Hot Lead, Cold Justice

by Mickey Spillane

  “Is he a famous outlaw?” She was relatively new to the West.

  “Middling,” York said. “But he’s as dangerous as John Wesley Hardin, and he’s a mite unhappy with me.”

  “Why unhappy?”

  “I put him in prison for ten years.”

  “That would do it.”

  “But as for those that ride with him? I have no photographs, drawings, or descriptions as part of those circulars. And I checked for individual posters of anybody resembling those three we saw playing halfhearted poker with Bliss Maxwell. Nothing.”

  She said skeptically, “You figure they beat it out of Trinidad before the storm really got nasty.”

  “I do.”

  “And likely headed to Mexico, and figure when this squall blows over, you’ll head that way yourself.”

  He sipped hot toddy and smiled. “Little time off can do wonders for a man.”

  “What if they’re still here?”

  “What if who’s still here?” he asked innocently, but he knew what she meant.

  “Those three ‘friends’ of Maxwell and the odd-eyed gent in the Rebel jacket.” She leaned on an elbow, cocked her head. “Caleb, just yesterday . . . when this pretty white stuff started looking ugly to the locals, and the Mercantile had a run on supplies?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, I had one local canny enough to stop by and pick up some supplies right here at the Victory. Guess who that local was?”

  “Bliss Maxwell.”

  “I heard you were a detective!” Rita’s sarcastic smile was a sideways thing. “And you know what supplies he bought? Three fancy bottles of rye from my private stock. Three-dollars-a-bottle whiskey.”

  York frowned. “I thought a bottle of whiskey at this establishment cost twenty-five cents.”

  “It does, but I told Maxwell I didn’t care to sell any of my barroom supply, because I needed it myself. But said he could have the expensive stuff. The Denver stock, like you’d find in a top hotel.”

  York was frowning. “You know Bliss Maxwell to be much of a drinker?”

  “I do not. I would say he’s a one or two drink-a-night man. Of course, warming your stomach in this weather is an understandable pursuit.”

  He shook his head. “Not on three-buck-a-bottle whiskey it isn’t. He buy any other provisions?”

  She nodded. “Slabs of bacon. Corned beef. Smoked sausage.” Archly she added, “You’d almost think he had guests.”

  York was ahead of her; but still—it just didn’t make sense. “Why stick around Trinidad, before we really got snowed in?”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “Well, didn’t your friend Burnham mean to kill you, not Tulley? Maybe he realized he’d missed, and stuck around for a second try. Then got himself caught in this storm.”

  He thought about that, then admitted, “Maybe. Maybe.”

  She grasped his hands with hers and something earnest, and frightened, filled her face. “Why don’t you stay here with me, Caleb. Avoid the office. Don’t go to your room at the hotel. Don’t bother prowling these streets—everybody’s inside. Stay here on this desert island with me and the rest of the stranded souls. None of the others would have the . . . amenities . . . of your accommodations.”

  Before last night, he might have accepted. Likely would have. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t visited Rita’s fancy quarters upstairs before. To him it seemed the scrape he was in with the two women in his life was damn near as dangerous as what he faced from Luke Burnham.

  He drew his hands away from hers, then touched her face and smiled; she looked awfully troubled. Afraid for him, clearly. He liked that she, too, had both a hard and soft side. He finished the hot toddy. Rose.

  “I have a paycheck to earn,” he said.

  He was getting into the frock coat when she was at his side. “If you get yourself killed, you lummox, I’ll never speak to you again.”

  “Sounds fair.” He put his hat on, not bothering with knotting it on with a muffler, then kissed her on the forehead and went out into the frigid whiteness that was Trinidad’s Main Street.

  Some of the boardwalk was cleared of drifting, parts weren’t, but he was able to make his way to the livery stable in only twice the five minutes it would usually have taken.

  The owner, burly blacksmith Lem Hansen, his hair a dirty yellow, his face a red-cheeked oval, was dressed no differently than any day—long-sleeve flannel shirt, canvas trousers with a leather apron, and a hat so misshapen its original form was unfathomable.

