Gunman's Rhapsody

by Robert B. Parker

  Forty-three

  Behan never looked quite comfortable, Wyatt thought, as the sheriff walked toward him. He was always a little too dressed up. When he wore a gun, it didn’t hang quite right. On horseback he looked awkward, as if he’d be happier on foot. On foot, he looked as if he’d be easier sitting.

  “I need to talk with you,” Behan said, his voice distant, and surprising in the sulfurous quiet.

  There was no one else to talk to but Wyatt. Ike had run. The McLaurys were dead, and Billy Clanton. Dr. Goodfellow was probing the wound in Virgil’s calf. Morgan, in pain from his shoulder wound, was being loaded into a hack. Doc had retreated to Fly’s boardinghouse with a bullet burn creasing his hip.

  “I won’t be arrested,” Wyatt said. His own voice seemed to come from somewhere else.

  “I’m the sheriff, Wyatt. I got to arrest you.”

  “If you were God, Johnny, I wouldn’t let you arrest me. I’m not going away. I’ll be around for the inquest.”

  “I warned you,” Behan said.

  “You fed us bullshit,” Wyatt said. “You told us you’d disarmed them.”

  The hack with Morgan in it moved past them and Wyatt watched it as it went. The street was filled with people now, many of them men, many of them armed.

  “I told you I would disarm them,” Behan said.

  Wyatt turned back from looking at the hack.

  “Johnny,” Wyatt said. “This is your fault. You couldn’t come at me direct, so you rigged this.”

  “Wyatt, so help me, God…”

  Wyatt shook his head.

  “Don’t talk to me now, Johnny. I can’t talk to you. You got to get away from me.”

  Behan tried to hold Wyatt’s eyes and couldn’t and hesitated another moment and turned and walked away. Wyatt watched him go as he headed east on Fremont Street until he turned the corner by the post office at Fourth Street disappeared. He realized he was still holding his revolver. He could tell by the weight that it was empty. He opened the cylinder, ejected the shell casings, fished absently into his left-hand coat pocket and came out with a handful of fresh bullets. As he fed them one at a time into the cylinder, the coroner’s people were gathering up the three dead men and loading them onto the back of a wagon. Wyatt snapped the cylinder shut and put the gun in his right-hand pocket. Another hack, carrying Virgil, moved slowly past him.

  “They find the slug?” Wyatt asked.

  “It went on through,” Virgil said.

  “Good,” Wyatt said and the hack moved on.

  Fremont Street in front of the alley was crowded now. To Wyatt the crowd was a phantasmagoria, as intangible as the projections of a magic lantern. It was what followed reality, trailing in the absolute fact of the gunfight, like the wisps of gun smoke that had already disappeared, dispersed by the fresh fall air. The coroner’s wagon began to move away with the corpses of the McLaurys and Billy Clanton, and when it was gone Wyatt was the only embodiment of the facts that had transpired, alone in the insubstantial crowd of miners and cowboys that meaninglessly milled and chattered around him. People may have spoken to him. If they did he didn’t hear them. He put the leftover shells back in his left-hand coat pocket, and put the newly loaded revolver in his right-hand coat pocket. Then he turned and went to find Josie.

  Forty-four

  They were in her room, sitting together on the bed. Josie’s face was a white oval in the cold last light of the November day that came in through the window. A wood stove warmed the room.

  “So it’s over?” Josie said.

  “Hearing’s over,” Wyatt said. “You want to hear what Spicer ruled?”

  “Of course.”

  Wyatt’s coat hung on a chair near the bed. He reached over and took paper from his inside coat pocket and unfolded it.

  “The evidence taken before me in this case,” Wyatt read, “would not, in my judgment, warrant a conviction of the defendants by a trial jury of any offense whatever.”

  “Of course, he’s right,” Josie said. “No one could have ruled differently.”

  Wyatt smiled a little. He put the paper back inside his coat.

  “Maybe if Behan were running the hearing…” Wyatt said.

  “Thank God he’s not,” she said.

  Josie put her head against Wyatt’s shoulder. He held her hand. They were quiet together in the still-moonlit room.

  “Do you think Johnny put them up to it?” Josie said.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it about me?” Josie said finally.

  Wyatt thought about her question.

  “It’s about you and me,” he said after a time. “There’s been a lot of push and shove between us and the cowboys. And it’d be hard to get along with both sides. Johnny tried, but after you and me turned out to be what we are, it was pretty easy for him to slide over to the cowboys. I think he stirred them up, Ike especially, because Ike’s pretty much a fool drunk and easy to stir up.”

  “Is he through trying?” Josie said.

  “Not likely,” Wyatt said.

  “What do you think Johnny will do?” Josie said.

  “He’s got the rest of the cowboys to rile. Brocius, and John Ringo, for instance, are a little different than Ike and the McLaurys.”

  “Are you afraid of them?”

  Wyatt shrugged.

  “Thinking about that doesn’t do me much good one way or the other,” he said.

