The Six-Gun Tarot

by R. S. Belcher

  He walked down the hill through the high grass, toward the cave where the group now huddled in terror. A warm breeze caressed the grass; it swayed to the rhythm of the world’s breath. It caressed him too, whispering, but Biqa could no longer remember what the words meant.

  The Wheel of Fortune

  Murders bring out a crowd. By the time Jim had ran to summon Highfather and Mutt and returned, a group of Chinamen had gathered around the banker Stapleton’s body. A few boarders, roused when Jim had generated such a ruckus telling Mutt, also joined the expedition to Johnny Town. A few more night owls, loitering outside the Paradise Falls, saw the party armed with rifles and lanterns and tagged along out of morbid curiosity. Word got around fast; a white man was dead in Johnny Town.

  Highfather rolled the body over onto its back while Mutt held the lantern. Jim noticed that every doorway, every window, had a shadow in it, watching, chattering quietly in an alien tongue. None coming too close to get involved, but all close enough to observe and comment. Highfather ignored the crowd, for the most part. He did turn to the burly tattooed man who had pursued Jim into the alley. He and a few of his fellows were with the body when the sheriff arrived.

  “Did you chase this boy?” he asked the Chinaman. The man shook his head, fixing his eyes on Jim. Highfather turned to Jim. “Is he the one who chased you in here?”

  “Yes sir,” Jim said, glaring back at the tattooed man.

  “The boy … he try to come in saloon … He no old enough,” the man said. “I chase him off, tell him to come back when older. No hurt.”

  “That’s a lie!” Jim shouted.

  Highfather shook his head curtly and gestured for the boy to step back. Highfather plucked a wicked-looking hatchet, with an emerald ribbon attacked to its handle, out of the tattooed man’s back pocket. He handed it to Mutt. “I think we’ll discuss this back at the jail,” the sheriff said to the tattooed man. “See if we can’t get the truth out of everyone.”

  “My employee has given you the truth, Sheriff Highfather,” a melodic voice said, rising above the murmur of the crowd, cutting through it. The crowd parted.

  The old man’s beard was white, like sunlight reflecting off ice. It fell almost to his knees and stood out in stark contrast to his silk robe of shimmering emerald. His eyes spilled out into the shadow, black water moving under a moonless sky. He was Chinese and the four men who ringed him all bore tattoos like Jim’s pursuer. They held hatchets in their hands, low at their sides, emerald ribbons fluttering.

  “Ch’eng Huang,” Highfather said. The old man bowed, slightly. “You know how things work. Your man is a potential witness to a murder, maybe even a suspect.”

  “I assume the boy is a suspect as well?” Ch’eng Huang said. Angry shouts went up from the other white men. The Chinese began to move to defend the old man, but Ch’eng Huang raised a single long-nailed finger and everything stopped. Silence fell.

  “Purely in the interests of fairness,” the old man said.

  “I know this boy, Huang,” Highfather said. He stepped toward Ch’eng. His quartet of defenders parted for the lawman. No one, not even in Johnny Town, wanted to confront the Man Who Could Not Die. “I know he isn’t a member of a murderous gang of cutthroats and opium fiends, like your Green Ribbon Tong.”

  Ch’eng nodded, his face placid.

  “Certainly, and I know this man to be an excellent employee and devoted husband with a beautiful infant girl at home. I assure you, he is not your killer. I give you my word as a … community leader, Sheriff.”

  Highfather leaned in closer to Ch’eng and lowered his voice.

  “Don’t think I won’t run you and all your hatchet boys in, Huang,” he whispered. “All I want to know is why your people were messing with the boy and what Stapleton was doing here. Don’t even try to pretend that you don’t know. You know every bug that crawls through the walls of these streets.”

  “True enough,” Ch’eng said. “I hold my responsibilities to my people as something of a sacred duty. Also, Sheriff, be quite sure that any attempt to extricate me and my employees from our community would be a very costly proposition. Even for a dead man like yourself. Neither of us can afford such a contest of powers, yes?”

  Ch’eng looked at the tattooed man who had chased Jim.

