Hanging in Wild Wind

by Ralph Cotton

  “And you think it might help?” Price asked, taking on a more serious demeanor.

  “It couldn’t hurt, could it?” said Longworth.

  “You’re right,” Cadden said, “it couldn’t hurt.” He looked at his brother, then back at Longworth. “All right, from now on, no more fooling around. We’re going to be so quiet you won’t hardly know we’re here.”

  Longworth gave him a questioning look.

  “Brother Cadden means it, Detective,” Price said with feigned sincerity. “So do I.”

  “I hope you mean it,” Longworth said. He turned and gave a quick glance toward the brass-ringed cell key hanging behind Bell’s gun belt. Then he walked back out front to the desk. The three prisoners looked at one another through stripes in the shadowy, moonlit darkness. Cadden winked. “Good night, Detective Longworth,” he called out in a respectful tone of voice.

  Next door, an hour later, in the living quarters behind his office, Dr. Martin Ford awoke with a start to the sound of a gun butt rapping soundly on his back door.

  “Who the blazes is it?” he called out as his feet swung off of the bed and found their way into his battered leather house slippers.

  “Please, Doc, open up. It’s an emergency,” Huey Buckles called out painfully, his pain both real and intense.

  “All right, then,” the old doctor grumbled. “Don’t beat my door down.” He struck a match and lit a candle sitting on a stand beside his bed. He stood up with a grunt, candleholder in hand, and walked over and unlatched the rear door. Opening the door a crack, he peeped out bleary-eyed and said, “What are you doing coming to the back door, this hour of the night?”

  “I—I couldn’t come to the front, Doctor,” Buckles said, “for fear someone would see me like this.” He cocked his backside around for the doctor to see. “I’m in a wretched condition.”

  “Good Lord, man. You surely are,” said the doctor, seeing the seat of his trousers burned away, bits of blackened cloth clinging to the blistered, peeling flesh. He saw blackened blood gathered and crusted atop the stab wound. “Get in here. Damned if it doesn’t hurt just looking at you.”

  Once inside, the old doctor closed the back door and said, “Follow me.”

  In the treatment room, he set down the candle, raised the globe of an oil lamp, lit the lamp and adjusted the wick up for optimum light. “Drop your trousers and sit down—no, lean down over that table.”

  The doctor picked up a pair of thick spectacles from beside the oil lamp and strung them behind his ears. When Buckles had gotten into position over the table, his burnt trousers down around his ankles, the doctor leaned in for a closer inspection. Shaking his head, he straightened up and said, “Before we get started here, are you one of the fellows Detective Bell found breaking into the cantina this evening? I heard the ruckus.”

  “I am,” said Buckles. “But you’ve got to believe me, Doc. We had no idea it was closed down. We were what you might call ignorant of circumstances.”

  “Ignorant of circumstances,” the old doctor repeated, shaking his head. “I’ve got to remember that one.”

  “You’re still going to fix me up, aren’t you?” Buckles asked.

  “Yep, I’ll fix you up. From what I’m seeing here, it looks like Detective Chief Bell must’ve taught you whatever lesson you needed to learn.”

  “You won’t tell him about me being here, will you, Doc?” Buckles asked.

  “What difference would it make if I did?” the doctor asked. As he talked, he stepped over to a desk and took a bottle of whiskey from a lower drawer. He uncorked it and handed it to Buckles.

  “None, except I don’t want you to,” said Buckles. He took the bottle and turned back a long, deep drink.

  “All right, then. I won’t,” the old doctor said, reaching out for the bottle, wondering if he would have to pry it from the wounded man’s hand.

  Something in the doctor’s voice told Buckles he was lying. But before he could do anything to make sure the old doctor didn’t tell, Buckles had to get his wounds tended to.

  “Thanks, Doc,” he said, letting go of the bottle. “I never needed a drink so bad in my life.”

  “You needed it more than you know,” said the doctor. “This is going to hurt some.”

  Buckles let out a whiskey breath and said, “Have at it, Doc.”

