The Killing Machine

by Ed Gorman

  He was calmed, but not by much. “Federal or not doesn’t give you a right to treat one of the most prominent men in this whole Territory the way you just did.”

  “You’re right, it doesn’t, sir.”

  “Go on now, Felix. I’ll explain this all later.”

  Muttonchops picked up his bowler. Flicked fat fingers at dust I couldn’t see. “You haven’t had any bigger supporter than me over the years, Marshal. I’d keep that in mind.”

  He walked out. He tried to look dignified but he tended to waddle and waddling is a bitch when it comes to dignity.

  I closed the door.

  Wickham said, “You better be on the money with this, Ford. That man is the biggest gossip in three states. My nephew’s reputation’ll be ruined within half an hour.”

  “He’s already ruined it himself,” I said.

  “Let’s hear it then.”

  He sat down. Grabbed his pipe. The ruddy face was suddenly pale. “What the hell am I going to tell my sister if this is true? He was a kind of rough-and-tumble kid, but he never got into any serious trouble before.”

  “Any deputies here?”

  “Two in the back, one going off shift, another coming on.”

  “Tell them to go round up Wayland and Brinkley.”

  “For what?”

  “Now,” I said. “Right now. I’m pulling rank on you, Marshal.”

  He went and started talking to them in a loud, harassed voice. He told them to each take a repeater, because he didn’t know what they were walking into, the fucking Federale not telling him a fucking thing, so take the fucking repeaters, you hear me?

  Then he came back and slammed the door shut behind him and went and sat behind his desk and said, “I didn’t like you much before, Ford. Now I don’t even like you that much.”

  I told him everything I knew and when I finished, he said, “Now there’s a load of horseshit if I ever heard it. I can’t believe he’s a killer.”

  “He killed Gwen, if nobody else.”

  “If you say so.” He was bitter.

  It was clear he couldn’t admit this to himself. He could convince me that Clarion couldn’t have done all it took to kill people and get the gun. But he couldn’t convince me he hadn’t killed Gwen. He couldn’t convince me because I’d been there and seen it.

  Then, “He kill her in cold blood?”

  “Second degree. They won’t hang him.”

  There were tears in his voice. “And I’ll have to go tell his mother. My sister’s a damned sweet woman and her health isn’t all that good, anyway. I’m just afraid of what this’ll do to her.”

  “I’m sorry for that, Marshal. But right now I’m worried about little Julia. How fast can you round up a posse?”

  His eyes were distant. I supposed he was rehearsing his words to his sister. Seems like our Frank kind’ve went a little crazy, I’m afraid, Sis. He, uh. Killed a woman and now he’s kidnapped a little girl. I hate to say this, Sis, but if he contacts you in any way, you’ll have to let me know right away. It’ll be better if we bring him in safe and sound. I’ve got a posse looking for him and if they find him first—well, every lawman, even a young one like Frank, he makes enemies in a town this size. And I’m sure there are a couple of fellas who’d just love to shoot him. Now, don’t cry, honey. I’m not tryin’ to scare you; I’m just trying to make you understand that you and I have to do everything we can to bring him in safe and sound. I know how loyal you are to him—but right now you need to help me bring him in.

  Then, coming out of his thoughts, he said, “What’d you say?”

  “I said we need a posse, and damned fast.”

  “That won’t be any trouble.”

  He usually stood up fast and straight, the way a much younger man would. But there was a decided weariness in his bones and posture now. He looked his age. “I’ll need half an hour.”

  “I’ll be out front.”

  The men were about what you’d expect to find in a town this size. Six of the men were middle-aged, sober, quiet. They wore heavy coats and carried hunting rifles.

  You can usually judge a posse by its demeanor. The two young men passed a pint of rye back and forth and laughed a lot.

  I walked up to the one with the fancy Stetson and said, “We won’t be needing you boys.”

  “Oh, is that right? And just who the fuck would you be?”

