by Jake Logan
“Where’s Hawkins?”
“You’re going to kill him?”
“Is he here?”
“You can’t shoot him. John! We’re getting married tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to make you a widow. I’ll cut him down tonight.”
“I’m begging you, don’t. Let him be. Let me marry him. I have to!”
Slocum stared at her. She was earnest, and her eyes welled with tears at the idea of Hawkins being put into one of his caskets.
“You don’t know what he’s done, what he’s capable of doing. A woman like you can marry any man she wants.”
Miranda snorted in contempt. Her lip curled and she shook her head vigorously, her hair spun out from her face and formed an auburn halo that made her all the more beautiful. If only she didn’t look as if she was going to bite him.
“You don’t know what I’ve gone through. Please, trust me. Believe me when I say I want to marry him.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. It’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride on the night before the wedding. Leonard said he was going to spend his night somewhere else. With one of his brothers perhaps.”
Slocum knew Hawkins wasn’t with the marshal. That left the bank president’s house as the likeliest refuge for the undertaker after the fight at the cemetery.
“Where does the bank president live?”
“Kenneth? I don’t know. I was only introduced to him this afternoon. He was quite brusque.”
“That’s the bank president?”
“Yes, Kenneth Hawkins. He is going to be his brother’s best man. Tomorrow. Or is it today? Time is getting away from me.”
“Crying over dead outlaws can do that,” Slocum said. “You know him?”
“No.” Miranda looked confused at the sudden turn. “I don’t really know anyone in Espero.”
Slocum started to mention the man wearing the oilcloth slicker, then held back. A crash of thunder masked another sound, a softer noise. Water dripped onto a floor somewhere else—and a puff of wind from outside moved the heavy velvet curtains. He swung his six-gun away from the woman and trained it on the drapes just as a shotgun barrel pushed the heavy material aside.
Slocum and the man with the shotgun fired at the same instant. The shotgun blast tore away part of the coffin. Slocum’s bullet flew straight and true. As the man crashed forward, pulling the drapery with him, Slocum saw he had finished the job Polly had begun out on the road. The man dead on the floor had his right arm bandaged up and held in a sling. Using a shotgun had been his only option. Wielding it left-handed—clumsily—spelled his death.
“You killed him,” Miranda said in a small voice. “Just like that, you shot him down.”
Slocum hardly listened. He swung around the doorway, six-shooter trained on the outer lobby. The door to the street swung to and fro as the growing storm wind clutched at it. A quick look outside showed only one horse. Slocum ducked back inside and secured the door with a locking bar.
Miranda waited for him in the viewing room. She had taken a chair to the side, hands folded in her lap. She looked more composed than before. Adapting to a pair of corpses in the same room had come easily for her, Slocum thought.
“Why’d he come back?”
“Leonard might have sent him to be my bodyguard. He said something this afternoon about someone wanting to harm him through me. That is pure fantasy, of course.”
“Yeah, pure fantasy,” Slocum said. He slid his Colt back into its holster, grabbed the man on the floor by the collar, and dragged him across the floor, leaving a thin trail of sticky blood behind. Getting his feet under him, Slocum heaved and got the man upright. “Help me,” he said. He had found out the hard way why the man’s moniker was Porkbelly.
“What are you going to do?”
“Two to a coffin’s still more than they deserve.”
Miranda grabbed the outlaw’s feet and guided them up over the edge of the coffin. Slocum dropped the man on top of the other. Then he searched the man’s pockets and found only a silver dollar. He pocketed it, much to Miranda’s disgust.
“Do you always rob men you’ve just slaughtered?”
“When they stole all my money before burying me alive, yeah,” Slocum said. “Somebody still owes me for escorting you to Espero.”
“But Leonard paid you . . .” Her voice trailed off. Her lips thinned and she looked at him like a mother scolding her young ’un. “You aren’t saying Leonard had anything to do with that robbery, are you? That’s absurd. And burying a man alive? That’s why he provides the bells for many of his customers. He told me about a story by some Baltimore writer named Poe. ‘Premature Burial,’ the man wrote. Leonard said he would read it to me after we are married so I can better understand his business.”
Thunder crashed outside. A momentary flash of lighting lit the room a dozen times brighter than the oil lamp on the table. Slocum studied Miranda’s face and again marveled at her beauty. And her gullibility believing she had a life with Leonard Hawkins. Even a brief talk with the man ought to have sent her galloping away as fast as she could ride.
“Where’s the wedding supposed to be?”
“There’s a barn at the far end of town. I’m not sure who will perform the ceremony since Leonard said the preacher had died some time ago and Espero never replaced him. He told me he had requested a circuit preacher, but I don’t know if he’s arrived. There might be a judge in town. Whoever it is marrying us, Leonard promised me it would be legal.”
Slocum wondered at the woman’s concern for the marriage being official when she was marrying a vicious killer. But she remained oblivious to that, no matter how the evidence piled up around him. Slocum glanced at the two corpses. Even those deaths did nothing to spook her.
“You’ll be all right. I need to find Kenneth Hawkins.”
“Wait. The rain. The storm’s getting worse. Stay. Please.” She came out of her chair and grasped his arm rightly enough that he had to yank away to break her grip. “I don’t want to be alone tonight, John.”
