Tombstone / The Spoilers

by Matt Braun

“I hope to Christ—”

  There was a knock at the door. Hitching back his chair, Starbuck motioned the lawman to the far side of the room. Then he walked to the door and opened it. A bellman handed him a telegram and accepted a dollar tip in return. Closing the door, he tore open the envelope.

  “It’s from Griffin.”

  While Paul watched, he took a pencil and slowly decoded the message. His expression turned grim, then gradually dissolved into a look of thunderstruck rage. At last, cold fury written across his features, he glanced up at the lawman.

  “The governor refused to sign the extradition papers.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “Legal technicalities.” Starbuck studied the telegram a moment. “Griffin doesn’t spell that out, but he says there was pressure brought to bear on the governor. Pressure not to extradite.”

  “Pressure!” Paul repeated. “Pressure from where?”

  “Gunnison,” Starbuck said in disgust. “Earp’s evidently in thicker than I thought with the mine owners.”

  “But it’s a murder charge!” Paul’s eyes were rimmed with dull despair. “The evidence was all laid out, depositions and everything. How the hell could he refuse to extradite?”

  “Who knows,” Starbuck said woodenly. “Where politics are concerned, it don’t pay to underestimate Earp. I should’ve learned that in Tombstone.”

  The truth suddenly came home to him. There was no way to touch Earp. Working within the law was a waste of time. With bleak irony, he asked himself why he’d even tried. Some men, using politics to insulate themselves, were above the law. Even in Arizona, had Earp been brought to trial, it very likely would have resulted in acquittal. There were too many skeletons that couldn’t bear the light of day. Too many men of wealth and power who, as a last resort, would have called all their political markers in his defense. Only outside the law could Wyatt Earp be stopped. There was no legal way.

  “How bad do you want Earp?”

  “Pretty bad,” Paul said slowly. “Why?”

  “Because I’m fixing to handle this thing the way I should’ve handled it a long time ago.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Feet first.” Starbuck’s voice was edged. “You got any objections?”

  “Objections!” Paul’s laugh was a harsh sound in the cramped room. “Hell, I’ll back your play!”

  “It might cost you your badge.”

  “Would it get Earp killed?”

  “If I can force him to draw,” Starbuck said with surpassing calm, “he’ll be dead before he gets the message.”

  “How d’you figure to do that?”

  “He’s got a weak spot. I aim to gig it till he sees red.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight,” Starbuck said, rising to his feet. “Let’s go.”

  “Where to?”

  “The Tivoli.”

  Upstreet from the hotel, the Tivoli Saloon was wedged between a dancehall and a two-bit a night flophouse.

  By comparison with Denver gaming parlors, the Tivoli was crude and barnlike in appearance. Coal oil lamps hung bare from the rafters and the back bar mirror was webbed with cracks. The ubiquitous nude paintings were conspicuous by their absence, and the bar, though mahogany, looked as if it had been purchased at a bankruptcy auction. Spittoons were much in evidence, and sawdust covered the floor to absorb blood from the nightly slugfests.

  While miners were not partial to guns, they took queer delight in maiming one another in no-holds-barred rough and tumble brawls. A bullet-headed bouncer, wearing an eye-patch and an evil grin, refereed the bouts with a lead-loaded bungstarter. He allowed the fights to go no more than a couple of rounds before he waded in and began splitting skulls. An ivory tickler, generally souped on rotgut whiskey, accompanied the thunk of his bungstarter on a rinky-dink piano. Such as it was, the bouncer and his musical colleague were the only entertainment in the Tivoli. The gaming tables, thought to be rigged, were considered more challenge than amusement. The miners spent their evenings trying to outguess quick-fingered dealers.

  The bouncer was dragging a limp gladiator through the door as Starbuck and Paul entered the saloon. A raucous crowd already jammed the room, and the gaming tables were under siege by miners as yet unconvinced that the hand was quicker than the eye. Starbuck led the way to the bar, and bulled a spot for himself and the lawman amongst the serious drinkers. He chose a position directly across from Earp’s faro layout.

  Sipping whiskey, Starbuck turned his back to the bar, one heel hooked over the brass rail. Several minutes passed before Earp happened to glance in his direction. A ferocious grin lit his face and he rolled his eyes toward Bob Paul.

