by Ed Gorman
I landed hard enough to slam his rifle to his chest. He couldn’t squeeze the shot off. I rode him all the way down to the ground, ripping the Winchester from his fingers and already smashing him in the face three or four times before he’d even settled against the grass.
I didn’t have much choice but to kill him. He’d be too dangerous to leave alive. I couldn’t shoot because of the sound. I could take the bowie he carried and cut his throat but I wasn’t much for cutting people. About all that was left was to strangle him and then break his neck so he couldn’t come around later. Despite what you may have heard, strangulation is an imprecise method of killing somebody.
I dragged the corpse behind the boulder. The body was busy with its purges. Dying smells.
I had no idea if anybody was watching me from the castle. Not much I could do about it, anyway. I finished hiding the body, grabbed my Winchester, and ran toward the waters of the moat gleaming in the moonlight.
There hadn’t been any sounds from inside for minutes. When I got to the bridge, I slowed down. I had to move as quietly as I could. Frogs and crickets and night birds covered some of my entrance.
The first thing I saw was the courtyard, decorated in a style that was supposed to be medieval. There was even a gallery where the king and queen passed judgment on the entertainment that took place in the courtyard. Wide steps led up into the hotel itself.
Except for a few shields and spears and coats-of-arms, the medieval motif was dropped inside the hotel. Then it became, from what I could see in the dark, a very expensive European hotel with vaulted ceiling, small shops, two or maybe even three restaurants, and then the usual concierge’s desk, tiny offices for various hotel functionaries, and a check-in desk so long and wide you could probably play tennis on it.
But there was, over it all, the stench unique to a large fire. If anybody ever rebuilt this place, they’d have to deal with the smell. It would be a long time before the odor simply vanished into the air. And it would get only worse as I got closer to the wing that had been burned down.
Silence.
Well, the usual creaks and groans of any large building but nothing else. This was a testament to one of two things. Either none of the people in the building were speaking above a whisper or they knew I was there and were observing me from a place I was unaware of.
Three floors with dozens of rooms. I could spend all night looking for Liz and Terhurne. I thought of the first thing you learned as an agent. It was true in wartime and it was supposedly true at that moment. That nothing mattered but the job you were doing for the government. Anything personal was irrelevant. Meaning, in this case, that my priority should have been Grieves. But I couldn’t get Liz from my mind. I didn’t like thinking about what they might do to her before they killed her. Most people think that there are no fates worse than death. But they’re wrong.
I didn’t expect to find much on the ground floor and I was right. I spent fifteen minutes opening office doors onto darkness. All three restaurants had ample window space so spill light from outside made them easy to check. What nights there had been in these places. People from all over the world—rich and powerful people, of course—had spent hours in there. The so-called Frontier West was the selling point. Silks in the evening but in the day you wore costly cowboy clothes purchased in one of the shops I’d just checked out. The clothes were nothing like real range clothes and most of the people looked silly as hell in them but slap them on tame horses for trail rides and they could fancy themselves real true Western folk. Folk who frequently asked, “Is Jesse James anywhere around here?” They’d be photographed endlessly for use later back at home where they’d bore their friends with an interminable reprise of their frontier adventures.
I was just about to try the next floor when my right boot stepped in something slick on the floor to the right of a carpeted stairway.
I hunched down, touched a fingertip to the mess and then gave it a sniff. Blood does have a smell, much as some medical people say otherwise. And there was no doubt this was blood.
The pool of it was at an angle to the central staircase. I tried to reconstruct what might have happened. There had been a single shot. A scream. Somebody had been wounded or killed right at that spot, thus the pool of blood. I then followed the smaller splotches of blood to the staircase itself and could see in the moonlight that the injured or dead person had been taken up to at least the second floor.
The dark at the top of the stairs was rich and deep. Anybody could be watching me from there. I took each of the first steps carefully, slowly, my Winchester aimed right into the center of the gloom above me.
Each tiny noise I made was magnified a hundred times, at least to my ears, in the odd quietness of the place.
On the fourth step I stopped, tensed.
A single sound from upstairs.
The cold sweat came again. This time accompanied by a pounding heartbeat. I was exposed completely there on the staircase.
The sound again. At least this time I had some sense of what was making the sound. A footstep, then another. Easy to imagine somebody getting into position to shoot.
Another footstep. Weight on a wooden floor, a flat spot in that floor, a faint creaking sound.
The first floor was marble. The second was wood.
A bad choice awaited me. Go back or go on? Either way I was a damned good target. I stared hard into the darkness above me. But even though my eyes had adjusted to the worst of the gloom, I still couldn’t make out any human shape up there in the shadows.
Then he made it easier for me.
To get the shot he wanted, he had moved away from the side of the staircase to the edge of the top step.
He had a clear shot.
But I fooled him. He was expecting me to stay within the range of his aim. I’d be standing up and running back down the stairs or I’d be hunching down and hugging the side of the staircase.
What I did was throw myself to the far side of the staircase and start rolling back down the steps as quickly as I could.
