Powder Keg

by Ed Gorman

  I didn’t have to go get Jen and Clarice after all. They ran down the path toward me.

  “Who’re you talking to?”

  “Your brother.”

  Mike said, “I knew you’d remember the cave, Jen. But I had to leave there. I was out hunting some meat and when I came back I saw them outside the cave. With rifles. So I couldn’t get back to my horse. I’m on foot now. They sure didn’t look like the kind who’d bring me in alive. I figured them for bounty men.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what they are. Gosh, I wish you were down here so I could give you a hug.”

  “That’s some baggage you’re carrying, Jen. A lawman and a little girl. What’s the story?”

  “This is Clarice, Mike. We found her back at that old cabin. We couldn’t leave her there, so we brought her with us.”

  Mike didn’t say anything, but the fact that she’d brought Clarice along, there, looking for him, told him something about the situation back at the cabin.

  Jen pointed at me. “And this is Noah Ford. He’s a good man, Mike. He wants to hear what you have to say. And then bring you back to town peacefully. He used to work with the two men you saw. They’re federal agents but they’re also killers.”

  “And he isn’t, I suppose?”

  “He’s trying to help, Mike.”

  “That what this man is? Federal?”

  I said, “That’s what I am, Mike. But why don’t you come down here?”

  “Then lean your rifle against the tree behind you. And hand your .44 to Jen.”

  No reason not to, I thought. So that was what I did. He came down monkey-swift, monkey-sure, dropping from a heavy branch when he had a clear path.

  They were brother and sister, all right. Pioneer stock, hard work keeping them trim, intelligent faces. He wore a green sweater and a green hunting cap, green being a good color when you wanted to fade into the forest.

  They hugged. They hugged so long that Clarice looked up at me and actually smiled. And then she made a winsome face and gave me a shrug of her shoulders. She seemed to be amused by all the hugging. But soon enough her face was dour again, the gaze frightened.

  When they finished hugging, Jen slid her arm around his waist and laid her head on his shoulder. She explained who Clarice was and what had happened in the cabin.

  “They sound pretty dangerous, Ford. You going to turn me over to them?”

  “No.”

  “You want to put cuffs on me?” Mike asked.

  “Not if you won’t cut and run.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody, Ford. I honest-to-God didn’t.”

  “Well, when we get back to town, we’ll sit down and talk about it. Right now while we’ve got some decent weather, let’s make as much time as we can.” To Jen, I said, “When Clarice gets too tired to walk, I’ll carry her.”

  “You think I can’t carry her?”

  Mike laughed.

  “Never tell my sister she isn’t strong enough to do something. She’ll prove you wrong.”

  We’d been four hours walking. I suggested we rest up before we start the trek back. Jen looked relieved. Clarice said, “You have any more licorice, Jen?”

  Jen smiled, reached in her pocket, and gave her a six-inch black twist of the stuff.

  Mike and I tore down pine branches and made a place for everybody to sit down.

  When we were all sitting under the shelter of a huge pine, Jen put Clarice on her lap and began rocking her. In very little time, they both appeared to be asleep.

  I said, “Somebody in town wants you dead. Connelly and Pepper didn’t kill the federal man and for some reason I’m not sure they killed Tom Daly.”

  “That’s why I ran, Ford. Like you said, somebody in town’s got it in for me. Most people are grateful that I robbed Flannery’s banks. But you live in a town as long as Sis and me have, you naturally get enemies.”

  “Especially when you steal from the richest man around, to say nothing about chasing women the way you do.”

  He shrugged. “Flannery’s got it coming. You know that. And as for the women, well let’s just say it wasn’t always me chasing them. Sometimes it was them chasin’ me. And I don’t mean to be braggin’. I just mean—well, I did some pretty stupid things. Hurt a lot of people I shouldn’t have.” Then: “You want my own opinion, it’s Flannery who killed the federal man and Flannery who killed Daly. People would just naturally think I did it. And then he’d have his wife all to himself again. And she wouldn’t be sneaking off to see me.”

  “You mean that’s still going on?”

  He shook his head miserably. “I’m not saying it’s right. I’m not saying he doesn’t have a good reason to hate me for it. But the way he treats her—And we’ve been sweet on each other since she was in second grade and—” He shook his head again.

  “You think Flannery knows she’s still sneaking off?”

  “It’s a possibility. He seems to know everything else that goes on in town. Guess he feels that since he has all the money, it’s his right to know or something.”

  I leaned back against the tree. “There’s a man named Long. Seems when you robbed one of the banks, Flannery fired this Long’s son. And now the son’s practically out of money.”

  “Oh, shit,” he said. “I didn’t know that. That damned Flannery. That sounds like somethin’ he’d do, fire somebody like that.”

  He didn’t seem to understand that he just might have had something to do with that. “You didn’t have to rob his bank, you know. That way his son would still have his job.”

  “Yeah, I suppose you’re right if you look at it that way. But you look at it my way and you have to wonder how many ranches and farms Flannery would have foreclosed on if I hadn’t robbed that bank.”