He couldn’t fathom what she was asking of him. It sounded as if she intended him to share her bed, but everything Miranda said spoke of her devotion to Leonard Hawkins. How being cuckolded the night before his wedding would set with the undertaker hardly occurred to Slocum. What did make him wonder was the woman’s attitude.
“If I can’t find him tonight, I’ll be at the barn for the wedding.”
“John, please. I’m begging you. Don’t hurt Leonard. Let me marry him.”
He evaded her grasp again and stepped across the bloody trail on the floor. There would be more blood spilled before the night was over if he found Hawkins.
He closed the outer door against her pleas to let Hawkins be. The fury of the storm sending down sheets of rain suited him better. The storm had moved quickly and drove raindrops straight down. His good intentions putting his pinto in the lee of the wind had been for nothing. He swung up into the creaking, wet saddle and rode into the rain, wiping rivers from his eyes as he went up one street and down another hunting for the bank. When he found it, his hopes soared.
A house attached to the rear of the bank might be Kenneth Hawkins’s living quarters. Slocum wondered if the banker had the same dedication to money that his brother did to death. It was almost too much to hope that Kenneth Hawkins viewed banking the same way his youngest brother did law enforcement.
Dismounting, Slocum went to a window and peered inside. A kerosene lamp put out a sputtering yellow light. The lamp’s wick needed trimming. In fact, the whole shabby house needed renovation. The furniture was in disrepair, and the cupboard door hung on one hinge, revealing a sparse larder. Hawkins might not live here, but the almost full lamp burned, showing someone had been here recently.
Slocum went to the door and lifted the latch. He shoved, but the doo
r resisted. The rain had caused the wood to swell. Putting his shoulder to the door bought him swift entry. Keeping his gun roving around the room as he sought a target, he took in more of the furnishings. A bank president living in squalor like this boggled the mind.
He crossed the small room and poked through a trunk filled with quilts and a man’s clothing. Slocum turned slowly when he heard movement behind him. His pistol lifted to center on Kenneth Hawkins’s midsection.
“What are you, a sneak thief? I don’t have anything to steal!”
“Come in and close the door.” Slocum motioned with his six-gun for the banker to sit in one of the two chairs at the table. “What is this place?”
“What’s it look like? This is my home.”
Slocum hid his surprise. Hawkins sounded truthful.
“You don’t believe I can live like this?” The bitterness told more than the words. “Leonard doesn’t believe that bankers deserve to be paid well. Or hardly at all. The boy sweeping up at the general store makes more than I do. I know; I loaned old man Bennett enough to keep him going when business died down here.” Hawkins looked at Slocum. “The railroad went to Dexter Junction, not to Espero.”
“All that’s left here is ranching.”
“And some farming, of course.”
Slocum waved the six-gun about to indicate the house.
“Why do you stay if your brother owns the bank and won’t let you earn a decent wage?”
Kenneth Hawkins turned pale. He wiped rain from his face with a hand shaking so badly he might have palsy.
“You don’t know Leonard. He’s not like other men. His interests are strange and dangerous—for everyone else.”
“I know he buried the Nevilles alive to force Liam Neville to sign over the deed to the Box N.”
Hawkins closed his eyes as his lips moved in a silent prayer. He heaved a deep breath and looked at Slocum.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“The hell you didn’t. You’re no fool. You know what he’s doing to this town.”
“Nothing he hasn’t done before. You asked why I stay. That gang following his every whim.”
“You can get away. It’s not as if you would be leaving much behind.” Slocum looked around the room. The quilts and clothing in the single chest were worth more than the rest of the possessions combined, with the house itself thrown in for good measure.
“He would catch me. And if he did . . .”
“What would he do to you?”
“The same as he did to our parents. The same as he did to the Nevilles.”
Slocum almost pulled the trigger to put the man out of his misery.
“He buried your ma and pa alive?”
“He sat under a tree on the hill reading a story aloud, as if they could hear it.”
“Something by this Poe fellow?”
Hawkins’s eyebrows arched in surprise.
“Leonard is quite a reader. He reads everything he can find if it has to do with death, burials, and funeral rituals. He forced me to sit and listen as he read ‘A Cask of Amontillado’ and then ‘Premature Burial.’ It took him the better part of an afternoon. When we left, they had been buried for more than two hours. There wasn’t any way they could have been alive.”
Hawkins looked around, then smiled without a trace of humor. “He made me read another story to him. ‘The TellTale Heart.’ I swear I hear their screams in the night and have ever since I was seven.”
“If you had any gumption, you would get a gun and shoot the son of a bitch.”
“I couldn’t. His eyes are like knives, piercing your soul. He knows what I’m thinking before I do.”
“You should have shot him in the back, then,” Slocum said in distaste. “He’s a monster and preys on other people’s fears.”
“He’s gotten fat off mine,” Kenneth Hawkins admitted.
“Where is he?”
“You mean to shoot him down?”
“Like the mad dog that he is,” Slocum said. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. If I did, believe me, I would tell you. If you spooked him, he’s probably with Julian. If there’s anyone more vicious than my brother, it’s him. They see enough of themselves in the other that they’ve become fast friends.”
