Hart the Regulator 1

by John B. Harvey

  ‘Next time you got any complaint to make about the way the law operates round here, maybe you’d best make it in some other way. You reckon you understand that, Jack?’

  The rancher glanced at him, then away, staring at his broken reflection in the mirror.

  ‘Same goes for anyone else round here.’ Hart continued. ‘You know where to find me.’

  He eased his Colt back into its holster and stood straight, started to back towards the door.

  Gradually the crowd relaxed and began to move, sensing that the action was over. Low, quick snatches of conversation spilled over one another. At the far side of the room, Annie stood away from the wall and wiped one hand across the front of her short, dark hair.

  Only three people remained quite still.

  Lee leant back on a table, half-sitting on it, his left hand still stretched across to his right shoulder. The pain that pulsed through him caused his eyes to narrow, the corners of his mouth to tighten. His discarded pistol lay on the floor, several feet away to his right. For an instant he glanced up at Hart in the doorway and Hart wondered what was hurting the young gunman more—the gunshot wound or the knowledge that he just hadn’t been fast enough. Nowhere near fast enough. Hart could have killed him had he wanted: both of them knew that.

  Aaron was still at the far end of the bar and his hand was as far away from his holster as before. He’d read the message clearly enough; there was no way he was going to make a play against Hart. Not without something else bettering the odds in his favor.

  Texas Jack LeFarge was bent over the bar, head down, his hand apparently to his cut face. For him the fall from pride was the greatest, the most painful; he felt himself reduced to what he was—a bitter shadow of a man who couldn’t cover the fact up any longer. Not with any amount of shouting and hectoring, nor with his hired guns. He was a rancher who was getting old and who only had the use of one eye and one arm.

  From the door Hart saw LeFarge’s head sink lower as the noise about him rose; his hand slipped away from his face. Hart turned to go. He was out on the boardwalk and the batwing doors had swung twice behind him when he heard the woman’s shout of warning.

  LeFarge had moved the instant Hart had gone through the door. He’d spun round fast and ducked low across the floor, left hand scooping up the fallen gun.

  Hart half-guessed and hit the doors in a dive. He came through faster than LeFarge could follow and as soon as he hit the boards he rolled his body to the right. The Indian blanket came away from his left arm and the shiny sawn-down barrels of the Remington 10-gauge shotgun caught the light. Before he finished rolling he had positioned LeFarge, kneeling now in the center of the room and trying to get a line on Hart. Behind him, to his right, Aaron had obviously thought that this gave him the edge he needed and had spread his legs wide and was going for his gun.

  Hart braced himself with his right elbow and knee and angled the Remington upwards: he squeezed down on both barrels.

  The explosion shook the saloon apart.

  Texas Jack was thrown sideways, the right side of his body shredded and torn. He slammed into tables and chairs, knocking them in all directions, sending people scattering away.

  Aaron took most of the remainder of the charge in the upper part of his chest and across the neck. The force of it lifted him off his feet and carried him back into the far wall where he hung for a few moments like a black-shirted dummy in a dry goods store. Then he came forward fast, nothing to stop him, face smacking down on to the floor with an echoing crack.

  Hart stood up and broke the shotgun, throwing the spent cartridges to one side and pulling two more from his pants pocket, pushing them into place. He moved the weapon into his right hand and bent to retrieve the blanket, draping it over his shoulder.

  Texas Jack was a huddle of limbs from which blood seemed to flow without beginning or end. Hart moved him with his boot and the rancher’s body toppled on to its back, knocking a chair over as it went. The black cord that held his patch had snapped: an empty socket, white and puckered, stared meaninglessly up into Hart’s face.

  Hart moved away, heading for the back of the room. Where Aaron had slid off the wall, a smeared passage of blood marked his going. Dead, he looked young no longer. The smoothness of his face had become twisted in a rictus of shock and pain and maybe a sure knowledge of dying.

