Ralph Compton Straight to the Noose

by Marcus Galloway

  That was more than enough for Mason to believe those men were the threats Greeley had described. If he was a gunman himself, he would have spent more time sizing those men up. He would possibly have gauged their proficiency at killing by the guns they wore or where they sat. As a gambler, Mason knew which players to challenge and which to give a wide berth. While those armed men definitely fell into the latter category, only one of them seemed at all interested in leaving that saloon. While that struck Mason as odd, he wasn’t about to turn his nose up at one of the rare bits of good fortune he’d had recently.

  Simons left the Bistro and staggered down the street. The gunman who followed him was the man carrying the Army Colt. After giving them a slight head start, Mason followed as well and had no trouble spotting them on the mostly empty street. Simons and his escort walked down one street and turned a corner to continue on until they reached the end of the part of town illuminated by torches. Apart from those two, several locals were staggering to their own destinations. Some working girls tried to tempt every man they saw. One of the men they didn’t try to snag was a vagrant with a filthy, yet familiar face who shadowed Mason from several paces behind. Mason quickly became certain of two things: That man was one of Greeley’s overmen and he was being very careful not to get too close to Simons or any of the armed men nearby.

  Mason’s first thought was that if an overman could get this close, why couldn’t he just take a shot at Simons and be done with it? All he needed to do to answer that question was remind himself of how tightly wound those gunmen had been at the Bistro and how quickly they would respond to a shot being fired at Simons. Obviously the overmen weren’t so deeply devoted to the whims of their employer that they were willing to walk into a cross fire for him.

  Following Simons and the gunman around another corner and down an alley, Mason watched the two men swap a few parting words. The gunman wandered away. Simons unlocked the door to a narrow building with two floors and as many windows and went inside.

  Mason stood in a shadow for a while, waiting to see how long it would take for either the same gunman or another one to come along. Surely they patrolled the area to keep watch on Simons. When no patrol came along, Mason broadened the scope of his search to include the vagrant or anyone else who might be there to watch him instead of Simons. Once again, he came up empty.

  “Perhaps I should be a hired gun after all,” Mason said under his breath. “Seems like an easier job than I thought. Let’s just put that to the test, then, shall we?”

  While Mason wasn’t much of a quick-draw artist, he placed his hand on his holstered Remington as if he were. Nobody came at him from some hidden spot, so he took a few cautious steps toward the door.

  Still . . . nobody.

  He approached the door and got close enough to reach out for the handle. His blood raced through his veins, and his heart skipped several beats when a dog somewhere else in town started barking wildly at something that had caught its eye. Once he was able to draw a breath, Mason realized he was still alone in that alley. He even touched the handle and gingerly tested it to find the door was locked.

  Taking his hand away, Mason looked around and saw there was still nobody who took any interest in who he was or what he was doing. He put his ear to the door and listened without being disturbed, which told him the security around Simons wasn’t nearly as heavy as Greeley had believed. The only sounds he heard within the building were the shuffle of tired feet and the occasional cough from Simons. Mason quietly stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets and walked away so Simons could drop his guard even further.

  * * *

  Mason returned less than two hours later. While there were still signs of life throughout Sedrich, things had quieted down considerably. He took a different route through town to see if he attracted any more attention than he had before. As far as he could tell, even the overman he’d spotted had called it a night and found a bed somewhere.

  When he returned to the door he’d tried earlier, Mason could hear nothing from the other side. The door was still locked, but that didn’t mean much so long as he had the proper tool for the job. He reached under his jacket to draw the dagger secreted at the small of his back. The blade came out and his finger found one of the rings at the top of the handle. Fitting the scratched tip of the blade into the lock near the door’s handle, Mason closed his eyes and felt for what scraped against the sharpened metal. He found the sweet spot without much trouble and got the door open on his second try. Just before the lock gave way, he heard a metallic snap. Some part of the lock’s mechanism had been broken by his forced entry. Under most circumstances, that would have been a bad thing. This time around, Mason figured he could use it to further his own purposes.

  Once inside, he eased the door shut. The room was so dark that he couldn’t make out all the walls. After his eyes adjusted, Mason could tell he was in a kitchen. There were cabinets on one side, a large water basin in a corner, and a small wood-burning stove in the other. Judging by the stink of rotten potatoes and mold, Simons wasn’t much of a cook. There was a dim light source coming from the next room, so Mason stepped carefully in that direction.

  Mason had snuck out of enough places in the middle of the night for his feet to be almost as sensitive in looking for imperfections in the floor as his hands were in looking for weaknesses in a lock. When his boot scraped against a board that was raised just a bit above the rest, he stepped over it and didn’t come down with all of his weight until he’d tested for squeaks. It was a tedious process, but he inched his way into the next room without making a sound.

  Simons was asleep in that room. His drunken snoring rolled through the air, marking his location in the dimly lit space even better than the pair of lanterns hanging nearby. As Mason approached the undersized figure, he reconsidered his options as far as getting the ring was concerned.

