The Killers

by Peter McCurtin

  The voices stopped before they reached the jail. I dropped a cigarette stub on the floor and stepped on it. Mayor Dunstan spoke first. “Are you in there, Sheriff?”

  “No place else,” I yelled back. “Come on in.”

  Dunstan didn’t come in first; a big brute of a man I knew to be the town blacksmith opened the door. I think his name was Bullock, and it suited him. He’d been drinking or dancing or both; it seemed funny that a man who worked in heat all the time in a hot country should sweat so much. The few strands of blond hair left on his bullet head were plastered down with sweat; and there were widening stains under both arms of his black wool suit.

  I grinned at him. “Where’s Dunstan?” I asked.

  The blacksmith pushed the door open all the way, and Dunstan came in, followed by five men. I knew two of them by sight. I didn’t know the others, but they were all the same breed: small town storekeepers and businessmen with the smell of money in their noses. They didn’t have anything to say; the Mayor was the man with the mouth.

  “Evening, Mayor. Evening, gents,” I told them in a friendly enough tone. I had nothing against the sons of bitches; I had nothing for them either. Money smells just as sweet in my nose, but that doesn’t make me grub for it. Work hard maybe while I’m planning to take it—scheme hard if I have to—but grubbing for it is something I’d rather not do.

  It hurt Dunstan to be polite to me. The banker, being a banker, was the kind of man to make a sour face at a poor man’s hello, then run to wash the dust off a rich man’s boots with his own spit.

  Dunstan harrumphed in the back of his throat. That’s the word for the noise he made. “Evening, Sheriff,” he said at last through a mouth as puckered as a dog’s rear-end in an alkali bed.

  Those stiff-collared musty-suited storekeepers turned me mean. Maybe in the whole world there was one storekeeping man with enough guts to be called a real man. I had never met such a man. “Evening, gents,” I said again.

  They mumbled back, some not liking me, some maybe even hating me because I was an obstacle that had to be moved, or climbed over, before they could get to the money. The money they thought was on the way—Fallon’s money. They hadn’t said a word yet, but I knew they were moving while Fallon sat back at the hotel and pulled the strings.

  From where I sat, the goose-gun making the storekeepers nervous, Fallon didn’t look so bad. Sure he was a double-crosser and a go-between and an all-round son of a border town whore. He didn’t try hard to be anything else.

  Only the big blacksmith wasn’t nervous with me. Dunstan was more nervous than the others, but then he’d been talking to Fallon. I wondered if he’d dipped into the punch bowl just once in his life before he got up enough nerve to tell me to quit.

  That’s what he was going to tell me. I was feeling mean, and I thought that was funny.

  Chapter Seven

  Before he spoke Dunstan made sure the blacksmith hadn’t disappeared in a pool of sweat. Bullock, the blacksmith, was the man closer to me than anybody else. Bullock stood to one side so that Dunstan could see when he talked. Dunstan was back a ways and the storekeepers, taking no chances, were herded together inside the open door.

  “We want to talk to you, Carmody,” Dunstan began, puckering and unpuckering his womanish lips. And they were womanish lips, maybe spoiled baby lips. “It’s time for a talk,” Dunstan went on.

  I crossed my knees the other way and you know how things happen when you move around trying to get comfortable. Of course I didn’t move my knees so the muzzle of the goose-gun was staring Dunstan in the face when he started again.

  Like hell I didn’t!

  At first, Dunstan was like a rabbit looking at a snake. He was more like Fallon than himself. Not that he had any of Fallon’s guts; I mean his way of speaking was like Fallon’s. The words stopped and started.

  Dunstan had a belly like a cow in the last month. “Don’t drop it in here,” I warned him.

  The blacksmith wasn’t one for words, but he knew how hard his fists were. “Look, you,” he said.

  “Look at what? At you? I’d rather look at Dunstan.”

  “Look at me,” the blacksmith said, taking a sidelong look at the scared banker.

  I shifted the muzzle of the goose-gun so it was staring at the blacksmith. “I don’t want to look at you, Horseshoe. You’re not pretty enough, like Dunstan.”

