by Jory Sherman
Then rough hands grabbed his arms and jerked him upright. He felt himself being dragged across the room.
Esmerelda came out of the bedroom, holding his pistol in her hand.
She screamed as the hooded men swarmed over her. One of them snatched Ruben’s pistol from her hand.
Esmerelda kept screaming.
Ruben felt his heart being torn from his chest. He felt it being squeezed and the blood spurting from it like some diabolical fountain, drenching his brain, drowning his thoughts, and blowing through his eyes like an explosive somewhere inside his brain and deep in his soul.
TWENTY-THREE
Dr. Thaddeus Rankin lived in a small house next to his clinic and infirmary on Green Street in the northeast section of Leadville. He was awakened, near midnight, by one of his orderlies, Rufus O’Brien.
“What is it?” Thad Rankin asked as he sat up in bed. He rubbed his eyes and held a hand over them to shut out the yellow glare of the lantern in O’Brien’s hand.
“Pregnant Mex woman at term. Baby seems to be blocked somewhere in the birth canal.”
“Dammit, Rufus, they aren’t Mexes. They’re people of Mexican descent. Show a little courtesy.”
“There’s a white man and woman with ’em. I think you know the man.”
“Who is he?”
“Brad Storm, he says.”
“Tell them I’ll be there momentarily, Rufus. Now get that damned light out of my eyes. I can dress in the dark.”
O’Brien swung the lantern to one side and lowered it to a point just above his right knee.
“I’ve summoned Mrs. Brummage, Doctor. She should be at the infirmary by the time you arrive.”
“Lord,” Rankin exclaimed, “Mrs. Brummage? Excellent.”
“Yes, sir. And there’s one other thing I must bring to your attention.”
“Damn, Rufus, what is it?”
“I’ve dispatched our ambulance to pick up some Mexes, I mean folks, who are badly beaten up. I believe the woman was raped and her husband soundly thumped. Their neighbor rode in an hour ago, and Billy Letterman drove the ambulance out to their residence.”
“Lord,” Rankin said again, “why in hell does everything happen at once?”
“It just does,” Rufus said as Rankin waved him away from his bedside.
Rufus left the room. Dr. Rankin climbed out of bed in his long nightshirt and stripped it off over his head. He dressed in five minutes, grabbed his medical bag next to the door, and hurried to the infirmary. He saw the wagon outside the building with two saddled horses tied to the back and a pair in harness. The pale pile of blankets and pillows shone in the moonlight like rumpled shrouds covering gravestones.
He walked under the roofing over which hung the large sign RANKIN CLINIC & INFIRMARY. Under this legend, in smaller letters, was THADDEUS RANKIN, MD, CORONER.
He strode through the empty waiting room with its chairs and benches, lamps burning on small tables in two corners. He pushed open one of the double doors on leather hinges and stopped at a hall tree. He set his bag down and slipped a light tan coat over his white shirt. He picked up his bag and hurried past the five unoccupied beds to the last one, where he had heard the whispers and murmurs of those standing around the bed. He recognized Brad and Felicity Storm and the midwife, Ethyl Brummage, but not the two Mexican men crowding the edge of the bed. Wall lamps burned buttery holes in the shadows over the bed. The odor of bleach-scrubbed flooring filled the infirmary, mingled with other elusive scents associated with medicine and illnesses.
“What have we here?” Rankin asked as he pushed past Brad and Felicity and shoved the two Mexican men aside.
Rankin set his bag on a bedside table.
“Glad you’re here, Doc,” Brad said. “I think we’re having a baby.”
Rankin ignored the comment and looked at Pilar. Mrs. Brummage dabbed the sweat off Pilar’s forehead with a damp cloth. Pilar was biting down on a rolled-up towel.
“She was screaming when they brought her in here, Doctor.” Ethyl swept back Pilar’s hair with the cloth.
“All of you will have to clear out, Brad. Just sit in the waiting room and wait. I’ll have a look at the little mother-to-be.”
He turned to the two Mexican men.
“One of you the husband?”
“I am,” Julio said.
“I’m his friend,” Carlos said. “Pilar’s too.”