Slocum suspected that all Leonard Hawkins wanted was power. He shared freely the ill-gotten spoils of his extortion and outright robbery with Julian. Men like that sought money, not power, because a town eventually got up enough backbone in its citizens to have a necktie party. Why the people of Espero hadn’t done that with Hawkins was something he didn’t need to explore. They hadn’t.
He would.
“Where do Julian and his gang camp when they’re in town? Is there a hotel? A saloon where they hang out?”
“I never heard. They might be at the hotel since Leonard owns it. The saloon, too.” Kenneth Hawkins smiled his rueful smile and added, “He almost gives the drinks away. That keeps the people drunk and from getting too frisky.”
“You’re his best man?”
“The wedding? Yes, I am. Tomorrow morning at nine A.M. sharp.”
“Where?”
Kenneth knew Slocum’s interest. If Leonard or the gang couldn’t be found tonight, the wedding gave the best chance of gunning down the undertaker.
“There’s a barn behind the livery stable that hasn’t been used for anything more ’n barn dances this past year. That’s where Leonard’s going to tie the knot.”
That jibed with what Miranda had told him. Slocum got up to leave, paused, and had to ask a final question.
“Why’s she marrying him?”
He hadn’t expected an answer and didn’t get one from the banker. Some questions might not have answers, and this was one of them. He pushed out into the storm, intent on finding the hotel in the hope that Leonard Hawkins slept there. The sooner he died, the sooner the town would be free and Slocum could move on.
10
The banker wasn’t wrong.
“I’ll have another,” Slocum said, pushing his nickel across the bar and getting another shot of whiskey. It wasn’t the best he had ever swilled, but it was good enough and was just what he needed. Horace just stared at him. After the first time in the Six Feet Under when Slocum had expertly identified the whiskey’s content, the formula had been changed. Slocum didn’t detect the nitric acid in this batch.
“I remember you. You’re the gent what brung Mr. Hawkins’s new missus to town, aren’t you? The one with Max when he was gunned down?” The barkeep hitched up his drawers and rearranged the apron tied around his ample middle.
Slocum nodded, tasted the whiskey, letting it burn his lips. A quick movement sent the entire ounce down his throat. It warmed him when he needed something cool against the humid night, but the calming effect of the alcohol was worth the heat.
“You still workin’ for him?”
Slocum looked up sharply. The man’s apprehension told Slocum how fully Leonard Hawkins controlled this town.
“Can’t say I am. Just staying for the wedding.”
Horace relaxed a mite, working on restacking the shot glasses behind the bar.
“You better be ready for a big wingding. Mr. Hawkins has been talkin’ about his new wife ever since that first time she writ back. This is a cause for real celebration in Espero. Yes, sir, it is.”
“There’s no need to convince yourself of that,” Slocum said.
“What do you mean?”
“I know he owns this saloon and damned near everything else in town. I know how he keeps everyone under his thumb, you included.”
“You’re talkin’ crazy, mister.” The barkeep moved away, taking an occasional look over his shoulder as if Slocum had grown horns and a spade tail.
Slocum ran his finger around the rim of the glass, then licked the
last drop off. At the prices charged, he could buy an entire bottle for fifty cents and not go blind drinking it. Rather than ask for another, Slocum let the water drip off him onto the sawdust covering the floor. He hadn’t found Hawkins anywhere. The man knew the town—hell, he owned the town—and after the dustup out at the cemetery, he was likely to lie low for a spell. Considering he went ahead with his wedding in the morning, he might be in bed somewhere with a whore.
That thought made Slocum shudder. What would he do to a soiled dove who didn’t pleasure him enough? What would he do to Miranda if she failed in her wifely duties? A man with the twisted tastes of the undertaker undoubtedly had appetites no normal woman could satisfy. Saying he would make her a coffin as a wedding present might only be the start.
His search through the rain-drenched streets had failed to turn up Julian and his gang, too. Hawkins might be holed up with them, fearing not only Slocum but Liam Neville and his daughter. This brought a smile to Slocum’s lips. He knew nothing about Polly’s pa, but he had seen how determined she was. Losing her brother and ma made her all the more dangerous to Hawkins. She wouldn’t care about the law, about trials or anything but getting her revenge.
He moved his hand closer to his Colt Navy as he vowed to beat her to Leonard Hawkins. Polly had been wronged, but she hadn’t been buried alive. Slocum caught his breath as he remembered the darkness, the closed-in pine walls, the air turning worse with every breath he took.
To cover his remembered discomfort, Slocum started to call out to the barkeep. He glanced into the mirror behind the bar and saw a pair of men pushing their way into the saloon. One made a beeline for the bar to order. The other, thinner man hung back to scout out everyone in the room. His head looked as if it had gotten caught between an anvil and a smithy’s hammer, but it was the scar on the left cheek that confirmed Slocum’s suspicion. This was Julian, the man who had buried him alive.
Slocum turned away from the barkeep so his hand could move easily to his six-shooter. He kept turning, whirled about, and leveled his Colt.
Julian had anticipated the move and had ducked back into the night.