Haskell didn’t realize he was chuckling out loud until an old woman just then entering Union Station ahead of him pulled a younger woman wide of the laughing, obviously demented stranger, and told her to keep walking. Haskell pinched his hat brim to the pair hurrying off behind him now, and started to turn back to the large oak doors.
“Marshal Haskell!” sounded a voice behind him, barely audible above the echoing footsteps and loud conversational hum. He turned to see a man in the uniform of a ticket agent hurrying toward him, sashaying through the crowd and waving a small envelope above his head.
Haskell recognized Boyd Anderson, the ticket agent who usually handled the government pay vouchers Bear always used to purchase his train tickets. Haskell also gambled with the man on occasion, in the gambling den of the Larimer Hotel, where Bear kept a small suite, his only home, his having so little time or need for a home.
“Almost missed you!” Anderson called, smiling with relief as he approached.
With a pang of dread, Haskell noted the small envelope in the man’s pudgy hand. “Ah, shit,” he said half to himself. “What now?”
Chapter Six
“A note from the head honcho,” said the ticket agent, Boyd Anderson.
“Henry Dade?” Chief U.S. Marshal Henry Dade, that was.
“The marshal had a messenger bring it down here yesterday. He wanted me to see that you got it. The chief marshal wanted me to know it was very important that you got it before you headed back to the Larimer.”
Haskell leaned his rifle against a marble column and accepted the small envelope that had his name scrawled on it, in the spidery hand Haskell had come to recognize as that of his boss. “Hell.”
“What’s the matter?”
“This note means that ole Henry’s likely gonna want me to hop, skip, and jump off to another job before I even have time to change clothes and shave and throw down a few belts of bourbon.”
“No rest for the wicked,” the ticket agent said, grinning.
Haskell, surly ever since he’d been so rudely awakened from his bacon-and-eggs dream in the coach car, scowled at him. Anderson cleared his throat sheepishly, pulled his broadcloth trousers up his broad hips, and trotted back toward his cage.
Haskell opened the unsealed envelope and shook out the folded lined notepaper, and gave a snort as he read his boss’s typically succinct order: “Report to office pronto!—H.A. Dade.”
“Damnit, Henry,” Haskell said, crumpling the note and envelope and dropping them into the nearest trashcan. He set his rifle back up on his shoulder and headed on through the station’s front doors, grumbling, “What in the hell’s so damned important it can’t wait until I’ve had a bath and one night to drink and gamble and carouse a little? Shit, I fought in the War of Southern Rebellion to outlaw slavery!”
Still grumbling, he hailed a hansom cab and then sat back, grumbling some more and lighting an Indian Kid cheroot as the coach rocked and rattled up Sixteenth Street toward the Federal Building that sat on Colfax Avenue, near the gold-domed State Capitol. When the handsome cab reached the bottom of the Federal Building’s broad, stone steps, Haskell lumbered out of the coach with his gear, cheroot tucked into a corner of his mouth, and tossed some coins up to the waiting, top-hatted driver, a fellow named Dalton Briggs whom Haskell also gambled with from time to time at the Larimer.
“Want me to wait for you, Bear?” the driver asked, knowing Haskell didn’t like to walk much farther than say, the distance from one saloon to another saloon on the same block.
“Yeah, why don’t you,” Haskell said. He’d likely be heading back to either the Union Station a mile and a half away, or, hopefully, the Larimer Hotel, a good six blocks away. While he hoped his next destination would be the latter, he had a feeling it would be the former.
Either way, they were each farther away than he wanted to walk.
He trudged up the sandstone steps into the Federal Building then took the marble inside staircase to the second floor hall on the left side of which, about halfway down, stood the stout oak door in the upper, frosted glass panel of which CHIEF UNITED STATES MARSHAL had been stenciled in gold-leaf lettering.
Haskell fumbled open the door and strode into Henry Dade’s outer office, and stopped abruptly, throwing out his hand to ease the door closed behind him. A lurid smile curled his upper lip as he stared at the pretty, round backside of Henry Dade’s secretary, Miss Lucy Kimble. Miss Kimble, the daughter of State Senator Luther Kimble, was bent forward to stoke the fire in the Colonial-model heating stove abutting the outer office’s outside wall.
