what he can’t see, he’s not gonna be able to run after no robbers.”

  “You will have to run,” said the toad to Gene. “In all the confusion, our locals won’t piece it together but, quick enough, they’ll take it to the real lawman. He’ll figure your part, especially since he already’s got a bead on Doyle. But Doyle’s good shot bought you half a day at least.

  “After the heist, this is the first place they’ll look. Doyle’ll plant a burned map of Mexico in the trash ashes. But you go east to that farm where we met. Cut up the cash. Hide my share in the lockbox under the living room floor. Harry, leave the money you owe. Doyle will peel off extra bills for expenses. There’ll be scissors, hair dye. A razor for your mustache, Gene. If you’re banged up from the fight, there’ll be a sling for your arm and doctor’s papers about a farm accident. Only lie when you have to. A close trim, a henna and Billie’ll look respectable. The shed has a change-up car. Alberta plates. Harry knows the bootlegger trail into Canada. The four of you’ll hit that whistle-stop depot at Aden before the evening papers. Doyle’ll have train tickets to Vancouver for Mr. and Mrs. Louis Dumas. Doyle figures he’ll like New York: Anybody can be anybody there. Harry, you can help Doyle drive to the big time or he’ll let you out on the way, your choice.”

  “What about you?” said Gene.

  “I stay here to keep messing with the minds of our friends and neighbors. A year from now, I regretfully leave this paradise for a better job. Six months later, 1 vanish a free man.”

  “What’s to stop us from keeping all the money?” said Gene. “You won’t go to the cops.”

  “You’re too smart to risk running from my insurance men plus hiding from the law.” Taylor smiled. “Besides, you and the Larsons are fundamentally honest people. A banker learns how to judge that real quick.”

  That moonlit night as she floated on his chest, Billie whispered: “Would Doyle double-cross our banker?”

  “No. Not as long as it’s all working. They’re both too clever for that.”

  “What about us?” whispered Billie.

  “Yeah.” A breath made his chest rise and fall. “Anyway you look at it, what about us.”

  On the first day of July the thermometer said it was 92 degrees in the shade. Doyle was gone, Harry was stoned. After his morning run and workout, Billie stretched Gene out on their bed, rubbed him down, lay beside him like every morning. They napped. Something woke Gene before the ticking alarm clock. The window glowed like molten white gold. He shielded his eyes and shuffled to the edge of the fluttering curtains.

  Out there. By the barn. Doyle closing the trunk of his Ford and carrying a shovel back into the barn where maybe it hadn’t been hanging that morning.

  That night, Gene told Billie: “Tomorrow I need you to go to town. With Doyle. If Harry comes, even better, but you’ve got to get Doyle away from here and keep him away for at least half a day. Say it’s for supplies or whatever, but you’ve got to get me free of him.” She nodded in the darkness and he hated them both for the creeping fear.

  The next day, the second day of July, two days before the fight, he watched as Billie drove away from the farm toward Shelby. With Doyle. Doyle alone.

  Gene ran to the barn, found Harry slumped on a stool. Harry sat in that manure oven, his shirt sleeves buttoned tight on his wrists, flies crawling untroubled on that face where the eyes clung to open above a slack-jawed smile. Gene said: “What kind of man are you?”

  “Wasted,” answered Harry.

  “Can you still lie and do it good enough to save your sister?”

  Harry stared at ghosts standing witness. Licked his lips, told Gene: “I’m the kind of guy who says whatever and then believes it’s true. Believing a lie helps sell it. So you’re telling me that for once in my stupid life, what 1 gotta do is just be myself? Even I can’t screw that up.”

  Can’t do it like Billie, thought Gene as he saddled the black horse while lecturing her brother: “If Doyle beats me back, tell him I took the horse to ride out my crazies. Sell him that. If I get back first, we got to get this horse in his stall like he never left it.”

  As he galloped away, Gene didn’t look back at the man slumped in the barn door.

  Way he figured it with Billie’s talk about the Pythagorean theorem, from the barn on the ranch south of Shelby to the farmhouse east of that town was just under 14 miles. But that was one way, and across fenced rolling prairie and farmland where somebody might see him.

  Somebody, but not Doyle. He’d be busy. In town. With Billie.

  Gene boot-heeled the horse’s flanks. Not for nothing. Not all this for nothing.

  Misted indigo humps of the three Sweet Grass Hills rode a horizon of blue sky. Fields of wheat Gene and the horse charged through were losing green to gold, baking to an early harvest in the 95-degree heat. The horse reeked of wet sweat. Would Doyle’s nose pick up that scent rubbed on a man? When he got back. With Billie. A circling hawk watched Gene cut the first of many barbed wire fences. I'm just like an old-timer now, he thought as he rode through the savaged fence. What was it like for them? Fields of horse belly-high buffalo grass instead of sodbuster ruined scrub and wheat planted for starving Boston urchins. What was it like for Billie’s people who rode this endless open with a hundred million buffalo? Gene heeled his horse.

