Valley of the Lesser Evil

by Carl Dane

  Purcell dismounted and faced me squarely. I don’t know if he was ready to draw down but I wasn’t – not yet, anyway – and lifted my hands a little, palms toward him.

  “What’s this all about, Hawke?” The voice was deep, seeming to rumble up from the bowels of the earth.

  “There are people watching, Purcell. They’re a ways away, but they can see my hands are nowhere near my gun. You seem to hold most of the cards around here, but gunning down a town marshal who has posed no threat to you is a hard charge to beat no matter how much you stack the deck.”

  “Didn’t know you’d turned coward,” Purcell said. “I always suspected some yellow in you, but you can’t see that sort of streak ‘til a coward turns his tail.”

  “I’ll be ready for you, but just not now. You probably heard that I got a little ventilated, but so did all the assholes you hired to do it. I just need a little time to work the kinks out in my shooting arm.”

  Purcell growled. It was a real growl. Like an animal.

  “You don’t need to get no kinks out, you need to get out. Now. You and that overgrown mountain goat deputy.”

  Purcell took a step closer. “You got a grudge against me and I’ve made sure people know about it,” he said. “I ain’t done nothing wrong and I got a right to defend myself should you try to get the drop on me.”

  “What you’re trying to set up might not be in your best interests, Purcell. I’ve lost a little speed but you’re still no match for me. Want to try me on that target?”

  I knew that when I walked to the tree I would be a pretty tempting target myself so I tried to put that out of Purcell’s plans.

  “Mind you, Purcell, we’ve got about fifty people with a lot of time on their hands leaning on their fences watching, so now’s not the time to gun me down on the sly.”

  He said nothing.

  “Three shots. Fifty bucks I can get a closer spread than you.”

  “Do it.”

  I stood square to the tree. The paper target was 150 feet away. I drew smoothly and shot three rounds from down low. One was within the bullseye, but slightly left of center. The other two were in the nine ring, one about two inches to the left and the other an inch and a half above dead center.

  “You think you’ll scare me off with your fancy shooting,” Purcell said. It wasn’t a question.

  I didn’t reply and walked over to pin up a new target. I took off my gunbelt before doing so, not wanting to give him any excuses or justification for claiming I was a threat to him. I tacked the new target a couple inches higher up the trunk. Purcell didn’t notice the different positioning or didn’t care.

  I hadn’t yet finished turning around when Purcell drew and fired. His motion created a hissing sound as the gun snaked out of the leather and the first shot went off while the barrel was seemingly still on the rise. Shots two and three followed like an echo, and his Navy Colt was re-holstered as quickly as it had been drawn.

  There was no need to retrieve the target. I could see from where I stood that all three rounds were tight within the bullseye.

  “Give me my fifty dollars and then get the fuck out of Shadow Valley,” Purcell said. “Find some nice peaceful town to settle down in, collect the taxes, write a few summonses, and spend the rest of your years behind a desk or in your rocking chair.”

  I handed him the money and he put it in his front pocket, not bothering to count it and not breaking eye contact.

  “You understand me?” Purcell asked.

  “Let’s say I got what I paid for,” I said.

  He drew his head back an inch, started to say something, but let it go.

  “By tomorrow,” he said, turning his horse back toward town.

  “Count on something happening tomorrow,” I said.

  I waited until he was out of sight and the fence-leaners found some other source of fascination. I walked back to the tree and took down the target from the tree. Loblollies are common in East Texas but you don’t find too many of them in Hill Country, and I was lucky to come across this specimen. It suited my purposes just fine, being one of the softest woods you can find, and on top of that, this was on old tree with a little rot on the side facing me.

  My knife cut into it easily and I only had to dig around for a minute or two until I got what I wanted.

  Chapter 34

  The Silver Spoon was slow that night, so Elmira didn’t have a good excuse to avoid me.

  She was ill at ease as we sat facing each other across her desk and before I could start the conversation she began to cry. I didn’t know why and didn’t know what to do, and didn’t even know what my role was in this latest drama. Technically, I suppose, I was her employee. In practical terms, I was her protector. And after that whiskey-soaked night before Cassie’s abduction, I’d become…well, I’m not sure what I’d become, other than confused.

  I picked up my chair and set it beside her and held her. She really let loose. She quaked and sobbed so hard she lost her breath and took in a few quick gasps before starting the process all over again. After a few minutes she composed herself, looked for a handkerchief which I could not supply as I’d never gotten in the habit of carrying one, and finally rubbed her nose on her sleeve in a gesture I would have more readily expected from Carmody.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, for lack of anything better to say.

  “I think you should leave.” The suddenness of the remark seemed to startle both of us.

  “Now? You mean you want me to leave you alone?”

  “No, I mean I want you to leave here. Forever.”

  “Can I at least know why?”

  It took her a minute to collect her thoughts, and then she spoke slowly and deliberately, like each word was a step on untrustworthy ice.

