Carmody 6

by Peter McCurtin

  A bucket of cold water thrown hard does wonders for a man at death’s door, and there was one bright clear moment of being alive again before the pain in my head boiled up and slopped over like pudding on a stove. Westfall had another bucket ready; I told him to fire away.

  The wet slap in the face nearly knocked me over. One of the women, no longer wailing, looked in from the foot of the stairs and cursed God for letting me live. Westfall yelled at her to fetch a bandage, but she wouldn’t do it.

  One of Sam’s bibs was on the sideboard and I used that to wipe off. Before I did anything else I picked up my gun and holstered it. Westfall didn’t have any ideas about stopping me.

  The pain in my skull said I was due to die any minute; my head felt bigger on one side than on the other. The trickle of blood stopped as the swelling came up. “Where’s McCarty?” I asked Westfall.

  “Gone after Saxbee,” he said. He gave me an open bottle of whisky. “You won’t catch him if that’s what you’re thinking. Got a forty-five minute start.”

  Different parts of my skull were hammered by pain as it moved around. A third drink of whisky chased it, deadened it. Not completely, but I was able to stop squinting. I said, “You let me sleep too long. The kid killed Sam.”

  “That’s crazy. Why would he want to do that?” Dumb in some ways, Westfall was sharp in others; he said I was crazy but was ready to be convinced. But why should McCarty kill Sam; where was the profit?

  “Not for profit, for glory,” I said.

  Westfall was no drinker, but he took a long swallow from the bottle. “You got no proof, Carmody.”

  Explaining glory-seekers and dime novels to Dink Westfall would take more time than I had. “Sam’s the proof,” I said. “You helped ready Sam for burial?”

  Westfall made a noise and said yeah.

  “The bullets didn’t go out in back, did they?” I knew I should have killed McCarty the minute I walked in and saw the hole in Sam’s forehead, because no .50 caliber rifle bullet ever made a hole that small.

  “You’re right,” Westfall said. “Neither bullet went through. Wasn’t thinking about that.”

  I said a .38 might go through a skinny man; never through Sam. Sure the lead was flattened by now, but any fool could tell the difference between a .38 and a .50 caliber. “I’m going to dig one out,” I said.

  Westfall was surprised, angry. “Why don’t you just find the son of a bitch? Then kill him.”

  In my head there was a picture of McCarty riding out to wait for Sam. I could see the snarling grin on the kid’s face as he thought about what he was going to do. Sam, by making peace with Saxbee, was spoiling the kid’s chance to become a dark avenging angel. Yeah, just like Billy the Kid. Sam was ruining the end of the story, so Sam had to die.

  “I’ll kill him, but not with bullets,” I said. “He’d like that—go out in a blaze of glory, so-called. I mean to hang the son of a bitch, legal and proper. The law, the hangman—all the things he hates. So do I, but this time I can make an exception.”

  I took out my knife and tested the edge. No need though; it’s always sharp enough to slice a hair in two. Westfall turned his eyes away and I said he didn’t have to help. “Just watch so later you can tell the court what you saw.”

  We went upstairs and it took some hard shoving and tough talk to get the women away from the corpse. Cutting into dead men was more my line than Westfall’s, but I didn’t stop him from bringing along the whisky. Sam lay heavy, lard faced on the bed. The color had gone from his hands and the brown spots that come with old age stood out clearly against the waxy skin. I told Westfall to pinch out the candles and light the lamp.

  “Open the window,” I said, getting Sam’s shirt open. Sam had been dead for some hours, and it wasn’t like back East where you can pack a body in ice, or in the high country where it’s cold even with the sun shining. And once my knife started cutting into the hollow places the smell would get worse.

  I bumped Sam around until he was ready to be cut. The women had sliced his coat and shirt up the back, to make it easier to get him dressed. It was like I thought: no bullet came out through the back of the head, none through the back. A smarter feller than McCarty might have been more careful. A smarter feller would have used the stolen Sharps, no matter how unhandy he was with big-bore rifles. Still, there was no special need to be careful. Who else but Saxbee would want Sam dead?

