Winter Kill

by Bill Brooks

  Harve Ledbettor had slipped up on the porch behind the talking deputy and had placed the long barrel of his Buntline Special just behind the deputy’s ear and thumbed the hammer back.

  “I believe him, too, boys. Don’t make this into a bloody mess,” Harve said.

  “What the hell business is this of yours?” Bittercreek bellowed like a bull, but all the bellowing in the world wasn’t worth a wooden nickel against an ounce of lead.

  “Green’s with me,” Cole said. “And there will be no hanging.”

  “He god-damned killed my sweet baby’s husband and I won’t stand for it!”

  “You’ll stand for it or join him,” Cole said.

  Newcomb gave Cole a hard eye and said: “Do I know you from somewheres?”

  “I arrested you and Emmett Dalton once in the Nations for selling snake-head liquor to the Indians.”

  Newcomb shook his head; he didn’t remember because it had probably been more than once some federal marshal had hauled his bacon into court. His recourse was to blink like he had a cinder in his eye. He turned back toward Teddy Green.

  “What proof you got that Elihue is wanted in Texas?”

  “These,” Teddy Green said, pointing to his eyes. “I never forget the face of a wanted man. Got a memory as long as the hind leg of a dog. When he was in Texas, that fellow went by the name of Dirty Bob Braddock.”

  Bittercreek Newcomb was breathing hard now without having done anything; his chest heaved and fell beneath the greasy duster he wore; his sombrero was battered and mud-stained; his face was as red as a beet. “Looks like what we got here is a Mexican stand-off,” he declared.

  “No, sir,” Cole said. “What we have here is a bunch of dead men if you don’t release this man and back away.”

  “Well, you’ll be just as dead as the rest of us,” Bittercreek sputtered.

  “Maybe so, but so will you and that deputy with the Buntline Special behind his ear … that’s a fact.”

  There was a long moment when the only sound was the patter of the soft rain on the tin roofs of the whorehouses and into the puddles where it collected, then Bittercreek Newcomb let out his breath and said: “All right, god dammit. Hedge, Roy, you help Pat here get my son-in-law up to the funeral parlor … take his jawbone, too.”

  The deputies didn’t move immediately and Bittercreek had to tell them again before they lowered their shotguns. Cole nodded to the one who had Teddy Green’s pistol in his waistband and the deputy handed it back to Green, his eyes full of regret but full of relief, too; he would get to go home and see his wife and children that night.

  “I’m gonna wire the police down in San Antone,” Bittercreek said. “And if I find out they ain’t never heard of no Dirty Bob Braddock, then I’m coming to arrest you for the murder.”

  “You won’t arrest me,” Teddy Green said.

  “Why not?”

  “This job can’t pay enough to get yourself killed over a murderer and rapist, even if he was married to your daughter.”

  “Who says I’d be the one getting killed if I was to come looking for you?” the fat lawman said.

  “Don’t come looking for me, mister.” Teddy Green said it as calmly as if he were ordering a dog to sit and not move, then turned and walked away into the descending rain.

  “Let it go,” Cole said to Newcomb. “That feller may have been a good husband to your little girl, but he sure as hell isn’t worth getting killed for.”

  Bittercreek Newcomb leaned to the side and spat and didn’t bother to wipe his chin. “I can round up a hundred men if I have to,” he said.

  “A hundred won’t be enough,” Cole said. “Leastways not where you’re concerned. Let it go.”

  “I still don’t remember you from down in the Nations,” he said, as though that was still troubling his mind. “What are you doing up here?”

  “Just passing through, Marshal. Just passing through.”

  * * * * *

  They had gotten halfway back to the good side of town before Harve said: “Hot damn, but we come close to shooting the ribbons out of those yahoos, didn’t we, John Henry?”

  “We came close to dying, Harve, that’s the way I saw it.”

  “Hell, dying, living, it’s all the same thing in the end, ain’t none of us getting out of this world alive.”

  “I’d just as soon die in my sleep than out here on these muddy streets, if you don’t mind.”

  “Hell, I’m ready for a drink. How about you, John Henry?”

  “We’d better just sit tight and stay off the streets. Bittercreek Newcomb might still want revenge for Teddy Green killing his son-in-law.”

  Harve grumbled his assent and didn’t say anything until they’d reached their hotel.

  “You know what I saw back there?” Harve asked.

  “No, what?”

  “The prettiest Chinese whore I ever laid eyes on, and I’ve been to San Francisco.”

  “You better lie low, Harve.”

  “’Cause of Bittercreek?”

  “No, I think maybe Cleopatra has her eye on you.”

  Harve looked struck dumb for a moment, then he grinned like a beaver. “You think?”

  “Well, I think she was at least warming to you by the time we left Cheyenne.”

  “Well, then, I’d best be careful and get me safe on back to that sweet woman when this is all over.”

  “You can go now, if you want,” Cole suggested.

  “No, sir … we ain’t finished the job yet, and I intend to be there at the end. ’Sides, I ain’t killed nobody yet.”

  “You have a one-track mind, Harve.”