“Fine, fine, now shoo, all of you. To the waiting room. I’ll let you know what I find here.”
Brad and the others filed out of the room.
Rankin rolled a curtained wall up to the adjoining bed, blocking any view from the doors to the waiting room.
He was a thin man with wide-set brown eyes, a shock of snow white hair, aquiline nose, and a firm, determined set to his mouth and jaw. He had studied medicine in Philadelphia, gotten his degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He had served in the Civil War during several campaigns, culminating in Gettysburg, where his two sons in the Union Army had been killed on Little Round Top. He left the army as a colonel, rescued one of the ambulances, and drove it to Oro City, where he set up his clinic and infirmary.
“Ethyl, undress her and give her a gown. Then put a pillow under her hips.”
“Yes, Doctor. You see that she doesn’t spit out that gag. You do not want to hear this woman scream. It will break your eardrums, I do declare.”
Rankin leaned over Pilar.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said.
Pilar’s eyes were wet and flared with a look of anxiety.
Ethyl returned with a smock and a pair of pillows.
“You didn’t sedate her, did you, Mrs. Brummage?”
“Of course not, Doctor. That baby wants to come out, but she’s fighting it.”
“Let me be the judge of that,” he said as Brummage removed Pilar’s print cotton dress with its wide colored bands sewn above the hem. She helped her into a plain white muslin gown that covered her nudity, then slid a pillow under her buttocks.
Rankin opened his medical bag and pulled out his stethoscope and a reflector that was attached to an elastic band. He slid the band over his forehead.
“Bring me a lamp, please,” he said to Ethyl.
“Now, Pilar,” he said, “I’m going to have a look. You may feel my fingers, but I promise not to hurt you. Do you understand English?”
Pilar nodded. Brummage held the lamp at an angle that would allow Rankin to focus the reflector. He bent down and probed with his fingers as Ethyl looked on. Ethyl was a matronly woman in her forties, with wiry hair the color of wheat. Her neck rippled with layers of fat, and her second chin ballooned from her neck and lower jaw. She had penetrating blue eyes that might have been chipped from agate or sapphire. They caught the light and glinted with a piercing intensity as she watched the doctor she admired at work.
He stood up.
“What do you think, Doctor?” she asked.
“That baby wants to come out, but she’s fighting it.”
“I know.”
“Mix up some ergot and perhaps we can induce labor pains in the young woman.”
“Right away, Doctor,” she said and placed the lamp on a table to the right of Pilar’s bed.
As Rankin spoke to Pilar, Ethyl walked through another set of double doors. There were other rooms beyond the infirmary, a small kitchen and laboratory, Dr. Rankin’s clinic office, a room he used as an operating theater, and a storage room well to the back. Ethyl went to the lab and opened a white cabinet. She selected a jar containing the dried, thick-walled mass that fungi created from their invasion of rye fields. She took down an empty glass and spooned the ergot into the glass, filled it with water from a pitcher, and stirred it. The scent of ergot mingled with the aromas of bleach, alcohol, traces of carbolic acid, and the musty scent of hydrogen peroxide.
Dr. Rankin listened for the baby’s heartbeat with his stethoscope and nodded to Ethyl when she returned with the medicine.
; “Strong heartbeat from the child,” he said. Then to Pilar he said, “Mrs. Brummage is going to give you some medicine to drink. After a while you should feel pains down here”—he patted her lower abdomen—“and that will mean your baby wants to come out. Now, she’s going to take that towel out of your mouth. You drink, and I’ll see you later.”
Ethyl removed the gag and held the glass up to Pilar’s lips. “Drink it all down,” she said and patted Pilar gently on her back.
“I’ll be in the waiting room, Mrs. Brummage. If she begins having contractions, time them with your watch and call me when they get to five minutes or less.”
“Yes, Doctor,” she said and pulled a watch on a braided leather fob from her apron pocket. Ethyl’s husband had died in a mining accident some five years before, and she had no children. She had turned to midwifery out of a strong desire to give birth to her own child. Rankin, a widower himself, had offered her part-time work for him as a nurse and midwife. She was happy to have the income in a town without pity for its homeless and poor.