  Though the blacksmith’s clothing was plenty warm normally, today it would have left him frozen in minutes; but he had a heating stove going, and every stall had a horse in it, and the area outside the stalls was crowded with horses as well. Any horse in town whose owner didn’t have access to a barn was paying to keep it here.

  The blizzard was a boon to the livery.

  York got the Burnham circular from his pocket and unfolded it and held it up for the blacksmith to consider. “Ever see this man? That scarred eye is an ungodly milky thing to behold. You wouldn’t forget it.”

  Hansen didn’t have to study the poster. “Yeah, I seen him. Confederate jacket, worn to hell. Three others with ’em. A skinny one what coughed. Two others who looked meaner than a foam-mouth dog.”

  “That’s them.”

  “They kept their horses with me a while. They kept themselves with me, too. Slept in the stalls with their animals.”

  “When was this?”

  Lem thought about it. “Not yesterday. The two days before that, it was. Nights, I mean. They lit out night ’fore last and I gathered they was about to start a considerable ride. It were already snowin’. Not as bad as it got. But snowin’.”

  So the night before last the Burnham gang had ridden out. What had their destination been? Mexico, chased by the threat of a storm? Las Vegas, maybe? To what purpose?

  York asked, “You see which way they were headed?”

  The blacksmith nodded, and pointed to the road that Main Street curved into past the livery, yawning north, where the horizon was home to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

  Likely Las Vegas then. But that was a hell of a ride in these conditions.

  “Thank you, Lem,” York said.

  He paused to stroke the dappled gelding and say a few soothing words to the animal, which had done so well for him, and not just in this instance.

  “Always a pleasure to serve the law, Sheriff,” Lem said with no enthusiasm and a nod. “Be they a reward?”

  “Yes,” York said. “And I intend to collect it.”

  The sheriff had already promised Cesar at the cantina a share and wasn’t inclined toward further generosity.

  The sheriff’s next stop was the telegraph office, or it would have been, had he found the place open. Instead he faced a locked door with a message posted on its glass: “LINES DOWN.”

  So if the Burnham gang had gone to Las Vegas to take down the bank, say, or to some other town to do the same. . . or to rob some prosperous business or saloon, somewhere within riding distance . . . there was no way of knowing it, with the telegraph lines down.

  He pressed on to the First Bank of Trinidad, where all was quiet. No lamps on, doors locked, no sign of life. Closed for business in the blizzard, no bothering with a posted message to that effect. Some things were just understood.

  If Rita was right, Bliss Maxwell—apparently an honest local merchant—was playing host to four dangerous outlaws, holed up to wait out the storm and then, possibly, pick up where they left off . . .

  . . . and shoot the sheriff instead of his deputy, this time.

  York found that somewhat improbable, but another possibility tickled at his brain. What if Maxwell, in another, less honest life, had known Burnham? Perhaps ridden with him either in Quantrill’s raiders or Burnham’s first postwar gang, waylaying stagecoaches. In such a circumstance, the saddle shop man might have been coerced, essentially blackmailed, into providing a hideout for the current gang. A place to h
ole up if, for example, they had ridden to Las Vegas to raid the bank or some other substantial target.

  It was guesswork, but rang true to him.

  Intending to first check out Maxwell’s living quarters above the saddle shop, York made a discovery out in back of the small barnlike structure that served as a workshop attached to the main building. Seemingly abandoned back there was a buckboard, its wagon box empty but for snow that had filled it up, its yoke unhitched and anchoring it.

  York looked the wagon over, and saw words carved in, under the front between seat and toe board, saying JAMESON RANCH. That was one of the small ranches near town. What was its wagon doing here?

  Then he noticed something else, not far from the buckboard. This was a part of Main that had nothing in back of it but vacant lots and scrubby desert stretching beyond, at least when it wasn’t covered in white. A pile of snow, without the natural look of a drift or bank, had something leading to it.

  Tiny spots of red.

  He knelt over the spots, little droplets of scarlet spreading and soaking the snow, and suspected at once that violence had been done here. He was right to suspect this, but could not know that these spots had been left by a lunger in a coughing fit.

