The Running Kind: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  Trying to steady his shaking self, Hector took a breath, then took his shot. He saw a pink spray.

  Hector jacked the lever on the Winchester and fired a third time. “The Gun that Won the West” still had at least one more shot left in it: Hector emptied that one in the bastard’s face, too.

  A noise behind him: Hector swiveled and pointed his Colt. It was Hallie. He moved to cover his groin with his big old Peacemaker. Was the barrel long enough? Well, it was very cold, after all.

  She smiled and said, “After a husband and three sons, you think I don’t know what you’ve got, Mister? You’re freezing, poor thing.” She had his clothes, boots and coat in a loose bundle. “Put these on,” she said. “Won’t be much help getting dressed out here, cold as you already are, but better ’n’ being bare-assed.” With shaking hands, Hector took the pile of clothes from her and began to dress.

  Hallie pushed down the rickety wire fence bounding her property, moving to step over it.

  “I wouldn’t,” he said. “Put two in his head.”

  Hallie shook her head. “You surely killed him dead enough. Even I could tell that from a distance.”

  “So it’s going to be a sorry sight. I’ll clean up the mess.”

  Hallie held up an old blanket. “We need to clean this up. And we need to do it fast in case others happen by. Can’t exactly report this, can we? And I’ve seen plenty of blood in my time, Hector. Get dressed fast and please come help me.”

  When he finished dressing, he stepped over the fence and made his way down a slight embankment to the road. Hallie had already wrapped the blanket around what ever remained of Tomás Hawk’s head and tied it off with twine.

  She was scooping up snow and tossing it over the patches of pink, red and gray brain matter dappling the snow mantle. Hector looked at the body again. A big kid. Hector never saw his face, of course, and now Hector—nor anybody else—ever would.

  Hallie said, “Too bad you shot out his tire. We’ll have to drag the body out of here.”

  Hector was still shaking, his teeth banging against one another. He shoved his Peacemaker down his waistband and slung the Winchester into the back seat of the Woody. He popped open the rear hatch. The back seat was already down. “We’ll put him in here and drive him back. It’s not so far it should wreck the rim.” Hector saw then how lucky he’d gotten with his first shot.

  To the good, the bounty hunter had installed snow chains on all four wheels—somehow the bullet had missed all that metal.

  Hector got him up into the back of his own car. Hallie—so strong, thank God—did most of the work because of his still weak left arm. He started the engine and that damned radio started blasting again. Hector turned down the sound and cranked the dial to a country station, “Riders in the Sky.” He said, “Going to be next-to-impossible to break any ground for a grave in this weather, you know. I fear we’re stuck with a corpse we can’t bury.”

  “There’s a dry well behind the barn, a pretty deep one,” Hallie said, rubbing her arms and turning the car heater up. “We’ll drop him down there. I have some quicklime in the barn. We’ll empty a few bags of that atop him. Come the spring, I’ll have my boys help me throw some dirt over whatever’s left. Maybe even say some words, though he hardly seemed to merit the effort.”

  They drove to that dry well on a flat tire. They manhandled the corpse from the dead man’s own car. Hector winced when he heard Tomahawk’s body finally hit bottom: seemed a lonely place to spend eternity.

  Hallie crossed herself; kissed her bloodstained fingers. A lapsed Catholic, Hector tried to copy the move, his hand shaking and his teeth still chattering. His feet still burned in his boots.

  She took his arm and said, “You look like hell, honey. Need to get you in a hot bath, now before you start losing parts of yourself.”

  ***

  As Hallie drew the bath Hector sat shivering by the fire. Through the window he saw that the snowfall was still heavier now: hardly any visibility at all. The man on the radio was predicting at least six new inches of snow. Hallie said, “It may make getting out of here in a hurry real trouble. I hope that bounty hunter didn’t tell anyone else where he was headed.”

  Yes, Hector hoped Hawk didn’t tell anyone like ex-Pinkertons or mobsters. Not crooked Feds, nor cops.