  I got the bullet out of Sam’s chest and Westfall got sick. With his head out the window he kept trying to be sick long after there was nothing left. I poured whisky on my hands and cleaned the bullet the same way. I told Westfall to stop acting like an old woman. “There it is,” I said.

  The lead was smacked out of shape by impact, but sure as hell it hadn’t been fired by any big-bore rifle. “That’s what the lawyers call Exhibit A,” I told Westfall. “I mean to bring in Exhibit B on the end of a rope.”

  “You want help?”

  I said no. Again, I was thinking of how it must have been when Sam met the kid on the trail. I knew it hadn’t been quick because natural born killers like McCarty get some of their enjoyment from watching the other feller sweat. Probably he said how disgusted he was with Sam before he killed him. There was no telling with McCarty. Could be he called Sam daddy before he put the first bullet in his head. McCarty would do the head first, to show Mr. Blatchford how straight he could shoot …

  “No help,” I said again. “I want to take good care of that boy. Don’t want the smallest chance he might get shot by accident.”

  “What you say—then he’s crazy,” Westfall said. He followed me downstairs and watched me get mounted. “The son of a bitch is crazy.”

  “I’ll cure him of that,” I said.

  Chapter Ten

  Starting back for Mariposa I knew I might have to ride through many towns before I found McCarty. At the time Westfall soaked me with water the kid had been gone for the best part of an hour. Now it was closer to two hours; too late to hurry. It would have been easier for McCarty to shoot me than to crack me on the head. I thought I knew why he hadn’t done it: killing a man with a sneaky bullet in front of a witness wasn’t part of the legend the crazy bastard was trying to build up around his name.

  I didn’t hurry for two reasons. One, it was probably too late to stop him from killing Saxbee and anybody else he could find. Two: I didn’t push my horse along the darkened trail because the kid might be having second thoughts about me. Maybe he figured I was the only one who would take the trouble to mark him for a liar and a murderer. Coming from somebody like me that might not altogether spoil the dime novel portrait he wanted to paint with blood and gunsmoke. But it could cast doubts.

  So I rode easy, listening more than looking because there wasn’t much to see with oily-black clouds rolling across the moon. My horse whickered at some sound—the next sound was the hammer thumbed back on my .44—but when the faint crunching noise started again, it was nothing but a ground-nesting bird.

  Five miles of flat country without good cover stretched between the ranch and the boundary wire. Not a good place to stage an ambush—and maybe he thought I was counting on that. But any place is a good place if a man doesn’t expect to be shot, so for a good part of the way I stayed off the trail. Nothing happened by the time I got to the wire.

  There, the word was that McCarty had gone through. Well over an hour before; the answer wasn’t too friendly. The fence rider who told me was kind of respectful about the kid. Yesterday the same feller would have made jokes about McCarty, the way he looked. Fast gun or not, there would have been some discussion about McCarty and women. If he could handle a woman—or would want to? Now all that was set aside because the kid was riding out alone to take on Saxbee and his killers.

  That’s how Saxbee’s ranch hands were spoken of when I went through the wired gate. A bunch of hired killers!

  Most of Saxbee’s men—like Sam’s—were still drunk, or still drinking, or still sleeping it off. But that’s how legends
get started.

  About a mile outside the wire the country was still flat but rocky and crisscrossed with gullies. I rode by the place where I had held off Saxbee’s riders; later I crossed the ridge where I had saved McCarty’s life by killing two men I didn’t know. I’m not much for apologies, but maybe those two men had one coming.

  Before I got to the dip in the trail where Sam got killed I rode out from the trail, got down and came in quiet with the Winchester in my hand. Nothing happened and after that I got impatient to be dragging my friend Tex at the end of a rope. Looping and dragging him back to be hung was something I meant to do. Some of the cold hate I had was for me; mostly it was for fat Sam Blatchford. That belly-stuffing woman-jumping selfish old man would let women and children die if it meant saving his own life. Sure he would. Even so, he was better than some men I know, and he deserved a better end than to be shot by a rabid rat from the city sewers. I was late getting started, and it was too bad about the men McCarty was fixing to kill, but how Saxbee and the others ended their lives was no concern of mine.

