Showdown

by Edward Gorman / Ed Gorman

"Just don't treat him like one of your servants," Prine said. "He's not, and I'm not, either."

  "Well, hell, man, I didn't mean to insult him."

  "Maybe not," Prine said. "But you did a damned good job of it anyway."

  Prine took a dun, Neville a pinto. They walked them up to the barn, where they found a couple of old saddles.

  Neville looked unhappy about having to set his royal ass on a saddle this worn, but at least he had the good sense not to say anything about it.

  Lattimore appeared a few minutes later. He handed Prine a Winchester and Neville a Sharps that had been old ten years before.

  "Best I could do," he said to Neville.

  Prine fought a smile. He was sure that Lattimore had dug up the oldest weapon he could find for Neville. If Neville knew this, he didn't let on. He was behaving well since Prine had ragged on him about treating Lattimore better. He was like a dog brought to heel.

  They were just ready to saddle up when Betty Lattimore, pretty and plump in blue gingham and a white apron, hurried down to them.

  "Figured you boys'd be hungry," she said.

  They took their food over to a small table in the backyard. Slices of beef and a boiled potato and peas, probably from her garden on the far side of the house. They ate with the innocence and fury of predatory animals. "And you're invited to sleep here overnight if you'd like."

  "Thank you very much, Mrs. Lattimore," Neville said in a voice so formal and polite that Prine actually quit shoveling food into his mouth for a few seconds. "You and your husband have already done plenty, and I plan to pay you back as soon as this is all done with."

  "Why, we're practically neighbors, Mr. Neville. So there's no call to talk about paying us back. I'm sure you'd do the same thing for us."

  Neville looked confused briefly. Somebody was turning down his offer to pay them back? He was used to paying people off. Money was the currency, not friendship. That was startling enough. But then, she'd said that he would do the same thing for her. But would he? Prine could see this thought process. It would be too much to say that Neville was having any kind of conversion to the goodwill of the common man here, but clearly he was forming a favorable impression of these people.

  "Yes," Neville said, "I guess I would do the same thing for you."

  He glanced at Prine as he said this. Prime gave him a doubtful look.

  They left just as dusk was streaking the sky with its richest colors, the colors that only Eastern potentates were said to possess, colors that were the secret treasures handed down from ancient Egypt, colors, or so it was claimed, that no other civilization could duplicate—mauve and purple gold and green the color of a cat's eye.

  Both men huddled inside their ponchos. They knew that soon enough the land would shimmer and shine with frost. Ice might even cover the creeks and the river by the time of the midnight moon.

  Distant drums, having nothing to do with them, came from Ute camps scattered around the hills to the west.

  Neither man said much. There wasn't much to say. Once in a while they'd piss and moan about how their asses hurt from their saddles, how the dropping temperature was beginning to test the strength of their ponchos, how when it was all over a bed would feel very good.

  Neville, of course, had small moments of rage. Obviously, the man couldn't help himself. He'd start thinking of his sister and he'd go wild for a few minutes.

  Their first stop came around nine o'clock when they saw the remnants of a mining town. An entire block of businesses were boarded up. Maybe two dozen tiny houses stood dark. Somebody had shot out all the stained-glass windows in the church.

  The whipping and whining wind didn't exactly help Prine's sense of desolation. My God, not only had the gold boom gone bust in this place, he wondered if a plague hadn't visited it. He thought of images he'd learned about in school, how in medieval days the bubonic plague would literally wipe out the entire populations of some small towns.

  They tied their horses to a hitching post in front of the saloon. The batwing doors, silhouetted against dim, flickering lamplight from inside, hung on one hinge each. A player piano badly out of sync and tune rolled through "Camptown Lady," somehow making it sound like a dirge.

  Prine was so tired that all sorts of silly childhood images came to him. Ghosts, inside; or ghouls, the spirits so hideous there weren't even any names for them.

  They took their rifles with them.

  The way the wind was whipping, one of the batwings tore free and fell to the floor. Prine pushed on inside.