He fired. He fired four or five times, in fact. His bullets chewed up carpet and they chewed up wood but he wasn’t lucky enough to chew me up.
When I rolled back down on the marble floor, I kept right on rolling until I was out of his range, off to the side of the staircase.
A shout from far above me, the third floor: “What the hell’s going on down there, Lars?”
“Must be that federal man he told us to watch for.”
“You get him?”
“No, but I will.”
“You damned well better.”
“You the boss now, asshole?”
All this conversation going on in the gloom, no faces attached to it.
I could hear the shooter reloading. He was taking his time. Probably figuring that he was just making me all the more nervous.
What he was making me was mad that I hadn’t yet reached the second floor. My only concern was that there might be one or two other men on that floor. It wouldn’t be hard to find another way up. But I didn’t want to open a door when I got up there and take three bullets in the chest for my trouble.
I took another tour of the first floor. This time I knew what I was looking for. An alternate set of stairs that would take me upward.
The shooter had to know I wasn’t dumb enough to try the grand staircase again. He also had to know that I’d be frantically looking for another way to get up there.
It took me longer than I’d expected. Not that there weren’t alternate, smaller staircases. There were three others in fact on that vast floor. The problem being that they were all open, exposed. I couldn’t get up them without making at least a few small noises. Easy for him to hear me and sit in the darkness, waiting for me.
I even considered the dumbwaiter I found in the kitchen, the problem being that I’d be trapped on it if it made too much noise—trapped and with no easy chance of escaping.
Behind the largest office on the first floor,
I found a door that seemed out of place in the sumptuous setting. A plain, unadorned door.
I opened it and found my means of getting to the second floor. Maybe even the third. The management must have used those stairs when they had to get up top quickly. A resort had to have a dozen little emergencies a day.
I started climbing.
The echoes in the narrow stairway were even louder. Not even moving on tiptoe helped all that much. I considered taking my boots off but not knowing what lay on the other side of the door, I decided against it.
The other trouble was the darkness. In effect, I was moving inside a long coffin, sealed without any light getting in at all. I could stumble at any moment. And that would likely be heard by somebody. And the narrowness was getting to me. I’ve never been one for cramped spaces. We all have fears that can turn us into raving lunatics at the wrong moment. And this was one of mine. It was so tight in there that I could smell myself, sweat, tobacco, gunpowder.
As I went step by step, I kept touching the wall on the right, hoping that its seamlessness would suddenly turn into a door frame. After a few minutes I wondered illogically if I wasn’t on a stairway at all but some other passage used for a purpose I couldn’t even guess at.
But, finally, the feel of a frame. Then, lowering my hand, the feel of a doorknob. Finally—as long as it wasn’t locked.
It turned without any problem at all.
I leaned my sweaty head against the door in a moment of relief. I couldn’t get Liz from my mind. I should never have let her come along, the hell with her getting a story that no other newspaper would have.
I set my Winchester against the wall, making sure it wouldn’t fall and rattle its way down the steps I still couldn’t see. The clatter would be bad enough. What if it also misfired?
I stood up straight, fixed my Colt firmly in hand, and started to ease the door open an inch at a time.
It was when I had gotten the door open just far enough to peek out that the rifle point stabbed at the side of my head and a male voice said, “I was betting you’d find this stairway, Ford, and looks like I was right.”
Chapter 25
From what I could see, he was tall, rangy, and looked at least partly Comanche, even though his work shirt and denims weren’t what most Indians wore, not even on reservations. He seemed to have a discoloration the size of a silver dollar on the left side of his face, though in the dim light I couldn’t be sure.
Also, he wasn’t alone. As he took my Colt from me, somebody came up from behind and hit me with enough force to drop me instantly.
I woke up tied to a chair in a small storage room of some kind. Boxes of various kinds were stacked high on all four walls. The Indian and a Mexican sat at a table watching me.
The Mexican reached into the pocket of his vest and extracted a railroad watch. He studied the face of it then handed it across the table for the Indian to see.
“You lose,” the Mexican said.
“You bastard. I never win with you.” The Indian shoved the watch back across the table. “You didn’t bring me any luck, Ford. We bet on how long it would be before you woke up again. I had you at under five minutes. You were out six. Now I have to pay up.”
“Glad you two are having such a good time.”
“You’re lucky we didn’t kill you already,” the Mexican said.
“Grieves said we should torture you if we don’t get what we want.”
“I personally enjoy torturing,” the Mexican said, “do to you what all them Texas Rangers did to me when I was a young man. But my friend here, he’s a Catholic and he says torturing somebody is a mortal sin.” He smiled. “Can you believe that, here I’m a Mex and I don’t believe none of that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost bullshit, and here he’s raised wild and the missionaries get their hands on him and they’ve got a believer for life.”
Though my head hurt, and the trickle of warm blood down my back made me uncomfortable, I couldn’t let it pass. I looked right at the Indian. “So torture’s a mortal sin but murder isn’t?”
