Doom Weapon

by Ed Gorman

  “Now, you get out of here. I heard my lawyer come in up front there and he’s the only one I’m going to talk to. And I’m not going to tell him anything, either. Because me and Uncle Bob, we figured out a way to get our dream. Where we’d have everything we needed. And now that he isn’t here, I’m going to have the dream all for myself.”

  No warning. Her coffee cup, mostly dregs, flying across the shadowy space between us, banging off my forehead.

  I suppose she expected anger. I suppose I expected anger. But all I did was lean down and pick up the empty cup and say, “Somebody killed your uncle because of what you won’t talk about, Molly. That means that they’re going to try and kill you, too. I’m sorry for all that happened to you. I’m sorry it hurt you so much and made you tough. And you are tough, Molly. But you’re not tough the way this killer is. You’re not tough that way at all. Let either me or the sheriff help you before it’s too late.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “And I bet I know just how you’d ‘help me,’ too. Now get the hell out of here.”

  I yelled for a key and then I turned back to her and said, “We’re not all like those men, Molly. We’re really not.”

  Somehow Grieves had seemed more tolerable back in St. Louis.

  Dobbs now realized that this was because Grieves had no choice but to be tolerable. He wanted what Dobbs alone possessed.

  But when the two men met in the weary cold winds of Junction City, and after the money had changed hands, and after they’d fired their bellies with the best saloon whiskey they could find in such a burg—then the real Grieves emerged. And Dobbs found him obnoxious, a loud and boastful man who physically and verbally abused anybody he didn’t care for and who constantly flashed his federal badge as a way of intimidating people.

  But, as poor little Dobbs found out on the second day of their time together, Grieves was far more than merely obnoxious.

  The two of them had been out on the plains for most of the morning. Every quarter mile or so, Grieves would see something he wanted to blow up with the new grenades Dobbs had created in the munitions lab. For all his size and bluster, Grieves was like an evil, spoiled child. He seemed to get an almost sexual thrill out of watching trees, old barns, deserted and rotted wagon beds, even gravestones, destroyed in the smoky hellish fire of destruction.

  The gravestones were especially bad. Dobbs spent fifteen minutes trying to talk Grieves out of blowing them up. Didn’t Grieves have any conscience? Dobbs asked him angrily. These gravestones were the sacred emblems of lives lived and now passed. These gravestones signified the splendid memories the living held of the dead. These gravestones—and here Dobbs had pointed directly at two of them—guarded the bodies of infants who’d died at less than six months old.

  You can’t just blow them up, Grieves. They’re not yours to destroy. Leave them alone, Grieves. Please. Please, Grieves.

  But of course he blew them up, chunks of stone like daggers flying through the air, the grass around the gravestones suddenly on fire.

  All Dobbs could think of was the two little girls whose gravestones had been destroyed. And how their folks would feel when they went up there next time and found the stones reduced to rubble.

  But that was just the first terrible shock Grieves had in store for the timid Dobbs.

  The next one, later on, would haunt Dobbs the rest of his life.

  Chapter 9

  For my noon meal, I decided to eat where the workingmen did. I hoped the place would be quiet enough so that I could look through the sack of Grieves’s things I’d picked up at the boardinghouse.

  Nothing made any sense yet as far as Grieves went. He hadn’t filed any complaints via telegram. The handful of people I’d talked to about him hadn’t reported him seeming unduly upset about anything. He’d kept up correspondence with his wife. D.C. had told me that she’d received word from him just before he seemed to have vanished. And he’d lived the way he’d always liked to live, in the constant presence of women and liquor.

  I passed a dress shop that was obviously for whatever passed as the carriage trade in Junction City. The dresses cost a lot more than most women could afford to pay even once in their lives. Through the window I saw a woman looking at me. A very pretty, dark-haired woman dressed in a lacy frock that emphasized the slender but well-appointed body. The dark eyes watched me curiously, showing no emotion. It took me a bit to recognize Ella Coltrane, the woman who owned the short-haul railroad. She’d be shopping there, of course.