  I showed them my badge. “Appreciate you stopping by. But these six men’ll be all we need.”

  His friend with the flat-brimmed black hat said, “You can’t tell us what to do.”

  “I can as far as this posse’s concerned. Now, again, I appreciate you stopping by. Maybe we can use you later on, but for now, we’ve got what we need.”

  I didn’t realize just how drunk they were until Stetson started for his gun. He caught his thumb on his belt loop. I ripped the gun from his holster and pointed it at him and told him to get down.

  “You ain’t got no right to order me around.”

  “Sure, I do,” I said. Then lost patience. I reached up and grabbed the edge of his sheepskin and jerked him out of his saddle and stirrups. He hit the ground hard, the way a drunk usually does. Somebody shouted, “Behind you!”

  I swiveled in time to see his friend going for his gun. Stetson had been drunk and clumsy. This one was drunk and slow. I put a bullet in his hat and said, “The next one goes into your forehead.”

  Wickham had been inside, giving one of his day deputies instructions for holding down the office while the boss was gone.

  The marshal was preceded out the front door by the barrel of his Winchester. “What the hell’s goin’ on out here?”

  “These two,” I said. “I want them jugged for twenty-four hours.”

  “Verne,” he said, over his shoulder. “Get out here and bring your shotgun.” He sneered at the two young ones. “The Link brothers. I thought I told you, you weren’t invited on this posse.”

  “It’s a free country,” said the one just picking himself up from the ground. He still looked dazed from hitting the ground so hard.

  The other one said, petulantly, “He darned near killed me, Marshal. And with no call at all.”

  “Phil was goin’ for his gun,” one of the older posse men said. “Behind this man’s back.”

  “Gosh, Phil,” the marshal said, “and here I figured you were innocent as usual. People just like to shoot at you for no reason at all, don’t they?”

  “You don’t have no call to mock me,” Phil said.

  Wickham scowled. “Punks with pride.” He nodded to Verne. “Get them the hell in a cell.”

  Verne came and led the Link brothers off.

  Wickham spent five minutes dividing the six men into two groups, giving them specific areas to cover. Then we were off. Wickham and I rode together.

  It was three hours before we found Frank Clarion. The chill told me that despite the sunshine and the burning leaves, this was the last of autumn. You could smell and taste the snow that was in the mountains and headed down the passes. Scarecrows watched us from just about half the farm fields; huge orange pumpkins were lined up in front yards, just waiting to be carved into boogeymen; and sleek black crows walked around with a certain jaunty air.

  Wickham had written down a list of six places Clarion was likely to hide out. An abandoned railroad shack near the foothills, a cave that the Cree sometimes used for ceremonies, a cave in a limestone wall above a leg in the river, a deserted farmhouse, a burned-out church with a usable basement, and one of Clarion’s aunts who loved the boy very much. Too much, according to Wickham.

  The burned-out church and the deserted farmhouse were ours. We didn’t find him or any evidence that he’d been there. On the stage road back toward town, one of the posse men came riding hard to tell us that everybody was up at the abandoned railroad shack.

  We joined the rider for the hour-long journey to the shack. The men were gathered behind a copse of birches, their shotguns leaning against the tr
ees.

  “Wanted to wait for you, Marshal,” said a man who’d introduced himself to me as Brian Lamott. “We didn’t want to take no chances with that little girl.”

  “I appreciate that. So you got a look at him?”

  Lamott nodded. He must’ve ground-tied his horse up there in the grass on that hill where we couldn’t see it at first. But then the horse drifted down and Pop there saw it and we knew he was here.”

  The shack was tiny, weather-raw. No windows. I thought of Julia. Her mother dead and her in the control of a scared and crazed young outlaw.

  Wickham said, “I’m going to walk over to the shack.”

  I grabbed his arm. “You sure about this?”

  He just looked at me. “This is what you’d do if he was your kin, wouldn’t you?”

  He knew the answer to that.

