Haskell sat back in his chair and stared across the massive desk at his little, near tallowless boss with short-cropped iron-gray hair and a mustache two shades lighter than his hair. Haskell was met with a near-blank, unblinking stare, so he continued. “And then you know what they did?”
“No, what’d they do next?”
“They shot at me. While I was layin’ helpless and at death’s doorstep in the coffin, they fired at me, notched my right ear.” Haskell touched his right ear over which he still wore a small bandage. “Still hurts, in fact, as does my sundry other miseries. I think they broke my nose. My eyes were swollen up like eggs. Ribs turned to powder! If Stumpy hadn’t thought fast and sent a rope out into the river, just after the coffin busted apart around me, you’d still be sittin’ there in your chair, wondering what in tarnation had become of your prized deputy, Henry. What, oh what has become of Bear Haskell, you’d have been sayin’, near tears, no doubt.”
“No doubt about it. I’d have been a wreck.”
“And I’d have likely been floating around somewhere in the Gulf of Fuckin’ Mexico!” Haskell pounded his right fist down on his chair arm for emphasis. “So that there is the reason I’m so late gettin’ back. I was laid up in a hotel there in Henry’s Ford, tryin’ to get enough strength into my badly beat up carcass to make my way back down out of the mountains. Still stiff an’ sore but I’m a little better now. Could use another few days off, however ... ”
“Huh, that’s funny.”
“What’s funny?”
“That’s not how Mister Gibbs told it.”
Haskell felt a burn of dread in his gut. “How’d Stumpy tell it?”
“Well, it wasn’t easy. I had to threaten him a good deal about relaying certain information about his checkered past to his wife. It’s a shame it took that sort of depravity on my part to get the truth out of him, but when I did get the truth out of that old catamount, he finally confessed that he’d left you in Henry’s Ford”—the Chief Marshal leaned forward, scowling, his sallow cheeks on fire, gray eyes blazing—“diddlin’ whores seven ways from Sunday!”
Chapter Five
“There was only one whore,” Bear said, when it became all too clear to him that his self-righteous indignation was getting him nowhere with his boss.
Haskell might have seen it all, but Henry Dade had seen it all and then some, and Dade knew when he was getting it spooned to him.
“There was only one whore, Henry, and she was sort of a sawbones, you might say. I mean, there wasn’t no real sawbones in Henry’s Ford, so she done the best she could patchin’ me up. Like I said, I’m still stiff and sore and could use a few—”
“Enough bullshit!” the chief marshal said, blowing another heavy smoke plume across his cluttered desk. “I’m taking a week off your next year’s vacation. So you were knocked around a little and given a sailing lesson. Boo-hoo.” Henry feigned rubbing tears from an eye. “That was a day off from where I come from—Texas, with the Comanches not to mention the Comancheros runnin’ off their leashes. And without no whores to make me feel better afterwards. So I’m shavin’ one week off your next year’s vacation allotment.”
“But Henry—!”
“But Henry, nothin’! Now shut up so I can give you your next assignment. Your train is due to pull out of here in ninety minutes, so you’re gonna have to haul your tender ass back to the Larimer pronto, kick out whatever tart you got loungin’ around in there like an oversized cat ... ”
“You been spyin’ on me, Henry?” Haskell scowled, suspicious.
“ ... And pack a bag and hustle your mangy hide down to Union Station. If you miss that train, I’m gonna cancel your vacation for the next five years, and send you up to Dakota instead—in January—to chase illegal whiskey peddlers on the reservations up thataway!”
“Christalmighty—that’s nasty even for you, Chief!”
“Under the cirumstances, it’s a gift.”
“All right, all right,” Haskell said, waving again at the toxic fumes billowing around his head and causing his eyes to water. “Give me the next assignment before I suffocate in here.”
Dade plucked a thin manila folder off a two-foot-high stack of other similar folders to his left, and tossed it over to Haskell’s side of the desk. “You ever hear of a regulator named Jack Hyde?”
“Of course, I have, Henry,” Haskell said, opening the folder and giving the first page a cursory skim. “Every man wearin’ a badge has heard of Jack Hyde, otherwise known as ‘the Jackal’.” Bear chuckled. “I’ve heard tell that that crazy killer has been on the run so long that there are some mothers out there who tell their kids the Jackal’s gonna come get ’em if they don’t clean their plates or say their prayers.”