  “Kada thought the boy had stolen property from me. He was mistaken. As for the late Mr. Stapleton, he was enjoying the hospitality of the Lotus Lantern until about an hour ago. He departed for home. Alone.”

  The crowd shifted, like troubled seas. A voice like rotgut pouring over gravel boomed above the heads of the onlookers.

  “Make way! Make way! Damn your yellow hides! Step aside for a man of medicine, I say!”

  Dr. Francis Tumblety, his eyes red from whiskey, or the hour, perhaps both, pushed his way through the street. He was a stout bullet of a man, with coal-black hair, slicked to his pate, bifurcated with a long, narrow part. His eyes were like a fish’s out of water, bulging and dark. A massive, drooping mustache fell from his upper lip to well below his chin. It was hard to tell if it was waxed or just greasy. The doc always looked like he hadn’t had a decent bath in months and he usually smelled that way too. Occasionally he’d remember to cover the stench up with a little Bay Rum hair tonic, but most of the time he just didn’t give a damn.

  The doc was wearing his military bang-up over a dirty undershirt and suspenders. The threadbare dark blue overcoat was still covered with his various medals. Some townsfolk said that the medals were fakes; others joked that they were the only thing holding the foul-smelling coat together.

  “Doc, we need to know what killed this man and when, if you can manage it,” Highfather said to the scowling physician.

  “Bah, child’s play, Jonathan, for one schooled in the esoteric arts of the Hippocratic healer.”

  Tumblety gave a sour look to a Chinese woman in the crowd and then knelt, with a groan, to examine Stapleton.

  “We better get him back to my office,” he said. Tumblety snapped his fingers in the direction of two of the Chinamen looking on in the crowd. “You two yellow scalawags, there! Chop-chop! Pickee up the dead man, Mr. Charley. C’mon, damn your lazy bones!”

  The two men looked at each other, then Ch’eng Huang. The old man nodded once, curtly. The two men wrestled Stapleton’s body up off the ground and followed the swiftly retreating doctor.

  “Jonathan, I’ll have your answers by mid-morning!” Tumblety bellowed. “See you then!”

  With the departure of the remains, the crowd began to disperse.

  Highfather turned back to Ch’eng. “Much obliged. I know the doc can be a caution.”

  “He is an ignorant simpleton. Surely you know that blowhard is no more a doctor than I am a Mormon.”

  “Yeah.” Highfather scratched his head. “But he’s what we got. Anyway, thanks for your folk helping with Mr. Stapleton.”

  “Please give my regrets to the Widow Stapleton,” Ch’eng said.

  “Huang, I really need to know who he was out here to see tonight.”

  The old man met his stare for a moment and then nodded. “You are a moral man, Sheriff. You seek harmony in a world out of balance.”

  “I’m just trying to keep the peace, Huang. Help me out, here.”

  “He was with a girl, one of his regulars. I can vouch for her character and innocence.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “He met with me briefly after his time with the girl and before he departed, as I said, alone. It was a very … unpleasant conversation. I gathered he wanted my help and protection, but the specifics were rather vague. He was afraid of someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Bick,” Ch’eng said.

  “Malachi?” Highfather said.

  “Yes, but I’m sure he is not your killer, Sheriff.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you found the body.”

  The old man smiled, bowed and took his leave. His ring of bodyguards encircled him and he vanished int
o the thinning crowd.

  Highfather sighed. “I’ll talk to Bick,” he said to Jim and Mutt. “Jim, I want you to get home and get to sleep. You think you can do that without getting in any more trouble?”

  “Yessir,” Jim said.

  “Mutt, you go tell the widow what’s happened. I want her to hear it from us, not some drunken town crier.”

  “I’m … I may not be the fella to do that, Jon,” Mutt said. “I ain’t exactly a comfort in my storytellin’; maybe I could roust the preacher?”

  “No. If she’s able, ask her what business her husband and Bick were mixed up in.”

  “Might be able to help there. Seems ole Art had done gone and lost the deed to the Argent Mine to a couple of lick-fingers named Deerfield and Moore in a card game over in Virginia City a few weeks back.”

