Guns (John Hardin series)

by Phil Bowie

  They stopped to watch a small gang of porpoises loping along out in the glassy swells. They had a baby with them, and it would come almost all the way out of the water as it surfaced frequently to breathe, two adults never more than a few feet away from it.

  Something over by the dune line caught Joshua’s attention and he ran ahead to investigate, stopping to look closer and then turning to shout, “Sam, Sam. Come here quick.”

  It was a Bonaparte’s gull, trapped in one of the holes of a translucent plastic six-pack retainer, fluttering and flopping, trying to free itself and move away from them.

  Joshua looked up at him with an anguished expression and said, “You gotta help him, Sam.”

  “Let’s step back a way so he’ll calm down. We’re in his space here. Why don’t we both help him?”

  “I don’t know how. Oh, please, Sam.”

  Sam took off his denim shirt, walked up to the bird very slowly and spread it out all the way over him, and the covered bird settled down.

  “Okay. Now you feel through the cloth and hold him. Try to watch out for his wings. Try to fold them back against his body and then hold him still.”

  “Sam, I can’t do it.”

  “Yes, you can. Just take your time and be careful.”

  After considerable nervous fumbling Joshua managed to do it. Sam got out his pocket knife. “Now, what we’ll do is work the cloth back enough so we can see that plastic around him. Hold him, and let’s do it slowly.”

  When the plastic was exposed Sam slipped the blade in deftly and slit the plastic. He stepped back. “Okay, Josh. Let him go,” thinking let’s hope he didn’t break a wing trying to get loose earlier.

  When Joshua stepped away the gull fluttered and screamed raucously, trying to regain some of its avian dignity, then it flapped tentatively and took off, faltering a little but flying.

  Joshua wiped his hands on his pants absently and grinned widely, watching the bird fly away.

  “Good job,” Sam said.

  “Yeah,” Joshua said.

  Sam stuffed the plastic in his back pocket and picked up his shirt.

  The fourteen-mile-long Ocracoke beach was generally less plagued by litter than most mainland beaches Sam had seen—there were lengthy stretches where on most any given day you would not find another human footprint much less a discarded Bud bottle—but there were always some don’t-give-a-damn sun worshipers finding their way out here. Back one day in July when a hard blue sky had been crowded with magnificent cumulus clouds with dazzling sunlight shafting down among them, turning their fringes into liquid light, dappling the sand and the sea with shadows, Sam and Valerie had been sitting side-by-side on a plaid blanket in one of the cool cloud shadows, loosely hugging their knees, watching rain veils drift along the horizon, and tasting the clean breeze, Joshua industriously excavating some imaginary dinosaur bones nearby.

  A young couple with a baby had a sheet spread out thirty feet away. When the couple got up to go they left a loaded diaper, three empty Coors cans, several cigarette butts, and a crumpled yellow chip bag on the sand. She was carrying the baby, her purse, and a diaper bag. He had the big cooler and the wadded-up sheet.

  Valerie brushed some sand from her dark sculpted calf, got up, and walked over to stand in front of the departing couple, halting them. “You see my friend over here?” she said in a friendly tone, pointing back at Sam. “He’s a captain in the Environmental Rangers. He’s off duty right now, but if you leave that mess back there on the beach he won’t have any choice. He’ll have to issue a citation and I think the fine can go up to three hundred dollars. Especially with the diaper. That would make it a Class Two offense.”

  Sam sat on the blanket trying to think mean and nasty behind his sunglasses.

  The young woman shifted the baby to her other arm and said, “He was gonna go back and get that in just a minute. Wasn’t you, Jack?” The young man went back and picked up all the trash and stuffed it inside the cooler. They left in a hurry, looking sullen. Damned law was everywhere these days.

  Sam drove Joshua into the village. They ate heaped-up foot-long dogs washed down with vanilla milkshakes at a picnic table on the grass outside the Burger Box, Joshua then asking for a butterscotch sundae and sharing spoonfuls with Sam as the boy demolished it with efficiency. Sam took him home.