“That’s the one all right,” Dade said. “Never mind that that’s one of the cruelest things you could threaten a child with, considering how vile and crazy ole Jack Hyde is. Poison mean. Surlier than a Brahma bull tossed five Texas miles in a cyclone. They say he was born that way. Bad apple from the get-go. As the file says—and it don’t say much, because not much is known about Hyde--he’s supposedly responsible for the killings of nearly fifty men all across the west. Responsible for the cold-blooded killings of all fifty of those men, though no one’s been able to put Hyde away for any one of those murders. No prosecutor has been able to build a case against him. Hyde is sneaky. And he moves fast. Sneaky, fast, and deadly.”
“Thus ‘the Jackal’ handle,” Haskell said, flipping through the file. “How come there don’t appear to be no sketch of him here, Chief?”
“No one seems to know what he looks like. Leastways, if they do, they’re not tellin’ the authorities.”
Haskell closed the file and tossed it back down on Dade’s desk. “Don’t tell me someone finally knows where he is. Lawmen and bounty hunters across the west have been on his trail for years. I’ve never heard of anyone even getting close. If anyone had, we would have heard about it. You know what braggarts bounty hunters are.”
“The Texas Rangers think they have him pinned down in west Texas.”
“You know what braggarts the Texas Rangers are.” Haskell grinned.
Dade merely puffed away on his stogie, regarding the big deputy flatly through the billowing smoke.
“Bad joke, Chief,” Bear said, sheepishly clearing his throat. “Well, if these Rangers have him pinned down, why don’t they go ahead and slap the cuffs on him?”
“Three tried to do that last week. Those three men ended up dead and tossed into a shallow wash. Some cow puncher found their half-eaten bodies strewn by mountain lions.”
Haskell whistled. “Three Rangers, you say. My, my, my. How do they, whoever they is, know these Rangers were throwin’ down on the Jackal?”
“They is Captain Homer Redfield, out of the field office in Sundown, Texas. He and his men were doing some investigative work, and they seem to think they’d identified the Jackal. Redfield sent those men after him, where the Jackal had last been seen, and next thing Redfield knew, those three Rangers had become panther bait.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, anyway, Chief, what does this have to do with us? We’re federal. Neither the Jackal nor Texas is in our jurisdiction. Besides, you know better than anybody how nasty the Rangers can get when some other lawman goes sniffin’ around in their territory. I’ve stepped into their bailiwick before, and it got nearly as bad as what I went through up in Henry’s Ford.”
“Homer Redfield is a friend of mine. He has unofficially asked me for help. He’s too proud to go through official channels, so he sent me a personal wire. He needs help because those three dead Rangers left only two other rangers, including Homer himself, in Homer’s remote field office in Sundown. He’s badly undermanned, and none of his men are especially good detectives.
“The town has no marshal. The Rangers are the only law in Sundown. There is of course a county sheriff in the area, but he has somehow disappeared. It seems
there’s a shootin’ war down that way between one large rancher and a handful of smaller ranchers. Homer suspects that one of those two factions, either the large rancher or the smaller ranchers who have formed a pool, has hired Jack Hyde. Apparently, punchers on both sides of the dustup have been dropping like flies, and Homer believes some of those killings, including the sheriff’s disappearance, can likely be attributed to Hyde.”
“How so?”
“Hyde is known for shooting men from ambush, in the back, from long range.”
“Yeah, with a high-powered sporting rifle, I’ve heard. A Sharps hybrid with a German scope thing.”
“A hybrid with a German scope thing, right. You’re smarter than you look.”
“Thanks, Chief. They’re always appreciated—whatever crumbs you’ll toss my way.”
