by Tim Bryant
A WORLD OF HURT
A WILKIE JOHN WESTERN
TIM BRYANT
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Teaser chapter
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2017 Tim Bryant
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ISBN: 978-0-7860-4229-6
First electronic edition: December 2017
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-4230-2
ISBN-10: 0-7860-4230-3
CHAPTER ONE
My name is Wilkie John Liquorish, and I’m here for to rob you,” I said.
The trip from Mobeetie to Fort Worth was a fool’s errand. It’s an angry hot ocean of sand, full of snakes and scorpions, Tonkawas and Comanches and maybe even ghosts, and when you’re herding eight hundred head of cattle, it’s akin to swimming the Colorado with a bale of cotton under one arm and a pig under the other. By the time we got to Comanche Texas, speaking of Comanches, our cattle were skin and bones, completely unsellable, and half our boys were jealous of them, because the boys were bones only.
I buried my brother Ira Lee in Meridian, and that was it for me. I had lost all my taste for cattle driving. Far as I could see, we were driving them straight into hell itself. I was ready to repent of that life. When I walked away from it, I walked from there clear to Fort Worth. It was slow and hot and lonesome. I walked mostly by night and slept by day, and, when I wasn’t walking, I was riding a mule named Bird. Not my favorite way to go, but more about that later. In between all of these things, I became my own man. When I arrived on the edge of town, I had no past and no great future either. The sun meant nothing and the moon meant less. Hell’s Half Acre opened its arms.
Three days after arriving, I pulled a robbery. I was dead hungry and didn’t have any coin on me. Tubbs’s General Store at Sixth and Main seemed to have plenty. I’d been watching long enough to know their banking schedule. Another man I couldn’t identify would come in at four o’clock to spell Mr. Tubbs, and he would take the day’s earnings down to the Fort Worth National Bank on Eighth and Main. Way I figured, 3:30 would be just about right. Any earlier, the pot would be smaller. Much later, you might run into that second fella and have more trouble on your hands.
“Well, my name is Bill Tubbs, young man, and I hate to tell you, but you’re doing nothing of the kind,” the man said.
He was standing behind the counter and seemed to be set on staying put. I was in a quandary. If I backed down now, my outlaw days would be over in a hail of laughter instead of bullets. They would most likely throw me in the hoosegow just for trying. They might feed me there, but in general the thought wasn’t appealing.
“Don’t reach for nothing but sky,” I said.
I pulled Ira’s .44 Colt out of my holster and waved it once. I knew I didn’t have the luxury of time.
“You say your name is Liquorish?” Tubbs said.
I could tell by the way he said it, he was thinking of the candy. It isn’t spelled that way, but I didn’t have time for a spelling lesson.
“You’re wasting my time,” I said.
“No need to do anything hasty, Mr. Liquorish,” he said. “That’s an awful big gun you got.”
There was something implied there, and it was something that didn’t need saying. Being barely five foot tall and a hundred pounds when packed down with holsters, guns and ammo, I can tell when I’m being poked at.
“You saying I’m little,” I said. “I get that. I get that a lot. But you know what? So’s a bullet, and I got six of them right here.”
I leveled the Colt good and steady at his face, taking in the waxed mustache, the sweat that glistened on his nose, and those eyes, blue as the Gulf of Mexico and every bit as full of crap, and I fired twice. Tubbs fell in a huff and a puff against a shelf full of flour and meal, a cloud of white rising around him like a quickly fading halo.
He left a trail of blood and flour across the back of the store as I dragged him into a mop closet, where I traded him for the mop and went to cleaning up. I pulled thirty dollars from the money box to cover expenses up until that point. Leaving more than that behind would show it wasn’t personal and I wasn’t greedy. I was just about to be on my way when the front door opened. In walked the High Sheriff of Hell’s Half Acre.
“Bill not here?” he said.
I scanned the back of the counter and found an old rag, which I quickly dried my hands on.
“Not at the moment, Sheriff.”
The sheriff scooted across the floor at me, squinting like he was looking into the sun. The man easily made three of me, and none of the three looked particularly friendly either.
“Who in tarnation are you?” he said.
“Wilkie John Liquorish, sir,” I said.
He had a big Colt Navy Revolver. I knew what it was because I had seen one like it on a sailor back in my San Antonio days. I had offered the sailor three head of cattle for it.
“What the hell am I going to do with three cows on a ship?” the sailor said.