No sooner had Rankin entered the waiting room than the double doors burst open and Rufus flew in, wild-eyed and excited, breathless from running half a block down the dark street.
“Ambulance is coming,” he said to Rankin.
They all heard it then, with its rumbling wheels, the clunk of iron hooves, and the creak of wood and leather, the crunch of rocks and gravel that grew louder by the second.
Rufus grabbed a long table on wheels at the front of the room and wheeled it outside with its thin mattress and tight-fitted woolen blanket.
Moments later the ambulance pulled up outside and came to a halt. There was a clatter of wooden tailgate and door, the muffled sound of men talking, the soft groan of someone in pain.
Felicity gasped as Rufus wheeled in the gurney with a woman lying atop the blanket, her battered head resting on the pillow. “My God.” She gasped as she looked at the woman’s battered face, the dried blood, the swollen cheekbones, the bruises on her neck.
“Doctor,” Rufus said, “this woman was raped,” and he continued on through the double doors into the infirmary.
Rankin hurried into the infirmary, his coattail flapping like the wings of a wounded bird.
“Another one coming,” Rufus said as he dashed back through the waiting room.
Brad couldn’t believe what he was seeing as Rufus and the ambulance driver, Billy Letterman, carried the limp body of a man between them, his head sagging to his chest, his boots dragging on the hardwood floor.
He ran up to them and lifted the wounded man’s head.
Sanchez’s eyes were swollen shut from a brutal pounding, and caked blood filled his nostrils and the space between his nose and mouth.
“Ruben,” he said.
“We got to get him into a bed,” Letterman said. Letterman was in his late twenties and wore a checkered shirt under his woolen jacket. He had a prizefighter’s cauliflower ears and a button nose that looked as if it had been flattened with a ball-peen hammer or a dozen hard fists.
Brad swore under his breath and watched the two men drag Ruben into the infirmary.
Felicity came up to Brad and ran fingers up and down his arm.
“Do you know that man?”
“He’s the blacksmith. Shoed Ginger yesterday morning.”
“What happened to him, I wonder.”
“I know what happened to him and that poor woman who is probably his wife.”
“What?”
“The Golden Council threatened him when he wouldn’t pay them protection money. They call it ‘insurance,’ the bastards.”
She could feel his anger, saw the terrible light of rage flash in his eyes like daggers of fire bursting from a blast furnace. She put an arm around his waist as Carlos and Julio looked on, their faces masks of bronze, their eyes hooded in shock.
“I’ll get those bastards,” Brad murmured. He clenched both fists, looked down at Felicity. “Now you know why I do what I do,” he said.
“You mean for Harry Pendergast.”
“Yes, for him, for Ruben, for all those in this town who are preyed upon by evil men.”
“It’s not your fight, Brad.”
“Yes, it is. I want to get the men who did this to Ruben and his woman.”
“Is it justice or vengeance you’re after, Brad?”
His body tensed and his jaw hardened, his lips compressed. He balled up his fists even tighter. And there was that look in his eyes, stronger than any she’d seen before. So strong was his look, it frightened her, frightened her as if she were looking death itself in the face.
“What’s the difference?” he whispered, more to himself than to her.
“Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” she whispered back.
“No, Felicity.” He opened his hands and touched her shoulder with his left. “Vengeance is mine this time.” He closed his eyes like tiny fists. “Justice be damned.”
She drew away from him in shocked disbelief.
“Who are these men you hate so much?” she asked.
“Cowards. Men who wear yellow hoods to cover their faces. Men who killed Hugh Pendergast and two sheriffs. Killers with no conscience, who raped a man’s wife and beat him half to death. That’s who they are, Felicity.”
“Brad, you’re a cattle rancher. And I’m your wife. Let’s go home.”
“Not until justice is done,” he said. “Or my vengeance is satisfied. Whatever comes first.”
The waiting room filled with a terrible silence and there was only the faint sound of the ambulance horses wheezing and blowing outside and the threnodic zinging chorus of the crickets in the grass, the drumbeat of Brad’s heart at his temples, and the crackling flames of hatred behind his eyes, deep in the furnace of his raging mind.