  The sight before him resembled a stage set that had been deserted long enough to be shrouded with thick, dusty cobwebs. A long pine bar was on the right wall, a long dusty mirror running parallel to it. Empty tables and chairs filled up most of the space except for a small stage against which the player piano was pushed. Rats were everywhere, paying no attention whatsoever to the intruders. There must have been a dozen good-sized rats on top of the piano, scurrying about in frenzy. Needing, wanting—but not finding—food.

  Only after a time did they cast their tiny red eyes on the newcomers. You could almost hear them begin to calculate what these strange upright creatures would taste like.

  Neville shot three of them. The explosion of his Sharps was almost loud enough to tear the wide chandelier above them from its mooring.

  "Happy now?" Prine said.

  "I don't have the right to shoot rats?"

  "You don't have the right to waste ammunition, is what you don't have."

  In the mere, drab light, Neville's face filled with blood.

  "I guess that was pretty stupid."

  "You won't get any argument from me," Prine said.

  Prine began to walk around the saloon. He wondered how long it had been since this place had heard and seen human revelry. The rats might dance on some spectral midnight. But it had been a long time since saloon gals had prodded old sourdoughs to drink some more of the watered-down liquor, and high-kicking dancers had exposed their frill-covered bottoms to the delight of the all-male audience.

  Prine heard it first. He thought it was just one more variation on the eerie tones the winds made. But after it sounded two or three times, he recognized the gasping noise, like that of a man who couldn't catch his breath. A drowning man, perhaps.

  Neville had climbed the stairs and was inspecting the second floor. Prine stayed on the ground floor, trying to find the source of the strange sound. He finally located it behind the bar, the one place he hadn't thought to look.

  The old man lay on his back. From the dark circle on his filthy gray shirt, Prine assumed the man had been shot in the chest. He'd been hit in such a way that he couldn't breathe well. When he tried to speak or call out in simple syllables, the words would stop somewhere in his throat and he would clutch his throat with both hands, as if his throat had been cut.

  Prine grabbed the only source of light, the ancient lantern on top of the bar, and held it down to the man. The wound, as he'd guessed, was in the chest, though further away from the heart than he'd suspected. There was a wooden box on top of the back bar. Inside, Prine found two canteens. They were both full. He untied his bandanna and soaked it with water.

  He spent the next ten minutes exhausting the full extent of his medical knowledge—pulse points, eye dilation, breathing, consciousness. None was very good. The old man muttered words from time, to time but nothing Prine could understand.

  Neville showed up and watched as Prine cleaned up the old man's wound so he could get a better look at it.

  "They figured he was dead," Neville said. "They weren't far wrong."

  "He going to make it?"

  "Take a miracle."

  "Didn't find anything upstairs. But this must've been a nice little place at one time."

  Maybe because they were talking, maybe because the old man knew how close he was to dying and he wanted to talk to somebody—whatever, he sat up a little and fully opened his eyes.

  "You ain't them, is you?" he said. His teet
h were blackened stubs. His mouth was circle of scabs. He had to blink his eyes to focus. "No, I can see you now. You ain't them."

  "They shot you?"

  Phlegm clogged his chest and throat.

  "They didn't see nobody in here except ole Midnight, so they just figured they had the place to themselves. They wanted to sleep before nightfall." He started coughing up blood. Prine held his frail upper body until the coughing stopped. "When they found me—I always sleep in the back room—they figured I might tell the law on them. Stupid bastards. Closest town is Claybank, and an old man like me ain't never goin' to Claybank and live to tell about it. The one named Tolan, he's the bastard that shot me." Then: "Midnight! Midnight!"

  Prine wondered if the old man was hallucinating. There was no evidence of anybody else in the place. Maybe the old man was recalling a childhood friend.

  But the old man grew more and more agitated, cried louder and louder for this "Midnight!"

  And damned if Midnight didn't put in an appearance. A raven of vast proportion and eerie gaze, it didn't simply fly through the air, it smashed its way, the flutter of its wing violent as a terrible storm. It landed on the bar above the old man. Perched there, looked down at him.

