Showdown

by Edward Gorman / Ed Gorman

  SHOWDOWN

  (Previously Gun Truth)

  Ed Gorman

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2012 / Ed Gorman

  Copy-edited by: David Dodd

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  Background Images provided by:

  Image from the public domain

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS PRODUCTS BY ED GORMAN

  Novels:

  Nightmare Child

  Serpent's Kiss

  Shadow Games

  The End of It All

  Voodoo Moon

  The Thomas Dwyer Series:

  Murder in the Wings

  The Autumn Dead

  A Cry of Shadows

  Novellas:

  Cast in Dark Waters (with Tom Piccirilli)

  Buy Direct From Crossroad Press & Save

  Try any title from CROSSROAD PRESS – use the Coupon Code FIRSTBOOK for a one-time 20% savings! We have a wide variety of eBook and Audiobook titles available.

  Find us at: http://store.crossroadpress.com

  Chapter One

  You couldn't pick up a newspaper these days without finding an article or editorial about how barbed wire had changed everything out west. Some were for it, some were agin it.

  It was 1886 and people were still arguing about it. Some said it made good friends; some said barbed wire made blood enemies.

  Al Woodward was agin it. While it was fine for ranchers and farmers and livestock breeders, it was hell on insurance investigators.

  Take tonight.

  Al Woodward, a freelance insurance investigator for several different companies, had been climbing through some barbed wire when one of the barbs tore the right buttock of his new trousers. And dug a painful little trench of hot blood across the same buttock.

  But Al was more worried about his trousers than his buttock.

  These weren't your Sears & Roebucks or your Monkey Wards at $1.49. These were $3.98 trousers bought at one of the best men's stores in Chicago, purchased only two weeks ago.

  Al cursed himself for wearing these tonight. Damned barbed wire.

  Now that he stood upright, his hand unconsciously favoring the rip in his trousers, he looked around at the large round lake whose surface shimmered with moonlight, some of the shimmers even playing off the scrub pines that encircled three sides of the water. Pretty as a painting of a lake at nighttime, but

  Damned barbed wire. And damned stupid dime-novel melodrama. Meeting out here. There wasn't any place closer to meet?

  Al Woodward was in town working on an arson case. He'd been here two days now and had just this afternoon started putting the scheme and the person responsible together. The local fire folks, amateurs at best, hadn't seen any evidence of arson. But to Al it was obvious. He'd talked to some people who lived near the small factory, and the way they described the fire, there wasn't much doubt that it had been set by human hand. He'd even found two pieces of two-by-four that had been scorched in a way that indicated kerosene.

  Al had also turned up a man who claimed—by letter—that he had been paid to start the fire. He'd found the letter late this afternoon in his hotel room. Pushed under the door.

  The letter contained a map of the lake here, and how to reach it, and the time to be there and meet the arsonist.

  Well, here was pants-torn Al . . . where the hell was the man who'd summoned him?

  He heard a distant noise from the town of Claybank. He responded instinctively by turning his head in that direction. And when he did, he saw the object on the narrow band of sandy shore that ran around sixty percent of the lake.

  He had a pretty good idea of what it was, which was why he hesitated at first to tromp over there for a closer look. He wasn't a brave man and never pretended to be. When saloon friends boasted of their courage, he kept his mouth shut. He was no hero.

  What had moments before been a lovely scene of moonlight-limned pines and lake had quickly become a deserted and sinister collection of shadowy crevices, forbidding woods, and a body of water that held God knew what.

  He was for that instant a child again, afraid of the dark because of all those stupid ghost stories his cousin Purvis was always telling him when he stayed overnight. Even at seven years old, he'd recognized those stories as so much bushwah. But they scared him nonetheless. (He was a suggestible boy, just as he became a suggestible man, unable to read any medical articles because he came down with every disease he'd ever read about, totaling, by now, six bouts of leprosy and something like forty-one heart attacks.)

  He had to go over there and see what the hell was lying on the shore. Even from here, it was obvious what it was. But maybe the person was still alive. Maybe there would be something Al Woodward could do to help him.

  He didn't hurry.

  And he kept moving his eyes around, looking for the merest sign of life. Maybe the man had been felled by an animal. Or maybe been bitten by a snake. Or maybe simply had a heart attack like one of the forty-one heart attacks he himself had had.

  But then again

  It didn't take an Edgar Allan Poe to come up with the idea that maybe the man (and the closer he got, the more clearly the shape became a facedown man) had come out here to meet Al and was then met by the man he was going to snitch on. And the snitchee killed him.

  Happened all the time. Al, right off the top of his head, could think of six or seven incidents like this working out of the Kansas City office alone.

  Arson was a serious charge, especially when it involved, as this case did, the death of a man who'd been trapped inside. The man had been a late-night worker who'd been trapped in the flames because they engulfed the building so quickly. Now, maybe the arsonist hadn't planned on killing anybody—probably hadn't, in fact—but that didn't matter. A man was dead, murdered. First degree, second degree, manslaughter. That would be up to a jury to decide.

