Kinch Riley / Indian Territory

by Matt Braun

  Spotting an empty table against the far wall, he began threading his way through the crowd. That was an edge of sorts—having his back against a wall—and it might just make the difference. At least they couldn’t get him from behind. Approaching the table, he noted that the one next to it was occupied by two Santa Fe men. An engineer, Pat Lee, and his fireman, Jim Hickey. When they glanced up, he shook his head, warning them off, and slipped into a chair on the far side of the table.

  He ordered a bottle and when it came, poured himself a single shot. Leaning back in his chair, he sipped at the whiskey and kept one eye on the door while he watched the mad whirl on the dancefloor. The trail-hands turned the whole affair into one big struggle, pushing and shoving and shouting, like a gang of wrestlers who just happened to wear spurs and six-guns. Their antics alone were worth the price of admission, and in passing, it occurred to him that dancehall girls earned every nickel of their money. After a night on the floor with the Texans, most of them were probably nothing short of a walking bruise.

  McCluskie was still nursing the same drink when the doors flew open and Hugh Anderson strode into the room. Behind him were five hard-looking cowhands, and they all came together in a little knot, quickly scanning the crowd. One of the hands spotted him sitting alone at the table and nudged Anderson. The Texan’s gaze jerked around, settling on him at last, and an instant later the men separated. Anderson came straight toward him, but the others fanned out and moved across the floor from different directions. The Irishman grunted to himself, smiling slightly, and climbed to his feet.

  Now he had his answer. It was the hunters who had come for him. Which was just as well. He’d never been one to bet short odds, anyway.

  Anderson stopped before the table, his lip curled back in a gloating smirk. “Mister, you got enough brass for a whole herd of monkeys.”

  “Want to borrow some?”

  “Come again?”

  “Why, it’s pretty simple, Anderson.” The Irishman jerked his chin at the five hands. They were now spread out in a rough crescent that had him caught in a crossfire from all sides. “If you had the starch to fight your own fights you wouldn’t need so much help.”

  “You stupid sonovabitch. This ain’t no church social. That plain enough, or you want me to draw you a picture?”

  McCluskie started to answer but movement off to the left caught his eye. The moment his gaze flicked in that direction he knew he’d been suckered. The cowhand farthest down the line had shifted positions, distracting him for a crucial instant, and it had worked perfectly. Even as his eyes swung back he sensed it was too late.

  The gun in Anderson’s hand was out and cocked, pointed straight at him. It was as if time and motion had been arrested. He saw the hammer fall, glimpsed the first sparks of the muzzle flash, and then went stone blind as the pistol exploded in his face. The slug mushroomed through his throat, slamming him back against the wall, and he felt something warm and sticky splash down over his shirt. Then his knees buckled and he was suddenly gripped with the urgency of killing Anderson.

  The trainmen seated at the next table leaped to their feet just as the other Texans opened fire. The shots were meant for the Irishman, but they were hurried and wide of the mark. Lee collapsed, drilled through the bowels, and Hickey screamed as a slug shattered the thigh bone in his right leg. McCluskie heard the gunfire and the terrified shrieks of dancehall girls, sensed the crowd scattering. But it was all somehow distant, even a little unreal. Blinded, falling swiftly into darkness, he willed his hand to move. To finish what he had come here to do.

  Another bullet smacked him in the ribs, but like a dead snake, operating on nerves alone, his hand reacted and came up with the Colt. That he couldn’t see Anderson bothered him not at all. In his mind’s eye he remembered exactly where the Texan was standing, and even as he pressed the trigger, he knew the shot had struck home.

  Anderson staggered backward, jolted by a fiery blow in the chest. His legs gave way and he started falling, but with some last reserve of strength he raised his pistol. The floor and his rump collided with a jarring crash, and in a final moment of consciousness, he shot the Irishman in the back.

