Blood Storm

by Bill Brooks

  “Thank God it’s you, John Henry. She’s in Jazzy Sue’s room.”

  He went in and instinctively took off his hat when he saw her sitting there on the side of the bed, her head down, her body shaking. Jazzy Sue was sitting next to her, trying hard to comfort her, her arm around Rose’s shoulders, saying: “Now girl, now girl, just calm yourself down.”

  “Rose,” Cole said.

  She lifted her face to look at him. “Mister Cole . . .” Her lips trembled; her hands shook.

  “What happened out there, Rose?”

  Her eyes were full of fear, tearing as she looked at Cole. “He hurt . . . Mama,” she stammered.

  Cole looked at Liddy for an explanation.

  “She found a diary Flora kept among her things. It was in a trunk of Flora’s effects. I had it stored since her death. I gave it to Rose.”

  “Rose,” Cole said, sitting next to her on the bed, “is that what the diary said, that Johnny hurt your mama?”

  She nodded and bit her lower lip until it turned white.

  “Where is it?” Cole asked Liddy.

  She pointed to a pile of things exposed in a small open trunk sitting in the corner. A brown leather book lay atop the clothes; its pages were marked by a thin red ribbon. Cole took the book and opened it to the place where the ribbon lay between the pages. The handwriting was delicate, small, a little difficult to read. But there it was, the part about Johnny’s abuse of Flora; how he’d beaten her on several occasions; how he’d always apologize for the beatings; how much she was in love with him; how he’d promised to leave his wife for her. It was a tale of a woman left longing, clinging to unkept promises, to unrequited love, to pain and shame.

  I hate him and love him, the first line of the last paragraph began in that tender, unschooled hand. I wisht he woodn’t hurt me so bad. I wisht he’d love me more and marry me like he said. I don’t know if I can stand much more of this life! Oh, Dere Johnny, please, please don’t hurt me no more!

  Cole flipped a few pages more, to the last entry. It was dated July 4th, 1876.

  I asked Johnny last night when he was going to leave! I told him if he didn’t leave her, I wood make things hard on him (tho I didn’t really mean any of it). Johnny knows I know all his dirty secrets. Secrets about this town, not just about him. He got real mad when I mentioned it, about his dirty secrets. We had quite a row because of it. He slapped me and threatened me, said he would kill me if I said anything! I was sorry to have upset him so. I cried, but it did no good. He called me a b—! & cussed me in terrible ways! I’m worried that now I’ve gone and done it. Johnny can be a terror. Still, I love him. . . .

  Cole closed it and handed it to Liddy. “You didn’t know?”

  She shook her head. “It was among her things. I didn’t bother to go through them, considering the circumstances. I’m not even sure why I saved them.”

  “I need a word with you,” he said.

  They stepped outside in the hall.

  “I thought you told me you never allowed your girls to be abused.”

  “I didn’t. This was something different, something I didn’t know anything about. I knew Flora was seeing someone privately, but a girl’s private life is her own. I never get involved with that. Johnny was not a customer as far as I knew. They could have met anywhere. Johnny liked women. Flora was the type to be taken in by a man like Johnny. She always had these romantic notions that someday the right man would come along and he would be the answer to all her problems.”

  Cole could see that Liddy was shaken by the sudden turn of events. He felt that no one, seeing the anguish of the young woman sitting on the side of the bed, could help but be drawn into her suffering.

  “Where’d she get the gun, John Henry?”

  “I gave it to her,” he admitted.

  “Why? Why would you do a thing like that?”

  “I told you, there’d been some trouble on the trail. I wanted her to be able to protect herself.”

  “Well, she’s done more than that now. She’s killed a lawman. They’ll probably want to hang her for it.”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “What makes you think it won’t?” she asked, her words sharp, angry. “Johnny has lots of friends in this town.”

  “I’ll need your help on this, Liddy.”

  She cast a fretful glance toward Rose’s room. “God, John Henry, this whole thing has become such a mess.”

  “I know, but we’ve got to finish it, not let it finish us.”

  “What is it you want me to do?”