  I’d spoken to a lot of people and learned a lot of things in the past few days: “There’s Nick Tremont. He claims you killed his son and since Sheriff Nordberg likes you and Jen so much, he wouldn’t press any charges.”

  “His son tried to kill me because I was seeing the girl he used to court. It was on the up and up. She’d told him three or four months before I started seeing her that she didn’t want to see him anymore. It was self-defense.”

  “From what I heard, you sure didn’t do right by Loretta DeMeer.” I hadn’t talked to Loretta herself at that point, but that was one of the stories that folks trotted out whenever Chaney’s name came up.

  “Then you didn’t hear it right.”

  He started to walk away, but I called out to him, “What about Jim Sloane and Tom Daly? Was that self-defense, too?” I don’t know if I was trying to get some sense of him, or whether I was just cold and tired and lashing out a little bit.

  He turned back and looked at me. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ford, but I don’t know who they are.”

  “Jim was a federal agent, the first one sent here to try and track you down. Way I hear it, he was shot in the back within three days of arriving here. Tom was also a federal agent, and a good friend of mine. One of the deputies says he saw you shoot him.”

  Chaney looked at me, his eyes cold as the snow around us. “I never claimed to be an angel, Noah, but I’m not the devil some of them want to make me out to be. I steal from Flannery because he deserves it, and I killed Tremont in self-defense, but that’s all that I’ve done. I’ve never murdered a man, I’ve never shot anyone in the back, and I did not kill either of your fellow agents. I guess it’s up to you whether you believe me or not.”

  And then I asked him about blowing up the rear of that bank that night and robbing it.

  “That wasn’t me,” Chaney said. “There was a witness that saw two men ridin’ away from the bank right after it was robbed. But nobody’d believe it. They just figured it was me and that the witness was drunk and seein’ things.”

  Two men. A huge explosion and fire…Connelly and Pepper.

  Chapter 21

  We avoided the main trail as long as we could. Between them, Jen and Mike seemed to know every twist and turn in th
e woods. By now, Connelly and Pepper had to know that the cave was empty. They would be backtracking, trying to find us. At least one of them would be riding the main trail. They’d be watching and listening for any sight or sound that would give away our location.

  The temperature dropped. Stars swept across the dusk sky. This was three hours into our walk. We had a long way to go.

  Poor little Clarice hadn’t even lasted an hour. Jen carried her. She had to be tired. But after what Mike had said about never questioning her strength, she’d never let me share the load, though I’d asked her three times if she wanted me to take Clarice. Even in the dusk, her eyes had a fierceness. She didn’t need to say anything. That glare of hers was answer enough.

  But Clarice wasn’t just a physical burden. She’d come out of her sleeping and start crying for her mommy. She’d even pound on Jen’s chest, demanding to be put down so she could find her mommy. First she had denied the death; then she had acknowledged it; and finally she was angry and back to denying the death.

  Jen’s soothing words and soothing manners didn’t have the effect they’d had earlier. But she wouldn’t set Clarice down. And finally Clarice would slip back into sleep.

  A couple of times I thought I heard a horse on the main trail. Both times I crept up to the edge of the woods. But I didn’t see anything.

  Much of the time the only sounds were the crunch of our footsteps on snow, the sound of our breathing, and the occasional whimpering of Clarice as she dealt with nightmares no child should ever have to confront.

  I spent a good part of the time thinking about the people Mike and I had talked about. Somebody hated him. I wasn’t sure he understood that. Both he and his sister seemed to see Mike’s affairs with women as putting him in the “scoundrel” category. But men who do what he did are only “scoundrels” when their affairs don’t touch you. Easy to laugh, even easy to admire in a certain nasty way.

  Flannery hated him not only for business reasons—robbing his banks—but maybe even worse, from Flannery’s point of view, because his wife had never given up on Mike.

  Tremont’s son had no right to draw down on Mike—that is, if Mike was telling the truth about the circumstances. If the girl had really broken it off with Tremont’s son, then Mike wasn’t sneaking off with her. But where your son was concerned, did you really care about that kind of truth? The only truth Tremont knew was that his son was dead at Mike’s hands.

  Then there was Long, with the son who couldn’t find work. Everybody I’d talked to about Long talked about how crazy he got when he was drunk. Not difficult imagining him killing anybody, especially anybody he hated as much as he did Mike.

  Sorting out the tangle wouldn’t be easy. This case that was supposedly about federal bank notes being stolen—and thus federal investigators brought in—was really about the personal lives of everybody involved. And personal investigations were always a lot messier than professional ones.

  I kept thinking of Jen’s face whenever she stood close to her brother. Her love for him was both touching and scary. Touching for the obvious reason but also scary because she refused to hold him to what he’d done. What if it turned out that he had killed Daly and the man before him? Even though I had finally came to believe his story, what if I later found out he was lying?

  Who would Jen back in a showdown? Her brother or the law? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to that.

  So we trudged on, night settling in, the wind down, no fresh snow. Every once in a while, Mike would start joking with Jen. I started wondering about it. I’d taken Jen’s word that he was a decent young man who’d only tried to help the people in his valley.

  But he was pretty damned jaunty for somebody with all his troubles.

