Sliphammer

by Brian Garfield

  “Forget what?”

  “Wyatt Earp. He’ll destroy you—he’ll swat you like a fly, if you get in his way.” Absently, he made a face at the coffee and put the cup down to’ cool. He leaned back, crossing his legs and hooking one arm over the back of the chair, and in a sleepy way he added, “You’ll never get him out of this town if he doesn’t want to go.”

  “Funny way for you to talk,” said Tree.

  “Why? Because I wear a badge and you and I are supposed to be on the same side?”

  “You might say that.”

  “I might, but I won’t. You see, I’m an elected official with a duty to the constituency that voted me into office.”

  “What’s that got to do with Earp? He didn’t vote for you.”

  “His friends did,” McKesson murmured, smiling a little. He was being deliberately mysterious and it irritated Tree.

  Tree said, “All right, since you want me to ask. What friends?”

  It made McKesson laugh. “Very good. I’m glad to see you’re not the usual kind of bumbling half-assed farmer they use for deputy sheriffs down in Arizona.”

  “Spare me the kind words, Sheriff. Get to the point, if you’ve got one.”

  One bushy white eyebrow went up, a warning sort of expression that might have been accompanied by tongue-clucking. “Easy, young fellow,” McKesson said. “You haven’t got so many friends in his bailiwick that you can afford to alienate me.”

  “I didn’t know we were friends.”

  “I’m doing my best to be friendly,” McKesson answered. “I’m trying to give you some advice that may save your skin. What could be friendlier than that?”

  “You said something about Wyatt Earp’s friends.”

  “Friends,” the sheriff echoed. “Everybody’s somebody’s friend.” His hard smile did not give him the disarming appearance it was evidently intended to provide.

  Patiently, Tree reached for the coffee and tasted it. It was a far cry better than the Chinese cafe’s.

  McKesson said, “You’ll have to forgive me. I like to act as if I’m absentminded and vague—as if I’m not aware of events. It’s often an effective pose—it puts people off their guard, which makes it easier to get around them and cut them off. I should warn you I’m an overeducated old fart but I’m not as slow as I appear.”

  “I’ll bear it in mind.”

  “You do that. Now, about Earp and his friends. You arrive here one bright sunny morning all by yourself, evidently expecting to be able to do single-handed what a small army couldn’t do. In the interests of keeping the peace, which is what I’m hired to do, I feel it’s incumbent on me to alert you to the realities of the situation you’re in. You’ve been posted up here to keep surveillance on the Earps until you get word from Denver that Governor Pitkin’s signed the extradition papers. At that point you’re supposed to arrest Wyatt and Warren Earp and take them back to Arizona in custody. Is that right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think you can do that? If you do, you’re a fool. How do you expect to pull it off?” McKesson looked as if he were genuinely curious.

  Tree gave him a long scrutiny, trying to see past the mask of wordy pomposity. Clearly McKesson was, as he said he was, a lot faster than he appeared: if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have this job. A mining boom camp was no place for an addle-headed old law man.

  Tree decided it might be profitable to play McKesson’s own game. And so he said, “Let’s put it this way. If I don’t have a plan, I’d be stupid to admit I was that much of a fool. And if I do have one, I’d be stupid to tell you what it is.” And he smiled.

  The white eyebrow went up again. “Smart,” McKesson commented. “Smarter than I took you for—and coming from me that’s both a compliment and a confession. I rarely fail to size a man up correctly at first crack. You took me by surprise twice. Either I’m slipping or you’re a damned clever young man.”

  “Uh-hunh.” Tree was beginning to enjoy the game; he would have enjoyed it more if it hadn’t been for the looming shadow of Wyatt Earp, which lay dark in the back of his mind and colored every thought and deed.

  McKesson said, “I do like you. You size up like a man. I think you deserve a free lesson in politics—it may save your life.”

  “I thought we were talking about friends.”

  “We are. To a man like Wyatt Earp, friends and politics mean the same thing.”

  “All right. You’re in a mood to lecture—I’ll listen.”

