Dooley stopped scratching. “I don’t believe I ever insulted your mother.”
The killer straightened. “So now you’re calling me a liar. Make your play, clean or not.”
Dooley smiled, which caused the gunman to step back, bewildered. “Seven o’clock,” Dooley said. “I’ll be clean by then. You might not even recognize me. Have a good breakfast. They have real good doughnuts in this town. And the bacon tastes like the hog bathed in maple syrup.”
He slipped inside the door, followed quickly by Butch Sweeney and Chin Lu, who slammed the door closed.
* * *
“What are you doing, Butch?” Dooley asked as he sank into the steaming water and bubbling suds. Man, that felt like paradise.
Butch Sweeney peered through the crack in the door he had opened in the back of Chin Lu’s bathhouse and barbershop. “I don’t think that’s Boone, but someone’s definitely watching the alley here to make sure you . . . we . . . don’t skedaddle.”
“Man,” Dooley said as he sank underneath the foam and water and came up quickly shaking his wet hair and grinning. “Never knew a bath could make a man feel so good.”
One of Chin Lu’s workers came over and drenched Dooley with fresh water.
Dooley motioned at the empty tub near him. “Better fill this one, boys. This one will be pitch-black in a short while, and I want to be real clean.”
The door slammed, and Butch Sweeney whirled. “Confound it, man, that’s Harley Boone out yonder waiting to gun you down. How come you’d insult a man’s mother?”
Dooley grinned. “I never met Harley Boone till just now, Butch. Certainly never said anything bad about his mother, or anyone’s mother—if Harley Boone ever had a mother.”
Butch came over to the bench in front of Dooley’s tub and sat down. One of the Chinese servants offered him a flask, and he accepted, drinking heartily.
“Harley Boone has killed thirty men,” Butch said.
“Including Cheater Norris,” Dooley said.
“Yeah. I think that’s right.”
“And Ol’ Ole Finkle.”
“Well, yeah, but I remember when that happened. Didn’t see it. Ol’ Ole called Harley Boone a liar, and Harley wouldn’t take no insult. Ol’ Ole reached for his pistol in his waistband, and Boone shot him down.”
“Sounds familiar,” Dooley said. “I wonder if Cheater Norris insulted Boone’s mother.”
“Don’t start cracking jokes, Dooley. This is serious. I’d fetch the marshal, but we ain’t got no marshal in town no more.”
“Did the marshal insult Boone’s mother?”
“No, damn it. Quit funning. Cheater Norris didn’t even carry a gun.” The workers busied themselves filling another tub for Dooley, as his was turning the color of crude oil by then. When they were gone to refill their buckets, Dooley moved to the other tub.
“He didn’t carry a gun? And no one thought to file a complaint against Boone? Last I heard, shooting an unarmed man was something like a felony.”
Butch drank more from the flask.
“Why doesn’t this town have a marshal?” Dooley asked.
“I dunno. I hear folks talkin’ ’bout it, but they got the vigilance committee, although that guy who writes those articles for the Ledger, he keeps writing that it’s time for the law, and not hemp justice, to come to Leadville.”
The workers came by and dumped more water on Dooley, who nodded with satisfaction and pointed at the tub he had just vacated, now filled with filthy water. “Drain that one, boys, and refill it. I think I’ll sleep in that one for a while.” They nodded, and Chin Lu translated Dooley’s orders.
“Your bathwater’s getting cold, Butch.” Dooley motioned at the tub that was starting to lose its steam. Then Dooley leaned over and yelled at Chin Lu, “Hey, could you order some supper for Butch and me? Maybe some whiskey for Butch? And get some supper and drinks for yourselves, too. That sound fine?”
“Fine,” Chin Lu said as Dooley pointed at his money belt hanging on a hook near the new duds he had brought with him from the clothing emporium.
“Get in the water, Butch,” Dooley said. “It’ll make you feel better. There’s nothing to worry about.” He paused, suddenly uncertain. “What time does the Ledger come out?”
“What?”
“The Ledger. The newspaper. What time can a person buy a copy?”