  By six o’clock, according to my railroad watch read by the light of the moon, I needed to stop and rest. Jen’s steps were dragging. Clarice slept in her arms but was held lower and looser than she had been at the start. Even Mike had slowed noticeably.

  I decided to call uncle first. “Why don’t we stop? Mike can pass around his canteen and that jerky he said he had.”

  “I’m not tired,” Jen said. “But then I’m not as old as you are.”

  Mike said, “She was always like this.”

  I laughed. “That, I don’t doubt.”

  Mike said, “Sis, you know darned well you’re ready to drop. Let’s do what Ford, here, suggests and rest a while.”

  The way they treated each other was with a kind of rough tenderness. They would take care of each other to the death if necessary. That was a good kind of partnership to have, whether it was spouses, kin, or just friends.

  No significant wind and no snow at all. We could keep moving as long as we had the stamina. And the blessing of the moon. Light bloomed broken down through the boughs and branches of the forest, pointing our way.

  “Maybe they won’t find us,” Mike said as we cut along the trail.

  “They’ll do their best.”

  I sensed his eyes on me. “You having second thoughts about my story?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “I told you the truth.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, thanks for making me a suspect again.”

  “You asked me if I was having second thoughts. I have second thoughts about everybody in every investigation. Having them is part of my job.”

  He laughed; it was a harsh sound. “You trust your father?”

  “I did while he was alive.”

  “You ever have a wife?”

  “Yep.”

  “You trust her?”

  “Nope. She didn’t even trust herself.”

  “You’re a strange one, you know that, Ford?”

  “Not the first time I’ve heard that one.”

  “What’ll you tell Nordberg when we get back to town?”

  “Won’t tell him anything. Just hand you over. Which is what I told him I’d do.”

  “How about Connelly and Pepper? What happens to them?”

  “Them, we’ll have to see about.” Then: “We’ve talked enough. No sense helping them find us.”

  He muttered something I wasn’t able to hear. Then he fell back. Spoke softly to his sister. “You got quite the man there.”

  “He’s trying to help us.”

  “Not the way he’s talking to me, he isn’t. He’s changed his mind. He thinks I killed Daly and the other federal man.”

  I stopped, turned: “Be quiet, Mike. Don’t make it easy for them.”

  “See? You see, Jen?” As if I’d just proved his point by speaking up the way I had.

  We fell into silence; our pace picked up. Every so often an odd noise would freeze all of us in place. Then, once we were sure the noise wasn’t Connelly and Pepper, we moved on.

  A break in the timber gave us a look at the moon hanging above the ragged chain of mountains. I suppose we’re each struck in our own way by the timeless and almost alien beauty of that landscape.

  Clarice woke up. She needed to pee. We all did. We took turns. A couple times I thought I heard something. It was awkward raising steam against a tree with one hand and clutching my rifle with the other.

  Then Mike was carrying Clarice.

  Jen caught up to me. “Mike says you don’t believe him anymore.”

  “I want to and in the end I probably will believe him. But I always have second thoughts.”

  “If you’re such a good detective why would you have doubts?”

  I sighed. “Look, Jen, as I told Mike, all I’m going to do is turn him over to Nordberg. He can take it from there. That’s all that’s going to happen. You trust Nordberg, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then there’s nothing to worry about. We’ll both work on finding the man we want and I doubt that’ll be your brother.” Then: “Jen, the more we talk like this, the more likely they are to find us. Why help them?”

  Around seven o’clock, the wind started getting harsh again, meaning we could talk
in soft voices again.

  We stopped. Mike and I found fir trees and stripped away enough material to build another lean-to. In case we decided to spend the night there—or if the weather decided to force us to stay—we had something to put against the dark gods.

  On our last trip for branches, Mike stopped me and said, “I’m nervous about going into town.”

  “You put up a good front.”

  He shrugged.

  “I’m like Sis, I guess. She’s not as tough as she pretends to be.” Then: “I’ll own up to the bank robberies. I damned well wanted to stop Flannery from getting all that land back and I’m proud to say I did a fair job of it. But I’m against anybody getting hurt. I left two of his banks because the only way I could get the money was to shoot somebody and I wouldn’t do it.”

  “A lot of people think you killed those men. That needs to be straightened out. I’ll help with that and so will Nordberg.”

  “That’s why I’m getting nervous about heading to town.”

  “You took a lot of chances robbing banks.”

  “You don’t know Flannery. You don’t live here. You don’t know all the good people he hurt. He didn’t leave me much choice.”

  The cry—and it was a cry, not a scream—came from the approximate position where we’d planned on throwing in for a while.

  Mike and I damned near knocked each other over trying to get up trail to see what was going on.

  By the time we got there, we could hear Jen calling out Clarice’s name.

  Jen was walking up and down the shadowy trail, so frantic it didn’t seem like the tough Jen she usually was.

  “What happened?” I asked when I reached her.

  “She just got hysterical. She said she wanted to find her mommy, wanted to go back to the cabin. And before I knew it, she started running toward the main trail. I ran after her but I tripped and hit my head on a rock.”

  Not till then did I notice the small but nasty bulb on the right side of her head. A trickle of blood snaked from it.