Lucy Kimble was another one like Emma Kramer—a rare beauty who did everything she could to hide her charms. While Emma kid her wares inside ten pounds of soiled flannel and patched denim, Miss Kimble hid it by pulling her dark-brown hair into a knot as tight as a clenched fist, until it drew her eye corners up to resemble those of a Chinese. Miss Kimble also wore grim, shapeless old-lady dresses—the kind old ladies wore to funerals—and stumpy, black or brown side-button shoes. If she wore any jewelry, which was rare, it was usually a small gold cross hanging from a gold-washed chain or prosaic cameo pinned to her breast.
Nothing could hide the fact, however, that beneath such dowdy attire lurked the body of a succubus. Whether Lucy herself knew it or not was open to question. Haskell often wondered. While she didn’t have tits the size of Emma Kramer’s (though it was impossible to tell with the way she reined them in), Haskell had a feeling that behind the taut corsets she always wore under her dresses and probably several other undergarments, as well, her bosoms were firm and perky and would feel right supple in a man’s hands.
Haskell, who often opined on such subjects with only a modicum of chagrin, doubted that any man had ever had the chance to judge for himself. By all accounts, Miss Kimble lived a sheltered life up at her family’s stately Sherman Street digs. Outside of work, Haskell never saw her in public. While she did have a beau, who was the son of another senator, the girl’s shy, dour, humorless, and altogether unfriendly demeanor told him that they’d likely never even held hands, much less swapped spit. At least he couldn’t imagine it though he had to admit he’d once thought the same thing about Emma Kramer, and she’d turned out to be damn near deadly in the old mattress sack!
Was Miss Lucy, as well?
Intriguing, Miss Lucy was. The stuff of a man’s fantasy, all the more alluring by being so cussed unattainable.
Studying that very subject as the girl continued to poke around inside the stove, Haskell rolled his cheroot from one side of his mouth to the other, drew in a long drag, and blew it out his nose. Miss Lucy lifted her head, sniffed. She turned her head to one side then, seeing the big man standing behind her, gave a startled “Oh!” and whipped around, flushing.
“Marshal Haskell, indeed!” she intoned, breathless, nudging her, small, oval, steel-framed spectacles up her fine, clean nose. “I didn’t know you were standing there. You might have said something!”
Haskell opened his mouth to speak but closed it when Henry Dade’s office door opened and Henry Dade himself poked his lean, gray head into the outer office, frowning. “Bear, for god’s sake, get your ass in here, you big galoot. My note said pronto. That doesn’t mean take time to pester my secretary!”
“Indeed!” agreed Miss Lucy, who held her hands behind her as though she could still feel the burn of his eyes on her shapely backside.
“Right—sorry, Chief,” Haskell said, leaning his rifle against the hat tree near the door, and setting his bedroll and saddlebags on a chair in the same location. “I do beg your pardon, Miss Kimble,” he said, pinching his hat brim to the girl as he headed for Henry’s office. “Cat just got my tongue there for a second, I reckon.” He gave her a wink, which brought some badly needed color up into her fair cheeks, then stepped into his boss’s office and drew the door closed behind him.
Chief Marshal Henry Dade had walked around behind his mammoth desk, which nearly filled his small, cluttered office. Smo
ke from the Chief Marshal’s ubiquitous cigars forever hung in toxic clouds the color of coal smoke ejected by a Baldwin locomotive’s giant, black diamond stack. Dade cast his senor-most deputy U.S. marshal an incriminating glare then poked the stubby stogie in his right hand at Bear, and said, “What have I told you about pestering Miss Kimble?”
“I wasn’t pestering her, Chief,” Haskell said. “I was admiring her. There’s a difference.”
“Not to her there isn’t. Not to her father, either. If Mortimer Kimble ever caught you ogling that girl’s ass, he’d have you strung up by your little toes, stripped buck-naked, and marked with a brand to each butt cheek!”
“Ouch!”
“Yeah!”
“Just for admiring her ass?”
