The Killing Machine

by Ed Gorman

  She said, “I ain’t goin’ on the island because the Eye-talian woman told me it was haunted.”

  “Fine.”

  “I s’pose you don’t believe that.”

  “That the Eye-talian woman told you that or that it’s haunted?”

  “My pop, he told me you was a wiseacre.”

  “No, I don’t believe it’s haunted.”

  “Well, then I’m gonna let you find out for yourself.”

  “Fine.”

  “Don’t say I never warned you.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And if I hear you a-screamin’, I’m rowin’ right back to my daddy’s boatyard.”

  “I wouldn’t expect anything else.”

  “And quit lookin’ at my tattoos.”

  “All right.”

  “Fred ain’t none of your business.”

  “Fine.”

  “It was what my aunt called an ‘unhappy episode.’ She reads books is why she talks like that.”

  I started the process of making a cigarette one-handed. She rowed. I didn’t think about haunted islands; I didn’t look at her Fred tattoos; and I didn’t think about her aunt who knew how to read.

  It wasn’t far from the boatyard, the island, and it was bigger than I’d expected. You could set up a hamlet here; maybe even a tiny town. There was enough length and width for it. It was pretty, too, with a wide, sandy beach and a stretch of autumn colors on the trees that lined the shore.

  She rowed us up to the shore. Wanting to impress her with my manliness, I climbed out of the boat and dragged it up onto the sand. Pretty good for a onehander. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “Don’t take all day.”

  “I paid your daddy five dollars.”

  “My daddy don’t have to sit here and be bored.”

  I spent fifteen minutes walking around the entire beach. When I got back to the boat, she said, “You ready to go back?”

  “I just wanted to see what the beach was like.”

  “What the hell you think it’s like? It’s sandy.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  She spat tobacco juice into the water. I’d been wondering what she did with all that tobacco runoff in her mouth. Maybe she swallowed most of it.

  I found a trail that eventually wound its way into the heart of the island and a wide clearing that ran maybe a quarter mile. In the center of the clearing was the cairn. It stood maybe ten feet tall and three feet wide. It was a craggy assemblage of pieces of stone dragged from several points near various parts of the shore. The markings on it looked Indian but not exactly Cree. Maybe Ute or Blackfeet.

  A dozen yards away was a small log cabin. This was the second generation of log cabins, not just the board roof covered with sod and the shanty look of it. This had a shake shingle roof and squared timbers.

  I pushed the door open and went inside. It smelled damp, apparently from recent rains. But I didn’t see anything wet. The furnishings were simple but store-bought, two cots for sleeping and a couch big enough to double as another bed. The floor was finished with wood so you could sleep on that, too, if you wanted. There was a fireplace, two cupboards sparsely stocked with canned goods, a cast-iron stove for cooking, and a large steamer trunk.

  There were four windows, meaning that somebody had gone to some considerable expense. Sunlight angled through the windows facing the west and in the sun splash on the floor I saw the stains.

  They were the color of grapes, the stains, as if they’d been a dark red at one time, scrubbed down as much as possible and then lacquered over. I assumed they were blood stains, but since this cabin was used by men who hunted and fished, it wasn’t necessarily human blood.

  I was gone an hour in all. I didn’t find anything there that made me feel that the trip had been worthwhile. I’d hoped to find some connection to the gun. I wondered if any of the men who’d wanted to buy it knew about this place. They could hide it here until they were ready to leave. But I didn’t find any secret hiding places in the cabin and I’d even gone back to the cairn to see if it was wide enough at its base to conceal a weapon. No luck.

  When I got back to the rowboat, she was sitting on the shore Indian-legged, a .45 in her lap.

  “You took your time.”

  “I had a lot to do. What’s the gun for?”

  “I got the feeling somebody was watching me.”

  I turned and looked at the autumn-tinted span of trees. “Somebody in there?”

  “Somebody…or something.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “You go ahead and laugh. You’re a city boy. You don’t know how spooks operate. Some Indians run away from the Trail of Tears and hid out here so the soldier boys wouldn’t find them. But they found them, all right, and killed every one of them: man, woman, and child. Except for one old man, so the story goes. He built the cairn and then cut his wrists and bled on it. That way the cairn was cursed. It’s his blood that haunts this place.”

  The Trail of Tears. The Cheyenne loved their lives in Georgia, which they considered to be a gift directly from God. The Cheyenne had long ago adopted many of the ways of the white man. They built roads, schools, churches, and had a form of democratic government. But more and more whites pushed into Georgia as part of the migration west. And they took more and more land belonging to the Cheyenne. When gold was discovered, the Cheyenne feared they would be pushed out of their land altogether. And they were. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson, a greedy and ruthless man, helped Congress pass the Indian Removal Act. A pretty fair share of white people battled against the act, but finally had to give up. A few years later, the Cheyenne were forced to migrate west without enough food, medicine, or even horses, to make the trip safely. Many of them died. Some of them ran away, not following the others to Oklahoma where Jackson and Congress had promised abundant and fertile land. It wasn’t surprising that some of them had found their way to this area and to this island. It wasn’t surprising, either, that they would want to build a cairn that was a curse to the white man.

