York’s smile settled on one side of his face. “Mrs. Hammond, you are a rare woman indeed. Willing to sell out your own dead son, just hours after his passing, to cover your misdeeds. I’ve seen a lot in my day, lady, but never anything like this. Anything like you.”
She came to him, slowly, no sudden moves, cutting the distance in half. “I hope the Cullen girl lives. What I did was rash . . . wrong. But I think any judge, any jury, would understand a mother’s anguished, misguided act.”
“I thought Pierce was the misguided one.”
“Caleb, Caleb . . . if the Cullen girl does live,” she insisted, her expression softening, “she will return to a life much changed. Buildings burned down, cattle wasting away, her people dead . . . she’ll be so alone. Dejected and dismayed, her hopes, her dreams dashed.”
“A reasonable assumption.”
She moved even closer. “I can make it up to her, for what I did to her tonight, so . . . so impetuously. That offer of mine, that insulting offer I made for her holdings? I’ll replace it with one commensurate with the property’s actual value.”
He shook his head slowly, his smile openly bitter. “Everything that’s happened tonight, and you can think of business?”
She looked to the sky—or the ceiling, anyway. “What am I left with but business to consider? I have one remaining son—Hugh—who is himself a brilliant man of commerce . . . but he has turned away from me. If I can make the Circle G a going concern, an attractive prospect. . . and with his brothers both gone? That heart of his grown so cold may yet warm to his mother. I can bring him back into the fold. Bring him back into my loving grasp.”
Grasp is the right word, he thought.
“All you have to do,” York said, “is convince the woman you tried to kill tonight that doing business with you is a golden opportunity.”
She smiled; it tightened her eyes, and the redness of the face paint screamed at him even as her voice was soft as silk, and as slick.
“You’re the one who can do that, Caleb. If you can convince Willa Cullen to sell me the Bar-O, at a price that’s better than fair . . . after all, her cattle are dying of thirst and her ranch buildings are mostly burned out, so it’s really just the land that has any value . . .”
York glared at her. “Her property is devalued because you burned it out! Her cattle are dying because you denied the animals water, and her people are gone because your men killed them. Interesting damn way to bring the market value down, lady.”
She ignored that; her left hand gripped his right arm. Her throaty voice grew soft, seductive.
“If you can convince her, Caleb, I will make you a full partner. You don’t have to invest a dime. You won’t have to be part of a single thing to do with the business. I know you have no inclination toward being a cattleman—it’s not what you do, or who you are. So you stay sheriff and marshal and police chief and whatever badge they push your way—you can earn your keep by helping me make sure Trinidad and San Miguel County throw no obstacles in my path . . . in our path.”
The tips of their noses almost brushed now.
“Do you know how many men died tonight, woman?”
“No. Do you?” She slipped an arm around his waist, drew her body to his. “I told you before, Caleb. I can use a strong man. And I still have a few child-bearing years left. Perhaps you can give me another son.”
Damn her! She still smelled of lilacs.
Through his teeth he said, “A son to replace the one I took away from you? Or maybe the one you sent to his death tonight?”
She pushed him away, hard, her expression suddenly savage. Taking several steps back, her upper lip curling back over her teeth, she said, “Arrest me, then. Take me to a judge and see how I fare.”
“You’re facing a judge right now.”
Victoria Hammond shook her head in slow disbelief. “You’re a lawman, Caleb. You’re not some gun for hire, like the rabble who died on both sides tonight.” Very casually, she added, “And you’re certainly not a man who would kill a woman—are you?”
“Might be.”
She went for her gun, the lovely face clenched into sheer ugliness and utter evil now, but York drew so quick his bullet entered her and exited before she even had the weapon out of its fancy holster, the thunder of the .44’s report shaking things in the room.
York grunted. “Seems I am.”
She looked down at the red-rimmed hole in her belly and a trickle of red trailed down, shimmering over the black silk. Then she crumpled to the floor, a curtain that slipped off its rod, and began weeping like a little girl—likely with gut-shot pain and utter disappointment and maybe at an outcome she could not talk or scheme her way clear of.
But surely not regret.
And her dead husband looked down from his gilt-edged frame with no sympathy at all.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When Caleb York rode into town, going on midnight, he noted the light in Doc Miller’s office window. He quickly hopped down, tied the gelding up at the hitching post in front of the bank, and hurried up the exterior stairs hugging the building. That he was exhausted made no difference at all.