  “Because Purcell’s going to kill you.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He was here today,” Elmira said. “In this room,” as if the very thought of Purcell in the same room was bizarre and outrageous, like encountering a mountain lion in your parlor.

  “Lots of people have tried to kill me recently,” I said. “I’m still here.”

  “But you can’t shoot. I heard what happened today, with the target and all. And he’s not like the others. He’s worse. A hundred times worse.”

  “What else did he say to you?”

  “He says if I sell to Moon he’ll let you live.”

  “Nice of him. And you told him what?

  She looked in my direction but didn’t make eye contact.

  “I told him I can’t. I can’t.” She began to sob and her shoulders heaved. “I just can’t.”

  I was out of sympathy and heartily sick of half-truths.

  “Why? He’s offered you twice what the place is worth. All right, so maybe I understand your reasoning. I wouldn’t want to be run off my business either, as a matter of principle, and might not sell even if it were ten times the fair market value. I get that. But I don’t see that as part of the equation here. You say you won’t sell because it’s the only life you know. You say you can’t start over. That’s bullshit. There’s something else going on, something a lot deeper, and God damn it, I’ve almost been killed a dozen times because of it and you owe me an answer.”

  I realized I was yelling and took a deep breath.

  “You tell me honestly and I’ll help as best I can,” I said. “If you force me to turn over all the rocks and things might not go your way.”

  “I…” she stopped and took a deep breath.

  “And I just have a couple more to turn over. What’s under a rock is usually pretty ugly. I don’t think either of us wants to look there. This is your last chance.”

  “…I just can’t.”

  Chapter 35

  I spent the next day getting ready for the last act of this peculiar drama, and maybe the final curtain of my life.

  There was a lot to do,
and Carmody was going to be a busy man. God bless him, when he wasn’t focusing his energies on getting under my skin he was one hell of a lawman. He certainly must have been a terrific soldier, too. He didn’t quibble, didn’t judge, and didn’t even blink when I told him what I thought was happening and where I thought things were headed.

  All he did was retrieve a pencil and what looked like a piece of packing paper and write down a timeline in a surprisingly elegant script. He repeated it all back to me, accurately.

  The bank had a clock visible through the window even when the doors were closed. We would set our time to that. Not being a railroad town, Shadow Valley didn’t need much in the way of accuracy and the time was sort of an educated guess. Clocks were set to noon when the sun was directly overhead. But we needed to coordinate some arrivals and departures, so we borrowed a pocket watch from the general store for Carmody, who did not have a timepiece, and set it to bank time.

  I retrieved a couple telegrams from the office late in the afternoon before it closed. I showed them to Carmody after he rode back in after making his contacts, and he nodded.

  Whether it all added up to anything was an open question. I’d know shortly.

  “Something tells me we might not pull this one off,” I said. “And in times like this I have a standard speech I give to people I’ve dragged into hopeless situations, which is a surprisingly large number.”

  “Lemme guess,” Carmody said. “It starts with the fact you are damn likely to get killed tomorrow and get me killed along with you, and you say no hard feelings if I want to back out, and it ends with me telling you to stop with the bullshit and I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Something like that. Thanks.”

  “It’s my job. Your job, too, though sometimes I can’t figure out if it’s your vocation or avocation.”

  The silence was heavy. He looked at me in sort of a detached way. “Surprised that I know some big words, or are you taken aback by what I actually said?”

  I didn’t like where this was going but there were lives on the line, including ours, especially ours, and I wanted everything in the open.

  “Tom,” I began, suddenly aware that this was the first time I’d ever used his first name, “let’s not kid each other – you’re no stranger to killing.”

  “No, Josiah,” he said, without indicating any irony at invoking my first name. “I ain’t. And I ain’t judging you, I mean that sincerely. I’ve killed a lot of people what needed killing. Did I get a thrill out of it? Yes, sometimes, I suppose I did.”

  “So?”

  “So I came up hard, killed to eat, killed to live, and in the war, killed because they told me to. Tomorrow I’ll kill or be killed because I have obligations, and my life is the sum of everything before it. It’s the only life I know.”

  “So?”

  “So, you had options. After the war you could have gone back doing whatever professors do, which I gather involves a lot of running at the mouth, or dealt cards, or run for office, or hell, you could have played the damn piano in any saloon in the country. But I think you got hooked on fighting and killing during the war. It comes easy to you now, just like when you killed that Mexican sentry.”

  I started to speak but he cut me off.

  “I ain’t saying you done wrong. Maybe you had no choice, maybe bopping him over the head would have made too much noise, but after you did it it didn’t even occur to you that you’d just killed somebody casual as a man flicks a mosquito off their arm. You seemed surprised that I’d even brought it up.”

  “You’re saying I like it too much.”

  “I’m saying that there’s men like me that fight and kill and the thrill comes natural after the fact. And then there’s men like you that need the thrill and then find reasons to fight and kill to get it. Plenty. But you, Josiah, are a different piece of work.”

