Crossfire

by Matt Braun

  She pondered that bit of reality as she dealt to one drunken mark with three crooked piles of silver dollars, and to two newcomers, one fat and one slender and tall. She baited the drunk and the tall newcomer with winnings and took from the fat man with stupid eyes.

  “Well, Oscar,” the tall new player said. “If my luck’s as strong as this lady is on looks, I’ll own Jarrott’s place before sunup.”

  “I do declare, you gentlemen sure know how to talk to a lady.”

  “Old Abelson here’s got a smooth tongue, miss. But don’t get near his dry-goods emporium or he’ll have your month’s wages before you’ve walked one aisle.”

  Vivian dealt twenty-one for Abelson and busted the drunk and the fat man called Oscar.

  “Damn,” the hog-jowled gambler said, as he tugged at his collar and loosened his shoestring tie. “Right off to a shitbucket start.”

  Vivian gave him a fake sheepish look.

  “You’ve got your nerve, Oscar. Tellin’ this lady that I’d take her wages,” Abelson said. “You and your cronies down at the courthouse got a line of bullshit a mile long. And when you take somebody’s money, they don’t get nothin’ for it but more laws and more bureaucrats.”

  Oscar swooped winnings after he’d doubled up. Vivian had gathered that he was a political hack of some sort and she figured to hype him up for a big kill.

  “You in politics?” she asked the bulbous player.

  “Mayor Oscar Westfall,” he said proudly as he jammed a cigar as big as an ax handle into the corner of his chubby pink lips. “Mayor of the fair city of Tucson.”

  “Well, sir, I’m proud to make your acquaintance,” Vivian lied, her eyes suggesting that she might eat him alive in the goose down. “I’m new in town. Got in only this morning, and Mr. Jarrott was kind enough to give me employment.”

  Having always thought of politicians as the most dishonorable of all charlatans, she proceeded to rob the mayor of his silver as fast as he laid it on the felt. At the same time, she returned some of Abelson’s taxes. At least, she thought to herself as she skillfully raked in the mayor’s money, most crooks she’d known made no pretense about being anything but crooks. But politicians, she’d observed, had, without exception, veiled their skulduggery and vain deeds in a cloak of self-righteousness.

  She was just about to finish off Westfall’s purse when Jarrott approached.

  The casino owner slapped the mayor on the back and shook Abelson’s hand.

  “Howdy, Sherm,” Westfall grunted as a one-inch chunk of cigar ash fell unnoticed into his lap. “See you got yourself a new dealer.”

  “And a mighty pretty one,” Abelson added. “Bringing me a fine streak of luck too.”

  “Wish I could say the same,” the mayor wheezed through a cloud of acrid smoke.

  “Stick with it, Oscar. Maybe your luck will turn,” Jarrott said as he looked toward Vivian and tugged on his earlobe. “Your credit is always good in the Buena Suerte.”

  Vivian saw the signal and begrudgingly but skillfully reversed the flow of coin to Westfall’s favor. As Jarrott walked off, she smiled, recalling Jarrott’s statement: Politics will not be a problem in Tucson.

  She knew better. Politics was always a problem . . . everywhere.

  SEVEN

  Dogshit!” Pearl grunted after throwing her cards on the scattered coins in the middle of the table. “You got a four-leaf clover up your ass, Jake.”

  “ ’Bout time, Pearl. You’ve damn near run me dry,” Jake said through his beard. Then, after a pause, he added: “Run me dry of coin, that is.”

  Doc and Kirk laughed aloud at Jake’s reference to his raucous night in bed with Pearl.

  “Shut up, you peckerheads,” Pearl spat. “Jake! Deal! And pour me another whiskey, Hoodoo!”

  “Yes’m,” Tallman chided, faking a slave-to-master tone as he poured the last of a bottle into her glass. “Anything you want, Mizz Pearl.”

  Doc and Kirk snickered at Tallman’s wiseass response as Pearl glared at the newest member while she picked up her cards.

  Though Tallman was playing along, he was quickly growing tired of cards, whiskey, and childish verbal grab-ass. Were it not for the odd amusement he got out of Pearl’s domination of Doc, Jake, and Kirk, the previous three days would have seemed endless.