  “Let’s head back.”

  “Maybe we got the curse now. Maybe tonight somebody’ll chop off our heads with an axe. They say that’s what happens when his ghost pays you a visit. I wouldn’t’ve come out here except for my daddy made me.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  She rowed us back. This time I didn’t feel so emasculated about sitting with one arm in a sling while a burly lady rowed me to the far shore. I was too lost in my thinking to worry about it.

  About halfway to the mainland she said, “You want to hear about Fred? It’ll pass the time.”

  “Sure,” I said. I have the ability to look right at a person and appear to be listening intently to everything they’re saying. But behind my eyes and ears, I’m lost in my own world. She told me about Fred. All I can remember was that they both got an awful lot of tattoos bearing each other’s name. Well, I remember a few other things, too: that he beat her, stole from her, publicly humiliated her, and made her serve a three-month jail sentence that rightly belonged to him.

  “So,” she said, concluding in such a way that I thought she was going to cry, “you can see why I’d love a man like that. He sure was good-lookin’.”

  Marshal Wickham was having a piece of apple pie and a cup of coffee when I found him in the café. His Stetson took up about half the space of the small table where he sat. He had to set it on a chair so I’d have room for my own pie and coffee.

  I said, “Unless Wayland’s a damned good actor, we can eliminate him.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He tried to bribe me. Said he wanted to give me a preemptive bid for the gun.”

  “He thinks you’ve got it?”

  “Apparently.”

  Wickham’s eyes gleamed with a kind of mean humor. “You could make yourself a nice pile of money.”

  “I’d rather have the man who killed my brother and the gun.”

  “You Federal boys are what they call single-minded.”


  I shrugged. “Not always. Investigators get bribed off from time to time. But never when family members are involved.”

  “So if we eliminate Wayland…”

  “That leaves us Spenser and Brinkley.”

  “I don’t take much to Spenser.”

  “I doubt even his mother did. He’s a grade-A ass-hole.” I sipped the coffee. It had a nutty flavor I liked. Kind of walnut. “I’ve been looking into some other things.”

  “What other things?”

  “A couple of people tell me that David wasn’t killed for the gun.”

  “People like to talk. Passes the time. Makes them feel important. I get that all the time. Want to butter up the marshal by tellin’ him something he don’t know. So they come up with these stories.”

  “I don’t doubt that. But James’s wife got me to thinking about a few other ways to look at the shootout that night.”

  I reminded him about the money James had suddenly come into. The new house, especially.

  “You know,” Wickham said, sitting back and lighting up his pipe with a stick match, “I wondered about that. Where James came into that kind of money. I should have pressed him harder about that. The place isn’t a palace, but it’s a nice, solid house. And it’d be expensive for everybody except rich folks. But James came up with the money.”

  I told him about the envelopes from Fairbain.

  “I’ll be damned,” Wickham said.

  “What?”

  “That’s a story that might lead somewhere. You might be on to something here, Ford.”

  “But if David wasn’t killed for the gun, who took the gun and where is it now?”

  “Yeah, that’s the hard angle to figure. If he wasn’t killed for the gun, why would the killer take the gun?”

  “Only one reason I can figure, Marshal.”

  “What would that be?”

  “To confuse us. Make us think it was for the gun.”

  He smiled. It made him look ten years younger. “So that’s why you Federal boys make so much money. ’Cause you can figure things out us poor old local folks couldn’t get to in a month of Sundays.” Then: “You got any idea why he was killed, then? If it wasn’t for the gun, I mean?”

  “Not yet. Maybe never. I mean, we can’t rule out the possibility that it was for the gun. Sometimes the obvious reason is the right reason.”

  “Those envelopes sure sound interesting. Think I’ll go ask Spenser about them. I don’t think he hates me quite as much as he hates you.”

  “You trying to hurt my feelings, Marshal?”

  He laughed. “Just like you said, he’s a grade-A ass-hole. Soon as I bring up those envelopes, I’ll be right at the top of his shit list, too. You can bet on that.”

  “Good luck.”

  He pulled his hat on, cinched up his gunbelt. “Maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll give me a reason to shoot him.”

  “I’d sure hate to think about that, Marshal. A fine man like Spenser. Shoot him a couple times for me, all right?”

  Chapter 15

  The desk clerk said, “A Mr. Spenser was asking for you.”

  “Oh? When was this?”

  “Maybe an hour or so ago.”

  “He say when he’d be back?”

  “No. He just said you’d know where to find him.”

  This clerk was a new one for me. He was round and had a nose so red the railroads could use it at night. The eyes were nervous. They were almost as red as the nose. He’d either had a big night or some long years of big nights.

  “Is everything all right?” he said.

  “I think you started to say something, then stopped.”

  “I was just going to say something that wasn’t any of my business to say.” He touched pudgy fingers to his golden cravat.

  “I see.”

  “I mean I’d say it if you said it was all right to say it.”

  “I’ve got plenty of time. Why don’t you go right ahead then?”

  “Well, the management here, they think I talk too much sometimes. Say things to the guests I shouldn’t.” He must have sensed my impatience. “He looked scared.”