  Nonetheless, the small red splotches, so stark against the white, seemed to lead to that pile of snow, which York used his gloved hands to paw away. This didn’t take long before some actual violence was revealed, or at least the aftermath of same.

  A man in a nice black suit—no overcoat—lay on his back, as still as if he’d been frozen there. But that wasn’t the case.

  Bliss Maxwell—staring at the sky with snowflakes flocking his eyes, his mouth open as if words wanted out—had spilled far less blood than the crimson dots that had led York to him, surprisingly.

  Surprisingly because Maxwell’s throat had been cut.

  Ear to ear.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Twenty minutes before his dead body was discovered by Sheriff Caleb York, Bliss Maxwell was playing gracious host to his four guests.

  Luke Burnham and his boys—Jake Warlow, Moody Fender, and Ned Sivley—were seated at the kitchen table in Maxwell’s well-furnished quarters above the saddle shop. They were eating the fare Maxwell had prepared for them—flapjacks and bacon and, again, whiskey-laced coffee.

  Maxwell didn’t join them in the fare. He’d had a bad night, entirely sleepless, and if his guests had been at all observant they would have noticed their host’s red eyes and dark circles.

  This scheme Luke Burnham had outlined the evening before, and pulled him into, had denied Maxwell of slumber. After thinking it through, turning it over and over in his mind, he finally came to a decision—he must find a way to hit the brake on this runaway wagon.

  But former general store proprietor Bliss Maxwell was, if anything, a salesman. And today he would have to make the sale of his lifetime.

  The room was heavy with the aroma of melting fat, as more bacon sizzled and fried. He tended it and said, “Gentlemen, I beg you to reconsider. What you propose to do today is ill-advised. It’s not the presence of Caleb York in this town that prompts me to say this, although that presents a danger in and of itself. No, it’s the position you have put me in.”

  Burnham bit the end off a piece of crisp bacon, and chewed as he said, “What position is that, Silas?”

  Maxwell had given up on getting his old comrade to stop calling him by his real first name.

  The merchant swiveled from the stove to them. “Luke, if you take down this bank, the Trinidad bank, it will undoubtedly come back on me. We were seen together—Jake, Moody, Ned, and me—at the Victory.”

  Calling the gang members by their first names was an attempt to make him seem more an ally.

  “And,” Maxwell continued, “the four of us were at the cantina together.” His chin came up. “I didn’t mention this before, but York came around here, the day after his deputy was shot, sniffing around.”

  “No,” Burnham said with a frown, pouring rye into his coffee. “You didn’t mention that.”

  “Which makes it a certainty,” Maxwell said, pressing on, “in the wake of a bank robbery, that the sheriff will make a return visit to check up on me. He may well suspect that I’m billeting you.”

  “Silas, old friend,” Burnham said, after a sip of coffee and rye, “hasn’t it got through to you yet that I would like nothing better than to have Caleb York knock on that door?”

  Maxwell came over and stood next to the seated outlaw leader. “York is no fool. If he thinks there’s the slightest chance four desperados, one of whom is out to get him, are holed up here? He won’t come alone. He’ll come the way you entered Lawrence, Kansas—in force. After raising a posse. Might even burn us out—he’s as ruthless as you, Luke, in his way.”

  Fender, frowning as he cut a syrup-drenched flapjack with a fork, said to the outlaw leader, “Your old buddy Silas is an excitable type, Luke. Tell him I won’t put up with havin’ my digestion trifled with.”

  But Warlow said, “Luke, he’s right about York, and you damn well know it. What say we don’t burrow in here till the snow stops and melts some. It’s not comin’ down as hard now. We could hit that bank and ride out today. There’s two horses down in that little barn, and sure as hell plenty of saddles. We can grab a couple more rides from the livery on our way out.”

  “You grow yourself a short memory, Jake?” Burnham asked. “You don’t recall our several jaunts in this winter weather, last few days? No. We stay here. We’ll be ready for anything York might bring.”