  “Smart,” McKesson remarked again, and then he chuckled. “If you’d known me longer you’d know I’m always in a mood to lecture. Lately I haven’t had many good audiences, though, unless you count the drunks I gather into the fold every night. All right, young fellow, settle back and enjoy your coffee and try to appreciate my wisdom as much as it deserves. I’ll tell you about Gunnison and I’ll tell you about Wyatt Earp, and his politics, and his friends.”

  McKesson was smiling—but his eyes were at odds with his lips. He spoke with a flat down-East accent, Tree noticed.

  McKesson said, “We’ve got a tough Httle town often thousand tough people here. It’s a new mining region but it’s rich as hell. If you’ve seen the town, and you couldn’t have helped that this morning, then you’ve seen that -it’s a spectacular monument to what unlimited money and baroque bad taste can achieve. That ought to tell you something about the kind of men who built this town—the men who still own it. There are about fifty of them all told—strike-it-rich millionaires. Two years ago almost every one of them was a down-and-out prospector. They’ve got all the money in the world but they’ve got no traditions, no education, no taste, and not a hell of a lot of good sense. I’ve seen two of them sit in the lobby of the Inter Ocean Hotel during a cloudburst and bet fifty thousand dollars on which of two raindrops would first reach the bottom of a windowpane.”

  The sheriff sipped coffee and cleared his throat. “Now, these old boys made their strikes just in the past couple of years, and big-money mining’s changed a good deal since the old days when they used to pan and sluice. The fortunes that are being made in these mountains are coming out of deep shafts in the ground, not out of creek-bed gravel. It takes a lot of manpower to dig a thousand-foot mine shaft and drag ore out by the thousands of tons and wagon it down into the smelters and mill it down into pure metal. A hell of a lot of manpower. For every overnight millionaire in Gunnison there are a couple of hundred hardscrab-ble miners working for day wages. Or more—some of these mines carry payrolls of six or eight hundred men. Nowadays a lot of these miners think they aren’t getting paid enough or looked after well enough. We’ve got a troublesome little bunch of loudmouthed agitators frdm back East calling themselves Knights of Labor trying to form strike unions. Maybe you’ve heard what happened in Leadville and Creede when they tried the same thing—a lot of heads were smashed.”

  “I heard,” Tree murmured, lulled by the rambling run of the sheriff’s voice. “What’s this got to do with me?”

  “I’m coming to that. Let’s look and see what we’ve got here. We’ve got a handful of lucky millionaires who want to stay rich and get richer, and we’ve got thousands of unhappy miners being stirred up by radical agitators, and into the middle of this comes a big man with handlebar mustaches and two revolvers and a big-gun reputation that’s made him as much of a legend as Wild Bill Hickok. This is the man who licked the Clan tons in Tombstone, the man the dime novels call the Lion of Tombstone.”

  McKesson paused to see what effect his speech had taken. Tree was lighting his pipe. He was thinking about Wyatt Earp, a man he had never met, wondering how it would be, not liking the possibilities.

  McKesson said, “The people who own this town gave him the key to the city.”

  It made Tree look at him. “What?”

  McKesson nodded. “They’re treating Wyatt Earp like visiting royalty. Given over the whole Inter Ocean Hotel to him and his wife and his brother.”

  “Why?”

  “Two
reasons. First, these ore barons of ours are like kids when it comes to celebrated visitors—they’d do the same thing for an actress or a senator. And second, these Yankee millionaires of ours know it was the Earps who whipped hell.out of the Johnny Reb Texans in Kansas, and they respect a case-hardened man above all ethers. They’ve got a good use for Wyatt - Earp, you see. Just the fact that he’s holed up in the Inter Ocean is enough to give pause to these radical agitators. The miners know Earp’s on friendly terms with the owners, and nobody wants to get into a fracas where he may find himself staring down the wrong end of Wyatt Earp’s gunbarrels. Do you begin to see what I’m driving at?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. The point is, you’re supposed to arrest Earp and take him out of Gunnison. The millionaires aren’t going to like that. Earp’s doing them a favor by being here, and they’re doing him a favor in return.”