  “I’ll keep a repeater on that door,” I said.

  “No need. If he wants to kill his own uncle, then I wouldn’t want to live, anyway.” The weariness in the voice and eyes was now joined with real sadness.

  So the seven of us sat and waited and watched. Seven unremarkable men on a tiny piece of unremarkable land playing out a drama that very few people gave a damn about. You had to wonder how many hundreds of such dramas had been played out in the shadow of these looming mountains.

  “He won’t shoot him,” one man said.

  “I never did like that little prick,” said another.

  “I don’t hear the little girl cryin’ out or nothing,” said a third. “Maybe he killed her already.”

  “Hell of a thing after the way the marshal treated him all these years.”

  “How about his mama? She don’t have good health as it is. Think what’ll happen now.”

  I said nothing. There was nothing to say. I was a stranger here on a job, passing through. I didn’t know the particulars of any of it.

  Wickham was halfway to the cabin when Clarion ducked into the doorframe and blazed off two quick shots. He didn’t hit Wickham, hadn’t intended to. He just hoped to scare his uncle. But if his uncle was scared, he didn’t show it. He didn’t even break step. He just kept walking.

  I’d had my repeater trained on the door, but I realized that if a shot went wide it might hit the little girl. And it might just go wide, too, what with the wind. The wood of the shack was so worn a bullet would pass clean through it.

  “I want to help you, boy,” Wickham shouted. The wind was up. Hard to be heard without shouting.

  “Nothin’ you can do,” Clarion shouted back.

  “Is Julia alive?”

  “I didn’t mean to kill Gwen. I loved her.”

  “Dammit, I said is the girl alive?”

  “Yes. I got her gagged is all.”

  “I’m coming in.”

  “I don’t want you to do that.”

  All this time Wickham kept his pace, walking, walking, straight to the shack.

  “I’m walking in there, Frank. You’ll have to kill me to stop me.”

  “You sonofabitch.”

  Which meant that he didn’t have whatever he needed—the wrong kind of courage, the right kind of hatred—to kill his own blood.

  Just as he reached the cabin, Wickham turned around and cupped a hand to his mouth and said, “You boys go on back to town. I’m gonna handle this myself from now on. I appreciate the help and I’ll stand you all to a good meal and a night of drinks. But you head back now.”

  One thing about Wickham. He had the kind of authority that made whatever he said believable. This wasn’t any ruse, any game. He wanted us gone. God alone knew what he had in mind.

  The men responded as I figured they would.

  “He means it, fellas,” one man said.

  The others grumbled their agreement.

  But it was easy to see they had enough respect for Wickham to do what he said.

  “I guess it’s a family matter now,” a man said.

  The retreat was ragged. A couple men didn’t mount up till the others had started away. They watched me. “You going?” said the white-haired man.

  “You better do what Wickham says,” I said.

  He said, “Your shit don’t stink, huh?”

  “He don’t gotta go, Fred. He’s got a badge.”

  “So does my grandson. I got it for him for his birthday.”

  They got on their horses and rode away. I hid behind a boulder. I could hear them in there, their voices but not their words.

  I spent most of my time trying to figure out if Wayland had gotten out of town before the deputy got him. He seemed to have a way of finding out things faster than just about anybody. He couldn’t leave on a train because the deputy would check that. He couldn’t rent a horse and wagon because the livery man would tell us. But what he could do was buy a horse and wagon from a private citizen, pay the man enough to keep his mouth shut, and then take off across country with the gun in the wagon bed and his mind filled with dancing dollar signs.

  I thought of David then, and my folks. Sometimes I got sentimental and thought about going back there. But even if I wanted to make it up with them, my presence there would shame them. They probably didn’t even speak of me anymore, as if I’d died or had never existed in the first place. A well-raised boy like me fighting on the side of the Union. It was not anything that could ever be lived down. Not for my parents. Society, no matter what society you care to name, never has room for people who betray its most sacred principles, even if those principles are clearly wrong.

