by Bill Brooks
There was the sound of shuffling boots on the boards, and, as Cole reached for the self-cocker, he was hit from behind and sent off balance. He was quickly shoved into an alleyway into the darkness of cover. He guessed there were at least three of them, maybe four. The blows were delivered with short, hard grunts, and each one seemed to find a new spot against Cole’s ribs and kidneys. Two or three times a boot found its way into his shoulders and back as he rolled around in the mud, got to his hands and knees, and was knocked back down again. A kick to his chest knocked the wind out of him and he stopped trying to get up.
The rain boiled up in the mud, next to his face. He could feel the blood leaking from his nose and lips. It was hard to breathe, and he clawed at the mud, trying. Then he heard the double click of a revolver being cocked just above him and knew he was going to be shot in the head. He closed his eyes and waited for the journey to begin. He didn’t know if he was ready to die, but a great peacefulness came over him, knowing that the time had finally come. Like a dream, only this time it wasn’t a dream. This time, he pressed his palms into the mud trying to raise himself up, to see the man who would do it, but a foot pushed down hard in the middle of his back, pinning him. He waited for the explosion of the pistol, wondering if he’d even hear it. Bang!
It didn’t hurt. Then something slammed to the muddy ground next to him. He opened his eyes and saw the shadowy details of a man’s bloody face under the pallor of yellow light coming from a second-story window of one of the buildings lining the alley. The dead man’s features were distorted, the eyes frozen in a surprised stare. Cole could hear the sound of boots splashing through the mud, followed by the distinct metal click of a shell being ejected and another being jacked into the breech.
He lay there, trying to breathe, staring into the face, what was left of it. Then he heard the unhurried approach of footsteps, the sucking sound of mud. He waited. Maybe it wasn’t over. He saw the muzzle of a carbine dangle in front of his eyes for a brief moment, then watched it swing over and poke at the dead man.
“You still alive?” the voice of Miguel Torres asked.
“I think so,” Cole managed to whisper through the shortness of breath that’d come with being kicked in the chest.
“I could only get the one,” he said. “The others scrammed into the dark. I guess, if I’d been carrying a repeater, I might’ve got more. But this old single-shot . . .”
“That’s OK,” Cole said. “One seems enough.”
“You know that man?” he asked, poking with the muzzle.
“No. But then, there’s not a whole lot left to identify.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Those big grain bullets create a lot of damage. Can you get up?”
Cole nodded. He felt Torres lift him under his arms until he could sit up. Torres leaned him against the wall of a building, squatted down, took stock.
“I seen worse,” he said. “You were lucky.”
“How so?”
“That one there, the one I shot, he was about to cap you.” He stood, went over to the dead man, bent down, and picked up the pistol still clutched in his hand. Miguel held it aloft where the light was better under the upper window. “Forty-Four-Forty. Merwin and Hulbert model. Don’t see many around. Mean little bastard of a handgun.” He shoved it into a pocket.
“You think you could help me up the rest of the way?” Cole asked.
Again he squatted in front of Cole, looked into his eyes. “Somebody wants you dead, why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because you came here looking into the killings,” he said. “That why they want you dead?”
“It would be my guess, if I had to make one.” Cole looked back at the dead man briefly.
“Whip you, then kill you,” he said. “They wanted to make you suffer a little before they capped you with that Forty-Four-Forty. I’d say you’ve made some real enemies.”
In spite of the beating, Cole didn’t feel there was anything broken—no ribs, no bones. “I think, if I can stand, I’ll make it back to my hotel room all right.”
“I’d think you’d want to wait right here until the next stage left tomorrow,” Miguel said, “then crawl on it. You look like a man who’s running out of chances. Maybe the next time I don’t come along, then what?”
The rain splattered off the brim of Miguel’s hat, danced in Cole’s eyes, along his skin, feeling good and cool and welcome. Cole pushed against the wall, worked himself upward.
Miguel watched as he did. “It’s a hard rain,” he said, “cold.”
“Yeah,” Cole agreed.
Cole looked around for his self-cocker, saw it lying in the mud a few feet away. It took some doing, but he managed to bend and pick it up and straighten up again without falling down.
“You better clean the mud outta that before you try firing it,” Miguel said. “Blow up in your hand.”
It was hard for Cole to breathe through his nose. Maybe he had been wrong about nothing being broken. He pinched off the blood between his thumb and forefinger. “You just happened to come along?” he asked.
“I was over there,” Miguel said, nodding toward a bagnio across the street. Cole could hear the laughter of women, the bark of eager men.
“Drinking?”
“Yeah . . . that, and keeping an eye on things,” he said, looking across the street. “I heard there was a girl that maybe knew Robertito who works in there.”
“The same girl who sent your brother’s clothes?”
“Maybe.”
“She admit to it?”
He hunched his shoulders. “I didn’t ask her anything yet.”
“Then you just happened to be over there, watching, and saw this?”
“Something like that.”
“Lucky for me,” Cole concluded.
“That’s what I said.”
“I owe you.”
Miguel didn’t say anything, whether or not he thought Cole owed him. He said: “Like flies and shit.”
