by Will Keen
‘And took your horse, which possibly explains why you’re here.’ Carter looked into his drink, up at McClain. ‘The question that comes to mind is, what were you doing out there in the first place, up in the hills between here and Tombstone?’
McClain hesitated. ‘Maybe saying I encountered them was not the best way of putting it.’
Carter shook his head. ‘Is that you telling me you were lying?’
‘I’d been after those two men all the way from Macedo’s Flat, losing them a couple of times, then picking up their trail. The encounter bit wasn’t a lie, just me not caring to admit I was impatient. I came upon them sudden, and made a careless mistake.’
‘But you weren’t chasing them ’cause they stole your horse, because when you made that mistake you were still sittin’ on it. So I admit to getting somewhat confused here. A deputy sets off from Macedo’s Flat, on the trail of two men for some crime not yet mentioned. He makes a pig’s ear of it, ends up on foot, turns up in Red Creek but now he’s riding a sorrel horse I happen to know belongs to a likeable homesteader by the name of Jed Crane.’
‘Crane’s dead.’
Carter cocked his head. The clear grey eyes were now like chips of ice.
‘I’d say Jed was a mite too young, too fit, to have suffered with his heart, so. . . .’
‘He was gunned down by the two men I’m chasing. He refused their demands for food and money.’
There was a silence. The piano player had left, his arm around the woman. Men had drifted out through the sliding doors, leaving a scattering of lone drinkers and an absence of conversation. Glasses clinked as the bartender cleaned up with a dirty cloth. Norris was sitting back in his chair. He had lit a cigarette. McClain was conscious of his gaze, aware that, while Carter had naturally been suspicious from the start and was now doubly so, Norris knew for certain that McClain had been lying through his teeth.
McClain sighed, spread the droop of his moustache with finger and thumb and shook his head. ‘When I walked onto their spread, Sarah Crane had just done burying her husband,’ he said softly. ‘Which gave us something in common. The reason I was after those two sons of bitches is because, back in Tombstone, they rode out to my house and murdered my wife.’
Hearing that, Norris went very still. He frowned, seemed to spend seconds gathering his thoughts. Then he grimaced, spread his hands.
‘I’ve been keeping quiet, Carter. After what McClain’s told you, you’ll understand why. Grief hit him hard. Back in the Flat, he was like a dead man walking, common sense gone clean out of the window, fixated on just the one thing: revenge, an eye for an eye.’
‘So I’d guess he set off after those two in a hurry,’ Carter said, ‘without talking to Dexter?’
‘That’s right. Left before dawn.’
‘And then?’
‘I’d been on night duty. When Dexter showed up about nine or ten I told him what happened. He’s astute enough to realize McClain would be in no fit state to handle violent men.’
‘He sent you after him. Yet you were first into Red Creek.’
Norris smiled. ‘You don’t miss much.’
‘No, and I suppose the explanation comes easy. McClain was on foot, took a detour to the Crane spread, you came down from the hills without seeing him.’
Norris nodded.
‘What about the two he was chasin’?’
‘I wouldn’t know them. But I thought McClain was here; saw his horse outside the hotel.’
‘Hotel?’ Carter grinned. ‘Ma Thom would have stood you a drink if she’d heard that.’
‘If you don’t miss much,’ McClain said, ‘you’ll know if those fellers are still here.’
‘Lots of fellers here in Red Creek. You care to describe them?’
‘One tall, lean and mean, the other a short, ugly hombre wearing eyeglasses and a tall black hat. He’s the one with the Dragoon pistol.’
‘Which description I didn’t really need, as it happens,’ Carter said. ‘They came in a while before you, Norris. I couldn’t help noticing that fine roan, and that raised hackles because the feller in the saddle usually rides ragged broncs on their last legs.’
‘You know them?’
Carter grimaced at McClain’s question. ‘Hedrick Skelton and his odorous brother, Marty? Yes, I knew them all those years ago, on the Texas gulf coast. To say seeing them here was a surprise is putting it mildly. I mentioned drunken riffraff, and the Skeltons sure as hell like their liquor. OK, I’m not exactly saying it was them, those two in particular, that sent my business up in smoke, but. . . .’ He spread his hands and shrugged.
