Enemies and Other Western Stories

by Ed Gorman

  Enemies and Other Western Stories

  Ed Gorman

  Enemies and Other Western Stories by Ed Gorman

  Copyright © 2013 by Ed Gorman

  Cover Design L. J. Washburn

  Rough Edges Press

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This collection is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used in a fictional manner. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  "Enemies" copyright 1999 by Ed Gorman. First appeared in Legend

  "Anna and the Players" copyright 2000 by Ed Gorman. First appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

  "The Victim" copyright 1995 by Ed Gorman. First appeared in The Big Book of Western Action Stories

  "The Long Ride Back" copyright 1995 by Ed Gorman. First appeared in New Trails

  Contents

  Enemies

  Anna and the Players

  The Victim

  The Long Ride Back

  About the Author

  Other Ed Gorman Books

  Enemies

  Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1893

  Speaks should have known better. Hell, he was dealing with Harry Creed, and Harry Creed was one crazy son of a bitch.

  "Where the hell you takin' me, Harry?" Speaks said.

  "Oh, you'll see, you'll see," Harry Creed said, sounding like a kid teasing his younger brother. But at a hard-lived sixty-three, Speaks sure didn't look like any kind of kid.

  The date was September 2, 1893. The place was Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

  "We almost there?" Speaks said after they'd walked four more long blocks.

  "Almost, almost." Harry Creed laughed.

  These days Harry was dressing like a pirate. He wore a bandanna over his head, a golden ring on his right lobe, and he had a wee bit of a knife scar on his right cheek. Speaks wondered cynically if Harry had given himself that scar.

  For all his bitching, Speaks was enjoying the day. This was one of those golden, lazy autumn days when the flat autumnal light of the sun seemed to penetrate to your core and warm your very soul. The air smelled of burning leaves, and there was no headier perfume than that, and the trees were so colorful they almost hurt the eye. He wanted to be a raggedy-ass kid again.

  And just then, Harry Creed steered them around a corner and down a dusty alley.

  Speaks was hot now, in his black suit coat and gray trousers, sweating. When they got where they were going he'd take the coat off. He was wearing a ruffled white shirt. He'd been doing a little gambling this year, and had decided to dress appropriately. His Navy Colt was back in his hotel room. Cedar Rapids had a full force of police. They'd throw your ass in the jug if they saw you sporting a handgun. The old days were long gone. Long gone.

  The first thing he saw was the big red barn that said blacksmith over the double doors. The first thing he heard was the shouts and curses of men who'd already been doing some drinking at ten o'clock on this fine fall morning. He could also smell blood, but he wasn't sure if it was human or animal. The scent of fresh blood tainted the air. He'd been around enough of it to recognize it instantly.

  "You bring me to a cockfight?" Speaks said.

  "Hell, no, man." Harry Creed grinned. "Somethin' a lot better than that."

  And he just beamed his ass off right then. Speaks half expected him to start skipping at any moment. Skipping. A grown man.

  The barn smelled of the smithy's fire and new-mown hay and horse shit. The smithy, a wiry little bald guy with a toothless grin and a wary eye, nodded them toward the back of the barn. His wary eye was fixed on Harry Creed's pirate getup. "You wouldn't happen to be Captain Kidd, would you?" he said, and winked at Speaks.

  "Asshole," Harry Creed muttered as they walked to the back where maybe a dozen men stood in a circle, their hands filled with greenbacks just pleading to be bet. This was Saturday, and Friday, at least in most places, had been payday.

  "You get the old Master in here, and I'll bet he gets through three of them little peckers in under a minute." The man speaking wore a cheap drummer's outfit and puffed on an even cheaper cigar. "And I got three dollars here to say I'm right."

  Another man, a youth really, dressed in a blue work shirt and gray work trousers, said, "I'll see that three and make it four."

  The other men laughed.

  "This ain't poker, kid," one of them said.

