The Killing Machine

by Ed Gorman

  It usually works. Make fun of a man and his fears and he’ll turn on you, tell you what a brave sumbitch he is and what a stupid sumbitch you are for doubting his manliness.

  “This is your call, Tib.”

  “You think we’re pussies?” Tib said.

  “I don’t buy into owls and your old lady’s spooked feelings, but I have to admit we don’t know what we’re riding into. Maybe my brother’ll be reasonable and there won’t be any trouble. Or maybe he’s got a bunch of men there with carbines, just waiting to use them on us. There’s always a chance we’ll be outnumbered. That’s something you have to take into account, I guess.”

  “I’m not a pussy.” That white word in the mouth of a red man sounded kind of funny, like a little kid cussing. I smiled to myself.

  “I sure don’t think you are, James.”

  “Well, I sure ain’t, either,” Tib said.

  “Never said you were, Tib.”

  Then Tib asked, “What exactly are we tryin’ to get back from this brother of yours?”

  “A gun.”

  “Must be some gun.”

  I didn’t like or trust either of them. Couldn’t explain it; just felt it. Maybe it was the way they were always glancing at each other. Their contempt for me was clear in the tone they took with me.

  We reached the hill where I’d sat my horse earlier in the day. The night smelled of wood smoke and forest and snowy mountains. Fifty voices cried out their complaints, everything from baby birds to coyotes.

  Now that it was dark, nothing was the same. A mountain wind had started ripping away the last of the remaining leaves. Shadows in crevices and gullies lent the landscape a mysterious, even treacherous, look. In daylight this area had been a sweet autumn land with apple trees and tilled acres and even a stream for fishing. But night wore a mask, and not a kind one. It could be hiding anything. I was an expert at night. I’d learned to use it pretty well back in the days of the war.

  I grabbed my field glasses and stood up in the buckboard.

  The house was dark. So was the barn. No sign of humans or horses. A couple of raccoons ate at spoiled apples in the backyard, their dark eyes gleaming whenever moonlight touched them.

  James’s breathing got heavier. The excitement of danger. Sometimes that made for the best kind of warrior; sometimes it made for the most reckless and foolish kind. I was beginning to get the sense that James belonged in the reckless category.

  The three of us jumped down to the ground. Each of us toted a carbine, as well as a holster and sidearm.

  “I can scout it for you,” James said, confirming my sense that he was eager to get to the shooting, if there was to be any. And I guessed that if it didn’t look like there would be any shooting, James would start some on his own.

  “I appreciate that, James. But this is my fight. You’re here for backup.”

  “That means what exactly?” Tib asked.

  “Means I’m going down there and try to reason with him.”

  “Maybe they are gone,” James said.

  “Maybe. But I doubt it. He has men in this town who have money for him. He couldn’t have made a deal that fast. We were supposed to meet and talk. That’s what I hoped we’d do, anyway. Obviously, he had other ideas. We can’t just pull our wagon up in the yard. We don’t know what’s waiting for us.”

  “He’d just shoot you down?” James said.

  “I don’t think so. But I can’t be sure. We haven’t spent a lot of time together since before the war. That’s a long time ago. People change. That’s the only thing you can count on.”

  Then: “You wait here,” I said. “You’ve got my field glasses. You should have a pretty good sense of what’s going on. I’ll see you in a while.”

  I set off.

  I swung west a quarter mile, into the loam-smelling woods, immediately entangled in underbrush as I sought some sort of trail. I found mud, feces, holes that tripped me, branches that lashed that broken face of mine, thorns that cut my hands, and at least half-a-dozen dead little critters that scavengers of all kinds had had their way with.

  I emerged at a fence line, barbed wire, and eased myself between two strands. There was no other way in. None, at least, any safer than this. I half-expected sniper fire to pick me off. Or at least try to scare me off, unless my brother had decided to make quick work of me. The only place to hide was the outhouse to the east. I kept listening for any human sound. There was always the possibility that Tib or James had inadvertently mentioned to somebody that we’d be coming to the ranch tonight. Or maybe not inadvertently. It was pretty obvious that these two were the type who’d sell you to the highest bidder. Maybe they’d sold me out to David, and now David was waiting for me after setting the trap.

