Frontier of Violence

by William W. Johnstone

  Moses Shaw stood apart from his sons and the hostages, another forty or fifty feet up a gradual slope reaching to the southwest. He stood motionless, hands planted on his hips, gazing toward the top of the slope. He seemed oblivious to the leftover droplets of rain running off the brim of his hat and down the back of his neck. His craggy features showed no more reaction than if they’d belonged to the stone face of a statue.

  “The old man’s gettin’ impatient for Harley to show back up, too,” said Wiley.

  Cyrus looked curious. “How can you tell? He’s been standin’ like that, not movin’ a muscle, ever since he walked out there a little bit ago.”

  “I don’t know how, but I can tell,” Wiley said stubbornly. “I hope to hell Harley does get back pretty soon. Otherwise the old man will get irascible and take it out on all of us.”

  “How the hell do you know a word like irascible?”

  Wiley sighed wearily. “Because I pick up a book and read it every now and then. You ought to try it sometime.”

  “Fat chance. What does it mean, anyway—that word irascible?”

  “Means peevish, foul tempered. Easily provoked to anger.”

  Cyrus snorted a short laugh. “Well, hell, that ain’t no hard conclusion at all. The old man is foul tempered and pissed off about something practically all the time.”

  “Yeah, but there are times it can get worse. And that’s even less of a picnic than normal.”

  At that moment, Moses shifted his stance, turned, and started walking back toward Wiley and Cyrus.

  “Good,” said Wiley, straightening up from his squatting position. “He must have spotted Harley comin’.”

  Cyrus rose up, too, as Moses reached them.

  “Harley’s comin’ yonder,” said the old man. “He don’t seem to be pushin’ his horse unduly, so I’m guessin’ he didn’t see no sign of a posse on our tail.”

  Cyrus nodded. “Just like you figured. Right, Pop? I mean, what with us havin’ a couple of their women as hostages and you tellin’ ’em what we’d do iffen they came after us, you really put a kink in their tail.”

  “That’s what I was aimin’ for,” Moses allowed. “But with townsfolk, you never can tell. Me puttin’ a slug in the pumpkin of their marshal, I think, was the real deal-sealer. Havin’ him go down was like takin’ out the war chief of a pack of howlin’ Injuns . . . leaves ’em all discombobulated for a while, not hardly knowin’ which way to turn.”

  “In that case,” said Wiley, grinning, “you put a kind of a jinx on ’em, Pop—you took out their head man and you grabbed a couple of their women for hostages.”

  Frowning, Moses said, “Speakin’ of the women . . . They been behavin’?”

  Cyrus lifted his brows. “Ain’t really like they’ve had much choice. Not the way we’ve got ’em hog-tied. They been jabberin’ some between themselves, but that’s all.”

  “That’s women for you,” grunted Moses. “You can hang ’em over a pot of boiling oil and they’ll jabber right up to the point where you drop ’em in. Only exception I ever saw was that ol’ Injun squaw I took on after your ma passed givin’ birth to Wiley. Ol’ Majeilah. She was the quietest, most non-talkingest female ever there was. Had her nigh on to nineteen years and I don’t think she spoke more’n a word a year in all that time.”

  “She maybe didn’t speak in words,” said Cyrus, “but she was all the time mumblin’. Putterin’ around the house and mumblin’ in some Injun lingo that didn’t make a lick of sense.”

  “Don’t speak ill of her,” cautioned Moses. “She took on the lookin’ after of me and you three hell-raisin’ young boys . . . I’d say that earned her the right to go around doin’ some mumblin’ if she had a mind to.”

  Harley came riding down the long slope and reined up before his father and brothers.

  “I rode a long way back, clear to the top of another high slope,” he reported as he swung down from the saddle. “Not a thing in sight for as far as I could see in any direction. You plumb scared ’em off, Pop. They’re hidin’ back there in their shithole of a town, afraid to even stick a toe in our direction.”