  She surprised me by gathering up her shawl around her shoulders and coming up to the front door. “You’re Mr. Ford, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Would you like some company?”

  “Sure. But I doubt you’ll want to go where I’m headed.”

  She hurried out. Joined me on the walk.

  “Fine day, Mr. Ford.”

  “Fine day.”

  And it was a fine day. Clouds like the sails of schooners riding a wind so pure it took you back to your childhood. Even the temperature was cooperating.

  We walked. Her skin was fair and freckled, her dark eyes vivacious. She was in her late twenties. She had the kind of intelligence that could amuse you or abuse you at will.

  “Do you even know who I am, Mr. Ford?”

  “Sort of.”

  “That means they told you my name and that I’m rich and that I’m a widow.”

  “The widow part I hadn’t heard.”

  “Cholera. A rafting trip. Four of them dead in a day. Including my brother.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “They used to call me dirty names, this town. Now they feel sorry for me. I don’t know which is worse.”

  “There are probably worse problems.”

  She slid her arm through mine. I had no idea what she wanted. I was sure that when I found out I’d feel a lot less flattered by her attention.

  “So where are you headed that I wouldn’t want to go?”

  “I saw a little café. The Cup and Saucer.”

  “Oh, my God, take out life insurance before you go in there.”

  “The food that bad?”

  “Not just the food. The miners. All they do is get drunk and complain about what a bad deal they’re getting.”

  “It’s not a life I’d want.”

  She stopped, withdrew her arm from mine. Then she turned and said, “You’re not a communist, are you?”

  “Nope, not at all.”

  “A socialist?”

  “If you mean should the workingman get a fair deal, then I s’pose I am a bit of a socialist. Right now they’re the only ones fighting for the common man. The government sure isn’t.”

  “But you’re the government.”

  “I like to think I’m helping the average man. Not hurting him.”

  “So that means you throw in with miners?”

  I scratched the back of my head. “I guess it does.”

  She didn’t try to hide her anger. “Well, you’re sure not the man Mr. Grieves is. He’s much more intelligent.”

  “You know Grieves?”

  “I’ve enjoyed his company on two or three occasions.”

  “Well, then I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  “Why don’t you go ask your miner friends some questions?”

  And she hurried away.

  The Cup and Saucer didn’t want for decorations. DON’ T LET HIM CHEAT US ANYMORE signs had been nailed to the walls every few inches.

  I found an empty corner with a wobbly table and two chairs. Tobacco smoke was as heavy as fog in some places. The air was raw with the stench of bloody meat frying. The man who took my order had the busted nose of a drunken brawler or a former boxer. The atmosphere was saved only by the strong slant of sunlight streaming through the soiled windows.

  For the first twenty minutes or so, alone with my coffee and cigarette, I was able to concentrate on the sack with Grieves’s things in it.

  Most of it was irrelevant to m
y investigation. A comb, a handkerchief, a yellowback, change, a letter from his wife telling him how much she missed him and how lonely the nights were now that her pregnancy was in full bloom, and assorted buttons, cravat clips, pens, and a pair of telegrams from D.C. inquiring about his progress on the counterfeiting ring he was trying to locate.

  I almost closed the sack up until I realized that stuck into the same envelope as his wife’s letter was another piece of paper.

  I opened it up and found it to be a list of some kind.

  Nathan Dobbs

  The convent

  The mansion

  Next to each was a penciled check mark indicating, I assumed, that he had dealt with this person or place for whatever reason.

  Nathan Dobbs sounded familiar. I wasn’t sure why. But I knew it was a name of some prominence and significance. But why? It didn’t have anything to do with counterfeiting. That I was sure of. Why had Grieves listed it here? Then I remembered the initials N.D. from the gunsmith’s.

  For a time my mind was relieved of trying to figure out what the list meant.

