Santa Fe Showdown

by Jory Sherman

  No, he was a cat, a bobcat perhaps, padding quiet over hard ground, stopping every so often to listen, to sniff the air, to explore with all its senses as it hunted for the unwary rabbit or the field mouse, someone’s house cat, or a small dog. He walked close to the silent buildings and took his time, staying to the shadows, crossing each street with caution, looking, listening.

  He saw a dim light down the way on one of the nameless streets, a spray of golden light pouring from a window. He glided toward it like a bobcat, a shadow moving through shadows.

  There it was, the hotel where he and Marylynn had stayed, where she still was, he assumed. A flood of relief came over him. There were the stables, dark and quiet, across the street.

  Lew knew where he was.

  He had a long walk ahead of him, but at least he knew which way to go. He crept away from El Palacio and headed toward his own hotel. He wondered if she was up in her room, sleeping perhaps, or reading. Maybe pining for him. He shook off those lethal thoughts and kept to the shadowy streets, heading for El Rincon.

  He came in the back way, to the barn where Ruben was. He didn’t go inside, but waited, watching the back door of the hotel for ten minutes. Then he waited another five minutes before walking across the open space to the door. He let himself inside. He took out his key and opened his door very slowly. He stood to one side, waiting, listening, hoping no one was in his room.

  He waited for several seconds, then slipped quickly inside. He closed the door, latched it. He did not light a lamp, but let his eyes become accustomed to the deeper darkness inside. He listened for any scrap of sound.

  There was a soft rustle over where his bed stood.

  Lew’s senses screamed a silent alarm in his brain.

  His hand floated down to the butt of his pistol.

  “Lew, is that you?”

  He heard a click and knew there was a hammer being cocked.

  He hunched over and slid his pistol from its holster, silent as a cat.

  “Marylynn?” he said.

  “It is you. Yes, it’s me.”

  “You’ve got a gun pointed at me?”

  He heard the slide of metal against metal as she eased the hammer down.

  “Not anymore,” she said. “I’ll light the lamp.”

  “No,” he said, “don’t light it. I’ll come to you.”

  His voice was a whisper, but it sounded loud to him in the darkness. He slid his pistol back in its holster and fumbled his way to the bed. He reached out, and she grabbed his hands. He eased onto the bed. She was sitting up and she put her arms around him.

  Gave him a hug.

  At first he wanted to draw away, but her touch felt good. He smelled her. Her hair was scented, and he drew in the perfume as she lay her head on his shoulder, brushed his face with her flowing locks.

  “I was worried about you,” she said.

  “How did you get in here?”

  “I told the clerk I was Mrs. Jones, and he let me in. I told him it was a surprise and told him not to say anything. I gave him a silver dollar.”

  “You rascal,” he breathed.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “Out walking.”

  He felt her stiffen as she touched the side of his face. Then her hand went down to his side, through the torn shirt, and he felt her fingers touch the sliced skin, the clotted blood.

  “Lew, you’re hurt,” she said. “You’ve been in a fight.”

  “I’m not hurt and I didn’t get into a fight,” he said.

  “I need to look at those wounds.”

  “They’re not wounds, Marylynn. Scratches.”

  “From a knife,” she said, as if she knew everything.

  “No. Glass.”

  “Glass?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Why can’t I light a lamp?”

  “That’s an even longer story. Just sit and be quiet. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. In the morning.”

  “I can’t wait that long.”

  “Shhh,” he said.

  And then he drew her to him and kissed her. She melted in his arms, flowed into them like something supple and willing, and her mouth was warm and wet and set his blood to tingling. He felt himself slipping off the bed and put his hand down to stop himself. He felt something. Something hard and cold and heavy. Metal.

  “You trade in that Colt?” he said.

  “Yes,” she breathed against his face. “I did everything you told me to do.”

  “Except stay away,” he said, and his voice was without rancor or threat, so soft it sounded almost like a prayer, almost like gratitude. And the moon sprayed gauzy light through the window and glazed her soft hair so that it shone with a silvery luster like one of those night paintings of horses by Frederick Remington he had seen in Harper’s Weekly one day so long ago.

