by Jory Sherman
“I—I’m not sure. I want to buy, trade that is, for a small-caliber pistol. Something a young boy might use.”
“Well, let me show you what I have,” the man said, and started pulling out drawers. He laid four pistols out in front of her on the felt cloth. Two of them were single shot, a third was a double-barreled derringer, and the fourth was a Smith & Wesson in .32 caliber.
“Them are what I got,” he said.
She picked up the Smith & Wesson. It felt good in her hand. She pulled the trigger several times. Cocked the hammer back by hand. She held the empty pistol up and stuck out her arm, sighting down the barrel. She pulled the trigger again. The hammer struck with a loud click that made the man wince every time she did it.
“Barrel cracks open to load in cartridges,” he said.
“Do you have a box of ammunition to go with it? A holster?”
“I think we can find a holster for it. Might not have a cartridge belt for bullets that small. And I got a couple of boxes of .32 ammunition.”
The pistol fit the holster. The man set two boxes of cartridges on the counter.
“I’ll take both boxes,” she said. “And the pistol and holster.”
The man smacked his lips, made sucking sounds with them. He tapped his temple with a bony finger. He picked up the Colt again, then slid it back in its holster.
“I’ll take the trade and give you two dollars,” he said.
“I should get more. The Colt is a better gun,” she said.
“Two dollars and four bits, then,” the man said, a curt whip to his voice.
“Three dollars,” she said.
“Umm, I don’t know.”
“Look, how many of these small pistols do you sell? This one looks dusty to me.”
“All right. I’m closing up. Three dollars and not a penny more, miss.”
She cracked the pistol and opened one of the boxes of cartridges.
“I prefer you not load that pistol in here,” he said, opening a drawer and fishing out three one-dollar bills. He set them on the counter.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going to shoot you.”
She filled all six cylinders, closed the barrel.
“That’s a double action,” he said. “Be careful.”
“I know it’s double action, sir,” she said, and snatched up the three bills and stuck them all wadded up in her bodice. She put the new pistol in the pillowcase and folded the cloth tightly, wrapping it around the gun. “Thank you, sir.”
“You be careful with that pistol, young lady,” the man called out as she strode to the door. “Say, you’re not going to shoot anybody, are you?”
She didn’t turn around, nor did she answer.
She could hear the man’s mouth make suckling noises as she opened the door and stepped back out on the street.
The man with the shotgun was gone, and so was his horse. The street was empty, darkening with shadows. She held her bundles tightly under her arms and walked rapidly away, heading back to her hotel.
So now she knew where Lew was probably staying. At El Rincon Hotel. Unless he had been there to see a woman, or someone else. She wondered where he was going at that time of day. Her heart pounded fast in her chest when she thought of him, so close and yet so far.
She stopped suddenly and turned around. She walked briskly toward El Rincon. Perhaps Lew was staying there, and perhaps the clerk might know where he was going. She had to know. Even though she felt like a thief, or worse, she had to know.
What was it her father had said to her once? “Don’t never give up if there’s something you really want.” That was it. And something else, too. “Nothing sadder than what might have been. You see opportunity, you go after it.”
Well, she had seen Lew Zane, and they had been intimate. She wanted him.
She was going after him, come hell or high water.
She tightened her lips together, a look of determination on her face.
“Persistence,” she told herself, “is my middle name.”
The night came on, plunging the street into darkness. She saw the pawnbroker hurrying away up the street. Lamplight shone through the hotel window, and she shivered from the sudden chill.
But deep inside her, there was warmth.
The warmth of hope.
17
ZANE WAITED OUTSIDE THE TECOLOTE, STANDING IN THE SHADOWS, listening to the ebb and flow of conversation inside. The talk was subdued, friendly, and in both Spanish and English. From what he heard, those inside seemed to be mostly ranchers or ranch hands, drovers, laborers, and workers in various professions speaking quietly of their trades or the weather, their wives and gal friends. Such talk, he thought, might have sounded the same in the Osage general store or around any cracker barrel in any number of small towns he’d passed through.