  “And you have friends,” Josie said.

  “I do,” Wyatt said and smiled. “And my brother Warren came in from California. He’s planning to stay awhile.”

  “Is he like you?” Josie said.

  “He’s more like Morgan.”

  “Kind of likes trouble?” Josie said.

  “Kind of.”

  “If only Johnny would just come out in the open,” she said.

  Wyatt shook his head.

  “It’s not Johnny’s way,” Wyatt said.

  “I don’t know what to wish,” Josie said. “I can’t wish that we hadn’t met.”

  “No, you can’t wish that,” Wyatt said. “Whatever comes of all this, we are worth whatever it costs.”

  “Then I wish someone would kill Johnny.”

  “Someone would have to murder him,” Wyatt said. “He won’t come at you straight on.”

  “Could you murder him?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve shot men before.”

  “It’s not just what you do, it’s how you do it,” Wyatt said. “And I think I promised you I wouldn’t.”

  “I know,” Josie said. “I know.”

  “Shooting the sheriff is serious business. There’s some law out here now. Hell, I’m supposed to be part of it sometimes.”

  “Maybe Doc,” Josie said.

  “That’s up to Doc,” Wyatt said. “I won’t ask him to do my shooting for me… And I don’t want you asking him.”

  She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder.

  “You know me quite well, don’t you?” she said.

  “I know you’re talking different than you did when you made me promise not to shoot him.”

  “I didn’t know it would get down to you or him.”

  “Things do,” Wyatt said.

  “And you knew they would.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you promised me anyway.”

  “I love you,” Wyatt said.

  “God, I’m such a little girl.”

  “You appear to me to be growing up fast,” Wyatt said.

  “What if I talked to Johnny?” Josie said.

  “I don’t like that, but even if I did, it don’t really matter anymore. Thing like this has got a life all its own. The balls been opened. It’ll run until it’s done running.”

  “And we just wait for it to happen?”

  “We can do a little better than that,” Wyatt said. “We can be ready for it.”

  Forty-five

  It was a Wednesday night, three days after Christmas. Wyatt and Virgil were at the bar in
the Oriental. Virgil had a glass of beer. Wyatt was drinking coffee.

  “Allie was wondering when Mattie was going to move into the hotel with the rest of us,” Virgil said.

  “Allie’ll have to ask her direct,” Wyatt said. “Mattie ain’t got much to say to me.”

  “You ask her to come with you?” Virgil said.

  “I told her she could.”

  “And she said no?”

  “She didn’t say anything,” Wyatt said. “Mostly she just cries.”

  “Nobody’ll bother her anyway,” Virgil said.

  “I know,” Wyatt said.

  “How about Josie?”

  “Allie asking about her too?” Wyatt said.

  “Nope, me.”

  “Hell, Virgil, this whole thing is about Behan wanting her back,” Wyatt said. “He’s not going to kill her?”

  “Be a way to get at you,” Virgil said.

  “No, Johnny ain’t much. But he won’t hurt her.”

  “I agree he ain’t much,” Virgil said. “But since the fight and the trial he got a lot of people on his side now. And some of them are much.”

  “Curley Bill?”

  “Yep, and John Ringo. Billy Breakenridge is a pretty good man. And Dave Neagle.”

  “And none of them would hurt Josie,” Wyatt said.

  “How ’bout Ike?” Virgil said. “Frank Stilwell? Pete Spence?”

  Wyatt nodded.

  “Okay. Maybe they would,” he said.

  “So whyn’t you send her to San Francisco, let her father look after her, until we clean this up?”

  Wyatt drank some of his coffee, holding it in both hands, looking over the rim through the ribbon of steam that rose from the cup. He put the cup down and grinned at Virgil.

  “ ’Cause she won’t go,” Wyatt said.

  Virgil grinned back at him.

  “I understand that,” he said.

  Virgil finished his beer.

  “Well,” he said, “time to go home.”

  “The Cosmopolitan Hotel is not home,” Wyatt said.

  “No, but the perimeter’s a hell of a lot easier to secure.”

  “Home sweet home,” Wyatt said.

  Virgil said good night and turned and walked out of the front door of the Oriental.

  Wyatt gestured at the bartender for more coffee, and watched as it was poured. From the street came the sound of gunshots. Wyatt thought there were four. Shotguns, he was pretty sure. Two guns, both barrels? He turned toward the door as Virgil pushed into the saloon. The left side of him was bloody.

  “I’m hurt, Wyatt,” Virgil said.

  He seemed calm enough, but Wyatt knew that the first shock of injury often left you calm. It hadn’t yet started to hurt like it was going to.

  “Where?” Wyatt said.

  He stepped to his brother’s side and put his left arm under Virgil’s right arm and held him upright. Wyatt held a Colt.45 in his right hand, pointing at the floor with the hammer thumbed back.

  “Empty building across the street,” Virgil said.

  “I meant, where are you hurt?”

  “Left side, left arm,” Virgil said.

