by Ed Gorman
Chapter Twenty-three
He knew many things about the pine trees, Kriker did. He knew the white pine and the jack pine and the bristlecone pine and the ponderosa pine. He knew that some pine needles were soft and could be used as mattresses when you were camping out, and he knew that some pine needles were hard and could be used in making roofs. He liked the clean sweet high perfume of pines, especially at cold dusk such as now, and he knew few sights so beautiful as a sloping valley of pines, green tops vivid against a pure white sweep of snow beneath. He had lived in these hills four decades now, and the sight of pines—like a cub bear or pink squirming infant born to a settlement woman—still had the power to move him deeply.
But for now such thoughts were beyond Kriker as he positioned himself behind an especially wide pine trunk and looked down the hill at the line shack where Thomas Bruckner held the girl.
Next to Kriker were two large canvas sacks weighted down with rocks. They would suffice from a distance to convince Bruckner that Kriker had the money and was willing to make the trade.
Dusk was now a deep purple. Stars stretched from horizon to horizon, sharp and brilliant against the streaked dark sky. The moon was full and silver.
Kriker, hefting his rifle, walked up to the edge of the clearing and shouted down to the cabin. He let go two shots.
“Bruckner! Can you hear me!” he shouted.
He knew it would be awhile before Bruckner responded.
Bruckner knew the voice at once. The whiskey and tobacco rasp of it was unmistakable even from this distance. All he could wonder was what Kriker himself was doing here. Where was James? Where was the money?
Then the worst realization of all struck him.
He had been going to carry the dead body of the girl to a point near the settlement, then drop her off in exchange for the money. By the time they learned the girl was dead, he and James would be gone.
But now—
Being on the side of the law, being the pursuer instead of the pursued, had kept Thomas Bruckner unfamiliar with panic. The authority of the law was very good for steadying your nerves.
But out here—the wilderness at night—the authority of the law did not matter.
Especially when a man such as Kriker—a man who’d vaguely frightened Thomas Bruckner even when they’d been working together—obviously meant to kill him.
Kriker shouted, “I have the money with me, Bruckner! I want the girl!”
In the endless blue-shadowed night, Kriker’s voice was as imposing as an Old Testament prophet’s.
The next time Kriker shouted, “I want the girl!” Thomas Bruckner had the clear impression that the man had crept much closer to the cabin.
Beneath his heavy clothing, Bruckner’s body was soaked with sweat. His eyes scanned the pines and the foothills beneath but found no sign of Kriker.
Given the mountain man’s ability to track and hunt, he could be anywhere.
Kriker swung wide east, in an arc that took him down a deep valley and back up a hill slick with ice. He had to lift his feet high and bring them down heavily for purchase. Then another deep valley and another ice-slick rise awaited him. His intent was to come up from behind the cabin. He was panting and short of breath when he reached the top of the second rise. The satchels of rocks were thrown over his shoulder. His rifle dangled from his right hand. He was thinking about the time he’d brought the girl the store-bought shoes and how he’d had to put them on her himself and how for the first time she’d smiled on that sunny May morning.
Sheriff Decker and the posse reached the settlement just at the time when Father Healy and the granny woman were trying to help the people who’d survived the cholera go back to their cabins and take up their normal lives. There would be long days of nourishment no more substantial than beef broth, and there would be long nights of faint but not fatal nausea, and there would be the grief resulting from the deaths of seventeen people they’d known as friends and neighbors here in the settlement.
The posse came down the hill, their horses kicking up a dust storm of snow in the silver moonlight.
When they came into the settlement proper, they smelled of hard riding and the cold. Their mounts smelled of heat and manure.
Sheriff Decker found Father Healy waiting for him in front of the main cabin.
For most of his life, having grown up scruffy on the streets of Chicago, Healy had always feared lawmen of any sort. Now he found himself facing Decker with a certain self-confidence. He was not sure why, but when he nodded and introduced himself as “Father Healy,” he felt for the first time as if this were a fact—he really was a priest now—and not merely a ruse to hide behind.
“I want the Bruckner brothers,” Decker said. He sounded exhausted.
“We were just preparing a meal. Why don’t you join us?”
Decker glanced back at the men behind him. It had been a hard, fast ride. A break would probably be good for them.
He nodded and let the priest lead him and the others inside the cabin where, five minutes later, the granny woman ladled out beef broth. She also handed out big chunks of fresh wheat bread.
Sheriff Decker was a dunker. He dunked his bread so deep and so long in his soup he could scarcely lift the bread up again. Yet he managed to do so each time. As he dunked and ate, he said, “I want the Bruckners and I want Kriker.”
“Kriker is gone, too.”
“The girl who rode in told me that the bounty man had Kriker handcuffed and under arrest. How’d he get away?”
Some of Father Healy’s old fear of lawmen returned. He could not bring himself to tell Decker that he had let Kriker go. “He just got away.”
“I assume he went to the line shack to find the little girl?”
“I assume.”
“You don’t sound disturbed by that?”
“By what?”
“By a man like Kriker getting away.”