“Normally I wouldn’t send one of my deputies on a personal errand, and I am not doing that now. Not officially, anyway. I’ve done some digging. Two months ago, in Kansas, a stagecoach driver hauling federal mail was shot in the back. Shot right out of the Concord’s driver’s boot in the middle of nowhere. A county sheriff out that way believes a saloon owner named Angus Fuller hired Hyde to kill the driver, as Fuller believed the driver was having carnal knowledge of Fuller’s wife. Unfortunately, the sheriff couldn’t prove his case enough to issue any arrest warrants. But the case is still open. And since that coach was hauling mail ... ”
“We can call this a professional mission and you can sleep tight at night in the knowledge you’re not overstepping your bounds enough that you might get called on the carpet by the congressional committee tasked with overseeing the Marshals Service.” Again, Haskell grinned.
Dade blew another heavy smoke plume at him.
“Your contact in Sundown is Homer Redfield. Whatever else you need to know about this case is in the file. You’ll have a few traveling days to study it. Now, get your ass out of here. My secretary has your traveling papers all typed and ready to go. You are not to talk to her, understand?”
“Ah, hell, Henry!”
“Do you understand?”
Haskell heaved himself up out of his chair, hanging his head like a chastised dog. “I understand.”
The file in hand, he headed for the door.
“Bear?”
Haskell turned back to the chief marshal. “I know—I’m not to undress her with my eyes, either.”
Dade drew another lungful of toxic cigar smoke, leaned back in his chair, and blew the smoke at the ceiling. “Good work up at Henry’s Ford. Nice to know those five tomcats will no longer be tormenting the stagecoaches and trains down that way.”
Haskell threw his shoulders back, his blue-gray eyes flashing surprise. “Thanks, Chief!”
“Now get out of here. You miss that train you’ll be spending the winter in northern Dakota!”
Bear hurried out.
~*~
“Don’t kill me! Oh, please don’t kill me! I don’t wanna die! I’m scared! Oh please, oh please, oh please don’t kill meeeeee!” cried a young man due to be hanged three days later in the little jerkwater town of San Saba, Texas. “Where’s your Christian mer-ceeeee?” the young man screamed.
Haskell had started up the broad wooden steps of the Rio Grande Hotel, but now, hearing the young man’s pleading cries, the federal lawman stopped and turned toward the gallows sitting up the dusty, sun-blasted street on his left. Two men stood atop the small wooden platform that looked as though it had been hammered together out of shipping crates and a handful of two-by-fours.
A good dozen townsmen as well as townswomen and even a handful of boys and dogs stood in a ragged semi circle along the base of the platform. Three half-dressed soiled doves stood on a second floor balcony across the street from the contraption, leaning against the balcony and smoking, enjoying the festivities. A beefy man closest to the platform and wearing a badge held a double-barrel shotgun up high across his chest. His expression was businesslike. A tall man in a black suit stood near the wooden lever—a former brake handle from a wagon, it appeared—that would spring the trapdoors beneath the doomed men’s boots.
That gent would be the executioner. He had a sweeping gray mustache. He was checking the time, as though he had a schedule to keep. Or maybe we was waiting for Hell’s hinges to squawk at the customary hour ... ?
Both doomed men standing atop the platform, nooses around their necks, wore flour sack hoods. Both had their hands tied or cuffed behind their backs.
The one doing the screaming was the smaller of the two.
He sobbed and begged for mercy. The crowd laughed and heckled him. One man shouted, “Burn in hell, Kirby Pine. Burn in hell. Both you and your old man!”
The man standing next to Kirby Pine bellowed from behind his hood, “I’m gonna come back as a ghost and murder you in your bed, Ben Malcolm!” He laughed. “Yeah, I recognized your voice. I’m gonna come back and kill you with a hatchet—nice and slow! And then I’m gonna rape your wife and both your purty daughters!”
The women in the crowd all gasped and slapped hands to their mouths.
The man with the shotgun turned and gestured angrily to the executioner. The hangman snarled as he jerked the brake handle to one side. The trap doors beneath both doomed men opened. The doomed men dropped down beneath the gallows floor, the double pops of their breaking necks silencing the kid’s wails.
The crowd roared its pleasure.
The dogs barked and chased each other.
One of the doves tossed a pink garter belt from the balcony. It landed in the street beneath the feet of the dead men, who were dancing, twisting and turning, five feet above the ground.
