A Quiet, Little Town

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  Red looked bewildered. “But why me?”

  “Because I can’t trust the law, but I believe I can trust you. Red. You’re a shotgun messenger, and that means you’re a brave and resolute man who’s good with a gun and can care of himself.”

  “Lady, I’m only brave part of the time,” Red said. “Maybe half the time.”

  “And the other half?”

  “If the other half was melted down it couldn’t be poured into a gunfight.”

  Augusta smiled. “Then I’ll be happy to accept the help of even half a brave man.”

  “What’s in the letter?” Red said.

  “I think you should read it. Della Stark, the daughter of the rancher Gideon Stark, sent it to Allan Pinkerton. But Mr. Pinkerton was very sick from gangrene, so he handed over this investigation to me before he died.”

  “I don’t think that the daughter of Gideon Stark, one of the richest men in Texas, needs to ask anybody for help,” Red said.

  “She does if she suspects her father or some other party could be scheming to murder the man she loves,” Augusta said.

  “Let me see the letter,” Red said. “But I ain’t making any promises.”

  Augusta passed the letter over. It was fairly short and to the point.

  My dear Mr. Pinkerton,

  My name is Miss Della Stark, the daughter of Gideon Stark, the Texas rancher and I am writing to you because I need your help on a matter of the greatest moment. To put matters in a nutshell, I am in love with a man, a physician, but my father demands that I wed another, like himself a wealthy rancher and a hidalgo in his native Old Mexico.

  My father has recently informed me that if I meet with the doctor again, I will be locked in my room at the ranch until I agree to marry his choice of husband, ere it take years of imprisonment. By a most singular circumstance, one of my father’s drovers let slip in my presence that my physician’s life is now not worth “a plugged nickel.”

  Mr. Pinkerton, I fear a terrible murder is about to take place, and I beg you to do all in your power to prevent it.

  Yours Respectfully,

  Della Stark

  Red passed the letter back to Augusta, who took it and said, “The letter was mailed from here, the Alpenrose Inn. Miss Stark reserves a room for overnight stays when she visits town.”

  “Where is the doctor?” Red said.

  “I made some enquiries, and there are three doctors in Fredericksburg,” Augusta said. “I’ll know more when I speak with Miss Stark tomorrow.”

  Red smiled. “Do you really think a highly respected rancher like Gideon Stark is going to send some of his boys to punch the ticket of a small-town sawbones? For God’s sake, he’d be looking at a noose or twenty-to-life in Huntsville.”

  “Red, the nineteenth century is quickly coming to a close, and the old ways are dying fast,” Augusta said. “Men like Stark no longer do their own killing. He’ll hire a professional so that the doctor’s death can’t be traced to him. I’m sure he doesn’t want his daughter to know that he was responsible for the murder of her lover.”

  “I’m pretty sure she’d figure out that her old man was behind the killing,” Red said.

  “But she’d never know for sure,” Augusta said. “And that alone would probably prevent her hating him for the rest of his life.”

  “Or she’d know, but couldn’t prove it,” Red said.

  “Either way, Gideon Stark gets what he wants. The doctor is dead, his daughter marries a rich hidalgo, two enormous ranges are joined in holy matrimony, and Stark becomes one of the richest and most powerful men in the country. He’s a big man who wants to be bigger, and such an alliance could take him all the way to the presidency of the United States.”

  “You sure credit ol’ Gideon with a sight of ambition,” Red said.

  Augusta said, “From what I’ve heard and read about Stark, he gets what he wants, and he wants it all. He takes on all comers and makes the big operators toe the line and the small ones bunch up and eventually surrender. Some men lust after wealth, others after women, but Gideon Stark lusts after power. Not too long ago north of the Perdinales there were eight major ranches and a dozen smaller ones. Today, there’s only one, the Stark Cattle Company. The rest were bought out, burned out, or just fled the country. The law turned a blind eye. They knew who and what they were dealing with, and no one wanted to take him on.”

  “Seems like the Texas Rangers would’ve shown an interest,” Red said. “Maybe they still would.”