  After a time, Hallie came and took his right arm and hauled him up to her. His teeth still chattered and his toes throbbed. He saw she had washed the blood from her hands and bare arms. Her arms were strong and muscled from all the work she handled all alone around the farm.

  “C’mon, fella, don’t be foolish.” she said. “You’re still freezing. Don’t want you getting pneumonia or losing your toes.”

  In the bathroom, she began to fumble with his buttons. “I can undress myself,” he said.

  “Not with your hands shaking like that, you can’t,” she said. “Besides, I’ve already seen it all, remember?”

  Not really. Hallie hadn’t gotten a good look at all of his body. As she stepped behind him to take off his shirt he heard this sharp intake of breath. She said, “My Lord, what happened to your back?”

  “Cat-o-nine tails,” Hector said. “Happened in Paris, well really under the City of Lights, in February, 1924.”

  This tone in her voice: “We weren’t at war then.”

  “There are wars and there are wars,” he said. “I was in the latter kind that year. Paris in the old days was a crazy time. It’s a story you don’t want to hear now.” Hell, if she’d read enough of his books, if she’d read One True Sentence, she might already know that story.

  This knowing smile on Hallie’s face as he watched her in the mirror. She asked, “What was her name? Which one was she?”

  “Which one? Which one, what?”

  Hallie gave him a look. “Which one of your women in the books. Brinke? Molly? That other, Duff?” Another smile. “Never mind.” Then, “It looks like your arm is healing okay.” Then, “What happened here?” She was pointing at his lower left leg.

  “Just more old trouble. Some of the oldest, actually.”

  “God, what you’ve done to your body.” He was naked now and she held his right hand as he slowly lowered himself into the tub. His skin—particularly his toes—flared in pain at contact with the warm water.

  “Believe it or not, it’s lukewarm for now,” she said, splashing water on him and rubbing at his arms and back and legs.

  Lukewarm? It felt like fire.

  She said, “We’ll make it warmer as we go, draw that cold out of your bones.”

  He sat there and let her work on him; feeling embarrassed and a little like some overgrown child being cared for. Mostly though, Hector watched Hallie—watched the muscles in her arms and capable hands. He watched the way she stopped now and then and used her forearms to brush back stray strands of hair that fell in her face as she scoured at him. The bath was very hot now and he thought he might want to spend what remained of the day in the tub.

  Hallie said suddenly, “That man out there, he’s obviously not your first kill. Between the wars—the ones they give names to and your private campaigns—” Hector had to smile at that, but a rueful smile, “—how many would you guess you’ve… let’s call it handled?”

  “I couldn’t put a number to it,” he said. “Hell, I wouldn’t. Not the kind of thing to count. I don’t cut notches in the butt of my Colt. I’m not that breed of jerk. Listen Hallie, I want you to know, if he really had tried to use that knife on you in the sitting room—”

  “You’d have come charging out to help me and we’d both be dead now,” Hallie said. She winked. “I’m glad you had the sand and good sense to await your moment. I was really trying to buy you that time, Hector.” She looked at his body and smiled and said, “Looking your poor body over, I’d have you use that good sense more, but at least when the chips are truly down, you’re better than effective. You’re a survivor. You exude grace under pressure.”

  That last phrase dug into him more th
an a bit, rightly or wrongly—it was too associated with an estranged friend.

  Hector noticed Hallie’s hand was moving slower now. Her left arm was in water up to her elbow and she’d been rubbing at the calf and thigh of his left leg. Her hand moved higher. Her teeth nervously worked at her full bottom lip. They looked into one another’s eyes a time, and her hand strayed there.

  She’d started it; Hector more than meant to finish.

  He leaned forward, cupping the side of her face with his good right hand, and kissed her. It was slow and soft and warm. Then their kiss grew hungry. He could taste his blood on his tongue from her teeth. She stopped suddenly, panting, her forehead pressed to his so he couldn’t see her eyes. “This is more than wrong,” she said hoarsely. “You’ve been with her. You’re my daughter’s man.”