Butch Sweeney stared at his friend as if he had gone daft. “I dunno. I see them carting bundles to the stores and places when I’m hitching up the team. That’s right around daybreak. Before the six o’clock whistle sounds for the mines.”
The answer appeared to satisfy Dooley, who dunked his head underneath the fresh water again.
When he came up, smiling again, he motioned at the tub. “Come on, Butch. I’m paying for this, and if I’m clean and smelling sweet, you should be, too, else you might spoil my appetite. Don’t fret, pard. Harley Boone won’t kill me.”
* * *
“How can you be so sure?” Butch Sweeney worked the bar of soap furiously underneath his left arm.
“Sure about what?” Dooley was lathering up his untrimmed beard for the fifth time.
“About Boone? He gunned down that old miner. He shot the county clerk deader than a dog. And he has shot four or five others in town, and I don’t know how many more before he got here shortly after we got here.”
“Thirty men,” Dooley said. “I assume that includes Ol’ Ole Finkle and Cheater Norris.”
“Confound it, man!” Water slopped over the sides of Butch Sweeney’s tub as the young cowboy turned stagecoach operator lost his cool again. “This ain’t nothin’ to laugh at, pard. That’s a cold-blooded killer out there. Waitin’ to gun you down like a sick dog.”
“He won’t kill me,” Dooley said.
“How can you be so sure of yourself, Dooley? I know you did in Jason Baylor and a bunch of other gunmen, and I know you ended the reign of that bunch of bad hombres up in Nebraska or Wyoming or wherever that was . . . but . . .”
Chin Lu came in with the food. Dooley rinsed his beard.
“As long as the Ledger comes out in time,” Dooley said, “we don’t have anything to worry about.” He looked at the clock on the wall. “But we do have plenty of time to kill before morning comes. I might take a nap in some fresh water, Chin Lu, after we eat. And then . . . do you happen to have a deck of cards we can borrow to pass the time?”
* * *
It was a façade. Dooley had learned that word while in Abilene, Kansas. Someone had pointed at all those false-front buildings down Front Street, years ago, back when Wild Bill was still marshaling in that cow town. Dooley never considered himself a man of letters, but he did like the word.
Façade.
It had a nice ring to it.
Of course, Dooley was showing big, like the false fronts in Abilene, Ogallala, Dodge City, Julesburg—well, maybe not Julesburg, or Julesburg as Dooley had seen it—and even Leadville. Inside, he knew a million things could go wrong and leave him dead.
He did not want to face Harley Boone, but he knew he would if he had to . . . and if things did not go as planned, he would. But he also knew he did not want Butch Sweeney to get killed on his account. And Butch, loyal as Blue and General Grant, would try something if Dooley didn’t act like he was as calm and relaxed and manly and heroic as Buffalo Bill Cody.
A few things he had managed to figure out. Harley Boone had killed Ol’ Ole Finkle, but Dooley wasn’t sure what had caused that crime. Killing Cheater Norris was much easier to solve. That was to give George Miller a job to fill, to let George Miller get the appointment as county clerk and have access to mining claims and all sorts of official documents. George Miller had a worthless deed that lacked any legal standing in the state of Colorado—or so the attorney Cohen had told Dooley, and charged Dooley Leadville prices for his time and wisdom—and George Miller had turned out to be a greedy criminal.
Dooley just had to live through tomorrow morning. He kept his
Colt .45 close, never out of reach, just in case Boone lost his composure and came charging in, unwilling and unable to wait until morning to earn whatever George Miller had offered the cold-blooded assassin to do in Dooley Monahan. And he had to keep Butch Sweeney’s mind off making some damn fool play that would get the kid killed.
Six baths later, Dooley dried himself off and pulled on his new long-handle underwear and retired to the barber chair as Chin Lu prepared to cut off his beard and mustache and then give him a close shave. Dooley kept his Colt in his right hand, resting on his belly, as the barber worked his magic.
That came after supper. Chinese food. Spicy noodles with bits of chicken and all sorts of vegetables and things Dooley did not know what anyone called them or where they grew, but they had a fantastic flavor.