  I began to think the blacksmith might be the only real trouble I was likely to get. That was why they brought him along, I figured. I figured, too, that he was good and drunk. He didn’t look drunk when he came in—a man with all that meat to soak up the whiskey can look sober at first—but now I knew he was.

  “You better mind your manners, mister,” he said in a rumbling voice. “We come here to talk, not be sassed.”

  “Talk then,” I told Dunstan. “No, Mr. Mayor, I changed my mind. I’ll do the talking to save time.”

  Lord, but I was feeling mean. I was mean and getting meaner by the minute because I wanted another drink and the bottle was on the desk and I didn’t feel like moving with that drunk and outraged blacksmith to consider.

  I’m a great one for changing my mind. That’s what happens when you live the way I do. I guess you get used to doing what you Goddamn well like. It’s a way of working that just might get me killed some day. I sure hope so. When I finally stop that last bullet I’d hate to have folks say I lived so long because I was too careful.

  “You see that bottle of whiskey? You pass it to me. Then you can drink yourself if that’s what you want.” I was talking to the blacksmith. I didn’t mind being polite to the blacksmith. “You can drink, only you,” I warned him. “These other gents have had enough.”

  I watched him with the goose-gun. “Careful, don’t spill a drop—it’s Old Overshoe.”

  After bracing Fallon and his two gunslingers I didn’t want to get brained by a drunk blacksmith. He didn’t try it.

  Dunstan and his businessmen friends were waiting. The blacksmith took the bottle back, rammed the cork in with the heel of his hand, then changed his mind, and pulled it out with his teeth.

  Whiskey gurgled and Mayor Dunstan made a face. I swear that sour fat banker was a born reformer: he made so many faces.

  “You want me to leave, but I don’t want to leave,” I said. “That’s the start of it. You start off telling me that. Then you ask me why I don’t start acting like a nice feller and stop talking tough to Mister Fallon? As a comeback to that, I tell you that Fallon didn’t just come here to scatter twenty-dollar bills into the wind. I tell you Fallon came here to fetch back the wife of Big Sam Thornton. None of you gents much less than forty, so you know, you recall, who Big Sam is. That business of burning women and kids down on the Nueces River.”

  “Never any proof of that,” Dunstan protested.

  I went on. “Proof or not, you say if I dispute Fallon’s story—the hell with that Yankee-loving rancher. That’s old business and this is new. Lots of men were in the War and did bad things in the War and after the War. We have some words about that and I say the hell with Sam Thornton. I say, Fallon came here to get Thornton’s runaway wife any way he can—like a slave-catcher thirty years ago. I tell you Fallon came here for nothing else. Not to build this miserable town into something better, just to drag Thornton’s wife back to Thornton’s dirty bed. All right, you argue, that’s why he came here, but now that he’s here he wants to mix business with the other thing. In case you don’t recall the word for that, you miserable sons of storekeepers—that’s called pimping.”

  That didn’t bother the blacksmith much, or it bothered him and he didn’t show it. I decided it bothered him, because the bottle gurgled again. Then it bothered him to drink from my bottle, and he set it down on the desk without pushing in the cork.

  It bothered Dunstan and the others. I was talking so much I felt like John C. Calhoun getting hoarse over the divine rights of South Carolina.

  “We didn’t come here to be insulted, Carmody,” Du
nstan complained, redder in the face than before. It wasn’t a good healthy whiskey red in the banker’s jowly face. “You have no right ... ”

  “You want to talk about it, Dunstan,” I said. “All right, I twist the truth and don’t call you pimps. You admit that Fallon is a well-paid pimp, but he’s also a famous Texas man. Politician, lawyer, businessman—you like that dirty word—and anything else you care to mention. He’s doing a favor for a powerful friend and that’s all you want to know.”

  I let that hang for a while.

  “You just lost your own argument,” Dunstan said. “That’s it! You said it: we don’t give a damn. This town’s dying and we’ll grab at anything. The whole of Brewster County is in the middle of hard times. Anything that comes along is worth grabbing for. And you—you’re ... ”

  “In the way,” I said. “Sorry, gents, Mister Mayor and you too, Blacksmith—that’s where I stay.”

