.45-Caliber Desperado

by Peter Brandvold

  “How in the hell else is them gravediggers supposed to hear me?” The little man took a swig of his beer and looked down at his ankle. “Thanks to Mateo de Cava, I can’t exactly run hoppin’ and skippin’ on out there with the news in person.”

  Spurr looked the little man up and down, his salt-and-pepper brows furled critically. The little man smelled of sweat and beer and smoke from the recent fire. His eyes were dark and fidgety. Some men you didn’t like from appearances and instinctively knew you would like even less the better you got to know them.

  “Who’re you, little feller?” Spurr asked him.

  “T. Benson Grimley,” said the little man, glaring up at Spurr defensively, as though he knew the bad impression he made. “Folks call me T-Bone. I’m the constable here in Mayville.”

  “Constable, huh?” Spurr said with a chuff.

  Dusty Mason said, “Mayville?”

  “That’s the name we come up with and are now calling the camp though it ain’t official yet. Mayville . . . after May over yonder. She was the first businessman here, even before the rails got here.”

  T-Bone glanced at the narrow, two-story building near the depot and railroad tracks whose front oil pots were now being lit by a man in a black, floppy-brimmed hat and a torn blue blanket coat. Blue curtains hung over the lantern-lit windows. A shingle on two posts reached out from the place as though to physically waylay prospective customers passing on the street; it read simply MAY’S.

  “Thank god they didn’t burn that, too,” said the little man before taking another quick sip of his beer. “We’d have only one brothel in town, though there’s still plenty of whores. Homeless whores, thanks to de Cava’s bunch. They’re in tents down by the creek. Rail layers’re givin’ ’em plenty of business, though.”

  The little man snorted and drained his beer glass.

  “How long since de Cava pulled through here?” Spurr asked the man.

  “Yesterday around noon. Helluva dustup. I got caught right in the damn middle of it, too. Took a ricochet.” T-Bone looked down at his ankle. “Doc says the bone’s shattered. I might never put full weight on it again . . .”

  Mason was looking into the tent saloon, thumbs hooked behind his cartridge belt. “Who’re the bounty hunters?”

  A voice behind the two lawmen and the constable said, “Ed Joseph’s bunch.”

  Spurr swung around to see a man in a long tan duster and tan hat walking toward him from May’s. He adjusted his hat on his head. Long black hair dropped to his shoulders. He wore a deerskin vest adorned with large silver buttons beneath the duster.

  “Where’s Joseph?” Spurr asked the man approaching the beer tent.

  “You’re lookin’ at him.” Joseph stared out from beneath the brim of his tan slouch hat at Spurr. “You’re Spurr Morgan, ain’t ya?”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Spurr said. “You’re Joseph?”

  “I told ya you was lookin’ at him.” Joseph stood beside Spurr, peering into the beer tent at his wounded men. “Shit, I lose another one, Doc?” he called.

  “You might haul your friend out of here, Mr. Joseph,” the harried sawbones said crisply as he washed his hands in a stone bowl on a table near his patients.

  “That’s what T-Bone’s boys get paid for, Doc.”

  To Joseph, Spurr said, “Where the hell’d you come from, Joseph?”

  “Bonner. Just east of here. Just got done running a bunch of claim jumpers out of Reynold’s Park, and we was holin’ up and waitin’ for some new horseflesh from Amarillo. T-Bone there’s my brother-in-law, and he knew where I was from my sister, and he cabled me just after de Cava rode in. We hired our own special train, don’t ya know.”

  “How many men you start out with?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “And these are all you’re left with?”

  “Them five . . . er . . . four, I reckon, since ole Jimmy-John seems to have kicked off, now, too.” Ed Joseph shook his head and fingered his long black hair hanging down over his left shoulder—an oddly girlish gesture. He had a thick black beard and amber eyes, a knife scar reaching an inch down from the right side of his mouth. His face was like a roughly carved hunk of mahogany.

  Spurr had heard he’d been raised in Tennessee, and the old marshal detected the faintest of Scottish accents mixed with the petal-soft drawl of the Appalachians. Joseph’s gang, made of mostly ex-Confederate bounty hunters, was—or had been—notorious across the frontier.

  Joseph looked at Spurr, then slid his eyes to Mason. “Where’d you come from?”

