Hot Lead, Cold Justice

by Mickey Spillane

  Burnham laughed loud enough to attract attention. Then as eyes turned away from them, the outlaw leader uncrossed his arms and touched Maxwell’s sleeve again.

  “We’re not enlisting volunteer troops, Mr. Maxwell. Your role is a most specific one. You’re an unmarried man with living quarters above your business—the whole top floor, Mr. Sivley tells me. You know, this Mexican leather cutter of yours, he’s a talkative sort. Maybe you should have a word with him.”

  Maxwell, starting to get it, nonetheless asked, “What’s your point? What is my role?”

  Burnham flipped a hand. For a man who hadn’t worked an honest day in his life, that hand had a toil-worn look. “The ride from Las Vegas is no hardship. We can make it in a damn hurry, horses little the worse for wear.”

  “I’m listening.”

  His stare, with that milky eye, was a troubling thing. “I intend to come to Trinidad and spend a week or so with you as our host. You have a workshop out back, we understand, that can serve as a stable for our horses. The law will expect us to head for Mexico. We will wait for things to blow over, and then take our leave . . . leaving you to enjoy your share of the proceeds, with hardly any risk at all.”

  Maxwell goggled at him. “You would use my home, above my place of business, as your hideout?”

  “Exactly right. And as I say, I doubt we’ll need to stay any longer than a week. That’s a handsome week’s rent for a landlord, wouldn’t you say?”

  Maxwell was shaking his head, as if saying no, but his words indicated otherwise: “You’d need provisions . . . horses would require hay . . . I do have indoor plumbing, so you wouldn’t be seen going to and from a privy. . . . But what would I tell Juan?”

  “Why, does he bunk with you?”

  “No! But he has a room in back on the first floor, till he can build a little house . . . when . . .”

  “When that train of yours comes in.” Burnham flipped another hand. “Well, give him the week off. Send him on some errand, buying leather or some such. It’s not like you’re doing land-office business.”

  Maxwell was nodding now. “I could do that. Of course . . . might look suspicious, buying a week’s food for all five of us.”

  Burnham smiled—the shopkeeper was already thinking of the others at the table as part of one group.

  Warlow put in, “Buy dry provisions. Things you might purchase in quantity anyhow. Flour. Cornmeal. I make a mean flapjack.”

  “Jerky and such,” Fender suggested.

  Sivley said to Burnham, speaking as if Maxwell wasn’t even there, “Do we really need some damn fool merchant? Why not just hie for Mexico?”

  “It’s what’s expected.”

  Suddenly Fender had doubts, too. “If we aim to do what they don’t expect, what’s wrong with heading north? We know people Colorado way.”

  “No,” Burnham said. “Not unless Mr. Maxwell here doesn’t want twenty thousand dollars.”

  Maxwell was just sitting there.

  “You’re already an accessory,” Burnham reminded him.

  The merchant frowned. “You said that before. Why, because you talked to me about all this? I’d just deny it.”

  “No. Because you pointed out Caleb York to my men here.”

  “So what?”

  “So,” Burnham said with a shrug, “we’re going to kill him.”

  Maxwell’s eyes widened and his mouth made an O. It made Burnham smile before sipping tequila again.

  Now Maxwell was squinting at his old boss. He said, “Why do that?”

  “Well, if we’re holed up in this town, I don’t want Caleb York out there poking around, wondering if we might be hiding out in his damn county somewheres.” Then the man in the Confederate jacket shrugged, rather grandly. “Also, that’s part of the attraction.”

  Maxwell, not following, asked, “What is?”

  “Killing that son of a bitch.”

  Before long, all four outlaws and their newly recruited gang member were out in the chill, walking through the sleeping barrio. Burnham and his men had paid to spend the night in the nearby livery with their animals—it was known that Caleb York had a room at the Trinidad House Hotel, so staying there was out.

  Just as the five men were about to emerge from the barrio, Burnham—in the lead, of course—put a hand on Maxwell’s shoulder.