TWENTY-FOUR
Ezekial Hunsacker reported for work at the Leadville jail promptly at nine P.M. He was a corpulent, jowly, phlegmatic man in his late forties with bulbous gray eyes, a pocked face, pimply nose, and a round wet mouth.
Sheriff Jigger regarded him with wariness when the man introduced himself.
“I’m Zeke Hunsacker. Willits still here?”
“He’s asleep back in the jail on one of the cots. You over the croup?”
Zeke hocked a gob of phlegm into his wadded-up and soiled handkerchief.
“Yeah, I reckon. I’ll tell Percy he can go home. I owe him a shift or two.”
“You do that, Zeke,” Jigger said dryly, shooting a look at Wally, whose chair was leaning against the wall, his hat pushed back on his head.
Zeke limped away from Jigger’s desk, favoring his left leg, unlocked the door to the jail with his own set of keys, and closed it after him. They could hear his voice through the door as he shook Percy Willits awake.
“Zeke’s all right,” Wally said, tipping his chair back on its four legs and squaring his black hat. “He don’t look like much, but he’s hell on wheels with a nightstick. Used to be a deputy with Sheriff Brown, who took him on saloon rounds when he was alive.”
“He’s still a deputy, ain’t he?” Jigger said.
“Yeah, but he got busted up at the Silver Slipper when a bunch of miners got drunk and tore up the place. Zeke got his leg broke, and I think he leaked some brain juice from a miner with a sawed-off.”
A lone fly zizzed around the office ceiling, its body shining green as it buzzed past the lamp next to Jigger’s desk. Other flies had crawled into cracks in the walls after the sun went down. There was a new, freshly printed flyer tacked to the wall next to others for wanted criminals. This one was for Brad Storm, offering a two-hundred-dollar reward.
Sheriff Jigger picked up a sheaf of flyers as if weighing them in his hand. “We got about half of these nailed up this afternoon,” he said. “Maybe we can do the rest tomorrow.”
“I got me some calluses on my fingers,” Wally said.
“Do you good, them calluses. Make a man of you.”
“That’s what my pa told me when I
was hoein’ our garden back in Tennessee.”
The lock on the jailhouse door clicked as a key turned inside the keyhole.
Percy emerged, closed the door, and locked it with his ring of keys jangling like tiny, off-key bells. He rubbed the granules of sleep from his eyes.
“I’m goin’ home, Sheriff,” Percy said.
“Straight home? Wally and me are about to start our saloon rounds. Buy you a drink if you stop off at the Silver Slipper. That’s our first check.”
“Well, now, I could use a shot of red-eye. You buyin’?”
Jigger smiled. “My pleasure,” he said and stood up, reaching for his hat on the tree behind the desk.
“You ready, Wally?”
“I reckon,” Wally said. “You’re not likely to find Brad Storm there, though.”
Jigger walked around the desk.
“Ain’t lookin’ for him. It’s Mexes I’m after.”
“Mexes?” Wally stood up and hitched his gun belt. “What for?”
“Mexes is part Injun, ain’t they? And it’s illegal for an Injun to drink white man’s whiskey.” He looked at Willits. “Percy, you might have yourself a full jail come mornin’.”
“That’ll sure run up the feed bill,” Percy said.
“How much can a few beans and a tortilla cost?” Jigger said.
Percy laughed self-consciously.
Wally did not. He felt a tenseness rising in him that was like a foreboding. He had nothing against Mexicans. In fact, he knew quite a few, and most of them were good citizens of Leadville. He had arrested a few who had drunk too much at the cantinas and gotten into fights. But they always paid their fines and stayed out of trouble after a night in jail. Most of them, anyway.
“I changed my mind. I think I’ll just go on home,” Percy said, “put a log on the fire and read me a dime detective magazine.”
“Suit yourself, Percy. See you tomorrow.”
“I reckon,” Percy said. He hung his key ring on a peg, took his pistol out of one of the desk drawers, and stuck it inside his belt. He walked out into the night and headed home on foot. He lived only three blocks from the jail, on First and Bellavista. The jail and sheriff’s office were on Front Street, between Second and Third streets.