  Speaks still couldn't figure out what Harry Creed had gotten him into.

  The barking dog got everybody's attention. It was a boxer, and a damned good-size one, and when it moved you could see its muscles move in waves down its back. Tear your damned leg off, this one would.

  The men made loud cheering noises, as if a favorite politician had just walked into the barn.

  "Master's gonna do it, aren't ya, boy?" said the young guy. "You're gonna make me a rich man, ain't ya, Master ol' boy?"

  A couple of the men separated then and Speaks got his first look at the ring. It ran maybe three feet high, was metal, and was maybe four feet across. This was the kind of ring cock-fighters used.

  "Next batch!" a pudgy guy shouted as he came through the back door carrying a round, lidded metal can.

  "God, I hate them things," one of the men in the circle said, and shuddered for everybody to see.

  "What the hell's in the metal can?" Speaks asked Harry Creed.

  But all Harry did was smile that stupid pirate smile of his. "Ain't you gonna be surprised?" he said.

  As the man with the can reached the ring and started to pull the lid off, all the men, without exception, moved back. It was clear they wanted no part of whatever was in the can.

  Master was in the ring now, crouched low, his eyes mesmerized by the can in the man's hands. Master's jowls flickered and snapped. Master knew what was in that can, all right.

  The men got excited, too. Their eyes gleamed. Some of them made eager, lurid noises in their throats. In many respects, they were even more animal-like than the rats. Killing had never been something Speaks cared to see, even if the victim was an animal. In Houston once, admittedly carrying more than a few drinks around in his belly, he'd broken the nose of a hobo who was trying to set a cat on fire for the amusement of his pals.

  The man was swift and sure. In a single motion he jerked the lid away and upended the can.

  At least eight or nine fat, angry, filthy, tail-twitching rats fell to the floor of the ring. When they hit the floor they went crazy, running around in frantic circles, bumping into each other, trying to cower when there was no place to hide or cower at all.

  Master was jubilant with blood lust.

  He didn't need any encouragement.

  He leapt upon the first rat, seizing the thing between his teeth, catching it just right so that when teeth met belly, blood spurted and sprayed all over Master's otherwise tan face. The way a burst balloon would spurt and spray.

  Speaks had enough already.

  This little wagering sport was called ratting. You bet on how many rats a dog could catch and kill in a sixty-second period. Ratting was even more popular in the East than out here. Easterners just didn't talk about it much. They always made you think that they were very civilized people and that you, a Westerner, were somehow heathen. But Speaks had been to New York a couple of times and he knew that civilization was not a dream shared by everybody. He'd seen a man cut out the eye of his o
pponent with a Bowie knife.

  While Speaks was not partial to rats in any way, he still couldn't see torturing them this way. He didn't like cock-fighting, either, far as that went.

  "Hey, where ya goin'?" Harry Creed said. "Master here just got goin'."

  But Speaks just wanted out. Who the hell wanted to watch a dog get himself all bloody by killing rats when it was such a beautiful day outside? Life versus death; and at this point in Lyle Speaks's years, he always chose the way of life and not the way of death.

  He was just turning around when he felt something press against the lower part of his back.

  "You just walk out of here real nice and easy, Mr. Speaks," a voice whispered in his ear, "and everything's gonna be just fine. Just fine. You understand me?"

  Speaks was wondering who it was. You lived a life like Speaks's, it could be almost anybody, anybody from anywhere for almost any reason at all.

  "You understand me, Mr. Speaks?" the voice asked again.

  Speaks nodded.

  If there was one thing he understood without any difficulty at all, it was having somebody hold a gun on him when he was unarmed. He understood it very, very well.

  The gun nudged him around until Speaks was facing the double front doors of the barn. Then the gun nudged him right on out of the barn.

  * * *

  He didn't really get a good look at the guy until they were almost out of the alley, and the only glimpse he got then was by looking over his shoulder.