‘My guess is you have good reason for suspecting them,’ McClain said. ‘If they went down, even for another unrelated crime, I’d say you’d feel some kind of satisfaction.’
He looked at Norris and felt excitement like a rush of hot blood, knowing that it must show in his eyes. Norris was giving nothing away, having been going along with McClain in spouting a pack of lies. But he had to be wondering why McClain had named his attackers as the men who had murdered his wife. According to Marshal Lane Dexter, the killer was McClain. And, though it had been Norris who had allowed McClain to walk out of Dexter’s jail, he would have no reason to doubt the marshal’s accusation.
As for Carter, he was also watching McClain and would be noting the sudden spark of excitement in his eyes, the awakened urgency in his demeanour. McClain had told him the two men in the hotel were killers. McClain and Norris were – as far as Carter was aware – serving deputy marshals, so he would be inclined to trust them while perhaps harbouring a suspicion that much had been left unsaid. He would watch, and wait.
‘This is a quiet town,’ Carter said now, pushing away his empty glass and easing his long frame out of the chair. ‘Hell, calling it a town is me doing it a favour, much as you did for Ma Thom’s place. Truth is this is a small settlement catering to the needs of homesteaders scratching a living from what’s mostly desert. But after the trouble I had in Texas that’s the way I like it. I never gave a thought to chasing after those two Skeltons. Time heals wounds. Tread real careful, fellers, I’d hate to have you unsettle the easy life I’m enjoying.’
‘In and out,’ McClain said, pushing his chair back. ‘The hotel is up the hill a ways. This works out, we’ll be leaving your town the way we came in, and this is the last you’ll see of us. Or them. They’re going with us, dead or alive.’
Chapter Eight
‘There’s a way of storming a house without bringing it down around our ears,’ McClain said. ‘Soldiers from a war not too long gone would know how. I’ll have to figure it out myself.’
‘You go in through the front door, I’ll be out back for when they come tumbling out of windows.’
‘You mean I knock on the door, ask permission?’
Norris grinned. ‘Knock, for sure, make one hell of a racket – then kick it open.’
‘There’s an old woman in there.’
‘Tough as old boots, I’ll warrant, and sure as hell she’ll have those two weighed up. She’ll be half expecting trouble, probably got a sawn-off shotgun under her pinafore.’
Or maybe, McClain thought, she’s a little old lady, white as a sheet and trembling in her worn slippers.
His half-smoked cigarette sent sparks flying as he flicked it into the street. He and Norris were in the deep shadows outside the saloon. They’d walked out into the cool night in time to see Carter drifting off down the sloping main street. Now, talk done and, as far as McClain could see, nothing settled, they untied their horses, swung into the saddle and rode up the street chasing their own long shadows cast by pale moonlight.
The shabby, two-storey rooming house Norris’s description had turned into a hotel was in darkness. The first thing McClain noticed was the absence of any horses at the sagging hitch rail.
‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘the birds have flown.’
‘Men forever one jump ahead of the law will want to stay that way. Their horses will
be out back.’
‘One of them’s mine,’ McClain said. ‘If they are there, get down and cut the saddle cinches while I’m at the front door waking the dead.’
The house was on its own with no property within fifty yards on either side: the barren edge of town. It was fronted by a ragged, unfenced yard of withered brown grass where Ma Thom had dumped a worn out settee sprouting horsehair stuffing.
Hoofs crunched on the hard dirt as Norris took his sorrel at a walk across the yard and into the shadows to the right of the house. At that time of night every sound was magnified and carried far on the still air, but from the house there came no movement, no reaction.
We’re playing this all wrong, McClain thought – but what other way was there? He shook his head, sensing danger but not knowing why. He watched until Norris was out of sight and then he dismounted and looped the reins loosely over the hitch rail, absently patting the mare’s neck. The front door was reached by broken wooden steps that should have been dumped with the settee. Tread on those, McClain thought, and there’d be no need to pound on the door. Another sobering thought: if Norris was right, then as well as hiding their mounts the Skeltons could be taking turns staying awake.