  “Well, that’s good. But that don’t mean they’ll stay put forever,” said Moses. “Sooner or later they’re bound to light out after us. We just got to be smart and make good use of the time we got so that, when they do set their sorry asses in motion, we’ll have such a lead on ’em they won’t have a chance of ever catchin’ up.”

  “But we’re still gonna go on to our ranch and stock up on supplies, ain’t we?” said Cyrus.

  “A-course. Supplies and spare horses for the long haul. But that don’t mean we’re gonna tarry there for very long.” Moses gestured to Harley’s horse. “Tie him over there with the others and let him catch a little bit of a breather before we move on. When we do, because he won’t have rested as much as the other animals, let Cyrus take a turn on him. He’s lightest. Then you take Cyrus’s rested mount, me and Wiley will each take one of the women with us. We won’t stop again until we make the ranch.”

  “What about those women?” asked Harley. “How long are we gonna lug them around?”

  “Until I say otherwise,” said Moses firmly. “Until I’m satisfied we’ve got all the use out of ’em we can get.”

  “I ain’t sure what you mean,” said Cyrus, knowing it wasn’t a smart thing to bring up but unable to help himself. “But there’s ways that I, for one, would like to get some use out of ’em that ain’t got nothing to do with holdin’ off no stinkin’ posse.”

  Moses looked at his middle son, his lips curling as if in disgust. “That mouth and mind of yours never rise very far out of the gutter, do they?”

  “Aw, come on, Pop,” Cyrus protested. “It’s a natural inclination. You know there’s times when me and Harley go visit the whore cribs back in New Town. What do you think we do there? This is the same thing, only these gals are a helluva lot better—”

  “Knock it off, Cyrus!” Harley interrupted. “This ain’t the time for talk of business like that. We got a lot more important things to take care of first.”

  Moses just continued to glare.

  “All right,” Cyrus said sullenly, wanting to be more defiant only unable to meet the fire in his father’s eyes. “But I aim to see there’s gonna by-God be a time for that kind of business!”

  CHAPTER 36

  “You can leave now. You’ve served your purpose,” Clayton Delaney bluntly told the woman lying on the hotel room bed next to him.

  The woman, a redhead barely clinging to her middle twenties and clinging even more tenuously to some still-decent looks that were wearing out fast, put a hand on Delaney’s bare shoulder and said, “Why be in such a hurry, honey? There’s always—”

  “No, there’s not,” Delaney cut her off. “You’ve been paid. It’s over. Now beat it.”

  Huffing indignantly, the woman slipped from the bed and began getting dressed. Delaney lay on his back, motionless, not paying any attention, just staring up at the ceiling. When the woman had her clothes and shoes on, she glanced over her shoulder as if wanting to say something more, but then decided against it. She left the room, letting the hard-slammed door make a statement for her.

  After she was gone, Delaney continued to lie there. He’d hoped spending some time with a woman would calm him down, unknot the ball of frustration and anger that was clenched so tight in his gut. But it hadn’t, not to any significant degree. In fact, the irony of it, being reminded how an interlude with another prostitute at another time and place was at the root of everything now tightened inside him, only left Delaney feeling more frustrated and restless.

  He shoved back the thin sheet tossed partially across him, sat up, and swung his feet to the floor. Savaged his face with the palms of his hands, ran his fingers back through his hair. For a minute, he worked his right arm, the one that had gotten wrenched when the gun case was yanked from his grasp. After he’d stretched it some and rolled the shoulder around a bit, he lowered both arms
and brought his elbows to rest on the tops of his knees.

  So close. So damn close yet again.

  He’d had the case containing the guns right in his hands, he kept thinking, only to have them yanked away in a matter of minutes. If he’d had the briefest spot of privacy within that same span of time, he could have gotten his hands on the note. Then, after that, as far as the lousy guns were concerned, he wouldn’t have cared so much if they got stolen again. Hell, he wouldn’t have cared hardly at all.