  Earp followed his gaze and abruptly stopped dealing. From past meetings, he knew the Arizona lawman on sight. Once, during his brief tenure as a U.S. Deputy Marshal, they had even worked together in an effort to trap the Brocius gang. The faro game forgotten, his eyes hooded and his look suddenly became veiled.

  “Wyatt Earp!”

  Starbuck shouted the name. His abrasive tone claimed the crowd’s attention like a clap of thunder. All eyes turned toward him and the buzz of conversation faded to watchful stillness. The men ganged around the faro layout slowly edged away. He pointed a finger directly at Earp.

  “You’re wanted for murder!”

  Earp’s expression was sphinxlike. He stared at Starbuck with eyes slitted against the smoky haze separating them. His voice was clipped, without inflection.

  “What’s your game, Johnson?”

  “No game,” Starbuck said, jerking a thumb at the lawman. “You know my friend here?”

  “I know him.”

  “Course you do.” Starbuck looked around at the crowd, grinning. “All the same, he ought to have a proper introduction. Gents, I’d like you to meet Sheriff Bob Paul, Pima County, Arizona. He’s got a murder warrant for Earp’s arrest.”

  “That’s old news,” Earp said tightly. “Everybody knows I was railroaded out of Arizona.”

  “So you say!” Starbuck’s face took on a sudden hard cast. “What they don’t know is that you’re a garden-variety murderer. Common as dirt!”

  “That’s a goddamn lie!”

  “No, it’s the truth. You’re no gunman, Earp! You’ve got everyone believing it, but that’s the lie. You don’t have the guts to meet a man face to face!”

  “Watch your mouth, Johnson.”

  “Why? You aim to do something about it?”

  Warren Earp, who was working the roulette wheel, stepped clear of the table. Countering his move, Bob Paul eased away from the bar, fixing him with a warning look. Silence thickened in the room. Open hostility was stamped on the Earp brothers’ features, and a gunfight seemed inevitable. Then, at length, Earp shook his head.

  “Something stinks here,” he said gruffly. “Johnson, how come you’re sidin’ with a lawdog?”

  Starbuck shoved off the bar. He crossed the room, halting directly before the faro layout. There was a catlike eagerness in his eyes.

  “I am a lawdog,” he said with a cynical smile. “I work for Wells, Fargo.”

  Earp’s composure slipped. His face became a mask of black and angry bafflement. “You no-good sonovabitch. You suckered me!”

  “It was easy as pie,” Starbuck taunted. “You’re a tinhorn chiseler! Strictly smalltime.”

  No response.

  Starbuck goaded him viciously. “Your whole family’s smalltime. Your brothers are whoremongers! Your own wife’s a whore. You’re nothing but a bunch of penny-ante pimps! All of you!”

  Earp’s face was arrested in brute outrage. So complete was his shock that he appeared dazed, punchy. Yet he saw something in Starbuck’s eyes that cut through his numbed senses. He knew his life was forfeit if he moved. The man standing before him was prodding him to draw, and be killed. He kept his hands plainly visible on the table.

  Starbuck backhanded him across the mouth. His lip split, spurting blood, and a dread humiliation swept over him. But still
he refused the challenge.

  “Christ!” Starbuck said coarsely. “You’ve lost your balls, haven’t you? You want to live so bad you’d take anything.”

  Earp merely stared at him, saying nothing. A moment passed, the crowd frozen in a spellbound tableau, watching them. Then Starbuck wagged his head back and forth.

  “All right,” he grunted. “Here’s the way we’ll play it. You be on the morning train out of town. Otherwise I’ll kill you and take my chances with a jury.”

  Wheeling around, Starbuck pushed through the crowd and walked toward the door. Bob Paul backed along the bar, his eyes guarded, then turned and hurried outside. The miners looked stunned, like spectators at a public witch burning. They slowly moved away from the faro layout, and Wyatt Earp.

  The Tivoli closed early that night.

  The sky lightened into cloudless dawn. The train stood puffing steam and smoke before the platform. An eerie quiet hung over the depot, and the passengers boarding the train seemed strangely subdued. Once in their seats, they crowded the windows, gawking at the two men near the stationhouse door.