  McCluskie grunted with the impact of the slug and pitched headlong between the tables. His leg twitched and his hand slowly opened, releasing its grip on the Colt. Then his eyes rolled back, the sockets empty and sightless, and he lay still. A wispy tendril of smoke curled out of the gun barrel and disappeared. Afterward there was nothing.

  Hurriedly, the five cowhands moved forward and gathered around their boss. The instant they came together the sharp crack of a pistol racketed across the dancehall. One of them clutched at his stomach and slumped forward, and the crowd again dove for cover. But the Texans seemed frozen in their tracks, unable to move, staring at the fallen man in a numbed stupor.

  Standing just inside the doorway, Kinch thumbed the hammer back and fired again. There was nothing rushed in either his manner or in his soft feathering of the trigger, yet the shots thundered across the room in a staccato roar. Coolly, just as the Irishman had taught him, he spaced the shots evenly and drilled each one precisely where he meant it to go. Every time the worn Navy bucked, another Texan went down, and within a half-dozen heartbeats it was over. When the gun clicked at last on an empty chamber not a single cowhand was left standing.

  The kid slowly lowered his arm and stood there a moment, looking at the tangled jumble of bodies. Something inside tugged at him, demanding that he cross the room and make sure. But he shook it off, touched by the grim certainty that there was no need. He had seen McCluskie go down, felt that last slug as if it had been pumped into his own back. Whatever the Irishman had been in life, he was just a dead man now. Nothing more. That wasn’t the way Kinch wanted to remember him.

  Backing away, he holstered the Colt and brushed through the doors. There was a sudden chill in the air and he shivered. Then he knew it for what it was and hurried on into the night.

  FIFTEEN

  The kitchen was still as a crypt. Kinch sat slumped in a chair, elbows on his knees, staring at nothing. He hadn’t moved in the last hour, as if he had retreated within himself, locked in some private hell all his own.

  Seated nearby, Sugartit looked on helplessly. She wanted to touch him, take his hand, comfort him in some way. But she knew there was nothing she could say or do that would ease his grief. Years ago she had lost her own family, and she remembered all too well the cold, deadened sensation that clutched at a person’s heart. Remorse came quickly, but it released its hold with infinite slowness. Only time would heal the feeling of rage and loss that gripped him now, and difficult as it was to remain quiet, the girl merely watched and waited. When he was ready, in his own fashion, Kinch would find some way to talk about it. However long it took, Sugar meant to be there when he needed her.

  The only sound in the room was the soft shuffling of Belle’s footsteps. She circled the kitchen like some distracted ghost, wan and ashen-faced. She had long since cried herself out, and now she felt drained of all emotion and feeling. Her hands were icy cold, though the room was sticky with summer warmth, and she kept her arms wrapped around her waist. Somehow she couldn’t bring herself to take a seat at the table. She felt some restless compulsion to keep moving, almost as if in her mindless pacing she could outdistance the dreaded truth.

  That he was gone, lying dead at that very moment, she still couldn’t accept. He had always been so charged with life, full of strength and wit and energy, and it just wasn’t possible. Someone with his lust and vitality simply couldn’t be extinguished that easily. Like snuffing out a candle. Whatever God watched over Irishmen wasn’t that capricious or impersonal. To cut a man down in his prime, kill him needlessly and without purpose, was a waste she couldn’t comprehend. A truth so appalling her mind simply wouldn’t accept it as fact.

  Yet she had known it the minute Kinch walked through the door. The sickly pallor covering his face, and the shock etched deep in his eyes, bespoke t
he horror of what she had feared most. Stunned, unwilling to believe, she had stared at him a long time, until finally he lowered his head. His words still rang in her ears.

  “They got him.”

  That was all he said. Having spoken those simple words, a death knell sounded in a quavering voice, he slumped into a chair and hadn’t moved since. A rush of tears stung her eyes, and something vile and thick clogged her throat. She hadn’t questioned him then, and later, after she stopped crying, it didn’t seem to matter. Whatever had happened, she chose not to hear it. Somehow, in a way she hadn’t yet reconciled, if she didn’t hear it then it couldn’t be true. But even as she witlessly paced the floor, frantically seeking to elude the truth, she knew deep down that she was only fooling herself.