  The talk among the miners was getting loud, an anger giving the din a sharp edge. I didn’t pay much attention, but I was forced to pay attention when a large bald man was knocked into my table with a fist the size of a boulder. He was even angrier than McGivern, the miner I’d met earlier.

  The bald man tried to right himself but couldn’t. Seeing the inevitable, I grabbed my coffee cup, stood up, and walked backward into the wall. The man continued downward, striking the table and knocking the legs out before he crashed on top of it to the floor. His head struck my boot. The crashing sound seemed to hang there for a long time.

  The even bigger large man who had put him down them lunged forward, maybe to kick him. Four other miners grabbed him, restrained him.

  The man who’d waited on me, and who was apparently the owner, rushed into the melee. He had a club. But not for long. He was shouting for the fight to break up and swinging the club over his head. But one of the men grabbed it from his hand and punched him right in the face. His nose became a red geyser of blood. He covered his face and fell back into a chair.

  This was the sort of situation the mine owners could exploit, the arguments among the men themselves. If the owners put out a newspaper they’d splash something like this all over the front page: MINERS FIGHT EACH OTHER IN CAFÉ—DISAGREEMENT IN THE RANKS. Then they’d identify the dissenters, the ones who didn’t want to strike, and they’d go after them with bribe money to keep the dissent going. If all else failed, they’d move in their goons, Pinkertons, or freelance thugs. They were everywhere these days. Owners paid top dollar for thugs.

  As the man on the floor started to grapple at air and pull himself up, his opponent said, “You’re the only one what can convince them other miners to strike, Lou. He wants to get all the silver out of there he can and then run out on us. Maybe if we don’t dig that silver for him, he’ll think things over. We got to stick together, Lou. We got to strike.”

  The semicircle of miners in dusty, soiled work clothes raised busted hands in solidarity. They wore the kind of dirt that didn’t come off. Some of them looked like raccoons, the weariness and mine dust encircling their deep-set eyes. The rich people who own mines are the most ruthless bosses since the heyday of slave owners. Over in Pennsylvania and down in Kentucky they had five-year-olds working the mines for ten cents a day. The little ones could wiggle into the most dangerous places of all. Never mind that they missed school, developed black lung by ages eight and nine, and were frequently crushed to death in those wiggle places they were sent into. Satan was happy, as were his rich followers.

  “If we go on strike,” said the man on the floor, grabbing on to a chair and pulling himself up, “then we all starve. Better that a few of us work and share whatever food and oil we can afford to buy.”

  There was as much sorrow as anger in these men. They had wives and kids to support. There couldn’t be anything worse than watching the ones you love starve and go sick on you. It cut your manliness right down the middle.

  The mine whistle.

  The clarion call to keep the rich richer.

  They trudged off. The man who’d been knocked down joined them. The one who’d hit him clapped him on the back. “We ought not to be fightin’ each other, Lou. Don’t you see that’s what they want us to do?”

  Lunch pails banged against legs. Heavy work shoes tromped the floor. They filed through the door then as a unit, throwaway men laden with grief and fear.

  Unions were slowly taking hold in the West. The battles were brutal. The rich hired Pinkertons and thugs of all stripes to penetrate groups of workers and report back everything they learned. In Wyoming, twelve railroad workers had been cut down in a gun battle with hired goons. The workers probably would have stood a better chance if they’d had weapons.

  I sat there for a time finishing up my coffee. I was now the only customer. The owner with the bloody nose came over.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t get hit.” He still pressed a rag to his nose.

  “I try to avoid that whenever I can.”

  “You can afford to be a wiseacre. You don’t got this bloody nose.”

  I decided he might be a good source of information. “There a convent around here?”

  “You mean for Sisters and things?”

  “Yeah, for Sisters and things.”

  “Well, I guess then we’d be talking up in the hills. It ain’t exactly a convent. It’s more like a refuge. They help run the little hospital here and teach at the school for Catholics but they stay at the place up in the hills. Them Sisters did all the work themselves, too.”