  Hector wasn’t so sure about that, not at all.

  And he didn’t really care at the moment. He also didn’t care what that said about him.

  He forced his mouth back against Hallie’s. He massaged her full, firm breasts and she pressed his hands harder to her chest.

  He then reached behind her and down. He tugged her sweater over her head. His hands stayed to her back, felt the muscles carved there by years of hard work in the fields and barns. Her hand was there again, stroking him. He tore her skirt trying to get it off her. He pulled her into the tub atop him, as naked now as he was.

  ***

  It was variously slow and hard; hungry and frenzied.

  They lay together in the bath after and she said, “This was terribly wrong. A calamitous mistake.”

  As she said it, Hector realized that for the first time in decades he’d made love to a woman close to his own age.

  In his youth Hector had been drawn to worldly older women like the one Megan had asked about from his novel The Last Key. Brinke had been about five years older than Hector. Sometime in his mid-thirties, the pendulum had swung the other way. All the women after that seemed always to be in their early twenties. And the gulf just got wider over the years, just as Jimmy had pointed out.

  Hector kissed Hallie’s flushed throat, his hand gliding down her flat belly. He closed his hand between her legs and said softly, “Actually, this might be one of the few right things I’ve ever done.”

  Hallie turned around to see his eyes. “You’re serious,” she said.

  “I’ll be fifty-one in a few days,” he said. “High-time I gave up chasing after girls.”

  Hell, everyone told Hector that was so, they’d been doing that for years.

  She smiled sadly and brushed the hair back from above his right eyebrow. “Hec, your kind never truly grows up or settles down. Lovely as this was—and it was passing heaven—this can’t happen again. It just never can, Hector.”

  “I’m not sure yet I’m prepared to accept that.” Hector said. “I mean it. This is something new for me.”

  “Like I said.” Her hand there. “You’re just a big kid. There’s way too much boy in you, still. Too much of the handsome rover.”

  33

  Despite what Hallie said, of course it did happen again. And later, yet again, on a carpet in the sitting room in front of her crackling fire.

  At four, Hallie’s son Rayburn made contact via ham radio to say the cut back onto his property was hopelessly drifted closed.

  With a foot more of snow on the way, and more severe drifting expected, even with a tractor he’d fitted with a plow blade, he couldn’t get Meg and Shannon back before morning and maybe not for a couple of days after that if the drifting kept up.

  As she heard that assessment, Hallie gave Hector a look he couldn’t quite read.

  So Hector just smiled at her. After a time Hallie smiled back, a sad half-smile.

  ***

  They stood in the stable, staring at the big, fidgety stallion.

  “My husband bought him a year before he died,” Hallie said. “Dave had notions of breaking him. Someday, maybe of even breeding him. Dave was ex-cavalry. One of the last I guess. He chased Pancho Villa.”

  “Hell, me too,” Hector said, surprised. Suddenly a little uncomfortable, he said, “Maybe I knew Dave.”

  Probably not: when Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, New Mexico and killed all those Americans—prompting Woodrow Wilson to send Black Jack Pershing into the desert to try and catch the Mexican revolutionary “dead or alive”—there were thousands of men who crossed the Mexican border to hunt Villa.

  Chances were, Dave and Hector never came within hollering distance of one another.

  Hector flinched as that unbroken stallion kicked a back wall with a wicked hoof. The barn’s slats just held.

  The stallion was all muscle and spirit and defiant in its prime. It stood there fire-eyed, white and snorting steam as it pawed the hard frozen stable dirt with its right front hoof. There was something almost elemental about the horse.

  “He’s far more trouble than he’s worth,” Hallie said. “Unbroken, untamed. More than half-dangerous. Won’t be ridden, and if he ever got lose, I think he’d run until he dropped with a burst heart. Another of the running kind, you know? Wouldn’t know home if he found it.”

  “I surely do know what you mean.”

  It had been a time since Hector had been around horses like this one. He was tempted to try and have a hand at breaking him. He said, “What’s his name?”