  The ranch house had a shingle roof and adobe walls. Nothing moved in the dark windows; no smoke coiled from the tin chimney; no sound intruded on the silent yard. Sometimes you get a sense of places you’re unfamiliar with. Some instinct allows you to take a reading. Danger or not danger. But I got no sense of the place. The house could be empty or there could be an army inside.

  From here I couldn’t see the front door, only the pine rear door. Ten feet away was the well. A small cross had been jammed into a tiny hill of dirt some time ago. A small animal of some kind. My brother and I had always been partial to animals. One of the quickest ways to be favored with a Ford punch in the face was to display any kind of cruelty to an animal.

  I hefted my carbine. I told myself that I was estimating the amount of time it would take me to reach the back door from my present position. What I was doing was stalling, of course. I was thinking about what six or seven bullets tearing into me would feel like. I’d been wounded in the war. I didn’t look forward to being wounded again. Even if I could trust David, I didn’t know anything about the men with him. Maybe they’d shoot me and worry about David later.

  But at this point, I wanted to get close enough to stand in front of him and make my case. It’s a lot harder to shoot a man who’s standing right in front of you. You have to take into account his humanity. Even the worst of us has a little bit of that left in us. I never assassinated anybody from close range. I couldn’t afford to think of them as men with wives and children and lives. If I did, a lot of them would still be walking the earth. That was why I got sick of men on both sides bragging about the war. A lot of good men, wearing both colors, had died.

  I crouched down and began a zigzag run toward the back door of the house. Even in the cool night, I was sweat-soaked by the time I ducked just below the doorknob. I was also out of breath, which was why for three or four full minutes, I just haunch-sat there, letting my body repair itself. I didn’t need another reminder that I was no longer young. But there it was.

  I reached up and put my hand on the doorknob. My fingers anticipated a mechanism that would not give. I was right. I spent five minutes on it.

  I stood up, took several deep breaths. I was still sticky with sweat and my breathing was still somewhat ragged. I needed to piss, but now was not the time.

  The door creaked and croaked as I opened it. I paused every time the door advanced an inch, expecting a blaze of gunfire. I planned to pitch myself to the ground left of the door at the first hint of trouble from inside.

  But no such hint came.

  The door was as noisy as one of those root cellar doors that remain closed for months at a time. Loud as coffin tops after a decade or two with the worms.

  But no response from inside.

  The interior was much larger than I’d assumed. Pale moonlight displayed good oriental rugs, solid furniture of mahogany and dark leather, even a few paintings more serious than big-eyed dogs and doe-eyed children covered the walls. The booze was of good quality; that would be David’s doing, of course. Same with kitchen, both bedrooms and the workshop David had fashioned for himself on the large back porch—all neatly laid out and organized.

  I went through drawers. I turned up nothing. The only things I found of no
te were photographs of David’s children. There must have been twenty pictures. I’d had the sense that he’d left them behind mentally, as well as physically. But you don’t keep this many pictures unless the kids are actively on your mind. Holding the photographs, seeing those sweet little earnest faces, I liked my brother much more than I had in years.

  I heard something, or thought I did, and swung around, Colt ready.

  The gray kitten with the tiny white paws looked at me and I looked at her. She mustn’t have found me terribly interesting. She meowed once and then walked with a great deal of flounce and dignity out the back door I’d left open. She disappeared right through it.

  I walked over to the window facing the yard. From there I had a good look at the rolling front doors of the barn. They were almost completely closed. There was maybe a foot between the two edges of them. Not so much as a glimmer of light from inside. The silence started to bother me again. It was unnatural. Maybe I’d guessed wrong. Maybe David had packed everything up and headed for the border. Now that he knew the Army was on to him, he might stay just across the Canadian border. He’d stayed there before. I needed to try the barn.

