by Bill Brooks
“What’ll it be, Doc?” Cole asked him. The front sight of the pistol was aimed at a spot just above his breastbone.
“It’s not what you think,” he said. “I didn’t come to shoot it out with you.”
“That’s good. Because, if you had, I’d have to pull the trigger and I don’t think you could stand the grief.”
He coughed into a crimson-stained handkerchief, wiped it back and forth across his lips twice, and then balled it in his fist. “What’s your business with Liddy Winslow?” he asked.
“That’s just it, Doc . . . my business.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“It has to be.”
“You know of me? You know the type of man I am?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard the talk.”
“Dying doesn’t mean a damn’ thing to me. Does it to you?”
“Did you come to discuss philosophy, Doc, or was there another reason for this unexpected visit?”
His gaze grew to fixed points within his skull, his hands flexed and unflexed by his sides. His cheeks worked hard, like a bellows against a fire, trying to work the air in and out of his weakened lungs. “I will ask you again,” he said. His voice was raspy, full of phlegm, rough, the way a hard drinker’s will get after a time. Still, it was a voice stubborn with a Southern accent—the voice of a Confederate gentleman who had maybe lost some of his gentility. “What is your business with Miss Winslow?” he asked again.
“Like I said, it’s personal.”
“Then you and I, sir, have a problem.”
“Only if you believe so.”
He stood there, unmoving except for the labored breathing. He didn’t look like a killer; he looked like a man who had lost hope that he was going to live a long time.
“Someone took a shot at me tonight,” Cole said. “Maybe it was you.”
Something moved just under his left eye, a small twitch like a tiny worm working just below the skin. “Had I been the one,” he said, “you would have now been wrapped in the arms of death.”
Coming from him, the expression did not seem florid. “Well, Doc, I guess I was lucky, then, that it wasn’t you.”
“Miss Winslow is a special friend of mine. We enjoy a business relationship as well. It is incumbent upon me to see that she and her employees are not to be troubled. Do you understand my position, sir?”
“I know, she told me.”
The spot below his eye twitched again. He swallowed, the paper collar around his neck moved, the string tie moved with it. His shadow hovered against one wall. Cole was fully prepared for him to produce a pistol. He was half expecting it.
“She told you,” he said. It was not quite a question, not quite an assertion. Then, impossibly, the eyes became colder, more void of any emotion, and he said: “Then you understand?”
“I understand that your business with Miss Winslow is your own, Doc. I expect the same consideration.”
“Then you understand?” he repeated.
“Let me ask you something, Doc.”
He did nothing to invite the question, but Cole asked it anyway. “If your job was to protect the girls working for Liddy, then why didn’t you?”
The slightest blush of color rose in his neck; the side of his jaw moved almost imperceptibly. These were the little things a man needed to be aware of when challenging a man of Doc’s reputation. The hands will kill, but the look in a man’s eye will tell you whether or not he’s thinking about it. On the frontier, there were two types of men who would kill you: there were those like Doc, who might just pull their piece and have at it, and there was the other type, the ones that would lay for you in an alley, or shoot you in your sleep—fill your brains full of lead or shoot you in the kidneys and walk away. With Doc, Cole sort of got the sense he could do it either way. “You are intruding where you are not welcome,” he said.
“You know about the reward she’s put out for those responsible for killing the girls?” Cole said.
“You are here for that?”
“It’s what I do, Doc.”
Then the hard stare eased a bit and one corner of his mouth lifted into what could only be described as mild amusement. “I hope that your journey to this place was not a long one,” he said. “For you have come here for nothing.”
“I’m not the only who has come, or will be coming,” Cole said. “One of them might already be in town. King Fisher. You ever heard of King Fisher, Doc?”