  “The prison,” Mason said.

  “What prison?”

  “The one de Cava broke Cuno Massey out of.” Mason looked incredulous. “The one where he lifted the hair of Warden Castle, blew the man’s nose off, and left him a howlin’ cripple.”

  Joseph and T-Bone shared a glance. Then the ferret-faced, bespectacled little constable said, “We didn’t hear about a prison break. We figured they heard about the whores in Mayville and was just here to raise hell. They done already had plenty of bounty on their heads for Ed here to be interested.”

  “Reckon they raised that hell, didn’t they?” Mason said, rolling a quirley as he looked back down the street toward the charred brothel ruins.

  “Look—all I want to know,” Spurr said, “is how many rode out of here and in which direction.”

  T-Bone opened his mouth to speak, but his unlikely brother-in-law, Ed Joseph, shoved him brusquely back with an arm across his chest and stepped between the smaller man and Spurr. “Hold on. You don’t get that information until we come to an agreement.”

  Spurr tipped his head to one side and scowled. He didn’t like bounty hunters. And there was something particularly foul and morbid about the long-haired one before him.

  “I’ll be ridin’ with you two lawbringers. And I get the reward on them I bring down. Or, like the deal I had with my bunch, we split it up even between the three of us.”

  Mason turned to Joseph, frowning and removing his quirley from between his lips. “We don’t ride with bounty hunters, Joseph.”

  “Speak for yourself, Mason.” Spurr’s voice was toneless.

  He was still staring at Joseph distastefully, taking in the two gutta-percha-gripped Smith & Wessons on the man’s belt, a LeMat in a shoulder holster, and the two knives jutting from his high-topped black boots. Oddly, the man had a silver crucifix dangling down his chest. Few stranger men had Spurr ever seen, but he knew Joseph’s reputation.

  Mason switched his incredulous scowl to Spurr. “What’re you talkin’ about?”

  “I mean, Joseph has a deal. We ride out tomorrow at first light, and we split the reward three ways. If we manage to run down de Cava’s bunch, that is. And that’s one hell of a ‘that is.’”

  Mason started to speak, but Spurr cut him off with: “Ah, shit, their trail’ll be plain enough come sunup. But we can use all the help we can get, Mason. I don’t like this man any better than you do, but if he wants to help us run down them killers, we’d be fools to refuse him, short-handed as we are.”

  He gave Joseph a pointed look. “But you play by our rules—understand? This is law business. You break the law, do anything whatsoever to set fire to my britches and burn my dick, we’ll throw the cuffs on you and drop you off in the nearest hotbox to wait for a judge.”

  “Hell, Spurr,” Joseph said, dropping his chin and bringing a shrewd look to his dark, devilishly slanted eyes. “You’ve got a reputation yourself. Tough as an old Texas boot with a sidewinder tucked inside. I won’t cross you.”

  He held up a long, slender finger. “But you don’t cross me, either, when it comes time to split the reward money. You see”—he stretched an even more cunning grin—“I don’t trust lawmen anymore than you trust bounty killers.” He returned the finger he’d been pointing with to his hair, absently smoothing it down against his shoulder. “And I’m a bad enemy to make.”

  Mason balled his fists as he stepped toward the bounty hunte
r. “Why, you—!”

  Spurr threw a hand up, palm out, bringing the sheriff up short. “All right, then,” he barked, impatience in his raspy, gravelly voice. “We’re all partnered up. Friends for fuckin’ life!”

  He hitched his pants and cartridge belts up on his lean hips and sauntered into the beer parlor. “Now that that’s settled, I believe I’ll have a drink, then find me a whore to pound a pillow with.”

  18

  “WHOO-EEE, DOGGIES, BOYS! Grab your gals and lead ’em on out there, cause we’re gonna have us a roarin’ good time this evenin’ in Mayville!”

  The half holler, half howl had risen from a half-finished frame saloon not far from May’s. It was followed by a washtub base and concertina backing up a feisty fiddle. Spurr, lounging in the suds of his steaming bathtub while awaiting a girl, heard the hoof stomps and hand claps of a raucous barn dance.

