Right between the Eyes

by William W. Johnstone

  “Okay, Pa. I think I see now.”

  “You’d better. I’ve begun to teach you about guns, how to handle one properly and use it to defend yourself. But always remember it’s just a tool. How well it gets used—both from a skill standpoint and whether for good or evil—is strictly up to the person behind the trigger. It won’t be too many more years before you’ll be packing a gun of your own. You’d best have fixed in your mind before then how you mean to use it.”

  “Good heavens, Bob,” said Consuela in a slightly chiding tone. “The boy’s not even twelve yet. You sound like you’re getting ready to pin a badge on him and send him out to help defend the streets of town.”

  Initially, Bob scowled at her words. But then, realizing she was right, he willed himself to relax some. Leaned back in his chair, expelled half a breath, even managed a ghost of a sheepish grin. “Guess I was laying it on a mite thick, wasn’t I?” he said. Directly to Bucky, he added, “Sorry about that, pal. Didn’t mean to unload on you quite so heavy.”

  “That’s okay, Pa. I understand.”

  “Something else I’m sure you can understand,” said Consuela, “is that it’s time to be headed to bed. You’ve got school tomorrow, you know.”

  “But only for a couple more weeks, until summer break,” Bucky was quick to point out. “And, boy, am I looking forward to that!”

  “Well, it ain’t here yet. So get washed up and hit the sack,” Bob said. “We’ll be up to say prayers with you in a few minutes.”

  “Okay, Pa.”

  As the boy rose from the table and started to turn away, Bob stopped him, saying, “Speaking of school tomorrow, pal, I want you to do something for me.”

  “Sure, Pa. What is it?”

  “When you and your buddies start talking about this afternoon’s big shoot-out right here in the streets of Rattlesnake Wells, like I know you’re bound to . . . Let ’em go ahead and yammer about the excitement and the glory and all that. But somewhere in there, do me a favor and remind ’em, like I just did you, that a young man’s life ended real sudden-like when all was said and done. He was looking for glory and excitement, too. What he found out was that there’s always another side to it.”

  “O-Okay, Pa . . . I’ll, er, try to work that in.” But then Bucky continued to stand there, appearing uncertain or puzzled about something.

  “What is it, Bucky?” Consuela asked.

  “It’s just that . . . well, no matter what I say, the fellas are really going to be carrying on about this. And me, I’m the one whose pa was right there in the thick of it—out-drawing and out-blasting a two-gun shootist right here in our very own town. Practically right outta one of those rip-roaring dime novels. I mean, that’s how everybody else will be looking at it . . .

  “I understand about the sad side to it. How the young fella’s life got cut short, how nobody will ever know if he might’ve amounted to something better and all . . . But, holy cow, I don’t want to come across like some stern and serious dope while all the other fellas are carrying on and play-acting the exciting parts and everything. You’re my pa, Pa. They’ll be bragging you up like the next Wild Bill Hickok or something. Can’t I get in on at least some of the bragging along with ’em?”

  Bob and Consuela exchanged looks. She smiled. Bob felt the corners of his mouth also lift a bit as a swell of pride filled his chest. “I reckon,” he said around the lump in his throat, “if you feel the need to do some bragging on your old man, that’d be okay . . . Still try to fit in some of the other, too, if you can.”

  CHAPTER 36

  After the talks with Carlos Vandez and then Consuela and Bucky, Bob found that he’d resolved the shooting of Billy Clairmont fairly well in his mind. Like he’d told Vandez, he had a deep regret over the incident but he felt no guilt.

  In the arms of Consuela, he even got a solid night’s sleep. It helped that, unlike the run of previous evenings, there’d been no interruptions due to trouble in the town.

  Or so he thought.

  When he got to the jail the next morning, he soon enough found out that, while it was true no one had felt it necessary to notify him at home, there had been a disturbance in New Town. The first indication of this had come when he arrived to find Vern Macy asleep on a cot over against the side wall of the office area. It was standard procedure for Bob or one of his deputies to stay on premises overnight when there was a prisoner in the lockup.