  The girl came out first. She didn’t run. In fact, she moved so slowly I guessed that she was still in some kind of shock. She stumbled a couple of times, but didn’t fall. Then right in the middle of the clearing, between my position and the shack, she sat down, probably on Wickham’s orders. The two men were still talking inside the cabin. Their voices had raised.

  I walked out into the clearing and picked up Julia. Her eyes had the eerie blankness you saw in children of the war. I’d once shot a slaver who was holding three Yankee prisoners. I’d faced him off and told him to turn them over to me. He’d refused and then his son, in the haymow, had leaned out into the sunlight, his rifle barrel glinting. I killed the father first and then the son. A little girl came running out from the back door. She ran straight to the bodies. Her mother came then, trying to comfort the girl. When the girl looked up at me, the emptiness of her gaze startled me. No hatred; not even anger. Just this strange, flat stare. There are some realities the mind doesn’t want to register. Julia looked like that now.

  There were two shots inside the shack. If my ear was true, two shots from the same gun. Julia started to cry quietly. The sound of the gunshots had probably brought everything back to her, especially the death of her mother. I said, “I’ll be right back.”

  She just stared at me.

  But I didn’t have to walk far. Wickham came out from the shack. His Colt hung precariously from his fingers, as if he didn’t want it. And apparently he didn’t, because he let it drop to the ground. Then he just fell back against the shack. The entire structure swayed on the edge of collapse. He wasn’t a small man, Wickham.

  “What the hell am I going to tell my sister Emma?” he said when I reached him.

  He staggered forward, as if he might fall facedown. I got a shoulder against him and said, “Take it easy.”

  “I didn’t have any choice.” Tears shook his voice. “He was going to shoot me.”

  “C’mon, we need to get back to town.”

  In the middle distance, Julia stood up. Sunlight gleamed on top of her head. Sight of her seemed to make him forget Clarion a moment.

  “You go on to her,” I said. “I’ll get a look at Clarion.”

  “At Clarion? What the hell for?”

  “Make sure he’s actually dead, for one thing.”

  “Oh.” He settled down.

  “Then I’ll get his horse and pitch him over it.”

  “My poor sister.”

  “You go on now, Marshal. That li
ttle girl could use a friend about now.”

  He nodded groggily, as if he was only understanding about half of what I said to him.

  Chapter 19

  I went inside the shack. The dirt floor smelled like an old grave. The other smell gave the impression that every animal within a radius of fifty miles had used this shack as a toilet at one time or another. On top of these smells were the smells Clarion made. He was dead, all right. I didn’t need a pulse or a mirror beneath his nose to tell me that. He was dead, all right.

  Ten minutes later, I slung him across the back of his horse, tied him down as good as I could, and then I rode back to where Julia and Wickham waited on his horse. She was talking some now. Her eyes shone with life again. A pained expression, true. But life, real life.

  The trip back seemed endless. Julia would get crying so hard that we’d have to stop and take turns holding, almost rocking, her like a little baby. She kept asking if her mom was still alive, as if asking it enough times would change the same whispered answer we always gave her.

  The men from the posse were in the marshal’s office. He went in there and talked to them and I took Julia over to the hospital.

  The first thing Jane did was get her two cookies and a glass of milk. We sat at one of the tables in the break room. Julia said she wasn’t hungry. She was still young enough to fit nicely on Jane’s lap. Jane rocked her and talked to her and suggested that Julia at least try the cookie. She did. She looked ashamed for liking it. How could you eat a cookie when your mother had just been shot to death? But then, like a tiny animal, her small, pale hand darted out at the saucer with the cookie on it and she took another bite.

  When I walked into Wickham’s private office, he was pulled up tight to his desk. His head was in his hand. He stared straight down at the shiny, empty surface of his desk.

  I sat down. “You talk to your sister?”

  “Yeah.” Not looking up.

  “How’d it go?”

  “How’d you think it’d go?”