  The man wore a tan twill shirt and tan twill trousers. The kind of clothes, almost uniformlike, that workmen in the city had started wearing.

  His elbows were cocked on either side of him. His feet were in the gently lapping dark water from about the top of the ankle on down. He had dark hair, small ears, wide shoulders, slender hips. There was really nothing remarkable about him at all.

  By this time, Al Woodward was on his haunches. He gaped around because he had this feeling that somebody was watching him.

  That darn Purvis.

  He had a terrible thought: Maybe he was going to pee his pants. Wouldn't that be something? At his age? He'd peed them right in front of Purvis one night. Humiliating.

  Al really didn't have time to register much but pain. The man came up so quickly—right up from the beach like somebody who'd been buried alive—and locked his hands on Al's throat so forcefully that Al felt his life choking away immediately.

  Al's eyes began to pop. Blood imbued his cheeks with an ugly redness. Sweat beads like transparent warts covered his forehead. Saliva began to erupt out of him. His nostrils ran with blood. His false teeth flew out and hit his killer in the face. Far from being annoyed by this, the killer only laughed, as if the false teeth had been a part of a joke.

  The killer had thought this through.

  His next move was to spin around—taking Al with him—and push Al into the dark,
lapping lake itself. Noise of water splashing furiously. Noise of Al making strangled screams in his throat. Noise of the killer breathing hard. This wasn't easy, not easy at all.

  And then the killer baptized Al unto death. Held his head under water until Al had ceased his useless thrashing, his faint, would-be cries.

  The killer spent only a few more minutes with Al, roping twenty-pound blocks of iron onto each ankle and then swimming the corpse out to the middle of the lake, where the water was at least thirty feet deep and numbingly cold.

  For a long moment, Al bobbed on the surface of the lake, a sad puffy figure painted gold by the moon, and then the water around him began bubbling and his sightless eyes addressed the earth for the last time.

  The vortex took him then.

  Chapter Two

  On the sunny morning of October 4, 1886, Deputy Tom Prine saw the man for the third time in three days.

  The man was middle-aged, on the beefy side, in a rumpled dark suit that tried hard to make him look respectable. But the broken nose and wary eyes and large, busted hands suggested a rough life lived on the edges of the law.

  Prine saw all this from his window table in The Friendly Café, which was half a block down from the sheriff's office. Yesterday, he'd walked past the man, close enough to register various details.

  Prine himself was a slender twenty-nine-year-old with an angular face that many women found handsome in a melancholy way.

  As evidence of this, Lucy Killane, the freckle-faced redhead with the gentle brown eyes and the sweetly erotic face, said to him now, "D'you know about the band concert tomorrow night, Tom?"

  "I saw some posters for it, Lucy."

  "I'm planning on going. And you could always stop by for supper early if you wanted to go with me."

  Prine wished now that he'd never gone out with her. By the time he started to pull away, after four months of courting, he seemed to have let down not just Lucy but the entire town. She had been orphaned when she was six and raised by the nuns at the convent. They had instilled in her gentleness and a selflessness that never asked for reward of any kind. She just liked helping people, whether at the hospital, the church, the park where the old folks gathered.

  Prine had had his share of romances. He'd always felt good about breaking off before he lost control of the situation. Men liked to act tough where females were concerned, but he'd known a lot of men who walked around brokenhearted because of some little gal in some distant town they'd fled to mourn alone.

  But with Lucy, it was different. When he saw the pain in her eyes now, he felt no glee, no romantic triumph. Here was a good, true, forthright woman. Not a saint; nor did she pretend to be one. She liked beer and naughty jokes, and on a couple of nights she'd almost given into him completely. But she was an honest and honorable friend and would never desert him. He had put that pain, that mourning, that sorrow in her eyes, and he damned himself for doing it. A lot of his girls had liked the game of love as much as he did. But not Lucy. Her feelings were simple and transparent and deep.

  The terrible thing—the thing that had caused him to turn away from her—was that he wanted more. She worked in a café and he was a deputy. Even between them they couldn't earn enough money to live anything more than a hardscrabble life. A tiny shacklike house somewhere. Three or four kids running around. And a sameness—day in and day out—that would be as crushing to him as any prison could ever be.

  He'd known a deputy once who'd courted and won the hand of a rich girl. The man now lived in splendor and relative ease. The girl's old man helped him learn the cattle business. And now the former deputy was on his way to becoming cattle-rich himself. Prine never told anybody about this. It'd make him sound like a moony young kid, some stupid magazine-story dream of hitching up with a rich girl. But it was a flame that burned with the tireless brilliance of a votive candle in the most secret part of his heart. He couldn't extinguish that dream even if he wanted to.

  He looked up at Lucy now, hovering there, trying to smile with that small, lovely Irish mouth. But there was no smiling to be found in those sweet eyes. Just the terrible loss that Prine had put there.

  "Try me again sometime, though," Prine said.

  "Sure."

  The tears in her voice and eyes were unbearable. He slipped his hand into hers.

