by Carl Dane
But the doe-eyed girl who came at me with a dagger upset the natural order of things. I wanted to get my balance back. I needed a drink.
“Tomorrow we meet with Moon, right? No more surprises?”
“Of course,” she said, more quickly than the last time she lied. “From now on I’ll tell you everything.”
Chapter 10
Eddie Moon betrayed not an ounce of surprise when we walked into the Full Moon the next day at noon. With Elmira in tow, I barged into the back office without asking permission.
Felix Duran, however, was startled and froze for a second before his eyes turned hard as coal.
“I expected you would come at some point,” Moon said, as though I were there to sell him insurance.
He was a broad-shouldered blond man, medium tall. He wore a long black coat, a striped vest, a black cravat, and as far as I could determine, no gun. We sat at a round table.
Duran sat with us. I sized him up as he settled into the chair.
“I have to say you’ve caused me considerable inconvenience, Mr. Hawke.”
I said nothing. It was his show now, and I figured he’d write the lines as he went along.
“It’s not easy to find ranch hands,” Moon said, “and you and Mr. Carmody managed to kill six of them.”
He was smooth and could think fast, I granted him that. Admitting any connection with the Duran gang would have been the last thing he’d want to do, but I’d caught him by surprise with Duran in the room. If he’d claimed ignorance then how would he explain the glowering Felix at his elbow?
“I’m very much in the same circumstance as Mrs. Adler,” Moon said. “This building sits at the southern tip of several hundred acres of ranch land, which I own and work a little, although it’s not a full-time thing. Mrs. Adler’s property is pretty much a mirror image to the south. At certain times of the year both of us need to hire some help.”
I pointed at Duran, rudely, as was my intent. “And this is how your hands dress – with crossed ammunition belts and a .45 and, unless I’m mistaken, a foot-long sheathed knife stuck in his boot?”
Duran jerked as if he were ready to spring at me. I guess he wanted to see if I’d flinch. I didn’t. Moon held up a hand.
“The range is a dangerous place,” Moon said. “We’re right on top of land that both Apaches and Comanches think they own and are willing to kill for – either us or each other. The rustlers are just as homicidal as the Indians. Look – how the hands dress or what they do on their own time is none of my business or responsibility. They’re not my regular employees. I hire them for day-work, and they come and go.”
“Your ‘day-work’ includes roughing up Mrs. Adler’s customers and employees and damn near escalated into killing a peace officer,” I said. “That peace officer happened to be me, so I’m taking this personally.”
“I have nothing personal against you or Mrs. Adler. And I deny any insinuation that I’m trying to harm her business. I don’t need to. It wouldn’t make sense. There are plenty of customers to go around, and this isn’t a particularly big place. Look outside. It’s only a little past noon and I don’t have an empty table. Why would I go to all that expense and trouble to close her business and gain customers I probably can’t handle?”
He was right. I’m no expert, but like a lot of others in my profession I’ve filled in the gaps by dealing Faro and keeping the peace in these types of places. I know that a crowd that’s too thick is hard to control, both in terms of cheating and fighting. You wind up with what I’ve read British economists are calling “diminishing returns,” which is a pretty clear way of summing it up.
“However,” Moon continued, spreading his hands and radiating that earnest, open aura so effectively employed by experienced negotiators, liars, and cheats, “it would make business sense for me to amortize my expenses running this place and taking over her existing operation, if the price were right. I’ve made several attractive and eminently fair offers that have been rejected out of hand.”
Mrs. Alder took a breath and looked like she was going to say something but Moon spoke quickly. “I know what you’re thinking, both of you. That I’m somehow behind the trouble at the Silver Spoon. But why would I do that? Mrs. Adler, you can do the numbers yourself. I’d make a modest profit in the long run if I bought you out at the price I’d offered. But it would make no sense – no sense at all – for me to force the purchase by taking the risk and spending the type of money involved in hiring gunfighters.”
He spread his hands palms up.
“Why would I do it?”
On that point I had to admit he made sense. Not that I believed he was telling the whole truth, of course, but on the face of it nothing about the current situation made sense. Kill a marshal, attempt to kill another one, hire gunworkers and thugs, risk a noose… to take over a comfortably profitable but essentially unspectacular business?
“Things around here,” Moon said, “have just gotten out of hand for reasons I can’t explain.”
I thought that was an odd way of putting things, but saw no point in continuing the conversation. The information I needed would not come from Moon and certainly not from the sole surviving Duran, who make a shooting gesture with his thumb and forefinger as I left.
Chapter 11
A stranger stepped out in from behind the stable as I and Mrs. Adler walked back from Moon’s office.
The man was decked out as a shootist, and his intent was clear.
“Step into the street,” he said.
I told Mrs. Adler to get inside a shop and stay there, and I did what the man said.
“So it’s going to be like this?” I asked. “You want to draw on a sworn lawman in front of witnesses? Even if you win, which you won’t, you lose. You’ll have a price on your head and you’ll be hunted for the rest of your life, which won’t be long.”