  “What favor?”

  McKesson’s smile, again, was colder than it should have been. He said, “I’d have thought you’d have figured that out by now. This is a mining state—the men who own the mines pretty much control the politics. It’s for sure they control the governor’s office. You can’t arrest Earp unless Governor Pitkin signs the extradition papers. Now do you see? Earp’s friends are trying to persuade the Governor not to sign the extradition papers.”

  Tree’s pipe had gone out; he found a match and lit it. When he looked at the sheriff, the long-clawed hands were spread in a gesture that meant, So there it is. McKesson’s smile was small and almost apologetic. “Friends,” McKesson said, “and politics. Earp stays in town to intimidate the agitators, and in return, the owners protect him against extradition.”

  “You think they’ll persuade the Governor not to sign?”

  “Who knows? My private opinion is it’s a tossup. But whatever happens in Denver, your problem’s right here in Gunnison, and nobody here will give you any help. The only men in Gunnison who’d be tough enough to join you going up against the Earps are the owners’ hired strike-breakers. They’re a pack of thugs but they have a purpose—they help me keep the peace by keeping the lid on ten thousand miners. Point is, of course, the strikebreakers are Earp partisans because they’re all on the same side, against the miners and agitators. You won’t get any help there.”

  McKesson had finished his coffee. Now he stood up. “So you see the whole city’s united against you. Regardless of what happens in Denver, you haven’t got a chance.”

  Tree said, “What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “If the Governor signs the extradition, where does that put you?”

  “In a rather uncomfortable spot, I’m afraid. I’m a county official, of course, not a state employee, so there’s some question whether I’d be bounden to obey instructions from Denver unless martial law was declared.”

  Without comment, Tree stood up and knocked the bowl of his pipe into his hand. He stooped over the spittoon to dump ash into it, pocketed the pipe and rubbed his hands. He gave McKesson a dry look.

  McKesson said, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m a coward.”

  “What word would you prefer?”

  For the first time, McKesson flushed. But he regained composure quickly; he said, “Realist. I prefer realist. I happen to know which side my job’s buttered on. I’m a hired hand, you know, and if you eat a man’s bread then you’re obliged to sing his songs.”

  “Thanks,” Tree said, “for telling me where you stand.” The tone, if not the words, was without sarcasm.

  “Think nothing of it.”

  “I will,” Tree replied, and saw it take effect; he added, “Just one other thing.”

  “Name it. I’m always anxious to be of service to a friend.”

  “Aeah. If I have to arrest him will you try to stop me?”

  McKesson’s pitted face was too animated ever to be blank, but he held it now in stern, guarded repose. “Probably not. I’ll have to wait and see.”

  Tree tugged his hat down, feeling dismal; he said, “Listen, I’ll fight you too if I have to.”

  “Will you, now. You’re talking as if you had a chance of winning.”

  “No point in acting as if I’d already lost.” Tree managed a cool smile.

  “You have, you know,” McKesson breathed. “You can only get killed.”

  “You can’t always go by that.” Tree went outside into the morning sun and heard the screen door slap shut behind him. He squinted. The brilliant light was not in keeping with his bleak mood. Belly churning, he went up the street.

  Four

  As he traveled the one-block distance between the sheriff’s office and his hotel, he was thinking darkly of the spare slipham-mer six-gun and holster packed away in his carpetbag. The way things shaped up, it looked as if he would need it: any time gunplay moved from remote possibility to likely probability, a sensible man needed two guns. Not that anybody in his right mind would use both guns at once, or be likely to need all that firepower—even case-hardened killers admitted that if you couldn’t do it with five or six bullets you probably couldn’t do it at all. But guns, even the most finely tuned and smithed guns, were never wholly reliable. You never knew when a vital spring would break, or a cartridge misfire, or a firing pin crystallize and shatter.