  Vern woke when Bob came in, quickly shoving away the blanket that had been covering him and swinging his feet over the side of the cot as he sat up. He was fully dressed except for his boots and gunbelt, which hung from the back of a chair right beside the cot.

  “Hey, Marshal . . . G’morning.”

  “And to you, Vern. What’s the occasion?”

  Stifling a yawn, Vern said, “We’ve got some overnight guests. I drew the short straw for sticking around to hold their hands in case they got scared of the dark.”

  Bob fed some kindling into the top of the stove and went to work setting a pot of coffee to brew while Vern stomped into his boots, then stood up and buckled on his gunbelt.

  “How many and what did they do?”

  “Three rowdies from down Texas way,” Vern answered. “They were paying their respects to some of the gals in Duchess’s bawdy house. One of ’em felt the need to get a mite too rough, and when the gal he was slapping around hollered for the bouncers, the other two Texans joined in to fight them off. It took me and Peter showing up to lay our gun barrels across a couple skulls before things got settled down.”

  Bob grunted. “Arthur must be slipping,” he said, referring to the imposing black bouncer Duchess employed to keep things tamed down in her bawdy house. “Time was he would have handled only three troublemakers without hardly breaking a sweat.”

  “Yeah, that surprised me a little, too,” Vern allowed. “I think one of ’em must have clubbed him from behind, right at the start, and knocked most of the starch out of him before he ever had the chance to get set. And I gotta say, these three hombres do have some pretty rough bark on ’em.”

  “Well, it sounds like you and your brother were still able to handle them okay. Glad to say it don’t look like you’re too much the worse for wear, except maybe for the damage sleeping on that old cot might’ve done to you.”

  Vern shrugged. “The cot ain’t that bad. And by the time we showed up, those Texans were thankfully starting to get a little winded. At any rate, neither me nor Peter figured their hell-raising was worth notifying you. Not last night. Especially after the day you had and all the times recently we already had to bother you.”

  “I appreciate that,” Bob told him. “But any time you figure the best call is to send word or fetch me at home, don’t hesitate to do it.”

  “I’ll remember that,” said Vern. “As far as damage done, there was a pretty fair amount suffered at the bawdy house. Furniture and the like. And Duchess was real prompt about calculating it up and bringing over the amount practically before we had those jaspers locked up.”

  Bob grinned. “From all reports, Duchess is mighty quick about money when it comes to all of her business transactions.”

  “Those Texans claim they got money to pay whatever the charges are,” Vern said. “But we explained to ’em that the amount of their fines would have to be set by you this morning. They deserved to cool their heels behind bars for at least one night anyway. Way I see it, you’ll probably want to charge ’em with disorderly conduct, assault, and disturbing the peace at the very least. I entered all the details in the report log before I turned in last night.”

  “Okay. Sounds good. I’ll take it from here. What you need to do is go on home and grab a few more hours of rest so you can report back at noon.”

  “Like you said, that sounds good.”

  “Before you go, though—anything else happen last night I oughtta know about?”

  Vern cocked an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah. A few things that might come back around again today. For starter
s, you know that Fred and Peter had no luck finding any matching footprints out at the butte, right? Fred said he was gonna let you know.”

  “Yeah, he stopped by the house before I headed out to the V-Slash.”

  “How did that go, by the way?”

  Bob twisted his mouth sourly. “About like you’d expect. Hard news for ’em to get hit with. Despite his young age, the Clairmont kid had rode for the brand for quite a while. Sorta grew up there. But Carlos Vandez had recognized a wild streak in him when it came to an itch for using his guns, so it didn’t come as a complete surprise. He’ll be coming in after the body sometime today I expect, to take it out for burial on a plot they’ve got out at the ranch.”

  “That shooting naturally got the attention of a lot of folks. One of ’em, one I’m sure you will be hearing from yourself, and pretty quick, is that newspaperman Dutton. He came around yesterday with about a million questions. But since none of us were there to see it go down—except for Bullock, and I don’t know how much Dutton bugged him—there wasn’t a whole lot in the way of details we could tell him.”

