by John Legg
“I got a good look at that prancing, bone-white horse of his.” He paused. “Then there were gunshots. I don’t know, goddammit, three, four, a dozen. I got no idea...no idea.”
Pembroke came to a stop again, chest bellowing in and out. The pain of his loss, coupled with the wounds he had suffered had left him a wilted empty hull.
“I took two slugs in the chest that I know of. Doc says it was three. Don’t matter. They all hurt like hell. I managed to get off a couple shots, but I can’t even say if I hit any of them. Damn, if we’d only talked a little less with the pastor...” He dropped that thought.
Coffin gave Pembroke another dose of whiskey. “Thanks. I was on the ground, bleedin’ my life away it seemed. Then people come a running. And those bastards were heading off. Everything gets kind of blurred after that, except for one thing...”
“Amy,” Coffin said, the word flat and devoid of hope. “Yeah. I managed to crawl over to her before anyone else really got there, but there was nothing anybody could do for her even then.” He visibly tried to keep a grip on his rampaging emotions. “Only thing can be said, Joe, is she died fast, so she didn’t suffer none. Not as much as you and me. If only I...”
“Stop it,” Coffin ordered, torn between rage and grief. “There’s all kinds of ‘what ifs’ we can call on. If you hadn’t of gone to church. If you hadn’t talked so long afterward. If I hadn’t been gone so long. If, if, if. None of that means shit right now. None of it!”
Pembroke nodded and then groaned with new pain in his chest. Since he wanted to get his mind off Amy if he could, he asked, “So how did things go for you?”
“I found Merkle.” When he saw the light of wonder in Pembroke’s eyes, he added, “Didn’t get him though. I killed several of his men and captured two. They’re over at the jail now. Merkle and Vickers got away. I figure he either has other men around, or more fled with him. Two of his men tried to gun me down in Bendersville.”
“That where you got that?” Pembroke asked, pointing to Coffin’s shirt.
“Yep.” Coffin took another sip of whiskey, then put the bottle down and rose. “Well, Enoch, I’ve got some things to see to.”
Suddenly a little fire leapt into Pembroke’s eyes, and he became more like his old self. “You going to talk to them two you brought in?”
“Yep.”
Pembroke looked up at his young friend, and he was suddenly glad he was not Coffin’s prisoner.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Coffin walked into the office and straight to the back where the cells were. He looked at the only prisoner beside the two he had brought in earlier that day. “What got you in here, boy?” he asked the young man.
“Ah, hell, Marshal, I got likkered up over at the Pittsburgh and slapped one of the girls around.”
“That was mighty stupid.”
“I know.” The youth, only a year or two younger than Coffin, hung his head.
Coffin opened the cell. “Get goin’.”
“I’m free?” the youth asked, surprised.
Coffin nodded. “If you got any sense at all, boy, I won’t see you in here no more.”
“You won’t.” The young man grabbed his hat and scrambled out the door, still not believing his good fortune.
“It’s about goddamn time you come back here, you stupid little bastard,” Ochs snarled from his place on the hard iron cot. “Jesus, I got to hit the outhouse.”
Coffin said nothing. He just unstrapped his shoulder harness, which he had patched up as best he could, and hung it on the peg by the door. His gunbelt followed.
Ochs watched with growing annoyance; Davenport looked on from his cell wondering just what was going on.
Coffin opened Ochs’s cell and stepped inside. “Sit up,” he said quietly. Ochs was about to retort until he looked into Coffin’s deep blue eyes and saw something in those orbs that chilled him to his very soul. He struggled, trying not to jostle the broken leg too much, until he was sitting with his back against the wall. His knees bent over the edge of the very narrow cot, and his feet were flat on the floor. He was sweating both from the exertion, as well as a new and very deep wellspring of fear.
“You remember that I was askin’ you some questions back at Merkle’s camp.”
Ochs stared at Coffin. If he had not been watching Coffin, he would have sworn that the voice came from the Grim Reaper, so cold and sparse were the words. Finally he nodded.
