He wondered how many of his gang he’d have to kill before he managed to get safely down into Mexico.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Payne and his gang left Tucson on Wednesday morning. Jack arrived in the city on Friday morning. Soon as he arrived, he stabled his horse and went to the Sheriff’s Office.
The sheriff was a small man – Jack reckoned no more than five feet and five inches – but ramrod-straight and made of pure steel, and not a fellow to be messed with.
Jack showed the man his badge, informed him he was the deputy up in Paradise Flats, and he was after the five men who’d killed his ma and pa.
After he’d listened to the men’s descriptions, the sheriff stared Jack in the eye and said, ‘Is your intention to capture ’em and bring ’em to trial, or kill ’em?’
This was a fair question. Jack wanted to see them dead. But he’d sworn to uphold the law, so he figured he’d better allow the men the chance to give themselves up before he got around to killing them. ‘I’ll arrest ’em if I can, but I don’t suppose they’ll take too kindly to the idea of surrendering, not when they know there’s a rope waiting.’
The sheriff nodded. ‘Spoken like a lawman. Me, I’d have no qualms about you shooting every last one of ’em like the vermin they are.’
‘You seen ’em?’
‘Not personally. But I got a load of men on the payroll here in Tucson, and a whole load more deputised civilians. That’s a lot of eyes. The fellow with the beaver fur top hat is named Amos Payne. Wrong side of forty. He gave a false name when he and his men stayed at the rooming house on Carter Street. They all did. They didn’t arrive all together, but you can generally tell when a gang has split up, pretending they’re not really a gang. They give themselves away in a dozen ways, you probably know that yourself. One of my people recognized Payne from ten years ago. Said he was a mean cuss. Shot a man in Wyoming just because he didn’t like the way he was looking at him. Also said he was surprised that Payne hadn’t had his neck stretched long before now. My man said a couple of other things: Payne has a crazy way of talking, like he’s sermonizing in a pulpit. Dresses like a preacher too, all in black. Guess he thinks the top hat makes him look more impressive, what with him being so tall and lean and all. I’m told he’s about six-seven, and skinny with it. . . Seems a mite loco to me, wearing a hat like that. It’s the kind of thing people take note of. In my father’s day, a lot of men wore those beaver fur top hats. Not so many now.’
‘How come you didn’t arrest ’em?’
If the sheriff was riled by the question, he didn’t show it. ‘Me and four of my best men had to deal with a feud ten miles outside town. Two families have had a quarrel that’s been simmering away since the War Between the States. One family had a son killed fighting for the Union side, the other had a son killed fighting for the Confederates. It just so happened they decided to start killing each other the day before Payne and his gang arrived. The feud turned into a goddamn massacre. When it was over, only a couple of the grandparents were left standing. By the time I got back here, Payne and his men had long gone.’
‘You heard anything about the four men Payne was with?’
The sheriff scratched his jaw. ‘According to my people, two of ’em weren’t anything special; another was a burly fellow with a scar from mouth to ear – he acted like he was Payne’s second-in-command. And the fourth man was young, not much more than a boy. That’s about it.’
‘They go anywhere, or just stay at the rooming house all night?’ Jack thought it likely they might want to blow off a little steam while they were in town.
‘All of ’em, Payne included, visited The Lucky Horseshoe saloon. One of ’em – one of the nothing-special ones – got a little too drunk and a little too talkative for Payne’s liking, so Payne told him to go back to the rooming house. And he did, too. I guess he was too scared to argue with Payne, even full of whiskey.’
‘The Lucky Horseshoe, eh? maybe I should ask around there myself, maybe find out exactly where they’re heading in Mexico.’
‘Go ahead. But there’s one other thing. I don’t know if it was Payne or not, but something tells me it was.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘A man was killed on the street that runs around the side of the saloon, sometime around midnight. He was shot with a derringer, right through the eye.’
‘What makes you think it was Payne?’
‘I’ve met varmints like him before. It’s just the kind of thing a snake like Payne would do, is all.’
At ten o’clock in the morning, The Lucky Horseshoe already had customers. Four of the women were sitting around looking like they’d only just woken up, but they were mainly talking among themselves at a table at the back. There wasn’t much entertaining needed at that time of day, but if any of the customers needed entertainment, the women were there ready.
Jack bought a bottle of what the barman called champagne, though Jack reckoned neither the bottle nor the contents had started life anywhere near France. But that didn’t matter. The point was, the bottle said he had money, and he was willing to part with it. He took the bottle over to the women.
Jack set the bottle on the table and said, ‘That’s to help you ladies wake up. I hear champagne’s good for that.’ He’d never heard any such thing, but that didn’t matter either.
The women looked at the bottle and looked at Jack and they seemed to like the look of both.
‘Hi stranger,’ said a woman with bright yellow hair coiled into ringlets. ‘You need a little company for a while?’
‘I certainly do,’ said Jack. And then he noticed that the woman was wearing his ma’s ruby ring.
‘Why should I believe you?’ asked the woman.
They were in a room above the saloon, and Jack had finished telling the woman, whose name was Cora, about the ring she was wearing, and how it had been stolen by the men who’d killed his folks.