  “I stayed away,” she whispered.

  He started to say something about lying, but she touched her fingers to his lips. She wasn’t finished.

  “As long as I could,” she said.

  20

  WAYNE MCGARRITY SMITH TRUSTED NO MAN. BUT HIS FATHER, Liam Elmore Smith, who had taught his son everything Wayne valued, had told him he must choose wisely those men who could aid him in quest for the “Holy Grail.”

  “You delegate those men who will willingly do your bidding, Wayne,” his father once said, “and the others you command or rule by putting the fear of the devil in them. You can’t be God, but you can be the devil easily enough. Lord knows you come by the ability through your terrible bloodlines, lad.”

  Wayne smiled every time he thought of his father, and of his mother, too, for that matter. They were a wicked pair, he liked to say, his father from Limerick, Ireland, his mother Scots-bred, but born in Ireland, too, and named Colleen Brook by her parents of the Campbell clan—both cut from the same bolt of cloth.

  He rode into Santa Fe with that delegated man, Earl Crisp, and one other, Reed Danvers, one of those who feared him and therefore revered him. Hand-picked men, both tough as hickory nuts, and both obedient to a fault. And obedient, bless their damned souls, only to him.

  “You got a place to go, Wayne?” Crisp asked, his face made raw by the setting sun. The light flickered in his windburned face, softened the contours of his jawline, his hooked nose and the ledge of his brow jutting over squinted pale blue eyes.

  “I do, Earl,” Smith replied. He never gave any of his men any more information than they needed at any particular point in time.

  “Good place?”

  “It’ll suit us. Won’t be there long, but we need to convert all the silver to cash and make ready for my next move.”

  “You sure do know how to do it, Wayne,” Danvers said. “I mean we had fresh horses all the way. That posse’s probably still way back in P-yeblo.”

  Crisp laughed a dry laugh. He licked parched lips.

  “They never had a chance,” he said.

  “Well, we’ll see what the other boys did for us. They been here a couple of days. Can’t beat that telegraph.”

  “I forgot about that,” Crisp said.

  “I didn’t,” Smith said, sunlight dancing on his sharp features, glinting off his rusty hair, sparking the red bristles of his two-day beard. He looked like a man who had been sculpted out of iron with an ax blade, all lean muscle, no fat, and piercing blue eyes that bored right through a man when his blood was up.

  Smith’s father had given him good advice when he was a strapping lad just out of school.

  “Only fools work for a living, Wayne. The smart man enjoys the profits of other men’s labors. You don’t need any more schoolin’ than you’ve had. I’ll provide the rest.”

  And, he had, too. Wayne’s father was a constable and he had worked as a prison guard before that. What he had learned from criminals would fill an encyclopedia. He passed along much of that information to his son.

  “When a crook wants to make a big haul, get a lot of money, light his cigars with dol
lar bills, you know where he goes, Wayne, my boy?”

  “I don’t reckon.”

  “He gets himself in trouble with the law and goes to jail. That’s his school. That’s where he plans everything and finds the men he needs to carry out the job. In prison, yes siree, sir.”

  “I don’t reckon I would want to spend time in jail. Prison, either, Pa.”

  “Smart boy, you are, Wayne. Nor was I suggesting it, mind you. You do like me, that’s all. You become an officer of the law. That way you get to know criminals, find out their secrets. Ah, yes, that’s the beauty of it, don’t you see? You befriend the criminals you need and plan your jobs. They carry the jobs out and you’re still sitting on your side of the fence.”

  “Is that what you do, Pa?”

  “You don’t see us livin’ in squalor, do you, Wayne? Do you lack for anything your heart desires? Do you have food on your table, a warm bed to lie in at night? Do you see your dear old mother slavin’ like a potato picker in the fields all day? She has a woman to do her washin’ and cleanin’ and she can read the magazines and make herself pretty every night for her dear sweet husband.”

  “It doesn’t sound hard, anyways. Not if you do it, Pa.”

