Sliphammer

by Brian Garfield

  Sparrow murmured, in his abrasive, insinuating twang, “It changes the picture a little for you, doesn’t it? Before, it was a disagreeable job somebody told you to do, you didn’t think it was just, you had trouble making up your mind whether to do it or not. But this has got to change things for you, Tree. Now you’ve got a personal stake. Earp the same as pulled the trigger that killed your brother.”

  “If I believe you.”

  “I think you do,” Sparrow said. “You know damned well I’ve got my own ax to grind but you still know I’m not lying. I don’t have to.” He flicked imaginary moisture from the corners of his mouth with thumb and forefinger, and added, “There was one thing I didn’t strictly tell the truth -about. I said none of the miners would help you arrest Earp. That was true, but I do know a couple of men who might give you a hand—hot miners. One’s a foundry worker from the smelter on Bald Hill; he was one of us on the street yesterday, damn near’got killed in the gunfight. He’s mad enough to want to get even, not too bright, but he’ll do. The other man I’ve got in mind is an ex-convict who used to be a cattle thief, ran with the old Clanton gang. He’s a liltle gone to seed but he hates the Earps on principle and he’d go along with you for a cut of the reward money. You asked for help. I can get you those two—not much but better than nothing. I wish I could do more but I’ve got big problems of my own. Morale stinks in my organization after that fiasco yesterday—Warren Earp upset my applecart when he got those miners fired up; the timing was all wrong but I had to go along with them or they’d have lost all respect for me. It’s going to take a while for me to get things built up again. If I told a bunch of miners to go with you right now and face Wyatt Earp, they’d ride me out of town on a rail. But I told you before, I want the Earps out of this town, and if you’re the man who can do it, I’ll do my best to help.”

  “I’ll give it some thought,” Tree said, and turned once again to open the door. Caroline got up and followed him out, not speaking. He went downstairs and outside. She trailed along, almost demure, until he stopped on the corner and said to her, “You’d better start back for Arizona.”

  “I’m staying.” Her face was set. “What are you going to do?”

  “The day after tomorrow,” he said, “is Saturday night That’s when I’ll make my move.”

  “Are you going to use those two men he offered?”

  “I haven’t got much choice. McKesson’s out of it.”

  “I’ll help too,” she said.

  “Caroline,” he breathed, “you’ve got a beautiful face and a beautiful body and plenty of guts but you’re short on sense. It’ll be tough enough without having to keep one eye out for your safety.”

  “He was my husband,” she snapped, and strode away fast, leaving the words hanging behind in the still air.

  Eleven

  He didn’t like either one of them. Obie Macklin was small, a quick-moving man, all sharp angles. His eyes never stopped moving restlessly. His biceps were thick, his hands calloused and scarred from foundry work, but he looked unsteady, undependable. The other one, Mordecai Gant, was even worse: a burly ex-convict down on his luck, Gant was a used-up tough, with no skill but thievery and fighting, and no future in sight. He had been reduced to cleaning out stables for a living and he smelled like it. Gant protested to Floyd Sparrow in a pained whine: “Look, it may be a half-assed pissante job but it’s the first one I ever had where I didn’t have to rob somebody or kill somebody to get paid. I made myself a nice quiet nest here and I don’t want nobody shake the limb.”

  They stood in the dark maw of the stable; it was past midnight. Floyd Sparrow said to Tree, “He’ll work for you. He just likes to whine.”

  Gant clamped his mouth shut. He was squat and greasy, his features fleshy, his cheeks folded and jowled; he looked like a thief.

  “He’ll come,” said Obie Macklin. Mackjin ended every sentence with a nervous, meaningless laugh. “He’ll think about his share of that ree-ward money and he’ll come.”

  Gant glared at him. “Obie, I’ll do my own thanking. You about four seconds short of losing your front teeth.”

  “You wouldn’t hit me—I’m littler’n you are!”

  Gant said, “Nobody that wears a gun is little. If you got the guts to pull that on me.”

  “Listen,” Floyd Sparrow said, “try saving the violencing for the Earps.”

  Gant turned and gave Sparrow what passed for a shrewd squint. “Buddy, less I get paid in advance, I ain’t about to go fool with the Arp brothers.”

