GUN TROUBLE AT DIAMONDBACK (Bear Haskell, U.S. Marshal Book 1)

by Peter Brandvold

  “All I know is I found him with three bullet holes in his back. Out there. By the privy.” Big Deal pointed toward a back door that didn’t fit its frame snugly enough. Sunlight shone around the edges and underneath, where a knot had worn away on the very bottom.

  “Show me.”

  “Huh?”

  Haskell was getting irritated. “Show me where you found him, Big Deal!”

  “All right—you don’t have to yell. This whole thing makes me nervous enough as it is. Why, prob’ly half the town thinks I killed ole Marshal Cameron for his badge!”

  The kid flicked the back door’s locking nail from its hasp and shoved the door wide. Haskell followed him into the jailhouse’s back yard.

  An old chair sat in a bare spot beside the door. On the ground beside the chair was a dented tin coffee cup. Coffee had dried to a brown crust on the bottom. Beyond, a hard-packed trail angled toward a one-hole privy that sat about fifty feet from the jailhouse, a half-moon carved high in the door. A sun-bleached deer skull was nailed to the privy above the door.

  The yard around the privy and the trail leading to it was all buckbrush and sage and stunted cedars and rocks. Split stove wood was stacked four to six-feet-high against the jailhouse’s back wall, to either side of the door and the chair. A chopping block sat to Haskell’s left, as he faced the privy. The head of a splitting maul was embedded in the block.

  A pile of split wood surrounded the block on three sides.

  “I found him right there when I came to work for the nightshift at seven o’clock a week ago last Wednesday night.” The Kid was pointing at the ground beyond the chair, near the piled wood abutting the jailhouse.

  “You think he was shot comin’ out of the privy?”

  “Musta been. There was scuff marks and blood right in front of the privy when I found him.” The Kid was walking slowly toward the privy, raking his gaze along the hard-packed trail. “More blood here ... and here ... and there.”

  Haskell followed the kid toward the privy. Dried brown blood marked the clay-colored dirt of the trail and some of the rocks along both sides. There were scuffmarks, as well. Spurs had dragged across the ground, chewing into some of the slender sage branches.

  Haskell stopped near the privy door. Just in front of it was a fist-sized patch of blood splashed across a blond tuft of buckbrush. There were two roughly round shapes in the soft dirt of the trail.

  “You’re right, Big Deal. Good detective work. He fell here first. Must’ve risen and stumbled his way to the jailhouse.” Haskell walked slowly back toward where Big Deal had found Cameron, following the scuffmarks and blood splotches. “He fell again here. Looks like he must’ve ... looks like he must’ve crawled to where he finally ... collapsed.”

  Haskell stood staring down at the ground beside the chair and just in front of the wood piled against the jailhouse, to the right of the door now as Haskell faced the building.

  “He must’ve been trying to get to the door.”

  “That’s how I figured it,” Big Deal said. “Just couldn’t make it.”

  “Three bullets in him, eh?”

  “Yep, three.”

  “With that many bullets ... ” A thought occurred to the federal lawman. “Wasn’t he wearing a gun?”

  “No.”

  “Wasn’t that odd?”

  “Not if he was usin’ the privy.”

  “How so?”

  “When ole Lou used the privy he always ... ”

  Big Deal let his voice trail off as he looked at the stacked stove wood right of the door.

  “What is it, Big Deal?”

  “Sometimes when he’d come out to use the privy he’d leave his pistol and shell belt on the woodpile there.”

  “Right here?”

  “Yeah, about there.”

  Haskell looked around atop the pile. He shoved his head up close against the jailhouse’s stone wall, and looked into the dark, foot-wide gap between the wall and the wood. “I think I see it.”

  “Sure enough?”

  Haskell tried to reach into the gap but it was too narrow. “I need a stick.”

  He and Big Deal looked around. “There’s one.” Big Deal walked out into the brush and found a four-foot long cedar stick with a dogleg bend at one end. “Will this work?”

  “I’ll give it a try.”

  Haskell poked the stick down behind the pile and, grunting and chewing his lips for over a minute, finally worked a shell belt with a gun and holster attached to it up to where he could grab it with his left hand. He pulled the rig out of the gap and set it atop the woodpile.