  “He’s the kind who’ll make up what he needs to sensationalize his story anyway,” Bob muttered. “With any luck, Mike may have stuffed him in an empty beer keg and shipped him off to the brewery for a refill.”

  “A couple more visitors you can probably look forward to,” Vern went on, “are Saul Norton and Myron Poppe, the bank clerk. Seems they both have some complaints to register about our pal Larkin. Sounded awful petty to me, in both cases.”

  Bob frowned. “After the beating he took, I’m surprised to hear Norton was up and about at all. Especially for some petty matter.”

  “He didn’t look so hot, you’re right about that. He was walking with a cane and his movements were mighty stiff. Almost hurt just looking at him. But I reckon feeling the need to speak up for his lady love’s honor was pushing him past his pain.”

  “So that was his complaint? Larkin going to see Victoria Emory?”

  “You know about that?”

  “Some.”

  “Okay. Yeah, Norton’s worked up because Larkin stopped by the Emory house to try and call on Miss Victoria. She met with him at the door for a few minutes, I guess—long enough to tell him she never wanted to see him again—and then he left peaceful-like. Don’t really know what else Norton wants. Sorta the same thing for Mr. Poppe. His wife ran into Larkin in Krepdorf’s store and they exchanged some unpleasant words with one another. That was what he wanted to report.

  “They came in at the same time. Apparently they’d got to talking about it inside the bank, comparing notes I guess you could say, and decided they could make a stronger complaint if they pitched it together. So me and Peter listened to their tales of woe, then had to tell them that, since Larkin hadn’t broken any kind of law or anything, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do. But I got a hunch neither of ’em will be satisfied until they bend your ear about it, too.”

  “Thanks. You’ve given me enough to look forward to for one morning,” Bob said wryly. “So beat it. Get out of here and go get some rest before you think of something else.”

  * * *

  Once Vern had left, Bob poured himself a cup of mud and sat down behind his desk to read the report log from last night. Most of it, not surprisingly, had to do with the incident at Duchess’s bawdy house. A piece of stationery folded into the log next to Vern’s entry contained, in a flowery woman’s hand, a listing of damages amounting to seventy-five dollars. It was signed simply “D.” Bob grinned again at the madam’s efficiently subtle demand.

  A moment later, however, his grin fell away hard. He got to the listing of the three Texans who’d caused said damage. Their names were Charley Drake, Wilbur Nixon . . . and Rance Brannigan!

  For several clock ticks Bob sat perfectly still, staring down at the name as if stunned.

  The day had finally come. Brannigan was in town.

  When Bob’s brain started to work again, started to propel his thoughts past the impact of Brannigan’s name, it replayed Vern’s words from a few minutes earlier: “Neither me nor Peter figured their hell-raising was worth notifying you.” Not worth notifying him!? After all the talk of Ed Wardell bringing in hardcases to fan the flames of a possible range war, how the hell could his two deputies think the arrival of Brannigan wasn’t worth . . . Then the rest of it hit Bob. There was the trouble, the shortfall. After Fred had gotten Brannigan’s name from the wire Smoky Barnett sent to Denver and then wrote it down on a scrap of paper for Bob to see, the marshal had shoved that paper in a desk drawer and the name was never specifically mentioned to either Vern or Peter. Any subsequent talk they heard about the outside gun Wardell might be bringing in was merely indirect references like “hardcase” or “hired gun.”

  Bob expelled a long, ragged breath and leaned back in his chair, as if trying to distance himself from the name now appearing once again in the report log. No amount of fretting over the lack of communication or the failure of an earlier notification really mattered, not when it came right down to it.

  Brannigan was here. That was the long and the short of it. And now Bob was going to have to deal with him . . . however it played out.