  As he turned into the narrow lobby he became caustic with himself: Was this a legitimate errand, or was it just-a way to postpone meeting Wyatt Earp? Was he scared of Earp? Or was it that he cherished certain illusions about a legendary man and feared Wyatt Earp in the flesh wouldn’t live up to them? Or was it simply that he didn’t like this job and didn’t want to do it? If Stillwell had gone after my brother, he thought. Was it justice to arrest Earp? He couldn’t help remembering what he had said to his half brother Rafe: Fair my ass. It was a job.

  He reached the back of the corridor and fumbled the room key out of his pocket, thinking maybe Earp’s influential friends would solve his problem by quashing the extradition. In the meantime, he reasoned, was there any reason why he should’hurry to meet Earp?

  The key was within an inch of the lock when a corner of his vision registered warning in his mind. Alerted, he froze. The nail was gone from the doorjamb.

  His left hand palmed the sliphammer gun. He moved to one side of the door and reached out to thumb the latch. The door wasn’t locked; it rode open, squeaking a little with a sappy protest of green wood. He flattened his back against the outside wall, gun up, holding his breath. Chances were there was nobody inside—somebody had searched the room, maybe, and gone.…

  He wheeled inside, crouching low, gun fisted tight. When the intruder fired the bullet went over his head.

  Tree’s eyes registered the lancing bloom of muzzle flame and not much else: the intruder was in the dark corner. Tree shot twice, very fast; the afterglow was his aiming point.

  The man came walking out of the corner as if on stilts, tripped and fell across the bed, and rolled off, leaving a red smear on the blanket. When he hit the floor his left hand opened and a tenpenny nail rolled out, clattering like a spinning coin on the floorboards.

  Tree was down on one knee; he got up and strode forward and kicked the gun out of the man’s fist, and then had a look at the man.

  The eyes were open, losing focus. It was the same man he had seen talking to McKesson—the man who had pointed him out to McKesson. Black bile formed in his throat; he wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and laid his fingers along the man’s skinny throat, feeling for a pulse. There was none.

  Ears still ringing, Tree walked down the hall to the lobby. He still had the gun in his fist. The clerk, alarmed by the noise, stared at him and trembled.

  Tree said, “Get McKesson and bring him back here.”

  Swallowing, voiceless, the clerk nodded in spasms and ran flapping out the door.

  Tree went back to the room, stepped across the body, and opened his carpetbag. He took out the spare gun and threaded the holster onto his gunbelt; he was buckling the rig around his
hips when McKesson came in, red-faced and out of breath.

  McKesson’s boot heels skidded when he came to a stop. He wore a gun, but it was holstered. His white hair was awry.

  “For crying out loud,” McKesson said helplessly.

  Tree bent down and picked up the intruder’s gun; glanced at it and handed it to McKesson. “One thing before you start making a speech. That’s a .38. You can tell he fired it by the smell, and you’ll find the bullet in the wall out there in the hall. He was waiting back in that corner when I opened the door.”

  McKesson took it all in his eyes, without moving from his stance in the doorway. When he spoke, he was surprisingly crisp: “Why did he miss?”

  “He telegraphed. I came in low and he shot over my head.”

  “If you knew he was in here why didn’t you speak out?”

  “He heard my boots in the hall. He saw me open the door. If he’d had anything to say to me he had plenty of time to say it.”

  McKesson gave him a sharp look. “You’re a tough son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

  “I’m still taking nourishment,” Tree said. Then his temper broke: “Who the hell was this bastard? I saw him toll you onto me.”

  McKesson nodded. “Grady Jestro was his name.”

  “And that’s all you’re going to tell me?”

  McKesson said, “I’m not obliged to tell you a damned thing. It’s within my power to run you in for homicide.”

  “You can try,” Tree intoned.

  “If that’s a threat I’ll ignore it. This sizes up as self-defense. Justifiable homicide. I’ll release you on your own recognizance as a courtesy to a fellow peace officer.”

  “Still trying to show me what a good friend of mine you are.”

  “Yes—whether you want to believe it or not.” McKesson moved into the room and Tree saw the little knot of onlookers crowded into the hallway. McKesson turned his head and said, “You two make yourselves useful. Get this out of here.”