  Hart stopped by Lee who was still leaning back against the same table. He waited until the gunman looked up at him.

  ‘I didn’t want this. If I’d wanted killin’, I’d have started with you.’

  Lee nodded: ‘I know.’

  ‘Just listen. Don’t make it your business to go no further. There ain’t nothin’ here for you to avenge. Get that wound dressed an’ ride out. If you come back we both know I’m goin’ to have to kill you.’

  Hart stared into Lee’s face a moment longer before stepping to the bar. ‘Give me a bottle. No, two. An’ a couple of glasses. I’ll pay you later.’

  He stuffed the glasses into his waistcoat pockets, pushed the bottles under his arm and headed back for the door. Behind him some of the people of Boley were starting to drag the bodies out into the street.

  Chapter Eight

  The red dress hung down from the bedpost and in the light that glimmered from the stump of candle it looked not red, merely dark. She leaned back against the brass rails, her legs spread out in front of her. She was still wearing silver stockings held near the tops of her thighs by green and white garters; white underthings that were edged with lace and left a width of leg between themselves and the frilled garters.

  Her breasts were small, the nipples hard and dark; darker than her dress, fairer than her hair, her eyes. She held the glass so that it pressed against her stomach, fingers rolling it backward and forwards unthinkingly, making a line above the triangle of tightly curled hair, darkest of all.

  Hart sat at the head of the bed, watching her. The first whisky bottle was two thirds gone; his own glass rested on the knee of his pants. He had seen drink make fools of many men—the Kid it changed into a crazed animal, others it rendered helpless fools. With Hart it did neither of these things but it had its effect just the same. It brought back to his mind images that he only wanted to forget.

  And so he drank more, always hoping to obliterate them.

  Annie reached out her own glass and when it was full she left her hand where it was and smiled over it with her heavily made-up face.

  The candle flickered in a sudden draught.

  She drank some of the whisky and transferred the glass to her other hand. Slowly she touched him, drawing her fingernails diagonally across his chest so that he could feel their sharpness through the wool of his shirt. After a few moments she stopped and began to unbutton the shirt; she pulled the ends from inside his belt and opened it out. Then she edged forward until her legs were almost around Hart’s own and he could feel the warm whisky breath on his face.

  She lowered her head until the ends of her hair brushed his skin; he closed his eyes as her tongue started to trace small circles, her teeth gently to bite.

  ‘No!’

  He pushed her away and her glass spilt, the whisky running over her leg and on to the sheet. He could see in her eyes the fear that he was going to strike her. But when he moved his hand it was to touch, briefly, her hair, to rest it on the warm flesh of her shoulder.

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  He could still feel and smell her breath, coming faster now, uncertain.

  He picked up her glass and poured some more whisky into it; this time she drank a little, then moved back to her former position at the end of the bed.

  ‘Are you wondering what he’s going to do?’ she asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The one you wounded. Lee.’

  ‘I told him to forget about it. Ride out.’

  She sipped at the whisky. ‘Is that what you’d do?’

  Hart thought for a moment, shrugged.

  ‘You wouldn’t, would you?’
>
  ‘I wouldn’t be in that position.’

  ‘ Why not? Because you’re better? Because you’re faster?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  She brushed at her hair. ‘What happens when you’re not?’

  Hart pushed his back hard against the railings of the bed head. He didn’t know what he wanted from her but he didn’t think it was this.

  ‘Well?’ she asked again.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’ll quit.’

  She laughed, a short, bitter laugh. ‘When you’re like Texas Jack? Left with only one arm and one eye.’

  ‘It didn’t stop him, did it?’

  ‘No, you did that.’

  Hart reached for the bottle. ‘Did that bother you?’

  She shook her head slowly. ‘I was glad.’

  Hart looked surprised. ‘How come?’

  At first he didn’t think she was going to answer but eventually she did. Her voice was softer, quieter. Slow.