  “Why would Bick sell the deed to that land to Stapleton?” Highfather said.

  “I guarantee you that he sure didn’t expect it to travel,” Mutt said. “A schemy fella like old Malachi would sure not take kindly to Stapleton messing up his plans, whatever they were, by raising when he should’ve folded.”

  “I’ll go ask him about that. You talk to the widow and see what she might recall about any of this, but do it gentle-like.”

  “Yep,” Mutt said, spitting as he walked away. “Gentle is my damned middle name, Jon.”

  Highfather walked with Jim back as far as Prosperity Street.

  “Doesn’t this Bick fella pretty much own most of Golgotha?” Jim asked.

  “Yep. His family was here even before the Pratts and other Mormon families rolled into town. Old money.”

  “I know the type,” Jim said. “Think since they own all the land, all the stores, they own the people too.”

  “Pretty much. I’ve been dealing with old Malachi for a long time, though. I don’t know if you’d call it mutual respect, but I can usually expect pretty plain talk from him, in most cases.”

  “Good,” Jim said.

  There was silence until they reached the point where they would part company.

  “You aren’t telling me everything,” Highfather said. “About you, about what you were doing there tonight, are you?”

  “No, sir,” Jim said. “But I promise you I will.”

  The sheriff frowned. “Git home,” he said.

  Jim ran down Prosperity, toward Rose Hill. He turned right and headed back to the Widow Proctor’s place. He couldn’t tell Highfather everything yet. He’d think he was hopping crazy like a loon. How could he tell Highfather he was trying to unlock the secret of his dead father’s jade eye, that the eye had shown him things that simply couldn’t be real but were? How could he tell him that the old Chinaman—Ch’eng Huang—had glanced at him for an instant and spoken directly into his mind.

  I know what you seek, young man, he had said silently. I can answer your questions about what you hold—about your father’s legacy and yours. I will be waiting.…

  Jim ran home to bed. When he finally did sleep, he stumbled through endless tunnels with wet things moving under his skin.

  The King of Wands

  It was a hair trigger to dawn when Highfather walked into the Paradise Falls. It was grand, especially for a cattle-trail town like Golgotha. The stage was dark and the red-velvet curtains were down. Kerry Duell, one of Bick’s men, pushed a broom across the empty boards. Georgie Nance, looking for the world like a human basset hound, tended the almost empty bar. A few patrons still nursed a drink. One of Bick’s girls worked a pair of Dakota cowboys passing through on their way to the next cattle drive. She laughed when they laughed and between rounds touted the comfort and privacy of Bick’s hotel, next door.

  “Evening, Sheriff,” Georgie said with his odd accent: not English, but close. No one knew where Georgie was from and the bartender never offered to clear it up for anyone. Sometimes he sounded Irish, other times like an Indian. The standing bet was a hundred bucks and a bottle off the top shelf if anyone could solve the mystery of where Georgie called home. The bottle was still up there.

  “Heard you had some trouble over in Johnny Town, tonight. Somebody dead?”

  “Really can’t say right this minute, George.”

  “Right. Care for something? We’re planning on chasing everyone out in a spell.”

  “No thanks. Your boss in?”

  “Back table, same as always, Jon.”

  Malachi Bick sat at an octagonal card table, overlooking Kerry’s performance on the stage with his broom. His back was to the wall. He carefully pulled cards from an oversized deck and laid them on the red-felt table, one card at a time. His black hair hung in loose curls that fell to his shoulders in a half shingle. His sideburns were long and he wore a goatee and mustache. Bick’s eyes were the color of sin, guarded by heavy lids that gave him a quality of inscrutability, like a reptile waiting, languid, until the moment of certainty when the prey could not escape.

  He wore his expensive clothes casually. They were clean but rumpled from the day’s exertions. A wine-colored shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows and held with black garters; a black vest, black trousers and half boots that came to just above the ankles. His coat hung on the back of his chair. His silver-tipped walking stick rested there as well.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” Bick said in a voice as rich and warm as pipe tobacco smoke. He picked a card off the felt and flicked it across the table to Highfather’s side. It depicted a bearded man with an eye patch hanging upside down from a tree—one leg crooked, the other straight. Two ravens perched in the branches of the tree. THE HANGED MAN was written at the bottom of the card.

