Marshal Jeremy Six #6

by Brian Garfield

  There was no time to fool around hunting for answers, and there was only one quick way to find the one answer he wanted. He cocked the gun and pointed it at the floor and pulled the trigger.

  Click. Nothing happened. Dumbfounded, Candy cocked it again and pulled the trigger again.

  Nothing, Click, click. He fanned the gun steadily at least a dozen times. It didn’t fire at all, not once. He took another six new cartridges out of Fred’s gunbelt, loaded those into the gun, and tried again. Same result: everything worked just the way it was supposed to, only the gun didn’t fire.

  “So,” Candy muttered. He unlimbered his own gun and cocked it. He cocked Fred’s impotent gun. And he held the two cocked guns right beside each other, lining them up parallel. He held them up in front of him, crosswise to his face with the barrels pointing off to his left, and squinted across the open hammers.

  That was it, plain as day. Fred’s firing pin was a good eighth of an inch shorter than his own.

  A cold lump settled into the pit of Candy’s stomach. Quietly, moving with deliberate method, he put Fred’s gun away where he’d found it, shut the drawer, holstered his own gun, and went out of the Marshal’s Office. Nobody seemed to notice him. There was no hue and cry anywhere. They hadn’t found the barkeep yet. He went up the street to the stable and tossed the stable boy a dime and brought out his own horse. He saddled it, moving quickly with no waste motions, but he was moving calmly now, like a machine, as if there were no skull-smashed bartender down in Cat Town, no hurry in the world.

  Fred Hook had been a friend of Candy’s, and Candy didn’t forget his friends. He cinched up, mounted, rode out of the stable and trotted down the muddy street as far as the candy store. He stopped there to buy a pocketful of peppermint stick candy, came out and got back on the horse, and rode up the street to the gun shop.

  The place was locked up. Nobody was inside. Candy didn’t show any outward sign of irritation. He asked a pedestrian where he might find the gunsmith’s house. The pedestrian gave him directions, and Candy got back on the horse and pointed it toward the edge of town, where Gene Lanphier lived. A knotted muscle rippled at his jaw line.

  Eight

  Lanphier sat on a corner of the bed, fiddling aimlessly with the long-barreled forty-five. Sheila watched him silently until his face flashed toward the window and he said crankily, “I wish that damned rain would quit.”

  “Stop torturing yourself, darling.”

  “Easy to say,” he snapped. He slipped the center pin out of the six-gun and let the loaded cylinder roll out into his cupped palm. A fully loaded .45 was big, blunt, and heavy; a steel cylinder full of them weighed a couple of pounds. He bounced the weight in his fist, as he muttered, “Anyhow, now I know what it’s like to go through hell. I’ve been there. And I guess you do too.”

  He looked at her; and although she smiled for him, he knew that things would never be quite the same between them as they had been before.

  She seemed to sense what he was thinking. She said, “We couldn’t have gone on forever, could we?”

  “Gone on doing what?”

  “Acting like two moonstruck kids. We’re grown up—and I suppose sooner or later something was bound to happen to make us act like it. It didn’t have to be Fred Hook. It might have been just a little thing.” There was a faraway regret in her voice.

  He didn’t like it; he didn’t like to hear her say it. But he knew it was true. It was time, he thought in a melancholy way, to put away childish things.

  He snapped the loaded cylinder back into the Colt and drove the center pin home. Hefting the revolver in his fist, he looked at it curiously and said, “You know what some of the boys are saying? I heard somebody this morning when I went up to the store. They’re saying there’s something magic about this gun of mine. They’re saying no ordinary gunsmith could outfight a professional like Fred Hook unless he had some trick up his sleeve. Nobody pays any attention to the fact that Hook’s gun didn’t go off. Maybe nobody heard. They all think I’ve got some special sort of gun. Some trick.”

  His face turned sour in the slanting light from the window. “It was a trick, but not in my gun.”

  “Don’t,” she murmured.

  He’d told her before. He’d been telling her, all night long. But he couldn’t stop. He had to keep saying it.

  “I fixed Hook’s gun,” he muttered, in a mausoleum tone. “That day he came into the shop and threatened me. I knew he’d come here to get into a gunfight. I didn’t know it would be with me, but I knew he’d be in a fight. I knew what I was doing. Back in Silver City when I saw him force that no-account deputy to gunfight him when he knew the deputy didn’t have a prayer. That was when I told myself Hook didn’t deserve to live. And I never forgot it ... When he came into the shop I knew I was going to stop him from killing any more innocent people. I knew he’d be getting into a gunfight sooner or later, and I fixed his gun so it wouldn’t go off.”