“What is?”
“Trouble and you.”
“Maybe I’m just having a bad week.”
“Man”—he shook his head—“nobody has that bad a week.”
“Like you said, I’m lucky.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“What about him?” Cole asked.
Miguel looked at the dead man. “I guess it’s too late for him. I guess he had a worse week than you.”
“No, I mean, you just going to leave him there?”
“Well, I guess his friends will figure it out, come back for him soon as they think it’s safe. I guess it’ll be up to them to see he gets buried. I don’t see where that concerns me.”
“What about that girl?”
He looked over at the house across the street again, the laughter from the women louder, pitched, like someone was tickling them, the men barking like dogs. “I’ll probably go back over, hang around a little, see what I can see.”
“Remember, she probably had some feelings for your brother,” Cole said. “Why else would she have done what she did? Go easy, if you find her.”
Miguel cocked his head, the rain slanting off his hat brim to the side, sluicing down over the shoulder of his coat. “You think just because I was never married to one, I don’t know how to handle a woman when I have to?”
“No, I just meant that you need to remember that whoever sent Robertito’s clothes back to you probably didn’t have anything to do with his disappearance.”
“That’s what being a detective teaches you? To think that way?”
“You’re a smart man, Miguel. You want to find out about your brother, do it the right way.”
He looked at Cole with those fearless dark eyes that were hidden in the shadows of his face. Cole could hear his breathing. He started to turn to the street, everything feeling loose, unattached. “Another thing,” he said. “You need my help, let me know.”
Miguel didn’t say anything. Cole didn’t expect he would.
; Chapter Nineteen
John Henry Cole asked Graves, the hotel clerk, to have a boy get a bottle and bring it to his room.
“Looks like you fell down in the mud,” he said.
“Make it mash whiskey.”
He climbed the stairs; they might as well have been the Rockies. He fumbled with the key to his door, found it already unlocked. The lamp didn’t need to be on for him to know there was someone in the room. He could smell her fragrance.
“What do you want?” he asked, without bothering to reach for the lamp. He struggled with his duster, wet and heavy with rain and mud, as were all his clothes.
“Mister Cole,” she said. From the sound of her voice, she was sitting on the bed.
“Who are you?” he asked, pulling out the tails of his shirt, working the buttons with his muddy, cold fingers.
He heard the glass chimney being raised. Then a match flared and the flame touched the wick; the room slowly filled with soft, warm light. It illuminated her face. It was a face he hadn’t expected to see again: Suzanne Smith’s. She looked different than on the stage, less prim and proper, less plain. Her hair was loose and down around her shoulders. She wore a waistcoat over her blouse and a long heavy skirt.
“What’re you doing here, Miz Smith?” Cole asked, still struggling to get out of the wet shirt. No matter how he moved, it hurt.
“I know this seems odd, my being here in your room like this, the light out,” she said.
“No, the way things are going, there’s not much I find odd. But it still doesn’t answer the question of why you’re here.”
“I don’t know . . . where else to be,” she said.
Then he saw, on the bed beside her, bundled under the blankets, the small, still form of her daughter, the toss of dark ringlets upon the pillow.
Suzanne Smith saw Cole’s gaze, and said: “She’s exhausted. I’m sorry . . .”
“Don’t be.”
“I had no intention to impose myself on you. . . . I barely know you. But you see, Mister Cole, I have no one else to impose myself upon.”
“If you don’t mind, I need to get out of these wet clothes.” He waited for her to avert her eyes, but she didn’t. The room was small, not built for privacy.
Cole pulled off the shirt, then the boots, and then his pants. He was still in his underdrawers, but they’d need to come off as well. He reached for a towel, turned his back to her, and with as much dignity as he could manage traded the drawers for the towel. When he turned back, she was still staring at him.
He scrounged a shirt out of his saddlebags, the one purchased to replace the one he had torn into bandages for Rose. He put it on, keeping the towel tied around his waist.
“You mind if I smoke?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Normally I wouldn’t in the presence of a lady.”
“No, go right ahead, Mister Cole. It is your room, after all.”
Mud was clinging to his hair. He ran his fingers through it.
There was a knock at the door. She started, her right hand coming to her throat, just above a cameo brooch she’d pinned there.
“I think it’s the bottle I ordered,” Cole said. He reached into the pocket of his wet pants and pulled out the money.
The kid had corkscrew red hair and he tried hard to look past Cole into the room. Cole saw him grin when he spotted Suzanne Smith, the freckles spreading out across his nose. “Anything else you be needing, you just let me know, sir. Name’s Deke. Just ask Mister Graves downstairs to have Deke get whatever it is you be wantin’. I’ll do it.”
Cole closed the door with him still trying to get a better look at Suzanne Smith. He pulled the cork on the bottle, found the water glass, wiped it out with his fingers, and poured enough of the mash to get his blood circulating again. Then he remembered what manners he still had. “You?” he said, holding the glass forth.
She nodded just a little. He handed her the glass, watched her sip the mash, saw the flinch in her eyes as she swallowed it. She steeled herself, drank the rest, and handed back the glass. He poured another one for himself.