  “Who is that?” the outlaw leader asked.

  Coming out of the sheriff’s office across the way was a bony, bandy-legged figure wearing a dark flannel shirt, gray woolen pants, red suspenders and work boots, under-dressed for weather this frosty.

  Maxwell noted the deputy starting out on his nightly rounds.

  “That’s nobody,” he said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The morning after the shooting of Deputy Jonathan P. Tulley, Sheriff Caleb York—wearing the long black frock coat with its bullet holes and bloodstains, the brim of his cavalry-pinched black hat tugged down—moved along the boardwalk like a wraith emerging from the whispering snow.

  Trinidad wearing white made something strange and strangely lovely out of the little Main Street, the way York saw it. He’d wintered plenty of places in the Southwest and rarely had weather like this found any of them. Certainly he hadn’t expected such a thing in New Mexico, at least not until he saw the wire from the Territorial governor that had gone out to sheriffs and marshals telling of a blizzard underway north of them that seemed headed their direction.

  The warning included no suggestions of how those lawmen were to address the coming cold—this part of the country had not, in recent years anyway, had a storm like this to deal with. If Tulley were up and around, York would have dispatched his deputy to go door to door—businesses and homes alike—and advise stocking up on provisions and then staying indoors until this beast literally blew over. Perhaps further suggesting they gather any available firewood and get it inside, to keep warmth going in the potbellies of their stoves.

  But Tulley wasn’t available for such duty, and anyway a surprising number of citizens were out and about, bundled up and walking along the boardwalk on both sides of Main, taking in the wintery sight of snow coating the already sand-covered street (brought over from the nearby Purgatory River to keep dust down in more typical weather). They blinked and brushed white flakes away as they gaped and goggled at awnings and rooftops already lined with snow and windowsills and hitching posts similarly snow edged.

  A few merchants, in jolly moods as if an old-fashioned Christmas had arrived a month or so late, were out front of their shops with brooms, sweeping snow away, like it would do any good. Right now Trinidad was enjoying this change of pace in its weather, the snowfall steady but not unpleasant, wind swirling the stuff but not driving it. An artist at a window working in watercolor or oil might be trying right now to capture the scenic beauty of it all. Meanwhile the citizens who the sheriff knifed through on the boardwalk seemed to be memorizing their town so that, in a more typical snow-free winter, they might remember it.

  York stopped at the café for coffee, stamping his feet and waving snow off his hat before heading in. One might have expected the unpretentious little restaurant’s half a dozen tables, with their red-and-white checkered cloths, to be filled, and certainly a cup of Arbuckles’ in this cold would seem called for. But the citizenry were out and about enjoying the novel conditions.

  The sheriff hung the long coat on a peg inside the door but left his hat on, pushed back some. No wind to fight in here.

  The place had a homey feel, nothing like the Victory, whose free lunches were the café’s major competition. The wallpaper was yellow-and-white floral and might have been in a sitting room, and in one corner were some comfortable chairs with a table piled with books for the reading and relaxing pleasure of customers. Right now no one was doing either.

  Fred, the owner and main waiter, came over in his usual white apron, a slender, bald, elaborately mustached man who brought an entire pot of coffee for the sheriff as well as a white-enameled tin cup. The
two men exchanged nods and slight smiles.

  “Shame about Tulley,” Fred said, shaking his head.

  “Shame,” York agreed.

  He was not surprised word had got around town about the shooting, as there had been plenty of witnesses there at the Victory when Tulley fell just beyond its portals. What York needed now were more witnesses, and not those who’d been in the saloon but anyone who heard the shots and had gone quickly to a window. That would be his first order of business today—seeking such people out.

  Such door-knocking and routine interviews, of residents of the living quarters over businesses (usually their owners, but sometimes employees), was the side of detective work that, going back to his Wells Fargo days, York had never relished. But such tedium came with the territory.