  “Traveller, after Robert E. Lee’s horse.”

  Hector shook his head. “Does that mean that your husband was a secessionist?”

  “Just a history buff,” Hallie said. “Can’t bring myself to get rid of the beast because Dave loved him so. I love him, too, after a fashion. Though he’s expensive and, like this, unbroken but fenced in, he’s pretty much useless.”

  Hector smiled. “I’ve got me some habits and hobbies the same could be said of.”

  Traveller suddenly pushed his head Hector’s way. “He is a majestic thing.” The horse tolerated Hector’s stroking of his neck.

  “Like Dave, you must have been pretty young when you signed up for the army,” Hallie said, watching Hector and the horse.

  “Under age, but tall, and the recruiters weren’t too choosy under the circumstances,” Hector said. “I reckoned it would be romantic to ride horses and hunt Mexican bandits. And I wasn’t too happy at home about then.”

  Hallie brushed that comma of hair back from Hector’s forehead. “Was it? Romantic?”

  “Hardly at all. Pretty nearly everything but.”

  “Guess you and Dave are more alike than I might have thought. Cowboys born out of their time. Too old for breaking, yet too young to tame.”

  Hector thought that might surely be said of Traveller. But of himself?

  “Not me,” he said. “I like central heating and air conditioning too much now.”

  Hector pulled Hallie close. He kissed her as Traveller snorted and bumped Hector’s shoulder with his nose, seeking more attention. Hector broke his embrace with Hallie. He stroked the stallion’s long nose and said, “I like comfortable feather beds with down covers and phonographs and radios. I love my Chevy. And I don’t have to follow that sucker around with a shovel.”

  “What about the television,” Hallie said. “You have one of those gizmos in your big house?”

  “Hell, no,” Hector said. “I’m a working writer. Who has the time for that horseshit?”

  ***

  Hallie was making dinner. He’d offered to help, but she’d said, “Thanks, Hector, but I suspect you’d just be in the way. Sit by the fire, do some writing or reading.”

  More the morning writer, Hector turned on the radio and twisted around until he found some concert originating from a New York City ballroom.

  He went to that little shelf over the piano and took down a copy of The Last Key and started reading it where he’d left off in Ohio. He sat there crouched close to the crackling fire and hanging on his own words. He was finally starting to feel really warm again. Maybe it was all that Key West imagery, he thought. Ma
ybe it was something else.

  As he read his own novel, he found myself drawn back to that time, his first days in the sultry Keys. He was half his present age then and so still full of illusions.

  And he had been moving toward his first marriage. He was planning to wed a fellow writer: that black-haired, black-eyed beauty five years his senior. Brinke Devlin. How he’d loved that sleek, perplexing woman.

  That too-short span in Key West they’d shared had arguably comprised Hector’s one legitimate shot at a Square-John life.

  He knew how that sorry story ended, so Hector closed his own book on some paragraph that still held promise of a bright future.

  He sat there alone with this memories, listening to the wicked wind and the comforting kitchen noises, finally having some time alone with his thoughts to do some serious reflecting.

  For most of his nearly fifty-one years, Hector had lived his life at a sprint. He’d lived on the run like some goddamn fugitive, even when he sometimes wasn’t.

  Always the running kind.

  Hector and Traveller—the writer let himself think they maybe were sorry kindred.

  He looked around Hallie’s little farmhouse and imagined how it would look in spring and summer and autumn.

  Sitting there, Hector thought about how the home would look with a fresh coat of white paint. They’d have them some big and black, flop-eared dog Hector could pet with his left hand by the fire as he wrote with his right. He’d live in quiet peace here. Just drive down into town now and again to shop and to collect mail or to fire off a manuscript or two. He’d maybe be some kind of latter-day crime fiction version of Louis Bromfield, writing while living amidst some agrarian idyll in the Show-Me State.

  Mostly Hector’s thoughts centered around pretty, strong, lonely and sensuous Hallie Dalton.

  Much woman as they put it, down borderlands’ way.