  They played a game of Monopoly at the kitchen table, Joshua getting gleefully wealthy as Sam cheated carefully in the boy’s favor, and then Sam ushered him in for his shower, helping him towel off and climb into clean pajamas.

  Joshua made popcorn in the countertop microwave, dragging his stool over so he could reach, and they settled in on the couch. Sam had rented Heidi mostly for the boy and Rooster Cogburn mostly for himself. He never tired of watching the interplay between the aging John Wayne and that most noble of ladies, Katharine Hepburn.

  When Valerie came home she found them asleep on the couch in the darkened living room, one of those old shoot-’em-up tapes that Sam liked so much playing in the VCR. Sam had his boots off and his feet crossed on the coffee table, his head thrown back and his mouth open, snoring mildly. Joshua was curled in under Sam’s protective arm, his head pillowed on his small hands against Sam’s rib cage.

  She leaned her shoulder on the door jamb, her arms folded, and just watched them for a while, the light from the TV playing over them.

  My men, she thought.

  5

  IRA COHN SAT DOWN NAKED IN A STRAIGHT CHAIR AT THE doorway of the book-and-file-piled closet he called his home office for IRS purposes and booted up his Micron, which occupied one whole shelf. He logged onto the Internet quickly, thinking I knew it would come to me.

  He ran a search under “the wild west", got a long list of sites, scrolled down a few pages, and clicked on “Outlaws". Bingo. There it was.

  Sam Bass.

  He picked up a half-eaten Milky Way from the mouse pad, took a bite, and started reading fast, automatically condensing and editing as he went.

  Born 21 July, 1851, Indiana. Parents died when he was small. Raised by a skinflint uncle who worked him like a dog and denied him an education. Ran away by building a raft and floating down the Mississippi to Rose-dale. Worked hard as a teamster, driving supplies to Texas. Bought a fast sorrel mare which he raced, winning enough bets to quit his job.

  Discovered hard liquor.

  Took up with Henry Underwood, who had fought with Jennison’s Jayhawkers against Quantrill’s guerrillas and obviously knew guns. They got into a minor scrape and lit out, chased perfunctorily by the sheriff. Bass became a partner in a freight company and later in a mine, which failed, whereupon he fell in with a pack of serious gunmen. They robbed seven Deadwood stages in the Black Hills in 1876 and ‘77. In the fall of 1877 the gang boarded a train at Big Springs, Nebraska, and relieved it of $60,000 in newly minted twenty-dollar gold pieces, collecting another $1,300 from the startled passengers.

  The gang split up but Bass gathered another group of hardcases to establish an enterprise of robbing Texas trains. Among his business associates were old friends Henry Underwood and Frank Jackson, along with apprentice thief Jim Murphy. Subsequent train robberies soon made Sam Bass the most notorious and most wanted outlaw in Texas—dead or alive—but he eluded a small army of lawmen by moving from one hideout to another in the back woods of Denton County.

  There was the inevitable shootout, at Salt Creek, and Bass had to escape with others on foot, which only increased the rewards posted for them.

  Turned out Jim Murphy was working for the authorities, hoping to get himself and his old man extricated from certain previous charges, and hoping for at least a goodly chunk of the posted rewards. Even some members of the hardened Texas Rangers would later revile Murphy for his betrayal of the Bass gang.

  Murphy was present in July of 1878 when the Bass gang met to plan a robbery of the Round Rock, Texas, bank and he got a message out to the Rangers, who were waiting in force when the gang rode into town.

  There
was a big-time gunfight. A deputy shot Bass through the hand. Then he was trying to calm his skittish horse when a Ranger knelt in an alleyway, took deliberate aim, and shot Sam in the back. Frank Jackson spurred his horse and grabbed the reins of Sam’s mount. They rode hard, Bass hunched over and bleeding but still trying to shove cartridges into his pistol, down an alley, up a rutted street, and on out of town.

  Jackson, also wounded, managed to guide his friend’s horse for several miles. Near Bushy Creek, Bass told Jackson to stop. Jackson helped his friend down onto the grass under a tree. Bass told Jackson to leave and take what gold they had between them. Jackson reluctantly obeyed and rode away, vanishing. The Rangers found Bass that night, still alive, and carried him back to Round Rock.