  Even the burning of a brothel and the turning out of a dozen whores could not keep the proverbial lid on the fledgling little railroad camp. The track layers and gandy dancers, not to mention the homeless whores themselves, were going to have a hoof-stompin’, tail-raisin’ good time no matter what.

  Spurr felt a smile touch his mouth as he grabbed his whiskey bottle off the chair beside the tub. He had the bottle only half raised to his mouth when he heard the squawk of a loose floorboard in the hall beyond his closed door. He set the bottle back down on the chair and rose in the tub, pricking his ears.

  Above the din of the barn dance and the moans and groans of lovemaking in Miss May’s rooms all around him, Spurr heard nothing now. The old whore, Miss May herself, weighed a good three hundred velvet-and-crinoline-ensconced pounds and had been lounging, half drunk, on a red plush settee in the first-floor parlor, with a wooden cash box and a pistol beside her, when Spurr had entered her domain, introduced himself, and announced his desire for a bath and a woman.

  She was likely passed out by now, leaving the watchdogging and bulldogging to a bent-up old ex-railroad inspector named Steaves and his double-bore shotgun, while the girls went about their business.

  The board squawk in the hall was probably just a customer taking his leave from his few minutes of frolic and, having heard the jubilation in the half-built saloon, was heading that way. From somewhere below, a girl laughed loudly and phonily.

  Spurr sank back down in the tub and reached once more for his bottle. He’d no sooner gotten a gnarled hand wrapped around the whiskey, however, than a shadow moved in the hall beneath his door. The shadow stopped moving and remained beneath the door. There was no sound from the hall. At least, none that Spurr could hear above all the other noises.

  The fractious crab in his chest twisted, belched, and flicked its leathery tail. The withered organ was like a creaky old man itself, trying to heave himself up out of a chair and groaning and panting with the near-fatal effort.

  Slowly hoisting himself up out of the water, trying to make as little noise as possible, Spurr kept his gaze directed at the unmoving shadow. The person out there might be the whore he’d been waiting for, as he’d ordered one sent up to him after enough time for him to have had his badly needed bath.

  On the other hand, the shadow wasn’t moving . . .

  Spurr’s recalcitrant old ticker squawked almost audibly as he drew a breath and slid his big Remington from his holster on the chair beside the bottle. Quietly clicking the hammer back, he lifted one old veiny leg over the side of the tub, then the other. Dripping wet and blowing water from his lips, he felt like a fool as he knelt down on the other side of the room’s single bed, which lay perpendicular to the tub.

  Spurr drew another breath then hollered, “Come on in, little darlin’! Ole Spurr’s been awaitin’ on ye!”

  Spurr’s yell hadn’t finished echoing around the room before the door blew open as though from a dynamite blast.

  It slammed against the wall, causing the room to shake and for Spurr’s bottle to tumble off the chair and hit the floor with a thud. A man burst into the room, stopping the door’s bounce with his left boot—a red-haired gent with blue eyes and a cherry-red, clean-shaven face. Eyes spitting sky-colored fire and gritting his teeth, the man extended a walnut-gripped pistol and drilled three shots at the tub that stood six feet in front of him.

  Plink! Plink! Plink! went the slugs hitting the water before clanking against the tub’s copper bottom.

  The shooter held fire and stared wide-eyed at the tub he seemed to just now notice was empty. No more than a half second had passed, however, before he saw Spurr kneeling behind the bed, and he swung his gun in the old lawman’s direction.

  Spurr had him dead to rights.

  Bam! Bam! Bam-Bam!

  The redheaded bushwhacker was picked up off his feet and thrown straight back out the door and against the wall on the opposite side of the hall, cracking it. He seemed to hang there for several seconds against the long jagged crack, moving his arms and legs as though trying to climb the wall backward to some perceived escape hatch in the ceiling.

  Then his chin dropped to his left shoulder. His knees hit the floor with a loud thud. He slumped forward, rolled onto his side, sighed heavily, and died.

  As the usual shouts and screams rose around him, and doors opened, and jakes flanked by whores rushed out to see what had spawned the fireworks, Spurr shambled barefoot and naked into the hall himself and looked at the stiff. He didn’t recognize him. Or maybe there was a dim recollection. He couldn’t remember.

  He swung his cocked Remington around at three men filing toward him—two naked, one in balbriggans, all wielding pistols. “Drop them hoglegs or join your friend in hell!”