  He was a kid. By Speaks's standards, anyway. Twenty-two, twenty-three at most. One of those freckled frontier faces with the pug nose and the quick grin that made them look like altar boys until you noticed the pugnacious blue eyes. Speaks had seen kids like this all over the West. Not knowing what they were looking for but somehow all finding the same thing: trouble. There used to be a lot more of this kind in the West, self-styled gunmen who strutted and peacocked all over the place, just trying to prove how tough they were. But that was the old West, when there were a lot of bona fide gunfighters roaming around, and when kids like this one always got themselves killed in saloons for saying the wrong thing to the wrong man. This kid was out of place and out of time, a decade too late to live out his dime-novel dreams.

  A couple of times Speaks thought of trying a move or two on the kid, but he decided against it. These old bones weren't what they used to be, and his glimpse of the kid told him that he was dealing with a very serious pistolero, or whatever the dime novelists were calling punks this year.

  "I'm going to make it easy for you," Speaks said.

  "Just keep walkin'."

  "I don't have much money, and I don't know where I can lay my hands on any, either."

  "I don't give a damn about money."

  "You will when you get to be my age, kid."

  "Just shut up and keep walkin'."

  Now they were on the sidewalk. In one of the newspapers that he'd read last night, an editorial had boasted that Cedar Rapids possessed seven hundred telephones, fifteen blocks of electric streetlamps, and more than a mile of paved streets. A lot of the sidewalks were still board, though. Like this one.

  "They're onto you."

  "Who's onto me?" the kid said.

  "The people. They can see you got a gun on me."

  "Bullshit."

  "Look at their faces, kid. These aren't dumb people. One of them's gonna get a cop."

  The kid went for it, not right away maybe, but after a minute or so. He started watching the faces of the passersby, the women in big picture hats, the men in fancy Edwardian-style duds, the farmers with their sun-red faces and hat-white foreheads. Speaks could sense the kid's step falter as he started to watch passing faces closely. Falter, and make him vulnerable.

  Speaks wheeled around. The kid was right-handed, so Speaks came in left, fast, under the arc of the kid swinging his gun around.

  He got the kid in the ribs with his elbow and in the groin with his fist. The kid folded in half, and Speaks ripped the gun out of his hand.

  Speaks knocked off the kid's fancy-ass cowboy hat, grabbed him by the hair, and dragged him all the way back to the alley.

  "My hat!" the kid kept saying, as if Speaks had taken his magical talisman away. He didn't seem to notice that in the meantime Speaks was tearing out a good handful of his hair.

  Speaks found a wall and threw the kid up against it and then, to send him a clear and unmistakable message, started slamming the kid's head against the wall, never once letting go of the greasy hair.

  Three, four, five times the kid's head came into slamming contact with the wall until finally his eyes rolled back, and the kid started sliding to the dusty alley, whereupon Speaks kicked him in the chest for good measure. Holding a gun on an unarmed Speaks was not the way to curry favor with the big man.

  "Who the hell's this?" said the pirate.

  Speaks looked over at Harry Creed and sighed. "What's the matter, they run out of rats?"

  Speaks wished his traveling buddy Sam November was here. He'd be able to shoo Harry Creed away. But Sam was up visiting a sick relative in the Decorah area, which was why they'd traveled up the Mississippi from New Orleans in the first place. So now Speaks was stuck with a punk who meant him harm, and the antics of Harry Creed. He'd come here to see an old friend, Keegan, but now he wondered if he should've come here at all. Harry Creed was not somebody he wanted to spend any time with. And the punk just made things worse.

  "Them rats really bothered you, huh?" Harry Creed giggled. "You shoulda seen yer face, Lyle boy. You was whiter than a frozen tit."

  The kid was just coming around.

  "Who's this?" Harry Creed said.

  "Don't know yet," Speaks said. "But I sure aim to find out."

