The Big Showdown

by Mickey Spillane

  Turned out he was a good, confident rider, and the only awkward moment was just before they left, when he gave her a look as she climbed up on Daisy.

  “Something wrong?” she asked. The small picnic basket was slung over her saddle horn.

  “No, I . . . I’m just used to ladies riding sidesaddle.”

  She might have been offended, but instead merely gave him a teasing little smile. “Maybe I’m not a lady.”

  The grin under his thin, well-trimmed mustache was nicely devilish. “Time will tell.”

  They spent several hours riding the range, where the beeves grazed and cowboys drifted through, keeping an eye on things. The men nodded to her and ignored the rider they assumed was a tenderfoot. For his part, Zachary seemed fascinated by the smallest things—a line shack, a barbed-wire fence, a roped stray—and took everything in, like a child eager to learn.

  The sun wasn’t quite above them yet when they settled on the slope above the sparkling river, the breeze a soothing third companion, and they ate the picnic lunch, very leisurely, sitting on an Indian blanket she spread out. He asked her a number of questions about the cattle business, some a little naive, most surprisingly smart, others just gathering information about this new world he found himself in.

  “Why,” he said, resting casually on his side, poised to have a bite of cupcake, glancing back at the glimmering river, “would they call a beautiful waterway like that ‘the Purgatory’?”

  Sitting Indian-style, she was working on a cupcake, too; she swallowed her bite before grinning mischievously, as she pointed in the direction the stream was running.

  “Because Texas is that way,” she said.

  He laughed. “This country . . . such a hard place, but people still have a sense of humor.”

  “You have to have that,” she said with a matter-of-fact shrug, about to take her last cupcake bite, “to survive.”

  “That’s true everywhere.” Zachary used a napkin on his fingers. “What an incredible feast. You may not have demonstrated yet that you’re a lady, Miss Cullen, but you’re clearly a woman of exceptional skills.”

  “Am I now?”

  He nodded, and the expression on the handsome, vaguely Apache-like face was clearly admiring. “You ride like a man, you cook like an angel, and even in jeans and a plaid shirt, you’re a vision.”

  She licked a crumb of chocolate cake from her upper lip, then said, “Maybe instead of establishing whether I’m a lady should wait until we’re determined whether or not you’re a gentleman.”

  His laugh was hearty. “Please! I’m not getting fresh. You’re quite safe with me, at least at the moment. I couldn’t be more stuffed if a taxidermist had just finished with me.”

  She laughed a little herself. Then some silence settled in, which she broke by saying, “I gather you were pretty successful back East. On Wall Street, is it?”

  He nodded. “I got in just after the war. My timing was good—they capped Stock Exchange membership in ’69. It’s not been an easy living—the security trade is prone to panics and crashes. That’s one reason why I jumped at the chance to make a change.”

  “One reason, you say. Is there another?”

  He smiled, but his expression was somehow melancholy. “Doesn’t everyone who comes West have their reasons?”

  “Personal reasons, you mean.”

  He shrugged slightly, avoided her gaze.

  She said, “Forgive me, Zachary—I don’t mean to pry.”

  He shrugged again and shook his head. “Miss Cullen . . . Willa. I just don’t want to subject you to my sad story, and lead you to think I want you to feel sorry for me. I like you, Willa . . . not meaning to be forward. But your pity is not something I crave.”

  Willa knew she should let that stand—but how could she? How could anyone?

  She leaned forward, smiled gently, and touched his hand. “Tell me.”

  He swallowed, and as he spoke, he looked past her. Into memory.

  “Her name was Hannah,” he said. “My childhood sweetheart. . . and later . . . my wife. She was very beautiful, as beautiful as you. But she wasn’t strong like you. And the boy she gave me, Hiram . . . he wasn’t strong, either.”

  The air between them had gone suddenly brittle, the breeze a little too cool.

  She said, “They’re . . . they’re gone.”

  He swallowed again, nodded. “Diphtheria. Quite a bad outbreak in ’81, back East.”