  “You won’t listen?” the blacksmith asked me.

  “Not the way Fallon wants it,” I said. “Fallon wants me to sit back and let him bring in gunmen to take the girl. I go fishing, that’s what Fallon wants. What you want, I guess.”

  Dunstan said, “That’s not what we want, the businessmen of this town. We want you to get out. The sheriff will be back. It’s not your job: let him handle it in his own way.”

  I said I was sorry not to be able to oblige. ‘“With Luke gone I’m the sheriff.”

  Sucked in air puffed up Dunstan’s wattled face. He made that harrumphing noise again. The Mayor was getting set to fire his big gun at me. I got ready for the shock.

  “Judge Flanders, if you will,” the mayor called out.

  I wanted to see Judge Flanders. Luke hadn’t said anything about a court in Salter City. Though Luke bent the law and made his nest there, Salter City wasn’t the county seat.

  I had figured the man with the beaver hat and white whiskers to be the oldest of the assembled storekeepers, maybe the richest or the poorest of the money-grubbers. He gave a jump when he heard his name called; then he dropped a heavy book.

  Dunstan was impatient, and I knew I was right about how he divided rich men and poor men. When the so-called judge got under the hanging lamp I saw how poor he was, and how scared. I didn’t feel even a gnat’s eye worth of pity for the shabby old son of a bitch who was trying to bend his knees enough to pick up the dropped book. The poor old snuffling bastard groping for the book was Dunstan’s version of the man-destroying monster gun I held across my knee.

  One of the storekeepers got the book for Judge Flanders. Notice how much respect I have for the law and the old men who twist it to suit other men. Notice that I call him Judge Flanders without asking to have the fact of his judgeship proved to me.

  “No hurry, your honor,” I said kindly.

  His honor hadn’t been spoken to like that for some time. Every godawful town in Texas, in other states and territories, has a judge like Judge Flanders. A judge like that is like the sway-backed nag nobody wants to buy. They shove a fistful of ginger up his glory hole and trot him out when everything else fails.

  “Thank you, Sheriff Carmody,” the judge told me, nodding his head in my direction. The trouble was, he couldn’t stop nodding once he started. I guess he needed another drink; so did I.

  Mayor Dunstan was puffed up like a rooster about to make a surprise attack. If there had been hen shit to scratch in, he would have scratched. It was a wonder that he didn’t crow. My thought was that he was saving that for later. I hoped the mayor of Salter City wouldn’t be too disappointed.

  The judge couldn’t find his page, and they had to help him again. I guess I never did see a group of citizens more anxious to get the Laws of Texas read aloud.

  Judge Flanders found it easier to see once he finally discovered his spectacles. One side was cracked and both sides were dirty; but it was better than being blind.

  Blinking at me, shaking the law book in shaky hands, he told me I wasn’t any kind of lawful sheriff. With his dirty glasses on, the mildewed book in his hands, he steadied up like a gunfighter handed back his gun. Or a drunk with a new full bottle.

  “Damn right,” the blacksmith agreed.

  Judge Flanders had his moment. “Don’t interrupt, Mr. Bullock,” he said. “Or else ... or else … ”

  He read me page such and such, paragraph something or other. “No sheriff in any county in the State of Texas shall appoint a substitute, or acting, sheriff without the knowledge, or consent, of the Governor of Texas.”

  Judge Flanders removed his glasses, closed his law book, and looked at my bottle before he looked at me. He tittered so hard he had to wipe his mouth. He was able to do that by himself. “That’s the law, Mr. Carmody, as stated in the Revised Statutes of the State of Texas.” Judge Flanders had done his part. Now he darted a quick glance at the men who were holding a bottle, or something, to his head. They didn’t say anything. Maybe they wanted more for their bottle.

  “That means you’re not the sheriff,” the judge said. “The sheriff didn’t follow the law, so you’re not the sheriff. What I mean, Mr. Carmody, you’re holding office illegally.”