  Haskell recognized Lou Cameron’s shell belt and holster. It was the same one he’d won off a buffalo hunter in Texas when he and Haskell had first come west together. The pistol was the same old cap-and-ball he’d used during the war—an unwieldy, walnut-gripped, nondescript piece that he’d had converted to shoot .44-caliber metal cartridges.

  “How did it fall back there, I wonder?” Big Deal said. “He musta reached for it and somehow shoved it off the woodpile.”

  Haskell looked around, scratching his chin. Finally, he shook his head and looked at the gun on the woodpile. “He was down on all fours by the time he reached the woodpile. I have a feeling he was shot once when he first walked out of the privy. He was shot a second time as he stumbled toward the jailhouse. That shot felled him. He crawled from there to here, where you found him. He was probably shot the third time here. He was trying to get to his gun but he couldn’t make it.”

  “Then, how ... ?”

  “The killer must’ve dropped the gun back behind the woodpile.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Haskell felt a ball of fury ignite just beneath his heart. “He was taunting his victim. He was mocking Lou. The killer probably told Lou that he’d give him a chance to get to his gun. But he didn’t let him, of course. I bet the killer was laughing all the while. Then he walked around in front of Lou, when Lou was crawling at his last, and dropped the gun and shell belt down behind the woodpile, where Lou could never reach it.”

  Haskell stared at the gob of dried blood in front of the woodpile. More fury surged through him, causing his ears to ring. He could almost hear the killer’s jeering laughter in his own head. “That’s when the killer finished him with one more round.” Bear shook his head. “Whoever killed Lou did so in a rage. Must’ve really hated him.”

  “Jesus,” Big Deal said, cupping his chin in his hand and wagging his head as he stared down at where Lou Cameron had died. “That’d take a hard-tailed, bona-fide, died-in-the-wool son of a bitch to pull a dirty trick like that.”

  “Yep.” Haskell nodded, thinking it through, imagining how it had happened. “A hard-tailed son of a bitch who had one hell of a mad on.”

  Big Deal grunted, shook his head again.

  “Who was that mad at him, Big Deal? Think it through. Remember. Ole Lou must’ve piss-burned somebody right smart. Now, I know Lou was good at that sort of thing, but think recent. Do you remember his getting into it real serious-like with anyone within the last couple of weeks?”

  Big Deal stared at the ground in frustration, slowly shaking his head.

  “Think!” Haskell urged.

  “I am thinkin’,” Big Deal said, getting angry again and glaring at Haskell. “You’re makin’ me nervous!”

  “How nervous?” Haskell studied the younker shrewdly. “Nervous enough to jerk those hoglegs again and tear down on me?”

  Big Deal ground his jaws. His eyes flashed with fury. “I knew that was comin’. I just knew you was gonna think it was me who killed Marshal Cameron because I wanted his badge. But it wasn’t me, I tell you! Me an’ the marshal—we got along! Hell, he was like a pa to me, ole Lou was. The pa I never had!”

  Big Deal ripped the badge off his vest and extended it to Haskell. “Here—take it! I don’t want it! I don’t want nothin’ to do with it!”

  Haskell took the kid’s badge. Big Deal wheeled and ran into the jailhouse
. His footsteps echoed loudly in the cave-like building. The front door squawked open and slammed closed.

  Big Deal was gone.

  Haskell pondered the badge in his hand.

  Chapter Nine

  A half hour later, Haskell stared down at the words freshly chiseled into a stone plaque at the head of a mound of fresh dirt in the Diamondback cemetery, on the shoulder of the nearly bald rise just north of town.

  TOWN MARSHAL LOUIS J. CAMERON

  1840-1889

  SHOT FROM AMBUSH

  “The Lord hath given him rest from all his enemies”

  11 Samuel 7:1

  Uncertain of his next move after visiting the place of Lou’s murder, Haskell had decided to pay his last respects. The cemetery hadn’t been hard to find. There was really no other place for it on the craggy shoulder of the mesa on which the humble town sat.