  She covered her mouth. Then her fingers lowered and she said softly, “I’m sorry. Zachary, I am so sorry.”

  His smile could only be described as brave. “My staff at the brokerage was exemplary. They covered for me for many, many months. They did very well without me, too, and when I finally returned, we did better still. And at work, I was fine. But at home, in our town house . . . too many memories. Too many ghosts. I tried moving, to an apartment on Park Avenue. Lovely place. I hated it.”

  His eyebrows rose.

  “Then,” he said, “a bolt from the blue . . . this golden opportunity courtesy of a black sheep who I barely knew. A fresh start. A new challenge. And here I am.”

  He told it so simply, so elegantly, with the tiniest smile, the heartbreak showing only in his eyes.

  She was crying.

  He came over and put an arm around her, and comforted her, as if the loss just described had been hers, not his.

  “How selfish of me,” he said, angry with himself, “to put you through that. I had no right. . . .”

  She looked up at him and touched his face, her eyelashes pearled with tears, though the crying was over. Their faces were inches apart. Impulsively, she kissed him, tenderly, briefly, hand still touching his cheek.

  They drew apart.

  Emotions roiled through his expression like thunder in a sky swept black with clouds.

  Then he kissed her, and it began as hers had, tenderly, but grew into something more, something passionate, something hungry. They kissed and they kissed, and he eased her onto her back and lay beside her, and his fingers found the buttons of her shirt. She raised a hand to stop him, but that hand froze in midair, and then his touch was on her underthings, cupping a breast, and his face was in her neck, kissing, nuzzling, loving, then lustful.

  He seemed to catch himself and rolled off, turning his back to her. She flushed and did up her buttons and glanced away, ashamed. He was looking away as well, perhaps equally so.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, so soft the rush of the Purgatory nearly drowned it out. “That was . . . I’m sorry.”

  Normal color returned to her cheeks and she slid over to sit beside him. She touched his hand.

  “I don’t mind,” she said. “I really don’t. But . . . it’s a little fast, don’t you think? A little sudden?”

  He flashed her an embarrassed smile. “Much too sudden. Far too bold. I hope you can forgive me.”

  She smiled back. “Perhaps I should have fed you even more.”

  He laughed. “Perhaps all the blood is in my stomach, digesting that feast, leaving nothing in my head to help me think.”

  She had another idea about where that blood had rushed to.

  “I suppose,” he said, heaving a sigh, “we should be getting back. Your father might worry.”

  Willa waved that away. “No, we’re fine. The Bar-O’s a big spread. Papa will expect me to give you the nickel tour.”

  Zachary helped her pack up the picnic things, the folded blanket going in on top. They left the basket with their tree-tied horses, and they walked along the sandy, rocky shore, just taking in the scenic beauty.

  At one point the Easterner stopped and she stopped, too, looking back at him. You could almost hear the water shimmer.

  “I need to apologize,” he said. “Not for how I feel. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is for me to feel this way about a woman again. You’ve brought something alive in me that has been dead for . . . for a very long time.”

  “Zachary . . .”

  “But I do apolog
ize for . . . well, I know that things are moving too fast. But I’ve always been the kind of person who moves quickly to get what he wants.”

  She looked into the dark, almost Oriental eyes, and said, “I’m that kind of person, too.”

  He sighed, looked away, almost shyly. But then his gaze came back to her, hard and clear. “When the time is right,” he said, “I want to talk to your father.”

  “About the ranch?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “That’s all but decided. We’ll be going over the legal documents soon. No, I need to talk to him about . . . us.”

  He might have tried to kiss her again, and she might have let him.

  But he didn’t, and she didn’t encourage it. They just walked back to where the calico and Appaloosa waited.

  Walked back hand in hand.

  When he lost a hand because he wasn’t paying attention, Caleb York decided it was time to throw in his cards—even though he was fifty-some dollars ahead. Two hours of poker, here at the Victory on another slow weeknight, had failed to keep his mind off his long, mostly unsuccessful day.