Haskell gave a wry snort—nothing like a public execution to amuse the local populace—then, shifting the weight of his saddlebags, war bag, bedroll, and rifle atop his overburdened shoulders, continued on up the porch steps. He crossed the wide wooden veranda and then stopped to cast his gaze westward down the wide main street of San Saba, back in the direction from which he’d walked.
The spur line that had carried him here from Amarillo aboard a Kansas & Pacific freight and passenger combination from Denver, ran along the western edge of the little town. The twin silver rails were all that separated the town from the vast, open west Texas desert spiked sporadically with prickly pear, mesquites, catclaw, and sotol cactus, and haunted by little more than rattlesnakes and brush wolves. What few humans and cattle roamed in that nowhere land were scrawny, pathetic, sunken-eyed beasts, barely recognizable as members of their given species.
There was damned little else out there between San Saba and Lac Cruces, New Mexico, but a few craggy, bald mountain ranges and some sandy bluffs and mesas.
The four-car combination that had deposited Haskell here, thirty miles from his destination of Sundown, farther south, still sat atop those rails, on the far side of the little train depot that resembled nothing more than a two-hole privy. One badly in need of paint as well as a new roof. Apparently, the locomotive’s boiler had belched out of its bowels some necessary piece of equipment and couldn’t continue until the part was replaced or fixed. The conductor had told Haskell and the other half-dozen impatient passengers that the repairs would likely be made by dawn the next morning.
Haskell hoped the surly gent wasn’t blowing smoke up his ass. It was still summer in west Texas. That meant it was as hot as hell with the fires burning. Bear had a job to do even farther south and west of here. He wanted to get that job done as quickly as possible and get the hell back to the cool mountain breezes wafting over Denver from the Rockies before he melted or dried up and blew away.
He pushed into the relative coolness of the hotel’s dim lobby and tramped past a couple of wilted potted palms to the impressively long and elaborately scrolled and varnished front desk. He secured a room from the elderly gent clad in a sweaty cotton shirt, green visor, and armbands. The man’s right eye twitched uncontrollably beneath the visor.
Ignoring the malfunctioning nerve, Bear paid for
a night’s slumber with a government voucher supplied by the enigmatic Miss Kimble, and left his gear in the care of the eye-twitching desk clerk, whose name was Galvin Dunstable and who was also apparently the bellboy.
Dunstable assured Haskell that once he’d dined he would find his gear in his room on the second floor, and directed the federal lawman to the hotel’s saloon/restaurant opening off a broad open doorway in the wall opposite the desk.
Haskell tossed Dunstable a fifty-cent tip then made his way to the open doorway, wanting nothing so much as a few shots of bourbon, a beer, and a steak to fill the empty cavern inside him that long train travel always seemed to carve. He stopped in the doorway and was happy to see that there was only one other customer in the dining room—a pretty, honey-haired gal whom Haskell had spied aboard the train. A veritable princess in a white silk blouse and green tweed traveling skirt.
Haskell had checked her out well enough to know that she was traveling alone.
Bear brushed dust and soot from his calico shirt, adjusted his grizzly claw necklace over his chest, and strode into the dining room like a man who knew his business.
Chapter Six
Haskell was heading for a table near the golden-haired princess, who sat near the far side of the room and against the front wall. But when he’d gotten halfway down the room, a door opened behind the bar running along the room’s right wall, and a burly man in gaudy waiter’s garb and a waxed mustache came out holding a large tray high above his head.
The waiter walked over to the woman’s table and set a smoking platter down in front of her.
“More wine?” he asked.
She’d been staring out the window, watching the festivities over at the gallows. She had an open book on the table before her, and a near-empty glass of wine. She turned to the waiter now, hesitating for a moment when she saw Haskell, then glanced up at the waiter and said, “Please.”
She had a pretty voice—not too high, not too deep. Sort of in the mid-range of wooden wind chimes. Her eyes were hazel. Her hair was rich and thick, like spun honey, and some of it was gathered atop her head while some of it hung straight down her shoulders and curled lovingly around her breasts, which pushed against her silk blouse. The first two buttons of the blouse were undone, offering an inviting glimpse of the girl’s deep cleavage.
The Jackals of Sundown (A Bear Haskell Western Book 2) Page 4
