The Big Showdown

by Mickey Spillane

  York nodded. “I spotted that, but haven’t had a close look yet.”

  “Take one.”

  York did.

  The knife was small, the kind usually tucked into a boot or belt or sleeve, five inches of pointed blade with a jigged bone handle and double brass guard—dagger-style, its gleaming double-edged blade looking razor sharp. One side of the blade bore tiny tears of blood.

  “Smoky Mountain toothpick,” York said, rising.

  “So sharp,” the doc said, “it made its cut and took just a little blood away with it.”

  York pointed at the dead girl. “What does the wound tell you, Doc?”

  “That’s a right-to-left wound, judgin’ by the messy exit point. Probably a right-handed man, but that’s nothing you can take to a jury. That kind of blade? You can swing backhanded, if you’ve a mind.”

  York nodded. “Step into the hall, would you, Doc?”

  They spoke just outside the murder room. The sheriff told the doctor of the bloody trail down the steps and the blood-spattered duster they led to.

  “I could use some help gatherin’ the evidence, Doc. Grab a sheet off of one of these beds and go down and wrap that bloody duster up for me, and keep it at your office till I need it.”

  The doc gave him half a humorless smile. “You figure that’s a good place for it, do you? Since I get more blood splashed around in my surgery than you do in your office.”

  York gave him a grim smile. “I knew you’d understand.”

  The doc nodded toward the murder room. “You want me to secure that weapon?”

  “No, I’ll get it.”

  York went back in, picked up the Smoky Mountain toothpick, wiped what little blood there was off on the bedsheet, and stuck it in his boot, where there was a place for such a weapon.

  Then, standing tall, he looked down at the poor dead girl, her mouth frowning, her wound grinning, the skinny thing all blister pale.

  “I’ll get the son of a bitch, Pearl,” he told her quietly. “Don’t you worry a hair on your pretty little head about it.”

  York returned to the main floor of the saloon, where near the bottom of the stairs the undertaker stood guarding his two dollars.

  “Go on and get your wicker baskets, Mr. Perkins,” York said. “They’re all yours, upstairs and down.”

  Perkins gave him a ghastly smile. “You’re a good man, Sheriff.”

  “One thing, Mr. Perkins.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Those outlaws comin’ to town after my hide?”

  “Uh . . . what about that, sir?”

  “If things don’t go my way, and you put me in your window? I will haunt your skinny backside till Judgment Day.”

  Perkins gulped and turned as white as the dead girl upstairs. “Sir, I would never. . . .”

  But York, smiling darkly to himself, had moved on to where Rita was keeping her upset girls company at their table toward the back.

  He took her aside. “Honey, you need to pack a bag.”

  She frowned, startled by the suggestion. “What?”

  “Not everything you own. Just enough to hold you over for two or three days.”

  “What for?”

  He brushed a tendril of dark hair from her face. “I aim to protect that girl I saw in the lamp glow the other night.”

  That stopped her. She smiled just a little. “So you do care?”

  “A sheriff cares about every citizen. Some a little more than others.”

  Smiling, she nodded, but as she was going off, he called, “Put on your Levi’s like the other morning. Leave your work clothes behind.”

  She nodded and disappeared up the stairs, skirting a corpse and an undertaker.

  Rita had barely gone when Tulley burst in, scattergun raised in a fist, attack-style, that and the badge on his shirt allowing him to bull right past Hub at the batwings.

  For a moment, York thought the Rhomers had arrived after dark, after all.

  But that wasn’t it—Tulley had just heard about the excitement down to the Victory.

  The eyes in the white-bearded face were wild. “I hate to ’bandon my post, Sheriff, but I thought mebbe you might need your ol’ deputy.”

  York put a hand on the man’s shoulder, while using his other hand to pull down the shotgun-waving arm.

  “You did right, Tulley. I can use you right about now. And, anyway, smart money is on the Rhomers hitting town in sunlight.”

  He filled Tulley in on what had happened here. The undertaker was heading out, going after his wicker baskets, and the deputy took everything in with big eyes.

