Wilde West

by Walter Satterthwait

  The snow crunched beneath him as he came up behind it, and the creature turned.

  He brought the gun down, hard, against the side of its head. It flinched, tried to bring up an arm to protect itself, and he brought the gun down again.

  Grigsby was drunk and he was no longer a United States marshal.

  The drunkenness wouldn’t have happened at all (so he had told himself several times, back when he was still capable of telling himself anything) if he hadn’t learned that he was no longer a United States marshal. He’d been doing damned well—not a single drink all day, not even a heart-starter in the morning. He’d been stone cold sober when he talked to that little weasel, Vail, and confirmed O’Conner’s story. He’d been stone cold sober for the entire train trip from Manitou Springs. When the train pulled in to Leadville, he’d been feeling so proud of himself that he nearly stopped to celebrate in the saloon beside the station. He’d caught himself in time.

  The telegram had been waiting for him at the Clarendon. Mort, the Denver telegraph operator, had addressed it to U.S. Marshal Robert Grigsby—even though Mort had known that no such a person existed anymore.

  SHELDON RECEIVED WIRE TODAY CONFIRMING RECALL STOP WIRE ME IF QUESTIONS STOP SORRY MORT.

  Only Mort had known where to reach Grigsby, and Mort had been cagey enough to word the message in such a way that the operator here in Leadville wouldn’t figure it out. No one here in town, and probably only a few people in Denver, knew that he was out of a job.

  But Grigsby knew. He folded the telegram neatly into quarters and slipped it into his left back pocket, thinking, as he did, that this thin scrap of paper was far too fragile, far too flimsy, to carry the weight it carried. A few words penciled across its front, and a life was ended. A career was finished. Twelve years of work went spinning into the gutter. He paid the desk clerk for his room and then he walked over to the bar and ordered a drink.

  That had been the first. Since then, over the past three hours, he had downed at least a quart of whiskey. After the first five or six drinks, he had stopped telling himself that the drunkenness was a considered, reasonable response to bad news. He drank, he realized, because he was a drunk. Other people were lawyers, bakers, candlestick makers. Farmers. Mine owners. Poets. United States Marshals. He was a drunk.

  With the knowledge had come a kind of liberation, a sense of pressure lifted, tension eased. He was a drunk, he had always been a drunk, he would always be a drunk. So what if he wasn’t marshal anymore. Who gave a shit. No one in Denver. No one here in Leadville. Not him. He still had his other identity, his true identity. That he would always have. Tomorrow, or maybe the next day, or maybe next week, he’d go back to Denver, sell the house, and then take off for Texas. Lots of good whiskey down in Texas. Good place for a drunk.

  He had been in Hyman’s Saloon, next door to the Opera House, for an hour. (An hour and a half?) His legs were wobbly and his mouth was numb and slack, and he knew, dimly, that it was time to go. He bought a bottle from the barkeep and staggered off.

  Shuffling along the wooden planking of the sidewalk with a flat-footed lurch, the bottle tucked under his arm, he smiled blearily when he saw people watching him from the corners of their eyes, taking care to step well around him as they passed. Citizens. The good citizens of Colorado. The good citizens he had sworn to protect, back when he had been a U.S. marshal.

  Assholes, all of them. Petty, money-grubbing assholes. What did they know? Nothing, was what.

  Mathilde. Maybe he should go see Mathilde.

  No. Not like this. Tomorrow, after he sobered up. Plenty of time tomorrow. Plenty of time now for everything.

  As he was reeling into the entrance of the Clarendon, some large bulky shape exploded from within and slammed into him. He stumbled backward and the whiskey bottle went slowly sailing from beneath his arm, lazily spun in the air once, then somehow sped up just before it smacked against the sidewalk. It shattered, whiskey splashing everywhere.

  Grigsby wheeled around, his big hands coming up to destroy. “Asshole! Sonovabitch!”

  Wilde grabbed him by the front of his jacket. “Grigsby! He has her! The killer! The madman! He has Elizabeth!”

  Grigsby tried to focus. Clumsily he grabbed Wilde’s wrists, tried to wrench the hands away, discovered that he couldn’t. Sonavabitch was strong for a lulu-belle.