“Good,” Coffin said flatly. “I don’t want to have to go through all the bullshit again, so, you will tell me what you know about Cady Merkle and anybody in Madison or Virginia City who’s helpin’ him.” He paused a moment and stood staring at Ochs with flat, hard eyes. “Since I don’t feel like makin’ threats every two minutes, I will offer you one blanket threat now. If you answer my questions, you might come out of this alive. If you don’t answer, or if you try to sidetrack me, you will encounter pain. Very much pain.”
“Why this change of heart?” Ochs asked. He was hoping to distract Coffin just a little so he could build up whatever reserves of strength and fortitude he had in him.
Coffin shrugged. “Merkle killed my wife-to-be and shot Marshal Pembroke full of holes.” He waited just long enough for Ochs to digest that. “Now, tell me about Cady Merkle.”
Ochs swallowed hard. “Now don’t go gettin’ too nervous here, Marshal,” he said, fear making his voice vibrate. “I don’t know all that much about Cady—about his operations, that is. I really don’t.” Sweat was rolling down his plump, sallow face.
“I expect that from the kid over there,” Coffin said, chucking a thumb over his shoulder. He felt a little odd about that. Davenport was about the same age as Coffin. “Not from you.”
“But I...”
Coffin kicked Ochs’s makeshift splint about center on where the leg was broken.
Ochs emitted a low, animal-like moan, and his eyes rolled.
Coffin gave him a few moments to settle back down. “Tell me about Merkle,” he said with more insistence.
Ochs’s eyelids fluttered as he tried to retain consciousness. He managed but he was still pale. “What…” Ochs stopped to wet his lips with his tongue, “...What do you want to know?”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.” His eyes got very wide as Coffin moved his foot back for another kick “Wait!” Ochs screamed. “I don’t know. I really don’t. He could be in a dozen places. Hideouts, friends’ houses.”
“Where’s he likely to go since I kicked the shit out of his little band of assholes?”
“Depends on where he’s got supplies or where he plans to meet more of his men. A likely place is up near Busted Shovel. There’s a big cave up that way.”
Coffin nodded. “Who’s helpin’ him out here?”
“Nobody.” He braced for an assault while holding out his hand, hoping Coffin would not kick him again. Coffin hesitated, and Ochs said urgently, “Nobody in Madison.”
“Virginia City?” Coffin asked. Ochs nodded.
“Who?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Yes you can.”
Ochs shook his head. He almost looked defiant.
“You are a fool,” Coffin said, almost to himself. “A goddamn fool.” He kicked Ochs in the broken leg again. Then he jerked Ochs up by the shirtfront, swung him and slammed him into the bars.
Ochs howled and screeched. He managed to grab the bars, to keep himself from falling.
Coffin grabbed the outstretched arm, pried the arm loose and pulled Ochs away from the bars, snapping his knee up so that it connected with Ochs’s stomach. Ochs’s breath was knocked out, and he staggered as he tried to keep from putting his damaged leg on the ground. Still, he went down on one knee.
At the same time, Coffin jerked and twisted Ochs’s arm up behind the man’s back. Almost straddling Ochs, Coffin pushed down on Ochs’s back with his left hand and twisted the arm up with the other.
Ochs screamed as ligaments and tendons in
his shoulder stretched and then ripped.
Coffin let the arm go and it fell, flapping uselessly at Ochs’s side. He grabbed Ochs’s greasy hair from behind and pulled the outlaw’s head back. “Who’s helpin’ Merkle?” he asked, voice tight with barely bottled rage.
Ochs gargled and sputtered, so Coffin eased his head down a little. “Giles Crown,” he said weakly.
“He the one owns Virginia City Mercantile and Crown Lumber?”
“Yeah. He also owns the Westerly Saloon and a couple other places in Virginia City.”
“Why the hell would he deal with Merkle?”
“Old pals.”
“You and Vickers, too?”
Ochs tried to nod but couldn’t because Coffin was still holding his hair. “Yeah. We was Jayhawkers fightin’ for Doc Jennison. When the busybodies from the government took Jennison’s commission, we hid out a spell, then we rode as Red Legs for Jennison’s friend George Hoyt.” He sounded as proud as he could under his circumstances. “Crown was a captain, Cady was a lieutenant. Me and Hugh were sergeants.”
“Goddamn murderin’ scum,” Coffin muttered.