The small amusement fell from his mouth. “He is a low-heeled assassin,” Doc said. He said it like a Southern senator denouncing an opponent. A cough rattled high up in his chest and bent him forward at the waist. The hand with the balled-up hankie jerked upward to his mouth and the veins of his neck distended into small purple ropes as the paroxysms rattled through him. He gripped the jamb of the door with his free hand in order to steady himself. Finally, after several seconds, the cough abated and he wiped his mouth and swallowed several times. He looked weak and frail, a man ready to step through death’s door. “Do you mind not dropping the hammer on that piece?” he asked, his gaze falling to the revolver in Cole’s hand. “I need a drink of my whiskey. I have it here, inside my coat.”
Cole motioned for him to do so. His hand, a tremble of bones, reached inside the greatcoat and brought out a small silver flask that he held aloft and said: “I would offer to share it with you, but not many men will drink from the same container as a lunger, so I won’t bother to extend the invitation.” Then he tipped it to his mouth and Cole watched the sharp edge of his Adam’s apple jerk in his throat as he swallowed. His breathing was labored, but he replaced the flask inside his coat, then swiped a finger across his mustaches, sweeping away the dew clinging to them.
“Your involvement with Lydia,” he said, his voice a tinge weaker now, “will come to nothing. There are things that you do not understand.”
“My water’s getting cold, Doc.” Cole felt there was nothing he was going to learn from him that he did not already know, except that Doc saw him as a rival, a threat to whatever it was he thought he had going with Liddy Winslow.
Doc blinked. Just once. He drew in a deep breath through his nostrils and let it out again. “Perhaps the next time we meet, sir, the odds will be more even between us,” he said, again his gaze falling to the self-cocker in Cole’s hand.
“Maybe so, Doc. You just never know.”
He adjusted the greatcoat over his shoulders, pulling it tighter about him, then he turned and closed the door behind him, the scent of his bay rum still lingering in the air. Doc Holliday, King Fisher, Johnny Logan. The number of gun shooters Cole had to keep an eye out for was beginning to add up.
Chapter Eleven
The next morning Cole walked down to Johnny Logan’s office. The sky was leaden, lying low over the cañon, and the streets were muddy from a late night rain. An icy wind blew down through the cañon and the pedestrians, what few there were that time of morning, were huddled against the cold, their hands bunched inside their pockets, their collars turned up. One man’s hat was racing down the muddy street, its owner running behind it.
Constable Logan looked up when Cole entered. He had been drinking coffee from a tin cup, an unlighted cigar clamped between his teeth. The wind blew in behind Cole and stirred some papers on his desk.
“You mind?” he asked.
Cole closed the door as he straightened everything. Logan’s coat was off, and through the tight fit of his shirt Cole could see the bulk of his shoulders and chest and arms. He was a man who could do a lot of damage with just his fists. Cole had been in the ring with men like him back when he did some prize fighting. He knew what it was like to hit a man like him and what it was like to be hit.
“I see you ain’t left town yet,” Logan said, blowing steam off the coffee as he brought it to his mouth.
“I came to get some information from you.”
Logan didn’t bother to invite Cole to sit down or have some of his coffee. Instead he said: “You’v
e wasted a trip down here, then. I ain’t in the information business.”
“What do you know about a ring here in Deadwood?”
Cole waited for a sign of recognition: a muscle twitch along the jaw, a shifting of the eyes, the unsteadiness of the hand holding the cup of coffee. Either he was a good poker player or he didn’t know what Cole was talking about, because he couldn’t see anything in him that gave away whatever secrets he might be carrying.
“Cole, right?” he said. “If I read your name right, the one you signed on the hotel register, it’s John Henry Cole?”
Cole waited for him to say what was on his mind.
“I got no time for gun artists and bounty hunters, just like I got no time for drunks and troublemakers.”
“Does that include murdered prostitutes?” Cole asked.
Logan set the cup down. Some of the coffee spilled onto his desk, staining the edges of some Wanted posters. His lips compressed and his jawbone worked into a small knot under his left ear. “You’ve been warned,” he said. “You go on back to the hotel and get your things and climb on the next stage out.”
“I’m afraid not. My business isn’t finished here yet.”