  “Scared.”

  “Yessir. The way he kept looking around, real nervous like. And when I said you weren’t in—well, I know this sounds funny, but I honestly thought I saw tears in his eyes. And you should have seen his hands.” He put one of his own pudgy ones out to demonstrate. He made it twitch. “Just like that.”

  “Thank you for telling me that.”

  “You’re most welcome, sir. That’s what I keep trying to tell the management here. That guests like to know things that you know but that they don’t. Things that might be more important than they seem.”

  He had a strange way of talking and it was wearing me down.

  I went upstairs to my room. Every once in a while the sling started to irritate me. I took it off and lay down. Hotels are generally quiet in midafternoon. Even the wagon traffic on the main street had slowed.

  I was more tired than I wanted to admit to myself. You hear saloon stories of men who get shot and are up to full steam after a good night’s sleep. Maybe there’s a species of very special men who can do that. I belong to the plain, old, human race and there’s one truth that race holds to. The older you get, the harder it is to spring back after any kind of serious injury or wound. I could take my sling off all I wanted, trying to convince myself that I was healing up real quick, but sleep came so fast and so hard that there was no denying my exhaustion. And it wasn’t yet three p.m.

  The knocking was part of my dream. Or I thought it was. The part of my mind that was aware of the external world convinced me that if I woke up there wouldn’t be any knocking, that I was dreaming the knocking. So why wake up? Just slip back into full sleep; you needed the rest anyway, friend.

  But then some part of me figured out that the knocking was real and that it was in fact getting louder and more persistent and that somebody on the other side of my hotel room door was suddenly and sharply calling my name.

  I don’t know what I did exactly, but without my sling I managed to inflict a whole lot of pain as I slid my legs off the bed. I grabbed my Colt from the holster on the floor and barefooted my way to the door.

  It was Marshal Wickham. “Somethin’s sure goin’ on here, Ford.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Get your socks and boots on and I’ll tell you.”

  The first thing I did was get my sling back on and then I tended, one-armed, to my socks and boots.

  “That’s a bitch, getting boots on one-handed,” Wickham said. “I never thought of that before.”

  “So you’re pounding on my door and shouting my name. What the hell’s going on?”

  “The desk clerk told me that Spenser was here to see you earlier and he looked real scared.”

  “You woke me up to tell me that?”

  “No, I woke you up to tell you that somebody got into Spenser’s hotel room and cut his throat. Just the way they cut your brother’s throat.”

  PART THREE

  Chapter 16

  I spent an hour in Spenser’s hotel room. I mostly went through his two travel bags and his mail. He’d apparently been on the road for some time. He had twenty-six pieces of mail. I went through each one, found nothing that bore on the gun or his murder.

  Brinkley and Wayland were sitting in Marshal Wickham’s front area when we got there.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Wickham said.

  With four of us in there, Wickham’s modest office was crowded. Wickham didn’t waste any time. He said, “So who’s killing you men off?”

  Brinkley said, “Why don’t you tell us, Marshal? Unless I’m mistaken, that star you wear means that you represent law and order in this hick burg.”

  Wickham glanced at me. Frowned. People think that when you wear a badge, citizens snap to. A lot of them don’t. Given the circumstances, Wickham’s question was well taken. But they didn’t feel like a
nswering him, so they didn’t.

  He looked back at them. “Let me put it this way, then. Why would somebody want to kill you four men?”

  Brinkley and Wayland looked at each other. Then they faced Wickham and Brinkley said, “The gun. Why the hell else would they kill us?”

  “You’re telling me you have the gun?” Wickham said.

  “No,” Wayland said, “he’s telling you somebody thinks we have the gun.”

  “Then you don’t?”

  “No.”

  “Any idea who does?”

  “No.”

  “And no idea, of course, who killed Fairbain or Spenser?”

  Brinkley spoke: “You’re the lawman here, remember? If you don’t know, how the hell can you expect us to know?”

  Wayland said, “I want to leave town.”

  “Not quite yet, I’m afraid,” Wickham said. “If you’re afraid you might be killed, you can always stay here.”

  “Here, meaning the jail?” Brinkley said. “Why would two respectable businessmen want to be thrown into a jail cell with a bunch of ne’er-do-wells?”

  “You’re forgetting,” I said to Wickham, “these are very high-toned men. Selling arms is an admirable business.”

  “Why is he here?” Brinkley asked.

  “He’s a law officer same as I am.”

  “This is your jurisdiction.”

  “He’s Federal.”

  Brinkley scowled.

  Wickham said, “So you don’t know why anybody would want to kill you, even though two of you are dead. You don’t have any idea who might be behind the killings. And even though you wouldn’t ever consider staying in a cell here where you’d be safe, you want to leave town because you’re afraid the killer will take your lives if you don’t.”

  “None of that sounds particularly unreasonable,” Brinkley said.

  Wayland: “I want to know how much longer we have to stay here.”

  Wickham was about to speak when I slipped the envelopes from inside my jacket pocket and held them up in the air. “Before you answer that, Marshal, let me ask them if they know anything about these envelopes.” There were four of them. Two each. They took them, looked them over. Handed them back.