He was still giving some consideration to that idea, and what he should do about it, when an upstairs window shattered. Fragments of falling glass sparkled in the moonlight, their brilliance at once dimmed by a dazzling muzzle-flash. The crack of the shot followed. A six-gun’s bullet chipped white wood from the hitch rail close to McClain’s elbow.
Out in the open, no cover.
Instinct took McClain at a dead run straight at the house. The second shot thumped into the earth where he’d been standing. As he ran, broken glass crunched underfoot. A third shot sent a bullet whistling past his ear, then a fourth raised dust as it thunked into the old settee. Then McClain was backed up against the house’s dry timber walls. He flattened himself, drew his six-gun and settled his ragged breathing, twisting his neck to look up at the shattered window directly above.
An arm poked out, metal glinting in a man’s fist. Firing blind, the gunman tried two fast shots and then gave up. Both bullets punched holes in the dirt too far away to bother McClain. Listening hard, he could hear no sound from the upstairs room. He eased away from the wall, six-gun raised and ready. Above him the black rectangle of the shattered window was empty.
Norris would have heard the shots. The crude plan had been for McClain’s assault on the front of the house to drive the Skeltons out the back way – into the waiting arms of the big deputy. The plan had taken a beating, but was still in place. McClain, out front, had been seen and almost certainly recognised from the fracas on the mountainside. But there was nothing to suggest he had company. Wild shooting had failed to drop McClain, so he was still a danger. Cowardly by nature, they’d want to avoid any further gunplay, and Norris was surely right: the back yard was where their horses were tethered, that’s the way they would go.
Confident that the Skeltons had left the upper room, McClain stepped clear of the wall, walked a half circle across the dry grass then ran at the wooden steps. The first step took his weight with a squeal. He stamped on the second and, to the creak and crunch of breaking timber, his foot went straight through. He toppled sideways and fell awkwardly with his foot trapped and his leg at a painful angle.
As he went down he gave a fleeting thought to the dead horse on the high ground and the broken leg. But this fall didn’t maim McClain; it saved his life.
Ma Thom might have bought better furniture but she’d skimped when replacing a rotting front door. What had once been solid oak gone bad was now something fashioned from old packing cases, stencilled numbers faded but still visible. Somewhere in the entrance hall a shotgun blasted. The widening spray of hot lead tore the door’s thin wood to shreds at waist height. Shotgun pellets whined and hissed, cleaving the air where McClain had been standing. Then an instant of silence, followed by the stamp of boots: two men, beating a hasty retreat.
McClain wrenched his foot free. His six-gun had been knocked from his hand in the fall. He located it, scooped it up, sprang up over the ruined steps and hit the shredded door with his full weight. He tripped, stumbled into a hallway that stank of cat and cordite. Stairs were to his left, ahead of him a passage that would lead to a kitchen where there would be a back door. Even as McClain picked himself up again, there was the bang of that door being kicked open. Then more shots, a six-gun volley, the harsh yell of a man in pain. A horse whinnied. The sound of the animal’s protest was followed by hoofbeats as two horses were ridden away at speed.
McClain reached the back door at a run. Too late to stop the Skeltons flight. Too late to see which direction they’d taken.
Too late to save Frank Norris.
The big deputy was down on his back, one arm flung across a frame of wood and wire netting where once there had been chickens. Even in the wan moonlight McClain could see the shine of fresh blood, white feathers sticking to the wound in the dead man’s chest.
Dead?
McClain holstered his six-gun and stepped down into the yard. He ran to the downed deputy, dropped to one knee. His fingers located a faint pulse in Norris’s throat. He rocked back, wondered how long the man could stay alive without immediate treatment. Hastily, he pulled the wounded man’s shirt and undershirt out of his pants, dragged and rolled the material up and over the wound, then held the makeshift compress in place by fastening Norris’s vest.
Unhygienic, feathers and all, but what the hell, McClain thought – then stiffened as Norris’s eyes flickered open. The deputy opened his mouth. His lips trembled. He took a shallow breath, tried to find words, croaked. . . .