&nbs
p; I regretted letting that damn gun get away.
The High Sheriff was a little slow on the draw. Maybe he didn’t see me being all that formidable. If that’s the case, it was a mistake. I shot him right in the teeth. That brought out such a holler, I was afraid the whole neighborhood was going to come running. The next two shots shut him up real good.
The sheriff joined Bill in the mop closet. Seeing as I only had one shot left, I decided it was closing time. I locked up the store and grabbed three boxes of bullets from the top shelf behind the counter. Nobody laughed when I climbed the ladder to get them. Nobody laughed when I crawled out a back window and slipped into a side street, two blocks away from the whorehouse where I was keeping a room. I was seventeen years of age, but the Madam there didn’t believe it. In that instance, it was all for good, as she took pity on me and took me in. An hour after I turned Tubbs’s General Store into one more crime scene in the middle of the most crime-infested town west of the Mississippi, I was sleeping like a baby in the Madam Pearlie’s big feather bed, her best girl, a caramel-skinned redhead named Sunny, keeping watch over me.
Waking the next day and heading downstairs, I was surprised to hear the news being whispered from ear to ear to ear. Mr. Tubbs, the city commissioner who had muscled his way into the Acre with the plan to clean up its dirty image, had been gunned down in his own store. The High Sheriff, who had been using the store as police headquarters in enemy territory, was shot dead too. The Madam called for a day of celebration. Call girls were going for half price and so were the drinks.
CHAPTER TWO
I thought about taking credit for the killings, but it wouldn’t have done me any good. It would’ve been taken as a plea for attention, which I had no need of, or, more likely, for a joke. Then I might have had to shoot somebody else. I could see it was a vicious cycle, and, anyway, I sure didn’t want to shoot up the madam’s establishment, a right genteel place called the Black Elephant Saloon. And yes, I had been instructed right from the get-go that there was a White Elephant Saloon on Main Street where I might better belong. But Madam Pearlie had welcomed me like a son and told me to pay no mind to any such talk, I belonged right where I was. I liked being the only white man in the Black Elephant. It made me feel important. And I liked Madam Pearlie.
It was during that half-priced celebration, while the Black Elephant’s six girls lined up the men in the back and the bartender lined up the drinks at the bar, that I first met Gentleman Jack Delaney, whom Madam Pearlie said was known, to close friends and family, as Jack Rabbit. That was the only time I ever heard her refer to him in that manner. Others said Gentleman Jack had once been a slave on a plantation somewhere north of New Orleans. They said he managed to save up money from blacksmithing and bought up his own freedom a few years before the war. Then, somewhere along the line, he went into business as a bounty hunter.
“I’m here strictly on business,” he said.
I thought maybe he was referring to the Tubbs store murders as they were being referred to in the Fort Worth Chief. It’s what everyone was talking about, inside and outside the saloon, me included. We would sit around the Black Elephant half the day talking about who might have done it, how they could have pulled it off and got away. It was such great fun that, every once in a while, I’d have to remind myself that my latest thought on the matter wasn’t at all how it had happened.
The barkeep, a one-eyed man from Missouri named Black Price Hardwick, was taking bets on who did it and whether they would ever be found out. Even Madam Pearlie got in on the action, which she said was unusual for her, putting a fifty-dollar banknote on the authorities never fingering anybody.
“If they was somebody here in the Acre, we’d already be knowing,” she said. “Whoever it was that done it, they’re already east of the Mississippi or else west of the Rockies.”
I had heard of both of those places, but they seemed far away from me as the ocean and maybe farther. I had no plans on ever seeing either of them. To me, Fort Worth was far superior to Mobeetie and the God-forsaken desert that made up most of the stretch between. I was staying put, at least until more reasonable weather arrived.
Gentleman Jack had a room at the colored hotel right across the street, so we saw plenty of him. Each of his days, as he told it, began with a breakfast of six eggs, salt pork bacon, biscuits, and brown gravy, all delivered up to his room and eaten off of a silver tray. Then he had his beard trimmed by one of the hotel staff while he watched in that same silver tray. After that, he was on his way. He would gamble at one of the poker tables or one of the blackjack tables in our front room until the clock over the bar showed noon, smoking and swearing up a storm and collecting his winnings. He always seemed to win. Then he moseyed on a little after noon.
“I’ve got to get about my work,” he would wink. “I’m strictly here for business.”