He moved well for a big man, but Cole was ready for him. He ducked the first blow from Logan’s huge right fist. The left one followed, angled downward, and grazed the side of Cole’s face. Cole drove a right to a spot just below his ribs, the only place to hurt a man his size with a body blow. Cole heard him grunt, but at the same time he swung a looping left hand that missed but caught Cole with the elbow to the side of his head as it came around. It was like being struck with an anvil. As Cole stumbled sideways, stunned, the inside of his head ringing like mission bells, his old prize fighter’s instincts took over. He lashed a left to Logan’s cheek, felt it drive hard against the leathery skin, strike bone. He followed with a right and another left, then two more rights in rapid succession—each blow driving Logan backward. His face was cut high on the cheek from where Cole had hit him with the last right and a knot bulged over his left eye and blood leaked from his nostrils. But he was big and he was a gamer, and he hit Cole with a series of pounding blows that drove him back and into the chair of Logan’s desk, Cole’s feet tangling in the rungs. Cole slammed hard against the floor, the palms of his hands stinging from trying to break the fall. Then Logan hit him with something that shattered his senses and dropped him into a long dark well of nothingness.
* * * * *
Cole awoke to a drunken chorus of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen”. The voice was scratchy, raking like cat claws against his skin. He tried moving, tried sitting up, and, when he tried, his head felt like shattered glass. He reached up, probed for the sources of the pain. There were many. The worst, however, was at the back of his skull, where the constable had hit him with something he hadn’t seen. His hair was sticky from where his scalp had been split, and, when he touched that place, it took his breath away.
The voice stopped singing long enough to say: “Looks like ol’ Johnny Logan gave you the bum’s rush and a whole lot more, mister.” Then, without further pause, it broke back into song.
Cole adjusted his vision enough to see he had been locked up in a small cell with none other than Calamity Jane Canary. She was horribly drunk and reeked of anquitum, a common concoction used by miners to keep down the body lice population. She squatted in her bunk, howling the same chorus of the song over and over again. The room was small, maybe six feet by eight feet, with one window that had a set of bars that let in a small amount of light. Through the gloom Cole could see a heavy iron door that he didn’t have to try to know was locked. Against his own better judgment, he managed to sit upright.
When Calamity Jane saw him do this, she stopped singing again. “Wah there, yer a damn’ sight more alive than I would’ve guessed! You don’t have no whiskey hidden on ya, do ya?”
Carrying on a conversation with her was not something Cole had in him just at the moment. And when she saw that he wasn’t a talker, she took over.
“I’d ’a’ nursed ya, if I had some bandages and bear grease. Hell, I’ve nursed a lot worse than ya. I’ve even nursed folks through the pox and measles. God damn if I couldn’t stand a drink . . . ’scuse my French, in case yer a Christian . . . which I am most of the time myself, except when I’m drunk and feelin’ blue. Which I am at the present.”
Cole felt his only hope was that she would pass out, but she didn’t.
“Hell, ya like singin’, mister? I should’ve been a singer like one of them opry gals, travel the world over, see everything, do everything.” Then her face shrank into a frown as she examined something on the front of her shirt. “Trouble is, my bosoms ain’t big enough to be one of them opry gal singers. Ya ever notice how big a bosoms them gals have?” She tittered. “But I ain’t missed much in life besides having big bosoms. I’ve seen and done things most folks couldn’t even dream about.” She laughed and slapped the top of her leg. “Whoo, boy! I mean I have done some things, believe you me.” Her fringed jacket was stained dark in places and her canvas pants were muddy at the knees. “Ya ever hear of Wild Bill?” she asked. “Hell, of course ya have. Everybody’s heard of Wild Bill.” She had small, blunted teeth, evenly set but yellowed. Her eyes shone fiercely, alive with a restless energy. “Me and Bill was married,” she said. “Oh, Gawd!” Her face twisted suddenly and she began to bawl aloud and flung herself across her cot in a highly dramatic way. Cole had seen worse performances. “Me and Bill have us a child, a baby girl, back East. And now Billy’s dead and will never get to see her, and she won’t get to see him, either! Oh, Gawd!”