  “The Rangers had their hands full, first with Comanches and now with the Apaches,” Augusta said. “Meanwhile Gideon Stark enforces his own brand of law in most of Central Texas, and the Rangers are happy to let him be. You don’t bite the hand that helps feed you.”

  “Augusta, where is this going?” Red said. “You asked for my help, but I can’t see that there’s anything I can do for you.”

  “There’s one thing you can do for me, Red. Make sure that Della Stark’s doctor stays alive.”

  Red’s spine stiffened. “Augusta”—he noticed she wore earrings, plain little gold hoops—“that ain’t gonna happen. Me and Buttons will leave this burg as soon as we sign up passengers. Sooner, if Buttons decides we should just cannonball back to San Angelo empty.”

  “Speak to Buttons, Red. Give me a couple of days.”

  “Why? I mean, it could be weeks, months, before a hired gun shows up to shoot the doc,” Red said. “Heck, even Sheriff Ritter can handle that.”

  “Red, I think the killers are already here,” Augusta said. “I believe the doctor doesn’t have days or months. Right now, I think his life can be measured in hours.”

  “What do you want me to do? Hang around the doc’s surgery with a Greener scattergun in my hands? His patients would love that, huh?”

  “I want you to save a man’s life, but I don’t know how you should do it,” Augusta said. “I’m pretty new to this detective business myself. In fact, this is my first case.”

  “Your first case.” Red groaned. “And you plan to brace one of the most . . .”

  “Powerful men in Texas. Yes, I know. But I won’t stand idly by and see an innocent girl stampeded to further her father’s ambitions.”

  “You said the killers are already here. Why do you think there’s more than one? How many hired guns does it take to put a bullet in a pill-roller?”

  “More than one if Gideon Stark wants his killing done right,” Augusta said. “Nothing must tie him to the doctor’s murder, so he’s hired the best professionals he could find, men who do their job and leave no loose ends behind them.”

  “Who are these men?” Red said. “Heck, Augusta, if they’re as good as you say, me and my Greener may not be enough.”

  “I have my suspicions, but I can’t prove them, at least not yet,” Augusta said. “And yes, Red, you may not be enough. Maybe a regiment of infantry wouldn’t be enough.”

  “I can’t bring the exact entry in the rule book to mind, but since you were a fare-paying passenger of the Abe Patterson and Son Stage and Express Company and may be again, I believe it’s my duty to help you all I can,” Red said. “I’ll talk to Buttons about it.”

  “I hope he’ll give you good advice,” Augusta said.

  “Well, I’ve never known Buttons Muldoon to say a foolish thing,” Red said. “Of course, I’ve never known him to say a wise one, either. But maybe he’ll come up with a solution to your problem.”

  Augusta rose to her feet. In her white dress, she looked like a column of fine marble. “One last thing, Red,” she said. “If I don’t make it . . .”

  “What do you mean, if you don’t make it?”

  “If I’m killed, please tell the Pinkerton agency that I did my job. There are other female detectives, and I don’t want to let them down.”

  “You won’t get killed,” Red said. “I’ll see to that.”

  “You will tell them? Red, please, if it happens, I want you to tell them.”

  Red saw seriousness
and a trace of fear in the woman’s face, and he suddenly felt woefully inadequate. “I’ll tell them,” he said. It was all he could manage.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It was not the staff of Moses that had been removed from its case and laid on the hotel room table, but a Marlin-Ballard sporting rifle in .32-40 caliber fitted with a thirty-one-and-a-half-inch brass telescopic sight manufactured by the famous L. N. Mogg Company of Marcellus, New York. Now gleaming in the light of an oil lamp, the rifle had been custom made for Helmut Klemm, the German sniper assassin, famous for head shots at distance. The Marlin-Ballard had accounted for twenty-seven victims, including an Austrian crown prince, a rich British merchant banker, and an eighty-seven-year-old dowager French countess with a pile of money and an impatient heir who’d feared that the old bitch would never die.

  Klemm, a blond, blue-eyed man of ice, realized he was slumming on the American frontier, but the money had been too good to refuse, and anyway, he planned to retire to his idyllic Bavarian estate once the job was done.