  The day had started well, the interviews with bank president Thomas Carter and janitor Charley Morton, giving York a good idea of just how Herbert Upton came to die.

  Before he met his Maker, the clerk had met his boss.

  Carter had arranged to have his own bank held up, either to cover up embezzlement or simply to line his pockets with the townspeople’s money. Upton had been an accomplice or perhaps a blackmailer—either way, it explained the clerk’s recent promotion and raise.

  So after hours, with no one else in the bank, Carter had shoved a pistol into Upton’s belly and ended whatever problems the clerk had been causing. The bank president waited for the right moment—the sun had probably still been up when the murder was done—and after dark dragged Upton behind the Victory and dumped him in the alley there.

  And janitor Charley had been woken up early before the bank opened the next day, honored by the president’s presence on so lowly a doorstep, to come right now and clean up a sticky mess. Spilled food indeed.

  As murders went, it was hardly the cleverest the ex–Wells Fargo detective had run into. If anything, the crime was a fairly clumsy one. But proving Carter guilty would take real doing. You didn’t go around accusing one of the most respected city fathers of a cold-blooded killing, much less the robbery of his own bank, without utterly damning evidence. The circumstantial variety would never swing it.

  So York had spent the late morning and the afternoon into early evening doing the kind of dogged, dull investigative work of which the dime novelists spared their readers. He talked to damn near everyone in town, at least those whose living quarters were above the Main Street businesses. He, of course, never mentioned the bank president’s name, merely asked whether anyone had heard a shot fired, or seen anything suspicious—say, someone hauling along a drunken friend somewhere. When he first got to the Victory this evening, York went around asking the same questions to the sparse clientele.

  No one had heard anything.

  No one had seen anything.

  Nothing in the world pulls a lawman down worse than not being able to prove a guilty man guilty.

  Dressed in his usual black, hat pushed back on his head, York had taken off his badge when he sat down at the poker table—always his habit, but somehow more significant tonight, perhaps because he was allowing himself to drink a little harder than usual. Before taking his seat at the poker table, in fact, he’d asked Rita to make sure he got the good stuff.

  “Drinking yourself blind is one thing,” York told her, with a nasty grin, “but going blind is something else again.”

  Rita, in a green satin gown with its usual low-cut front and up-the-middle slit, looked like a bowl of ripe fruit ready for the eating. But something in her face, especially around her dark eyes, seemed troubled.

  “I always,” she said, with a patient smile, “make sure you get the private stock. Straight from Denver.”

  “Thanks, honey.”

  She blinked at the familiarity. “Have you started drinking already, Sheriff?”

  “No. Just a long damn day. Just a chasin’-my-tail wasted day.”

  She glanced around, though there were few patrons or even employees to see on this dead night. Then her eyes locked on his and she said, “I’d like to talk. Later.”

  “Sure. We can talk now if it’s important.”

  He was aware that she lived on the premises, in the largest of the rooms upstairs.

  She shook her head. “No. Enjoy yourself. Play some cards. Take a load off.”

  At Rita’s nod, Hub the bartender gave York a bottle and a glass.

  But during the time he sat playing cards—the ruffled-shirt house dealer accommodated him and played seven-card stud instead of the usual five-card—York had not put a dent in the bottle. Oh, it was the good stuff, all right, and no matter what Rita said, superior to the usual fare he was served here.

  But his mind just would not let him enjoy himself. Wouldn’t let him lose himself in the game, and drink himself into a better mood or for that matter a worse one. Two hours of this nonsense was enough.

  When he rose, he glanced around for Rita, ready to have that talk with her. But she was nowhere to be seen. York went over to the counter and asked Hub if she was upstairs or in her office, and the bartender said, “No, Sheriff he went out half an hour or so ago.”

  “Say where she was going?”

  “No. Sometimes she goes out for a walk, to just enjoy the night air. Go back to your game and she’ll turn up soon enough.”

  York said no thanks and returned the largely unused bottle to the bartender.