  The wealth of the gold plating and jewel inlays on the outside . . . that was nothing compared to the value of the note secreted in the hollow handle of one of the weapons. The note that only Delaney and a precious handful of others even knew existed. What the delicately scripted words on that slip of paper meant to these individuals varied wildly and yet at the same time it all boiled down to the same thing: Power. Either maintaining it or trying to achieve it. For the time being, Delaney was in the latter category. But not for much longer, he vowed to himself. He’d tasted possession of those guns and that note twice now. It was just a matter of time before he sank his teeth in permanently.

  It had all started more than a year ago back in Springfield, Illinois. It was there that the wife of a powerful U.S. senator had committed suicide. Before planting a bullet in her poor tormented brain, she had left a note detailing the cause for her distress. Her esteemed husband, it seemed, had, in a moment of desperation, murdered a young prostitute who was becoming too demanding and threatening to expose their numerous dalliances. Haunted by the deed, even after it was covered up sufficiently to protect his good name and standing, the senator had confessed to his wife what he had done. She, it turned out, was not strong enough to deal with either the betrayal or the thought of living with a murderer. Hence her departure from the world and the whole sordid matter and a note left behind to clear her conscience for the hereafter.

  As luck would have it, her body was first discovered by a male secretary to the senator, a gambling addict who had some skeletons rattling loudly in his own closet. Recognizing the blackmail potential in the note but lacking the guts to use it in such a way himself, the secretary nevertheless pocketed the slip of paper and made no mention of it upon sounding the alarm over the wife’s tragic demise. The powerful men protecting the senator went quickly to work and painted the suicide as the act of a frail, disturbed unfortunate who had long suffered from bouts of depression.

  At the first opportunity, the secretary placed the pilfered note in the hands of Delaney, who at the time held the marker on the man’s five-figure gambling debt. Delaney had been angling for some time to use this debt as leverage over the secretary in hopes of parlaying that into something he could use as influence over the senator. In one stroke, the suicide note served to satisfy the secretary’s debt and simultaneously provide Delaney greater sway over the senator than he’d ever dared hope. Negotiations were quickly begun to force the senator to spearhead a controversial land deal that, once rammed through Congress, would eventually reap hundreds of thousands of dollars for Delaney and set him up for life.

  Things were well under way and showing every sign of working out exactly the way Delaney was demanding when something so mundane as to be almost laughable happened. A common burglary occurred at Delaney’s apartment building and his personal safe was cracked—the safe where he kept, among other valuables, the cased set of gold-plated, jewel-encrusted dueling pistols he’d recently collected in payment for yet another gambling debt. On a whim, after discovering that one of the guns had a secret hollow space in its handle, Delaney had tucked the suicide note inside. Whoever cleaned out the safe took the guns, as part of their haul, strictly for the gold and diamonds in evidence on the outside—without ever realizing the greater worth contained in the handle.

  With Delaney no longer having leverage over the senator, the land deal stalled. Desperate to gain control again, Delaney formed a ruthless team of hardcases and began chasing down leads to find out who was behind the burglary of his apartment. It took months of dispensing payoff money as well as several dislocated arms and broken jaws before they finally cornered the right thief. Once they did, the little weasel revealed before he died that he’d lost the guns in a card game to a man named August Gafford. Irony of ironies—right back to gambling once again at the core of it all.

  After several more weeks, Gafford’s whereabouts were finally pinned down. And with that came revelations of Rattlesnake Wells, the upcoming grand opening of the Crystal Diamond Saloon, and the much sought after bejeweled guns being advertised as the top prize in a shooting contest.

  As he sat on the edge of the hotel bed reflecting on this, reflecting on all that had brought him here to this speck of a boomtown in the middle of the Wyoming wilderness rather than being surrounded by the comfort and opulence he so badly craved, Delaney could only heave an exasperated sigh. So close and yet so far. He’d actually held the guns in his hands once again, actually gained rightful claim to them . . . only to have them once again be taken suddenly, unexpectedly, away by another low-life piece of vermin who didn’t even possess the brains to know what it was he truly had.

  The only ones who fully understood what the guns stood for—besides the senator and his confidants—were Delaney’s two gang chieftains, Eugene Boyd and Iron Tom Nielson. And even they didn’t totally comprehend the power of the hidden note and what could be accomplished with it.