  I took another walk-through of the house. It was one of those irrational acts you give into because you don’t know what else to do for the moment. I’d searched it thoroughly. I wasn’t going to turn up anything a second time through. And I didn’t.

  I went back to the window. I saw James and then Tib. They were making their way along the far side of the barn, keeping to the shadows of the chicken coop and a large shed. They were being careful, which told me that they probably hadn’t tipped David off to me coming out here. If they were working with him they wouldn’t have to worry about somebody spotting them and shooting.

  They probably weren’t all that brave. But they’d probably gotten bored sitting up on the hill waiting for something to happen. That’s one thing you learn to fight against when you have to assassinate somebody. You have to wait them out till the moment’s exactly right. A few minutes too early, a few minutes too late, can throw everything off. You might kill him all right, if you act too soon or too late, but you might blow your whole escape plan in the process.

  The kitten had strolled out in front of the barn and now stood before the sliding doors, apparently watching James and Tib. I wanted to get those two the hell out of there. Any chance we had of sneaking in was likely gone now. Surely they’d been spotted by somebody inside the barn.

  Maybe there was still time to wave them off. To proceed on the notion that they hadn’t been seen. And then figure out a way to sneak into the barn myself. Maybe there was a haymow door in the back.

  But for now I couldn’t afford to clutter up my mind with thoughts. Now was time for simple action. To get them the hell out of there.

  I got to the back door. Looked left, right, hefted my carbine, proceeded along the back of the house as invisibly as I could. The moon didn’t help. The roof didn’t have but an inch or two of overhang. There were no deep shadows to hide in. The moon was like a huge cosmic lantern. If a shooter had a bead on me, the moonlight made me easy pickings.

  There was a stubby oak tree to the east of the barn. I crouched behind it and picked up a few small pebbles. I’d never been much of a pitcher in baseball. But I could throw well enough to get their attention. I launched the first, then the second, of the pebbles.

  I got Tib on the arm. The way he spun around, the way his face went startled and ugly, the way his gun sought out somebody to unload on—all these responses in just a second or two. I stuck my face out for him to see. You could almost feel his rage and curiosity drain away. He waved. I waved back.

  James saw what he was doing. His eyes narrowed and looked for me in the gloom around the trees. He saw me. Scowled. He was ready for action and I was stopping him. If he didn’t get action soon, maybe he’d turn on me.

  I waved them off again. They nodded, understanding quickly what I wanted them to do. To fade into the trees behind them. Tib went quickly. James lingered in the moonlight. He wore a big frown. By not moving, by glaring at me, he was challenging my authority. He would be thinking that I was some Federale from the East and what the hell did I know about how things were done out here in the West and I wasn’t paying him all that much money, anyway, and just why the hell was he taking orders from me, anyway? Plus, at some point or another he’d also be thinking about the gun itself. David’s gun. The entire focus of my trip and the four arms merchants who wanted it. James had to be at least daydreaming how much money could be his if he could somehow steal the gun for himself.

  But he relented. Shook his head in disgust and then turned toward Tib and started walking.

  From the chicken coop came a sudden cacophony of excited hens. Maybe a dustup of some kind. Chickens certainly had a sullen temperament. The noise was raw on the silence. Usually chickens sounded sort of comic. But tonight there was something threatening in their anger. They battled there for what seemed a long, long time. But I used the distraction. If David was in the barn, the fighting in the chicken coop would distract him just as much as it distracted me.

  It took me ten minutes to get behind the barn. I was sweaty again, shaky. I also had the feeling once more that at least one pair of eyes was watching me. Amused, maybe, but with that power hidden observers always have—the ability to surprise you. The ability to do just about any damned thing they want if they’re clever or nasty enough.

