by Carl Dane
“Why the bow, I wonder? Why didn’t Taza just shoot them? The Apaches have plenty of guns.”
“Funny you should ask, because he told me and told me to tell you. He still can’t fire a rifle because the recoil hurts too much cause of where you busted his ribs and all. He says it sure takes a lot of pain to keep him from doing something, and hopes that you think about pain a lot – because he’s going to lay some on you when you’re both healed up.”
“If you see him, let him know how I feel right now and he’ll be happy that I’m suffering in the interim.”
Something occurred to me as an afterthought.
“By the way, if I start poking around under the covers, am I going to find that most of me is still here?
“Your leg ain’t all that bad,” Carmody said. “Didn’t hit the bone but cut some veins and you lost a lot of blood. The doc says your shoulder will heal up all right because the bullet didn’t shatter the socket but you’re going to be sore and stiff for a while. Months.”
I began to get tired again.
“One more thing,” Carmody said. He had trouble meeting my eyes.
I just let him say it.
“I have sort of a confession to make. Taza told me he spoke to you in English.”
I didn’t know where this was going and wanted to shut my eyes but Carmody was determined to keep talking.
“Well, Marshal, when you was having that fight with Taza I could tell he spoke English. I was stealing a glance or two and he was following our conversation. That’s why I said all that brave Indian warrior stuff toward the end…trying to set up a graceful way for us to back out of there. I didn’t want to tell you because you’d feel bad and sorta stupid but when Taza talked English to you that pretty much let the cat out of the bag, so I thought I’d let you know. I didn’t see no harm it not telling you. I was trying to protect your feelings.”
I groaned. He probably thought it was from the pain in my shoulder.
“Now I know you was a big-time war-hero type and all that, but one thing I’ve learned in fighting is to never assume nothing. Now, I didn’t want to make you feel bad for not picking up on it, but since you know, I should remind you that Indians are smart.”
He warmed up to his lecture and actually began wagging his finger at me. I debated telling him that I also assumed he was stupid as he assumed I was – but I didn’t have the energy. I figured I’d save my strength until I could strangle him.
“In any sorta fight,” he continued, “you never take what the other guy knows or don’t know for granted…”
Merciful sleep overtook me.
Chapter 29
I won’t say I had a stream of visitors over the next few days, but there was a pleasant, intermittent trickle. Elmira spent much of her mornings with me and brought up my food, and Carmody was in and out, busy, he told me, taking over my job while I was laid up.
People I didn’t really know stopped by. The blacksmith, a broad black-haired young man with huge hands, name of Richard Oak, said he was a friend of Cassie’s and knew her before her “troubles” started. He’d heard what I’d done to save her, and wanted to thank me. She was a troubled girl from the get-go, he told me, and had lived in constant fear of her father. He looked like he wanted to say more, and I wanted to know more, but my attention was evaporating as I began to feel weak again.
I got the impression he was still harboring a crush on Cassie, and debated advising him to go back to his shop and hammer himself out what the medieval armorers called a codpiece, but I held my tongue and drifted off.
The druggist I’d talked to briefly weeks ago pulled up a chair and inquired as to my health. His name was Vern Miller, and he was one of those sour and dour pickle-sucking-face types who I pegged as not being much fun but perhaps a steady presence when you needed him. Maybe he wanted an end to the town’s trouble and was offering some tacit support. But he was still no help. I’d pressed him before on what he knew of town affairs and when he didn’t want to answer he just didn’t answer. I got the same cool stare when I revived the subjects of Eddie Moon, Mr. Adler, and Zach Purcell. I could live with that, at least for the time being. At least he wasn’t lying to me, which was refreshing.
It was early evening after my first week in bed when I received a visitor I surely didn’t expect. He didn’t knock.
Toad filled the room. Even though it was now the first week of December and nighttime temperatures were dipping near freezing he still kept his sleeves rolled up to show off his muscles.
“If you came to finish what we started, you’ve might win this one, since I can’t stand up,” I said. That wasn’t exactly true as I kept my revolver under the blanket – Carmody had retrieved it from Cassie – and it was in my hand as I spoke.
“That’s not why I came,” Toad said.
“Why did you come?”
“To warn you. I don’t like what’s going on here, and I’m riding out.”
“Why do you care about me?”
Toad crossed his arms, and with the meat in them pressed against his chest they swelled like ham hocks. “I don’t care much about you, but just so you know, I’m not mad about what happened. You’re a fighter and I’m a fighter, and that was business. You won fair and square even if you are trickier than you are tough.”
He shifted his weight and thought for a second before he spoke. “You’re up against a stacked deck, mister. I don’t know exactly how and I sure as hell don’t know why, but there are some pretty powerful people lining up against you and they want you dead in a hurry. They wanted you out of the way before, but you showed the bad judgment to hang on, and now they want you dead yesterday. Not only you, but Carmody and Mrs. Adler.”
“The ‘they’ that want to kill us includes Eddie Moon, I take it.”
Toad grew a little impatient. “Moon is part of it, sure, but he’s just a chess piece like me and Dottie.”