  The clock was ticking on the land deal possibly being shelved for good if the senator wasn’t ready to throw his full weight behind shoving it through. And, somehow, the crafty old bastard had sensed that Delaney’s grip on the lever to control him had in some way slipped.

  Delaney desperately needed to regain that grip and regain it firmly. He needed those damn guns back!

  * * *

  In a cluster of scraggly trees out back of the Shirley House Hotel, Ben Eames stood fidgeting nervously. He’d been doing this for the better part of an hour. A patch of grass under his feet had been mashed flat, and the wet ground underneath, even though the rain had let up some time ago and the late afternoon sky was now starting to clear, showed through in several places as muddy gouges from the heels of his boots.

  From time to time, Eames slipped from his coat pocket a bottle of whiskey that he nipped sparingly from. He’d never mastered holding his liquor very well, in spite of all the time he’d spent trying to lose himself in various bottles of the stuff over the years.

  “False courage,” he muttered to himself. Holding the depleted bottle before him, as if studying it for the first time, he added, “But, then again, how much courage does it take to shoot a man in cold blood?” After regarding the bottle a moment longer, he uncorked it once again, saying, “Clearly more than I have without some assistance.” And then took another swig.

  Returning the bottle to his pocket, it made a dull clinking noise through the fabric as it brushed against the revolver shoved in the waistband of Eames’s pants. The sound and the weight of the gun pressed against the side of his stomach reminded Eames of his skill with firearms of every type. Long guns, handguns, it didn’t really matter. He’d long ago discovered that he could hit whatever he aimed at with whatever they put in his hands. It was just that he’d never aimed at another person before. Not intentionally. Certainly not the girl in Boston. It should have meant something that no formal charges had ever been brought against him over the incident, but that did nothing to stop the false claims and accusations that haunted him and followed wherever he went afterward, driving him nearly to the bottom.

  But now that’s what Gafford was demanding he do. Kill someone for real. Make right a perceived wrong . . . or be exposed once more and held up to public ridicule and blame all over again. The ringer who’d been brought in to swerve the contest but hadn’t been good enough to pull it off.

  Yeah. Ol’ Eagle Eye Emerson. The last time he botched a shooting assignment, a girl died. Remember? Sure, and it turned out the poor thing was with child. Remember that p
art? Emerson’s child, no doubt, that he was trying to avoid laying claim to along with his rebuff of the young mother—after he’d seduced her and no doubt had his way with her countless times . . . The cad . . . The murderer . . . The double murderer!

  Eames could still hear those voices ringing in his head, in his mind’s eye still see the printed words as they appeared in the newspaper accounts and editorials. The venom. The hate. He never wanted to experience that again. He couldn’t stand it. They all believed he was a killer, anyway. So if that’s what it took—to actually become a killer—in order to block out those voices, to not have to go through that all over again, then that’s what he’d do. To hell with them.

  Gradually forming this resolve as he brought his hand to rest on the handle of the gun at his waist, Eames glared balefully at the back side of the Shirley House Hotel. In there, second floor, room number eight. That’s where he’d find Clayton Delaney. His target.

  Gafford had provided him this information, along with a skeleton key he’d appropriated somehow with assurances it would open the door to number eight.

  The plan was pretty basic. Eames, dressed now in garb totally different from the buckskins he’d previously been seen in, would go up to the room. If Delaney wasn’t there and the door was locked, he’d use the skeleton key to let himself in. Then he’d wait until the target showed up, shoot him as soon as he stepped through the door, make his escape out the back. If Delaney was present when he knocked, he’d start shooting when the door opened, flee out the back when the deed was done. Either way, it would be quick, brutal, simple.

  Eames licked his lips, surprised he felt so parched after the frequent hits he’d taken from the bottle. He considered taking another. But no, he’d had enough. There’d be plenty of time for that afterward. Or maybe if he had to wait inside the room for any length of time. But, for now, he didn’t want to dull his senses any more than they already were . . . Not that one needed to be particularly sharp to stick a gun in somebody’s face and start pulling the trigger.