Horses were tied up on both sides of the street, their reins wrapped around hitch rails or through hitch rings. A wagon stood farther up the street, with two Missouri mules in harness. There was the sound of switching tails and low whickers. Laughter bubbled up inside the cantina, and glasses clinked like far-off bells oddly out of tune. The dark sky glittered with stars flung like crushed diamonds across black felt, and off in the distance a dog barked, then went silent.
Three men rode toward him from the far end of the street. They turned their horses in at an empty spot with a hitching post and a rail outside a dry goods store and next to a store with a sign on it that announced ABARROTES, which appeared to be part of the same deserted building. Their low voices drifted his way, and presently, after securing their mounts, they walked toward the cantina.
Lew held himself motionless in a well of shadow until they passed, then fell in behind them. He knew that he was less likely to be noticed if he entered with other men. He hadn’t been able to see any of their faces, but from the way they walked, he was sure that he did not know them.
None greeted the men who walked in, but they were accepted, and so was Lew, who made his way to the nearest opening at the bar. A few men glanced at him, but none showed surprise. He sat on a bar stool and did not draw attention to himself.
Lew glanced around to see what the others at the bar were drinking. The air was tainted with the odor of tequila and mescal, but he sniffed the tang of whiskey, too, and some of the men were drinking sudsy beers. Blue and gray smoke hung in a lazy pall over the main room and its tables. Far in the back, where brighter lanterns shone, men sat playing poker on tables covered with green felt, and the clatter of chips sounded like false teeth clacking together.
One of the barkeeps sauntered over to him after pouring drinks for the three men who had come in ahead of him.
“Whiskey,” Lew ordered, looking the man straight in the eye.
“Con agua o derecho?” the man said.
“Derecho. No agua.”
The barkeep smiled. He brought a shot glass and a bottle, poured the glass to the brim. Lew laid a silver dollar next to the bottle, and the man slid it away into his palm as if he were a magician used to sleight of hand. He returned and laid four bits in change next to the glass of whiskey. “Gracias, amigo,” the man said and smiled again.
Lew nodded, but did not smile. He touched the shot glass to his lips, but only let a small amount seep onto them. He glanced up at the large mural on the wall behind the bar. The painting depicted a small mariachi band in the background and a man and woman dancing in the foreground, with spectators looking on, smiling. The woman’s breasts were pronounced and protruding from her red and yellow blouse. The man wore tight black trousers, an open gaucho shirt, and a flat-crowned black hat. The woman had long black hair with a blue flower attached to one side. Everyone in the portrait was smiling, and some of the men were pouring beer from a keg into cups. One or two held bottles in their hands or tipped up, their lips touching the necks. Lew supposed the mural made a man want to drink, get married, or dance, only one of which was probably allowed in the Tecolote.
The murals on the other
walls depicted alluring women in various stages of nudity and seminudity, sprawled on couches or beds, holding up Spanish fans or caressing some handsome bare-chested Don Juan. These were less garishly lit by lamplight, but were visible nonetheless.
He turned slightly and surveyed the dimly lit room, spacious enough, he figured, to hold nearly a hundred people. He reckoned there were thirty or forty at tables, with several empty ones among them, another dozen or so at the long oak bar, which had been polished to a high sheen. He did not recognize anyone in the room. Certainly Grimes was not there, which helped him relax enough to actually sip some of the whiskey. It tasted of charred oak and brine and had a bite to it that warmed his throat and made his stomach double up into a fist when the liquid reached that level.
The two men nearest him were talking about hauling freight to Taos that week and how much they hated that “dirty little Injun town.” Next to them, two Mexicans were talking about their wives and recounting how many children they had.