“Who’s Dottie?” I regretted getting him off the track because he was a man with something on his mind, and it wasn’t, from what I could see, a very expansive mind, so I wanted to maintain his focus.
“Dottie’s my girl. She works at the Full Moon. I know she’s a dove, and it don’t bother me too much she’s with other men, but some of them beat her up bad and that does bother me.”
“Who beat her up?”
He looked like he was going to clam up and leave, so I hazarded a guess.
“Purcell.” I made it a statement and not a question. It’s easier to get somebody to agree yes or no than answer something open-ended.
Toad’s face grew harder and angrier. His nostrils flared and it looked like he was smelling something bad.
“We always knew Purcell was pulling the strings,” Toad said. “Just whispers, at first. We heard rumors that he was squeezing Moon. We figured that’s why me and the others were hired, to put Mrs. Adler out of business so that Purcell would have more to wring out of Moon. Don’t get me wrong, Moon is kind of scummy guy in his own right, but I hear he got along with the Adlers for years.”
“So why did he suddenly turn up the heat?”
“Don’t know. I honestly don’t. It don’t make sense as it stands, and I’m sure you figured that out for yourself. There ain’t enough money in all the businesses in town to justify bankrolling a bunch of hard cases trying to strongarm Mrs. Adler. Why would Purcell get his hands in this? And from what I hear, there are bigger criminals that Purcell pulling his strings.”
“Like who?”
Toad shook his head. “That’s all I know. I’m not trying to be cagey, Mister, I just don’t know nothing more. I’m just muscle and low on the ladder. But I can smell something big at stake here. It don’t take no detective to figure that out.”
“One more question? You know what happened to Billy Gannon, the marshal before me?”
“I know he was shot. That happened a couple days after I was brought in. Word was that somebody wanted to keep him from going to Aus
tin. Why he was shot, I don’t know. What Austin had to do with it, I don’t know either.”
He moved toward the doorway. He was so wide he reflexively turned sideways to walk through it.
“I’m headed out. If you’re smart, you’ll leave, too. But something tells me you ain’t that smart.”
“Thanks for telling me what you know,” I said. “Good luck to you.”
He didn’t reply and left the door open when he walked out.
Chapter 30
I’d never actually sent a telegram before. I’ve read hundreds, been handed them plenty, and told other people to send them, but when I began walking again I stopped at the telegraph office on the edge of town, the first time I’d been in a telegraph office, and wrote out the message and gave it to the operator. At first I didn’t know how to contact the person I wanted, who to send the message to, and it took some back and forth messaging to narrow it down.
Each telegram cost about a dollar. I thought that was a quite reasonable price, especially as the telegraph operator said he’d just bill my office. I still wasn’t sure who paid the bills at my office, so that sounded just fine to me. Over the next few days, I finally started getting hold of the right people and getting regular answers, and I felt guilty that the person supplying me with the information also had to pay a dollar each time to do it, but the fellow I eventually reached was a state senator and I guess his “office” paid for it, too. It was nice catching up, in any event.
The telegraph operator, a skinny old guy named McPherson, acted like he hadn’t paid attention to my messages, although I’m sure he had probably made copies and passed along the contents. Deep-pocketed people like whoever was backing Purcell tended to want to know what was going on around them and I’m sure they didn’t mind paying for the privilege.
And that was fine. Pretty soon I’d want them to know what I knew. Right now it was all guesswork on not adding up to anything, but soon I’d put the pieces together.
Meanwhile, it was fun sending those messages out and waiting go get ones back in. I could see how that sort of thing could get addicting.
Chapter 31
It had been exactly twenty days since I’d arrived in Shadow Valley, though it seemed much longer. I’d spent a good deal of that time laid up, and thus knew considerably less about the town than a marshal who’d been on duty almost three weeks should be expected to know.
As my strength returned, I floated the idea of a vigilance committee and got no takers except for the blacksmith, who looked like he could take care of himself. I had my doubts, though, because if as I suspected he had feelings for Cassie he would eventually find himself out of commission in more ways than one.
My problem was that not only that the good people in town were too scared to help me, but I also had no firm idea who the good people actually were. Tentacles of evil entwine people who look good on the outside, and the good and bad teams were chosen long before I got here.
Choosing up teams always seemed to me like sort of an arbitrary process, anyway. Good people can be conscripted to do bad things. I’d spent four years fighting people who were defending the indefensible evil of buying and selling humans like cattle, but I can’t say all the rebs, as individual people, were evil. As best as I could figure it, most were ordinary folk who against their will were plunged into extraordinary circumstances, and told by those in power to defend the only way of life they’d ever known.
In the past weeks we’d chosen up sides against a gang made up in part by Mexicans. The Mexicans in this part of the country often chose up sides based on the idea of keeping land they thought was theirs, and that’s a motivation I can’t hold against them. But like anything else, what you see depends on how you’re looking and who you’re looking at. When the Durans signed up to kill us, we thought of them as an historic enemy. But in many parts of the Southwest Mexicans made up some of the most fierce Union militias and saved the North’s bacon on more than one occasion.