  The men who were supposed to be guarding him might have been watching the saloons for Greeley’s boys, but they weren’t nearly as big a threat as Mason had anticipated. Then again, those men could still be about and were well armed. One curious set of eyes would become a nasty thorn in Mason’s side. There were at least a dozen ways he could meet his end just by being careless. If he got sloppy, even if he managed to get the ring from Simons, there was no guarantee he’d make it out of Sedrich alive.

  Even if he could get the ring away from Simons while the little man snored in a deep drunken sleep, Mason knew he wouldn’t survive a fight against overwhelming numbers on his way out of town. So he decided to stick to his original plan.

  Maggie was right. Sometimes he just thought too damn much.

  Simons sat in a chair surrounded by shelves and a small square table. Even in the sparse amount of light coming from the lanterns hanging near the front door, Mason could see there was an abundance of clutter in that room. The closest lantern’s wick crackled and fought to stay lit but didn’t have much longer before it went out. Mason crossed the room to a darkened hallway that extended for less than a yard before leading to a set of precariously narrow stairs.

  Keeping his boots to the edges of each step, Mason climbed to the second floor and found a perfectly good bedroom. A quick search of the room told him it was not only empty, but hadn’t been used in quite some time. Simons was probably too drunk most nights to bother climbing the stairs, and if his familiarity with the girls at the Bistro was any indication, he most likely spent the remaining nights in another bed entirely. Mason headed back downstairs, comfortable enough in what he’d learned to be able to hasten his movements at the expense of making a bit more noise. Simons was sleeping so deeply that Mason could have ridden his horse in through the front door without disturbing him.

  He approached Simons with dagger in hand. How easy it would have been to simply cut the little man’s throat and then separate a finger from his hand. But that wouldn’t have satisfied the questions that had been nagging at Mason from the
moment he started following Simons to this shabby little dwelling. It was from that point onward that Greeley’s story had come off the tracks.

  This was too easy.

  Something wasn’t right.

  Every instinct inside Mason told him to fold this hand, so he went straight for the one hand that truly mattered. He got ahold of Simons’s ring and pulled, but the damn thing wouldn’t budge. It was wedged tightly in place and to make things worse, Simons opened his eyes.

  Chapter 24

  “Wh-what . . .”

  In the time it took Simons to form those two croaking syllables, Mason had cracked the blunt end of his dagger against his temple to put him right back to sleep.

  * * *

  Simons awoke sometime later. He was groggy at first and when he tried to roll over, he couldn’t move. His next attempt was to reach for his head, but his arms were tied even tighter than his body. The only thing he could move freely was his head, and when he did that, he saw Mason sitting perched on the edge of a chair next to him.

  “Are you all right?” Mason asked.

  Blinking furiously, Simons wriggled and squirmed. “William? What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I came by to check on you,” Mason said while looking at him with wide, concerned eyes. “I thought there might have been some trouble after that scuffle you had with Wade and—”

  “Why am I tied up?” Simons roared.

  Flinching at the other man’s angry tone, Mason said, “I just got here. I knocked, but nobody answered. The lock was broken, so maybe someone forced their way in.”

  “Cut me loose!”

  “Oh, of course.”

  This time, it was Simons who flinched when he saw Mason draw the dagger from the scabbard hidden behind his back. Knotted linens had been used to tie Simons to the chair, and it was a simple matter for the sharpened blade to slice through them. When he was free, Simons hopped up from the chair and rubbed his wrists as if he’d been held captive for days instead of hours. “What’s going on here?” he asked.

  “Like I said, the lock on your door was broken. When I knocked, the door opened. I heard something suspicious, so I came in. You were tied to this chair and someone was here with you.”

  “Who?”

  Mason shrugged before putting the knife away. “I don’t know. I barely got a look at him, but he was a muscular fellow dressed in rags. He was carrying a club.” When he reached for the scabbard again, Mason shifted so his jacket opened to reveal the Remington holstered under his arm. As soon as the blade was sheathed, he straightened his jacket to cover the weapon. Judging by the nervous expression on Simons’s face, that brief glimpse of the.44 had been received just as Mason had hoped.

  “You said you came in here to . . . check on me?” Simons asked.

  Pulling up the chair he’d been sitting in while waiting for Simons to wake up, Mason said, “I didn’t think you’d buy that.”

  “Of course I didn’t. I’m not stupid.”

  In Mason’s experience, one thing that was certain about stupid people was that they were always anxious to say they were otherwise. He played into that by nodding as if conceding a defeat. “Actually I was sent to kill you.”

  Simons tensed.

  Mason knew the other man didn’t have any weapons, because he’d already taken them from him while he was knocked unconscious. The instant Simons’s features betrayed his intention to lunge or make some other aggressive move, Mason brought his hand up to the holstered.44. Although most any man could touch a holster with impressive speed, drawing a gun from it and firing with any degree of accuracy was another matter entirely. Bluffing at such a skill was a dangerous play to make, but Mason thought he might be able to get away with it in his present company.

