Canyon of the Long Shadows

by Carl Dane

  He screamed and tried to pull away, but that made it hurt more.

  Stinky and Droopy poured through the open door.

  I ignored them and concentrated on twisting Davis’s earlobe.

  Stinky grabbed my arms from behind and I played along and allowed him to pull my elbows behind me.

  Droopy went to work on my stomach. I let him have a couple of shots and pretended they hurt.

  “No,” Tremaine said. “Let me handle this.”

  Davis spoke through clenched teeth.

  “You’ll do what I tell you when I tell you.”

  Davis wiped the stream of blood from under his nose and shoved Droopy aside.

  He wanted me for himself.

  He wanted to beat the location of the money out of me, which promised to be a long ordeal considering I actually didn’t know where Carmody had hidden it, and then he wanted me to die, but not too quickly.

  But first he just wanted to beat me for the fun of it.

  Stinky locked his arms more tightly around my elbows, drawing my shoulders back.

  Droopy was reduced to the status of a confused spectator. His hand hovered near his gun, too, but he was unsure of what to do.

  There were two other exposed guns in the room. Stinky wore one, very low on his thigh, in the style of men who have never been in a gunfight but who like people to think that they have.

  Tremaine wore his with the butt at wrist level in a utilitarian holster. Tremaine looked worried now. Presumably, his payoff depended on keeping me alive until I coughed up the money. He had a job to do and now his boss was in the way. Literally, because Davis’s bulk was between me and Tremaine.

  Davis snarled. His lips drew back and his face twisted into a mask of hatred as he let out a scream of rage that came from the ground up.

  He drew back a meaty, square fist.

  I was hoping he’d go for my gut first, and he obliged.

  It hurt, but I twisted with it and deflected some of the impact, and more importantly I had an excuse to double over.

  I forced myself to wait. In order for this work, it had to unfold all at once, and I had to strike at the last, the very last, the exquisitely last moment.

  Chapter 50

  Stinky started pulling me back so my head would come up and Davis could work on my gut some more.

  I sprang up as hard as I could and flung my head back. Stinky was a tall man, which was convenient because the back of my head hit him square on the nose. I could feel it crush and hear the snap.

  Stinky screamed and I felt his hands go to his face, and then I reached back and drew his gun.

  He wore it too low, but with his height it was at a perfect spot for me; all I had to do was move my hand back an extra few inches and there it was.

  It was a nice gun, too. It melted right into my hand and slid out of the holster so quickly that I could hear the hiss of metal on leather.

  Of course it felt nice. I realized that it was mine. The aromatic fucker had stolen it after I’d been knocked out in Elmira’s office.

  It was a beautiful gun, particularly right now, as it was pointed directly at Gates’s forehead.

  To my left, Droopy began to move.

  He’d made the decision to draw but thought about it too long, so I had time to slice the edge of my hand across his throat. His eyes bulged in eloquent panic as he clawed at his crushed airway.

  I grabbed Davis by the hair and spun him around. When you have control of the head, the body generally follows and I was able to edge out of the cell, bulldogging Davis along and keeping him as a shield between me and Tremaine.

  For the moment, I had the extra ace.

  Tremaine was in the employ of Davis, and thus had nothing to gain and everything to lose by killing him.

  I, on the other hand, had a remote interest in keeping Davis alive for his utility as a human shield, but if he were killed I’d not shed a tear and in fact wouldn’t really be much worse off. It would be me and Tremaine, pretty much the way things stood with Gates alive, and now I had a gun.

  Tremaine had no option, at least for the moment.

  Without taking his eyes off me, Tremaine used his left hand to flip my desk up on its end, demonstrating considerable strength. It was solid oak and heavy, as I’d learned when I’d dragged it closer to the window so I could get a little more daylight.

  The desk rocked a couple of times and then settled; it looked bigger from this orientation, standing almost six feet tall now.

  Tremaine took cover behind it.