Lew noticed a newspaper being pushed along the top of the bar from the far end to where he sat, and each man dipped into it, ate something, then shoved it down to the next man. When it got to him, he saw that, atop the crumpled and greasy newspaper were several smoked fish, each one cut in half lengthwise. He picked up a chunk with two fingers and chewed it.
The bartender walked up to him.
“Troucha,” he said.
“Muy sabroso,” Lew said, and took another bite, slipping the smoked meat from the delicate bones of the trout.
A man came up and took the trout from the bar and offered it to the nearest table. The men seated there all dipped their fingers into the meat and pulled up chunks.
Lew decided that the Tecolote was a friendly place. The three bartenders were alert and efficient, and two waiters kept up with their tables. There were no women to be seen.
He took another drink and, out of the corner of his eye, saw two men enter the cantina. The first one he did not recognize, but the second was the man he knew as Baker. They seemed oddly out of place, at first, with their hard faces and shifty dark eyes. A lone man at a table stood up and beckoned to them. The two walked toward him. The three shook hands, and Baker slapped the man on the back. The three sat down. Lew figured this was the man, Moon, they had come to meet. Moon, if that was his name, seemed genuinely glad to see Baker and the other man. They all seemed like old friends. Baker and his companion sat facing the door, and blended in almost immediately.
A waiter stopped at their table and took their order. Lew watched as the waiter returned with two glasses of beer and a bottle of whiskey, along with two shot glasses. Baker paid the waiter, while the other man drank half the beer in his glass, then started looking around the room. Moon and the nameless man conversed in private, their heads bowed, almost touching. Lew could not hear a word under the hum of the other conversations. Baker continued to glance up at the door every now and then, as if he was expecting someone. Probably Grimes, Lew thought.
One of the men sitting nearest him spoke of his wife, who had died of consumption, and of the daughter he was raising with the help of a single neighbor lady. The other man said he ought to marry the neighbor, and the widower shook his head and said that she was fat and could never replace his Clara, and the talk drifted to hauling sacks of corn and lumber to Taos, while Lew finished his drink and ordered another, wondering why he sat there in such an alien place, listening to other people recounting their ordinary lives, while he was an outcast, a hunted man, with no home and no job.
He thought of Seneca and was homesick, a little giddy from the whiskey, even with the trout in his stomach and another newspaper floating down the bar to him. And then he thought of Marylynn and became as lonely as the other men in the cantina, and wondered why so many men said they drank to forget a woman, when the whiskey dredged up thoughts of every woman who walked the earth, the known and the unknown.
He watched Baker and the other man drink their whiskey and down two more beers, and by then he knew he could not down another whiskey or he’d look onto a spinning room and throw up the smoked trout he had eaten.
He shoved his empty glass out of the way, took a deep gulp of air, and started to rise from the bar stool.
That’s when Charley Grimes pushed open the batwing doors and entered the cantina.
Lew froze as Grimes looked straight at him.
Then, to his surprise, Grimes looked away and scanned the room as he took another step inside. Baker raised his arm and Grimes spotted him, then strode to the table.
While Grimes was walking across the room, Lew changed his mind and sat back down. When the bartender came over and pointed to his empty glass, Lew shook his head.
“No mas,” he said. “Cerveza, por favor.”
The bartender removed the shot glass, drew a beer from a keg, and set the foaming glass in front of Lew. Lew paid him, and left the change on the bartop.
He watched the four men who were huddled together over the table. A waiter brought Grimes a beer and an empty shot glass. Grimes poured whiskey into the shot glass, drank it down, and then drank from the glass of beer.
A voice broke Lew’s concentration.
“You a stranger here?”
Lew looked at the man nearest him, the one whose wife had died of consumption.
“Just passing through,” Lew said.
“What’s your trade? Or are you lookin’ for work?”
“I mostly do odd jobs,” Lew said, trying to think of some trade he might mention.
“Freight office is lookin’ for a loader. Hard work, but pays pretty well.”