“Her family goes back to the Pilgrims.”
“I don’t doubt it a bit!” Haskell grinned. “You tryin’ to tell me, Henry, you never took a peek at that girl’s derriere?”
“Never have,” said the Chief Marshal. “At my age and state of ill health, an erection would kill me.” He pressed a fist to his bony chest and coughed rackingly until Haskell’s own lungs felt raw.
“Christ, Henry—you really oughta stop smoking those things!” Haskell waved at the thick smoke billowing around him, causing his eyes to water. “Jesus!”
Dade plopped down into his high-backed leather chair. “These and coffee and bourbon are the only things keeping me alive. Myrtle can’t cook for shit. Never has been able to, and now her one-hundred-year-old mother has moved in with us, so that old abomination takes up even more of Myrtle’s time she could be using to learn how to boil an egg.”
Dade looked just like a man who subsisted on coffee, bourbon, and cigars. The Chief Marshal weighed maybe a hundred and twenty pounds dripping wet. His shabby, three-piece suits hung on his bony scarecrow frame. His face was gaunt and of the hue and texture of old paper. He wore a thick, brushy mustache that was about two shades darker than the close-cropped, iron gray hair on his head. He had a mole on his right temple. It owned a nasty dark color, and Haskell would have sworn it was growing before his very eyes.
He feared his middle-aged boss, who looked twenty years older than his actual age, which was around sixty, was hanging by a thread. Too bad, too. Haskell had nothing but respect for Henry Dade, who’d been an adjutant to General Grant in the War of Southern Revolt, and then a hell-for-leather colonel in the Texas Rangers. Henry’s own father had died at the Alamo. An ex-man-of-action himself, he was about the only man on God’s green earth who understood the wild and wooly ways of Bear Haskell. Henry Dade always tried to act as a buffer between Haskell and the higher-ups in the Marshals Service, who, because of Bear’s often “imaginative” law-enforcement methods, he often would have butted heads with otherwise.
“Anyway,” the Chief Marshal said, pounding his chest once more and giving one more nasty-sounding cough, “let me have your report on this last manhunt.” He extended a gnarled, age-spotted hand across the desk.
“Not done yet, Henry!” Haskell said in exasperation, slacking into the uncomfortable wooden Windsor chair angled before his boss’s desk. (The chair was without padding for a reason—the Chief Marshal, not given to chitchat, didn’t want anyone to linger.) “I just got into town not ten minutes ago!”
“Oh, right. Well get it to Miss Kimble as soon as you have time to scribble something down, and try to be more detailed this time, will you.”
Haskell grumbled at that.
“I heard you ran into some extra trouble. So said the town marshal of Socorro in the telegram I guess you directed him to send.”
“Yeah, I’ll put it in my detailed report, Henry. Say, could we get down to brass tacks? Why did you haul me in here before I even had time to wash my mouth out with some cheap bourbon?”
“Bad news.”
“It always is. I reckon that’s what keeps vittles on our plates, Henry. When old Myrtle is up to boilin’ an egg, I mean.” Haskell grinned.
“Okay, Bear—enough beating around the bush.” Dade took another couple thoughtful puffs off the short, fat stogie.
“Right,” Haskell said, gently prodding. “Enough beating around the bush.”
“Lou Cameron is dead.”
Haskell stared across the cluttered desk, a confusion of words entangling themselves in his throat so that while he parted his lips as though to speak, no sounds came out.
“I’m sorry,” Dade said, meeting his deputy’s gaze head-on.
“How?”
“Ambushed. His night deputy found him out behind his office up in Diamondback, two bullets in his back. Apparently, he’d just walked out of the privy. That’s when the killer threw down on him.”
Haskell ground his molars. “Backshot.”
“That’s right.”
“Any suspects?”
“Not yet. That’s where you come in.”
“You want me to go up and investigate.”
“Would you want me to send anyone else?”
“Nope.” Haskell leaned forward in his chair. He felt a little queasy and disoriented. It was like he’d been hit across the back of his neck with an ax handle. “I sure wouldn’t.”
“I’m sorry, Bear. I know you two were close once.”