  “Sure you are,” Sparrow breathed. “You made a deal, remember?” Then, without warning, he slugged his little fist into Gant’s unsuspecting face.

  It hardly budged Gant but his nose immediately began to bleed. He touched it, looked at the blood on his finger, and held his hand cupped under his nose to catch the blood as if he had some compelling reason „ to avoid staining his filthy shirt or the manure-fouled stable floor. He said in a slow-grappling, awkward way, “Whud you do that for, Floyd?”

  “To remind you you gave your word on this little thing.”

  “They ain’t enough of us. You didn’t say they’d only be three of us.” Gant tugged a shirttail out of his pants and bent his head to wipe his nose.

  Sparrow said, “You’ve got a choice, Mordecai. You can go up against the Earps, which gives you a chance, or you can go up against me, which gives you no chance. You’ve seen me work on a man. Now which is it to be?”

  Sparrow’s voice had been more gentle than Tree had ever heard it before, but something in Sparrow’s manner carried absolute conviction. It struck Tree for the first time that Sparrow’s carping, nervous personality was a ruse, that the man behind it was as ruthless and hard as any man alive. Sparrow was a dangerous man.

  Now, with a guilelessly dour glance at Tree, Sparrow said, “There they are—not much, I’ll admit. Can you use them?”

  “I’ll have to.”

  Sparrow said, “You heard the man, boys. Pay attention to what he says and follow his orders to the letter. I’ll bid you all good night.” With a sardonic salute, Sparrow walked out of the stable.

  Mordecai Gant wiped his nose and looked at Tree with baleful reluctance. Obie Mack-lin put a chaw of tobacco in his mouth; it bulged in his cheek, squirrel-like. He gave a nervous bray of laughter that trailed off into silence.

  Tree gave them both his unhappy scrutiny and began to speak.

  He got back to his room late that night. He didn’t have to check the tenpenny nail because the door was wide open, the lamp alight; Caroline was inside, gnawing on a hunk of cheese.

  He pushed the door shut and said, “I want you to go home to your daddy, Caroline.”

  With her mouth full she said, muffled, “You set it up for tomorrow night like you planned?”

  “Uh-hunh. I don’t give much for our chances now I’ve seen Sparrow’s two prize boys.”

  She swallowed, wiped her mouth, and said matter-of-factly, “I’ve been thinking on it. Suppose you get the Earps out of the hotel. You can’t use the railroad because the Earps’ mining boss friends could have the train held down the line, intercept you. So you’ve got to go out horseback.”

  He made a patient grimace.

  She grinned. “I know—I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. But you’re going to need somebody to hold the horses ready for you, and more than that, you’re going to need a goddamn chaper-one.”

  “A what?”

  “Chaperone, you know—duenna”

  “I know what the damned word means,” he growled.

  “Well, then?”

  “Well what?”

  “You can’t get Earp out of his hotel room without her knowing—Josie, his wife. You leave her behind, and she’ll raise a hue and cry they’ll hear from here to Leadville. You’ve got to keep her quiet, and you can’t very well shoot her. So you’ve got to take her with you. Besides, Earp might be easier to handle if she was along—he wouldn’t want to risk getting her caugh
t in the middle of a shooting war.”

  Tree glared at her. She was smiling innocently; she said triumphantly, “So you need a chaperone to look after the lady prisoner. Me.”

  “No. Absolutely no.”

  She sighed. “Look, Jerr, forget that I’m Rafe’s widow, which gives me a stake in this too. Forget that if you want to, but think of this: you need all the help you can get, and I’m not just a frilly petticoat schoolmarm all aflutter with my-goodnesses. I’m a ranch girl born and bred. I’m full of fight and vinegar. Maybe I don’t shoot so good but I don’t intend to shoot anybody. I can handle horses almost as well as Rafe could. Horse for horse I can probably outride you because I weigh fifty pounds less than you. I’m not dead weight, Jerr. I can help. I mean it.”

  She picked up the hunk of cheese and bit off a corner, watching him out of the side of her vision. “You need every pair of eyes you can get to keep watch on those Earps. And one more thing: you don’t know how far you can trust those two bully boys of Floyd Sparrow’s, if you can trust them at all. You do know you can trust me,” she finished, and added after a moment, “all the way.”

  He said sourly, “Thought it all out, have you?”

