The Killing Machine

by Ed Gorman

  She shook her pretty head. “Just that she needed to talk to you about James. She isn’t doing very well. Understandably. They’ve got a little one. Luckily, James came into some money last spring. He ordered one of those houses you can get through the Sears catalog. He and Tib put it up in about four days.”

  “How’d he come into money?”

  “No idea. Maybe that’s what she wants to talk to you about.”

  “—she’s white?”

  “Daughter of a missionary. James had the reputation of being a pretty rough character, but she did a lot to calm him down. Having a kid helped, too. He was a very attentive father. It’s too bad he could never find any real work that paid him much. He saw that Sears ad they run in magazines for those houses you can order—and that’s all he thought of, she said. He was bound and determined to build one for them. It really became an obsession. The trouble was, he couldn’t figure out where he’d get the money. Then this money just came in.” Then: “So how was the ride?”

  “If I had both arms, I could double my speed.”

  She took the letter from my fingers, set it on the stand next to my bed, then pressed me back against the mattress. She pulled up the covers and said, “You’ll have some food in about half an hour. See if you can take a nap. You still need to build your strength back up.”

  I skipped the manly protestations. It was fun to play strong man but I figured my face was blanched again from the workout with the wheelchair. A weariness had set in, too. The poison might be out of me, but my full strength hadn’t returned.

  I dozed off so quickly I didn’t even hear her leave. Next thing I was aware of was the tray being set down on my bed stand. The smells of beef, a potato, and beets got my eyes open. This was the first real food I’d had since they’d put me in this room. Real food. I sat up.

  The nurse’s assistant who’d delivered the food smiled at me. “You need any help cutting that slice of beef?”

  “No,” I said, “because I’ll just eat it like this.”

  I held up the delicious-looking cut of beef and proceeded to eat it with my fingers. Right then I didn’t give much of a damn about table manners.

  The nurse’s assistant laughed. “Good to see a man your size put the food away. Used to see my dad eat like that, God rest him.”

  I would have said something sentimental about her old man, but I was too busy cramming food into my face.

  Chapter 6

  “You’re Mr. Ford.”

  “That I am.”

  “My name’s Gwendolyn Andrews.”

  “Hello, Gwendolyn.”

  I judged her to be a very comely prairie-hardened thirty years old. Dark, gray-streaked hair; tanned, skinny, farm-girl body. Would be able to handle herself in most situations. Which was probably why she didn’t seem intimidated at all right now.

  “There are some things I’d like to tell you. We both had loved ones die. So we both want to find out the truth.”

  “Please pull the chair up.”

  Once she was seated, she used her long, tanned hands to smooth out the simple brown dress she wore. She spoke softly, purposefully, intelligently.

  “I’m sorry I dragged him into it, Gwendolyn.”

  “You didn’t drag him into it. He wanted to go. He was excited to go. So was Tib. That’s why they were killed. Your brother, too.”

  “You’re confusing me here, Gwendolyn.”

  “Gwen.”

  “All right, Gwen. My brother was killed because of the gun he was trying to sell.”

  “You sure of that?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Well, you might be surprised. I think it was because of James.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “Somebody’s been wanting to kill James for several months now. You hired Tib and James, and the man saw a way to kill him and blame it on somebody else. And he was right. Everybody thinks it was because of your brother and his gun. But it wasn’t.”

  “You have a name for this man?”

  “No. But in the past half year or so, James has been shot at twice, and once when he was sleeping alone in our new house, somebody set a rabid dog on him. James was lucky because he always slept with a gun underneath his pillow. He heard the dog snarling in the other room. He woke up in time.”

  I’d been lying down. I must’ve winced when I sat up because she said, “I should wait till you feel better.”

  “You can’t walk out on me now. You’ve got a lot more to tell me and I want to hear it.”

  “But you made a face…”

  “A little pain. Nothing much. I’d be most appreciative if you’d pour me some coffee out of that pot there, and I’ll get a smoke going.” Jane had rolled me half a dozen smokes.

  Gwen touched the pot. “It’s cold.”

  “I got used to drinking it cold in the war. Had a friend named Daniel Port who preferred it that way.”

  I sat up straight, struck the lucifer with my thumbnail, took a nice, deep drag, and then said, “So why don’t you fill in everything for me. I got in at the end of this thing.”

  She hesitated, the large, savvy, brown eyes reflecting sorrow. “A lot of this will make me feel as if I’m dishonoring my husband’s memory. But I want to find out what really happened out there at your brother’s ranch.”

  I let her take her time. And finally she spoke.

  Gwen’s story went this way: David Ford, my brother, hired James to be a kind of night watchman. This was right after David moved here and began refining the gun he’d stolen. David was impressed by how James presented himself.

  What David didn’t know, but a lot of townspeople did, was that James usually found a way to double his money no matter what kind of job he took. If you hired him to move furniture for you, you had to be careful that he didn’t steal something from your house while he was in there. If he worked in your stable for a month, you often found that one or two of your horses had been rustled. If you hired him to work on your farm, you could just about bet that he’d swipe as much produce as he could, and then hide it along the edge of your property so that he could sneak back at night and get it. He was the same with his own people. He stole from them every chance he got, which was why Indians didn’t trust him any more than white people did. But he was such a hard and careful worker that folks put up with his indiscretions.