  I grinned at the judge, thanking him for setting me straight on that troublesome point of law. “I was worried,” I said. “You read that good, Judge —just like a real judge.”

  By the time Judge Flanders figured that out, Mayor Dunstan repeated what the old man had said. “You’re finished,” he advised me. “Read it yourself if you want to. The law is clear. Do you hear?”

  What I said about the clearness of the law was dirty. The wound that troubled me most was getting better, but I was tired, and wanted to kill the rest of Fallon’s bottle in peace.

  “You heard the law,” Dunstan said, surprised at the way I was taking his legal buckshot. “You don’t have anything to say? You’re not the legal sheriff of Brewster County. You can be arrested and prosecuted for—what is it, Judge?”

  Judge Flanders had it on the tip of his tongue, but it slipped off. “For a lot of things,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Dunstan said. “That’s what could happen to you. However”—the Mayor tried hard to be a good feller—“there’s no need for that. It’s clear that the sheriff is to blame. The fact is, we’re prepared to pay whatever the sheriff agreed to pay you. Within reason, that is. How much is that?”

  “A thousand dollars for three weeks,” I said.

  Dunstan gulped and his greedy nature fought against saying yes. But he said it, and he didn’t call me a liar, which I was.

  “What do you say gentlemen?” he asked the onlooking storekeepers. He didn’t wait for an answer. “A thousand it is,” he said. “On condition that you get out of town. Now we can’t be fairer than that. Come on, man—what do you say?”

  I told them to scat.

  Chapter Eight

  It got quiet in the jail. I didn’t bring up the goose-gun, but I moved it a little. Small though the shift on the gun was, it frightened them. Dunstan was too scared to move; the storekeepers crowded back into the doorway like panicky sheep all trying to get through the same gap.

  Dunstan was ready to run if the others would give him room; if I didn’t kill him while he ran. Judge Flanders, so-called, wasn’t afraid of the goose-gun. Neither was the blacksmith named Bullock. They had different reasons for not being scared: the judge was sick of life and more afraid of being poor than being dead, and the blacksmith was too big and too drunk to care.

  I expected fists from the blacksmith—not talk. The judge had said his piece, read his bullshit laws; it hadn’t worked too well. The blacksmith moved out in front of the others. I told him to move back. I said my party was over. “Fallon’s shindig is still going,” I said. “Go back there.”

  Only a brave or a very stupid man would have talked back to a man with a sawed-off goose-gun in his hands. The blacksmith was both, and it came to the same thing.

  There was a problem about how to handle him. I had to stop him if he kept coming. Sure I co
uld blow him out through the door with a light squeeze of the trigger. When the smoke cleared, the blacksmith, the mayor and most of the leading citizens of Salter City would be nothing but a pile of stewing meat. And that wasn’t really the idea.

  Now the blacksmith was telling me I had no right to stand in the way of the town’s good fortune. I guess the poor lumbering fool really believed that better days were on their way. “You got no right,” he said. “I got kids, mister, and I can’t hardly feed them. I’m not asking you to stand aside.”

  I stood up holding the gun. “Move on out,” I warned the big man. “All you gents move. You want me to make a count?”

  They turned suddenly and ran, and it was a good thing there were no women and kids, because they’d have been trampled. The blacksmith stayed where he was. “You too, Horseshoe,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t talk so tough without that gun,” he growled, swaying on his feet, smelling of whiskey and sweat.

  “’Course not,” I said. “That’s why I got this gun, so I can talk tough. Now you get.”

  “No, I won’t do that,” he answered, shaking his thick head. “You’re the one in the wrong. You’re the one is leaving.”

  I was tired of talk. I didn’t want to hear any more about his hungry kids. And it wasn’t because of his hungry kids that I didn’t blow off both his legs at the knee. He was close enough to get hit in the belly with the muzzle of the gun. The barrel dug in hard but it didn’t knock the wind out of him. I upended the heavy weapon and tried to cave in his face with the stock. I didn’t get to do it, and maybe the gun was too heavy for such a quick move. He clamped both hands on the gun, quick as a cat for a big man, and would have tossed me and the gun across the room if I hadn’t let go.