by Ed Gorman
I smiled and the smile and the ripe golden dawn starting to break on the horizon were enough to stop me from sulking anymore.
“You calmed down any?”
“I’m not up to talking right now.”
“Glad you don’t hold grudges.”
That got me a scowl.
I did some mountain gazing. The snow, blue gone with the night sky, was slowly becoming white again. The lowest clouds on the mountain were starting to thin. Somebody down mountain rang a breakfast bell. There was a chance that somebody who lived higher up than where we stood, tucked away somewhere, might come down to town in a wagon and tell us to hop on.
Clarice came back and said, “I saw a mama deer.”
“A doe.”
“How come they call them that?”
“Maybe you should ask the federal man.”
I looked at Clarice. “She’s mad at me.”
“She called you a name last night. I told her I liked you.”
“I appreciate that. And I like you, too.”
“How come she’s mad at you?”
“I guess you’ll have to ask her, Clarice.”
She looked up at Jen and said, “How come you’re mad at him?”
Then Jen surprised me and I assumed she surprised Clarice, too. “I’m just worried, honey. About my brother Mike. And I needed somebody to take it out on.” Her gaze rested on me. “Sometimes I’m petty.”
“Gosh, I hadn’t noticed that,” I said.
“You’re supposed to be gracious when somebody’s apologizing.”
“What’s ‘gracious’ mean?” Clarice asked.
“It means you’re supposed to be nice about it when somebody says they’re sorry about something.”
“Oh. You mean you’re sorry for calling him that name?”
“Yes.” She laughed. “And it wasn’t a very bad name, anyway.”
“I’ll bet.”
“So, I’m sorry, Noah.”
“Thank you for saying that.”
“Can we start walking again?” Clarice asked. “It gets cold when you just stand in one place.”
Jen studied my face for a time and then looked down at Clarice, who stood next to her, and said: “Let’s go, honey.”
We held up pretty well most of the morning. We ate jerky as we walked and shared what was left of the canteen. The kid had slipped into herself again. She rarely said anything. I hated to think of what she was reliving in her mind over and over.
Around noon, the sky started turning gray again. The morning had glowed with sunlight. The deer to the west, and there must have been a hundred of them spread out over the long slope, noted our passage with that quick animal curiosity that never seems to last more than a few seconds.
Clarice just gave out. She’d been walking upfront with Jen, who had slowed down so that Clarice could maintain her normal pace, when she just tripped and flopped down face-first onto the snowy trail.
Jen and I were over her in seconds. I grabbed her underneath her arms, picked her up, held her in front of Jen for inspection.
“You just tired, honey?”
Clarice just nodded. Then she started crying. “I want to see my mommy.”
“I know you do, sweetie.”
“Can we go back to that cabin where Mommy is?”
Jen’s eyes flicked to mine.
“We’ll be there by nightfall, hon.”
Clarice yawned. “I’m sleepy.”
“I’ll carry her,” I said.
After finishing off the canteen, we started walking again. We wouldn’t want for water. Not with all the snow around us.
You could see the tracks left by Connelly and Pepper. By now they’d be in town. I wondered what they’d tell Nordberg. Connelly was always good and quick with stories for any situation. They’d likely be gone by the time we got there. Chuck Gage had been afraid of them. I doubted he’d gone to the sheriff’s office. Connelly and Pepper knew their time with the agency was over. They’d know I’d come after them for what they’d done in that cabin. For people like them, there were banks to rob and con games to play and Mexico and South America to hide in if things got very bad.
Mike was another matter. Nordberg and I between us had to find out who’d actually killed Jim Sloane. And who’d killed Tom Daly.
But even after we found the killer, Mike was headed for prison. The James Gang always said they were robbing banks and trains for the sake of the people, too. You might have noticed that the law hadn’t looked kindly on their pleas. As much of a greedy bastard as Flannery might be, Mike had no legal right to do what he’d done. His best hope was of finding a sympathetic jury that would be swayed by this homegrown Robin Hood legend.
The snow started about an hour into the afternoon. A confetti snow. The temperature drop had its effect on the bones. You have arthritis or rheumatism on a long, cold walk and your bones begin to remind you of who is in charge of your body. The bones ache, they burn and there isn’t a damned thing you can do about it except waste your money on some kind of quack patent medicine.
Jen talked Clarice into singing some songs. They both sounded girlie and sweet.
I broke away once to find food for the night. The jerky was about gone. One thing I wasn’t, was a hunter. Three rabbits escaped me before I was finally able to shoot one.
I carried it along on the walk, keeping it as well hidden as I could. I didn’t know how Clarice was doing and I wasn’t sure she’d want to see anything dead. I trailed behind a good twenty feet.
But of course that concern became moot just as the long shadows from the mountains started to wrap us in their cold dark shroud. The sunset was almost the same color as the drops of blood from the rabbit.
We came up over a little hill and Jen stopped suddenly, swooped up Clarice and ran back to me.
She stood Clarice down and said, “Wait here, honey.”