“We still are ... were ... despite everything.”
“Yeah, I heard about that. Damn women. Cameron was a damn good soldier back in the war, but, then, no one knows that any better than you do.”
“We fought together in the same unit—Silas’s Sonso’bitches, they called us, though in letters home, of course, we were the Zouave of the 155th Pennsylvania Volunteers. Silas Sanders was our colonel. I was a too-young first lieutenant. Cam was a wise old sergeant, five years older than me. A true-blue pain in the ass, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t love that stocky, hard-drinking bastard.” Haskell felt a tightness in his chest. The world had just changed for him, gotten a little darker, in the way it always does when someone close to us dies.
He sleeved a tear from his cheek. “Who sent word?”
“County Sheriff from up that way. Delbert Ford. Resides in the county seat of Casper. Ford’s strung out way too thin, short on deputies and trying to prevent a shooting war between two ranching factions. Casper’s a good twenty-five miles from Diamondback. Ford requested our help in bringing Cameron’s killer to justice.”
“Is that all you have?”
“That’s all I have. You’ll be starting from scratch.”
“All right, then. Travel vouchers?”
“My secretary finished typing them up an hour ago. The Burlington flier to Cheyenne, and then ... ah, hell ... you know the rest.”
“Yeah, I know the rest.” Haskell had been over that route more than a few times over his ten years in the service.
The big lawman rose from his chair. It groaned as it gave up his weight. As he turned to the door, Dade said behind him, “You all right, Bear?”
Haskell shook his head. “No.” He hardened his jaws as raw anger began to burn up through his grief. “But I will be just as soon as I find whoever killed Lou.”
“Bear?”
Once more, Haskell turned from the door.
“What is it, Chief?”
Dade stared at him through the billowing dust cloud encircling his head like a fallen halo. “Is she still there?”
Haskell hiked a shoulder. “I don’t know. I reckon I’ll know soon enough.”
He went out.
Chapter Seven
Three days later, Bear Haskell rode a sleek buckskin through a remote, high-desert Wyoming valley as arid, dusty, and vast as any he’d seen in Arizona or northern Mexico.
He’d acquisitioned the horse from the quartermaster at Fort Laramie. He’d spent the previous night in the noncommissioned officers’ quarters at Laramie, where he’d lightened his pockets by twelve dollars playing stud poker with three sergeants, a corporal, and a florid-faced fort sutler—all sun-seasoned men driven a trifle mad by the remoteness and barrenness of their
assignment.
Haskell didn’t regret the twelve-dollar loss, for it made the men who’d won it from him happy indeed if only because they’d won it from an unfamiliar face. If only because, even now after Red Cloud’s Sioux had been brought to heel, there was little to be happy about at Fort Laramie.
Not long ago, riding through the country northwest of that remote outpost would have been a death sentence. It would have been the equal of riding through Geronimo’s Apacheria in southern Arizona. The Indians had been quelled, but the sun-bleached human and horse bones that Haskell occasionally spied amongst rocks or littering the bottom of a dry wash, likely dug up from shallow graves and strewn by coyotes or wolves, were stark testament to the depredations that once haunted this vastness.
The area Haskell was riding through not only resembled the Southwest, it was nearly as hot, as well. Crossing a low divide abutted on both sides of the trail by chalky haystack buttes with only a few scraggly blond weeds growing out of the alkaline soil, the deputy U.S. marshal lifted his canteen and drank sparingly, trying to carve a hole through the dust caking his throat.
He was careful with his water because, while he’d visited Diamondback twice in the past, he couldn’t remember its exact location. There were few obvious landmarks out here in this pale, dusty vastness capped with a sky as large as all eternity. The bluffs and mesas around him looked like all the other bluffs and mesas around him, and government survey maps were notoriously unreliable.
For all the lawman knew, he might still be a good four or five hours away from his destination. He had only a few sips of water left in his canteen, and good luck finding any water holes in this parched country. At Laramie, Haskell had learned it hadn’t rained in over a month.
GUN TROUBLE AT DIAMONDBACK (Bear Haskell, U.S. Marshal Book 1) Page 5