  Mike McCluskie was dead, and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t bring him back again.

  The nursery rhyme jarred her to a halt.

  Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. God, she must be going mad. Reaching back into her childhood, dredging up some silly nonsense to cushion a blow she hadn’t yet been able to accept. That’s what it was. Some form of lunacy. Letting her mind play tricks on her. Turning a tall, sandy-haired hellraiser into a dumpy little innocent. Watching him tumble from the wall and shatter to pieces. It was a device. A childish game. Something conjured up from God knew where to convince herself that he really couldn’t be scraped up and glued back together again.

  Life didn’t work that way. Only in fairy tales did the good guys win. Out in the harsh reality of the world it was the bastards who walked away with the marbles. They never died. Or perhaps, because there were so many of them, it merely seemed that their numbers never dwindled.

  She turned and was amazed to see Sugartit sitting beside the boy. Though her mind seemed lucid and clear, she couldn’t recall the girl entering the kitchen. But obviously she had, and plain to see, she was wholly absorbed in the boy’s sorrow. Then, in a moment of self-loathing, Belle realized that for the past hour she had dwelt on nothing but her own grief. She had given no thought whatever to Kinch. Wasted and sickly, dying by inches as some ravenous thing consumed his lungs, he sat there stricken with remorse. Not for himself, but instead for what he had lost. The one man who had befriended him, given him a reason to live, made him forget for a small moment in time that he was marked for an early grave.

  All at once she felt an outpouring of pity that completely overshadowed her own misery.

  She crossed the room and gently laid her hand on the kid’s head. “Mike wouldn’t like this. Do you know that? If he walked through the door and caught us moping around this way, he’d just raise holy hell.”

  Kinch kept his eyes fastened on the floor. “He ain’t comin’ through that door no more.”

  “No, I suppose not.” Belle’s stomach churned, queasy and fluttering, as if she had swallowed a jar of butterflies. She took a deep breath to steady herself. “But that’s no reason for us to crawl off and call it quits. Mike lived more in thirty years than most men would in a couple of lifetimes. And he enjoyed every minute of it, too. Do you know what he would say if he was here right now? He’d laugh and then he’d say, ‘Bud, it’s nothin’ but the luck of the draw. You pays your money and you takes your chances.’”

  Sugartit placed her hand on the boy’s arm. “Belle’s right, honey. You mustn’t blame yourself. These things just happen.”

  Kinch slammed out of the chair, jerking away from them. “What d’you know about it? You weren’t there.”

  The girl winced as if she had been slapped in the face and stared after him in bewilderment. He stalked across the room and stopped beside the stove, refusing to look at them. The heat of his words left them startled, and for a while no one said anything. Sugartit had plainly hit a nerve, and the boy’s wretched look disturbed them in a way they couldn’t quite fathom.

  Presently Belle got a grip on herself and decided to have another try. Whatever was bothering him had to be brought out into the open. Left to fester and feed upon itself, it would only get worse.

  “Are you blaming yourself, Kinch? Is that why you can’t look at us?”

  He still wouldn’t turn around. “I waited too long. I should’ve gone in there with him. If there’d been two of us they would’ve backed down.”

  “Don’t you think Mike thought of that?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Yes you do. You know it very well. He told you to stay here because he didn’t want you mixed up in this business.”

  “Yeah, but he was always sayin’ that. I shouldn’t have listened.”

  “That’s just the point. You didn’t listen. You followed him anyway. Nobody could have asked any more of you than that. Why should you expect more of yourself?”

  “She’s right,” Sugartit blurted. “You did what you could, and that’s the most anybody can do.”

  “Cripes, you two don’t understand nothin’, d’you? I should’ve talked him into lettin’ me back his play. He’d have let me if I just spoke up.”