  “Playing gypsy again?” Highfather said, examining the card and taking a seat opposite Bick. “I guess that means you know why I’m here.”

  Bick said nothing. He scooped up the cards on the table and began to shuffle the tarot deck. Highfather tossed him the Hanged Man. It was retrieved and quickly returned to the deck.

  “Stapleton was afraid of you,” Highfather said. “Why?”

  “Lots of people are afraid of me,” Bick said, fanning the cards facedown onto the tabletop before him. “I have a way about me.”

  “You know I’m not.”

  “Yes, that has always been true in all our dealings over the years. Even from the beginning.” He flipped a card over and studied it. “Why is that, Sheriff?”

  “When I was seven, my father stood down some very bad men with an empty gun. He saved us—me, my brother, my mother—saved people he didn’t even know with that fool act. Saved himself too. He told me that you can never let a wolf sense fear in you, sense a way into you. They can smell it, and they’ll use it to eat out your heart.”

  “I’m not a wolf, Sheriff.” He flipped another card, frowned at it. “I have no interest in eating hearts.

  “Did you know,” he pointed to Highfather’s badge, “that symbol you carry is almost as ancient as mankind itself? A star imprisoned within a circle—a symbol of warding, of protection from the forces of evil, of binding evil. Did it ever occur to you how men of law, men who choose to stand between the innocent and the forces of chaos and evil, picked that particular symbol as a badge of their office? To stand for order and peace?”

  “I’m not partial to games, Malachi. Did you and Stapleton fight tonight?”

  “I’m just a businessman. I was expressing my displeasure with my attorney and someone I considered a trusted business partner.”

  “So you and Stapleton did have words tonight?”

  Bick tipped a card in the fanned pile. The entire pile flipped over in a graceful cascade; then with a flick of his wrist and gleam in his eye he flipped them all over again, facedown, except now one in the middle remained faceup. It bore the image of nine goblets. Highfather went out of his way to seem unimpressed.

  “Yes,” Malachi said finally. “We had not spoken to any great length after he retuned from his business in Virginia City. He finally had the nerve to tell me what had happened with losing the mine property. That lan
d has been in my family for a very long time. I was understandably distressed.”

  “What possessed you to give him deed to that land?”

  Behind Highfather, Kerry was turning the chairs up onto the tables. The saloon girl and her Dakota investors wandered out the door, casting drunken farewells to George.

  “It’s rather legal and very complicated business, Sheriff. Much more so than locking up drunks, punching cattle or rescuing damsels in distress off railroad tracks. It is also my business and mine alone.”

  “’Fraid not, Malachi. Not anymore. Whatever you are into this time, you’ve got a dead man hanging around your neck and that’s not going to just disappear.”

  “Are you charging me in the murder, Sheriff?” Bick smiled. “I have numerous witnesses that can attest to my presence here all evening long.”

  “I kind of figured that,” Highfather said. “But you and me have been dancing to this tune for a long, long time now.”

  The sheriff leaned across the table and flipped one of the cards over. It depicted a tower collapsing under the assault of lighting.

  “I intend to find out what you are mixed up in this time, Malachi, because I’m sure it has to do with my town and my people, just like I’m sure it has to do with Stapleton’s death.

  Bick’s eyes remained fixed on the tarot card. “And what do you think you are so sure of, Sheriff?”

  “You can feel whatever it is coming too, can’t you?” Highfather said, nodding. “Like a hot, gritty wind blowing off the Forty-Mile, carrying all the cries and the curses of all those bleached skulls out there back to us. The kind of wind that makes the dogs howl like babies. It’s coming and I’m damned sure you’re the harbinger of whatever trouble it is. So, this time I’m going to drag you into the light, Bick, and you are actually going to get what’s coming to you.”

  Bick looked up from studying the Tower. The smile was gone from his lips, but there was still a dark light in his ebony eyes.

  “Sometimes if you drag something into the light, Sheriff, you don’t get clarity, you just get blind.”