The tonic the barber slapped on Dooley’s fine face tingled but smelled sweet, and then Dooley asked for another bath, a warm one. He removed his long-handle underwear and sank into the soothing waters again.
“It sure is nice,” Dooley said.
“What?” Butch asked. “The water?”
“Being rich,” Dooley said, and winked.
“I’ll carve that on your tombstone, pard,” Butch Sweeney said. He looked at the clock on the wall. “In about eight hours from now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Eight hours. That kind of wait would make even the best gunmen a tad jumpy, on edge. Harley Boone would be awake all night, wondering, fretting, knowing that if Dooley managed to slip away during the night, and get out of Leadville, then Harley Boone would not get paid whatever George Miller was offering to pay him for willful and premeditated murder made to look like just another gunfight on some Western boomtown’s streets.
Dooley, on the other hand, slept like a baby.
* * *
“It time. It time. You go now. You go.”
Dooley’s heavy eyes opened and he saw Chin Lu staring at him. The barber and bather did not look happy.
“Morning,” the Chinese man said, and gestured angrily at the streets starting to show signs of life in the early-morning light. “Morning. You here all night. No one else come. Me need miners to pay rent. No pay you here all night.”
Dooley rose from the cot he had slept on, cursing himself for sleeping at all. Harley Boone could have come in during the night and shot Dooley full of holes.
“I think,” Dooley said as he yawned and set the Colt. 45 on the bench, “that you were paid pretty well.” He adjusted his long-handle underwear and moved to the clothes still hanging on the hooks by the bathtubs. Butch Sweeney sat in one of the tubs—all of the tubs had been emptied of water during the night—with his hat for a pillow and some towels over his body for a blanket. He snored contentedly. The half-empty bottle of whiskey on the floor near the tub must have served as mighty fine sleeping medicine.
Dooley found his money belt and pulled out a greenback. “I want you to do me a favor, sir,” he said, and handed the note with two zeros after a one at the owner of the barbershop and bathhouse. “Buy two of today’s Ledgers. Take one to George Miller’s office. Give it to him. Not the kid working for him. To your county clerk. Do you understand that?”
Chin Lu looked skeptical. “He no be in.”
“He’ll be in. He might not have to open his office for”—Dooley glanced at the clock—“two more hours, but I’ll guarantee you he’ll be inside and looking out the window.” He waited.
Mr. Chin Lu took the note.
“Bring the other paper here. With some coffee.” He thought that, should things not go the way he expected, maybe he should treat this morning as though it was his last on earth. There still were even odds that it might be. “And some doughnuts and that really good bacon that has a sweetness to it like candy.”
The man looked at Dooley as though his brain might have been damaged by all the bathwater and suds last night.
“Or just bacon,” Dooley said.
The man left, closing the door behind him, and Butch Sweeny stirred in the tub, lowered his hat, and opened his eyes sleepily.
Dooley busied himself getting dressed. New socks. New boots, kind of stiff, but the leather would break in after a few months in a saddle. Fine pants with nice suspenders, a real silk shirt—sort of like the one Harley Boone was wearing yesterday, only blue, not crimson—and a double-breasted vest, a silver pocket watch and chain, to stick into one of the many pockets, a good paper collar, a black string tie, and a brand-spanking-new hat that fit even better now that Dooley’s hair had been cut to a manageable length.
He looked mighty fine, he had to admit as he stared at the mirror behind the barber’s chair in the haircutting portion of Chin Lu’s business.
“Mighty fine,” Dooley said to himself, and added, just so he wouldn’t feel so cocksure on a morning that could be his last. “For a façade.”
* * *
“Damn it!”
Dooley tightened the buckle on his gun belt and moved to the bathhouse part of Chin Lu’s building, tugging on the Colt in the holster.
The back door slammed, the lock was bolted, and Butch Sweeney, still in his clothes he had put back on after his one bath last night, stomped his boots on the floor.
“What’s the matter?” Dooley asked.
“That guard. That fellow out back watching the alley.”
Dooley waited.
“He’s still out there.” Butch slammed a fist into his palm. “Hoped he might have fallen asleep at least.”
Dooley smiled. “It’s all right,” he said. “You’ll feel better. I sent Chin Lu to fetch us some coffee and breakfast.”