  Outside, the night air was nothing anybody would enjoy, not anything to go out walking in willingly—a wind had kicked up, and a cold one at that, and he had to snug his hat down to keep it from flying. The street was deserted, the jangle of his spurs the only sound besides the wind’s hungry-wolf howl. Going on ten, few lights were on in the living quarters over stores, and only the faint glow of de Toro Rojo in the barrio, like a small piece of sunset that refused to go down, indicated anybody but the smattering of souls in the Victory were awake in this town.

  At the hotel, the front desk was empty, attended only by a bell and a sign that said RING FOR SERVICE. The chinless clerk would be camped out in the office behind the wall of keys. The restaurant was dark, closed; the hotel, like the town, asleep. On this night, Trinidad was the kind of peaceful hamlet most sheriffs would relish—where a man with a star could pick up a paycheck for doing next to nothing.

  Caleb York wished he could take the next stage out.

  He trudged up the steps to his second-floor room, number 5. He had his key ready when he noticed the yellow light bleeding out from under the door. Taking a step back, and taking stock of himself—how much had he drunk? Hardly anything. He’d felt bone-tired before—how did he feel now?

  Ready.

  Or at least he did once the .44 was in his hand.

  He turned the key fast to its click, then shouldered in but kept low, the big six-gun aiming upward.

  “You really know how to make a girl feel welcome, Sheriff,” Rita said, sitting in a chair by the window, near the kerosene lamp she’d lit on his dresser.

  She was still in the emerald satin dance-hall outfit, the shelf of her full bosom uplifted by clever design, a long gray mannish coat hugging her shoulders. Her shapely legs were crossed and showing in their mesh stockings, extending boldly from the slit in the gown.

  He rose from his near crouch, holstered the weapon, and shut the door behind him.

  “A man’s not allowed to have a female in his hotel room,” York told her. “Unless he’s married to her.”

  “Is that a proposal, Sheriff?”

  “No. It’s a city ordinance this hotel has to follow.”

  “We should find somebody official who can enforce that.”

  The room was small, the furniture sparse and
nothing special. The green-painted iron bed would serve two. In case married people took the room. Nothing in the glorified cubbyhole said he’d lived here for six months, but he had.

  “Are you drunk, Sheriff? How much did you drink?”

  “I’m sober as hell and not thrilled to be. Never got around to emptying that bottle.”

  He went over and pulled the room’s other straight-back chair over to sit and face her in the cramped quarters.

  “You’re in a mood, Sheriff,” she said.

  “I am at that.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d care to share the reason why.”

  “There’s a man who murdered another man, and I can’t do a damn thing about it. For now.”

  “You could kill him.”

  “Not how I generally go about it.”

  Her smile had little to do with the usual reasons for smiling. “You’re talking about the bank president and his clerk, aren’t you?”

  She said this as casually as if she’d asked him to pass a plate of biscuits, and don’t forget the butter. He felt like he’d been slapped or maybe doused with water.

  He frowned. “What makes you say that?”

  “I see things,” Rita said, shrugging, her half-exposed breasts taking the ride. “And I’m not stupid. Nobody else has a motive. He stole his bank’s money, you think? Engineered it?”

  After a moment, York nodded. “Carson had at least four accomplices. I killed three of them, and he killed the other, poor bastard.”

  “Pearl’s back at the Victory.”

  Pearl, the prostitute Upton had planned to make an honest woman.

  “What?” he said. “Working?”

  “No, not working. Are you sure you’re not drunk? I put her in a room upstairs at the Victory where she can cry her eyes out and feel sorry for herself and toss down her laudanum. She loved that little weasel. Or anyway she loved the respectability he promised.”

  “Upton was probably a blackmailer. How much does Pearl know?”

  “Just that she’s lost her chance at a different life.”

  “I want to question her.”

  Rita shook her head and her dark curls bounced. “Not tonight. Let her cry it out some. Anyway, she’s in laudanum heaven by now.”