  Somehow, this woman had turned a small gang of nitwits into deadly, big-stakes stagecoach robbers. She was obviously very intelligent, and Tallman sensed a formal education, even though she did her best to look and act like the flintheaded wife of a squatter. Her mouth was foul, but her willingness to open her legs for her troopers provided Tallman with the ultimate amusement.

  “That’s better, Jake,” Pearl said, looking at her cards. “Keep ’em comin’ like that and I might let you get that beard wet again tonight.”

  Jake raised his eyebrows while Tallman, Doc, and Kirk roared again with whiskey-saturated laughter.

  “You gonna have Jake feed at the old honey-pot, Pearl?” Tallman asked after he looked at his cards. Though he felt like a fool playing games with this strange quartet, he wanted Pearl to think she had another lamebrained hard case to add to her collection.

  “Keep it up, Hoodoo, and I’ll have you eatin’ honey.”

  “Goddamn, Pearl!” Doc shouted. “Think me and Kirk could watch?”

  “For chrissake, play poker,” Jake groaned as he slid five silver dollars to the center of the table.

  As the betting began to develop, the hooting and laughter subsided. Pearl had taken only one card, while Doc stood firm and the others had taken three each. Tallman had drawn a six of diamonds, a nine of clubs, and a two of spades to a pair of fours. “I’m goin’ to open another bottle,” Tallman said as he chucked his cards. “If I stay in this rip, I’ll be playin’ for my spurs before long.”

  As he snatched a new bottle of cheap rye off the shelf, he laughed to himself. With only the most basic moves, Vivian could have cleaned Pearl and her soft-headed troopers in two hours. In all his years, he’d never seen anything like her mastery of the pasteboards. He truly felt sorry for Tucson’s gamblers.

  After he squeaked the cork free, he took a small pull on the bottle and again mused on Pearl’s odd nature. Aside from her plain, hawkish features, her body was well above average. He’d guessed her to be mid-thirties. Her shirt was undone at the top and he could see two small mounds that were topped with jutting nipples.

  As he stood there holding the bottle, he again wondered how Vivian was doing. He could never quite shed his concern for her. He’d talked her into the business and, though he’d sworn to himself he wouldn’t, he felt responsible for her safety. If you made one slip when you were dealing with big money and black-hearted beasts like those at the table in front of him, you got your final reward, six feet of dirt.

  “Hoodoo,” Pearl commanded. “You gonna stand there and hold that bottle all goddamn day? Bring that corn over here, for chrissake!”

  “Goddamn, Pearl,” Tallman said as he walked around the worn plank table. “Where do you put all the firewater? Ain’t never seen a lady drink so much as you!”

  “Lady!” Kirk sighed. “Well now. Looks like ol’ Hoodoo’s pitchin’ woo at Pearl.”

  “Shut up, shitbreath!” Pearl said with raised eyebrows and tight lips. “Or you ain’t gonna dip that little mule of yours for a month of Sundays.”

  Kirk’s face went red and he looked like a kid who’d been caught jerking off in the schoolyard. While Kirk bled, the other four jabbed and howled. Suddenly, the fit of tearful laughter died as the sound of a single rider penetrated the cabin. Pearl’s loudmouthed jesting stopped instantly and she popped out of her chair, her mood at once as serious as a preacher’s at graveside.

  “All right you boneheads, find somethin’ to do,” Pearl ordered. “Kirk, Jake, and Hoodoo! Clear out!”

  “Let’s go on down to the stream,” Kirk suggested as they shuffled out the cabin door together. “I’m gonna take me a bath and soak some of this whiskey out of m
y head. Looks like we’ll be workin’ in a day or two.”

  “Messenger?” Tallman asked Kirk as he looked over the rider and his horse, noting every detail.

  “Yeah,” Kirk said under his breath as if the obvious was some big secret.

  “Who the hell is he?”

  “Don’t know, Hoodoo,” Kirk said. “And I ain’t gonna stick my nose in.”

  “And you’d be smart to do the same,” Jake added as he stroked his beard. “Don’t let all Pearl’s bullshit and fuck talk fool you none. She ain’t as dumb as she looks, and she gets real upset when anybody butts in on the details of her operation. Piss her off and she could cut your fuckin’ balls off and eat ’em raw while you watched . . . and that’s gospel.”

  “Jake’s got it straight,” Kirk added. “Woman’s got turpentine for blood.”