That, of course, was bullshit, and I’m sure this fellow knew it, but it was worth a try. Carmody would certainly take up the chase if I were shot, but if the gunman had a horse nearby and knew anything about covering his backtrail he would be into the wind in seconds and in country like this – hilly with trees, valleys, and hidey-holes – even an experienced woodsman might never pick up the track. And the idea that surrounding lawmen would make it their mission to find justice for a city marshal from an isolated dump like Shadow Valley was mere fantasy.
“Who’s to say who did what?” the man said. “I just came to ask why you killed my brother.”
“You’re not a Duran. At least the Duran I know says he’s the last one standing.”
“My brother worked with the Durans. He was one of the men you buried without even finding out his name.” He hovered his hand over the butt of his gun.
“What was his name?”
My question threw him off a little. He didn’t answer but shifted his weight from side to side and flexed his knees.
“You’re not anybody’s brother,” I said. “You’re a hired shootist and somebody’s offered you what seems like a lot of money to take another crack at me.”
“I see you reaching for your gun,” he shouted, louder than necessary considering we might have been reciting our lines to an empty house. When there was trouble, the residents of Shadow Valley could disappear as quickly as mice when you open the pantry door.
But I suppose he didn’t see the harm in playing the game, either.
This was not the first time he’d done this, and I knew something would happen soon. As things stood, he’d established an alibi for confronting me and put on the record for whoever might presumably be listening that I was in the process of drawing first.
Then his hand snatched the gun with fluid precision, fast but not rushed. The draw is only half the battle. Gunplay is won by accuracy more than speed; there was no panicky spasm in his motion. In a split second, I not only knew that he meant to kill me but that he also knew how to do it.
I have an unusual motion t
hat I sometimes use in confrontations where I’m separated by a hundred feet or so: I turn sideways, flip up the gun to my front and then flick my wrist to the side and shoot. It takes a toll on accuracy because a gun being raised straight up has a better chance of hitting some part of a vertical target – like a man – than does one that is being bought from the side.
But the advantage to turning to the side is defense. I’m two-and-a-half feet wide facing front but only a foot across when I’m standing sideways.
No matter. His shot went into the dust because I shot him through the heart before he could level his weapon.
A lot of dead men wound up that way thinking that a gunfight was over because they’d put a round in the other man’s chest. But people can keep fighting and shooting on sheer reflex, or hatred, or both for a few moments after even a mortal wound, so I rolled to my right, came up on a knee, and shot him twice more.
His eyes were open but the life in them was vanishing. He fired a wild shot as he spun a quarter circle and fell to the ground.
I grabbed the Cooper Pocket double-action I keep in my left-hand pocket and spun myself around, a gun in each hand, surveying alleys, windows, and rooftops, and then I scuttled toward the cover of the nearest building. Where there’s one shooter there is sometimes a backup, or friends intent on avenging what had just happened, and that’s no time to try to re-load. The Cooper didn’t have the stopping power of my Colt but it packed five extra rounds.
There were no second shooters, nor anyone else in sight. There was only a surprisingly thick cloud of smoke, the distant barking of a dog, and the whinny of a horse.
A second later Carmody called to me and announced he was coming around the corner and asked that I kindly not shoot him.
A door creaked and Mrs. Adler’s face showed ghost-white in the opening. More doors squealed open and slowly a handful of people shuffled out onto the street to gape at the body.
Chapter 12
Carmody held the reins of the wagon as we brought another body to the cemetery of a town so woebegone it couldn’t even replace its dead undertaker – this strange place where the town marshal spent most of his time burying people who were inexplicably lining up to kill him.
“You aiming to fill the cemetery up all by your lonesome?” Carmody asked.
“Not my idea,” I said. “Seems like I don’t have much choice in the matter. I just wish I knew what was going on.”
“It don’t add up, does it?” Carmody looked off in the distance as the wagon lurched out of a rut.
“No, it doesn’t.” I said, “Let’s go through it step by step.”
“Let’s do that,” Carmody said.
I lifted my hand and counted off the facts on my fingers.
“First: Six months ago, Mrs. Adler’s husband disappears. Everybody’s curious, but Mrs. Adler doesn’t really seem to care. I suppose that’s not suspicious in and of itself. Half the married women I know wouldn’t kick too hard if a husband disappeared and left them a going business.
“Second, this Moon character steps into the void a couple months later, makes her an offer, which she refuses, and then turns up the heat apparently trying to kill the business and coerce her to sell, even though the potential profit would never justify the expense and risk.
“Third, Billy Gannon apparently kept the lid on most of this for a while, but somebody wants to drive Mrs. Adler out of business so bad that they ambushed and killed him. That’s when Mrs. Adler called me in because Billy had told her to get me if anything happened to him.
“Fourth, since I got here whoever is behind all this keeps upping the ante, I guess assuming that once I’m out of the picture the pressure can really be turned up on Mrs. Adler.”
Carmody pulled the wagon to a halt at the graveyard. “Before you have to use your thumb, why do you say, ‘whoever’s behind this?’ You don’t think it’s Moon?”