  “Well, sir, my daddy raised me right. He said … ‘Don’t try to ride a horse and a woman at the same time.’”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  Harve smiled and said: “Neither do I, but it means something.”

  They reached the hotel and Cole started to head for his room when he caught a glimpse of a man in a bowler hat and a greatcoat, sitting in the shadows of the bar. He told Harve he’d see him first light, and went over to where Teddy Green was sipping coffee.

  “Did you have to kill that man?” Cole inquired, taking a seat across from him.

  “I never kill anyone I don’t have to.”

  “If you try and arrest everyone you see that’s wanted for a crime in Texas, we might be a long time finding Ella.”

  His gaze held steady over the rim of his cup. “It’s not likely I’ll run into that many,” he said.

  “That’s not the point.”

  “It couldn’t be helped,” he said.

  “What were you doing at that end of town?”

  He lowered the cup and embraced it with both hands. “I thought maybe I might find her there.”

  “Ella?”

  He twisted his mouth and looked at his reflection in the cup. “It’s a long story,” he said.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Maybe another time. It’s late. I’ll see you in the morning, John Henry.”

  He didn’t move and Cole knew their conversation was over, at least for the moment. He didn’t want even to guess about the reference to finding Ella in the bad part of town. Right then Cole needed a whiskey, some time alone—they all did. But the questions kept running through his mind like wild horses across the high sage flats: Where was Ella? What was her involvement with Gypsy Davy and the murder? What did Teddy Green know about her that would make him seek her out in the red-light district? The only way Cole would find the answers was to find Ella, but the real question was, did he want to know the answers? He still loved her and maybe the truth wasn’t what he really wanted. When the bar dog asked him what he was having, he told him to bring him a bottle, then took it to his room.

  Chapter Ten

  The next morning they rode out
of Ogallala on three rented horses, heading west to the aunt’s house under a stormy sky. Harve complained that he hadn’t seen the sun shine since he’d left Denver and wondered openly if Nebraska was good for anything other than boredom until they spooked some sandhill cranes near the river. When the big birds lifted into the air, Harve said: “Good God Almighty, them’s big chickens.” Of course he knew what they were; he was just trying to lift the somber mood that had overtaken them. Nobody laughed but Harve.

  The aunt’s house was about ten miles outside of Ogallala and every mile seemed like twenty. Then it commenced to rain hard and something made Cole think that even the gods were going to be against him this time around.

  The place was just as Cole had remembered it: a two-story white clapboard with black shutters and a porch on three sides with the summer kitchen out back. The memory brought with it the scent of stored apples and the long kiss Ella and he had shared there in that small room with the spring sun coming through the windows.

  They reined in and Cole said that, since he knew the woman, he’d knock on the door. Harve shifted under the stiff wind coming out of the northeast and drew up the collar of his coat while Teddy Green sat on his horse, stoically taking in his surroundings. He seemed immune to the conditions, the rain beading on the crown of his bowler.

  Cole’s knock brought no reply, but he’d seen the hack near the rear of the house under a lean-to and the piebald mare in the corral, so it seemed likely that the aunt would be home. He knocked again and this time his eye caught a glimpse of women’s shoes through the tatted curtains of the parlor window. The shoes had feet in them and his heart skipped a beat.

  He tried the door but it was bolted. He went around back and saw the broken window to the summer kitchen and the door ajar. He found the aunt there on the floor of the parlor, strangled, her eyes staring at the wainscoting, a harness strap knotted around her neck. There was something else he noticed, too. He unbolted the front door and motioned Harve and Teddy Green to come inside. He wanted them to see the dead woman.

  “Jesus Christ,” Harve said when he looked down at her.

  “Gypsy Davy,” Teddy Green muttered as he squatted next to the aunt.

  “He’s cut off her ears,” Harve said.

  “If she knew where Ella was,” Teddy Green said, “you can bet she told him.”

  “Now what?” Harve said. “The trail looks like it ends here.”

  Cole did not claim to be an expert on dying, but it looked to him as though the aunt had died a hard death. Teddy Green was undoubtedly right; if she had known anything about Ella’s whereabouts, the aunt would have told it.

  “I’ve got one card left to play,” Cole said. “It’s not much, but it’s something.”

  Harve pulled his flask and took a pull, then offered it around. Teddy Green and Cole both declined.

  “We’ll need to let someone in town know,” Cole said.

  “Play your card,” Teddy Green said.

  They rode to the Feathers spread. It was a thin chance that Ella would have gone to Tom Feathers’s for refuge, but then how well did Cole really know her in the first place? The rain had stopped, but the wind had increased and dark clouds scudded so low it seemed they were riding right through them.

  The main house lay in a valley between swelling mounds of brown winter grass. When they topped a ridge, they could see it there, quiet and seemingly undisturbed except for a wisp of black smoke curling out of the chimney before it got swept away by the stiff wind. It was a raw day in every respect and none of them had gotten the picture of the dead woman out of their minds.

  “Seems awful quiet for a cattle operation,” Teddy Green said.

  They’d ridden through a large herd of the new shorthorn cattle a mile from the main house. Harve had hawked and spat his disdain when seeing them.

  “A cow without long horns ain’t much in my book,” he had said.