  ‘Getting those boys to make his gun play for him, that wasn’t all Jack did. There were other things he couldn’t manage for himself. Other ... injuries that weren’t maybe so noticeable. When he was feeling horny he’d come along here to the hotel and have a word with Emma. He’d be up here with them when she sent word, both of them.’

  She paused and looked towards the candle in the corner of the room, then at the drawn curtains.

  ‘He’d stand there, by the window, watching. First one, then the other. Lee and Aaron. Aaron and Lee. Sometimes he’d say nothing. Other times he’d tell them what he wanted done to me.’

  She swung her head back and stared at Hart.

  ‘The two of them together... till it hurt... him by the window shouting ... driving them on.’ She hung her head. ‘I was glad when you finished him, even like that, torn apart the way he was.’

  Hart reached out to her and she collapsed into his arms, clung to him, shaking. In the quaking light he could see where the tears were making her make-up smudge and run. Her hair was warm on his chest and against his neck, warm and smooth.

  ‘Annie.’

  ‘Umm?’

  But he didn’t say anything else. He moved his legs and back so that he was laying stretched out on the bed and she was pressed against him, an arm thrown round his side. Neither of them moved for what seemed a long time, aware of movements along the corridor outside and in the rooms on either side.

  Hart was tense, reacting to each fresh sound, his gun belt hanging at the head of the bed, the butt of the Colt .45 close to his reach.

  Every time he stirred she held him and waited for his body to relax.

  ‘I’ve been thinking.’

  Her voice was low and he could feel her breath on his skin as she spoke.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘About what you said of quitting. And about you and me. How we’re sort of alike.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘We both sell our bodies. Me for sex and you ‘cause you’re fast with a gun. Time’ll come when we’re no good for either. Too ugly or too slow.’ She pressed her fingers into the flesh of his shoulder. ‘Trouble is we won’t realize.’

  ‘It ain’t like that,’ said Hart uneasily.

  ‘Okay. If that’s what you want to think. Only…when I started doing this, working saloons, there was a whore called Patti. Fat Patti. She must have been around forty years old and she’d been so used she looked sixty. Her clothes were all patched and frayin’ and the dirt was grimed into them. She had great, sagging breasts and thighs that shook when she walked and her face was like some pock-marked piece of painted jelly. But she was there every night, goin’ up to men and pretending not to notice when they pushed her away, making out she didn’t hear the things they called out to her.

  ‘When finally they threw her out of the saloon she’d hang around the alley out back and wait for the drunks to come out at three or four in the morning. Then she’d do it up against the wall for two bits.

  ‘She didn’t know anything else. Weren’t any other way she could live.’

  Annie rolled away from him and after a moment he reached over and touched her back, feeling the knots of her spine clearly through her skin.

  That was different. You won’t ever be like that. It doesn’t have to be that way. It…’

  She turned on to her side quickly so that his hand was now touching her breast, the nipple hard against his palm.

  ‘Yes, it does,’ she said. ‘Yes, it does.’

  Hart moved to her and lifted her head towards him; there was down on her upper lip and it was damp and salty from her tears. He felt her tongue inside his mouth, her breasts on his chest, her legs sliding round one of his own. After a few minutes one of her hands reached down towards his belt.

  It was dark: the candle had guttered out. Hart lay on his back, suddenly awake, hand jumping towards the holstered gun. His fingers felt the familiar mother-of-pearl. For some time he listened, straining to hear whatever it was that had woken him. But there was nothing, only the sound of the girl’s breathing, even and unbroken—that and the sense of his own heart.

  He let go of the gun and rubbed at the corners of his eyes. Maybe it had been nothing. Nothing real. Perhaps he had been dreaming. Sometimes when he drank a lot he dreamed.

  He lay back and thought about what the girl had said—the fat old whore and Texas Jack slipped like pictures into his mind. Never knowing when to quit, when to stop. He was thirty-four years old. For a man who lived by his gun that was shading dangerously towards the time when his reflexes might be expected to slow, his reactions thicken like old blood.