  Wilde was shaking him. “Damn it, Grigsby! Don’t you understand! Mrs. Doe! He wrote a note, he pretended he was me! The Ice Palace! He’s there with her!”

  “Mrs. Doe?” said Grigsby. His mind was clearing, and he was beginning to understand that he didn’t want it to clear because when it did he would learn something horrible. About the killer. About himself. “The killer?”

  Wilde’s mouth curled with contempt and he pushed Grigsby away. “Drunk!” He looked quickly around him, turned back to Grigsby. “Your gun! Give me your gun!”

  Grigsby had never handed his gun over to anyone. Now he didn’t, even for an instant, consider refusing. He fumbled at the hammer strap, finally slipped it free, fumbled the gun from its holster. Holding the weapon by the barrel, its butt wavering, he forced his loose lips to move around the words: “You know how … use it?”

  Wilde snapped it away, shoved it into his waistband. “You point it and you pull the bloody trigger.”

  He spun away and Grigsby called out, “Wait!”

  Wilde looked back.

  Grigsby pointed to the horses tethered to the hitching rail in front of the hotel. “Horse. Take a horse.”

  Wilde nodded, sprang from the sidewalk, ripped loose a set of reins, and then awkwardly but swiftly scrambled up into the saddle. The horse reared, forelegs clawing at the air, but Wilde leaned forward, knees clenched against its flanks, and kept his seat. He jerked the reins to the right, and the horse came down and then bolted off in a gallop, kicking up black clods of mud behind it.

  Weaving, Grigsby tottered to the hitching rail. He put his shaking hand atop it and lowered his head.

  Fucking useless old man. Fucking useless old drunk.

  You swore to yourself you’d get this bastard, stop him before he killed again, and then when it comes to the crunch you’re blind stinking drunk, slobbering with booze and self-pity, can’t ride a fucking horse, can’t even fucking walk.

  Useless.

  End it, old man. Pack it in. Put a bullet in your head and get it over with.

  Something grabbed at his arm, wrenched him around.

  “Bob. What’s going on?”

  Doc Holliday. The fingers of his hand digging into Grigsby’s upper arm.

  Grigsby shook his head, trying to shake away the cotton.

  “Bob, where’s Wilde going?”

  Grigsby scraped his tongue against his teeth. He brought his glance into focus, found Holliday’s cold, glassy eyes. “The killer. At the Ice Palace. Mrs. Doe.”

  Holliday’s fingers squeezed. “Get to the police, Bob. Tell them.”

  And then he was gone.

  The saddle was bigger, broader than an English one, and the stirrups were set far too high for Oscar’s long legs. But the horse was moving in a fluid gallop as it raced down the wide muddy Leadville street, powerful muscles smoothly bunching and unbunching; and Oscar, right hand holding the reins, left hand clutching at the saddle horn, had no trouble staying on.

  Earlier this evening, when he had arrived in Leadville, he had thought it the ugliest city he had ever seen, as dreary and desolate as the Tenth Circle of Hell. The hills around it for barren miles had been stripped of their trees, black stubble sticking up every where through the gray slush. The slush was gray because the air was gray, thick with the smoke that belched day and night from the smelters and the refineries. And from the smoke that belched day and night from the stacks of the ore trains—thousands of them, it seemed—that crisscrossed the bleak, denuded land and ferried countless tons of rock ripped and blasted from the earth.

  The city itself was a drab black sprawl of soot-sown wooden shacks
and shanties, each huddled up pathetically against the next. In a way, it was more depressing than Denver’s Shanty town. In Shanty town, one felt that the inhabitants had never been given a choice: that they had been swept there by the unforgiving tides of fate. Here, one understood that the inhabitants, seeking their fortunes in the silver fields, had made a deliberate decision. They had elected to live here, amid the smoke and the sad, sinister squalor. The monochromatic ugliness of the place, its gross deformity, was the consequence of human greed, and the monument to it.

  Now, racing down those black mean streets atop an unfamiliar horse, Oscar thought of none of this. He barely saw the tawdry, tatty huts and hovels as they slipped past.

  He could not get his breath. At ten thousand feet the air was too thin; there was not enough of it. Earlier, when he had first climbed up the stairs to his hotel room, he had nearly collapsed. Now his ribs were clawing at his lungs; his heart was flailing against his sternum as though it might burst.