  He was the same way with secrets. James knew a lot of secrets. It was joked that, in fact, James knew more secrets than God. This was because you could never be sure where he was at any given moment. People had found him in their barns, closets, wagons, trees, root cellars. He never seemed to bother people. He just, he explained, liked to hear things. It was for this reason that certain people in town liked to bestow “favors” on him, usually in the form of money. A cynic might call this money blackmail. James preferred the term favors. It sounded a lot friendlier. He knew that he should never demand too much, because that would just lead to trouble. But he’d kind of sidle up to you and whisper a few sentences about what he’d overheard you say, and then soon enough you’d be giving him monthly “favors” like some of your friends.

  He might hear you say something about the lady you saw on the side, or he might hear you say something about how you were cheating your business partner, or he might hear you say something about the arson fire you set because you were in dire need of insurance cash.

  Tib, Gwen said, was fascinated by James. The way Gwen explained it, Tib had always wanted to be a rogue like the ones you read about in dime novels. Men who dazzled rich, beautiful women with their charms and then later broke into fancy boudoirs to steal jewels and diamonds. The trouble was, Tib was your basic plow jockey who didn’t have the pluck or the imagination it took to steal a stick of licorice from Mr. Adler’s candy counter over to the general store.

  So he sort of lived through James. James was better than reading a book, according to Tib. Every day of the week, James would do something—never anything big, except for the occa
sional horse stealing, because he didn’t want to go to prison—but something interesting.

  The one thing she resented about James was that he had secrets he wouldn’t share with her. Even when she begged him sometimes he wouldn’t tell her. He always said that if anything bad happened, she wouldn’t be involved in any way.

  One night, several months back, James got drunk and did tell her that he’d learned something important out to David Ford’s ranch. That’s all he would say. Soon after that he came into a lot of money. A lot by their standards, anyway. They bought the Sears house and put it up. This took all their money. James had to work as hard as ever to support them.

  But it was about that time that somebody tried to kill him. Once, twice, three times. For the first time ever, she saw her husband afraid. But he wouldn’t tell her anything more than he had that one drunken night.

  Then the trouble at David’s ranch, and James, Tib, and David were dead.

  “Everybody thinks this was about the gun, but I’m not sure it was.”

  The good ones take every path pointed out to them. I’m talking here about any kind of investigative man or woman you care to name. Unless it involves ghosties or goblins or spheres in the sky (all of which you hear about more frequently than you might imagine), the good investigator follows every path pointed out to him. He does not, however, always hold out much hope that he’ll find much on any given path.

  You have a man, my own brother, with an experimental weapon much sought around the world. You have four men of varying reputations trying to possess that gun. There is a shootout. Brother is killed. Gun vanishes.

  One of the men who died in the shootout came into some unexpected money a few months back. Tempting to think that this might have some bearing on the shootout. But here you have a man, James, who by all accounts was a thief and likely a blackmailer. There could be many other explanations than the gun as to how he came into the windfall.

  But, if you’re good, you don’t dismiss it. Because there’s just enough of a vague connection to making traveling that path worthwhile—if you are a serious investigator.

  “How about this?” I said. “How about if I check out what I think happened and at the same time check out what you think happened?”

  “You’d really do that?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Well, James—a Cree.”

  “He died helping me. I owe him that much, at least.”

  She took my hand. She was, as I’d guessed, strong and vital. The grip confirmed that. You take a pioneer woman, this being a theory I’ve had for years, and put her up against your average city man in a fight—and it’s likely the pioneer woman will win. Fourteen-, fifteen-hour days of the kind of hard labor you rarely get even in most prisons—she may be slim, she may look feminine as hell when she’s gussied up for a barn dance, but underestimate her at your peril.

  Then she was kissing me on the forehead and saying, “Thank you so much. I just want to learn the truth.”

  “So do I.”

  She turned and walked out of the room. For a moment my eyes watched her slender, but very female, backside. But then my gaze drifted up to the wheelchair. I wanted to see if I could improve on my top speed.

  But first…a nap.

  Chapter 7

  Two days later, I left the hospital. My gun arm remained in the sling, my knees trembled sometimes, and I had a vague headache.

  I put on a pretty good show for the townspeople who saw me make my uncertain way down the hospital steps and onto the sidewalk. A few people walked very wide of me, as if whatever I had just might be contagious. A few of them politely stepped aside to let me dodder my way past them. The hospital had urged me to let one of their people accompany me. But pride wouldn’t let me. Who the hell couldn’t survive a minor gunshot wound? Apparently, I couldn’t, not with any stamina or grace, anyway. I stumbled once, falling to my knee as if I were proposing marriage to a ravishing ghost woman nobody but I could see. Another time, drained, I fell against a hitching rack and stayed there for a good three or four minutes. But finally, and for no reason I could figure out, I got some serious strength back. I didn’t wobble nearly as much, the cloudiness of my vision cleared up, and I even managed to get a few smiles from passing pretty women as I doffed my hat.