I wasn’t too naive to know what a bounty hunter was. I’d run into a few of them in San Antone. Still, it was an occupation of mystery, and I didn’t have the first clue how it all worked or how a person would become such a thing. It was partly out of natural inquisitiveness and partly out of suspicion that I decided to follow along after him. I’d heard enough talk from Madam Pearlie and others to pique my interest.
Hell’s Half Acre wasn’t so different from places in Mobeetie or San Antone. The biggest difference, San Antonio’s Sporting District was mostly filled with military boys, and its girls spoke mostly Spanish. As a result, it was something between alarming and downright embarrassing to hear pale-skinned girls calling out from their ratty little cribs, telling you specifically what they could do for you and how little it would cost you. If you had to walk down a block, you might hear two or three of them calling out and then arguing amongst themselves, trying to undersell each other. It was all a guy could do to get to the other end of the block with his dignity intact.
With Feather Hill in Mobeetie, on the other hand, it was all a matter of scale. Whatever Mobeetie had, Fort Worth had fifty of. Fort Worth was an overabundance of abundance.
It was easy enough to follow Jack through a crowd though. He stood a good head taller than most of the men in the street, which meant he had two heads on me. He also wore, as a habit, a dark red top hat with a feather stuck in it—surely one he had purchased down in New Orleans—that made him tower even taller. I couldn’t help but admire his ability to wind his way through the girls, who all called even louder to him, caught as in a spell by his appearance.
He was heading in the direction of Main Street, and I began to wonder if it was foolishness or fearlessness leading him there. A colored man might move among the white people on that street if he kept his head down and didn’t call attention to himself. Neither proposition seemed likely with Jack. With each storefront he passed, it became more obvious that he had no plan to turn back. I considered calling out to him, just as a friendly warning. I stopped against a hitching post right square in front of Tubbs’s General Store and watched him go.
He ducked into the back door of Mary Porter’s house, the biggest, fanciest brothel in all of the Acre. It wasn’t uncommon for well-bred colored men to enter through the big two-story house’s back door, but I watched as his silhouette made its way from window shade to window shade, and, suddenly, out he stepped through the big red double doors in the front, stepping down from the wraparound porch and continuing on his way as if the whole house had been no more than a puddle to step through and then shake off.
Down Main Street he paraded, barely slowing down to doff his hat at a couple of the townspeople along the way. Finally, he removed his hat and ducked into a small building I had never taken notice of. I had just come off a disastrously star-crossed cattle drive, so I was dressed as the other ninety-nine percent of the crowd, and my white face, sunburned as it was, blended in well enough that I could walk right up to the old clapboard building built against and leaning noticeably toward the constable’s office. I meant to make a pass-by, take a quick glance into the two big front gla
sses, and try to identify the proceedings within. What fell on my eyes, I must admit, staggered me in my steps.
The man was dead. That was the first and foremost thing that sprang to my mind. There wasn’t any question about that. He was dressed in a fine looking suit. The kind you have shipped in from St. Louis or somewhere via stagecoach. He had a derby on his head that seemed too small by a size and determined to sit just a little off center. The man’s face seemed contorted into an expression that said, “I’d rather not have my photograph taken in this condition,” but that’s exactly what they seemed intent on doing.
One man stood behind the camera, his left hand on his hip and the other on the contraption that made the bulb flash. Another man had what looked like a woman’s powder puffin his hand, dabbing at the dead man’s cheeks and repeatedly trying to level out that devilish derby.
“What you staring at?”
There was a gentleman standing outside on the small porch, and it took a moment to realize he was talking to me.
I gathered myself and moved on without answering his question, although I could have told him plenty. I knew more about what I was staring at than he did. Sitting inside the little shop, waiting to have his picture made, gussied up like he’d never been in all his live-long days, was my old cattle-drive coach driver. A man named Leon Thaw, he had been born and raised in Mobeetie, Texas. The best shootist far and wide, his reputation had been sealed by getting tossed out of a Wild West Show in Amarillo and warned against ever coming back for getting up and outshooting J. B. Hickok. Twenty-six years old and getting no older, he was the husband of a seventeen-year-old Emeline Thaw and father of baby Millie. The last I had seen him, he was skinny as a broomstick, but swearing that he would make Fort Worth before I would.
“You take off on your own, Wilkie John, you’ll be lucky to ever see me again,” he said. “But if you do, I’m sure to be sitting up in some fine hotel sipping whiskey and waiting for you.”