“Soon as the war was over, we all come out here, took a look at how things worked, and then made our plans.” Coffin wanted nothing more than to just pound on Ochs until the outlaw was but jelly, but he knew he could not do that. Not yet anyway. “I heard rumors that Crown was the head of Virginia City’s vigilance committee. That true?”
“Can I get up or somethin’?” Ochs asked.
Coffin released the outlaw’s head, and Ochs lowered himself down and around. He squiggled on his buttocks a little until he was sitting against the bars. He looked ghastly, all white and sweating.
Coffin rolled a cigarette and fired it up. He handed it to Ochs, who was surprised by the gesture. Then he looked into Coffin’s eyes again, and he knew it was not a reflection of Coffin suddenly finding some humanity.
Coffin rolled another cigarette for himself, then asked, “Is it true?”
Ochs nodded, picking a piece of tobacco off his tongue. “Sure is.” He tried to chuckle, but that did nothing but jiggle his arm and leg. That hurt too much, so he clamped off the attempt at laughter.
“Why?” Coffin was puzzled. “Hell, if he was that well thought of as a merchant and what not, all he’d have to do is tell the vigilantes he was too old or too fragile to be doing shit like night ridin’. He could’ve just supplied them with rope and such.”
Ochs shrugged cautiously. “I think he just got his jollies by being a vigilante as well as outlaw. It suited him somehow.”
“So that’s how Merkle and his boys knew when the big shipments were headin’ out of here?”
“Yeah.” Ochs hawked up some phlegm and spit it in a corner. “He let the drivers know a long time ago to tell him when a big shipment was going through so he could put some, of his gold in with it.”
Coffin nodded. “Makes sense,” he admitted grudgingly. “That’s why all the stages with big shipments didn’t get robbed all the time—people might’ve linked Crown with the robberies.”
“You got it.” Ochs was almost enjoying himself.
“And all the other attacks on stages—the smaller ones—were just decoys, then?”
“Most,” Ochs agreed. “Sometimes he’d test out some of the new boys, like that peckerless little snot over there,” he pointed to Davenport with fingers that still had the smoldering cigarette. “They didn’t have the balls for that, we’d get rid of them.”
Coffin did not doubt the statement. “Still, the vigilantes were doin’ a good job, at least by their lights.”
“Yeah,” Ochs said, risking another small chuckle. It was no better this time than last. “What better way of gettin’ rid of the competition. Besides, then the vigilantes looked like they were doing what they were supposed to be doin’.”
It all made morbid sense to Coffin. It did nothing to ease the rage that seethed and rippled inside like a tangle of snakes. “And what about Beryl Pembroke?” Coffin asked.
“He was gettin’ too close to us.” Ochs seemed to forget for a moment where he was and who he was talking to. “That was a funny one, damn if it wasn’t.” He started laughing and immediately went into a spate of coughing. When he finished and more or less got his wind back, he said, “We hanged him good and proper. We was supposed to leave him there as a warnin’ to others. But then the boys started usin’ him for target...” Ochs realized what he was saying and who he was saying it to. He clamped his lips shut.
“What about the attack on Enoch Pembroke? And Amy?”
Ochs shook his head. “I don’t know shit about that. I was with you the time that happened, if you’ll remember.”
“Oh, I remember,” Coffin said, words cold and deadly. “I do indeed remember.”
Ochs looked up at Coffin, and he shivered. He felt as if his stomach had suddenly frozen as hard and cold as a mountain lake in January. “Wait, Marshal!” Ochs said, panicky. “Whoa. You said you’d let me live if I told ya what ya wanted to know. I did that. And more.”
“I said you might live. I didn’t promise you anything but pain if you lied.”
“But I told you the truth.”
“I suppose. But you got a long list of things to be taken to account for, boy.” Coffin’s voice was low, dreadful in its lack of humaneness.
Coffin began to take out all his grief and rage on Kurt Ochs. With each punch or kick he would remember Amy’s death, or Beryl’s death, Enoch’s wounds, or his own troubles. It was a catharsis, purifying his blood and spirit of guilt and anger and loss. Coffin raged and growled, Ochs’s screams falling on deaf ears. Coffin was a savage man-beast in his fury, as if possessed by some demon.