  Slowly, carefully, Simons opened his hands and held them up. “All right. You got me,” he whispered.

  “If I wanted to kill you, I would have done it already,” Mason said.

  “Then what do you want? Money?”

  “Have a seat, Randy.”

  Simons took a seat, placed his hands on his knees, and then rocked back and forth while awaiting Mason’s next words.

  This was the first time Mason had ever conducted an interrogation, but he guessed it would have a similar flow to a poker game. An opening move of aggression followed by a well-placed bluff. Then the pot was made juicier before the final blow was struck. Mason couldn’t help grinning at the similarities, the sight of which made Simons even more nervous.

  “You’ve made some folks real upset,” Mason said.

  “Comes with the territory.”

  “One of those folks is Cam Greeley.”

  The color drained from Simons’s face. “Oh Lord,” he moaned. “I knew he’d come after me sooner or later.”

  “Why is he after you?”

  “You . . . don’t know?”

  “Actually I was just sent to do a job. When I got to town, things didn’t line up to match what Greeley told me, so I got curious. Tell me how you know him.”

  Leaning forward, Simons spoke at a frantic pace. Each word had the urgency of a man grasping at a dwindling length of rope before falling over the side of a sheer drop. “I brokered a few jobs for him. Nothing much really. He was looking for some help and I steered a few men in his direction. With my family . . . I know plenty of men in that line of work.”

  “Which is?”

  “They’re gun hands,” Simons said. Scowling, he asked, “You didn’t know?”

  “I was told to kill someone and I came to do it,” Mason said in a tone that was bereft of any of the brighter emotions. He was actually doing his best to mimic what he’d heard from the overmen. “That usually doesn’t require me to ask many questions.” Although the tough act seemed to be holding up, he didn’t want to push it. In keeping with his poker mentality, now was the time to goose the pot a bit with a small strategic retreat. “I went to the Bistro to get a look at you and figure the best time to finish you off. But I could tell you weren’t the animal Greeley described. Furthermore, you seemed like a fairly decent man.”

  “What did Greeley tell you?”

  “That you surrounded yourself with crooked lawmen and bounty hunters,” Mason said. “You paid men to gun down any of Greeley’s overmen that might track you to Sedrich.”

  Simons expelled a tired laugh and rubbed his head where Mason had hit him. “Overmen. Are they still tossing folks into the paddlewheel of that boat?”

  “Last time I checked.”

  “You’re not one of them. An overman, I mean. I can tell. It’s in the eyes,” Simons said while swiping his finger between his own eyes. Wincing, he brought that hand back to his temple, where a nasty mark had already formed. “I swear . . . it was you that hit me.”

  Mason furrowed his brow as if he were trying to imagine such a strange possibility.

  Watching Mason carefully, Simons eventually chuckled. “It was just a glimpse, really, but I swear it was a glimpse of you. I suppose getting cracked in the skull will make you see things.”

  “It’s been known to happen. That man who I saw before is likely to come back. The only reason he’s not here already is probably that he figured I’d do the job I was sent to do.”

  “Yeah,” Simons sighed. “Greeley doesn’t like to get his hands dirty. Just do me a favor, huh?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Make it quick.”

  “I already told you I’m not going to kill you,” Mason insisted.

  “I know how this goes. You get me to relax so I don’t make a sound or put up a fight and then you shoot me. I’ve seen it plenty of times.”

  Drawing from his considerable experience in reading people, Mason doubted that very much. Simons had heard about it, perhaps, but not seen. “So, what have you been doing here?” Mason asked. “And why would Greeley want you dead?
”

  Simons was sweating profusely. His hands swiped at his face and neck to clear some of the larger rivulets tracing down into his shirt as he said, “I don’t know! This ain’t the first time he’s tried, though.”

  “There’s got to be a reason.”

  “Like I told you, I was doing work for him. Greeley wanted to hire on some enforcers for his new business venture.”

  “You mean the Delta Jack?”

  “This was before he got the boat. Back when he owned a saloon or two in Louisiana. He wanted to expand into other venues and needed men he could trust to be his enforcers. I guess he had some trouble with the local gunmen or maybe he just thought my kin could do a better job. A few of my cousins did jobs like that for him a few months earlier.”

  “Did Greeley have your cousins kill for him?” Mason asked.

  Simons started to answer that but quickly stopped himself and grimaced like a man who’d been caught in a lie. Or perhaps caught just before the lie. “My cousins are bad men. They’d tell you the same. I didn’t ask what they did for Greeley, but let’s just say men like them don’t get paid as well as they were for just saying nasty words to people. Know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “My cousins were always in trouble for something or other. They were always on the run. Always hiding. Always wanted in some territory for this and set to hang somewhere else for that. They kept in touch with their kin, though. I could get word to them and tell them where to find more work. They gave me a cut and told me they’d protect me if anyone came to try and get to them through me.”