  They questioned him at length about his associates but he gave them nothing of value and on 21 July, 1878, at the exact age of twenty-seven, Sam Bass passed into history.

  Could be one of two things, Ira thought. Either it’s just a coincidence. Most likely that. Or, for a guy who thinks of himself as a cowboy—Mrs. Stilley had volunteered as much—for a guy who even looks like a cowboy, for a guy like that, Ira thought, Sam Bass could be an alias.

  This was two days after he had returned to Raleigh from Ocracoke, three days actually, it being two in the morning now. It had been the previous afternoon before he had found time to tap out a draft of the piece about the rescue. He had handed a hard copy to his wrinkled editor along with the stack of contact sheets, asking about the possibility of submitting an expense voucher for the past weekend. The editor had ignored the expense plea, had skimmed the piece, had used her loupe to quickly scan through the photo proofs, circling just four possibles with her fat felt-tip, then had grunted once and nodded, which Ira had taken as high praise. She wanted him to use a digital camera, but he stubbornly preferred to use print film, developing and printing it himself in the newspaper’s darkroom. The piece would run the following Sunday as a half-page spread with a single photo on the front of the People section, above the fold.

  Ira Cohn was stark naked.

  Whereas Samantha Blackstone was stark nude, standing there now in the doorway of his bedroom down his short apartment hallway, hipshot and wearing only an extremely exasperated expression, her arms crossed under those Olympian breasts.

  “You tell me I remind you of some Greek sculpture in some old ruin called The Porch Of The Maidens,” she said. “Well, all right. Then you jump up and tell me, hey, hold it. Wait a minute. Now you’re playing with your computer? You have about five more seconds before I hold my nose and go into your filthy kitchen and try to find a nutcracker.“ She pointed an elegant finger inside the bedroom and stamped her foot on the carpet. “I suggest that you shut that thing off and get your skinny, hairy butt back in here right now.”

  “Okay, okay,” Ira said, shutting down the Micron.

  Within twenty minutes the scene in his cluttered bedroom did indeed resemble certain aspects of the wild west, and he had clean forgotten all about Sam Bass.

  6

  LOUIS STRAKE STOOD ON HIS HIGH DECK, HIS GLASS WALL at his back, looking down at the evening traffic that flowed in perpetual two-way streams along the Tappan Zee Bridge stretched across the darkened Hudson. The house was in deep shadow and the last of the sunset torched the tops of buildings across the river, lights coming on all over. Behind him in the dazzling chandeliered dining alcove off of the huge indirectly-lit great room, Dorothy was preparing the large glass table for him, his wife, and his daughter. He was still wearing his newest double-breasted light gray suit that had been tailored for him in London, and a dark blue silk shirt with matching tie, having returned home just under two hours ago from an art scholarship benefit luncheon that he and his young wife Elaine had hosted at the Strake Gallery of New Age Art in the city. The gallery was Elaine’s private passion, a gift from him, and it had even required a little creative bookkeeping on the part of his accountants to keep its profit minimal this year.

  He was fifty-one and an even six feet tall, with a once-muscular build now just beginning to show signs of softening, but he worked hard to keep kept himself toned and trim, and he had his thick silvered mane of hair brushed high and straight back and sprayed in place.

  His glass wall was constructed of five massive French doors with a row of fifteen-foot-high Palladium windows above, and the view from up here on the Palisades—the house half-cantilevered from sheer rock two hundred feet above the river—was spectacular. He especially enjoyed it at night, when he could look across toward the glitter of White Plains, and see the awesome sky-glow downriver that was being sprayed up from Manhattan.

  Gazing out on all those lights made him feel a part of the sprawling, intricately-tentacled economy that nourished one of the greatest urban concentrations on the planet, and for a time he could almost forget that he often moved in a much darker world.

  He also maintained another immaculate house in Vancouver and what he called his getaway cottage in the Bahamas, a neutral place where he often conducted business. His gleaming seventy-two-foot Hatteras was cruising down the Intracoastal under the guidance of his captain and two crew people to Fort Lauderdale. It would stay there for an electronics upgrade before moving to the Bahamas, where it would be constantly ready for him and certain of his associates throughout the winter.