  Haskell had walked here. It wasn’t far, but it was uphill in the heat, and he wasn’t accustomed to walking. His feet were hot and sore inside his boots, which hadn’t been made for walking. But he’d used the walk to do some thinking though he’d come to no conclusions about anything. While he’d at least learned that whoever had killed his friend had probably done so in a rage, Haskell was really no closer to finding the man or men than he’d been an hour ago.

  So why not say a final good-bye?

  He held his hat in his hands as he stared down at the stone plaque. A handful of withered wildflowers had been laid at its base. Haskell felt heavy with sorrow as well as regret for the harsh words that had come between him and Lou in recent years. While they’d remained friends, because the roots of their friendship had been driven so deep, the friendship had taken a battering.

  Haskell felt the need to say something about that now though he wished like hell he’d done it before he’d had to say it to a rock monument and a pile of dirt only a few feet from which a rattlesnake had left its papery skin. The hot breeze was playing with the skin now, skidding it a few inches this way and that along the ground.

  “Well, shit, pard,” Haskell began after clearing his throat, feeling a might foolish about talking to a rock but also sensing his old friend’s presence here just the same, “I sure am sorry we had to meet up again this way. With you down there and me up here. Just know you were my best pal for a lot of years, and I’ll remember all the good times we had. As for the bad ones ... well, hell, I’m sorry I ... I’m sorry about that. Deeply sorry. That was all my fault. I still can’t quite believe I let something like that come between us. I’m gonna make it up to you, pard. I’m gonna find out who did this, and I’m gonna make sure they swing. So, I reckon that’s all I got to say. I hope you can forgive what I done. See you later.”

  “Well said,” sounded a voice somewhere behind Haskell.

  The lawman wheeled, one hand on his Schofield’s grips. He left the gun in its holster when he saw the woman standing about ten feet away from him, on the trail that wound up the cemetery hill from the heart of Diamondback.

  Haskell’s throat constricted at the woman’s beauty. Long, dark-brown hair hung to her shoulders though some of it was pinned up beneath the small, black decorative hat she wore trimmed with fake flowers.

  Cobalt blue eyes blazed out from a cameo-perfect, heart-shaped face with smooth, olive skin. She wore a cream frock with small brown flowers printed on it—a conservative dress buttoned to her throat but revealing the swell of her firm breasts beneath it. She wore long, white gloves, and a beaded reticule hung from her right wrist.

  “How is it you haven’t aged, Suellen?” Haskell asked her.

  “Oh, I have. In more ways than one. You can’t see them all in this light.”

  “You’re as beautiful as ever.” Haskell’s tone was vaguely incriminating.

  “Why, thank you, kind sir.” She gazed at him. “I suppose a kiss would be inappropriate.” She glanced at the headstone behind Haskell.

  “I suppose it would. Under the circumstances. Is this a chance meeting, Suellen? Or did you see me walking up here? Certainly you don’t brave this heat and this sun to put flowers on your husband’s grave every day.”

  “You assume wrong, Marshal Haskell.” With a sneering curl of her ripe upper lip, Suellen Cameron strode forward and opened the reticule. She pulled out a spray of relatively fresh wildflowers, though no picked wildflower remained fresh long in this heat. She crouched to set the flowers beside the ones already there, and picked up the old ones. She held them down by her side as she straightened and gazed up at Haskell once more.

  “I didn’t request you outright, but I’d hoped they send you.”

  “Of course, they sent me. You have any idea”—Haskell looked down at the grave—“who ... ?”

  She followed the lawman’s gaze to the marker, and shook her head. “If I did, you’d already know about it.”

  “Are you sure it’s not a jealous lover, Suellen?”

  That jerked her head around, cobalt eyes snapping javelins of angry light at him. Her fine jaws hardened though her lips parted in another sneering half-smile. “I haven’t had any lovers since you, Bear. You were the only one.”

  Haskell’s ears warmed. He tried to maintain his composure. “Is that so?”

  “Indeed, it is so.” The former Suellen Treadwell’s Southern accent was coming out now with her haughty anger. “And, if I remember correctly, that was as much your doing as mine. It wasn’t like it took much to seduce you. In fact, I’m not sure which one of us seduced whom!”

  “All right, that’s enough.”