  “Can you walk to the hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  Wyatt turned to Blonde Marie.

  “Go across the street and get Goodfellow,” Wyatt said. “We’ll be at the Cosmopolitan.”

  Without a word Blonde Marie ran from the saloon.

  They moved slowly out of the saloon, crossed Fifth Street, and walked almost the length of the block to the Cosmopolitan Hotel. It took them longer than it took the news. When they reached the hotel lobby Sherman McMasters was there, and Doc, and Morgan, all armed. Warren, slighter and darker than his brothers, was at the top of the stairs with a shotgun. Allie stood beside him. Her eyes were big, her face was white. When she saw them she clattered down the stairs.

  “Bring him to our room,” she said.

  Dr. Goodfellow came into the lobby, and behind him Blonde Marie, who stopped awkwardly just inside the door to stare at the Earp women as they gathered around Virgil.

  “Oh Virgil,” Allie said, “oh goddammit, Virgil.”

  Virgil put his right arm around her.

  “Still got one arm to hug you with, Allie.”

  Allie rested her head briefly against his shoulder and took in some air, and some of her briskness came back.

  “Well, that’ll be plenty,” she said.

  Wyatt and his brothers waited in the lobby while Goodfellow and a doctor named Matthews worked on Virgil. Blonde Marie in a burst of enthusiasm had sent one of the other whores to get Dr. Matthews, just to be on the safe side.

  Doc was drinking in the lobby, walking back and forth with a whiskey glass and a bottle, swearing to himself, his black coat open and tucked on the right side behind the butt of his revolver. Sherman McMasters and Turkey Creek Jack Johnson were outside on the porch with shotguns. At two-fifteen in the morning, Dr. Goodfellow came down the stairs.

  “Wound in his side is nothing,” Goodfellow said. “But his left arm’s a mess. We’re going to have to take the elbow out.”

  “Will he be able to use it afterwards?” Wyatt said.

  “Not much,” Goodfellow said.

  “He can still shoot,” Wyatt said.

  “A handgun,” Goodfellow said and moved past Wyatt to take some medical supplies from George Parsons. Wyatt turned and looked at Morgan.

  “You heard the doctor?” Wyatt said.

  “Yes.”

  “Shots came from that construction on the corner,” Wyatt said. “Get a lantern.”

  He and Morgan went out of the hotel and walked back up Allen Street, the lantern casting its uncertain light ahead of them. It was a cold night, and the stars seemed very high. The saloons were still. Light and sound spilled out of the Oriental across the street and the Crystal Palace on the opposite corner. The life in the saloons seemed to intensify the empty silence of the street. On the corner of Fifth Street, Huachuca Water Company had a building half built. They went in.

  “Virgil would have come out of the Oriental and walked across Fifth Street,” Wyatt said. “So they would have to have been standing about here. Two men with shotguns.”

  Morgan moved the lantern.

  “No shell casings,” he said. “Nobody used a Winchester.”

  “Goodfellow said it was all pellets,” Wyatt said.

  They stood looking around the partial room. It seemed colder in the empty, partly open building than it had on the street.

  “Virgil’s always been fine,” Morgan said.

  Wyatt nodded.

  “Seems funny,” Morgan said, “thinking about him not being fine.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean he can still shoot a Colt, I guess. But he can’t shoot a rifle, can’t fight a man except one-handed. I mean, it’s like Virgil ain’t quite there anymore.”

  “I know.”

  “I guess Virgil will still know what to do,” Morgan said.

  “It’s not the same,” Wyatt said.

  “No, I guess it isn’t,” Morgan said.

  “And it never will be.”

  The lantern light picked up something lying beside a stack of rough siding. Morgan went over and squatted down, holding the lantern up.

  “Somebody’s hat,” he said and picked it up.

  Wyatt squatted beside him and they examined the hat. It was like everyone’s hat except that inside it, crudely burned into the leather sweatband, was a name: “I. Clanton.”

  “Ike,” Morgan said. “Sonova bitch Ike Clanton.”

  “Doesn’t mean he did it,” Wyatt said.

  “What the hell does it mean?” Morgan said. “Mean that Ike goes around, throws his hat away in empty buildings?”

  “Means we got a place to start,” Wyatt said.

  Forty-six

  Wyatt and Josie shared pigeon pie at Maison Dorée in the Cosmopolitan. Both picked at the food, without much appetite. Josie drank wine. Wyatt drank coffee.


  “Virgil says he thought he might have seen Frank Stilwell scoot into the Huachuca building,” Wyatt said.

  “Just before he got shot.”

  “He’s with the cowboys?”

  “Sure.”

  “You think he shot Virgil?”

  “Maybe. Virgil couldn’t be sure it was him.”

  “But you found Ike’s hat,” she said.

  “We’ll talk to Ike about that. Crawley Dake’s appointed me a U.S. marshal. Means I can appoint some deputies.”

  “But what are you going to do?” Josie said.