‘Easy,’ McClain said. ‘Don’t try to talk—’
Norris struggled, reached up for McClain’s hand, missed, and let his arm fall away, shaking his head weakly.
‘It . . . it. . . .’
‘Easy now.’
‘It . . . it all went wrong,’ Norris croaked. ‘Went wrong . . . the oppor . . . the opportunity, I had it planned, and it went wrong. . . .’
His voice faded. Again he shook his head, flopped back, eyes closed.
‘It happens,’ McClain said softly, ‘to the best laid plans. Now there’s the opportunity to live, Norris, so take it, hold it in both hands.’
Then once again he heard hoofbeats, this time approaching fast. He flung himself sideways, away from Norris, scrabbling for his pistol. But as he’d landed on his side, it was under him, and he cursed softly as a big horse brought a man in from the street.
‘Looks like I was wasting my breath,’ Don Carter said, ‘but if all that racket wakes the dead, your friend might be in luck. Where’s Ma Thom?’
‘I ran through the house, didn’t see her.’
‘Do it again, slowly, with your eyes open. Leave Norris. He’s either alive or he’s not. I’ll head down the hill and get Sol Levin out of bed. He’s the town doc, got a buckboard. . . .’
He was still talking as he wheeled his horse and rode away. McClain looked at Norris, saw the faint rise and fall of his chest, turned away and went back into the house.
He was met by a ginger cat. It weaved in and out of his ankles, meowing plaintively as he gave the kitchen a cursory glance. Empty. Not a good sign. Carter had complained of the racket, and he’d been down the hill. If Ma Thom was alive she would surely have shown her face, confronted McClain angrily with the shotgun Norris had half-seriously suggested she’d have under her pinafore.
The cat padded up the stairs. McClain followed it up the uncarpeted boards to the first floor landing and into the front bedroom. There was a stink of gunsmoke and cordite, and a weak draught from the shattered window. The old lady was there. She was in bed. One of the Skeltons had cut her throat, maybe to prevent her reaching the shotgun. But, McClain thought sadly, there never had been a gun. The soiled, crumpled sheets covering her were soaked in her blood. The cat sprang onto the bed. It crept silently over to the dead woman, paws
dimpling the sheets, and sniffed her face. It nuzzled her cheek then rolled over on its back, eyes closed, and began licking its paws.
There was no need for McClain to go over to the bed. Placing his fingertips on the woman’s still warm, lined throat to check for a pulse would be an intrusion and a waste of time. And yet he did so, felt no flicker of life, and drew the sheets up over the lined face. With a last look at the cat, unconcernedly occupied in its ablutions, he swung away and went back down the stairs and out into the fresh air.
This latest death, he realized, brought with it a sense of release. The killing of his wife had inevitably left him with a feeling of guilt. In the last months of her life he had kept Emma in Macedo’s Flat against her wishes. His job as a lawman meant his name was known to outlaws and, without his being aware of it, it was possible that an outlaw who felt himself wronged had been bent on revenge.
He now knew that his wife’s killer had not been someone exacting revenge. Hedrick and Marty Skelton killed out of habit and with the weakest of motives – three deaths now that McClain knew of, in the space of perhaps twenty-four hours. Emma – well, who the hell knew why she had been murdered. Jed Crane had refused to feed the Skeltons and been gunned down, the killing witnessed by his wife. She’d pointed the finger at the lean gunman, Hedrick Skelton. Two knifings suggested to McClain that the women had been murdered by the mad dog, Marty Skelton. But so what? A killing was a killing, the victim dead no matter the method of disposal. And now McClain laughed softly, bitterly; partly at that last dehumanising choice of words, but mostly because an old woman lying upstairs in a blood-soaked bed changed nothing. There were two men to be hunted, two men to be brought to justice. . . .
He was snapped abruptly out of his sour reverie. A buckboard creaked and rattled to a stop in the street. Carter brought his horse high-stepping across the yard to where McClain was standing and swung out of the saddle.