  He rounded a corner and saw the Palace, asprawl across the top of a broad, low, moonlit hill. He thumped his heels against the horse’s sides and willed himself to keep breathing, willed himself to arrive on time.

  A carriage was parked at the entrance to the castle. Oscar hurled himself to the ground, stumbled, pulled the gun from his waistband.

  His heart pounding madly, his chest heaving, a whine shrilling in his ears, he stalked into the portcullis. The ground squished and squirmed under his feet, like a jelly, and water gushed over the sides of his boots into his socks, stinging cold.

  In the moonlight the crystal walls of the palace seemed to glow from within, a ghastly, unearthly radiance.

  The place was huge, enormous—how would he find her in time?

  He heard—from up ahead, off to the left—a scream. He ran.

  A courtyard. An opening to the left. Another scream. From inside there.

  He flew across the expanse of slush, plunged through the opening in the wall of ice. Saw Elizabeth lying on a pile of rubble, her hands behind her back, her coat and dress torn open, her naked body splashed bright white by the moon. Saw a smear of something back and shiny across her pale face.

  Saw the black form leaning toward her, an object in its hand.

  The figure whirled to face him.

  Oscar gasped. “You!”

  NAILED SLIGHTLY ASLANT to the wall above the old upright piano was a handwritten sign that read: “Please don’t shoot the piano player, he’s doing his best.”

  His best was clearly not very good. The tune he was torturing at the moment had perhaps been, when it was written, a light, bouncy, frivolous piece. It sounded now, its notes warped, its tempo wavering, like a prolonged wail of pain.

  No one in the crowded saloon appeared to mind. The women, most of them grossly overweight, bulging from the tight red bodices of their dresses like sacks of flour from shop shelves, laughed raucously as they danced and drank and flirted with the miners, the cowboys, the shopkeepers. The miners and the cowboys and the shopkeepers laughed raucously back. The place was a bedlam, noise and smoke and the bright bilious blare of gaslight. It seemed impossible to Oscar that only a few hours before, less than a mile away, an utter horror had taken place.

  Dr. Holliday asked him, “How’s Mrs. Doe?”

  “She seems all right,” said Oscar glumly. “He hit her in the head and she bled rather a lot—well, you saw. But the doctor believes that it’s nothing serious.” Lying on her hotel room bed, pallid and beautiful, she had asked Oscar to telegraph Tabor in Manitou Springs and request that he come as soon as possible. Even after Oscar had saved her life, she still preferred that horrid little man to him. He had sent the telegram anyway, one of Love’s brave martyrs.

  “Would’ve been a lot worse,” Holliday said, “if you hadn’t gotten there in time.”

  “Umm,” said Oscar.

  “Have another drink,” said Holliday, and poured from the bottle into Oscar’s glass.”

  “You don’t suppose,” he said, “that they’ve any tea here, do you?”

  Holliday smiled his ghost of a smile and shook his head.

  “Umm,” said Oscar. Dispirited, feeling drained and infinitely weary, he sipped at the whiskey.

  “If you hadn’t shown up,” Holliday said, “he would’ve killed her.”

  Oscar slowly shook his head. “I still can’t credit it, you know. That it was he who killed those women. I never for a moment would’ve thought it possible.”

  Holliday moved his shoulders faintly in a shrug. “Sometimes you can’t figure people.”

  Oscar shook his head again. “But him.”

  Holliday drank some bourbon, looked up over Oscar’s shoulder, and nodded. “Bob.”

  “Doc. Wilde.” Grigsby’s face was ashen and he moved his big body slowly, like someone recuperationg from a long illness. Oscar noticed, as the man sat down, that his hands were trembling. Perhaps sensing Oscar’s scrutiny, he folded his arms over his chest, hiding the hands.

  “Just finished with the chief of police,” he told Oscar. “He’s gonna keep the thing quiet. No need for the newspapers to hear about all this. Reckoned you ought to know.”

  “Umm,” said Oscar. That was, yes, probably for the best. The news that someone in his entourage had brutally killed five women might—as Vail had tonight suggested—“really punch up ticket sales.” But it would turn the tour into even more of a circus than it had been so far. And besides, Oscar wanted no reminders of what had happened tonight. Probably, he would never need any. “Thank you,” he said.