  “Oh, now it’s enough. Now that you’ve gotten your licks in. Now you don’t want to talk about it anymore because you want to hold onto your fantastical idea that I was the lone culprit—the spoiled Southern belle, the spoiled, restless Southern belle who was simply too much for only one man so she had to go after his best friend!”

  “Yeah, that’s how I remember it!”

  “You remember wrong!”

  “I didn’t come here to argue with you, goddamnit. I came here to find Lou’s killer. If anyone would know if someone had a grievance against him, it would be you!”

  “Maybe,” she said, backing away. “Maybe I do know something.” She stopped, gazed up at him and there was that leering little smile again. “Stop by later for a drink. Maybe, if you mind your manners, I’ll fry you a steak. And we can talk.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “What’s the matter—you don’t trust me? Or is it yourself you don’t trust?”

  “Let’s stay on topic.”

  “What does it matter what topic we discuss, Bear?” Suellen threw a dismissive arm out. “He’s dead!”

  “I thought you Southern folk were better at honoring your dead.”

  Suellen kept her voice low as her eyes smoldered up at the tall lawman. “There got to be too damn many to honor ... after you Yankees were finished.”

  “That was your own damn faults.”

  “There it is—my being Southern rears up between us once more. That was the first thing you hated about me. And the second thing—well, we both know what the second thing was.”

  She chuckled jeeringly then turned and started walking back down the path. “Stop by later, unless you’re afraid, and I’ll fix you that drink and that steak.”

  She cast another challenging smile over her shoulder.

  Haskell stared after her, trying to keep his gaze off her round, swaying bottom and her slender back. Her lush, dark-brown hair blew out from her face in the wind. “You still in the same house you were in last time I rode through?”

  “That’s right!” she said, keeping her head facing the town now as she sashayed down the hill.

  Haskell whipped his head back around to Lou Cameron’s grave, cursing under his breath. He felt a raw male pull in his loins. The more he tried to suppress it, the worse it became. It took some will, but he returned his attention to what had brought him to Diamondback in the first place. He reached into his shirt pocket for a cheroot, for smoking alway
s lubricated his thinker box, but in the pocket he found only matches.

  “Shit.”

  He hadn’t had time to stock up on his Indian Kid cheroots, his favorite only because they were cheap and his lungs were tough, before leaving Denver, and he’d smoked his last one at Fort Laramie. The sutler there had been out of all kinds of tobacco, another thing that had the soldiers there looking wooly-eyed fowl and generally off their feed. Surely he’d find Indian Kids or something similar in the mercantile here.

  He needed forty-four shells, as well, and the errand would give him something to do until he could figure out a course of action in pursuing Cameron’s killer. Also, he might learn something in the mercantile, such a business being a commercial hub of sorts.

  Seeing that Suellen had drifted on out of sight, Haskell pinched his hat brim to his dead friend, promised him once more that he’d find his killer, and tramped down the hill. Ten minutes later he walked up to Bennett’s Mercantile, which was on the north side of Diamondback’s main street, not from the Blind Pig. Haskell had passed it on his way into town.

  A loading dock fronting the place stood a good five feet above the ground. Three young men of various ages around twenty were handing feed sacks down to a bearded, overall-clad gent standing in the back of a supply wagon, beneath the loading dock.

  “Well, if it ain’t the federal,” said one of the three young men—a stocky blond with a broad, sunburned face and deep-blue eyes. The sleeves of his checked flannel shirt were rolled up to his bulging biceps.

  “Well, if it ain’t so,” said the tallest of the three obvious brothers. Appearing to also be the oldest, around twenty-two or –three, this one had sandy hair but the same blue eyes as the stocky kid.

  Just finishing handing the sacks down to the man in the wagon, all three young men turned to Haskell. They were sweating and flushed from working in the harsh sun in the mid-afternoon.

  The one who hadn’t spoken yet, who appeared to be the middle one in age, was the only one of the three wearing a hat—a ratty brown bowler hat atop a cap of tight red curls. He had long sideburns and a flat, crooked nose. It had likely been broken at one time. His eyes were brown and set too close together, making him look both simple-minded and mean, but otherwise his features resembled those of the other two.