“Kriker’s a very complicated man.”
“He’s a killer.”
“He didn’t kill Rig or Tolliver.”
“Maybe not,” Decker said. “But he’s killed other people.”
“The girl has changed him. She’s made him gentle.”
“Is that why he robbed the bank? Because he’s so gentle? Is that why he escaped?”
“There are different ways of being gentle.”
“If you know anything about him that can help me, Father, I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me.”
The priest shrugged. “I know what you know. Nothing more.”
Decker fixed him with a cynical eye. “I have a cousin who’s a priest.”
“I see.”
“He was ordained in St. Louis. Bishop Morgan ordained him.”
“Ah, Bishop Morgan.”
“Who ordained you, Father?”
He knew there was panic in his face, and then a rush of blood from embarrassment. In his way Decker was a subtle and devious man. Healy stammered, “Bishop Wright.”
“Bishop Wright? I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of him.”
“Chicago.”
“Bishop O’Keefe is in Chicago.”
“Bishop Wright served before Bishop O’Keefe.”
Decker’s eyes had not left Healy’s. Something like a smirk was beginning to tug on his lips. “Bishop Wright. I see.”
A tall woman in soiled clothes appeared in the doorway. She seemed intimidated by the posse. But she drew herself up and came over to Healy and Decker.
“Hello, Mary,” the priest said.
Then the woman smiled. “She’s fine now, Father. Our daughter.”
“I’m happy for you, Mary.” He took her hand and held it gently.
“It was your prayin’, Father. It was your prayin’.”
“No, Mary, it was God’s will.”
“I just wanted to thank you, Father.”
Father Healy smiled. “Thank God, Mary. He’s the one who should be thanked.”
She leaned over and gave him a tender kiss o
n the forehead, all the more tender for the roughness of her life and manner. “We all want you to know how much we appreciate what you done for us, Father.”
Then she left.
When he turned back around to look at Decker, he saw something peculiar had happened to the sheriff’s hard flat gaze. It had softened considerably.
Decker said, “They seem to appreciate you here.”
“They’re very kind people, really.”
“I’ve often been told that a lot of them have criminal pasts.” He did not say this nearly as harshly as he might have.
“People change, Sheriff.”
Decker stared at the empty doorway through which Mary had just come and gone. “They’re raising families now, eh?”
“Yes.”
“And working the land?”
“Yes.”
Decker paused now. “And obeying the law now, Father?”
“Oh, definitely,” Father Healy said. “Definitely obeying the law.”
Decker stood up and pushed out his hand. “Bishop Wright must train his priests well. You did a good job with the cholera outbreak.”
“Thank you.”
Decker tugged on his hat. His brown eyes were a lawman’s eyes again. “I’m going to have to take them all in, Father. The Bruckners and Kriker.”
“You’ll bring the little girl back here?”
Decker stared at him a moment. “Is she kin of someone here?”
Father Healy smiled. He seemed both proud and sad at the same time. “That’s the nice thing about this settlement, Sheriff.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re all kin here. Just the way God planned for us.”
Decker shrugged into his sheepskin coat and put out his hand and shook with the priest. “You give my best to Bishop Wright.”
Their eyes held on each other steadily.
“Yes,” Father Healy said. “Yes, I’ll be sure to do that.”
Warmed now, and ready again for the last and most dangerous part of their trek, the posse went outdoors and mounted up.
The horses streamed silver from their nostrils, and the night seemed vast with brilliant yellow stars and the far lonely cry of a barn owl.
Father Healy stood watching the men depart. Then he surprised himself by doing something he had never been able to before. He said a prayer. It was a ragged and informal prayer and not at all the sort of thing a true church man would pray. But it was a prayer, and it did imply, however fragilely, that he had come to believe in some power larger than man’s. If not God then some sort of hope that made the night less dark. Perhaps it would be all he would ever have and enough at that.
He was praying for Harry Kriker.
Chapter Twenty-four
Thomas Bruckner opened the cabin door and shouted out, “I want you to listen to something, Kriker.”
His voice echoed in the deep blue shadows of the winter night.
“I want you to listen to how you’re going to get the girl back.”
He could hear a distant coyote. He could hear a distant moose. He could hear a distant dog. But in the stillness that lay thick as snow on the hills surrounding the cabin, he could not hear Harry Kriker.
“I’m going to walk the girl and my horse down the hill a ways. Then I’m going to walk the girl back to the cabin. While I’m in the cabin, I want you to put the money on my horse. Then I’ll mount up and leave the girl about a mile away. You understand?”
But there was just the silence of the vast blue night again. Just the silence.
Thomas Bruckner had the terrible feeling that somehow Kriker knew the girl was dead and was now merely closing in.
But no.
There was no way that could have happened.
Bruckner went back inside the cabin. He worked quickly. He took a blanket and bundled soft pillows inside it until it looked to be about the size the girl would be, and then he took his carbine and went outside to his horse. Ice had formed on the animal’s nostrils. Bruckner chipped it away with the edge of his hand.