  Kathy had said... Kathy! Why the hell was he thinking of her when ... She had said he would never change, never stop. Standing in the kitchen of the home he had had built for them, the one she had refused to live in.

  Staring at him, freckles across her nose and beneath her eyes, just staring, unsmiling. A strand of brown hair caught across her face. Hart remembered wanting to reach out and lift it back into place but not being able to. Her look forbidding him.

  ‘I want to marry you. For you to come and live here. For us to have kids.’

  ‘I’ve told you. Not while...’

  ‘Kathy, it’s not like before. I’m a Ranger, a lawman. That’s different. It’s...’

  ‘It isn’t different. It’s the same.’ She stared at the Colt holstered at his side. ‘That’s the same.’

  ‘Kathy, for Christ’s sake, you don’t understand!’

  She shook her head, almost sadly. ‘No, Wes, it’s you that doesn’t understand.’

  ‘Look...’ Hart moved towards her and saw her flinch; flinch then freeze. He knew he would never, could never touch her again.

  He had walked out of the house and away, certain that she wouldn’t be there when he got back.

  Hart shook the memory free and rolled on to his side. Unconsciously the girl turned in towards him and he felt for her warmth. Wanting to sleep again, yet not thinking that he would, he pulled her to him and tightened the sheet around the pair of them.

  He had slept. The light that showed through the curtains was grey with the beginnings of the day. Hart threw off the sheet then eased his left arm from under the girl’s body, bending it to free it from numbness. His head was thick with a dull ache and his tongue felt foreign in his mouth. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and picked up one of the bottles. Empty. He tried the second. He stood and swigged back the whisky, swilling it round inside his mouth, through his teeth. Quickly he spat it into the bowl.

  Hart started to dress.

  Halfway through he leaned over the bed and covered her sleeping body. He wanted his head to clear but it wouldn’t. The room smelled of sweat and stale semen; the sheet on the girl’s body was soiled and stained.

  He unhooked his gun belt from the bedpost and fitted it round his hips, buckling it tight. He tied the leather thong attached to the bottom of the holster round his leg; tested the weight and balance of the gun, spun the chamber against the palm of his l
eft hand.

  Saddle bags, shotgun, rifle, blanket—Hart moved behind the bed and stepped towards the door. His hand was on the handle when she stirred. Not meaning to look back he did so.

  The black hair, dark eyes, the slim, pale arm were almost the same as the first time he had come into the room, the first time he had seen her.

  She opened her mouth as though to say something, but shook her head instead, still not properly awake. She lay back down and stretched her arm towards him, palm upwards, fingers slightly open.

  At first Hart thought it was a gesture of goodbye but after a moment he realized. Leaning his rifle against the door, he pushed a hand down into his pants pocket. He bent over her and put the five dollar bills between her fingers; as he straightened up her hand closed, crumpling them.

  Her eyes were closed and he didn’t know if she were awake still or asleep.

  Outside, the cold air slapped him across the face like a woman’s hand.

  Chapter Nine

  Belle Starr stood on the planking outside the cabin, her long face set into a frown. Incongruous against the background of rough-hewn wood and ramshackle tile, she was wearing a gown of deep-green velvet which swept past her booted feet and spread sideways over the floor. The neck and bodice of the gown were decorated with close patterns of white lace; at the waist it was circled by a dull leather gun belt, the loops filled with shells, the holster with a .36 Manhattan pistol. She looked round at the other cabins, three of them ranged to her left, and her face did more than frown. Above her straight nose, her dark, lustrous eyes shone dangerously.

  She pushed at the angle of dark hair which crossed her forehead beneath the brim of her plumed hat and mouthed a curse.

  ‘Sam!’

  She slapped the riding crop that hung from her right wrist against her leg.

  ‘Sam! Will you drag yourself out here?’