As York entered, the doctor was coming into the waiting area from his surgery with a cup of coffee he’d prescribed himself. His living quarters were beyond that, including a spare bedroom used for patients needing particular care.
“Caleb,” the plump little man said pleasantly, as if this were a social call. He looked rumpled but pleased with himself.
“How is she?” York asked with urgency bursting, as he hung his coat and hat on the tree by the door.
The physician plopped himself down at the chair behind his cluttered desk. “Alive. Fever broke, and never got past one hundred degrees. Good signs.”
Looming from the wall in back of Dr. Albert Miller were framed diplomas hanging askew, as if they too had a hard night. The skeleton the doc called Hippocrates seemed to be listening intently from his corner as York stood before Miller, leaning in, a hand on the desktop.
“I’ll keep her here for a few days at least,” the doctor was saying. “If you can spare Tulley, I’ll put him on bedpan duty and he can haul food in from the café. Just soup at first.”
York sighed with relief, closed his eyes for a moment, then drew up a chair and sat, still facing the physician intently. “You’d say she’s doing well, then?”
Doc nodded. Sipped his coffee. “The bullet went in and out, so I didn’t have to go digging. I guess I don’t have to tell you that shreds of cloth getting into a wound like hers can kill you deader than any bullet. But that silk camisole she was wearing was a godsend. Didn’t tear the way that cotton shirt of hers did. Much cleaner puncture.”
“Can I see her?”
Miller yawned. “Well, she’s awake, and I’ve just given her a dose of laudanum that’ll put her out before you know it. But go on in, Caleb. Do her good to see your ugly face.”
York moved quickly into the doctor’s apartment and through to the sick room off at left, a glorified cubbyhole with a dresser and a metal bed and little else. Her head on a plump feather pillow, her hair still braided up, Willa was in a white hospital-type gown, her face bloodless but beautiful, her pale Nordic features taking on a new fragility.
The lamp on a corner table was turned low, but it—and moonlight from the window to her right as she lay there—made his presence known to her. A smile traced her lips as he drew up a chair next to her bedside and sat.
“Caleb . . . Caleb . . .”
“Shush, now. You just be quiet, woman. Doc Miller says you’re going to be fine.”
Her smooth forehead frowned a little, probably as much as she could manage. “What’s to become of me, Caleb? What’s to become of us?”
“We’ll decide that. Raymond Parker’s going to help out, and I’ll work hand in hand with him. We’ll make sure that beef of yours gets rightly watered. Don’t you worry none.”
“The ranch house is standing,” she said, brow smooth a
gain. “I can rebuild the rest.” Her eyes welled. “But so many were . . . were slaughtered. . . .”
He took a hand of hers and held it with both of his. “Don’t you think about that now. Just know this. A whole new future lies ahead for us.”
Her eyebrows managed to lift. “Here in town? Or at the . . . the Bar-O?”
He gave her a gentle smile. “At one of them. We’ll decide together.”
Her eyes widened and she tried to sit up, but the pain—laudanum or not—stopped her. Half rising, York gently settled her back into the pillow.
“Caleb,” she said. Softer. Barely audible.
He leaned in.
She said weakly, but distinct: “What about . . . about that woman? The Hammond woman?”
“Dead.”
“Dead . . . ?”
“I killed her.”
She beamed, obviously in a narcotic haze. “Oh, Caleb! That’s . . . that’s the sweetest thing you ever did for me.”
He kissed the tip of her nose.
“We aim to please,” he said.
A TIP OF THE STETSON
In following the late Mickey Spillane’s lead—established in his various film script drafts and notes about the York character and his world—I have been more concerned with the mythic West than the real one.
The first in the series, The Legend of Caleb York (2015), based on Mickey’s unproduced screenplay, clearly takes an approach in the Hollywood tradition. This appeals to me, as I grew up on John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, and Audie Murphy movies, as well as American television’s Western craze of the late fifties, Maverick my personal favorite.
But I hope to present the mythic West in a framework of the real one, providing authentic underpinnings to my fanciful tales, much as a noir detective novel sets melodrama against a gritty reality. So I am of course indebted to research, and while I no doubt have overlooked some sources, I should at least acknowledge the ones that were particularly helpful.