“So what’s this all about, Miz Smith?” he said, feeling the liquor rip through him.
She lowered her eyes at last. Her hands fidgeted, one against the other, the gray gloves she was wearing thin and tightly formed over her long, slender fingers. Cole imagined those gloves holding a parasol as she strolled along a tree-lined lane, a beau at her side, eager to please, a gentleman, and she as delicate in her manner as spring rain upon pretty flowers.
“You see . . .” she began, then drew a sharp breath. “I have no one to turn to, no place to go with my child, no one to take me in. And worst of all, Mister Cole, I have no money left.”
Her voice stumbled and she gripped the bedpost with one hand, the knuckles showing through the cotton glove. Then she lifted her gaze with as much pride as she had left.
“It’s not much of a reason,” she said, “but you’re the only one I could think of.”
“You mind?” Cole said, indicating the foot of the bed.
“No, please, sit down.” Then, as he moved closer, she said: “Your nose, it’s bleeding.”
He touched the back of his hand to it, pulled it away, saw a smear of blood. “I fell down. It was an accident.”
She looked at him a minute longer, knew he was lying about falling down, then swallowed, willing to let go the rest of the questions she had about what had happened to him.
“I thought you said on the trip up you were coming to meet someone, a man,” he said, sitting now on the bed. “What happened? Didn’t you find him?”
“I found him,” she said.
“And he disappointed you?”
She blinked several times, trying to hold back the tears that were building just behind her pale blue eyes. “You see,” she said, her spine suddenly becoming a rod of stiffness, her chin jutting forward in an effort to compose her dignity. “John has already married someone else. He said he sent a letter, explaining it to me. But I never received it. At least, he claims to have sent a letter.”
“The little girl?”
She turned her attention to the sleeping bundle of child beneath the blankets. “She’s his daughter,” she said. “John’s and mine.”
“That didn’t seem to bother him? That you came all this way, brought her with you?”
“She was three when he left us to . . . as he put it . . . find a better life for us. That was nearly two years ago. I couldn’t wait any longer in Denver. We were nearly out of money then.”
“So you thought you’d just come and find him, and everything would be all right after two years?”
She turned her face away. “I thought that it would . . . yes.”
“But you were mistaken about this John?”
She took a deep breath and let it out, her eyes wet, still wanting to be fiercely loyal, it seemed, to a man who’d abandoned her and their daughter. “He promised me . . .” It was like an unanswered prayer, the way she said it.
“Look, I’m sorry, Miz Smith. You and your daughter can stay here the night. In the morning, I’ll see what I can do to get you tickets back to Denver. You have people back in Denver, folks that could help you and the little girl?”
She shook her head. “No one.”
She was doing her best to maintain herself. He was doing his best to keep from closing his eyes and falling into the exhaustion that was pulling at him. “Well, try and get some sleep. We’ll discuss it over breakfast in the morning, what you and the little girl are going to do.”
“I’m a proud woman, Mister Cole. At least, I always was until now. If it weren’t for Tessie . . .”
“Don’t think about that right now, Miz Smith. I’ll go out in the hallway and finish my smoke while you get yourself ready for bed.”
Cole felt it was the worst kind of way to be, to be beholden to strangers, and he didn’t want to make it any harder on her than it already was. Besides, he thought, he had the bot
tle of mash and his makings, and for him, right then, that was just about all he needed. He stepped out in the hallway and smoked the cigarette slowly, taking turns with the mash, trying not to think about anything beyond the moment, trying not to think about Liddy and her visitor and Rose, or the men who’d nearly killed him out in a dark alley, or even why they’d tried to kill him. His exhaustion was so deep that events seemed to be turning faster than he knew how to keep up with them.
He waited for what he thought was long enough for Suzanne Smith to get undressed and into bed. He knocked lightly before stepping back inside. The flame of the lamp guttered low and he could barely see her face. He unrolled his sougan, stretched out on the floor, propped his back against the wall, still holding onto the bottle. He closed his eyes, listened to the buzz inside his head, medicated himself with the liquor, shifted his weight now and again whenever one spot got to bothering him. He let the whiskey begin its journey through his flesh and soul, let it carry him on a long, slow ride down a peaceful river. He didn’t mind resting that way. He’d done it a hundred times before in his life. Sleeping in places a man wasn’t meant to sleep: the hard ground, trenches filled with rain water, and saddles. Sleeping on the floor was hardly an inconvenience. He heard the little girl cough in her sleep, and it pulled him up a little, then the whiskey river carried him back down again.
He was nearly asleep, not quite, but just at the edge when he heard Suzanne Smith say something.
“. . . You want, it’s OK.”
He thought she was saying something to the girl. His mind was adrift, thick, heavy with exhaustion, the numbing effect of the whiskey. He thought maybe he’d been dreaming that she’d said something. Then she said it again.
“It’s OK if you want to lie here in the bed next to me, Mister Cole. I don’t mind. You don’t need to sleep there on the floor.”
It was soft, her voice, soft like a butterfly landing on the petal of a flower, soft and gentle and sweet. It drifted through his weariness. He thought about her in the bed. He thought about accepting the offer.