  “Now,” York said, “in just a short while, Miss Rita will be comin’ down those steps with a travelin’ bag in hand.”

  “She goin’ somewheres?”

  “She’s going to a jail cell down at our office. You’re going to accompany her there. And we’ll leave your post at the stable untended for tonight. Just before sunup, you’ll head over with your scattergun. Till then, Miss Rita is in your charge.”

  Tulley was frowning. “The gal know she’s headin’ for a jail cell?”

  “Possibly not. Make her as comfortable as you can. Give her that large cell, way on the end. If she needs a meal, run down to the hotel restaurant and have them bring one up. And let her know all she has to do is call out and you’ll walk her to the privy. Got all that?”

  Tulley was shaking his head doubtfully. “This may not all be to her likin’.”

  “It may not. Be firm. You have a gun.”

  The deputy goggled at the sheriff. “Well, sir, ladies like Miss Rita, they has guns, too, sometimes.”

  “Little ones, Tulley. Not a great big one like you.”

  That made Tulley smile. He seemed mollified. And the thing was, York hoped Rita would have a gun amongst her things. If somebody got past him and Tulley, she might need to defend herself.

  Because she was behaving very much like the kind of loose end this killer was tying off.

  At the doors, York told Hub that if Rita wanted to reopen the Victory, that was fine—once the undertaker had hauled both corpses away.

  “Might want to do some work with a mop first,” York advised.

  “Sheriff,” Hub said dryly, “you have a good feel for business.”

  Out in front of the saloon, York emptied the two spent shells onto the boardwalk and reloaded with fresh bullets from his gun belt. He really didn’t think the Rhomers would be dumb enough to attack at night. But the one Rhomer he’d had experience with turned out pretty damn dumb. So you never knew.

  Right now he was on his way to talk to that bank president. It was time. The banker could wrap himself up in respectability all he wanted, but if he was also wrapping himself up in a duster and slashing the throats of young females, well, York would have to take exception.

  Thomas Carter lived on the third floor of the brick bank building, above Doc Miller’s surgery and sharing the same outdoor stairway, just up another landing. And Carter appeared to be home, several windows glowing with light. York climbed the two flights and knocked on the banker’s door.

  When he got no response, the sheriff knocked again, louder and more insistent; but still nothing.

  He tried the door and found it unlocked. A lot of doors were left unlocked in a town this size, but for a man like Carter, that seemed surprising.

  Entering a small kitchen, York announced himself, loudly, but again was not acknowledged. He moved into a living room arrayed with expensive-looking furniture in the Victorian style, button-back sofa, wingback chairs, marble-top tables, Oriental carpet. A bedroom with more heavy furnishings and striped wallpaper was uninhabited, as well, and so was a guest room.

  “Mr. Carter! Sheriff York. Are you here?”

  He was there, all right. In a study at a rolltop desk, where he was slumped, arms slack and hanging down, his head to one side, resting in a drying, darkening pool of blood. Carter was still attired in the same dark brown suit with embroidered vest he’d worn at the Citize
ns Committee meeting early this evening.

  The side of the banker’s head that was up had a small black hole in it, edged with red, dark red turned black. The one eye showing was blank, the mouth yawning open expressionlessly. The scorched smell of gunpowder was in the air.

  Carter’s right hand, at the end of a dangling arm, hung limp over a .45 Colt that rested on the floor, where he might have dropped it.

  Might have dropped it, if this were a real suicide.

  But York knew it wasn’t.

  Half an hour later, York was back at his office, where he dragged the chair from behind his desk back into the cell block. Tulley was seated outside the first cell, scattergun across his lap, his snoring no worse than a mountain rockslide.

  York pulled the chair up and sat as Rita, seated on the edge of her cot, in a light blue shirt and Levi’s and riding boots, glared at him.

  “Lock me up,” she said, “and put that old fool in charge of my safety? I can’t even sleep with him sawing logs.”

  “You’re not under arrest,” he told her. “You can leave. But I believe, if you do, you stand to be killed.”