  The three lowered their guns. Spurr turned to face the other direction, where a portly man nearly his own age and with long snowy hair hanging down from a bald pink pate was also shuffling toward him. He was clad in only moccasins and a shell belt, squeezing an old Patterson revolver in his pudgy, brown hand.

  “Drop that horse pistol, Samuel!” Spurr was surprised to remember that Samuel Loggins was the man’s name. An army packer and whiskey drummer, he was sometimes a fort sutler when he was in the government’s good graces. Spurr had also known him when the man had professionally skinned buffalo hides.

  “Spurr?” Loggins scowled in disbelief. “I thought for sure you’d be stakin’ a claim on St. Pete’s back forty long before now!”

  “Drop that pistol, Samuel.”

  “Ah, shit—I don’t have no beef with you, Spurr.” Loggins depressed the big pistol’s hammer, lowered the gun to his naked white thigh mottled with blue cornflower veins.

  “Memory’s getting’ so bad,” Spurr growled, “that I’d have forgotten if you did have a reason. Can’t believe I remembered your name.”

  “What’s his name?” Loggins gestured his pistol at the dead redhead who seemed to be staring at a black spider crawling across the floor near his nose.

  “I don’t remember . . . if I ever knew it.” Spurr looked at the other men, a couple of whom had already slipped with their whores back into their rooms, the entertainment being over. “Anyone know this kid?”

  “Rusty Hammond.” This from down the hall. Spurr stared past two men and a blond girl who’d just come up the stairs carrying a bottle of whiskey, to a door on the hall’s left side. Two eyes and a nose peered out from behind a cracked door. “Waddie out at the Crosshatch. He seen you ride in last night, Marshal. Said you took his brother, Omar, to be hung by Judge Parker in Fort Smith last year.”

  “Ah, shit,” Spurr said, mostly in response to having his memory nudged.

  He remembered Omar Hammond’s bright red hair, apple-red cheeks, and eyes so frosty that just a glance would freeze a man’s pecker. Hammond had killed three Indian girls along a freight road near Sutter Creek, Nebraska Territory, after he’d led them all by pistol point into the breaks of the Niobrara River, raped each one before he’d locked them all in a farmer’s springhouse, then shot them through the walls. Him and a friend of his, Wheeler Whitfield, whom
Spurr had not been saddened to have gut-shot and caused to take a long, loud time dying . . .

  Spurr looked at the eyes and the nose in the foot-wide gap between the door and the frame. “You might have talked him out of dyin’ for a no-account brother.”

  “We figured it was a family matter.” The door closed. The latch clicked.

  Spurr snorted, cursed again.

  Downstairs, a woman started to yell profanities. May, no doubt. Presently, old Steaves appeared, wheezing at the top of the stairs at the far end of the hall, holding his shotgun as though it weighed as much as a steel-shod wagon wheel. “Sorry for the commotion, sir,” Spurr said. “I reckon you can have this one buried with the others out yonder.”

  Spurr lowered his pistol and grabbed the arm of the blond girl, who was staring down at the dead redhead and cradling a whiskey bottle, baby-like, in the crook of her right arm. “Think I’ll return to my room and flush out the old boiler. Come on, missy. You’re mine, ain’t ya?”

  “I reckon, mister,” the girl said tonelessly, still staring down at the dead redhead. “If you’re the one they call Spurr, that is . . .”

  Stiffly, she followed Spurr into the room. He closed the door and looked down at her, pleased to see that she was a full-bodied gal, with large, creamy breasts jutting from her pink corset, full hips swelling from a waist that was pleasantly plump. Not fat, mind you. Plump. The way a girl oughta look. Too many of them were so thin that you could snap them between your fingers, like a stove match.

  Curly blond hair fell to her shoulders. It was sort of layered and adorned with a black ribbon. The locks on the right side of her head were pulled taut against her right ear and caught under the black silk choker she wore around her neck and which was trimmed with a small, fake diamond pin. Her face was small and china-doll pretty. One might even call the girl beautiful. At least, to Spurr she was comely enough to give his leaky heart a painful tickle.

  He wished she wasn’t blond, because it reminded him of the blond Murphy girl. But you couldn’t have everything.