  I gave a yank to Gates’s hair and he half-stumbled, moving another pace toward the door.

  Gates held a hand out toward the desk.

  “Help me.”

  Tremaine had a decision to make, and fast. So did I.

  Stinky and Droopy were out of commission. Droopy was possibly out of the game for good; I’d connected pretty solidly with his larynx.

  Gillis and Weed were, for the moment, frozen in terror to the right of the door. They weren’t openly carrying but could be concealing.

  Tremaine was behind the desk, and like me, he’d have to do something soon.

  His problem was that I was hiding behind the considerable bulk of Judge Gates Davis. Even a professional like Tremaine could not expect to emerge from behind the desk, shoot me in an inadvertently exposed part of my body, and somehow rescue Davis. Even if Tremaine somehow managed to make his bullets curve around Davis and shoot me in the head, I’d mostly likely kill Davis by pulling the trigger in my death reflex.

  But my problem was that I couldn’t hold this position forever, wearing Davis like a blubbery suit of armor. Suppose I managed to work my way out to the street, what then? I had no idea if Davis had other goons in town, and in any event with Tremaine stalking me I’d be dead the minute I left to run for cover or mount a horse.

  I could try to shoot through the desk. It was very heavy oak, but I don’t think the top would stop a bullet, though it might slow or deflect it to the point where it wouldn’t do fatal damage. But there were drawers full of papers and other things, and multiple layers of even thin material can slow or stop a bullet.

  So maybe a shot through the center, where there was only one drawer above the kneehole of the upended desk, would penetrate, but it was a gamble.

  But if I opened up, Tremaine knew he was likely to be killed if he didn’t fire back, so he would shoot regardless of whether Davis was cut down in the crossfire.

  Or Tremaine might just say to hell with it right now and drill both of us and ride out of this godforsaken town that seems to draw trouble like a dead horse draws buzzards.

  There have been times when I’d had the same thought cross my mind.

  Now, just to further complicate matters, Gillis started moving. I risked a flash glance and saw that he was slowly brushing back his jacket, his palm out. The damn fool probably had a gun stuck in his waistband in the hollow of his back.

  I’d have to shoot Gillis in the head soon, but that would mean taking my attention away from Tremaine. Shooting him would require a 90-degree pivot.

  Weed … well, he was a wild card. He didn’t strike me as the gun-toting type, not in the Gillis mode, anyway. I doubt if Gillis had ever fired a shot in anger, but I’m sure he liked impressing the doves when he undressed and made a show of leaving his iron on the nightstand.

  But now Weed was making a move. I heard the rustle of clothing before I saw him break for his briefcase.

  I pulled Davis up to me nice and tight, pressing my left side against him so I wouldn’t have to pivot as far when I shot Gillis or Weed or both.

  And then Weed came up with something in his right hand.

  Chapter 51

  The purpose of training is to keep you from having to waste time thinking. In my business, if you think too long you’re likely to wind up with wings and a harp, so everything has to be automatic.

  I’d never been to the Academy, but Munro had, and he was an absolute evangelist about avoiding distraction. He
once disciplined my entire platoon, four squads of ten men each, during training because a rifleman had swatted a mosquito from the back of his neck. That moment of sudden movement and inattention, Munro had bellowed, not only could give away a sniper’s position but was also one less instant when the rifleman’s attention was focused on the enemy.

  If was four in the afternoon, and the squad had been training for about an hour. There was no action nearby, and everyone was looking forward to dinner and a night’s rest.

  Munro made all twelve men in the squad look for the mosquito, telling us we couldn’t break until we found it.

  After all, he said, that mosquito was clearly the most important thing in the world to us. After all, one of us had taken his attention off the enemy – armed men sworn to kill us – to swat it.

  We never found the bug and didn’t get to break until after midnight.

  I can’t say for sure if all of the platoon lived through the war because we kind of came and went, but I know that I most improbably lived to middle age by never again letting my attention wander during battle.