  “Locked in here, somebody could kill me.”

  Her traveling bag was on the floor next to her. He smiled. “Where is it?”

  “Where’s what?”

  “Your derringer.”

  She huffed a laugh, smiled, and reached under the flat-looking pillow. She showed him the small, pearl-handled, silver gun.

  “Your sister had one like that,” he said.

  She returned it to its hiding place. “This is my sister’s. It was returned to me after she passed.”

  He had used that gun. He had killed Sheriff Harry Gauge with it. Thanks to Lola.

  “We don’t usually allow our prisoners,” he said, “to hold on to their firearms.”

  “You said I wasn’t a ‘prisoner.’ ”

  “Make that ‘guest.’ But you need to be on your own guard while you’re here. I’m just one man.”

  Disgusted, she nodded toward the slumbering Tulley down the cell block. “And that desert rat isn’t even one man.”

  “He might surprise you. Thomas Carter is dead, by the way.”

  “What?”

  “Killed himself. At least that’s what I’m supposed to think.” He told her how he’d found the body, just a short while ago.

  “Why isn’t it a suicide?” she asked. “Maybe Carter killed that bank clerk and it wasn’t so hard, but when he used a knife on poor Pearl, it made him realize what he’d done. What he’d become.”

  “Yeah, that’s what somebody wants me to think.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “No. And neither do you.”

  A dark eyebrow arched. “Don’t I? What if I told you that Pearl shared with me what Upton told her—that Thomas Carter had embezzled funds and set up the robbery of his own bank to cover it up. What then?”

  “Then I’d thank you for the information, and say you’re right, but that only goes so far.”

  She got up and came over to the bars and stared through them at him, frowning. “It goes all the way, Caleb! You hounded that man into a terrible act with Pearl, and then into a state of mind where he took his own life.”

  York shook his head. “No, there’s more to this than that. And I think you know what it is. Would you care to tell me?”

  She folded her arms. “I don’t have anything more to say.”

  He gestured with open palms. “Then you’re not a guest. You are a prisoner.”

  She grabbed the bars and tried to shake them. “Damn you, Caleb York! Your killer killed himself! Can’t you be satisfied with that?”

  “I would have been,” he said, standing, getting ready to haul his chair away from here, “if Doc Miller hadn’t agreed with my diagnosis.”

  “What diagnosis?”

  He sauntered off. “Good night, Rita. Sleep well. Let us know if you need the privy. Or you can make use of that chamber pot.”

  “What diagnosis?”

  With a glance over his shoulder, he said, “That a man who shot himself in the head ought to have powder burns at the wound.”

  York left her stewing there.

  In the meantime, he needed to catch some sleep, across the street in that pueblo, where a pallet awaited him. Morning would come soon enough, and with it the Rhomers.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Caleb York slept well, considering.

  Not that the pending showdown would have hampered his ability to get some rest, but throughout the late evening, there had been the pounding of nails as boards were hammered over store windows, in anticipation of flying bullets.

  This practice harked back to the days of Sheriff Harry Gauge’s reign, when cowboys were allowed to tear up the town however they pleased, as long as they left their money at the Victory, which Gauge co-owned. The fearful preparation, all up and down Main Street, had lasted well past nine P.M.

  After that, York slept, and slept soundly.

  He’d had the pueblo hut to himself—three small rooms with a cooking area, some handmade furnishings, a couple of cots, and a trio of pallets, for the Gomez family who lived here. They had generously given their living quarters over to him, but even in the barrio, word of what was coming had got around. Where the Papa and Mama and three kiddies had spent the night was anybody’s guess.

  Outside the hole in the wall that was a window, Trinidad had not yet woken up. York, who’d slept in his clothes with his holstered gun on a stubby chair nearby, stood and stretched and smoothed his black shirt and pants. He got into his boots and vest and slung on the .44 last, tying it down.

  He usually woke around six and today seemed no exception. The eastern horizon would be blushing with rising sun soon if not already, and in half an hour, dawn would be here and, any time after that, so would the Rhomers.