  He was pouring his second cup of coffee when Rita Filley came in, wearing a two-piece hunter-green woolen dress with a black velvet collar. Plenty warm for your average New Mexico winter, she was underdressed for this one. Snow dusted her, and she paused inside the door to brush it off as best she could, her dark eyes searching for, then finding York.

  She rushed over, in a rustle of cloth, as he stood and pulled a chair out for her. Sitting, getting out of a pair of velvet gloves that matched the collar of her dress, she was flushed with cold but wore no face paint, her natural beauty always something of a surprise to York.

  “How is Jonathan?” she asked, one of the few people in town—or presumably anywhere else—who didn’t call the deputy just “Tulley.”

  “I haven’t stopped by the doc’s just yet,” York said, pouring coffee into a cup Fred had dropped off for Rita.

  She drank eagerly, almost greedily; like the sheriff, she took it black.

  York added, “If Tulley took a bad turn, I’d know about it.”

  Concern in the big brown eyes in the heart-shaped face turned to frustration-tinged anger. “Do you have any thoughts about who might have done this thing? And why Jonathan?”

  He had to mull that a moment. Then he decided there was no reason not to tell her. His pointing finger drew her eyes to the coat hanging inside the door—the two bullet holes and the patches of blackened blood in back were easily seen.

  She showed no reaction. “So your coat on your deputy means you may have been the target.”

  “Strong possibility.” He nodded at her cup. “You have coffee at the Victory. Did you stop for breakfast?”

  “No. I was looking for you.”

  Finding him this time of the morning had taken no great deductive powers on her part—York either had breakfast at the hotel where he kept a room, or here at the café.

  “Looking for news of my deputy,” he said.

  “No. Well, yes. But I have something on my mind that could pertain. It may be nothing, or . . .”

  “It might be something. What is it?”

  She sipped coffee, then leaned toward him. Though the place was underpopulated, the woman seemed to want to keep this private.

  “Remember night before last,” she said, “when those three out-of-towners sat down for poker with Bliss Maxwell—the latest addition to the Citizens Committee?”

  That was the as yet unofficial town council, headed up by the mayor and including the most prominent merchants in town, as well as the new bank president.

  “I remember,” he said.

  “More I think about it,” Rita said, looking past him, “the more I get the feeling they knew him. I didn’t see who approached who—I just looked over and the four of them, Maxwell and these three characters, were playing poker.”

  York frowned. “The more you think about it, you said. Why are you still thinking about this two days later?”

  What she said wasn’t exactly an answer to his question. “I have served a lot of men at the Victory these past months and I can tell when someone walks into my place wearing trouble.”

  “They didn’t cause any trouble while I was there.”

  “No.” The dark, pretty eyes narrowed. “But after you left, I stepped outside for some air. It was before the snow started and I was just enjoying the brisk feel of this weather, which hadn’t got out of hand yet.”

  “And it is going to really get out of hand.” He told her about the warning wire from the Territorial governor. Then he continued: “But you were saying . . . after you stepped outside?”

  She nodded, sipped more coffee, said, “I saw the four of them again. The three out-of-towners and Bliss Maxwell.”

  “Doing what?”

  “They were down the street, just outside the barrio, standing across from your office at the jail. Just gathered there talking. Nothing unusual, really. I merely figured they’d been over at the cantina for some more drinking and such.”

  He smiled a little. “The Red Bull is serving its customers entertainment in ways you no longer provide.”

  She smiled a little, too. “That’s right. Our girls just dance and encourage drinking, these days. Thanks to our prudish new sheriff.”

  That wasn’t entirely the case. He had since learned Rita’d been planning to divest herself of the upstairs brothel at the Victory even before he first brought the subject up.

  “So,” York said, “if Bliss and his three poker companions were just having a night out on the town, what made all of this linger in your memory?”

  “They weren’t alone,” she said, her eyes tight now. “There was a fifth man. A man wearing an old Confederate military jacket.”

  York leaned in. “Could it just be a gray coat you mistook?”