“Not entirely,” I said. “I just have a sense that he’s along for the ride, somehow. He’s no choir boy, that’s for sure, but he doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who would set up a series of murders, at least to take over a rival bar and whorehouse. He told us yesterday that things have ‘gotten out of hand’ and says it’s for reasons ‘he can’t explain.’ Does that mean reasons he doesn’t understand? Or reasons that he can’t talk about?”
Carmody turned in the seat and faced me. “I’ve seen people kill for a nickel, and I mean that literal. But for a guy like Moon, who has a good going business, would all this folderol be worth it? Hiring gunmen, risking a rope by killing a lawman, all to buy the Silver Spoon? Is it really worth that much?”
“No,” I said. “It’s not.”
“And if he’s willing to go to all this trouble and expense, and has the bankroll to back up all this insane mayhem, why not just offer her double, triple the price?”
“I thought about that,” I said, “and I think it’s because Moon, or whoever’s behind him, doesn’t want to attract attention. I know that sounds odd because shootings and fights and killing a marshal attract attention, all right, but when you come right down to it, that’s the sort of stuff that actually happens in towns like this – a lot. You can explain it away. It’s the same sad story repeating itself. But money leaves a trail. You offer ten times what a business is worth and pretty soon everybody’s going to be nosing around trying to find out why. You can’t explain away a crazy purchase. Also, upping the price too much would convince her not to sell. If I owned the Silver Spoon and somebody offered me three times the going rate I’d figure something was up and I sure wouldn’t budge. I’d find out what the hell made the place so damn desirable.”
Carmody raised one eyebrow. “So we’re talking what, a lode of gold or silver in a secret mine in the land she owns back of the Spoon? I don’t think so. I know this area, and the dirt barely has decent dirt in it.”
“Maybe there’s some sort of stashed or buried treasure,” I said. “But I doubt it. I mean, things like that do happen, and I’ve seen it, but somebody would have heard a rumor, and there would be some gossip. It always works that way. I’ve asked about mines and treasure and such and heard nothing like that. Mrs. Adler says she knows of nothing valuable, and I while only believe half of what she says I think that half is true.”
I began to dismount the wagon but Carmody held me by the arm.
“Look,” he said, “we only know one thing for sure: Somebody wants you dead in the worst way, and that involves me because I can sort of tolerate your presence and wouldn’t mind if you stuck around. And to be perfectly straight about it, if they kill you they are likely to do the same to me at the same time or in the near future.”
I thought that was reasonable, and had no choice but to nod in agreement.
“So here’s what I think,” Carmody said. “This Moon guy and your boss lady are part of a bigger picture that we can’t see. Neither one is acting much in the way of logical, am I right? Now, part of it makes sense. I could see a snaky guy like Moon trying to make things tough on his competition. That’s business. Forcing her out and maybe buying her out makes sense, I guess, but now this cat-and-mouse game has turned crazy. That happens sometimes for no other reason. Two guys have words and the words turn into a fistfight and then the guns come out and other people get involved and before you know it you’ve got a deadly feud over something so stupid nobody can even remember how it started.”
“And now we’ve got a whole cast of characters involved,” I said. The Duran gang – and I’m sure there’s plenty more of them – whoever this dead guy in the back of the wagon is, and maybe Zach Purcell.”
Carmody held my eyes, and said slowly, thoughtfully, “I heard.” It came out ah heared.
“A dangerous fellow, this Purcell,” Carmody said. “When people round here say his name, they whisper. You know of him?”
I nodded. “We crossed paths during the war. Mean bastard, or so I heard from Billy Gannon. When Billy was wounded, right near t
he end of the war, they put him in charge of a prison, and Purcell worked for him. He’d torture the inmates. Beat a few to death. Billy busted him. Last I heard Purcell was a gun for hire, and a fast one. Got his own outfit, too. Big outlaw connections. Lots of fingers in lots of pies.”
Carmody slid off the wagon and grabbed a shovel. “We’ll put him in what I’m going to call the Hawke Wing of this pitiful little cemetery.”
There was only one shovel and Carmody could dig like a gopher so I let him have at it.
“So, Marshal… if I may be so bold to ask, are you planning to stick around ‘til the end of this dance? Even though you seem to have a big bright target on your back?”
“I am. For one thing, I owe it to Billy Gannon. The primary reason I came out here was to find who killed him. We’ve kind of lost track of that in the middle of this drama. There’s also the matter of the reward money. Plus the fact that it’s my job.”
Carmody hopped out of the hole and jammed the shovel upright in the dirt pile. “Plus you like it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Oh, I ain’t judging you. Least not the way you think. If it weren’t for people like you, and maybe like me for that matter, people who kill for the right reasons, the people who kill for the wrong reasons would have their way, and then some.”
He began tugging the body, which I’d rolled up in the last blanket I could find in the jail. I grabbed the ankles. Carmody was looking far into the distance, at nothing in particular.
“I get the feeling you’ve done a lot of thinking about the right and wrong parts of this killing business,” he said.
It wasn’t a question, and I had nothing to add in reply, anyway. In silence, we lowered the body into the grave and Carmody covered it with dirt.