  “Meaning?” I said.

  “Because you think about it. You try to balance it all out, fit everything into a theory somehow. And you make it sound right. Maybe you are right. Or maybe you just talk yourself into it. But in the end I believe that you believe you’re killing for the right reason. And you think that without people like you people who don’t think about it – people like Purcell – would have their way.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, Sir,” Carmody said, drawing himself to his full height and standing at attention, “I can’t think it through or talk it through as pretty as you do, but that’s more or less what I think, too. Some things is worth fighting for. A very few is worth dying for.”

  “And that’s how it might play itself out,” I said.

  He nodded. There was nothing more to say.

  Chapter 36

  Elmira was incredulous when I told her we were going to meet with Moon and Purcell in the morning to discuss selling the Silver Spoon. I told her things were not what they seemed and I needed her cooperation, but offered no further explanation. I didn’t really have one yet.

  I also made it clear that she had no other option. We were due in five minutes, I told her. And then I took her arm and began leading her. Not roughly. But in a way that, I suppose you could say, left her no other options.

  “You’re scaring me,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. And that ended the conversation.

  Chapter 37

  Eddie Moon, Elmira, and I sat at the round table in his office.

  Purcell sat in a chair near the corner. His eyes showed no recognition, no emotion, just a cold, hateful radiance, like faraway light from a distant, dark star.

  Moon knew that something was going to happen and was smart enough to let me do the talking.

  “Before we’re through today,” I said, “the future ownership of the Silver Spoon will be decided.”

  Moon raised an eyebrow. Elmira’s lips parted and glanced from me to Moon and back again. Purcell didn’t react.

  “And there’s one other thing,” I said. “One man in this room will be dead.”

  I had their full attention now. Purcell blinked. Moon began to speak but I held up my hand.

  “I’m going to start by telling you what I know. Some of it’s fact, some is guesswork, but it all fits together and between us we’ll fill in the rest of the pieces. You each know a piece of what’s happened, but no one here knows the whole story. We’ll figure that out now.”

  Moon shook his head. “What is this shit? You said you were going to negotiate the sale of the Spoon.”

  “And I will, Moon. But first you have to hear my story. And here it is.”

  I stood up. I did it partly for effect and partly so I could react if Moon or Purcell made a move.

  “Moon, you’re a pretty rough customer. This is a tough trade, and preachers and schoolmarms don’t survive in it. Still, you managed to co-exist with the Spoon for quite a while, and your gambling was on the up-and-up – at least you didn’t cheat more than most. Some people around town say they actually respected you. But all of a sudden you turned up the heat on Mrs. Adler a few months after Mr. Adler did his vanishing act. I wasted a lot of time trying to connect you with Adler’s disappearance, and now I’m convinced that what happened to Mr. Adler was about something else entirely, which I’ll get to in a minute.”

  “I had nothing to do with Adler’s disappearance,” Moon said.

  “I believe you. I think that when Alder was out of the picture it became, coincidentally, the time to turn up the heat on Mrs. Adler to sell the property. And that’s when Purcell took over.”

  Moon almost looked at Purcell for direction, but caught himself.

  “I think you’re a tough and resourceful guy, Moon, but you were up against organized gangsters moving in on your business. You’re not the first man to be muscled out of his business, and you won’t be the last. But that’s not the issue. I could see what was happening right away, but the question I couldn’t answer was why. Why did these thugs move in on you and then, under your name,
try to get hold of the Silver Spoon?”

  No one answered, so I took the liberty.

  “Elmira,” I said, walking over to her and tracing an oval on the table with my finger, “you own property that extends a few miles in back of the Spoon. You know that, of course, and you probably know every inch of it because you’ve been scouring it for a month. I hear you take a lot of rides back there to ‘clear your head’ and ‘help you think.’”

  She stiffened.

  “But I’m not going to deal with that now. The most important thing, Elmira, is this.”

  I swept my finger straight through the imaginary oval.

  “A railroad. There’s a major line to be built right through your property. It’s not public knowledge yet. These things rarely are. Deals are cooked up in private, connected people then position themselves in the right way, and the businessmen and the politicians get rich.”

  Elmira pointed to the table as if the drawing really existed.

  “But how do you know this?”

  “Low friends in high places,” I said. “I knew there had to be some secret value to the Silver Spoon. At first I thought it might be gold, or silver, or oil, but Carmody checked that out and you’re sitting on a big pile of worthless dirt and rocks. Not even good dirt and rocks. But I wired a friend of mine who’s a state senator. He did some sniffing around and found out about the preliminary layout for the railroad line. I got the full story in his telegram.”

  “Why here?” she said. “Why a railroad here?”

  “This may not be prime cattle country,” I said. “This isn’t even prime whorehouse country, or anything country, but there has to be a way for the cattle to get from the big herds to the big markets. The days of the cattle drive are numbered. It’s all about trains and cattle-cars now.”