  * * *

  In Cedar Rapids, the courthouse was on an island in the middle of town. The original inhabitant of the island, back in the Indian days, had been a horse thief whose luck ran out years later in Missouri, where he was hanged. Local folks never tired of telling this tale. When asked if it was really true or not, this unlikely tale, the residents of the town would point you to the public library and tell you to go look it up. And by God, if it wasn't true, as the books verified, a horse thief had been the first resident of what later became the town. How was that for a rough beginning?

  A number of taverns lined the streets two blocks north, giving a good view of the island and, farther down, the ice works.

  Harry Creed went and got them beers while Speaks shoved the kid into a booth at the back of the place. It was a choice seat. Hot wind carried the smell of the outhouse through the screen door. The men playing pinochle didn't seem to notice Speaks, or the smell.

  "Who the hell are you?" Speaks asked.

  "None of your business."

  "Kid, I don't need much of an excuse to kick your ass, so you'd better start talkin'."

  The kid sighed. "My name's Pecos."

  Speaks laughed. "Pecos, huh?"

  "Yeah, what's wrong with that?"

  "Kid, you got farm all over your face, and your twang puts you in Nebraska. So how the hell do you get 'Pecos' out of that?"

  But before Pecos could answer, Harry Creed sat the beers down and they proceeded to drink.

  "Guess what his name is?" Speaks said to Harry Creed.

  "His name?"

  "Yeah."

  "Now, how the hell would I know what his name is?"

  "Take a guess."

  Harry Creed shrugged. "Jim?"

  "Nope."

  "Bob?"

  "Uh-uh."

  "Arnell?"

  "Pecos."

  "Oh, bullshit," Harry Creed said.

  "Ask him."

  Harry Creed took another sip of brew. "What's your name, kid?"

  "Go fuck yourself."

  "I'd be watchin' my mouth if I was you," Harry Creed said. Then he grinned. "With all due respect, I mean, Mr. Pecos."

  "You assholes think this is funny, huh?" Pecos didn't wait for an answer. "Well, it won't be so
funny when your friend Chris Keegan gets here and I get him in a gunfight."

  "Aw hell," Speaks said. "That's what this's all about."

  "What's it all about?" Harry Creed said.

  "His name and wearin' his holster slung low like it is," Speaks said. "This dumb kid thinks he's a gunfighter."

  "Not thinks," Pecos said, "am."

  Speaks made a sour face and shook his head. "Kid, there haven't been any gunfighters since they shut down the trail towns ten years ago. And most of what you hear about gunfighters is bullshit anyway."

  "Not about Wild Bill," Pecos said.

  "Especially about Wild Bill," Speaks said. "And the only reason Chris Keegan ever got into any gunfights was de-fendin' himself against kids like you who forced him into it."

  "He killed twenty-two men."

  Harry Creed snorted. "More like four or five, kid, and Lyle's right, he didn't want to get into any of them. Kid came up to him one night in Abilene and called him out. He woulda killed Chris, but he was so drunk he tripped over his own feet and Chris killed him."

  "Yeah," Speaks said, "and another time Chris was standin' at the bar and he saw this kid comin' through the batwings and he saw this kid start to draw and that gave him plenty of warning, so he ducked down and turned around and shot the kid before the kid could clear leather. Didn't take a whole lot of brainpower to do that."

  "Plus which," Speaks said, "Chris Keegan is a year older'n me, which'd put him right about sixty-four. Even if he used to be a gunfighter, he sure isn't anymore."

  "I could still be the man who beat Chris Keegan," the kid said.

  "You're a crazy bastard," Harry Creed said.

  But a dangerous one, Speaks thought. He said, "That why you put a gun in my back? So I'd be sure to tell Chris about you when we meet his train tonight?"

  The kid nodded. "That way he'd know I was serious. Real serious."

  Speaks threw his beer in the kid's face.

  Even the pinochle players glanced over to watch this one.

  "Hey, Lyle," Harry Creed said. "What the hell you do that for?"

  "Because I'm sick of this little prick."