  “Mebbe so,” Tallman said, slightly taken aback by the serious tone of their warnings. “But,” he went on, hoping to change the subject, “I’d like to see if she’s all that cold when she’s got a sausage stuck between them little legs o’ hers.”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” Kirk said as they reached the stream. Then the two outlaws howled in harmony and ran into the water fully clothed.

  After less than five minutes, the rider departed in a cloud of dust. Tallman would have given a pound of gold to have a way to tail the messenger, but, given Pearl’s nature, he knew no excuse would permit his departure. So he soaked up the afternoon sun and wished that he hadn’t had so much of the bad whiskey. For three hours, the trio jawed and smoked. Tallman had tried to get more detail from the pair of robbers, but it had soon become obvious that they knew very little. He had learned one thing, though. Pearl was more dangerous than a cornered mama grizzly. Kirk and Jake had recounted several of their previous holdups and revealed that Pearl commanded the operation and that she’d personally killed the Wells Fargo employees.

  “Get your asses up here!” Stroud hollered from the cabin, breaking the boredom of the three-hour wait. “We’re goin’ to work.”

  “Hot damn,” Jake said as he got up. “My stash o’ gold’s just about shit the bed.”

  “What do you figure we’ll get?” Tallman asked as they walked up the incline.

  “Don’t know, Hoodoo!” Jake said, his voice brimming with enthusiasm. “Could be two thousand! Or more! Usually is!”

  When they walked in the door, Pearl and Doc were hunched over a dog-eared map. “Get your butts over here,” she growled without looking up. “Vacation’s over.”

  “Got somethin’ big for us, Pearl?” Jake went on, glowing like a kid at a birthday party.

  “Over twenty thousand. Gold coin. No banknotes. And maybe something bigger a week from now.”

  “Ain’t that somethin’, Pearl,” Tallman said quietly as he laid a line of tobacco on a cigarette paper. “Your Judas even tells you how much.”

  The room got quiet as Pearl slowly looked up from her map and scowled at Tallman through pursed lips and narrowed eyes. “Hoodoo, get your ass over here and don’t worry none about nothin’ but what I tell you to worry about.”

  “Hell, Pearl! No need to git sore,” Tallman whined as he put a flaming sulphurhead to his freshly rolled cigarette. “Just strikes my fancy the way you got this all worked out. Slicker than babyshit for sure.”

  “Stage leaves Tucson tomorrow morning at seven,” she continued, turning back to the wrinkled map and ignoring Tallman. “We’re going to hit it in Picacho Pass. They got about forty miles to do before the pass, so I want us there no later than eight-thirty. That should give us plenty of time.”

  Tallman smoked and took in every detail of the operation even though he appeared indifferent. He had been especially interested in her mention of another job within the week. A rough outline of a plan to put the gang out of business began to develop in his mind.

  “Where they got it hid this time?” Jake asked.

  “Floorboards,” Doc responded quickly. “We’ll have to bring a wreckin’ bar.”

  “How much firepower they bringin’?” Tallman asked.

  “One man riding shotgun,” Pearl said. “Word is, he’s a tough nut, so keep your eyes on him.”

  “Just like before, Pearl?” Kirk asked.

  “Right. Only Hoodoo takes the kid’s place,” Pearl said, looking at Tallman with strange eyes. Then she paused. “Fucking shame,” she finally sighed. “Hurts every time I think of it.”

  As Pearl went on to explain every detail of her plan, Tallman was further taken with her mind for strategy and detail. Like Kirk said, she was not as dumb as she made herself out to be. Obviously a woman who’d discarded all social convention and become the ultimate scofflaw, Tallman wondered several times what she would be like under the sheets. And as she went over the lay of the land around Picacho Pass, he also pondered on how a person could get so far out of step with the rest of the world.

  The planning and Pearl’s tiring rehearsals went well into the evening. Tallman listened halfheartedly after a while, and he began to entertain disjointed thoughts about Vivian’s progress, the identity of the inside man at Wells Fargo, and Pearl’s outrageous behavior. But mostly he worried about his partner in Tucson. This was only their second case, and, although she’d worked like an old hand during the Southern Pacific Railroad operation, they’d dealt mostly with con men and charlatans. Though dangerous, they were not as ruthless and bent as this gang of cold-blooded killers, who’d taken pleasure in cutting up a sixty-year-old boot drummer for a sliver dollar. If the men at the other end of this operation were half as bad as Pearl’s bunch, Tallman thought to himself, Vivian could be in over her head.