Her grief was exaggerated, just as her singing had been. She may not have made an opera singer, but she might have made a pretty fair actress. Her loud sobbing went on for several more minutes as Cole sat there, trying to overcome his own grief—the grief of his injuries.
“Ya sure ya don’t have a drink on ya, mister?” she said, suddenly changing moods again, wiping at eyes that were absent of tears.
When Cole nodded his head, she took on a forlorn look.
“If I was wearing some bloomers, I’d ’a’ taken them off and made ya a bandage and wrapped that poor head a yars. Did I tell ya I used to nurse folks?”
“Look, I appreciate the offer, Miss Canary,” Cole said. “But the truth is, I’m not up to conversation just now.”
“Ya know my name!” she shouted. “Hell’s bells! Then I guess ya have heard of me?” She seemed as delighted as a child that Cole knew who she was. “What’s yar name, mister?” she asked, completely ignoring his request for some peace and quiet.
Cole gave up on the hope that she would settle down, at least for the present. “Cole,” he said. “John Henry Cole.”
Her gaze studied him for several seconds. “Nope! Ain’t never heard of ya,” she announced. “I thought fer a minute I might’ve known ya. I’ve known plenty a good-lookers in my time, shame to admit. Har, har, har.” Her laughter was dry, shrill, something that seemed to crack against Cole’s skull. “Ya ever consort with Texas Jack or White-Eye Johnson?” she asked. “Maybe that’s where I might’ve known ya.”
“Don’t know either,” he said.
She twisted the ends of her short, choppy hair; it was greasy and lank, what there was of it. “Whiskey gives me the blues,” she said. “Having too much of it, or not having enough.” She waited to see his reaction to her self-made joke, and, when he offered none, she slapped her knee and laughed. “Har, har, har. Johnny busted ya good, didn’t he? Drug ya in here and tossed ya on the floor. I said to him . . . ‘Johnny, what’d ya hit this feller with?’ And he said . . . ‘I busted him with the butt of my double-barrel whanger, and I’ll do the same to you, you don’t shut yer yap!’ Then I looked him in the eye and said . . . ‘There ain’t a day in heaven or hell that’ll ever pass by when ya’d ever bust me like that, Johnny Logan.’ Then he slammed the door and skulked off!”
For a long moment she stared at Cole as though
seeing him for the first time. “It’s a wonder he didn’t bash out all yar brains!”
“Yeah, a wonder.”
“It was me that lifted ya up on yar cot and put that blanket over ya so’s ya wouldn’t catch yar death.”
“Thanks,” Cole said, and meant it.
“Pshaw! Don’t need to thank me. I nursed plenty like ya . . . or have I told ya that already? Anyway, ya wasn’t the only one that paid the devil’s price. Johnny wasn’t lookin’ so tip-top hisself. I seen how his face was all cut and his eyes all big and swellin’ up. I’d ’a’ paid to see that go ’round.”
She fell silent for a minute, and the break from hearing her talk was a welcome gift for Cole, but it only lasted for a minute before she was back at it.
“They killed my Bill, ya know?”
“Who did?” Cole asked, slightly more interested now in what she had to say.
“Some right here in town. They paid that old ugly skunk McCall to kill him. Paid him fifty dollars and gave him a stolen pistol and sent him off to do it and he did, by Gawd!”
“Who paid him, Jane?”
But Cole could tell, looking into her startled eyes, that she was lost somewhere in her own fogged thinking, unaware of half of what she was saying.
“He wan’t cross-eyed, neither, like they said he was. He could see good as you and me. He was just a plain damn’ ugly sum-a-bitch, excuse my French.”
“Jane, who was it that paid McCall to kill Bill?”
“Poor Billy, laid low like that! We was goin’ to make a big score and go get little Janey and start a home, maybe in Nebraska along the Platte. Bill said how he always liked the Platte. Me, I never could see it, livin’ up in that lonesome Nebraska. But I’d ’a’ gone anywhere with ol’ Bill.” Her features grew genuinely sorrowful. “But that’s all dried up dreams now, thanks to Mister Jack McCall . . .”