And also in the past couple weeks, events had conspired to make one Indian tribe my enemy and another my friend. They, too, were fighting because of factors beyond their immediate control, and beyond their making. I don’t pretend to understand the nuances of the troubles between the Apaches and Comanches, nor or the trouble between them and us, but it looked to me like one more case of assumptions gone crazy. Look at the trouble with treaties: We assume that the Comanches have some sort of central government and a treaty with one group was somehow communicated to all, but that’s just not the way things work in their world.
Simple labels and categories save the mind from having to work too much and that’s not a good thing. My theory was to judge people as individuals. And in just a few hours that theory would be put to the test when I would count on an ostensible enemy to be a friend.
I hoped I was working things out correctly.
But I had no doubt about the inherent evil of one enemy – an enemy who had once fought on my side. Rumors about Zach Purcell had been circulating for months, I gathered, but I had a hard time getting anyone, even Elmira, to go on the record about what they had heard. I suppose it was like asking townsfolk about witchcraft in Salem; the less said about the Devil, the better.
So I gave up playing detective, knowing that whoever was behind this had to come to me, now. I let it be known that I was waiting. And I’m sure the skinny old geezer at the telegraph office was undoubtedly spreading the word, too.
As to Purcell: I’d heard that he’d established himself as a feared and ruthless gunfighter, as well as a gangster with involvement in lots of shady stuff, including the dark corners of state politics. I’d known him a little during the war – as I told Carmody, he even repelled the other sadists and Billy Gannon went to far as to have Purcell relieved of his post – and heard some about him in the intervening years, but didn’t have a handle on his reputation of late in these parts. While I’d been involved in lawing in several territories, and heard out-of-town news and seen wanted posters float across my desk, the Southwest is not like Illinois; there’s not much centralized communication and in some parts of the territory the next town might as well be the next planet for all you hear from there.
All I knew was that I was Purcell’s main impediment to getting what he wanted, I and Carmody, and there was a shit-storm brewing that was going to rain down directly on me.
In the meantime, there wasn’t much I could do except try to get myself back in shape for when everything came down. I did want to help Elmira, and did want to get to the bottom of who killed Billy Gannon, and most certainly wanted the reward money. And I wanted to get to the spider in the middle of this bizarre web of fear and half-truths that dominated life in Shadow Valley.
But all that was secondary.
In the past 20 days, somebody had tried to kill me or get me killed so many times I’d actually lost count. There was a showdown coming, and I’d force it. I owed somebody that much.
And I was looking forward to the payoff. This was my type of game, and as much as I enjoyed playing, winning was the best thing of all.
Chapter 32
I spent the next few days target shooting. I found a nice open spot in front of a hill, just on the edge of town. The hill would absorb errant rounds to avoid anyone getting hurt by a ricochet or overshot. Several stumps provided me platforms for bottles and other things I could aim at, and there were several trees on which I could mount targets.
Word floated back to me that the townsfolk thought I was a bit eccentric, and some of the ones who lived or worked on that side of Shadow Valley took to watching me, leaning on fences, sometimes in groups, and as near as I could tell laughing at me a little from time to time.
I was more than happy to let them think I was crazy. There are occasions where that works to your advantage. And there was method to my madness, in any event: My shoulder wound had slowed my draw and affected my aim. I had no idea when it would heal completely or if it really would. So I had to get us
ed to shooting the way I was, with what I had at the moment in the way of physical capabilities.
Wearing my holster about two inches lower helped. Not having to raise my right hand as high avoided the hitch I encountered when my elbow reached a ninety-degree angle and the backward movement of the elbow forced my injured shoulder to rise. I didn’t like the looks of it: Men who wore extremely low-slung gunbelts always struck me as attention-seekers who wanted to look like shootists. But you do what you have to do, a phrase I had lately begun to use often because it irritated Carmody.
I’d left word around town that anyone who wanted to see me knew where to find me. That was an unnecessary admonition as I was pretty hard to miss, blasting away hour after hour. But I wanted the word on the street.
Nights I mostly stayed in my room at the lodging house. I avoided the Silver Spoon. Elmira had become sort of distant, anyway.
Carmody kept the peace and updated me from time to time on changes in town, most notably the influx of some new hard guys who were hanging around the Full Moon.
It was on the third day of my shooting spree that I learned Zach Purcell was back in town. Good thing, too, because I was getting low on ammunition, and so was the provisions store. I didn’t yet know how much I’d spent because they accommodatingly billed it to my office.
It occurred to me that there would be more than one reckoning in my future.
Chapter 33
I saw Purcell riding up and tacked a target to a loblolly pine as he approached. I kept my gun holstered so as not to prompt any premature fireworks.
He looked and dressed the part of a shootist. There’s no standard uniform, of course, but black seems to be the choice of fashionable murderers everywhere and he was dressed in it from head to toe. He wore tight black leather gloves.
Purcell was so ugly he was impressive; I’ll give him that. His face was long and pockmarked, the hair that protruded from under his hat was so black it was almost blue, and he wore a thin mustache, trimmed thin. I’d never actually seen a shark but I hear they have eyes like his, small, mean, and penetrating. Maybe Purcell tried to copy their stare. Or maybe the sharks tried to copy his, seeing as how he was so good at it.