I would guess that most (if not all) of my contemporaries in the Western fiction field use the following two sources: Everyday Life in the Wild West from 1840–1900 (1999), Candy Moulton; and The Writer’s Guide to Everyday Life in the 1800s (1993), Marc McCutcheon. Of the numerous books on firearms in my library, I lean upon Guns of the American West (2009), Dennis Adler. Previous novels in this series all drew upon these invaluable sources.
For this novel, depicting the aftermath of the Blizzard of 1886–1887 (the central concern of the previous Caleb York novel, Hot Lead, Cold Justice), I again consulted Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West (2017), Christopher Knowlton; and The Real Wild West: The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West (1999), Michael Wallis; as well as the more recently published article “The Big Die-Up,” Chuck Lyons, Wild West magazine, April 2019. Sources new to this novel include Happy Trails: A Dictionary of Western Expressions (1994), Robert Hendrickson; and Famous Sheriffs and Western Outlaws (1929), William MacLeod Raine.
I really don’t know how I managed to write historical novels prior to Internet search engines, when I had to depend on such old-fashioned methods as newspaper, magazine, and book research. Now—as I imagine is the case for most writers of fiction working today setting their stories yesterday—I do a lot of it as I go, utilizing Google.
Web addresses are not included, as those change and disappear from time to time, but I will provide selected article names and authors (and sometimes Web sites).
Helpful in my depiction of a real-life Las Vegas, New Mexico, crime boss, was “Vicente Silva—Leading Silva’s White Caps Gang,” Kathy Weiser-Alexander (at the excellent Legends of America site); “Hiding in Plain Sight—Frontier Crime Lord,” Tom Rizzo (at his Web site); and “Crime Boss Vicente Silva,” Mark Boardman, True West. That magazine’s column “Ask the Marshall” by Marshall Trimble has been helpful in a more general manner. Also useful was “Las Vegas, New Mexico—As Wicked as Dodge City,” Kathy Weiser (again at the Legends of America site); and “Getting Lost in History in the Other Las Vegas,” Steven Talbot, New York Times.
I also wish to acknowledge the Western Fictioneers, an organization founded by Robert J. Randisi, James Reasoner, Frank Roderus, and other professional writers of Western novels and short stories (I’m a member). Their discussion group was extremely valuable to me here, on several occasions fielding research questions I couldn’t answer in my source books or on the Net. Thanks in particular go to Vicky Rose and Gordon Rottman.
Also, thank you to my supportive editor, Michaela Hamilton; my agent and friend, Dominick Abel; and my wife (and in-house editor), Barbara Collins.
photo by Barbara Collins
About the Authors
MICKEY SPILLANE and MAX ALLAN COLLINS collaborated on numerous projects, including twelve anthologies, three films, and the Mike Danger comic book series.
Spillane was the bestselling American mystery writer of the twentieth century. He introduced Mike Hammer in I, the Jury (1947), which sold in the millions, as did the six tough mysteries that soon followed. The controversial P.I. has been the subject of a radio show, comic strip, and several television series, starring Darren McGavin in the 1950s and Stacy Keach in the ’80s and ’90s. Numerous gritty movies have been made from Spillane novels, notably director Robert Aldrich’s seminal film noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and The Girl Hunters (1963), in which the writer played his own famous hero. His posthumously published final novel, The Last Stand (2018), published to celebrate the centenary of his birth, received rave reviews and extensive national coverage.
Collins has earned an unprecedented twenty-two Private Eye Writers of America “Shamus” nominations, winning for the novels True Detective (1983) and Stolen Away (1993) in his Nathan Heller series, and for “So Long, Chief,” a Mike Hammer short story begun by Spillane and completed by Collins. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award–winning film starring Tom Hanks. A filmmaker in the Midwest, he has had half a dozen feature screenplays produced, including The Last Lullaby (2008), based on his innovative Quarry novels, also the basis of a recent Cinemax TV series. With A. Brad Schwartz, he wrote the acclaimed non-fiction work Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness and the Battle for Chicago (2018). As “Barbara Allan,” he and his wife Barbara write the Trash ’n’ Treasures mystery series (recently Antiques Fire Sale).
Both Spillane (who died in 2006) and Collins received the Private Eye Writers life achievement award, the Eye, and were presented “Edgar” awards as Grand Masters by the Mystery Writers of America in 1995 and 2017, respectively.
Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek (A Caleb York Western Book 6) Page 19