  I made good time on the last five miles to Mariposa, and if it hadn’t been so dark the town wouldn’t have looked so bright from so far away. The town was just one street in a shallow basin, its only reason for being the good spring water that bubbled at the south end. That’s how I went in, riding out wide and starting back from the south end. I could hear the jangling of the mechanical piano in the one saloon. The jerking tinny music went up between the two lines of buildings and lost itself in the black night sky. I hate those god blasted noise makers, but I can keep myself from putting a bullet through their metal gizzards when there are other sounds to soften the nerve-rattling music. On that night, in Mariposa, there were no other sounds.

  Still out past the light, I could see the street, except there was nothing to see. Nothing to see and nothing to hear except that loco music box. In the deadest town in the lonesomest part of the Territory you could expect to see one or two horses hitched in front of a saloon. Not here; there was nothing. Mariposa was like a ghost town with the lights lit.

  I came in easy. When I got close to the light I climbed down and put a double hitch on my horse. There was more cover on the boardwalk, and more noise no matter how soft I walked, so I stayed in the packed dirt and sand of the street. I had the Winchester ready to kill, and that was kind of odd, because I wouldn’t kill McCarty unless he was an inch from killing me. And maybe he’d have to be closer than that before I shot lead through him.

  I kept walking, and I kept the same pace though nobody as much as ducked a head and looked scared. Down at the saloon, looking clearer now as I got farther into the bright, misty light, the piano was having trouble switching from one tune to another. Between the last music and the next I heard a sobbing breathy sound like an old man trying to blow up a pig bladder, and not getting too far.

  It was coming from a busted-open door on the right side of the boardwalk. It moved and I saw the flash of light on bright metal. Flat in the dirt, the rifle ready, I heard the same sound, and not even the smartest Apache can imitate a dying man that well. I moved back, then got up, and edged along the front of a building that looked like a dry goods store. I got next to the busted in door; the sound hadn’t changed.

  Maybe the dying deputy had been with Deegan, that day at Sam’s place. No way to tell now, not with the top of his chest and some of his face shot away. I didn’t know—still don’t know—who he was. He was tough, or he wouldn’t have lasted that long. I figured McCarty had used only one barrel on this feller, and he must have been in a hurry because he hadn’t hit him dead center.

  He was no friend of mine, but I used the knife on him before I moved on. His eyes were thanking me when I put the point of the Bowie above his heart, then drove it through with the heel of my other hand. He wanted to die and so he wasn’t hard to kill. The muscle shuddering went on for a while, but he was long and mercifully dead by the time I pulled out the Bowie and wiped the broad blade on his shirt.

  The player piano had righted itself and was ripping through “Them Golden Slippers” when I eased back into the street. Well, you have to know the deadest town in the world’s got itself at least one yapping dog. At first I thought the little beastie was snapping his gums at me. But he wasn’t, and he wasn’t much of a dog, and he came snarling down from the other end of the street. That little dog was small and jumping with indignation. I don’t know where he came from, why he came hopping at that particular time, and don’t think I’m soft about animals, because I’m not. I’m not—but I felt worse about the dog than the deputy when a shotgun blast, both barrels, fired from a window upstairs over the saloon blew that little mongrel into smithereens.

  The window shade was pulled down half way, and in the dim light I saw McCarty’s shadow as he moved back into the middle of the room. Either he was talking to himself, or there was somebody in there with him. What he was saying must have been pretty funny, because he laughed a lot. I call that sound a laugh because I have to call it something. It was high pitched, almost a whinny. He stopped laughing and I heard the shotgun being snapped open, the clatter of empty shells on the floor.