“I might look into it,” Lew said, distracted from his observation of the table where the four hard cases sat.
“You come on by Harmon’s Freight over on Mercado Street tomorrow morning, about six,” the man said.
Lew lifted his glass and drank with a gesture that said thank you.
The man turned back to his companion.
While Lew was talking to the freighter, Grimes kept looking over at Lew.
Lew finished some of the beer and then got up. He left his change for the barkeep and was halfway out the batwing doors when he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Hey you, mister, hold up a minute,” a voice boomed in his ear.
Lew turned and stared into the face of Charley Grimes.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t I know you from someplace?” Grimes said.
“Naw, I don’t think so.”
“You look mighty familiar.”
“Not me,” Lew said.
“Well, I’m pretty good at faces.”
“I never been here before,” Lew drawled, changing not only his accent, but the pitch of his voice.
“I’ll sure as hell remember directly,” Grimes said. “Maybe later, eh?”
“Yeah,” Lew said, and stepped outside. Grimes looked at him for a long moment, then went back inside the cantina, furrows appearing on his brow like the tracks of snakes in a layer of putty.
Lew strode away from the saloon and into the smokeless air. He breathed deep and leaned against the wall of the Tecolote for a long moment, as if to let the cobwebs in his brain drift away in the fresh air.
Close call, he thought. Then he wondered why he had come to the Tecolote in the first place. He knew before he went that he would probably run into Grimes, and he knew Baker would probably be there. These men didn’t matter to him except that they were a connection to Wayne Smith. Smith was the man he wanted to see—face to face. He wanted to look into the heart of a man who could coldly murder his wife and children for thirty pieces of silver, or many thousand pieces of silver.
He wanted to see what a bastard like that looked like up close with the snout of a six-shooter shoved in his face.
But he already knew. He had seen that same look in the faces of Wiley Pope and Fritz Canby, the boys who had slaughtered his mother and father. He had seen into their hearts and seen greed and lust and something nobody could describe
—a coldness, a lack of feeling for mankind.
And in their faces and in their hearts he had seen something else, too. Or rather, he had not seen something else.
A soul.
Lew launched himself away from the wall and headed back toward El Rincon.
That’s when he heard something that froze him in his tracks before he even knew for sure what it was.
Boots pounded on the hardwood floor of the cantina. Louder and louder, closer and closer to those batwing doors.
But he knew what it was.
Grimes had remembered who he was.
And now he was coming for him, to collect that thousand-dollar reward.
For a long second, an eternal moment, Lew didn’t know whether to run or to turn and face what might be one man or four.
Then, the batwing doors swung wide, outward toward the street.
And there was no more time to think.
18
CHARLEY GRIMES BURST THROUGH THE BATWING DOORS. THE doors screamed on their hinges, like a dozen tortured bats taking wing. In his wake, the cantina fell into a hush that seemed as if all the air had been sucked out of the room.
Lew knew he would stand no chance if he stayed in that spot to fight it out with Grimes. In seconds, other men, smelling blood, would come pouring out of the cantina, and among them, the three who were cronies of Grimes.
Lew ran straight down the dark street, then cut between two buildings and raced to the back alley. Behind him, he could hear pounding boot heels coming after him, faster and faster.
He ran down the alley without looking back over his shoulder, into the stygian darkness, pumping his legs like oiled pistons, stretching his leaps like a bounding gazelle. He breathed through his nose, filling his lungs, drawing energy from oxygen, strength from the fear balling up in his stomach like a fist of molten iron.
“You hold up there, feller, or I’ll shoot,” Grimes called out behind Lew.
Lew kept running to the end of that alley, then rounded the corner onto another street. He dashed across it, ducking his head to lessen his silhouette. He expected to hear a pistol shot at any moment. When he reached the shadows of a building, he glanced over his shoulder to see Grimes barreling around the corner. He thought he saw a pistol in his hand.