  Speaking in the halting English that all three of his henchmen understood, though the Arab Salman el Salim claimed the hated tongue scalded his mouth, the Irishman Sean O’Rourke said, “Ernest Walzer made it clear that we split the kill fee four ways, no matter who pulls the trigger. Does that still stand?” There was a murmur of agreement, and O’Rourke said, “The mark is an easy target, but afterward our getaway has to be clean. I mean spotless. After the doctor is dead, we’ll head to Austin and then catch a train to Houston and from there to New Orleans, where we can take a ship for England.”

  “Can we trust Walzer?” the big Russian Kirill Kuznetsov said. He was a man prone to bouts of deep, Slavic depression and dangerous beyond belief when a black mood was on him. “The old Jew didn’t need four of us.”

  “Yes, we can trust him. We’re his insurance,” Klemm said. “The client wants the kill done right. Where one may fail, four will not.”

  Kuznetsov tried a futile smile, his wide mouth stretching humorlessly, and said, “I can walk out of here now, break the doctor’s neck with my bare hands, and return to hotel.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that.”

  O’Rourke shook his head. “And risk bringing the law down on us. No, Kuznetsov, this is a quiet town, and the doctor must be killed at night when all its citizens are in bed. We’ll have horses ready, and as soon as we nail the mark’s skin to the wall, we’ll ride out of here. Let them blame it on Apaches like they did in San Angelo after we took care of those two idiots.”

  Klemm smiled and said, “Stover Timms and Lem Harlan were their names, remember?”

  “Squealed like pigs and begged for mercy,” Kuznetsov said. He pretended to spit on the floor. “Pah, they were not men. Who is foolish enough to ask Kirill Kuznetsov for mercy?”

  The Arab Salman el Salim spoke for the first time. “There are four of us, and all our hands must be bloodied. No one walks away from this without taking part in the kill.”

  “I agree with those words,” Kuznetsov said. “The payment from Walzer will be shared, and so must the killing.”

  “Yes, but silently is the way,” O’Rourke said. “Klemm, you are a rifleman, and I use the pistol.” He took his revolver from the pocket of his monkish robe, an Adams Third Model in .450 caliber. O’Rourke had carried the pistol as a British army officer until he was drummed out of the Inniskilling Dragoons for embezzling mess funds. He’d managed to salvage his cavalry saber and sidearm, both private purchases. The sword was long gone, but he retained the Adams and had racked up twenty-five kills with the weapon, resisting all temptations to switch to a much superior Colt or Webley. “One thing these weapons share is that they go bang when we pull the trigger. It is for that reason we will kill with the knife.”

  “Easy,” Kuznetsov said. “I have a knife, and on several occasions, I’ve used the blade before.”

  El Salim nodded. “The knife is as quiet as a viper’s whisper.” He drew a finger across his throat. “And as quick as its tongue.”

  “An effortless kill,” Klemm said. “And the easiest money we’ll ever make.”

  “When?” Kuznetsov said, looking at O’Rourke.

  “Come the morn, we hire horses and tell the livery stable that we’re riding out to look for a patch of land suitable for the building of a mission to house the holy staff of Moses,” the Irishman said. “Then, for the next day or two we lie low . . .” he smiled . . . “spending our time in prayer, so people get used to having monks in town. On the chosen day we make the kill and leave the town again, but this time we never come back.”

  “It seems like a sound plan,” Klemm said.

  “And how is your poor belly, Brother Helmut?” O’Rourke said.

  “Was is das? My belly doesn’t hurt,” Klemm said, scowling.

  “It does. It hurts like heck and in the morning, you will let Dr. Ben Bradford treat you for it,” O’Rourke said. “That way we do two things . . . we study the layout of his place and when you show up, groaning in pain, he won’t suspect that we’re there to kill him.”

  “That the Russian and the Arab are there to kill him,” Kuznetsov said. “O’Rourke, when you and the German stick a knife into him, he’ll already be dead.”

  “Ah, Brother Kirill, you’re a lovely man,” O’Rourke said, smiling. “Thanks for pointing that little detail out to us. So are we settled on the plan?”

  The other three exchanged glances and then Klemm said, “Yes, now let’s get it done and soon we’ll become men again instead of monks.”