  A dead man with a deputy’s badge on his chest lay in the shadows beside the jail. The gun still clutched in his hand hadn’t done him much good. The shotgun blast had hit him low, had just about cut him in half. I heard McCarty coming downstairs and I was across the street with my back against the wall beside the swinging doors before he got all the way down. Another corpse lay on its face, half in, half out of the saloon. The buckshot splintered doors stopped me from seeing more than his boots. I didn’t have to see more than that to know who he was. Deegan had boots like that, Mexican boots with some kind of silver work around the heels.

  I edged closer to the door, feeling with my toe for loose boards. Inside the saloon, McCarty was talking to somebody who didn’t keep up his end of the conversation. “What you did wasn’t smart, wasn’t polite,” the kid remarked in a mild voice. “Rule One, friend, never get in a busy man’s way.”

  I swear I never made a sound, but suddenly the kid broke off his one-sided conversation. Maybe ten seconds later he called out, “You out there, Carmody?”

  I didn’t say a word. He said it again. “Don’t play fox with Tex McCarty. I don’t think you’re out there—I know.”

  So far as my counting went, three men were dead, and I knew the tally would climb higher than that. I don’t usually mix feelings with killing, because that can be fatal in my business, but this rat-brained city bred killer was an exception. I can understand killing for money or revenge, or because the killer is wild with whisky. With men like that I’d be merciful and use a bullet. To put a bullet in McCarty might not be all that easy—he had to be as gun expert as he bragged or those three men, probably more, wouldn’t be laying dead. But damn me for a stubborn Texas fool, I meant to see that young weasel hang.

  “You coming in or not, Carmody? No cause for us to get surly about this.” McCarty stopped to listen before he went on. “Sure you’re mad cause I whacked you on the head. Had to do it, friend. Had to do it—you could’ve got in the way.”

  A wind driven ball of tumbleweed came rasping along the empty boardwalk and plastered itself against my legs. I let it stay there, thinking if I moved fast I could bring down the son of a bitch without killing him. I kept listening for the sound of twin hammers going back on McCarty’s shotgun.

  McCarty said without moving, “I’m getting tired of this pussyfooting. You come on in—or go to hell. What you doing here anyways? Too late for you to do a damn thing. I took care of just about everybody had anything to do with Mr. Blatchford. All but one.”

  Well, I thought, why not? “You mean that for me, Tex?”

  McCarty didn’t even sound surprised to get an answer after all that talking. More than the killing of Sam, that convinced me that he was crazy. But not crazy like somebody who stands on corners and shows the ladies what he’s got. And not crazy like all those loose b
rained fellers who think they’re President Garfield.

  Before he spoke McCarty let me hear that crazy womanish giggle. “No such notion, you and me are on the same side. Now you stop this foolishness, come in and have a drink. That’s all right. The owner just died and willed me the saloon. Ain’t going to be no shooting, that’s a promise.”

  “No need to be,” I called back.

  “Not a bit,” the kid said. “No gunplay and no hard feelings.”

  “Coming in,” I said, thinking it just might work, the kid as crazy as he was. Close enough, I could bend a gun barrel over his head or, failing that, put a bullet in both arms. I stomped my feet and reached out to push the door with the muzzle of the Winchester. A blast from one barrel blew the door off the hinges, and when I jerked back the rifle there were nicks in the barrel.

  I did more stomping, thinking he might take the sound for a falling body. But rats and human killers have a nose for tricks. “Didn’t work, did it?” the kid called. “Wouldn’t have no respect for you if it did. Ought to have killed me when my arm was still bad. Now it’s too late.”

  If I had to do it I’d kill the bastard—and the hell with my promise to a dead fat man. Watching the saloon door I backed down from the boardwalk. From the sound of his voice he was standing right in the middle of the empty barroom, and there was a chance of shooting under the swinging doors—to get him in the legs if he held still long enough. But he was too foxy for that, and by the time I got out far enough he had moved out of sight. I figured he had gone to the safe end of the bar, or around behind it.

  He started up again with his bragging. “Everything you try I’m ahead of you, Carmody. You want to kill me—come on in. If not, then ride away from here and let me get on with my business.”