  EIGHT

  Mayor Westfall hauled in a pile of silver dollars as Vivian retrieved the cards. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the dapper Jarrott give her a wink of approval and a thin-lipped smile. Regardless of Jarrott’s transgressions, Vivian had discovered that she could not dislike the man. And today, the Buena Suerte owner looked especially sharp in a dark-blue conservative plaid. This was only their third night, and she’d already decided that she liked him enough to enjoy herself in the event she had to use her ultimate weapons to loosen his tongue. So far, he’d been the perfect gentleman. But she suspected that his temperate behavior was simply a part of his approach to the grand game of pursuit and conquest.

  As she fingered another winning hand for the lard-assed mayor, she reasoned that it could be a whole lot worse. In her days as a con artist, she’d played up to some pretty disgusting characters, many of whom made Mayor Westfall look like a saint.

  “Go again,” Westfall said to Vivian after he slid two eagles forward on the felt and wiped the sweat from his fat brow. “I can feel the luck in my bones.”

  “Damned if you ain’t had it, Mayor,” sighed the hotel owner to his right. “I haven’t won a goddamned nickel.”

  “Hell, Henry. You can afford it,” Westfall wheezed as he mopped more sweat from his pink face. “The rates you charge!”

  “Bets, gentlemen?” Vivian asked.

  “Now, Mayor! What would you ever do without my hotel?” Henry said as he placed money next to his cards. “You’d have no place to take your young lady friends. I mean, Minnie don’t let you take them home, does she?”

  With that, the onlookers and the other three at the table erupted in a fit of teary-eyed laughter. It was obvious that Mayor Westfall was often the focus of casino buffoonery. In Tucson it was like it was in most places. The local politicians were either crafty charlatans or self-serving bunglers who were unknowingly used by the behind-the-scenes power brokers. Westfall was in the latter category.

  “And you a deacon of the church and all,” one of the bystanders chimed in. “Praise the Lord!”

  Westfall grumbled a curse and gave Vivian a sheepish grin.

  “Got an eye for the ladies, Mayor?” Vivian asked with sultry eyes as she pitched the cards.

  “These loudmouths,” he grunted.

  “Oops,” Vivian said as sh
e flipped a queen of diamonds on Westfall’s upturned two of spades and nine of hearts. “Guess Lady Luck’s on break.”

  Jarrott had explained to her that she was to keep Westfall up sixty or seventy dollars a week on average. In the past hours she’d been building him up for the sting. He had more than three hundred dollars in front of him. Now she would assist the others in slashing Westfall into a state of ill humor.

  Jarrott saw what was happening and chuckled out loud as he hoisted a cold, frothy mug of beer and toasted Vivian from afar. Vivian allowed a sly smile for the casino owner and scooped up more of West-fall’s winnings, just as the three-piece band struck a lively tune, as if to celebrate the happy mood that now permeated the air. Onlookers and the others at the table jabbed and snickered as Westfall’s pile of coins diminished with every hand. Elsewhere in the crowded room, whiskey, beer, and money were flowing like white water in a rain-swollen stream.

  Just as she scooped Westfall for the fifth time, two ominous characters bulled their way through the colorful glass doors. Then she saw Jarrott thump his mug on the polished bar and scamper toward the taller of the two. While dealing, she watched carefully as Jarrott pumped the man’s hand and slapped his back, paying no attention to the shorter man, who had the eyes of the devil and the nose of a rundown prizefighter.

  After a brief ceremony, the three men scurried toward the stairs. As they hurried by the blackjack table, Vivian noticed that Westfall paused, raised an eyebrow, and shook his moist pink jowls. He obviously knew the visitors. But he seemed to take no special pleasure in that fact.

  “Damn,” Westfall grunted as he lost another hand.

  “Gee. Sorry, Mayor,” Vivian sighed, leaning toward the blubbery hulk. “The cards fall like the great card player in the sky wants them to.”

  “Oh, I’m not angry with you, Susanna. It’s just that I hate to lose.”

  “Don’t we all,” the hotel owner said, showing no sympathy for the defeated mayor.

  “Tell you what, Oscar. I’ll buy you a drink,” Vivian added. “It’s about time for a break anyhow.”