She grabbed my arm and took me over to the side of the trail. It was almost dark, the dense woods on either side becoming shadowy walls.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Down there. There’s a dead man—he looks dead, anyway—in the middle of the trail. And there are two horses. I didn’t see anything else. The horses looked like the ones Connelly and Pepper were riding.”
I walked the rabbit over into the shadows and kicked snow over it. Then I stuck a long twig up to mark the spot. Too easy to lose without some way of identifying the spot.
Clarice hugged Jen around the waist. They both looked like statues.
This time of day, with shadows playing games, it was easy to mistake what you were seeing. Especially if you were worried about somebody the way Jen was worried about her brother.
I had to damned near walk to the man before I believed it was a man. I walked around, looking everything over, trying to imagine what had happened there.
When I came back, I said, “I’ll go down there now. You wait here.”
Jen clutched my arm. “I really am sorry for what I said, Noah.”
I patted her hand.
“Is it Mike?”
“I don’t know yet. I didn’t go all the way down. There may be a shooter in the woods. I wanted to grab my carbine.”
She gripped my wrist.
“I’m sorry I’m not handling this better.”
“You’re handling it just fine.”
I walked over and grabbed my carbine. Then I walked down to where the two horses and the man waited in the sudden wind. I’d lied to her. It was Mike I’d seen all right and he was dead all right. I couldn’t lie to her again, though. This time I’d have to tell her the truth for sure.
Chapter 23
Not much doubt about it being Mike. He’d been shot at least twice in the back with a shotgun.
I looked at the two horses. I picked up their reins and took them over to a tree where I tethered them to heavy branches.
I might never have found them if Connelly hadn’t started moaning.
I hadn’t really counted on anybody being in
the woods. But that’s where the moaning came from and so that’s where I went, gun drawn.
It wasn’t a path so much as a narrow clearing that ran straight into the woods. I had a carbine and a pistol then. The dark didn’t scare me. But not knowing what was going on did. This thing didn’t figure at all.
Low pine branches sprinkled snow on me as I brushed against them. The moaning came and went. When I saw them I felt even more spooked. This didn’t make any sense at all.
If they’d decided to kill Mike and leave him on the trail that way, then what were they doing lying on the ground there? The only light on their faces was moonlight patterned through the pines.
I walked around in the bloody shadows. The only sound in the lee of the looming lonely mountain was my crunching footsteps.
I knelt down next to Pepper. He’d vomited all over his chest. The stink was bad. I tried his neck and wrist for a pulse. Nothing. He was dead for sure. For the first time the woods seemed dark and dangerous to me. An explanation for this situation was forming in my mind. Something to do with these woods.
I rolled Pepper over. He’d been shot in the back several times. I rolled him back over so I could go through his pockets.
“You steal from dead men, Ford?” Connelly, his voice thin and raspy in the cold air.
I said nothing. I kept turning Pepper’s pockets out.
“It isn’t easy for me to talk, Ford. You hear what I asked you?”
I was finished with Pepper. I got up and walked over to Connelly.
He had propped himself up against a tree. He didn’t look all that bad. It was like him to be the survivor.
“It’s cold,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’d help me get to town?”
“What happened?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“You didn’t answer mine, either, Connelly.”
He coughed. “Somebody shot us from the woods. We were headed back to town. I didn’t get a chance to see who it was. I knew I’d freeze to death out in the open tonight. I crawled in here. Figured I’d hear you and the woman when you came down the trail.” He coughed again. “Help me up, huh?”
“Pepper didn’t see anything, either?”
“Nah. I don’t even know how he was able to crawl in here with me. I thought he was dead back on the trail. Now how about a hand up?”
“Mike die right off, did he?”
“Not right off. He was crying like a little baby. You should’ve heard him, Ford. Sickening. Those punks today wouldn’t last a month, goin’ through the shit we been through.”
He moaned again.
“Where’d you get hit?”
“I took two shots high on the shoulder. A doc can fix me up fine. All you need to do is put me on my horse. Now help me up?”
I raised my .44.
“Hey, what the hell’s this, Ford? You got no call to shoot me. We didn’t kill the punk there. The shooter did.”
“Which one of you put the broom up her?”
He started to say something, a lie, and then stopped.
“You saw her, huh?”
“Yeah. I saw her.”
“That kid—the little boy—that was strictly an accident. We shoved him is all and he hit his head. We don’t go around killing little kids. You know us better than that.”
“Which one of you used the broom on her?”
“Pepper. I told him not to do it. You know I wouldn’t do anything like that. Pepper was crazy. You know that. I screwed her. I’ll admit that. But that broom shit—that was all Pepper. Like I said—” He coughed. “You know how Pepper was. He liked hurtin’ women. He’d screw ’em and then he would hurt them. Her, he hurt bad.”
He was babbling, scared. He saw what I was going to do. “You a Catholic?”
“Most of the time.”
“You know what I’m doing right now? Right here talking to you? I’m shitting my pants. I never even done that in the war. But I’m scared, Noah. I never seen you like this before.” Coughed again. “You kill a man in cold blood, you’ll go straight to hell. I’m a Catholic, too, don’t forget that. That’s what our religion teaches us, Noah. We kill somebody in cold blood and we go to hell.”