  The first thing I did was go to the café where I’d had the good steak the other night. I ate a slab of meat as close to raw as I could get without making the cook sick. I’m a believer in the curative powers of animal blood.

  The serving woman started smiling at me as I kept asking her for more bread and then a few more potatoes and then just a wee bit more beef. She was ahead of me in the dessert department. She brought forth a slice of chocolate cake that had to exhaust her just to carry. She set it down in front of me, along with a clean fork, and watched me begin to attack that cake with a passion I usually saved for the bedroom.

  She laughed. “You been lost in the mountains, have you?”

  “Pretty close. Lost in a hospital.”

  “Well, you’re makin’ up for lost time today.”

  The second thing I did was stop in a store and buy myself a shirt. I traveled with three. But the one with the bullet holes needed replacing. The clerk said that I should try and buy a shirt that went with my sling, but I said that that didn’t matter to me. I hoped to have the shirt a whole lot longer than I had the sling.

  “You have some kind of hunting accident, did you?” he said. “I mean that’s a gunshot wound, isn’t it?”

  Wasn’t any of his damned business. “Bear.”

  “Bear?”

  “Uh-huh. Took a big bite out of my shoulder.”

  “My Lord, that musta hurt.”

  “Well, it did a little bit. But the bear was worse off than I was.”

  “You shoot him, did you?” He was eager for the whole story.

  “Nope. Bit him right back. Right on the same spot on his shoulder that he bit me on mine.” I smiled big and wide and crazy. You know how bullshitters smile. “I guess I surprised him so much he just skedaddled out of the camp I’d made and never bothered me again.”

  The clerk didn’t have much to say after that. He wrote up my order and seemed mighty relieved when I left. Maybe he was afraid I’d take a big bite out of his shoulder.

  The third thing I did was go back to my hotel. Not to my room, but to the front. I wanted to know which rooms Dennis Wayland and Lee Spenser were staying in. It was convenient that two of the men on the list were staying in my hotel.

  The clerk gave me the room numbers, then said, “But they’re not in their rooms. They’re in having coffee.” He nodded a shining, bald head in the direction of the hotel restaurant. “Those slings are a nuisance, aren’t they? I had to wear one for a month one time. And wait till you take it off. You won’t have any real feeling in your arm for a day or two.”

  I thanked him with a nod and then went into the restaurant. It was Victorian in the heaviness of its furnishings and the lack of sunlight. There was an almost funereal sense to the large room. All the workers wore clothes of dark brown and black. Cheery.

  Wayland and Spenser made it easy for me. They were the only two people in the place except for a thin woman with twitching nervous eyes, sipping tea.

  Wayland and Spenser both watched me walk toward them. When I was about halfway there they glanced at each other.

  I moved the discussion along right away. I set my inspector’s badge down and pulled out a chair with my good hand and sat down.

  The heavy red-haired man in the dark suit said, “You must be working with the marshal.”

  “Are you Wayland?” I asked him.

  “No. Spenser.” There was something of the Viking about him. Maybe it was the red hair and the broken nose. Or maybe it was the simple, deep-blue ferocity of the pitiless eyes. “You’d think the government would have better ways of wasting money than to have people like you follow us around.” His size and attitude suggested strength.

  “I
’m Wayland, Mr. Ford.”

  “We need to talk a little bit,” I said.

  “I’m trying to have a goddamn drink and a goddamn meal if you don’t goddamn mind it,” Spenser said.

  They make a mistake, men like these two. They work for the rich and powerful and then slowly begin to believe that they’re rich and powerful themselves. They’re not. They’re hired functionaries, the same as I am.

  “Mind telling me why you’re in town?” I said.

  “None of your damned business,” Spenser snapped.

  “Oh, hell, don’t let him rile you, Spenser,” Wayland said. He was tall, slim, lawyerly, right down to the way he tucked his thumbs into the slant pockets of his vest. He had thinning brown hair and shrewd brown eyes. “He thinks he matters because he has a badge, and that’s supposed to frighten people like us.”

  Wayland talked like a lawyer, too, but there was a hurt, weak, quality to his eyes, and his voice was pitched higher than he probably liked.

  But Spenser couldn’t let go. “Some gunny with a badge thinks he’s some big important man.” He glared up at me. He had a bubble of steak sauce hanging off his fierce red mustache. This probably wasn’t a good time to mention it. “There’s nothing illegal in what I’m doing. I work for the Brits, yes. The Brits are friends of ours, in case you hadn’t heard. And they need to defend themselves the same way we do. That means keeping up with new weapons. I’m here by invitation of…” He hadn’t made the connection before. “Ford. I was here at David Ford’s invitation.” His rage cooled some. “Was he a relative?”

  “Brother.”

  The two men looked at each other again.

  Wayland said, “That’s odd, isn’t it? You investigating your own brother?”

  They obviously didn’t know that I’d used the gun as a pretext. Yes, the government wanted it. That had been their interest in David. Mine was in saving my brother’s life. If another investigator had been sent, he likely would have killed David on the spot.

  “I grew up with him,” I said. “I knew his patterns and how he thought. It made sense for the Army to send me down here.”