“I’d feel better,” Butch said, “if you’d sent him to fetch the soldier boys at Fort Garland.”
“They wouldn’t get here in time, Butch,” Dooley told him. “That fort’s a far piece from Leadville.”
Butch found his hat, pulled it on his head, and started toward Dooley, but stopped, frowning, staring out the window.
“He’s out there,” Butch said. “On the boardwalk. Smoking a cigar. Looks real sure of himself.”
He did not have to tell Dooley who he was talking about, and Dooley did not want to look out that window and see Harley Boone waiting for him. That might be just enough to crumble this façade.
That’s when the door opened, and Dooley smelled coffee and hot doughnuts.
“You must be hungry, Butch,” Dooley said, and he moved into the barbershop portion of Chin Lu’s business. But in that room, with his nerves starting to prick him and trouble him, and last night’s Chinese supper rocking harshly in his stomach, Dooley felt his voice crack as he asked, “I don’t see a newspaper, Chin Lu.”
The man set the bags and the pot of coffee on the table filled with tonics and potions and razors and shaving mugs. His left hand disappeared around his back and drew out a Leadville Ledger from his back pocket.
Dooley couldn’t hold his nerves in check. He stepped forward, practically tore the paper from the Chinese barber’s hand, and folded it open.
He could breathe again.
He lowered the paper and watched Chin Lu fill a mug with coffee, and then another. But Dooley wasn’t sure he could drink coffee and he certainly didn’t trust maple-cured bacon and sweet doughnuts in his stomach just now.
“The county clerk?” Dooley managed.
Chin Lu lifted a second mug, and Dooley felt Butch Sweeney behind him.
“Yes,” Chin Lu said. “He there. I give paper.”
Dooley’s appetite returned, but only slightly.
* * *
“Dooley Monahan, you low-down yeller dog. I’m calling you out!” Harley Boone must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. “And if you don’t step out on the street in five minutes, I’m coming in with revolvers in both hands, and I’m blasting you to hell, your pard with the red hair to hell, that Chinaman to wherever it is men of his skin go, and then I’m burning the building and everyone in it to the ground. Do you hear me?”
Dooley was s
tepping out the door before Harley Boone had finished.
* * *
He had read about times like this, in dime novels and newspapers that printed more falsehoods than facts, but until this morning in Leadville, he had never seen anything like this except in his mind when he read those wild blood-and-thunders.
Harley Boone stepped off the boardwalk and into the mud. The notorious killer had not slept last night. At least, he had not changed his clothes.
Same leather gloves. Same two gun belts bulked over each other, one Colt’s gun butt facing out front, the other toward the back. Same fancy holsters that advertised both a leather shop and a silversmith. Same flat-crowned hat. Same purple ribbon tie with yellow polka dots, only the tie had been unloosened, and the paper collar unbuttoned. The crimson silk shirt was ruffled and stained with sweat and beer or whiskey or something. The pants looked less pressed than they had yesterday, and the boots were caked with mud, some fresh, a lot dried. Dooley wanted to think that Harley Boone had done quite a bit of pacing over the night.
Of course, his face remained pale, the eyes held no humor, and the silver filling sparkled as the sun cleared the mountaintops.
He had crushed the cheroot underneath his boot heel on the boardwalk before stepping into the street and crossing about halfway before stopping and smiling at Dooley Monahan. The eyes were dead. The smile held no humor.
Dooley grimaced as his brand-new boots sank into mud on his side of the street.
“You called my mama a bad name, Dooley Monahan,” Harley Boone called out as though anyone was listening other than Dooley Monahan in Leadville that morning.
It was too early for most businesses to open. The cafés and hotels were farther down the street. Here most buildings remained shuttered. No one roamed the streets, on the boardwalks or on the muddy roads. Even Chin Lu had closed the door and drawn the shade as soon as Dooley had stepped outside. Whoever had been watching in the alley probably was there, but Dooley was not a greenhorn. He would not turn to see if that killer was there. That’s the chance a man like Harley Boone would be waiting for.
Hang Him Twice Page 14