  “It ain’t hard at all, at all. I’ll show you everything I know. You’ll be a grand success like your old man. Anyways, if you look at it a certain way, it’s all one bunch, criminals and lawfolk.”

  “What do you mean, Pa?”

  “The way I see it, Wayne, it’s like when you were a little kid. You and a bunch of kids go out in the play yard and you play coppers and robbers. You choose up sides. All the same bunch, but you take turns playin’ first one side, then the other.”

  And his father had been right. Criminals and lawmen were all of the same ilk, in Wayne’s eyes. It just meant you chose one side or the other. You both played the same game. That’s how he had made money in Bolivar, and how he was making money now. He was on the side of the law and the men who worked for him carried out his orders. If anything went wrong, they went to jail. He was the man with the badge. Or used to be. Somewhere, not long ago, he had crossed the line.

  And so had his father, who was doing time in the penitentiary in Texas, down in Huntsville. But his father was a philosopher and did not take it hard.

  “When I get out, Wayne, I’ll have a plan that will make my retiring years golden, you’ll see. I’m living with the real professionals now, and what I’ve learned will make me rich. All they have is brawn, boyo. It’s your old man who has the brains.”

  His father had taught him that a life of crime was really the way rich people lived.

  “You can work hard all your life, get callouses on your hands, break your back, ruin your health, if you follow the straight and narrow,” his father said. “And you’ll always be poor and you’ll wind up poor.

  “Look, son, they teach you honesty in school and that’s the way the rich keep the poor underfoot. The most honest man on earth will turn dishonest in a flash if the price is right.”

  “What do you mean, Pa?”

  “I mean the way to the big money is to pay the people who handle it to give it to you without putting a gun to their heads. You take tellers who work in a bank—they handle all that money, day after day, and none of it is theirs. None of it will ever be theirs. But you come along and you offer them a cut if they will let you inside the bank, into the vault where you can take the money. You give them some of the money and they feel as if they’ve done no wrong. Crime pays, Wayne, because honest people turn dishonest once they realize their greed can be satisfied.”

  “It sounds so easy, the way you put it, Pa.”

  “Son, get a job on the police force. You’ll soon see how the criminal justice system works.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Money makes it work. The judge, the prosecutor, the sheriff, down to the jailer, all make money off criminals.”

  “How?”

  “I’ve heard lawyers ask their guilty clients how much time in prison they want to serve. If the man says a year, his defense will cost so much money. That money is divided up among the judge, prosecutor, sheriff, jailer, and so on. If the guilty party does not want to do any jail time, the price goes up. And burglars always get low bail or no bail—that’s right off the old ball bat.”

  “Why?”

  “Because burglars can only pay their way if they are burgling, you see. So the lawyer tells the judge, ‘This man is a good burglar, your honor. He can bring in five hundred dollars a week and he’ll give us half.’ So the judge sets bail, and the burglar goes back to work. When he goes to trial, whatever amount he pays his lawyer will tell the judge how long a sentence to order. Slick as a willow whistle, eh?”

  And Wayne had found out that this was the way things worked. He had talked to an inside man who worked for Horace Tabor, found out about the silver, and now he was the richer for it. The inside man had little risk if he kept his mouth shut.

  They could see the Sangre de Cristo range, with its snowcapped peaks, all purple and hazy in the sunset, rising majestically above the mighty Rio Grande del Norte, the sun banking behind them, shooting golden rays into the long battings of clouds that hung in the sky like rolled-up ropes of cotton.

  “When we get settled, Reed, you go fetch Moon and bring him to the hotel. I want to talk to him first. Then, we’ll send for the others, lay out all the silver bars, and use them for mirrors while we shave.”

  “I can hardly wait,” Reed said.

  Wayne smiled. They were like children, sometimes, his boys. Reed looked like he was strained through a sheet, a thin rail of a man with skin stretched tight over his Adam’s apple so that it looked like it would break through, a slender pipe of a nose, small, skinny lips, and hair that grew in every compass direction like an explosion of wheat stalks. But he followed orders and was loyal.