  * * *

  The delivery of Mrs. Nancy Brownlee’s baby was routine, but she’d spent ten hours in labor, and a crescent moon rode high in the sky by the time Dr. Ben Bradford returned to his home and surgery on Crockett Street and without lighting a lamp flopped into a chair, exhausted.

  The doctor’s parlor was small, cramped, two brown leather wingback chairs and a Queen Anne sofa taking up most of the room. A threadbare Persian rug lay diagonally across the wood floor. Against one wall stood a mahogany bookshelf crowded with medical volumes and a copy of Texas Laws on Wills, Trusts and Estates, and on another a print of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath, a present from a horse trader whose tastes ran to Junoesque ladies. The only window was high and narrow, shaded by a ruby-red velvet curtain. It was a dark, masculine room that smelled of pipe tobacco, leather, and the sharp odor of carbolic acid leaking from the surgery. But Dr. Bradford thought there were times when the room was radiant with light . . . when Della Stark moved through it like a candle flame.

  Ben Bradford was the masculine opposite of Della’s dazzling beauty. He was a serious young man with intelligent and solemn brown eyes, an inch above average height and not at all handsome. But dressed in his physician’s black garb, he presented a solid, respectable appearance that reassured his patients and made women think of him not as an ardent lover, but as a rock-steady husband who would support his wife and family and always provide a shoulder to cry on. Starry-eyed Della Stark adored him. But years later, Buttons Muldoon would recall Dr. Ben Bradford as “the most boring man in Texas” . . . and no one argued with him.

  Bradford took off his elastic-sided boots and stood. He divested himself of his frock coat and carried it with him to his bedroom. Then the feeling hit him. Creepy. Full of malice. As though he was being watched by someone with cruel, hostile eyes . . . the eyes of a predator. But that was impossible. The house was dark, the curtains drawn, and no one could see inside. The doctor was not a particularly brave man, but neither was he a coward. He tossed his coat on the bed and stepped into the patients’ waiting room where he kept a large rolltop desk. He retrieved a bunch of keys from his pocket, opened the desk, and then took a four-shot Colt Cloverleaf House Pistol in. 41 caliber from a drawer. Bradford had bought the little revolver for protection when he made late-night calls but had never felt the need to carry it in a law-and-order town like Fredericksburg. He checked the loads and went back to the bedroom, pulled aside the curtain, and stared into
the night. There was a small barn behind the house where Bradford kept his mare and buggy and beyond that a vacant lot with a FOR SALE sign. The thin moonlight did nothing to illuminate the scene, but everything seemed quiet. The doctor left the bedroom and went into the kitchen, where he opened the back door and stepped into darkness. The night was still. There was no breeze and nothing moved. A circuit of the house made with gun in hand revealed nothing except a tiny calico cat who watched the human with feigned disinterest as she passed.

  Dr. Ben Bradford lowered his revolver and stared at the sky and its tumult of stars. He felt slightly ashamed for acting like an old maiden aunt who hears a rustle in every bush.

  Yet...

  The feeling of being watched, stalked, studied did not leave him. He felt like the deer who feels the presence of the wolf. An intelligent man, Bradford knew his imagination wasn’t playing tricks on him . . . his instincts warned him that someone, somewhere, wished him harm.

  He felt a sudden jolt of alarm.

  My God, was Gideon Stark so enraged that he was seeing his daughter that the quick-tempered rancher had arrived in town with fire in his eyes and a shotgun in his hands?

  Bradford immediately dismissed the thought. Gideon may disapprove of Della’s choice of a beau, but the wild old days were long gone, and Gideon was more likely to send a cease-and-desist letter from his lawyer than stoop to violence.

  The doctor shook his head, baffled. Then why did he fell this way . . . so threatened?

  He had no answer for that question . . . and that night he tossed and turned in uneasy sleep, the Colt under his pillow.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “My daughter has a closet full of clothes, but she says she has nothing to wear,” Gideon Stark said. “Manuel, you will see that Della talks only to dress-shop ladies. Do you understand?”

  The gun vaquero nodded. “Sí, señor.”

  “No shooting the breeze with doctors and the like, understand?”

  “Sí, señor.”