  “No.” She shook her head slowly, silently. Then she said, “I . . . I walked down a ways. On the boardwalk, kind of tucked against the storefronts. Something about this seemed . . . wrong, somehow. It was a Rebel jacket, all right. And who wears a Reb jacket twenty years later?”

  The back of his neck was tingling, but York said, “Well, such coats are good and warm in this inclement weather.”

  She was shaking her head again, but just slightly. Thoughtfully. “He was a tough-looking jasper, this fifth man. He wore a beard, trimmed close to his face. He was damn near as tall as you, Caleb.”

  “How close did you get?”

  “Not right up on him.”

  “Could you recognize him?”

  She thought about it. “If he was in that jacket, maybe. With his beard shaved off, not a chance. I didn’t get that good a look. His features seemed regular. Not at all ugly. There may have been something funny about . . . his eyes.”

  “Funny? His eyes?”

  “I had the impression they weren’t the same color. Like one was dark, the other not. Again, I was not that close—I didn’t hear a thing they said. And I believe I would have forgotten all about it, if . . .”

  “If Deputy Tulley didn’t have holes in him.”

  She nodded. “And if your coat didn’t have holes in it, too.”

  He touched her hand. Squeezed. Smiled at her. She smiled at him.

  She asked, “What now, Caleb?”

  “I’m going to fetch a wanted poster from the office. I may know who it is you saw.”

  Now she clutched his hand. “Caleb, I’m sorry, but I didn’t see this person well enough to recognize his image in a drawing or photograph.”

  “I understand. But even if you can’t, I know someone who might.”

  Fifteen minutes later, York walked down the central lane of a quaintly snowy version of the barrio, which led to the two-story Cantina De Toro Rojo. During the day this citadel of sin was merely a rather grand version of the shabby abodes leading up to it, a snow-edged one now. No horses were tied up at the hitching rail and no one was going in or out.

  Inside York found the place deserted but for its owner, Cesar, who was managing to look sweaty even in this cold weather, as he sat at a small table counting his money, making piles and stacks—coins and paper, dollars and pesos. Strips of black hair crossed his bald head, his eyes dark and half lidded, his mustache a limp droopy thing, his untucked shirt matching his trousers in th
eir cream color and general bagginess.

  York’s boot scrunched across the straw-covered floor. He joined his unenthusiastic host at the table.

  “Mi casa es tu casa, Sheriff York,” Cesar said in a manner as practiced as it was insincere. “But we are not open for the business yet.”

  “I’m not here for beer or tequila or beans,” the lawman said. He unrolled the wanted poster he’d plucked from the wall of his office and spread it out like a much-too-small tablecloth. “Has this man been a customer?”

  The circular bore a rendering of the wanted man, but York—who not only had met the outlaw in question but had captured and sent him to prison—knew it to be accurate. The drawing was chest up, to give a sense of the Confederate officer’s jacket this individual was known to wear, and the wanted man’s roughly handsome, trimly bearded face, with its off-putting milky eye and saber scar through his eyebrow, made him unmistakable. The reward was one thousand dollars, a considerable bounty.

  Lucas Burnham, also known as Luke Burnham and “Burn ’Em” Burnham, was wanted for robbery in various states of the union as well as several territories, including New Mexico, where he was also wanted for murder.

  “Hay dinero?” Cesar asked, with a sudden, alert smile.

  “If I find him,” York said, nodding slowly, “and bring him in, dead or alive, likely the former, I will remember you, Cesar.”

  “Me recordarás bien?”

  “I will remember you to the tune of one hundred dollars.”

  “I like this tune. I need do nothing but tell you if I have seen this man?”

  “That’s right. Has he been here?”

  “Noche antes de la última,” Cesar said, nodding quickly.

  “Night before last,” York said. “Since then?”

  “No.”

  “Before then?”

  “No.”

  “Who was he with?”

  “Three men—not from here. Another man—from here, I think.”

  “Who?”

  “No lo conozco. ”

  “You’re sure of that, Cesar?”

  The cantina keeper nodded again. “Never at the Red Bull before. But he dress well. A gringo.”