  Starbuck took out the makings and built himself a smoke. He lit the cigarette, inhaling deeply, savoring the taste. Last night he’d thrown away the cheroots and gone back to roll-your-owns. The act was a token gesture, but nonetheless symbolic. He had laid Jack Johnson to rest. Today, like slipping into an old shoe, he was himself again. He thought it a damned comfortable feeling.

  Bob Paul, standing beside him, stiffened as the stationhouse door opened. Earp, trailed closely by Warren, emerged and started across the platform. Starbuck quickly moved forward and blocked their path. Without a word, he took the train ticket from Earp’s hand. Unfolding it, he studied the schedule a moment, then looked up.

  “California,” he said, not asking a question. “I hear there’s ships there that go all the way to China.”

  Earp’s expression was dour. “I reckon California’s far enough.”

  “Think so?” Starbuck blew smoke in his face. “You just keep looking over your shoulder, Wyatt. One of these days you’ll see me.”

  “What’s your name?” Earp spoke through clenched teeth. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

  Starbuck grinned. “Death don’t have a name. Now run along and catch your train before I change my mind.”

  Earp stepped around him and led Warren aboard the nearest passenger coach. The conductor signaled the engineer, and the locomotive chuffed a great cloud of steam. Wheels groaned and couplings cracked, and the train slowly got underway. As the caboose rolled past, Paul walked forward, halting at Starbuck’s elbow. They watched, preoccupied with their own thoughts, until the train disappeared down the tracks. Then the lawman let out a heavy sigh.

  “Too bad,” he said glumly. “About Earp, I mean.”

  “Oh?” Starbuck’s eyes were fixed upon distance. “What about him?”

  “That he got away, beat the hangman.”

  “Maybe he only thinks he got away.”

  “What d’you mean by that?”

  A cryptic smile touched one side of Starbuck’s mouth. “Let’s just say it’s not over yet.”

  CHAPTER 20

  SEPTEMBER 16, 1884

  Eagle City lay in the shadow of the Bitterroot Mountains. The town, not yet one year old, was the heart and hub of the Coeur d’Alene goldfields. The discovery had set off a mad stampede, and the small Idaho community quickly became the latest in a long string of western mining camps. Gold, the eternal magnet, drew adventurers by the thousands.

  On a brisk autumn afternoon, Starbuck rode into Eagle City. His reputation as a detective was now legend throughout the West. Only last year, in perhaps his most celebrated case, he had broken a ring of train robbers in northern California. The reverberations shook the very power structure of San Francisco, involving political kingpins and warring Chinese tongs. The attendant publicity, with Starbuck’s photograph splashed across dozens of newspapers, had robbed him forever of his anonymity. His face was known wherever he traveled, and he no longer undertook an assignment as himself. He was instead a master of disguise. A man of a thousand faces, none of them his own.

  Today, like a chameleon, he blended perfectly with his surroundings. His appearance was that of a scruffy miner, a common day laborer. He wore a threadbare mackinaw, soiled trousers stuffed into mule-eared boots, and a woolen duckbill cap. His features were concealed beneath a wild shrub of a beard, and his hair sprouted down over his ears. He smelled rank as a billygoat and his jaw was ballooned by a wad of Red Devil chewing tobacco. His own mother would have disclaimed him.

  His mission in Eagle City lacked official sanction. His disguise was not meant for payroll robbers or holdup men who plundered bullion shipments. Nor was he drawn by the lure of gold itself. He was there on personal business.

  Starbuck was not a vengeful man. Yet he was proud, and by his own measure, he considered himself a man of character and worth. His reputation as a detective was the single most compelling force in his life. Once he accepted an assignment, he went about it with bulldog tenacity and an obsessive drive to emerge the victor. Failure was a word foreign to his lexicon, and defeat was anathema to his temperament. A deep and overwhelming sense of integrity dictated that once a job was undertaken he would see it through. He imposed no time limit on himself, and short of a complete reckoning, the case was never closed. However long it took, he earned his pay.