  For most of an hour, the doctor plucked burnt cloth and bits of charcoal from the outlaw’s behind. He cleaned and swabbed both the knife wound and the burn, smeared a heavy layer of ointment over the entire area and bandaged it with a thick layer of white gauze cloth. When he’d finished working on the wounds, he took a blue bottle of laudanum from a desk drawer and handed it to him. “Start taking this when the ointment starts drying up and the pain comes back.”

  “Obliged, Doc,” said Buckles, stepping into a pair of worn-out pin-striped trousers the doctor had rummaged up for him to wear. He pulled the trousers up, buttoned them and swung his empty gun belt around his waist. “Now, about what we were saying.”

  “About what?” the doctor said, taking off the spectacles and pushing the sleeves of his nightshirt back down his forearms.

  “You know about what,” Buckles said. “About you keeping your mouth shut.” He reached over on a table laid out with sharp surgical instruments and closed his hand around the handle of a bone chopping knife.

  “Wait, mister,” said the doctor. “I said I wouldn’t tell him anything. I meant it. I wasn’t lying.”

  “The thing is, we’ll never know,” said Buckles.

  Chapter 13

  When Huey Buckles left the doctor’s office he took a swig of laudanum from the blue bottle. He capped it and put it away, feeling a soothing numbness run down his throat and through his chest as the medicine worked its way down. By the time he’d reached the alley running behind the darkened Belleza Grande Cantina, the pain in his rear end had subsided. A warm, furry glow seemed to surround him. He found himself grinning for no reason.

  “There you are,” said Paco in a lowered voice, “it’s about time.” He looked the smiling man up and down in the moonlight. “Did your doctor take care of you?”

  “Oh yes. I’m better already,” Buckles said. “Where’s our horses?” He looked all around, but he didn’t see the two animals standing only a few feet away in the moonlight.

  “Never mind the horses,” said Paco. He held up a worn wicker basket filled with bottles of whiskey. “Look what I took from inside, to make up for all the trouble we’ve gone through.”

  “Good thinking,” said Buckles, seeming relaxed, unhurried, more sociable than Paco remembered ever seeing him.

  Paco chuckled proudly. “It has taken us two tries to do it, but finally we have what we came after: information and whiskey.” He jigged the basket of whiskey on his arm.

  “Damn right we did,” said Buckles, feeling as if he stood atop a wispy cloud.

  “Did you take care of the doctor?” Paco asked.

  “Oh yes,” said Buckles, the easy smile still on his face.

  “Then you are ready to go?” Paco asked.

  “Ready, able and willing,” said Buckles. “What about the woman, Kitty. The one in jail?”

  “We’ll see about her on our way out of town,” said Paco. “If she is in the jail, we’ll break her out. But first things first.”

  They took their horses’ reins and led the animals around the side of the cantina and out to the front corner, looking onto the dirt street. Gazing across the street at the hotel, Paco gestured upward and said, “The son of a bitch we want is staying right there in the corner room.”

  “How do you know?” Buckles was still alert enough to ask, but his head had begun to nod a little beneath the laudanum’s powerful grip.

  “I watched him stand on the balcony up there and smoke a cigar while you were getting your wounds attended to,” Paco said.

  “Good enough for me,” said Buckles, his head bobbing a little, his eyelids drooping, “let’s go.”

 
“Wait,” said Paco. “Look at you. I don’t want you falling asleep. This is serious business.”

  “I’m all right,” Buckles insisted.

  “Yes, you are all right,” Paco said. “You are all right to stand here and hold the horses.” He pressed his reins into Buckles’ hand and hung the basket handles around his saddle horn. Then he crept away along the edge of the buildings lining the street, out of sight, until he stepped up onto the porch of the hotel.

  In the lobby, at the hotel desk, he stared over at a night clerk until he satisfied himself that the young man was fast asleep. After a few silent seconds had passed he eased over to the stairs and walked up them quietly.

  Inside the room, Chief Detective Bell awoke to a rapping on his door much like the sound that had earlier awakened the ill-fated Dr. Ford. As consciousness came to him, he sat up on the side of his bed and rubbed his face and said, “Who is it?”