  So had I not been trained in combat, I most certainly would have lost my concentration and asked Judge Percival Weed why he was holding a gavel.

  Chapter 52

  Weed held the gavel in both hands and rained down blows on Gillis’s head.

  It wasn’t a very big gavel and Weed wasn’t very strong, but the device made an impressive klop on Gillis’s skull after his hat was knocked off and he covered up and sunk to the ground.

  “You son of a bitch,” Weed said, hammering away at Gillis’s hands and head. “You told me this was all sort of legal. That I was helping stop a crooked scheme by that woman who owns the whorehouse.”

  He brought the gavel down again.

  “You said that the marshal was a crook.”

  Klop.

  “You said that hat this would help my career. And now I’m involved in kidnapping and counterfeiting.”

  Klop klop klop.

  “And you…”

  Weed was about to move in on Davis when Tremaine took advantage of the commotion and vaulted out the door.

  The man moved like the ghost of a mountain lion. He just disappeared.

  Davis roared.

  “You can’t run away like this, you fucking piece of chicken liver. I hired you to protect me from him…”

  I laid the barrel of my gun across Davis’s temple and he stopped talking and toppled like a tree.

  But Davis had a durable skull. Hard as I’d clocked him, he still managed to raise himself up on an elbow.

  I let Weed finish off the job with his little gavel.

  Chapter 53

  After I latched the inside shutters on the window and dimmed the lantern, I packed the whole sorry bunch of them, except for Weed, into the cell.

  I removed the cell key from the ring and put it in my pocket. In the spirit of pure meanness I left the ring on the floor within arm’s reach so whichever of them came to first could occupy themselves with some fruitless frustration.

  For someone who had just spent five minutes flailing with a gavel, Weed seemed remarkably composed. He wasn’t even breathing hard. What he lacked in strength he seemed to make up for endurance.

  “I can’t believe he got scared like that and ran,” Weed said. “He was supposed to be this fearsome gunfighter.”

  “He wasn’t scared and from what I know he’s nobody to mess with. He ran because he could think fast. He knew had no way to win that hand. No way that wouldn’t involve killing the man who hired him. I gather there’s a big payday for Tremaine when the curtain goes down on this, and if Davis is dead, so is the payday. He’s out there, he may have friends, and he’s still gunning for me. My problems are just beginning.”

  “Our problems,” Weed said. “I’m no longer Gates’s lackey. Nor do I want to be. I’m a lawyer and sort of a judge and a damn good one, and I’m probably going to wind up getting disbarred and going to prison. If I wind up getting shot it won’t be the worst thing in the world from where I’m standing now.”

  I heard a moan from somewhere in the pile of bodies in the cell and noted that Davis was starting to come to. Gillis was in a seated position on the cot, back against the wall and chin on chest, and his eyes were fluttering. Stinky lay curled up on the floor clutching his face and Droopy had not yet moved.

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Can you shoot?”

  Weed picked up the .41 that I’d taken off Gillis. It was a nasty little five-shot model with no trigger guard called a Swamp Angel, the same name given to some rifles and cannons for reasons that have always eluded me.

  “I never have,” he said, waving the gun in vague directions that included the proximity of my head, “but the process seems straightforward.”

  I wrapped my fingers around the cylinder to keep the mechanism from moving and gently pulled the gun from his hand.

  “This probably isn’t the time to learn,” I said.

  Whatever I was going to do needed to be done soon.

  I heard some more stirring behind me and lowered my voice. Unless I killed them all right now, which was an unethical but admittedly alluring option, the events of the next few hours could conspire to put them back in touch with the people who would be hunting me.

  “How many other men does Tremaine have?”

  “Only one other that I’ve seen. Not gunfighter-looking. Scruffy, like the two in there. He’s older, maybe in his 50s. Big white beard. Wheezes when he talks. But yesterday I heard Davis talk about getting more men from the canyon to ride here. I don’t know if he went through with that, but I did hear him say that those Canyon creatures are very angry at you. Something about setting them on fire?”