“It’ll be worth it.”
I put one bullet in his eye and one bullet in his heart, then I raised the gun and put two shots in his forehead.
I went through his pockets, just like I had gone through Pepper’s a few minutes ago, just like I was trained to do. Half the time anything I find I just throw away. But you can’t be sure what might be in those pockets so you look, you search. And sometimes you get lucky. I didn’t get lucky. Not that night. He hadn’t been lying about shitting his pants. But the animals that would rend him later on that night wouldn’t care. They didn’t have what you might call delicate palates.
I walked out of the dark woods, picked Mike up, and slung him over my shoulder. I felt cold and sick the way I used to get in the war sometimes. And it wasn’t just the weather.
When I reached the top of the hill where Jen had spotted the two horses and Mike’s body, she started walking slowly toward me, Clarice at her side. Then she broke and started running so fast toward me that she nearly fell over twice. With the dying light, the snow was glazing again.
I didn’t say anything to her. What was there to say? She ran up to the horse that carried her brother. I stopped right there and just watched her.
She took his face in her hands and kissed it with great reverence. Then she began touching her face against his, the way animals rub against each other. And finally she took his face again and kissed him on the mouth.
Clarice came up and took my hand. We stood there together just watching Jen. Finally Clarice broke away, ran to Jen, who had now fallen to her knees, sobbing. Clarice came up and slid her arms around Jen and held her very much the way Jen had held Clarice the night before, in the cabin where her mother lay.
At first I thought that Jen might push her away but she suddenly embraced her and they held each other for a long time.
It was time to get back to town. Straight through. No stops except for what the preachers always call “biological necessities.”
I mounted the horse with Mike on it and then said, “We can make town by midnight if we leave now.”
They were both still crying, still clinging to each other but more loosely now. Jen got up so abruptly I thought she was angry. She stormed over to the other horse, grabbed Clarice, set her up in the saddle and then climbed up herself. She looked back at me and said, “C’mon, Noah, I just want to get the hell out of here.”
It was night by then. In the starlight Jen looked wan but pretty. Clarice looked happy to be on a horse. Every so often she’d tug on the reins. Being a big girl.
We didn’t speak for maybe ten minutes, till Jen said: “How about Connelly and Pepper?”
“Same man killed Mike and Pepper.”
“What about Connelly?”
We rode at a good but easy clip. Talking was no problem.
“I decided to save you folks a trial.”
She just nodded and kissed the top of Clarice’s cap.
“Why’d you kill him?”
“It’s an old tradition in the justice code. Called General Principles.”
“General Principles?”
“Sometimes there are people you can’t kill for any one specific thing. But you can kill them for things they’ve done in general.”
“So you executed him.”
I changed the subject. “Whoever shot everybody tonight figures Nordberg and the county attorney will drop everything, not pursue it. Figure it was just somebody who had it in for Connelly and Pepper and killed your brother so he couldn’t testify against him.”
“You got anybody in mind who that might be?”
“Not yet,” I said. “But give me a couple days.”
PART THREE
Chapter 24
I’m not sure that small towns need those new inventions called telephones.
Word spreads fast all by itself.
We hadn’t been back in town with Mike Chaney’s body fifteen minutes before the street outside the funeral home was filled with a crowd of maybe a hundred people.
They had a good day for gawking. The sunlight had lanced through the white clouds and the sky was a light blue. The temperature was in the thirties. Not exactly tropical, but given the past two days, damned comfortable for being outdoors.
Sheriff Nordberg and I were upstairs in the funeral parlor while Doc Tomkins was downstairs examining the body.
Just before you went in the room where the wakes were held, there was an area with a horsehair couch and a small table and chairs. This was likely the area where the family met the other mourners.
But Nordberg wasn’t mourning. He was angry.
“I just can’t credence our own government hiring a couple of thugs like Connelly and Pepper. Lawmen are supposed to be—law abiding.”
I shrugged. “They knew all the bad guys and a lot of the bad guys trusted them. That was how they got their information for Washington. They could eat, drink, and whore right next to the bad guys. And pick up a lot of information while they were doing it.”
“Yeah. And look what they did to that poor woman in the cabin. Where’s the little girl, anyway?”
“Jen took her home. Give her a bath. Put her to bed. Then fix her a good meal when she wakes up. I hope Jen gets a bath and a meal, too. I hired a couple of men to go out to the cabin and get the girl’s mother and brother. We’ll give them a decent burial here. This has been hard on Clarice. She deserves seeing them buried proper.”
He grimaced. “Hard on the whole town. You see the people in the street?”
“Yeah.”
“That crowd’ll double in size by midafternoon and on toward evening it’ll triple. He was their hero.”
“They didn’t mind him chasing after married women?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Anybody else, they would’ve run out of town. The British like to call men like that ‘bounders.’ Well, around here bounders get run out of town. But with Chaney—they just didn’t want to hear about it. Somebody’d bring the subject up—how he was seen up in the haymow with so-and-so—and they’d just turn away. They saw Mike as their hero. They didn’t want to hear anything that took away from that.”