  “The clerk,” said Paco, disguising his voice to a higher pitch, to what he thought a clerk’s voice might sound like.

  Bell sat for a moment, then said, “Who? The clerk? What do you want?” Even as he spoke he looked at the corner bedpost for his gun belt before realizing he’d left it hanging on the peg at the sheriff’s office.

  “I have a message for you,” said Paco. “It can’t wait until morning.”

  A Winchester rifle leaned against the wall beside the bed, but Bell didn’t bother picking it up. “Damn it,” he growled. He stood up, walked to the door and took the handle in his broad hand. “This better be good,” he said, pulling the door open.

  Paco’s grim but smiling face met him in the darkened doorway. “Good for me,” he said. “But not so much for you.”

  An orange-blue flash filled the doorway. The first blast from the double barrel slammed Bell backward across the room, his feet barely skimming the floor’s wool rug. Before his bloody body could settle and fall, the second shot hit him, slinging more blood and body matter in all directions.

  From his position on the street below, Buckles saw the balcony doors crash open in the moonlight. “My God, that’s pretty!” he said dreamily, watching the balcony rail break away as Bell hurtled through it. In the moonlight, the effects of the laudanum made the detective’s body and the spray of broken glass look like some sort of an angel flying through a burst of glittering stardust.

  At the sheriff’s office, Longworth woke at the sound of the two shotgun blasts. He started to bolt straight up from the desk chair where he’d been sleeping, but the bite of a hard steel gun barrel atop his head sent him sprawling back down.

  “Damn, Cadden,” said Price Cullen. “You hit him too hard. We’re going to have to carry him to the cell.”

  “We don’t have to carry him anywhere,” said Kitty. She hurriedly opened drawer after drawer, looking for the razor the ranger said he’d left there as evidence.

  “What are you looking for?” Price asked her.

  “My razor, so I can cut his throat,” said Kitty, rummaging frantically.

  Price and Cadden looked at each other. “Let’s drag this knocked-out sumbitch to a cell,” said Cadden. This is going to be worse than cutting his throat, when Bell sees he let us get away.”

  “Whatever we do with him, let’s get it done,” said Price, Bell’s gun belt hanging over his shoulder. He looked off through the dusty front window. “What do you think the shotgun blasts were about?”

  “Probably just some bastard decided he’d been married long enough,” said Cadden. He reached over with Bell’s revolver and shoved it down into the holster hanging from Price’s shoulder.

  As the two picked up Longworth by his arms and his boots, Kitty stopped searching for the razor and hurried to the gun rack on the wall. “Whatever those shotgun blasts were about, we better be getting out of here pronto. Bell is probably headed this way right now.”

  The two brothers hurriedly carried the knocked-out detective into the cell, handcuffed his wrists through the bars and tied a bandana around his mouth. “Pull his pants down,” said Price with a dark chuckle.

  “Why?” Cadden asked.

  “Just for the hell of it,” said Price.

  “Why not, then?” said Cadden. They both laughed, unbuttoned the helpless detective’s trousers and jerked them down around his boots.

  “Pull his pecker out,” said Price.

  “You pull it out,” said Cadden. “I ain’t touching his pecker.”

  “Yeah, forget that,” said Price.

  They left the cell and locked it behind them. Instead of hanging the key back on the peg, Cadden slipped the brass ring around his wrist. “I’m making this a keepsake,” he said.

  As they came out of the cell, Kitty had killed the light of a dim oil lantern in the front window. She immediately shoved rifles and ammunition into their hands and shooed them out the back door, into the alley. Without a word they ran in a crouch to the livery barn, gathered three horses and began saddling them.

  “Where do we start looking for the money?” Kitty asked as she slung a saddle up over a dun gelding.

  The brothers looked at each other. “At the bank. Where else?” Cadden said with a shrug.

  “You said the bank is still under construction,” Kitty snapped back at him.

  “That’s right,” said Cadden. “But they could already have a safe built into the wall.”

  “If it’s not there,” said Price, “we try the new express office, or the—”

  “Jesus!” Kitty cut him off. “We don’t have all night to look for this money. How do we know it’s even here yet?”