  I ignored his question and thought about where we stood. Tremaine and Wheezy and any other allies we didn’t know about may lay siege to the place at any moment, and if Tremaine just ran out of patience he might start firing blindly through the shuttered windows, on the theory that he was bound to hit something. And there could be a contingent of outlaws with sunburns and a grudge arriving at any time.

  I remembered his considerable energy during the gavel attack, and on a hunch I asked him, “Can you run?”

  “Like a deer. I ran all sorts of races in school, especially long ones. I wasn’t much for team sports.”

  Somehow that didn’t surprise me, but it didn’t seem the time to pursue it.

  “What I’m going to ask you to do involves considerable risk,” I said. “But I’m talking like a lawyer. In plain language, it’s likely you’re going to get killed. But if we wait here, getting killed is a certainty.”

  He actually jumped up and down, like a kid who’s been chosen for a team for the first time in his life.

  “I can do it.”

  I opened the bottom drawer of the upended desk and pulled out one of the spare round-brimmed hats I favored. I would have given him the ratty one I’d worn after I lost my Boss of the Plains, but that was knocked off my head back in Elmira’s office.

  “This will give you good luck,” I said. I’m not a superstitious man, not exactly, but I’d kept this relic even though it had not one, but two bullet holes and had been trampled by a horse. As I’d emerged unscathed from both incidents, I allowed myself to speculate there may have been some supernatural powers connected with it. It was worth keeping, but not wearing. A man has to have some pride in his appearance.

  I gave him a holster that, when adjusted to the first belt-hole, barely stayed up. Against my better judgment I let him keep a revolver, the one that I remembered to retrieve from Droopy, and I left it loaded.

  “Your mission,” I said, noting how he puffed up when hearing the word, “is to draw fire and attention away from me. When we go out, run left, and run like hell. Cut in back of the buildings and keep dodging and ducking. And then get to your horse if you can. If not, steal one. And then ride to Austin and tell Munro or Harbold the story and tell them to get here yesterday.”

/>   I wrote down both addresses, moving over to write by the light of lamp on the cabinet, and it occurred to me that I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious and knew only that it had been dark when I woke up. My timepiece was missing and probably in the possession of Stinky or Droopy, but I’d only patted them down for guns.

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  He dug an expensive-looking watch out of his vest pocket and popped the cover.

  “It’s 2:37.”

  “There’ll be enough light to see by in about three-and-a-half hours. Right now, the darkness is our enemy and our friend, but we’ll know for sure what we’re up against at dawn.”

  “Do I run now?”

  “No,” I said, “I need to a minute to figure out the second part of this plan.”’

  “Well, for starters, why don’t I run out the back door?”

  I paused and vaguely waved toward the rear of the office, finishing the gesture with my palm up.

  “There isn’t a back door.”

  His eyes swept all twenty feet of the back wall several times, and then he nodded and said, “Oh.”

  I was getting a bad feeling about all this, but there was no turning back now.

  But while we were inspecting the back of the room I figured out Part Two.

  It just might work, I told myself, and if it didn’t it would give Carmody a hell of a story to tell at my funeral.

  Chapter 54

  Out of spite I made Davis take off his pants, too, even though I wouldn’t be using them.

  I also made him stuff the blanket from the cot through the bars. I wrapped it around me a couple times to add bulk.

  There was a quarter moon and it was clear, so there would be enough light to make out shapes. I was tempted to lift one of the slats on the window to gauge the light level, but didn’t want to risk drawing fire.

  Big cities and some of the bigger towns have coal-gas lamps on the streets, and some places use a couple of outdoor oil lamps burning through the night. In the backwater, though, we relied on the moon, the stars, and light spilling out from whatever building was still illuminated in the late night and early morning.