  It was true. There was no activity surrounding the house as you might expect. They saw a blood trail from the front porch leading to the barn just as they rode up.

  Teddy Green jerked the pistol from his shoulder rig and said: “We’ve ridden into some bad business here, John Henry.”

  They found three men hanging from a rafter. The cold gray light silting through the roof shone mutedly on their twisted faces. They were dressed like drovers and their tongues lolled out of their mouths, black and thick. Like the aunt, their ears had been sliced off.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” Harve muttered.

  “You know any of these men, John Henry?” Teddy Green said.

  Cole didn’t. They were no doubt hired hands who had gotten caught unawares.

  Teddy Green’s gaze took in the scene, then his eyes trailed toward the back of the barn where a door swung in the wind. “The blood trail continues out that way,” he said.

  The trail led to a well twenty yards beyond the barn. They heard a strange sound from the depths of the well, but it didn’t take a scholar to figure out it was the labored breathing of a person. Something the size of a fist knotted in Cole’s stomach. The only person he cared about might be lying in the bottom of the well, dying.

  “We’ll get a lantern and tie it to a rope and lower it down,” Teddy Green proposed.

  That’s what they did. They didn’t have to lower the lantern far, for there about ten feet down was Jake Feathers, Tom’s rich father. His face was bloody, and, when the light neared his eyes, they grew stark and wide with fright. He uttered something unintelligible and screamed.

  “Feathers, if we lower you a rope, can you get it tied around you so we can haul you out of there?” Cole shouted. He moaned and Cole asked him again.

  Then he said in a weak voice: “I’ll … try.”

  It took a good half hour before Feathers got the rope knotted around himself well enough that they could haul him up, and once they almost lost him. When they did get him out of the well, he looked like he’d been dragged by horses. Harve found a tarp and they laid him on it and carried him to the house. He was in bad shape, bad enough shape that Cole knew he’d die no matter what they did—a dying man gets a certain look in his eyes, and Jake Feathers had that look. They did the best they could for him, wrapped him in blankets, and fed him whiskey, most of which spilled from his lips.

  “Tom,” he kept saying over and over. “Tom … Tom.”

  Cole asked Feathers where Tom was and his eyes grew startled and shifted from Cole to Teddy Green to Harve and back to Cole. “Is Ella with Tom?” Cole asked.

  He blinked several times, and Cole asked again.

  He nodded his head. “Gone,” he said. “All gone.”

  “Where?”

  Harve spilled some more whiskey in him, then took a pull himself.

  “Where are they?” Cole said again. “Where are Tom and Ella?”

  Feathers looked toward the door, then up to the beamed ceiling.

  “Gonzales ….”

  Cole wasn’t sure if he heard him right, but Feathers repeated it. The name didn’t make any sense, but nothing did.

  “Who did this to you, old-timer?” Teddy Green said.

  “Hi- … him …” he muttered. “Man … knife ….

  “Gypsy Davy?” Cole said.

  Jake Feathers looked at Cole, looked at Harve, at Harve’s empty sleeve, then rolled his eyes, took a breath, and died.

  “Who’s this Tom?” Teddy Green said.

  “His boy,” Cole said.

  “You know him well?”

  “Well enough.”

  “Can he fight, John Henry? Can he stand up to a man like Gypsy Davy?”

  “I have my doubts.”

  “Then we’d better get going.”

  “Where?” Harve said.

  “Any ideas, John Henry?” Teddy Green said.

  Before Cole had a chance to think about it, the gro
und thrummed with hoofs. They went to the front door and there, topping a ridge, were maybe a dozen riders.

  Teddy Green stared at the bunch and said: “That would be Colorado Charley Utter and his assassins.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Their hats,” Green said. “See the way they wear them pinned back?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Colorado Charley Utter was a short, thick-set man who wore a cream-colored sombrero with the front brim pinned back to the crown. He also wore a heavy buckskin jacket that had beadwork, fringes, and doeskin gauntlets. He wore a brace of pearl-handled revolvers and Cole could see the brass-fitted stock of a long-range Winchester rifle like the one he owned tucked into the boot of his saddle. He was a grim-looking man who looked loaded for bear. The men with him were typical waddies: broad-brimmed hats pinned back like his, chaps and spurs, and equally well armed. Cole counted ten of them.

  “We’re looking for a man named Feathers,” Utter said. “One of you him?”

  “He’s in there,” Cole said, “but he’s not up to conversation just now.”

  Utter leaned forward, resting his hands on the pommel of his saddle. “Why ain’t he?”

  “He’s as dead as Moses,” Harve said. “Some feller tossed him down a well after he dragged him.”

  Utter looked beyond the three of them as though he were trying to see through the log walls of the main house, trying to see if Jake Feathers was really inside, dead as they’d said he was. Then he said something to the man next to him, a tall, lanky cowboy wearing batwing chaps and three pounds of pistol on his hip. He told the man to go see how dead Feathers really was. The man sniffed the air and swiped at his sandy mustache before climbing down from his horse and going inside. He came right back out again.

  “Son-of-a-bitch’s dead, Charley, these fellers weren’t lying. And his ears is cut off.”