  “I want to keep her here, out of sight. Don’t let her out of the house and don’t let anyone in. I need time to tie Johnny to Flora’s murder,” he said.

  Liddy looked confused. “I thought you said it was Leo you suspected.”

  “I think Leo was behind it, but he’s not the sort that does his own dirty work. He hires it done. I think he had Johnny on the payroll. I think Flora was getting too much under Johnny’s skin, and, when she threatened him with the secrets he’d told her, he went to Leo with it, and Leo ordered it done.”

  “Flora I can understand, maybe,” she said. “But why would Leo and Johnny have the other girls killed? Why wouldn’t they just kill me if all it came down to was wanting me out of business?”

  “That’s something I’ll have to ask Leo. Johnny’s in no shape to tell me.”

  There were other possibilities running through Cole’s mind—Doc Holliday, for one. The other night he’d seen him and Irish Murphy and Johnny having a private conversation out front of the saloon. Now Irish had left town suddenly and Johnny was dead. But that still left Doc, the man Liddy had hired to protect her girls, but hadn’t. Doc was still on Cole’s list of suspects along with Leo. Somebody knew something.

  Liddy’s eyes were full of concern. “Maybe I . . . we . . . maybe we should just get out of here.”

  “You know you don’t want to do that, Liddy.”

  She placed her hand on Cole’s arm, stepped close. “I might. I’ve been thinking a lot about us.”

  “What about your friend, Winston?”

  “John Henry . . .”

  “Its gone too far, Liddy, we’ve gotten too close to them.”

  “I’m afraid. For the first time, I’m really afraid.”

  “Maybe it’s not so bad a thing, being afraid. Maybe it will help keep us alive.”

  She pressed against him until his arms reached up and held her. He could feel her heartbeat, her warm breath against his neck. “I’m afraid for you,” she whispered.

  “Don’t be. Just keep a watch on things here, Liddy. Buy me some more time.”

  She kissed his jaw.

  The feeling came over him again: What is it between us that won’t allow me to be completely free with her? It was a question he still didn’t have an answer to, and just at the moment he knew he couldn’t afford the time to figure it all out. There were other things to worry about, like keeping a vigilante mob of Johnny’s friends from finding out it was Rose who’d killed Johnny. Then he needed to tie Johnny to Flora’s murder, and maybe tie Johnny to Leo Loop. Doc Holliday was still a candidate to be a part of the killings. Plus, someone had been doing their best to kill Cole ever since his first night in Deadwood. And even with all that to think about, there was still the matter of Suzanne Smith. What would become of her and Tess?

  As Cole headed to the Lucky Strike, he passed the place on the street where Johnny Logan had been shot and killed. There was a pink stain in the snow with new snow falling to cover up even that small trace of a man’s death. It reminded Cole of just how quickly the land devours the evidence of our existence once we’re gone.

  When he arrived at the Lucky Strike, Leo wasn’t there. The bartender, Harve, stood glumly at his post, a white apron tied around his bulging waist. His eyes were puffed, his lip cut, the dark bruises starting to form under his flesh from where Red had punched him a good number of times. Cole guessed it’d turned into a real fight after all, at least
from looking at Harve.

  “Where’s Leo?”

  Harve shook his head. “Don’t know.”

  Cole placed some silver on the bar. “Would that help you to remember where Leo went?”

  He touched fingers to his split lip. “That Red, he hits like a son-of-a-bitch.”

  “Leo. Where’d he go?”

  Harve swept up the coins, held them in his hand; his knuckles were scraped. “Left about an hour ago,” Harve said, checking the looseness of a tooth. “Climbed in his hack and took the north road. Ain’t seen him since.”

  “Tell me something. You get in any punches?”

  Harve winced. Cole headed for the stables.

  The old man was perched outside on a three-legged stool, rubbing his hands over the stove to which he’d been feeding the pine log. He was wearing a blanket around his shoulders.

  “Come to sell me back my coat?” he asked, his rheumy eyes expectant.

  “Not yet. But I’ll rent that buckskin off you again.”

  “Awful damn’ weather to be going fer a ride, ain’t it?”

  “You want to rent him, or not?”