  “Do you know the way to this place we’re stayin’?” Crisp asked.

  “Nope,” Wayne said. “Just that it’s kinda in the heart of town. I never been here before.”

  “Me, neither,” Crisp said. “Heard a lot about Santa Fe. Supposed to be like a big old trading post.”

  “There’s money to be made here,” Wayne said.

  “This road ought to go straight to downtown,” Crisp said.

  “That’s what I’m thinkin’,” Wayne said, pulling a pack of store-boughts from his pocket. “But just so’s you both know, we’re stayin’ at the Posado del Rio. Friend of mine said it’s a right fancy place.”

  “Anything’d be better’n Pueblo,” Crisp said, as Wayne struck a match and lit his cigarette. He didn’t offer a smoke to either Crisp or Danvers.

  It wasn’t quite full dark when the three men reached the center of Santa Fe. They rode around in circles for another ten or fifteen minutes until Crisp spotted the hotel, about a block off the plaza. It took up a full city block, and there were carriages parked outside, a doorman running in and out of the front doors. Trees and grass grew around low brick walls, and lighted lamps threw a soft orange glaze over the walkway. There were hitch rings along one of the low walls and they tied up their horses there.

  “You boys just take a seat in the lobby and I’ll get us rooms,” Wayne said. “No use in all of us goin’ up to the desk and scaring the shit out of the clerk.”

  Crisp and Danvers laughed.

  They both sat in plush overstuffed chairs and looked around at the people passing to and fro. None looked at them in their dusty clothes, their unshined boots, grease-stained hats, spurs that could cut the rug on the floor to ribbons. They laid their saddlebags on the floor next to their chairs and lit cigarettes. Both took pleasure in flicking their ashes into the large glass trays sitting on wrought iron stands. Danvers tapped a brass spittoon with the toe of his boot, and grinned idiotically at the dull tinking sound.

  Wayne paid cash for the rooms, three of them on the second floor, all with balconies, according to the clerk.

  “Little patios with chairs an
d tables,” the clerk said. “A good view of the city from those rooms. Will there be anything else?”

  “Send up a bottle of whiskey and a bill of fare,” Wayne said. “I see you got a café here.” He said the word “café” like he would say “cave.” No accent.

  “Yes, we have a very fine restaurant here. Open until eleven p.m. I’ll see that you have three menus, sir.”

  He wrote out a receipt and handed it to Smith.

  “Now, if you wish, you may sign the register for all three of you,” the clerk said, pushing the ledger toward him and pointing to an inkwell sunk in the counter with a fancy pen sticking out of it.

  Wayne signed three false names, James Brown, William Jones, and Harry Johnson. The clerk never gave the signatures a second glance and closed the book.

  Upstairs in Wayne’s room, he spoke to Danvers.

  “Reed, you go on to the Tecolote and tell Moon to get his ass over here. Then, you wait an hour and bring anybody else who’s there over here.”

  “What for?” Danvers asked.

  “I have to know what’s going on—whether there’s been any trouble here and if the other boys got down with the silver out of Denver.”

  “You mean Baker and Riley?”

  “Yeah. Them two. Charley Grimes ought to be there, too. And maybe he knows why Cal, Fritz, and Billy never hooked up with us when they was supposed to.”

  “I wondered about that, too,” Crisp said. “We had to pack all that silver by ourselves, ’cept for what Kip and Jethro brung.”

  “Don’t you drink too much now, Reed. We’ll eat when the whole bunch is here and have some of the whiskey I got coming up here.”

  Crisp licked dry lips.

  “I’ll do her, Wayne,” Danvers said. They had lugged their swollen saddlebags up to Wayne’s room. He looked at the bags of silver one last time and left the room.

  Wayne sat down on the divan and took off his hat.

  “Where’s that whiskey?” he said to no one.

  “Want me to go get it?” Crisp said.

  “Naw, we’ll wait. Got to have whiskey after a ride like we had.”

  Crisp grinned.

  “You know what, Crisp? Not havin’ any whiskey in a room like this is like a bird with one wing.”