  For eight years, he had served western business interests as a detective and professional manhunter. In all that time, despite the magnitude of the assignment, he had failed only once to deliver as promised. It was a singular loss of prestige, and the one black mark on an otherwise unblemished record. Today, he meant to wipe the slate clean.

  An item in the Denver Post had alerted him to old and unfinished business. Not particularly newsworthy in itself, the story carried a dateline of Eagle City, Idaho. What made it of interest to Denver readers was that it involved a man who, albeit briefly, was once one of Colorado’s more notorious citizens. The story related that Wyatt Earp and three associates had recently been convicted of claim jumping in the Coeur d’Alene goldfields. Tongue in cheek, the story went on to state that Earp, at one time considered the terror of Arizona, had now been reduced to petty misdemeanors. The concluding paragraph posed something of a question. Wondering aloud in print, it asked where Earp had been keeping himself since his short, and abruptly terminated, stopover in Gunnison.

  Starbuck, in idle moments, had often pondered that very question. Upon departing Gunnison, some two years ago, Earp had simply dropped out of sight. Except for a fleeting sojourn to Dodge City, duly reported by the Kansas papers, he had studiously avoided the limelight. The reason was no great mystery to Starbuck. That last morning in Gunnison, at the train depot, he had warned Earp that the matter was by no means settled. Earp, first and foremost a survivor, had taken the threat seriously. Vanishing into nowhere, his name had been all but forgotten by press and public alike.

  Yet now, the subject of an obscure news item, Earp had surfaced once more. And Starbuck, unlike the public, hadn’t forgotten. The case was still open, and the duebill was collectable on demand. In strictest confidence, he fired off a query to an old and trusted colleague in Idaho.

  The reply, based on a week’s investigation, was much as he’d expected. Earp had arrived in Eagle City shortly after New Year’s. The gold camp was remote and lawless, and he was soon up to his old tricks. Forming a combine, he and three other men had begun a campaign of outright intimidation. Some claim holders were persuaded to sell; those who refused found their claims jumped and the property thereafter held at gunpoint. Even when suit was brought, and the combine was fined for claim jumping, the net effect was unaltered. Earp, who apparently had no interest in working the claims, sold out his interest. With a substantial stake, he then bought the White Elephant Saloon & Gaming Parlor. Ever the grifter, it was the kind of goldmine Earp understood best. He relieved the suckers of their poke over the
gaming tables, and according to the report, he was doing very well indeed. All in a matter of months, he had gone from claim jumper to proprietor of the largest gambling dive in Eagle City.

  On the train ride north from Denver, Starbuck found himself reflecting on the vagaries of time. Some men’s lives were touched by it, others were not. Doc Holliday was now in a tubercular sanitarium, wasted by disease and dying a lingering death. Warren Earp, perhaps the best of all the brothers, had been killed in a saloon shootout. But the head of the Earp clan, by all accounts, had been affected little by the passage of time. In some ways, Starbuck thought to himself, Wyatt Earp was like a pestilence. He infected those around him, then moved on. He flourished while they died.

  Only Alice had escaped. Upon returning from Gunnison the summer of ’82, Starbuck had set her up in a millinery and dress shop. She proved a level-headed businesswoman, repaying the loan with interest, and they had kept company for nearly a year. When it finally became apparent he would never settle down, she proved equally realistic about her personal life. After the long assignment in California, he returned to Denver and found her engaged to a prominent attorney. He wished her well, aware that she needed the security of home and family, and even attended the wedding. On occasion, when he was in Denver, he still dropped by for a visit. She was radiantly happy, heavy now with child, and time had done nothing to dim their closeness. The memory of her often came to him in strange places, when he was alone and without friends. He cherished it in the way of a lonely man compelled to travel a solitary road. Not with regret, but with the warm remembrance of things past.

  A week ago, before departing Denver, he had called on her one last time. He told her nothing of his plan to kill Earp. Any number of things might go wrong, and he saw no reason to worry her needlessly. He had every confidence he could outdraw Earp, but there was always the chance he would himself die in the effort. Bracing a man in his own saloon, where he was surrounded by henchmen, entailed a high degree of risk. Moreover, if his own identity was somehow discovered, there was a good chance he would be charged with premeditated murder. For with some care, he had indeed calculated the death of Wyatt Earp.