  “Sure, sure. If I don’t, he’ll just stand around and eat hay and drop horse apples I’ll have to clean up.”

  The old man went inside, saddled the buckskin with Cole’s Dunn Brothers, and brought him out. “Four dollars,” he said. “Or did you forget?”

  Cole paid him.

  “I’d be back before dark, I was you,” he said. “Storm like this could get a hellava lot worse before it’s done.”

  “What’s up that north road?”

  He looked at Cole, gave that toothless grin. “Hell, nothing but them hills. But if you foller it fer enough, you’ll be crossing onto Mister Stevens’s land. You know Mister Stevens?”

  “Yeah, I know him.”

  “Private son-of-a-bitch!” the old man said. “English. Don’t ’low nobody to trespass. Say he’s had men whipped fer trespassin’. Got gold mine claims all over up there. I’d stay away, I was you.”

  Cole didn’t wait around for more advice.

  The snow continued to fall in large, swirling flakes, just like everyone had said it would. The snow was piling up fast, and by the time he’d gone as far as what he figured was Winston Stevens’s property line, it was nearly a foot deep. The snow lay in white bundles on the boughs of the pines and was draped over the rock outcroppings. And where Cole crossed a stream, the water looked black against the whiteness of the banks.

  It was deceptively beautiful, snow in the Black Hills. Cole could see why the Sioux were reluctant to give up this land. He could see why the white man wanted it. But the white man didn’t want it for the same reasons the Sioux did. But any man with eyes could see how such beauty could seduce as well as any woman, any sin. All you had to do was take a deep breath and let your gaze travel over those black, black hills.

  Cole didn’t hear it, the bullet that struck him. It was a blow to his upper body, hard and sudden, and it carried him out of the saddle and flipped him over and over, tumbling him down the side of the ridge he’d just ascended and into a snowbank that swallowed him whole.

  Cole lay stunned for a second, waiting to die, trying to suck air into his numbed lungs. It was a silent world, there under the snowbank, silent and peaceful, and for a few long moments he was willing to let it take him to that place where Zee and Tad and the Rebel flag bearer were waiting for him. It seemed he was at peace. He tried not fighting it, the dying. But then his lungs caught fire and instinctively he clawed through the smothering tomb of snow and gasped in a lungful of cold air.

  He dug the snow out of his nostrils and rubbed it free of his eyes and sucked air until he didn’t need to any longer. He could see farther up the hill that the buckskin had run a short distance, then stopped. The snow was too deep for him to want to run far. He stood there as though waiting for Cole to come get him.

  He unbuttoned the woolly coat and looked for the bullet wound. He couldn’t find one. He checked the coat and saw a small, flat matted spot where the bullet had struck but must have bounced off. Either the bullet had been of a low caliber, or it had been fired from too long a distance to go through the heavy coat. Either way, the buffalo coat had saved his life, and he was very glad it had. He was sorry now that he’d promised the old man he’d sell it back to him.

  He scrambled to a nearby rock outcropping and crawled under it just as a second shot kicked up a spray of snow inches from his face. The sound of the shot echoed down the mountain and he saw a shower of snow break from a pine bough about two hundred yards from up above where he was. The buckskin was startled by the gunfire and crow-hopped through the deep snow a few paces before stopping again.

  There was no point in returning fire with his self-cocker at that distance. In his haste to find Leo, he’d forgotten to bring the Winchester with him. He might as well have tried throwing rocks as to try and hit anything so far away with just a pistol.

  He hunkered down and waited. If they wanted him badly enough, they’d have to come down the mountain and get him. That’s the way he saw it. He waited a long time, listened, and kept an eye on the buckskin, which was eventually working his way back down the slope, pawing through the snow, looking for grass.

  Cole figured it was Charley Coffey up top, maybe Fork and Tolbert, too, but at least Charley. It was Charley’s way—shooting a man from cover. As for Fork and Tolbert, Cole could only guess. But if they worked for Stevens, and Charley was riding ramrod over them, maybe they weren’t above bushwhacking, either. He checked the loads in his self-cocker, made sure they were dry by putting in fresh ones, checked the Colt Thunderer Torres had retrieved and given back to him. He kicked out the spent shell, the one Rose had popped Johnny Logan with, and put in a fresh one.