  “It’s a couple of hundred miles from here to Denver and you’ll have to horseback across some of the ruggedest mountains this side of Hell. It’ll take a week to get there and you can’t stay awake the whole way. You’ll want somebody on your side that you can trust.”

  He said, “Your daddy was right about you.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Damn it,” she said, “I only want you to have the best possible chance of coming out of this alive—I want you to make it, Jerr.”

  Her eyes were open wide; her breasts lifted and fell with her breath. Her lips were parted, moist and heavy in repose. She wrenched her eyes away, walked quickly to the door, and went.

  When it came time to perform, Macklin and Gant did better than he had expected of them. They were like garrison soldiers who only griped when there was nothing better to do. Once the action started, they did fine.

  The operation was as simple as it was desperate. Because of its boldness, and because of the strength of the Earps’ defenses, Tree gave it a fifty-fifty chance to succeed: the Earps were so well defended that their sentries were less alert than they would have been had the situation seemed precarious. Their complacence was a formidable weakness.

  The Earps expected a night raid; because they expected it, they didn’t give its success much credence. The Inter Ocean was guarded at every entrance by Cooley’s strike-breaker-thugs. Men were posted on the staircase landings, front and back, and two armed guards stood outside the bedroom doors of Wyatt and Warren Earp, covering the corridor between them in cross fire. It had been no great task to leam that; the whole town buzzed with word of the Inter Ocean’s fortifications, and while Tree made a point of being visible and nonagres-sive all day Saturday, Macklin and Gant gathered intelligence. Once it became clear that there was no way to get into the Inter Ocean by any ground-floor entrance, and that even if somehow such entrance should be achieved there would still be no way to get upstairs undiscovered, Tree knew he had a good chance. They had made it so difficult for him to get at the Earps that they must believe, by now, that he probably wouldn’t even try.

  Wyatt and Josie slept in the bedroom of the big second-floor suite at the back corner of the building. Their windows gave out onto gingerbread balconies which overhung alleys at the side and back of the Inter Ocean. Two sentries stood guard in the alley under bright lights. They were expertly posted—too far apart to be taken together, too close to each other to be surprised one at a time. The chance of silencing them simultaneously, to prevent one of them from seeing the other attacked and giving the alarm, was too remote to consider. Nobody was going to get past those two; thus, clearly, nobody was going to climb to the balconies and get in through the windows.

  Earp’s generalship was excellent. But the world boasted very few impregnable fortresses, and the Inter Ocean had not been designed with the idea in mind of repelling invasion. There was an obvious chink in Earp’s defenses—Tree hoped it wasn’t so obvious that Earp was waiting for it.

  By three in the morning the Saturday night crowds had broken up. Obie Macklin strolled past the front of the Inter Ocean, acting like a drunk on his way home. He peered in the windows as he went by, and ambled the long way around several blocks to report to Tree and Mordecai Gant, who stood in a dim alley at the foot of the two-story Gunnison Bank’s fire stairs.

  Macklin said in a businesslike tone, “They all gone up to bed. Cooley was makin’ the rounds to check on his bully boys. Barkeep was puttin’ out the lights when I come by.”

  Tree said, “We’ll give them forty-five minutes to get to sleep,” and they did.

  At the end of that interval the three men went up the bank’s outside staircase. Over his shoulder Mordecai Gant carried a heavy ten-foot plank that would have staggered a smaller man. From the landing, Gant gave Tree a boost up onto the roof. Tree flattened himself by the edge and hauled up the plank. Gant boosted Macklin up, then lifted both arms; Tree and Macklin hauled him up by the arms.

  The bank’s roof was six feet lower than the roof of the Inter Ocean, which stood faintly silhouetted above the far end of the bank roof. An eight-foot alley separated the two buildings.

  The night, like most Rocky Mountain nights, was clear and starlit. Tree would have preferred a cloudy night but that might have required a month’s wait. The chill air had a bite in it. Tree felt an involuntary tremor. He picked up one end of the ten-foot plank and led the way, crouched to half his normal height, toward the far corner of the roof, with Gant carrying the other end of the plank and Macklin crawling on the right flank with his gun drawn.