  He spotted the farmhouse. Nobody else had seen him, though he’d seen a wagon ferrying a Hutterite family in their religion’s strange black pants, homemade checkered shirts and plain faces. They’d ignored a frantic horseman who galloped past them, cutting fences before they were even out of sight. They’d tell no one outside their colony what they’d seen: nothing outside their community of God mattered.

  Gene sat in the saddle on the heaving horse. Watched the farmhouse for ten minutes. Saw nothing move. He made the horse trot forward.

  “Hello?” he called. No answer. He reined in the horse by a garage window. Gene peered inside: dusty sunlight showed him a coupe with Alberta license plates. And only two seats.

  Took him one loop around the farmhouse to spot what he hadn’t found at Woon’s ranch. Behind a shed was a freshly shoveled solo hole in the earth, six feet long and four feet deep, its dirt pile waiting beside that gaping maw.

  Call me a lucky man, thought Gene. Not many people get to see this.

  Doyle, you lazy bastard. Four feet isn’t deep enough for even one in this coyote country

  From the saddle, he nudged open the shed door and saw three sacks of quicklime.

  Gene pulled the door shut, then jerked the reins and kicked the frothing horse home.

  In a gully a mile from the Woon barn, the horse staggering beneath him, Gene glanced over the ridge toward the highway: two cars turned off that main road toward the ranch.

  “Go!” he kicked his boot heels. The exhausted black beast stumbled through the rocky gully circling Woon’s ranch. If Gene rode low and kept the horse’s head down, maybe no one driving up in a car would spot him. He risked a scouting peek over the sage-brushed ridge.

  Saw Doyle’s Ford and toad Taylor’s Cadillac closing in on the ranch.

  From the barn ran Harry, stumbling into the path of the cars so they had to stop, had to not get to the ranch as he waved his arms and ranted like a man poisoned with monsters.

  “Hya!” Gene charged the horse through the gully, around the back of the ranch, up out of its shelter and into the barn as car engines whined closer. Gene rode the white-foamed black horse into the open stall, flipped off the saddle and almost ripped the teeth out of the wheezing horse’s mouth as he s
tripped off the bridle, let it fall to the stall floor as car engines stopped. Gene raced toward the mass of sunlight filling the barn door—

  Out, charging toward the two cars emptying of Doyle and Taylor and caught-a-ride Harry. And Billie. Gene yelled: “Where the hell have you been!”

  “In town!” called Billie. Her face told him the truth: “Just in town.”

  Gene whirled to Taylor: “Why the hell are you here?”

  “The town dispatched me to brief you on their plans.” The toad smiled. “And I’ll tell you ours. All that sweat: you’ve been working out. Good. But rest now. Hot out here, let’s go inside.”

  Gene snapped: “The barn?”

  “I’m no animal,” said Taylor, and led everyone into the house.

  Sitting in the Woon living room, Gene told Taylor: “Sounds like we ain’t going to have a fight. The radio says the chartered trains from back East have all canceled. No money, no fight, nothing for us to steal. Dempsey’s boss Jack Kearns says—”

  The toad lunged across the room to scream at the sitting boxer: “The fight is happening! Don’t you say that! The fight is happening and we’re...we’re...”

  “You’re wound tight,” said Gene. “Just as tight as one of the real boosters.”

  “Worry about you!” Taylor’s hands shook. “You got to fight fifteen rounds and still be workable! Don’t worry about Kearns! The fight’s going to happen! They’re meeting in a bank right now getting seed money! People will show up with cash they owe for tickets! And the chartered trains! They’re going to run full speed from St. Paul and Chicago and fifty dollars ringside! They’re bringing all that money so we can take it! Nobody’s going to keep it from us!”

  Gene shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

  Saw Doyle staring at the trembling toad.

  “Yes,” said Taylor. “Yes I am. And this is how it works.

  “Under that wooden arena are four rough dressing rooms, one for each fighter. And a collection room for all money coming through the gate. By the sixth round of the Main Event, accountants figure ninety percent of the gate cash will be in. To get it to the bank, they’ll send a posse in the seventh round. Kearns will make Dempsey take it that long so people get their money’s worth. Everybody knows Dempsey can put Gibbons away, so they all be glued to the ring for the first rounds, for the quick knockout. Guards will be on the gates leading down into the dressing rooms and collection area. But inside there’ll only be fighters, their trainers, a couple counting room clerks—and all that cash.