  A small mutiny seemed to be brewing, though, as Sivley said, “I think we’re invitin’ ruin if we dig in here, after hearin’ what Maxwell says. I say we hit the bank and vamoose. You can come back after you spend some time down in sunny May-hee-co, when Caleb York has forgot all about you and us.”

  The others agreed, and for several minutes the three men made it clear to their boss they weren’t staying.

  Back tending his bacon at the stove, Maxwell let this go on a while, then said, “Fellas . . . you don’t even know if that bank has enough money in it worth stealing.”

  Burnham, scowling, said, “Banks always got money, and money’s always worth stealing.”

  “I’m going to respectfully hold you,” Maxwell said, turning to them again, “to the original plan. To what we originally agreed upon. You have twenty thousand dollars. I am willing to forgo my cut and yet share my lodgings with you until the blizzard subsides and you feel it’s safe to move on.”

  “Do you,” Burnham said flatly.

  “I do. I have laid in generous provisions for your stay. That whiskey you’re pouring into your Arbuckles’ cost me three dollars a bottle, and all of that, and the roof over your head and the warm beds to sleep in, are yours. No charge. No cut.”

  Fender, frowning so hard it made him look even more stupid, said, “Why the hell would you do that?”

  Maxwell came over and leaned in, putting his hands on the table. “Because if you are caught, gents, I will be swept up in it. And if you get away, after hitting the Trinidad bank, my having been seen with you could easily land me in jail as an accomplice to a crime spree that your boss man here informs me has already included four murders.”

  Burnham growled, “You weren’t in on them.”

  “I’m part of all this, Luke. I could hang for those killings, even if you never do. And even if no charges are brought against me, the suspicion would remain. I’d be finished in Trinidad. The business I’ve invested my life savings in, and worked so hard to build here, would be tainted. Eventually driven out of existence. That is why I would do that.”

  Maxwell lurched away from the table and went over to look out the window over the sink. He stared out at endless white. Trembling. With anger. With fear.

  Quietly he said, “You’ll haul that banker over there to unlock that safe and it’ll make a witness of him, if you leave him behind, or you’ll kill him to avoid it . . . and either way you make something h
orrible out of my future.”

  Behind him, Luke Burnham raised a calming hand to his boys, who were all frowning, with Fender halfway out of his chair till his boss gestured him back down.

  The outlaw leader rose and walked over to the slump-shouldered Maxwell, whose hands were against the sink, bracing himself, as if he might otherwise collapse.

  “You talk sense, Silas,” Burnham said. “We’ll do it your way.”

  Maxwell let out air, looking up, and his expression in the glass of the window showed his relief. And then the glass revealed the quick movement of Burnham gripping the merchant’s hair in his left hand while the right hand swung around with something steel and gleaming.

  The last coherent thought Maxwell had on this earth was that the steel, gleaming thing was a Bowie knife.

  The cut throat initially sent blood splashing against the window glass, then Burnham held the head of the dying man over the sink to let more blood spill over the drain. At the table, Fender was grinning while Sivley and Warlow absently worked on their breakfasts.

  Burnham dragged the corpse away from the sink; no blood was flowing now—dead men, Burnham knew from long experience, did not bleed. He dropped the late merchant to the floor, where the body landed like a sack of grain that had been poorly aimed at the back of a wagon.

  “Ned,” Burnham said, nodding to the pump attached to the sink, “wash that out. Moody, get something to clean off that window glass.”

  Fender, of course, was irritated. “Jesus, Luke! Why didn’t you just plug him? I didn’t hire on for no damn house-cleaning chores.”

  “Maybe you never noticed,” Burnham said, “but guns make noise. Even in a blizzard, folks react to a gunshot. Whereas a blade may be messy, but it sure don’t call attention to itself.”

  Fender and Sivley looked at each other, the latter shrugged, then so did the former, and they got to work with those chores.

  Then Burnham went over and got himself more bacon and coffee, skipping the rye this time. He sat and sipped and chewed and thought.

  When the sink and windows had been cleaned up, Sivley and Fender—bloody towels in hand—turned and looked at their boss.