  The morning was cold, the wind stirring the dust in the barrio’s single hard-mud street. York used the nearest outhouse, moving through wandering chickens to get to and from; a few dogs were stirring, too. Some cooking smells drifted, stovepipe chimneys promising coffee and chorizo and eggs; the “mamacitas” were up, but the “pa-pacitos” likely still snoozed. Such a peaceful time of day in so peaceful a part of Trinidad.

  Yet even here something was in the air besides cooking. Something tense. Eyes were on him. Women were murmuring. Even the animals sensed the stranger among them, and the danger he brought.

  York crossed in the dark to the jailhouse, unlocked the front door and went inside. In the first cell, a slumbering Tulley was on the cot on his side, knees pulled up, looking like an ancient fetus. His snoring was gentle, compared to previously. The scattergun lay on the cell floor near him.

  York picked the scattergun up, and Tulley didn’t stir. It occurred to the sheriff that his deputy did not have the reflexes of a coiled cougar. He kicked the side of the cot, gently, shaking the chains that held it to the wall, and shaking Tulley, too. The old boy’s eyes popped open and he jerked himself into a sitting position.

  “Morning,” York said.

  Tulley snatched the scattergun from York’s arms. “Is they here?”

  “No. Sun won’t be up for another fifteen, twenty minutes. Go heat up what’s left of yesterday’s coffee.”

  “It’ll be strong enough to tear the bark offen a pine tree.”

  “Good.”

  Tulley nodded, tasted his mouth, and creaked to his feet. York let him by, then exited the cell and walked to the end of the cell block, where Rita in blouse and jeans was sitting on her cot, bare feet on the floor, rubbing a hand on her face.

  “Sorry if we woke you,” he said.

  “If there’s coffee,” she said, “I’ll take it.”

  “There will be, of a sort. And Tulley will walk you to the privy, if need be.”

  “Thanks.”

  A good distance separated them—him at the bars, her still seated on the cot against the far wall.

  “Listen,” he said, “you’re gonna
be alone here, real soon. I’m takin’ a position elsewhere and so is my deputy. You keep that derringer handy.”

  She gestured vaguely. “Won’t all the fun be going on out on the street?”

  “I don’t know where it’ll be going on. But somebody might take advantage of the commotion to come in here and deal with you.”

  “ ‘Deal’ with me how? Deal with me why?”

  “Maybe you’d like to tell me, Rita. Then I could unlock that cell and you’d have more options.”

  She shook her head. “I have nothing more to say.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  Then she got quickly up and came over to the bars. She gripped a bar with one hand, reached the other hand out to touch his face. He hadn’t shaved.

  “I do have something else to say,” she said. “Try not to get yourself killed.”

  “See what I can do.”

  She shook her head. “You must be crazy, facing down five men.”

  He grinned at her. “Who said anything about facing them?”

  She didn’t know what to make of that.

  Tulley brought her a tin cup of coffee. She tasted it, then gulped the sip, and said, “Well. That’s an eye-opener.”

  “Thank ye, ma’am. But it was a mite better yesterday.”

  York took Tulley out into the office while their guest drank her coffee.

  “You walk her to the privy,” York said, “then take your post at the livery.”

  Tulley gave him a one-eye-open frown. “You seem shore they’s comin’ in that way.”

  “I’m not sure of anything, Tulley. But that’s where the road from Las Vegas empties, and it’ll put the sun at their backs.”

  Tulley made a twirly gesture with a forefinger. “They could fool ye and circle ’round and come in from the west end of Main.”

  “They could, but then I’d have the sun to my back. They may know enough to not want that.”

  “Iffen you say so.”

  “Tulley, the Rhomers don’t know that I’m expectin’ them. I figure them to come at me head on.”

  “If I was them,” Tulley said, squinting shrewdly, “I’d spread my men around town, in the streets and alleys feedin’ Main, a man or two in a winder prob’ly, and draw you out and cut you down.”