  “I’ll send some telegrams out, tomorrow mornin’,” Grigsby said. “To the towns where the others got killed off. Let ’em know the thing is over.”

  “Umm,” said Oscar.

  For a few moments no one spoke. Holliday’s empty black eyes were watching Grigsby, who sat with his head and his large, silly hat tipped forward, staring down at the tabletop.

  It was Grigsby who broke the silence. He turned to Oscar and said, “I fucked up.”

  “Well, now, Marshal …” Oscar began.

  “I fucked up. I got stinkin’ drunk when the most important thing I shoulda been doin’ was keepin’ a clear head. Shoot, I’m still drunk. Swallowed near enough a gallon of black coffee and I’m still drunk. I let you people down, you and Mrs. Doe. Let myself down. And I wanted you to know that I’m right sorry about that.”

  “Well, Marshal,” said Oscar, embarrassed and—surprisingly, reluctantly—touched. “Really, you know, if you hadn’t told me that all the women he killed had red hair, I should never have rushed off as I did. I should never have reached Mrs. Doe on time.”

  “That don’t count for much, my tellin’ you,” Grigsby said. “But you did good, Wilde. You did real good.”

  Oscar shook his head. “If only it could have ended some other way.”

  Grigsby said, “Probably best it ended the way it did. Cleaner.”

  Cleaner? All that blood splashing on the snow?

  Again, for a few moments, no one spoke. Again, when someone did, it was Grisgsby.

  “Where’d you learn to ride like that? You handled that mare like a rodeo champ.”

  “In Ireland. I’ve been riding since I was a child.” Oscar shrugged modestly. “I should have done better if I’d had a proper saddle.”

  “You did just fine.”

  “Thank you for saying so, Marshal.”

  Grigsby smiled ruefully. “You can stop callin’ me Marshal. That don’t apply no more.”

  “How do you mean?” said Oscar.

  “I’m out of a job. I’m not Marshal no more.”

  “Because of this? Because of me?”

  Grigsby shook his head. “Nothin’ to do with you.”

  Holliday said, “Greaves and Sheldon?”

  Grisgby nodded.

  Holliday said, “So what’re your plans, Bob?”

  “Don’t rightly know yet. Maybe head down to Texas.” He turned to Oscar. “Do all the others know yet? About what h
appened?”

  “Yes. I’ve spoken with all of them.”

  “How’s the Countess makin’ out?”

  “Distressed, of course. How would you feel if you learned that the man who’d been acting as your escort was an insane killer?”

  Grigsby smiled slightly. “Never had me an escort. But the best thing for her, I reckon, is to put it behind her. Best thing for you, too.”

  Yes. But how? So long as he lived Oscar would remember von Hesse’s face as it looked in the Ice Palace when the man whirled to confront him.

  “Hau ab!” he had snapped. Go away! His lips were twisted back in a fierce rictus and his eyes were narrow vicious slits. His voice was a stranger’s: thin and querulous, like that of a very old man, or of a young, furious boy.

  “Von Hesse,” Oscar said. In German: “Let her go.”

  “Go away! You’ll spoil everything.” The object in his hand, Oscar realized, was a knife.

  Elizabeth McCourt Doe watched them, her glance sliding from Oscar to von Hesse. Oscar could see shudders running down along her naked body.

  “Let her go,” he said.

  “No! She is mine! She is ours!”

  “Von Hesse. Wolfgang. I don’t want to shoot you. But I will, I promise you. Get away from her.”

  “You fool! You silly shallow man! You don’t understand anything! She is mine!” He looked over Oscar’s shoulder, then suddenly moved with a speed and power Oscar could scarcely believe. His left hand darted forward and grabbed Elizabeth by the hair and he ripped her up from the pile of shattered ice, her mouth wide open in a silent scream, and he swung her before him. He wrapped his left arm around her throat and pointed with the knife to something behind Oscar’s back. “Who is he? Who is he?” And then the tip of the knife was against the woman’s skin, just below her breast.

  Oscar turned.

  Dr. John Holliday stood there, a gun in his hand, looking in the pale spill of moonlight like some black angel of death. How had he gotten here without Oscar’s hearing him? How had he gotten here at all?