  He waited some more, and finally they came, the sound of boots crunching in the snow. Little trailing balls of snow rolled down the slope ahead of whoever it was that was coming. Little by little they were coming. Cole got ready.

  From where he was squatting under the rock outcrop, he saw Charley Coffey run out from the trees and snag the reins of the buckskin and lead him back toward the sheltering pines. Cole thought about swinging around and firing off a shot, but it was too far off, and he figured the others, Fork and Tolbert, were perched up above, waiting for him, just waiting for such a chance to put some of their own rounds into him. Not today, boys.

  After several minutes more, they got close enough so that Cole could hear them whispering back and forth, asking one another had they seen anything yet, any blood, a body laid out stiff. They hadn’t seen anything. He had to be down there somewhere, they assured themselves. Cole was.

  Tolbert stepped onto the rock outcropping Cole was under. He knew it was Tolbert when he raised up from below and shot him in the only place he could—through the groin. He didn’t aim, didn’t try to pick the right spot, just swung up and shot him. Tolbert toppled headlong out into space and landed with a thud ten feet away, clutching himself, squirming in the snow, his blood turning the snow crimson between his legs.

  A shot rang off the rocks and Cole could feel the sting of shattered stone against his cheek. He ducked away again, heard Fork shout back up the ridge that Tolbert had just been killed. That wasn’t quite true. Tolbert was dying, maybe, but Cole hadn’t killed him yet. Then he heard Charley Coffey call back down for Fork to close in, finish him off, and Cole thought: Yeah, Charley, why ain’t you doing it?

  It was a little bit of a risk because Tolbert was lying ten feet away and exposed in the open, but his Winchester was lying there at his feet, and, if Cole could grab it, he increased his odds a good bit. He gave it a count of three, then went for it. Two, three shots cracked the air. One of the rounds slammed into Tolbert’s back and he stiffened, sucked in a lungful of air, and died. Nice going, Fork. Cole grabbed the Winchester and missed getting killed by luck or poor marksmanship, maybe both. He didn’t question things like that any more.

  Charley was up there c
alling to Fork, asking whether or not he’d nailed the son-of-a-bitch, and Fork was yelling back as to how he wasn’t sure if he’d gotten him or not, the two chattering like a pair of gossips at a church social. Cole gauged where Fork was from his mouth. The next time Charley called down to him about what was going on and Fork yelled back—“Nothing!”—Cole raised up and shot him with the Winchester.

  Fork clutched his side and dropped over. He didn’t say anything, didn’t scream or call out for help. He just fell over into the snow. Either stone dead, Cole figured, or tired of answering Charley’s questions while Charley was staying hidden up in the safety of those pines. For a long time, there was just the silence of the snow falling.

  Then Charley called out: “You get him, Fork, or what?”

  Cole called back: “It’s just you and me now, Charley. You want to come down here and settle it?”

  Charley must have run out of ideas because he didn’t answer. A few seconds later, Cole heard crashing up in the trees and saw Charley spanking the rump of his pony with the barrel of his rifle as he charged over the top of the ridge and out of sight.

  Cole found the buckskin still tied to the bough of the pines where there were a lot of cigarette butts stubbed out in the snow. The sun had suddenly appeared between a break in the clouds over the western horizon. It made Cole feel good to know that he was still alive and could still take notice of something like that, the sun breaking through the clouds. It would be dark by the time he got back to Deadwood.

  * * * * *

  By the time Cole rode up to the livery, the old man was properly drunk. He had a fat squaw sitting with him, warming her hands in front of the wood burner. She looked properly drunk as well.

  “See what some of that coat money bought?” the old man said, holding the bottle out toward the squaw. “She’s Crow Indian. Fat, ain’t she?” he said happily.

  Cole handed him the reins.

  “I like ’em fat,” he said, his lips spreading across his dark gums. “More to hold onto.” His laughter was filled with phlegm. The squaw said something to him in her language. He looked at Cole and said: “I don’t unnerstand a damn’ word of Crow, do you?”