  He stared dumbly at his own six-gun. “I murdered him.”

  “Stop,” she pleaded. There was a catch in her throat. She reached out a pale hand toward him. Her face was mottled with bruises. “There’s nothing we can do now, darling.”

  “I’m not saying he didn’t need to die. He deserved what he got.”

  “Yes,” she said. “He deserved it. Gene, don’t—”

  “But it wasn’t my right to do it,” he said. “It wasn’t up to me. I had no right.”

  She cried, “Stop it, Gene! You can’t bring him back to life!”

  “I don’t want to,” he answered bleakly. “He’s dead and it’s right that he should be dead. He should never have been born. It’s not his crimes I’m worried about—it’s mine.”

  He glanced drearily past her, through the window behind her. What he saw stiffened him momentarily. Sheila saw the look on his face; her eyes went wide and she said quickly, “Darling—what is it?”

  “Stay put,” he murmured. “Don’t move a muscle.” He got quickly to his feet and rushed out of the bedroom, crossed the parlor with long strides and flung the door open. He still had the long gun in his fist. He lifted it at arm’s length.

  Candy Briscoe was half a block away, riding forward unhurriedly.

  Lanphier aimed the gun at him and said, “That’s far enough!”

  Candy lifted the reins, halted the horse, and planted both hands on his saddle horn. His pockmarked face was expressionless. “Going to shoot me down just like that, friend? In broad daylight with all these folks watching out of their windows?”

  Lanphier looked around. It was true. His shouted challenge had brought half a dozen people to their windows; they were peering out through the rain.

  “Like you shot down Fred,” Candy said. “Without a prayer. You filed down his firing pin. You had him playing Russian roulette with every chamber loaded, only Fred didn’t know that. But I’m here to tell you something, friend. Your hill’s just got higher to climb right now. You haven’t had a chance to fool with my six-gun like you did with Fred’s. I’m going to kill you, mister, one bullet at a time. Sure as you’re born.”

  There was no point in asking Candy how he’d learned about the filed firing pin. He knew about it, that was all that mattered. The secret was shattered. It would have happened anyway—sooner or later somebody would have tried to fire Hook’s gun.

  Lanphier’s arm was getting tired with the six-gun leveled out in front of him. He lowered it to waist-level, still pointing it at Candy.

  Candy said, almost gently, “Put it away in the holster and draw fair with me, friend. I’ll give you a chance you never gave Fred. I’m going to let you draw first, just so nobody’ll have any complaints afterward.”

  There didn’t seem to be any choice. He couldn’t stand there and blast Candy out of the saddle, not while Candy had both empty hands folded in front of him. There was only one way out.

  Lanphier slid the gun away into his holster. Candy lifted his reins, but Lanphier held up his left hand. “Don’t
come any closer.”

  “What?

  “We’ll do it right here,” Lanphier said, his voice unsteady. He licked his lips and tried to measure the intervening distance with his eyes. The range was maybe a hundred and fifty feet.

  “You’re loco,” Candy said. “Mister, I’ll put six holes in you before you get your gun drawn.” Casually, he gigged the horse forward at a slow walk. The dull grin was a steel bar across his face. “This is it, friend. You take no walks from this.”

  “Hold it,” Lanphier said. “Right there will do.”

  “You’re in a real sweat to die fast, ain’t you? Can’t even wait for me to come in range. Maybe nobody told you, friend—the closer they come, the harder they are to miss. Way out here you’d spend all day wasting ammunition.”

  “It’ll do,” Lanphier said. His palms were sweating. “You can start your draw any time, Candy.”

  “Not till I get where I can expect to hit something.” Candy answered, and kept walking the horse forward.

  Lanphier’s brow burst out with beads of oil-sweat. And it was then that he heard a sharp intake of breath behind him. He whirled and saw Sheila in the doorway; her mouth was covered by the back of her hand and her eyes were round and wild.

  Lanphier rammed into her. “Get out of sight!” He thrust her inside, yanked the door shut, and wheeled again, back toward the street.

  Candy had taken advantage of the distraction. His gun was out, in his fist, hanging casually in Lanphier’s direction. “I’m all through stalling,” Candy said. “This is for what you done to Fred, by God!” And he snapped the gun up and fired.