  CHAPTER 37

  Myron Poppe was very distressed that morning. It wasn’t unusual for him to feel apprehensive as he left the house for work. After all, it was pretty much a given that in the hours ahead he could look forward to another dose of demands and cutting remarks from his boss, Abraham Starbuck. As the head teller for the Starbuck Territorial Bank, Myron was responsible for not only his own actions but those of all the other tellers as well. And hardly a day went by that Mr. Starbuck, a stern taskmaster by anyone’s standards, didn’t find fault with something he felt necessary to bring to Myron’s attention.

  All of that was bad enough. But while Myron certainly didn’t look forward to more of the same, it was common, to be expected, and so he therefore was somewhat inured to it. What he didn’t need on top of it, however—what was pushing his normal anxieties to a higher level—was having his wife on his back about her confrontation with John Larkin and demanding Myron do something to rectify it. What exactly it was he was supposed to do he didn’t know, and neither did she. But she still expected him to do something and, until he did, there would be no living with her. Or, to be more exact, living with her would be unbearable. She’d make sure of that.

  Myron was not one given to curses or epithets, yet he muttered more than a few of them under his breath as he walked from his house and proceeded down residential First Street toward its intersection with the main drag of Front. Myron prided himself on his punctuality when it came to reporting for work, but he had a full hour before the bank would open for business. Mr. Starbuck was almost as irritable about employees reporting too early for work as he was about anyone showing up late. The bank’s owner and president was probably already there himself, but that didn’t mean he wanted anyone else around yet. Some speculated he had a bizarre obsession about being alone with “his money” for a portion of each day. Whether or not there was anything to that, Myron didn’t know and didn’t join in on the speculation. Frankly, he didn’t give a damn. Especially not this morning.

  Myron had left the house so early partly to get away from his wife and partly with the notion to have time for stopping in and seeing the marshal. He’d already spoken with two of the town’s deputies about the situation regarding Larkin and his wife. He’d done so, in fact, accompanied by Saul Norton who turned out to have a similar issue regarding Larkin’s approach to Norton’s betrothed, Victoria Emory. As Myron had expected, since there were no illegalities involved, there really wasn’t much the deputies could offer in the way of help or advice. It would likely be the same result with Marshal Hatfield, Myron figured, but it was still worth a try. At least it was something more he could report to his wife . . . for all the good it would do.

  Of course, Myron told himself, if he were a different sort—more of a manly man, a type p
ossessing the potential for physical action—he could confront Larkin face-to-face. Demand an apology for his wife and threaten to thrash the scoundrel within an inch of his life if ever anything similar occurred again . . . At some base level, whether she even realized it herself, that might have been the very thing his wife wanted him to do. But the plain reality of it was the fact that Myron was not the confrontational type, and any pretense of such by him, given his small stature and timid nature, would fall short to the point of almost being ridiculous.

  With these thoughts swirling in his mind, Myron reached the intersection with Front Street. At this early hour, there was hardly any activity in either direction. He paused, gazing down the street toward the jail building, his stomach now churning with indecision on top of everything else.

  “I’m having the same problem,” said a voice from the opposite way Myron was looking.

  Myron jerked around, startled. On the other side of First Street, on the corner of the block that housed the Starbuck bank building, Saul Norton was sitting on a wooden bench at the end of the boardwalk. He was impeccably dressed, with a shiny black cane resting across his lap. But apart from his attire, he didn’t look very good. He was very pale, showing in particularly sharp contrast to the purplish-black circles around his eyes and the large bruise on high cheekbone. His eyes looked somewhat pain-dulled though struggling to stay alert.

  “Sorry if I gave you a start,” the battered apparition said. “I’ve been waiting here a while, hoping you’d be along. I had a hunch you probably would be since I knew that, like me, you weren’t satisfied with the answers we got out of those two deputies yesterday . . . I wanted to get an early start this morning in order to this time catch the marshal before he got involved with other things. I expected you’d be thinking along those same lines.”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking,” Myron said. “Although, to tell the truth, I don’t have my hopes up for results that are any more satisfying.”