  One of the French doors opened behind him. “Excuse me, sir,” Dorothy said quietly, “I believe Mr. Montgomery just drove up.”

  “The man’s name is Montgomery Davis. I’ve told you that before, dammit. It’s Mr. Davis. When will dinner be served?”

  “Yes, sir. In twenty minutes.”

  Strake walked erectly inside, strode across the high-gloss oak floor to the vaulted entrance foyer, and opened one of the heavy stained-glass doors. Davis, looking bear-like in a black windbreaker, was coming up the lit walkway, having parked his maroon Mercedes with its dark-tinted glass.

  “You’re late,” Strake told him.

  “The traffic was bad.”

  “That’s something you allow for. Keep your jacket on. We’ll go out on the deck.”

  They crossed through the great room. Strake opened one of the center French doors, and they walked out onto the deck, Strake closing the door behind them. He moved over to put his hands on the rail and look down.

  He knows I hate heights, Davis thought.

  Davis was a big man in his late forties with the face of a football coach set off by a razored black goatee. He had seen much violence in his long career and feared few humans or circumstances, but heights made his head light and his breathing rapid and shallow.

  “Come here,” Strake said. There was a breeze picking up. There were no poles under the deck, just big struts angled back into the rock. The traffic on the bridge far below moved in beaded strings of light. Red one way, white the other.

  Davis walked over to stand near the rail, not touching it. Controlling his breathing.

  The deck was softly lit from built-in fixtures under the railing and from the glow of the lights spread out down there. Davis thought he could feel the deck boards shifting slightly under his feet.

  Strake reached into the inside pocket of his immaculate suit jacket and took out a newspaper clipping. He held it out to Davis. It was carefully folded to show a photo of a lanky man standing in a side-hug with a short woman. Davis took his time studying it, bending slightly to hold it down under the railing lights, and unfolding it to scan the article. The piece was actually an abbreviated version, though Davis couldn’t know that. Picked up by the Associated Press Syndicate, it had run in one hundred and twelve different papers across the country, mostly as filler on slow news days. Davis straightened and said, “It’s the Cowboy. On some island in North Carolina.”

  “Yes. Keep the clipping.”

  “Louis, are you sure this will be worth—” But Strake cut him off with a quick stop-it gesture.

  “We have the transaction in Miami next week,” Strake said. “That should take no more than three
days.”

  Tina, Strake’s chubby three-year-old daughter, wobbled across the floor of the great room all by herself in her fluffy pink slippers and Pooh pajamas, clutching a yellow-dressed doll in one arm. She stopped, slapped the window with her free hand, and waved. Slapped and waved. Slapped and waved. Slapped and waved. Leaving finger marks on the glass.

  Strake smiled and waved back. Elaine hurried over, not looking out onto the deck, took Tina by the hand, and led her quickly away.

  “When we get back from Miami,” Strake said, absently watching his shapely young wife and his daughter through the glass wall, “I want you to go down there and kill him.”

  Davis was still for a moment. Then he said, “All right, Louis.”

  Strake turned back to rest his hands on the railing and look off. “I’m telling you now so you can think about it. Take Winston and the new one, Donny. The son of a bitch knows you and he may have seen Winston, so Donny will be useful, and the young man has his specialties. The pay will be thirty thousand. Half up front. I don’t care how you split it. You pay your own expenses. Be careful. Set it up. And, Montgomery…”

  “Yes.”

  Strake turned his head to look intently at him, those black eyes glittering now in the up-light.

  Like a pissed-off wharf rat, Davis thought, or a rabid Doberman, standing there stock still just before it charges you. He wondered, not for the first time lately, why he had worked so long for this guy who wanted people to think he was high-class but who was really no better than any number of other men who lived in Davis’s world of shadows and violence. Strake tried to talk like a lawyer but Davis thought he wasn’t fooling anybody. He was like two different men, one this fake slick talker and the other basically just a street thug like himself.