  An instant’s terrified paralysis seized Lanphier; he seemed unable to move. He heard the solid thwacking thump of the bullet slamming into the wall behind him; the ever-so-slight vibration of the porch under his feet seemed to shake him loose and he pawed madly at the handle of his long gun.

  Candy, impatient with delay, was still more than a hundred feet away; he flung his gun forward to cock it and jerked off a spray of shooting. Lanphier was down on one knee now, elbow on knee, making a brace of his left arm; he dropped the long-barreled six-gun across his left hand and his steady, easy pressure on the trigger made the gun go off. He seemed almost unaware of the three bullets that smashed wildly by him. When his gun went off it caught him almost by surprise, as it should. This was what he knew best: he was shooting at a target, and he had never let the sound of other guns disturb his concentration on the firing range.

  It only took one shot. Candy had fired four times and missed four times. Lanphier’s single, calculated shot caught him dead center. Candy’s arms flung up and out and he pitched from the saddle into a heap in the mud. The gun landed six feet away from him.

  The baker’s wife came over from next door; Lanphier left Sheila in her care, squared his shoulders, and went outside. A crowd, disregarding the steady drizzle, was gathered in an open circle around Candy Briscoe. Jeremy Six was down there. Lanphier went down from his porch, where he had squatted on one knee to shoot Candy out of the saddle. He walked down into the mud of the street and tramped up the block until he reached the edge of the crowd. Men gave him strange looks and stepped back to let him pass.

  Lanphier was in time to see that Candy wasn’t dead. Six was talking to him.

  Candy coughed. He looked up at Lanphier; a glaze was beginning to form over his eyes. “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”

  “I practiced some,” Lanphier said, in a dull tone.

  “Why?” Candy said, in a quiet, desperate sort of way.

  Lanphier shook his head mutely.

  Six reached out and touched Candy’s cheek. “Feel that?”

  “No. I guess I’m cashing in.”

  “You’ve got blood all over the front of you,” Six said. “It didn’t come from that bullet in you. They just found the bartender at the Tres Candelas with his head smashed in. That where the blood’s from, Candy?

  “Why not?” Candy said. His eyebrows shifted up and down. “Sure, I got mad, I pushed him around some. Yeah, you can add that to my score, Marshal.”

  Candy’s eyes, filming over now, shifted toward Lanphier. “I wish I’d killed you,” Candy said, and stopped breathing.

  Lanphier was muttering oaths in a monotone. Somebody said, “He’s dead, Gene. Cussin’ won’t help.”

  A man knelt beside Six and reached out to put copper pennies on Candy Briscoe’s eyelids. The man looked up briefly at Lanphier, and his eyes roamed from face to face until they reached Six. “Gene did everything he could to stop the fight, Jeremy.”

  “He stopped it, too,” Six muttered, looking at Lanphier with a hard glitter in his eyes. “Gene, you take some pretty dumb chances.”

  “He came after me,” Lanphier said. “On account of Hook.”

  Six nodded. Two men picked up Candy and put him across his horse. Six turned and said, “Walk off a piece with me, Gene,” and went over the street toward Lanphier’s house. Lanphier followed him up onto the porch. Six swung his big shoulders around and locked his glance on Lanphier’s.

  “What’s all this about Fred Hook’s gun?”

  “It’d take a long time to explain,” Lanphier said. All the strength had flowed out of him and he hardly felt capable of standing up straight.

  “Try me,” Six said. “If I get bored I’ll yawn.” There was something dangerous in his cold tone. “I want the whole story, Gene. From the beginning.”

  “It goes back a long way,” Lanphier said. “I don’t know if I could put it in words and make sense out of it for you. Not right now. I’m kind of rattled.”

  “Try,” Six said, very softly.

  “I—well, I mean I don’t—”

  “Tell him, Gene.”

  He whipped his head around and saw Sheila in the door. She looked ashen, her face white-pale around the purpling marks of the bruises where Hook had hit her in the face. She had to hold onto the side of the doorway for support. The baker’s wife stood mutely beside her, holding her arm. Sheila said, “You’ve got to get it off your chest before it sinks in and starts to rot, Gene.”

  Slowly, Lanphier nodded his head. “Yeah, I guess I do. You all right?”

  “I’ll be all right,” she said.