  I wrote down the instructions he gave me.

  The nose started bleeding in earnest again. “I wonder if I broke something. I kinda agree with them boys. I mean, mine owners are real bastards. I came out here from Pennsylvania. They worked my old man to death and half the time he had to fight to get his wages. The pricks. He died coughin’ blood up so bad we had to keep a bucket by his bed.”

  Then he waved me off. He went away to do something about his geyser.

  A sweet warm afternoon was a good time for a ride in the foothills. Maybe the nuns would make a better man of me. A lot of people had tried.

  Chapter 10

  The convent was a half mile out of town, built of logs and perched on a hill surrounded by pines. Below it stretched the farmland that the Sisters and their helpers tended in the warm months. Behind the convent I could see a white barn, a small corral for the horses, and a separate area for six dairy cows.

  Not too long ago this would all have been timberland. But whoever had homesteaded it—and it might well have been nuns—would have had to fight and conquer the land as they would any other foe. Cabins would have been built first, then outbuildings. Crops would have been planted right away. Wells would have been dug soon, too. I hadn’t seen any water nearby.

  There was a tranquility in that place that I let myself enjoy. It was as if the cabin and its land were within some kind of protective bubble. The air was sweeter, somehow. One time in the war I’d holed up in a monastery. I’d been wounded in the leg. The two monks who’d resided there had been killed in a crossfire. I’d patched myself up as well as I could and then set to eating anything I could find that didn’t need fire. Why invite the enemy in? I apparently hadn’t done a great job working on myself. An infection set in and I sweated a day and a half through delirium. But when I woke up it was odd—although I didn’t have much strength, I felt a peace I don’t think I’d ever known, not even as a boy. I hid out there another two days until I was sure I could travel well and fight if I had to. The trouble was that as soon as I left the monastery that feeling of serenity left me. I was then just one more grizzled soldier cast out of paradise.

  I could hear the nuns praying inside. The whipping wind probably stifled my knock.

  I’d been expecting a nun in a religious habit of some kind. This was a willowy mi
ddle-aged woman in a seaman’s sweater and a pair of dungarees cinched with a very female belt. Her good Irish looks were just beginning to fade along with the chestnut color of her hair.

  “Morning, may I help you?”

  “Sister, is it?”

  “Sister Jane, yes.”

  I introduced myself.

  “How may I help you, Mr. Ford?”

  “Do you know anything about a woman named Molly and her Uncle Bob?”

  She turned back to the three women seated at a long table beneath a huge wooden crucifix. “It’s about Molly.” To me, “They’ve been staying here a while. Is there some trouble?”

  “Well, right now she’s in jail, I’m afraid.”

  “Molly is in jail?”

  “And I’m afraid that’s not the worst of it. Somebody murdered Uncle Bob.”

  “Good Lord.” She was obviously shaken. The other nuns had heard, too. She stood back so I could come inside.

  One half of the long room was as neatly organized as a military barracks. Two sets of bunk beds, a kitchen area, a tall bookcase packed with books, and three long poles suspended by wire from the ceiling that sufficed as a closet.

  In the center of the cabin was a grotto of sorts. The enormous crucifix, a wooden kneeler, a framed painting of the Virgin standing atop a globe, and a small incense dish, the smell of the stuff sweet on the air.

  The table was the sort used for picnics, with benches on both sides. I was introduced to the three other nuns, each dressed in street clothes, and handed a cup of steaming coffee. I sat on a stool at the far end of the table.

  All of the women looked sensible and capable. No fluttery butterflies here. On the other hand, they’d kept themselves female. I’d seen mountain women who looked as burly and tough as their menfolk.

  Tin plates and tin cups sat in front of everybody. I’d been given a green glass cup. Visitors only, I suspected.

  They looked at me politely but with the kind of fearful curiosity you see on the faces of people who are hearing terrible news.