  There was, of course, a sentry on the roof of the Inter Ocean; that was taken into account. Crossing the roof of the bank, Tree kept his attention riveted to the hotel’s roofline, ready to freeze if a man’s head appeared. It did not; they crossed the bank without alarms and reached the corner which stood directly opposite the south corner of the back of the Inter Ocean. The Earp suites were up at the farther end of the hotel; the guards would not be watching this end with as much care. Tree sat down, removed his hat and both boots, and lifted his head, carefully to look down into the alley. He had time to glimpse the two sentries, fifty feet apart below the far corner of the hotel under gaslights which stood under the Earps’ balconies and threw heavy shadows across the windows above. Obie Macklin suddenly hissed and grabbed Tree’s arm. Turning his head slightly, Tree saw the red button-tip of a cigarette on the far roof corner, above the Earps’ balconies. View of the balconies themselves would be cut off to that sentry’s view by the deep overhanging window cornices. With that man above, and the two alley sentries below, nobody could get onto the balconies from overhead or from underneath; but once a man was on one of the balconies, none of the guards would be able to see him. That was the trick: to reach the balcony without discovery. Tree had considered the idea of a diversionary attack but assumed it wouldn’t work. Earp was smart enough to instruct his men to keep their posts. He had discarded the notion in favor of silence and subterfuge.

  The cigarette alternately glowed and dimmed on the far corner, six feet above Tree and a hundred feet away down the length of the eight-foot-wide alley. He didn’t withdraw his head; he knew the guard with the cigarette couldn’t see him against the black mass of the bank roof. The downward angle of the sentry’s view would keep Tree invisible unless he stood up to his full height.

  The cigarette moved back and forth; the rooftop sentry was pacing. Tree squinted toward him. After a few minutes the cigarette went flicking over the edge of the hotel roof. Wind made it flare angry red; it hit the alley floor in a shower of sparks. The sentry’s silhouette, heightened by a tall-domed hat, moved back and forth against the sky with shoulders raised against the chill. Gant whispered in Tree’s ear, “Maybe he won’t move away a
gain.”

  “Maybe he will. We’ll give it a few more minutes.”

  “Better move now—dawn gonna start to gray up pretty quick.”

  “We’ll wait.”

  “You got balls,” Gant remarked.

  That was when the sentry’s hat receded. “Move,” Tree breathed. Gant got on the other side of the plank and they slid it out across the alley. Against the dark mass of the mountain beyond, the alley sentries a hundred feet away wouldn’t be able to see it. With the long end of the plank hanging in space both Tree and Gant had to use all their weight to keep it level. Macklin put his lesser weight on the tip of the board, behind them. Tree’s shoulders and biceps bunched. With a cramped muscular strain they horsed the far end high enough to siide across the top of the balcony rail opposite. The plank was inclined downward from the bank roof at a twenty-degree angle. They slid it forward until it rested snug against the dark frame of the balcony door. It barely reached.

  Braced at the lower end, the plank wasn’t going anywhere. But too much weight on it would bow it enough to make it fall. It was thirty feet to the ground. Tree cursed silently, wishing he’d brought a plank six inches longer. They’d have to make sure not more than one person at a time had weight on it.

  There was no need for conversation. Tree palmed a sliphammer gun in his left hand and crawled out onto the plank. He watched the roofline of the Inter Ocean and he watched the two brightly lit sentries below. The bright light down there was in his favor; it didn’t carry this far, but it would make it hard for the sentries to see into the shadows beyond their own circle of light.

  He was halfway to the balcony when a fist struck his boot softly. He froze and glanced up, not moving his head. The sentry’s hat appeared at the hotel roof, moving slowly from right to left: the sentry was walking a square around the whole building. The hat rose higher as the sentry came closer to the edge. Tree held his breath and curled his thumb over the cut-down six-gun hammer. The sentry stood not more than ten eet away. It was impossible to tell what he was looking at. Blood pounded in Tree’s temples. The sentry’s head dipped sharply, as if he had seen something, and Tree tensed—there was the brilliant, exploding flash of a match. He saw the sentry’s face in the harsh light—one of Cooley’s thugs, lighting another cigarette. The match would blind him for quite some time: only a fool lit matches or smoked on night guard—it spoiled night vision. Tree was thankful for fools. After a moment the cigarette moved on toward the farther corner and Tree resumed his crawl.