‘I can’t think of a reason,’ he said. ‘But I’ll pay money for the ring. You came about it fair and square I guess, and you didn’t know it was stolen. I ain’t going to take it back by force.’ He placed some banknotes on the dressing table, spread them out in a fan.
She looked at the money, looked at the ring on her finger. ‘It’s pretty,’ she said. ‘But I knew it had to be stolen. The man who gave it to me, there wasn’t any way he came by it honestly. And when he gave it to me, I could tell it didn’t mean anything to him. He didn’t have much in the way of folding money, he’d spent most of the money he’d had on whiskey. So he told me to take the ring. I could see it was real when I held it up to the light.’ She slipped off the ring and handed it to him. ‘Guess I should be noble or something and tell you to keep your money, but I’m too poor to be noble.’
‘Let’s say I’m paying you for your time,’ said Jack. ‘That’s what I’m paying you for, not the ring. That make you feel better?’
She almost smiled, but not quite. ‘A little. Thank you for saying it.’
Jack said, ‘What was he like? Anything about him I could recognize him by?’
She pondered that for a moment. ‘His nose was broke. It was crooked, pushed over to one side. Apart from that, there wasn’t anything about him worth remembering. He was like just about every other man who passes through this saloon. You forget them even before they’re out of the swinging doors.’
‘What did he call himself?’
‘Said his name was Virgil. Don’t know if that was his real name, though.’
‘Did you see him with anybody else?’
‘There were four others, arrived much the same time. They pretended they didn’t know each other, but you could tell they did, the way they acted, each of ’em trying hard not to look at the rest. I didn’t have anything to do with ’em. . . .’ Her brow creased as she tried to recall. ‘There was another man who didn’t have much about him worth remembering. And a younger one, scarce more than a boy. And a man with a nasty-looking scar from there to there. . . .’ Sh
e ran a fingernail along her cheek, leaving a white trail from mouth to ear. ‘And then there was the tall, thin man, dressed like an undertaker. Everything black, except for his white shirt. He didn’t have anything to do with the women, and we were glad about that. You get to know which are the strange ones just by looking at them, and he was a strange one sure enough. Only thing I can tell you is that Mary – one of the other girls, the one who entertained the boy – said that he said, ‘We’re heading down towards Mexico.’ She remembered that because the moment he said it, he went kind of pale and shut up quick, like he shouldn’t have said anything.’
That was all Jack got from the woman. The ring and what she’d heard about the gang heading down to Mexico, which he’d guessed anyway.
He slipped his ma’s ruby ring safely into his vest pocket, thanked the woman and left the room. He figured at first he would have to just head south, hope to pick up their two-day-old trail, trust to his luck, but then something else happened and he didn’t have to do that.
Caleb Murphy was a fool. The world is brimming with fools, but whereas most men are foolish only some of the time, Caleb’s foolishness was a way of life. Many years earlier a schoolteacher had predicted that Caleb’s foolishness would get him killed one day. She was right, but it took forty years for that prediction to come true.
And today was that day.
Caleb had spent his whole life going from one job to another, never sticking at any one thing very long. As well as being a fool, he was lazy and he was a drunk, and he didn’t mind too much about what he did to earn money, so long as he didn’t have to work too hard and it kept him in whiskey.
A few months ago he’d obtained employment in the saloon, as odd-job man and cleaner. Of course, being Caleb, this meant that most of the money he earned went straight back to the saloon.
It just so happened that at the very time Jack was in one of the upstairs rooms talking to the woman who’d been given the ruby ring, Caleb had been in the next room. He was supposed to be cleaning it, but when he heard the voices next door, he quit cleaning and pressed his ear against the paper-thin wall so he could hear the voices more clearly.
He’d remembered the five men that had visited the saloon – the man in the beaver felt top hat and the rest of them, all pretending they didn’t know each other, though even Caleb, fool among fools, could tell that they did. He’d even overheard two of them talking together when they thought nobody was around to see or hear, saying how they were heading down to ‘the old mission’ on their way to Mexico, and Caleb reckoned he knew which old mission that was.
There were two or three old missions between Tucson and the border, but the one he was thinking of was the most isolated. It was situated in a dry, sun-blasted bowl of a canyon, some fifteen miles south-west of town. Once upon a time there’d been a village there, too. But the village and the mission had been abandoned years ago, and the abode houses had crumbled into dust, leaving the mission – the only stone building there – standing all on its own in the desert, probably full of snakes and scorpions and suchlike by now.
So Caleb, fool that he was, thought that here might be an opportunity to make himself a little extra money. He could hire a mule – he didn’t own a horse, and couldn’t afford to rent one – and ride to the old mission. With luck the five men would still be there. He could warn them that someone was on their trail – a lawman maybe, or a bounty hunter – and they would be so grateful they’d give him money. Maybe enough to keep him in whiskey for a few days.
Of course, any man with an ounce of brains would have kept well clear of the whole matter, but Caleb Murphy didn’t have an ounce of brains.
Because he was a fool.