  There was no haymow door in the back of the barn. There was a single, small door but it didn’t offer much hope to an intruder. The barn was big, but not big enough to allow anybody to open a door without being heard. I hunched down and walked around to the side of the barn. A small hatch sat very near the eave of the roof. With a good rope I could probably climb up the side of the barn and climb in through that hatch. But I didn’t have a good rope, now, did I? Not even a bad rope, for that matter. And there was the noise problem again. Even if I reached the hatch, they’d probably hear me when I opened it.

  I did the only thing I could. I crouched behind a hay wagon, watching the back of the barn as if it had some secret to reveal to me. But tonight it was keeping its secrets to itself.

  I decided to find Tib and James and see if between the three of us we could figure out some way to get me into the barn. It was funny, hunched down this way, the barn so near and familiar. A barn was a barn. But not this one. For all its familiarity—I saw barns just like it every day—there was still that unknown quality about it. That menacing quality. Maybe it was knowing the gun was inside.

  I worked my way around the far side of the grassy land to the tree line and then stayed to the shadows, trying to find Tib and James who were, presumably, anyway, hiding somewhere in the near oaks and hardwoods. The silence was on the land again. For thirty seconds there not even one of the night birds sang or cried. The barn loomed more ominous than ever, a kind of forbidden quality to what was nothing more than a stack of two-by-fours, nails, and white paint.

  A familiar feeling from my war days came back. Isolation. Three of us had been trying to sneak into the house of a Confederate general whose grown daughter was working as a spy for her father. She was known to be home for a few weeks. She was also known to have seduced a Union Army captain out of some important battle plans. We wanted to know who she’d shared those plans with. The back of the mansion sat along the edge of a river. We reached it by raft. Now we were coming up on the mansion itself. I was, anyway. When I glanced over my shoulder, I realized something was wrong. The two men working with me had stayed below on the raft. I hurried back to the small cliff above the river. When they saw me, they started laughing and pointing to something behind me. I felt isolated in a way I never had before. The world had completely turned around on me. The two men working with me were double agents. And I guessed correctly that behind me now I’d find one or two soldiers with rifles pointed at my back.

  I had that sense again. Isolation. Was I the only person in the entire world?
<
br />   “Hey! Here!” Tib stage whispered.

  And damn I was glad to hear another voice.

  The woods did a damned good job of hiding them. Not even the moonlight exposed them. They couldn’t have been much more than a few feet inside the shifting shadows of the woods, but I hadn’t seen them until Tib spoke up. I eased my way between two hardwoods and some oaks.

  James told me that he’d climbed up in a tree for a better look at the barn. He hadn’t seen or heard anything. He said he still didn’t think the barn was empty but Tib just shook his head and said it was, the Indian was crazy.

  Everything we said was in whispers, three men huddled together on a sandy little trail.

  “Nothing in the house?” Tib asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then they’re in the barn,” James said.

  “If they’re here.”

  “You thinkin’ they’re gone, Noah?”

  “Considering it. I didn’t think so at first. But it’s awful damned quiet. You said you didn’t hear anything. I didn’t, either.”

  Tib said, “Even if they’re gone, we still get paid, right?”

  “Hell, yes,” I said.

  “Just checkin’.” I must’ve sounded harsh to Tib.

  “I want you two to find an angle on the front door. Then open fire. That’ll give me cover to get into the barn the back way.”

  “Why not just sneak in the back door without no gunfire?” Tib said.

  “Good chance they’d hear me. I need to surprise them.”

  “If anybody’s in there,” James said, “I guess we’ll know pretty fast.”

  “We should get closer than these woods, if we’re going to do any good,” Tib said. “Then we’ll just make a run at the front doors. Soon as you hear us shootin’, that’s when you head for the back door. Is that right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  I was getting suspicious again. They didn’t seem bothered by charging the front door of a barn that could very well be hiding a powerful new kind of weapon and maybe three or four men besides. Maybe they were just eager for action, or maybe the people inside the barn—if there were any—were in on the whole ruse.