  “You’re wrong, Kinch.” Belle’s tone had the hard ring of certainty. “He would have tied you hand and foot before he let that happen.”

  “Don’t be too sure. He knew how good I was with a gun.”

  “Yes, but there’s something you don’t understand. He thought the sun rose and set in your hat. Why else do you think he stayed here? You just think about it a minute and you’ll see he would never have let you go along.”

  Belle realized her mistake only after the words were out. She damned herself for speaking out of turn, but by then it was too late. Kinch whirled around, his eyes distended and flecked through with doubt.

  “What’re you talkin’ about? It was his job. He stayed here to get Anderson, didn’t he?”

  “Of course he did. I just meant he thought too much of you to risk getting you in a jam with the Texans.”

  “That’s not what you meant. You’re lyin’ to me, Belle.” The kid scrunched his eyes up in a tight scowl. “I got a right to know, and you got no right to hold back on me.”

  She just stared at him a moment, feeling helplessly trapped. “Maybe you’re right. I suppose when a man does something like that it shouldn’t be kept a secret.” She faltered, trying to break it gently, but found herself at a loss for words. “I don’t know how else to say it except straight out. Mike never ran from anything in his life and he probably wouldn’t have this time either. But there was more to it. The reason he stayed, I mean. He was willing to take on Anderson and that bunch so you wouldn’t think bad of him. I tried to talk him out of it, but he had his mind set.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” Kinch seemed to stagger and his face went ashen. “He didn’t have to get himself killed to prove nothin’. I would’ve understood.”

  “Mike thought it was important enough that he wasn’t willing to take a chance. He did it the only way he knew how.” The boy was badly shaken, worse than Belle had expected, and she tried to soften the blow. “Maybe it’s not much consolation, but Mike was sure he could trick Anderson into making it a fair fight. I think he really believed he could pull it off and walk away without a scratch.”

  “Yeah, it was fair awright.” The muscle at the back of his jawbone twitched in a hard knot. “Six to one. With him backed up against a wall.”

  There was a sharp rap at the back door and the room went deathly still. Kinch’s arm moved and the Colt appeared in his hand. Stepping back beside the stove, he drew a bead on the window shade, then nodded for Belle to open the door. She threw the bolt and jerked the door open, moving quickly out of the line of fire. Dr. Gass Boyd stepped through the entrance and stopped, looking first at the two women and finally at the gun barrel centered on his chest.

  “Youngster, it would be a serious error in judgment for you to shoot me. I’m about the last friend you have left in this town.”

  Belle slammed the door and bolted it. Something in Boyd’s voice alarmed her, more the tone than the words themselves. But
as she turned to question him, Kinch holstered his pistol and stepped away from the stove.

  “Sorry I threw down on you, Doc. Guess I’m a little jumpy tonight.”

  “Save your apologies, son.” Boyd set his bag on the table and smiled. “After what you did tonight you have every right to a case of nerves.”

  “I don’t understand.” Belle shot him a puzzled frown. “What’s Kinch done?”

  The doctor looked from her to the boy and one eyebrow arched quizzically. “You mean to say you haven’t told them?”

  “Just about Mike.” Kinch ducked his head. “Didn’t see that it’d do any good to tell ’em about the rest.”

  “What do you mean, the rest?” Belle moved around the table and faced Boyd squarely. “Doc, will you please explain what’s going on here?”

  “Perhaps you ladies had better sit down. Our young friend seems to have omitted a few rather salient details.”

  Sugar obediently took a chair but Belle remained standing. “Quit hedging, Doc. Let’s have it.”

  “Very well. I have just come from the hardware store, which is temporarily serving as a funeral parlor. As of this moment there are five dead and four wounded. In my opinion one of the wounded will die before morning. The others have a fair chance of pulling through.”

  “You’re still beating around the bush. What does that have to do with Kinch?”