Jack Tanner left the woman’s room, the ruby ring in his vest pocket, and was heading for the stairs when he passed the door of the next room and heard the noise.
It was the sound of someone treading on a loose floorboard, then stopping abruptly because they’d realized they had made a noise, and they didn’t want to make a noise.
Why would somebody in the next room not want to make a noise? Why wouldn’t they want anybody to know they were in there? It was a saloon, and people made all kinds of noise in the rooms above saloons all times of the day and night. So why should anybody be trying hard not to make any noise?
Jack thought about the last few minutes, and his conversation with the woman, trying to recall if he’d heard anybody in the next room. He thought maybe he had, when they’d first entered the room and started talking. But then there hadn’t been any noise. He hadn’t thought about it at the time, but he thought about it now.
Somebody had been in the next room, he’d heard them. But then there’d been no noise – not because they’d left the room, but because they were being quiet.
Why were they being quiet?
Jack could think of only two reasons: they were sleeping, or they’d been listening through the wall. There might have been other reasons, but Jack couldn’t think of them.
And now whoever was in there was moving around, but moving furtively, trying not to be heard. Jack reckoned that people who’d just woken up didn’t move around furtively. They had no call to. Why should they?
So he reckoned that whoever was in that room had been listening through the wall.
Jack went down the stairs into the saloon, making sure his footfalls were good and loud, so that whoever was in the room heard him. Then he bought himself a whiskey and watched the reflection of the stairs in the mirror behind the bar.
He didn’t have to wait long. A man came down the stairs. A shabby-looking man in stained clothes. He had a ruddy face and an unkempt beard. The man went out through the swinging doors.
Jack drank his whiskey and followed.
When Caleb got to Casa Blanca Canyon, the old mission seemed to be deserted. But as he approached the building he heard a horse whinny, and shuffle its hoofs. It had been tethered inside the arched entrance.
Caleb got off his rented mule, tied the reins to a dead tree, and went through the archway, saying, ‘Anybody in here? I’m a friend. I got information for you. . . .’
The interior of the mission was dark. He could make out the shape of one single horse, still whinnying and shuffling, nothing else apart from a darker rectangle, which was the doorway to the main part of the mission.
He went through the doorway and stood there a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. There were windows set high in the wall, but these had shutters across them, so hardly any light got in. Caleb could make out rows of wooden pews, and an altar at the far end.
‘Anybody here. . . ? I’m a friend. . . .’
He felt the gun barrel against his spine, heard the click of the hammer being pulled back. A voice said, ‘Get your hands up.’
Caleb put his hands up, and the man behind him said, ‘What information?’
Caleb was scared now, so scared he forgot all about negotiating a price for the information he had. ‘There’s a man on your trail. He was at The Lucky Horseshoe, asking about you. That is, if you’re one of the five men that were there Tuesday night. . . .’
Caleb paused, waiting for the man with the gun to say something, but he didn’t. So Caleb said, ‘He told one of the women that your gang killed his ma and pa, and took his ma’s rings.’
The man behind him said nothing for a while, just kept the gun pressed into Caleb’s back.
And Caleb realized just how isolated this canyon was, nothing stirring except insects and snakes and lizards, and it occurred to him for the first time that he could be shot dead where he stood, and there’d be nobody to hear. His body could be dumped in the ruins of an adobe, or even left inside the mission, and nobody would find it till long after the meat had been picked off his bones.
‘What did he look like, this man?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Caleb. And as he said it, he thought how stupid he’d been, coming here to tell killers that a man was after them, but not knowing how they could recognize him
.
The man behind Caleb raised his gun and pressed the barrel against Caleb’s neck. ‘I asked you what he looked like.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Caleb. It was cool in the mission, much cooler than the furnace outside, but sweat popped out of his skin and ran down his face. ‘I was in the next room, listening through the wall.’
‘He sound young or old?’
‘Young, I reckon.’
‘The bitch tell him anything else?’
‘She told him that one of your gang said you were heading down to Mexico.’
The man said, ‘That it? That all you got to tell me?’
Caleb said, ‘Yes.’
‘Ain’t much, is it? Were you expecting to get paid for that?’
Caleb said, ‘I hoped maybe a few dollars. As a reward.’
The man behind him said, ‘You sure you’re not holding out on me? Maybe you got some more information, think you can bargain with it?’
Caleb, his voice high and reedy, said, ‘No, that’s everything, I swear!’
The man kept the gun pressed against the back of Caleb’s neck. ‘How did you know about this place?’
‘I heard two of you talking about going down to the old mission. I guessed it was this one.’
‘You hear a lot, don’t you? Maybe you hear a little too much. Didn’t your daddy ever tell you, you’ll live longer if you keep your eyes and ears and mouth shut?’
This seemed to require an answer, so Caleb said, ‘No, sir.’
The man with the gun said, ‘I’m inclined to believe you don’t know any more than you’re saying.’
‘I don’t,’ said Caleb. ‘I swear’
‘There’s just one more thing I want to know. Did you tell anybody you was coming here. . . ?’
And at that moment Caleb remembered how the schoolteacher had once told him that his foolishness would get him killed one day.
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