  “We don’t,” said Price. He grinned. “But that’s the sort of stuff that makes life interesting.”

  “Okay,” said Kitty, “we look in the places where it might be. But we do it fast. I don’t want to land back in jail. If we don’t find it, we cut out and find Silva and his men.”

  “Sounds first rate to us,” said Cadden, leading his horse out the livery door, a loaded rifle in hand.

  Following him, Price veered to the side and looked through a crack in the shed door where Longworth had parked the wagon loaded with its load of sample ore. “Hey, what have we here?” he said in whisper. The wagon sat barely visible in the grainy purple moonlight.

  Kitty stepped over beside them and peeped through another crack. Seeing the chunks of rock in the wagon bed she said to Price, “Forget it. That’s the silver ore samples Longworth had when we found him hauling out on the badlands.”

  “Hell, those rocks have got silver running through them,” said Price. “They’ve got some value to them, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, they’ve got value,” Kitty replied impatiently. “About two or three hundred dollars for that whole load, the way it sits. You want to hitch it up and drive it out of here tonight, with the detectives and the townsmen on our behinds?”

  “Damn it, Price, let’s go,” said Cadden, hearing the two of them whisper back and forth. “We’ve got our sights on some real money for a change. Don’t be wasting time on a bunch of rocks.”

  On the street, the sound of the two shotgun blasts brought townsfolk to their windows and doorways for a curious look toward the hotel. Upon seeing the body crumpled in the dirt amid pieces of broken wood railing and shards of glass, many ventured out in nightshirts and hastily grabbed clothing. “It’s Detective Chief Bell! He’s dead!” one man called out, bending over the body with a lantern in one hand, a shotgun in the other.

  “Yes, it is him. The pig,” Paco chuckled under his breath, watching from a darkened alley. He grinned at Buckles, who stood right beside him. “He better be dead, with all the iron I put in his belly.”

  Buckles chuckled too, his eyes half closed in his dreamy laudanum haze. “Is it me,” he said, “or did the lights go out at the sheriff’s office?”

  Paco looked back at the office three blocks away and saw the blackened window, where a light had been shining dimly only a moment ago. “You’re right, it’s out,” he said with a note of suspicion in his
voice. The two had hoped to gun down whoever came running from the office at the sound of the shotgun blasts. Now their ambush plan appeared to have gone amiss.

  “Let’s go see what’s wrong,” said Buckles. He took an unsteady step forward, but Paco grabbed him by the back of his coat.

  “Are you crazy, Huey?” he whispered. “It must be a trap.” He turned, pulling his horse by its reins. “Come on, we’ve seen enough. We’re getting out of here.”

  “What about the woman?” Buckles asked with a thick tongue.

  “We have done all we can do here,” said Paco. “Come on. Hurry up, before we end up fighting for our lives in this shit hole.”

  On the street a voice called out, “Where the hell is that young detective?”

  “Yeah, where is he?” another voice said as Paco Stazo and Huey Buckles slipped away along a shadowy alleyway leading to a trail out of town.

  “Nobody could sleep through that kind of noise,” said a woman.

  “Look, the light is out at the sheriff’s office,” said another townsman.

  “Where is our selectman, Tyler?” the woman cried out in a near frantic voice. “Somebody needs to get to the sheriff’s office and see if that young detective is dead or alive.”

  “I’m right here, Margaret,” said Paul Tyler, an elderly selectman with a completely bald head and a thick, white walrus mustache. He came running up, pulling a suspender onto his shoulder, an army Colt in his thin, bony hand. “I’m going right now and see what’s happened to young Longworth.” He looked all around.

  “Should we wake Doc Ford?” said another man. “Just in case we need him?”

  “I’m surprised he’s not already here,” said another man.

  “It’s not like Dr. Ford to sleep through gunfire,” Margaret Bratcher called out, her voice quivering, still near hysteria. “Something bad has happened—something terrible, I fear!”

  “Now, Margaret, calm down,” said Tyler. He gazed through the darkness, first toward the doctor’s office, then toward the darkened sheriff’s office, as if still expecting Detective Longworth to come bolting out at any second.