“To me it’s a worse sin, torture, I mean. You can kill a man clean and leave him die in dignity. But you can’t kill a man clean with torture. He has no dignity then. So the torture is a much worse mortal sin.”
“Even to a nonbeliever like me, that makes sense. But of course I don’t believe in mortal sins of no kind. The priests just tell you that to keep you in line.”
I glared at one then the other. “So what is it you two assholes want from me, exactly?”
“You got some mouth, señor.”
“At least I don’t kill women,” I said.
“Who kills women? Not me and the breed here.”
“You killed Molly Kincaid.”
“Bullshit,” the Indian said. “We killed her uncle but we never killed her.”
It was simple. I believed him. “Why’d you kill her uncle?”
The Mexican snorted. “Grieves, he was in town one night all liquored up and he seen this Molly girl and so he gets all crazy about screwing her. But she won’t go back to his room so he takes her uncle and her out for some steaks. Figures he’ll impress them and get in her that way. But all he does is end up bragging about how he’s gonna get rich. But in the morning he can’t remember what he told her and her stupid uncle, you see? So he had us kill the old man. He didn’t want us to kill the girl because he thought he could still screw her. When it comes to women, man, he don’t think logical at all.”
“Woman crazy,” the Indian said.
“He says he’s gonna get into that Turner woman tonight before he kills her and her husband. He’ll get the money from them first, though. He ain’t that woman crazy.”
“And then you kill me.”
“You know the kind of people we are,” the Mexican said. “This is a lot easier than workin’ on a ranch.”
I’d always thought that there was a factory somewhere that turned out men like these. They even looked alike no matter what color they were. Rarely shaved, rarely bathed men who preferred grubby clothes and valued only two things—money and the kind of guns they packed. The factory sold them by the dozen. And if you bought two dozen at a time, you got a discount.
“You file any reports on Grieves yet?” the Indian said.
“No.”
“What if we don’t believe you?” The Mexican this time.
“Then you don’t believe me. You asked me a question and I gave you an answer.”
“Grieves is afraid you already let Washington know everything. He’s real worried you’ve already sent more federales after him.”
“I don’t file reports until everything is finished. This isn’t finished yet.”
The Indian grinned. “You think you’ll be around to finish it, do you?”
“I plan to be around. I want to see this grenade for myself.”
“How do you know it’s a grenade?”
I smiled. “Well, Dobbs’s work is in creating handheld weapons. He spent years on different types of grenades. I went out to the quarry and saw what it did to the limestone.”
The Indian laughed. “Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Think of that on a battlefield. Just think what that grenade can do to people.”
I can’t tell you when the noises started to build. I’m not sure I heard them at first. But they did go, once I was aware of them, from virtual silence to a tumult of shouts. And then feet slamming down from above—the stairs leading to and from the third floor, somebody descending at a furious pace, shouts behind him then. And then finally gunfire, the thunder of it booming and echoing off the vaulted ceiling and the immense walls.
“Better go see what the hell’s going on,” the Indian said. “You watch him.”
“Thinks he’s the boss of me,” the Mexican said, his dark eyes unhappy as they watched his partner leave.
More footsteps on the stairs leading down to where we were. Then in quick sequence: the Indian shouting, quick exchange of gunshots, a mortal cry, a body collapsing on the floor.
Another sequence: shouts from those still descending the staircase, more gunfire, somebody rushing toward our room in an abrupt silence.
“Too bad he didn’t get killed,” the Mexican said presuming, I guess, that it was the Indian scurrying back to our room after the shooting was finished.
He shoved his six-shooter back into his holster. He seemed to be under the impression that whatever had gone wrong—obviously Grieves’s men up top had been chasing somebody—that everything was right again.
But that was quickly disproved.
The inward-opening door was flung open and there stood the bloody and ragged figure of Glen Turner. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t give the Mexican any chance at all. He shot him twice in the face. The Mexican’s hand hadn’t even had time to drop to his holster. He was blown back against the wall, his skull cracking on impact. He was already long dead.
Turner slammed the door shut, bolted it quickly. “There’s only two of them left out there.”
He sneered when he saw I was tied to the chair. “The big bad federal man.”
“You don’t look like you’ve been doing so well yourself.”
“Grieves is a sadist, let me tell you, that boy is ready for the asylum.”
“Where’s your wife?”
His face, which he valued so much, got ugly. “The way the bitch has treated me lately, I just left her up there.”
“You left her with Grieves?”
“Spare me the speeches, Ford. You and I both know what Grieves is going to do to her. The question is do I care and my answer is no. She’s slept with everybody else, she might as well sleep with him.”
As he said this, he started untying me.
“She slept with you, too. Right, Ford?” Pause, then: “Right?”
Chapter 26
The first thing he did after untying me was to hit me square in the mouth. He might have been something of a fancy lad but in the last few minutes I’d gotten to see that he was good with both gun and fist. I suppose, strictly speaking, that I had it coming, having slept with his wife and all. But I didn’t like it and planned to return the favor when I got the chance.