Finally he had to slow down as some pinch of sanity began clawing through the curtains of rage inside of him. He stopped then, looking down at Ochs as if seeing him for the first time.
Ochs was a puddle of battered flesh, vomit, blood, tears, feces, urine. There was nothing left in the blob to call it a human being anymore, though it still whimpered now and then.
Coffin absentmindedly wiped his hands on his shirt, and the stench of the broken pile of flesh and bones began getting to him. He sighed, not feeling any better having done all this, but he assuaged his conscience some by telling himself that Ochs had gotten nothing more than he had deserved. He had raped, robbed, pillaged and murdered from Missouri to Madison, and had done it with impunity for seven or eight years. Coffin might not be feeling very good about himself at the moment for having succumbed to such savagery, but he felt no remorse at the results of that fury.
Slowly, breathing hard, he left the cell and picked up the keys. Then he headed to Davenport’s cell. The young man cowered in a corner, blubbering and weeping.
“I ain’t gonna do the same to you, boy,” Coffin said harshly. “You’re free. But if I ever catch you—even get wind of you—committin’ crimes again, I’ll find you. You understand me, boy?”
Davenport nodded.
Coffin dropped the keys, left the cell and put his guns on. He walked out without looking back. A sizable crowd had gathered outside the office, drawn by the shrieks and screams Ochs had been issuing. Coffin did not look at them either. He simply pulled himself into the saddle and galloped off.
Some minutes later, a nervous George Davenport crept out of the cell and then into the office. He skittered like a rat to the door, saw all the people curiously watching the building, and he bolted, running like Satan was after him.
Some of the people then cautiously edged up and peeked into the office. A few braver ones ventured to the door that separated the cells from the office and peered inside. Then they began moving warily toward the cell in the back left corner. One man vomited, a woman screeched, and all fled out the door to the crisp cleanness of the outside air.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Coffin rode all night and arrived in Virginia City around midmorning. He stopped at Marshal Jud Wilson’s office. He didn’t need Wilson; he jus
t wanted Wilson to know that Coffin was going to kill Giles Crown. Since Crown was an influential man in Virginia City, there would be an outcry if he was shot down. By telling Wilson his plans, Coffin hoped to keep that outcry to a minimum.
Wilson looked up, surprised. “Marshal Coffin,” he said. “What brings you here this time?”
“Same as last time.”
“Cady Merkle?”
Coffin nodded. “You know anything about Giles Crown?”
“Sure. He’s one of the most upstandin’ men in Virginia City. He owns several businesses, contributes generously to charities when called on. Why?”
“He’s the real head of Merkle’s gang and...” Coffin stopped, anger almost ready to boil over when Wilson laughed.
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Wilson said, chuckles still coming regularly.
“Is it?” Coffin said tightly.
Wilson caught the rage in Coffin’s eyes and cut off his laughter. “Well, it’s gotta be crazy, Marshal. Jesus, Giles is on civic committees, he’s thinkin’ of running for mayor, he has more money in the bank than just about anyone in Virginia City.”
“Think about that for a minute,” Coffin said. “If the stages with the big shipments of gold get held up so regularly, where’s all Crown’s money comin’ from?”
Wilson pondered that. “He could be doin’ better at his businesses than we’re aware of.” He didn’t seem all that convinced. “Where’d you learn that anyway?” he asked. “Kurt Ochs.”
“One of Merkle’s top two men.”
“Yep.”
“How’d you ever get him to talk?”
“Let’s just say I used a little persuasion.”
Wilson shivered involuntarily. “You believe him?” Coffin nodded. “Yeah. He said him, Merkle, and Crown go back to the Jayhawkers under Jennison.”
“Well, I still ain’t fully convinced, mind you,” Wilson said as he stood and grabbed his hat, “but I think we should have a little chat with Mr. Crown.”
The two lawmen strode to Crown’s Mercantile. As they did, Coffin explained a little more of what went on. By the time they got to the general store, Wilson was worried and agitated. This was going to be no end of trouble no matter how it ended, he figured. He was also more than a little angry at having been played for a fool by Crown.