  "I'm sorry about it all, Lucy."

  He glanced around, seeing if anybody was watching. Fortunately, nobody seemed to be. A scene in a café wouldn't be good for either of them.

  "I know you are, Tom. I don't blame you."

  "Maybe if it was a couple of years down the line, when I was more ready for—"

  And then she laughed, a rich sound he'd always loved.

  "You don't have to come in here, but you do. You don't have to be nice to me, but you are. You don't have to let me embarrass you, but you do. You're a good Catholic, Tom, and you're not a Catholic at all—but you've sure got the guilt like one."

  He smiled, squeezed her hand, then removed his.

  "I've got this book I read every night. How to Be Guilty and Like It. It's teaching me a lot."

  Her moment of laughter was gone. "I'm thinking of moving, Tom."

  "Not because of me, I hope."

  A tiny smile. "Not because of you. You're not the center of my universe anymore, Tom Prine. I'm thinking of moving to get meself a better job and meet some new people." She always said "meself" instead of "myself." The last vestiges of a brogue she'd picked up from her long-dead parents.

  Prine was surprised by his reaction. He felt—abandoned. It was ludicrous, stupid. He'd broken off with her. But now she was talking about leaving.

  Before he could say anything, she said, "There's a customer waving for me, Tom. I'd better go."

  Abandoned. Yes, that was exactly how he felt. It was one thing to break it off with her, but another to think that she'd be gone from his life completely. . . .

  He went back to studying the man across the street.

  What made Prine curious, as he sat there on his midmorning coffee break, was that every morning the man did two odd things. He would suddenly pull out his railroad watch and check the time. And then he would write something in a small notebook he took from his back pocket.

  Only this morning did Prine see what spurred the man to take out his pocket watch and tablet. And that was the appearance of Miss Cassie Neville in her fringed buggy. Cassie was the daughter of Cletus Neville, a rich mining man who before his death had divided his estate between Cassie and her twin brother, Richard.

  Now, there was an obvious reason for any man to watch Cassie. She was a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty of grace and style. Twice a year she went to Chicago frock-hunting. And three or four times a year she traveled to St. Louis to hear their famous symphony orchestra. She had been engaged four times and she was only twenty-two years old. Needless to say, it had been Cassie who'd broken off the engagements.

  Fine and dandy.

  A smitten man, even a middle-aged fool, had every right to place himself in position to watch Cassie as she came to town five days a week to work in the basement of St. Francis Catholic church, where she taught school and handed out provisions to the poor. The Nevilles paid for all the provisions. A lot of townspeople donated clothes and used toys and housewares.

  Fine and dandy. To just watch the young beauty in her buggy was one thing. But to clock her and then to write down the time—at the very least, that was a strange thing to do three mornings running.

  Prine decided to find out what the man was doing.

  Karl Tolan had been in jail enough—never prison; that was his street-boy pride, never prison—to recognize when a lawman came within thirty yards of him. Tolan could sniff one out the same way a hunting dog can sniff out a bird or a fox.

  The man sitting in the window of The Friendly Café was definitely law. This was the third morning he'd watched Tolan watch the Neville girl, and this morning—or so Tolan sensed, anyway—the lawman seemed to get a sense of what was going
on here.

  But the three mornings had been worth it. He had the information he needed.

  By the time Prine reached the street, the man was gone. Prine hurried up and down the street, but there was no sight of him.

  Five minutes after leaving the café, Prine walked into the sheriff's office. He knew instantly that Mae, the sheriff's spinster daughter, had cleaned up last night. The sweet scent of furniture polish was in the air.

  The one-story building was divided into two parts. The office was large enough to hold four desks, an oil stove, three wooden filing cabinets, and several rifle racks mounted on the wall. There was a NOTICE board with current Wanted posters—current because this was another job Mae did.

  Sheriff Wyn Daly looked up and said, "Coffee any better this morning?"

  Prine shook his head. "I sure wish Peggy hadn't retired."

  "People your age just don't seem to make good coffee," Deputy Bob Carlyle said.

  Prine laughed. "I get the impression you don't think people my age can do much of anything."

  Carlyle surprised him by saying, "Well, you're a pretty fair deputy, Prine. I'd have to say that."

  Wyn, white-haired, beefy in the tan twill uniform they all wore, looked up and said, "I don't believe I've ever heard you hand out a compliment in the eight years you've been here, Bob."

  "Well, it's true. Prine here's good at the job." This was coming from a scrawny man of fifty or so whom too many drunks had underestimated because of his somewhat slumped posture and one glass eye. He had a quick hard right hand that had put down nearly every street tough in town.

  Wyn laughed. "Be sure and write that on a calendar somewhere, Tom. October 4, Bob Carlyle gives somebody a compliment."

  The rest of the morning went pretty much that way. Sort of slow and chatty. There was a fourth deputy, Harry Ryan, but he was the night man. A morning like this gave the day people a chance to talk over open cases, most of which ran to minor rustling, minor arson, minor saloon violence, minor theft, minor burglary.