  The baker’s wife said sternly, “You’ll be fine, girl, but right now let’s get you back inside and get your feet propped up. Land sakes, it’s a wonder any of us survive the way these menfolk behave.” The hefty woman steered Sheila resolutely inside.

  The door clicked shut; and Jeremy Six propped his hip against the porch rail, got a cigar out from under his slicker and jammed it in his mouth. Down the street the knot of curious people broke up and sought shelter from the rain. Candy Briscoe’s body had been placed on the horse and led away uptown.

  Six cupped a match to the cigar and spoke in puffs, “You said it goes back a long way. To where?”

  “Silver City,” Lanphier said. “Just after I got out of the Army and we got married.”

  “What happened there?” Six shook out the match, broke it between his fingers and tossed it away to the street. His full attention lay against Lanphier like a blade, motionless but ready to cut.

  Lanphier waved his hands around awkwardly, searching for the words he wanted. “It’s kind of hard to explain. Fred Hook was there, only he didn’t call himself that. He went under the name of Al Hooker.” He glanced at Six; something made Six frown, deep in thought, and tip his head slightly to one side as if something had tickled his memory and he was trying to remember what it was.

  Lanphier went on. “Silver City was tamed down by then, no more boomtown rough stuff. The town had settled down to a pretty routine way of life—I guess that’s why Sheila and I picked it to set up housekeeping. I opened a little gun shop. We had a sheriff name of Garrett—you remind me of him a little. He had a big county to cover and he wasn’t in town much. There wasn’t much trouble in Silver City, like I said, and Garrett hired an old-timer by the name of Billy Joe Weaver to be his deputy down
there. Billy Joe was an old-time mountain man, honest and plenty tough, but he wasn’t any gunfighter. He was just what the town needed to buffalo the drunks and bust up fistfights—he carried an old Indian tomahawk and anybody who gave him trouble would get a belt on the head that’d lay a man out for ten hours. I liked old Billy Joe. We used to sit out and play checkers while the sun went down. He was a nice old feller, had a lot of tall stories about his mountain man days.”

  Six watched him steadily. Lanphier knew he was rambling; he tried to pull himself together. He said, “That’s not what you want to hear about, but it’ll explain part of what’s happened, maybe. You’ve got to understand how I felt about Billy Joe.”

  “I think I get the idea,” Six murmured. “Go on.”

  “One day this Hook, Hooker, whatever you want to call him, he came riding into Silver City on a foamed-up horse. Billy Joe stopped him at the stable and started asking a few questions. I wasn’t close enough to hear what was being said, but I saw the whole thing. Hook started laughing at him and after a little bit he just must’ve said something that got into Billy Joe’s craw. Billy Joe stepped back and went for his gun. ’Course, there wasn’t anything for it. Hook was a professional, and Billy Joe was no fast-draw expert. He hardly had his gun halfway out of the holster before Hook blew him apart with three shells from his forty-four. They weren’t standing more than five feet apart.”

  Lanphier took a deep breath and let it out. “I didn’t have a gun on me. Don’t know what I’d have done if I had. I started across the street, and Hook got on his horse and came around at a dead run. Just about rode me down. I jumped out of the way and landed in the dust, and Hook went on riding by. I went over to see if I could help Billy Joe, but he was dead. He didn’t even last a few minutes, like Candy did. He was just dead.”

  Six nodded and tapped ash from his cigar.

  Lanphier continued. “Hook didn’t clear out of town right away. He hung around a little while, raising hell in half a dozen saloons. Three or four days later the word came in that Sheriff Garrett was on his way into town, and Hook cleared out. That was the last I saw of him until just the other day here. But I guess it must’ve festered in me quite a while, what he did to old Billy Joe Weaver. Anyhow, it gave me a hell of a jolt when I saw Hook walk into that gun shop of mine the other day. I wasn’t positive, right off, that he was the same one, but I knew for sure as soon as he opened his mouth. I sent Sheila home because I didn’t want her anywhere near him. It all got clear as crystal in my mind right then. I remembered what he’d done to Billy Joe and for just a minute there I made myself into the judge and jury and executioner, all rolled up in one. He needed his gun fixed, and I fixed it good. While I was filing down a spring to fit, I did some filing on his firing pin too. He didn’t notice what I was doing. I filed the pin down too short to make contact with the cartridge primer. You could fire that gun all day long and it wouldn’t shoot.”