Then he mounted up. He was careful with the blanket that was supposed to be the girl. If Kriker was watching—as was very likely—then he would expect Bruckner to be careful with the bundle.
Bruckner rode down the hill. Twice the horse got scared, slipping on ice. Its teeth gnashed and it made a moaning sound. Bruckner made a very similar sound. He wanted it to be over. He knew how crazy a man Kriker was. He’d always known.
He led the horse down to a flat next to a twisted oak tree. It wasn’t quite an eighth of a mile from the cabin. The moonlight on the ice around the tree was silver. Silty snow made Bruckner’s face red and cold again. He ground-tied the horse, then hefted the bundle that was supposed to be the girl and he put his Colt tight against where the girl’s head would be in the bundle. He just assumed Kriker was watching. From somewhere. Nobody knew how to hide—even in snow—as well as a man raised in the mountains.
He kept the gun pointed good and direct and hard at the head of the bundle, and then he started making his way back to the cabin.
Wind came and with it dust devils again, white and whirling across the blue shadows on the snow. There was no sound except the wind. He smelled his own sweat and felt how badly he needed a shave and felt suddenly an almost violent need to take a leak, and he thought of his brother and of how he should not treat him the way he sometimes did.
But mostly he thought of Kriker. Where he could be. What he planned to do.
When Bruckner finally pushed open the door to the cabin, he found out what he’d been wondering about.
Just what he’d been wondering about.
Kriker stepped from behind the door and jammed the barrel of his rifle right into the back of Bruckner’s head.
Bruckner dropped his Colt to the floor. It sounded very loud dropping just there just then.
Kriker said, “Now you put that little girl down real easy on that cot over there. Then you and me are going to have us a talk.”
Thomas Bruckner did not get frightened or angry or sad. He simply sighed, sighed and walked with his Texas boots loud against the wooden floor across the cabin and laid down his bundle on the cot.
“Now,” Kriker said, “get her unbundled so I can get a look at her.”
“Jesus,” Thomas Bruckner said to himself. “Jesus.” It was as much a prayer as a curse.
He leaned down and unbundled the girl.
Then he paused.
“I said get her unbundled,” Kriker said.
But a curious paralysis had come over Thomas Bruckner. He felt like the time his father had caught him stealing change from his father’s overall trousers in the closet. His father had said, “Thomas William, why do you have your hand in my pocket?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t know why you have your hand in my pocket?” “No, Pa, I don’t.” “Well, Thomas, you’re not only a thief, you’re a liar.” Then his father had really given it to him and given it to him good.
Only this was going to be worse.
Much, much worse.
“You unbundle her so I can look at her,” Kriker said. But he had started to sound suspicious.
“I can’t,” Thomas Bruckner said.
“Why not?”
“Because she ain’t.”
“She ain’t what?”
“She ain’t in there.”
There was a terrible silence. “She ain’t in there?”
“No, she ain’t.”
“Where is she then?”
“She’s…”
“She’s where?”
“She’s…”
“Where?”
“Outside.”
“Outside?”
“Harry, I didn’t do nothin’ to her.”
“Jesus Christ, you sonofabitch.”
Bruckner could feel Harry Kriker ready to go. He had been violated in the worst way possible, and when he let himself go it was going to be just unimaginable.
But Kriker surprised Thomas Bruckner by saying,
“She’s out in the snow?”
“I didn’t want her to smell.”
Kriker didn’t say anything.
“It was the cholera, Harry. I didn’t do nothin’ to her. You know I wouldn’t do nothin’ to a little kid like that, Harry.”
Kriker still didn’t say anything.
“I got her back here and I laid her out on the cot and I put a couple of good warm blankets over her and I gave her water and I asked her if she needed anything. I kept her just as comfortable as I could, and then she just…”
Kriker pulled back the hammer on his rifle.
“Then she just…” Thomas Bruckner said.
He didn’t need to finish his sentence, and he didn’t in fact finish his sentence.
In a voice quieter than Bruckner could ever have imagined, Harry Kriker said, “She speak?”
“What?”
“She talk to you?”
“No.”
“Not a word?”
“No.”
“Not no kind of sound at all?”
“Not no kind of sound.”
Kriker pulled the trigger four times. The first bullet tore away Thomas Bruckner’s nose and part of his forehead; the second bullet took away his jaw; the third bullet tore a big red hole in his neck, and the fourth bullet made a soft explosion of Thomas Bruckner’s chest from a side angle.
There was a great deal of noise and a great deal of smoke. Then there was just the silence again.
After a time of just standing there and looking down at Thomas Bruckner’s body, Kriker went outside the cabin into the chill night. He wanted to find the girl, and it did not take him long at all to find her. It was obvious by the mound of snow to the east of the cabin.
He got down on his hands and knees and scooped her out. It took ten minutes.
She was already discolored, and she was already frozen solid.
He knelt there and stared at her.
He wished she’d talked to him, said just one word, at least once.
He wondered what that word would have been.
And then it fell over him, an animal grief that took the form of a kind of baying sound and a shuddering accompanied by soft silent tears as his rough hands traced the cold lines of her tiny beautiful face.