  "I just wanted to see him again before I passed." Then: "You been a good friend, Midnight."

  The sleek, shiny, somehow supernatural bird made a sound in its own throat. A deep rumbling kind of music that was sustained for several seconds. A music dark as its feathers.

  The old man said, "They said they was gonna try and make a train tomorrow morning. Junction Gap. You get 'em for me, will ya? Now Midnight's gonna be all alone."

  They buried him out back.

  Midnight seemed to understand what was going on.

  In the moonlight, he sat sentrylike, upon the fresh earth that Prine and Neville had turned over. The raven raised its regal head once to look at the moon. The dark music sounded again in chest and throat. But this time it expelled the sound, letting it echo off the ragged rock hills and work its trembling, oddly frightening way through the night. Other animals responded in the far-flung darkness and made their own sounds. Even the horses Lattimore had loaned them joined in.

  Prine said some prayers for the old man, the prayers of his childhood. He didn't say them often, so many of the words were wrong. He wasn't even sure there was a God, at least not a God as Sunday school teachers espoused anyway. But he did believe in some kind of universal spirit that was the cement of not only this planet but the entire cosmos. He was appealing to that spirit now to take the old man to a good and true place.

  Ten minutes after burying the old man, they were on their way again. Now they knew where Tolan and Rooney were headed. They planned to meet the two at the Junction Gap train depot.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Karl Tolan had never forgotten how his three-year-old sister Daisy died. He still had nightmares about it. He was seven at the time.

  He'd been playing behind the crude slab cabin his father had built when he heard a cry unlike any he'd ever heard Daisy make before.

  She was off playing on the edge of their property. She liked to pick "pretty flowers," as she often tried to say. What she picked was dandelions.

  Karl's mother was inside making bread, his father off trapping.

  The cry.

  His body wanted to do two things at once—freeze in place and run. He was afraid to find out what had happened to his sister.

  He forced himself to go to her.

  Her tiny hands were raised almost in prayer to the sky, blood running from them as blood ran in gouts from her mouth.

  He knelt next to her, the cry scaring him as nothing ever had, screaming "What's wrong, Daisy? What's wrong, Daisy!" until his mother pushed him out of the way and put her fingers in Daisy's mouth. Daisy cried louder and louder; not even her mother's fingers could halt the plea.

  His mother pulled pieces of glass from Daisy's mouth. Karl had a hard time recognizing what they were at first, they were so bloody. But then he recognized where they had come from. He'd broken a bottle yesterday while he was playing games by himself. He swore to pick up the glass when he was finished playing. Otherwise his father would take a strap to him.

  But he'd forgotten somehow. And now Daisy, who had apparently mistaken the broken glass for pieces of candy, had started stuffing the glass into her mouth, not only cutting herself but swallowing some of the tinier pieces.

  Daisy lived less than ten hours. The way his folks glared at him, he didn't have to ask if they blamed him. Of course they did.

  They buried her on a hill where the winds were like cool magic in the spring months and where the surrounding trees took fire in the autumn.

  Less than a day after they buried her, some coyotes dug her up and ate most of her. His father killed them, but by then it was too late.

  His mother never recovered. Two years later, she smashed a bottle one night when his father was on one of his trapping trips. Karl was so sound a sleeper, he didn't hear the breaking bottle or the rest of it. She hadn't screamed, made a fuss. Which had been very much like her.

  She hadn't wanted to take any chances. She slashed both her throat and her wrists. By morning, when he woke up and found her on the far side of the cabin in her bed, her skin was blue-gray in color. He had never seen her eyes so sad. Not scared. Just plain old sad. He'd done it, he knew. When he'd helped kill his little sister, he'd helped kill his mother, too.

  After his father got back and they buried her, he got out his long piece of leather and went to work on Karl. He drew blood. He slashed his buttocks to the point where Karl's legs were numb, not just his buttocks. Finally, Karl fell to the floor, sobbing, pleading for his father to stop.

  A few minutes later, he heard the father outside. There was just the one shot. Karl knew immediately what it was. He'd have a lot of work to do, burying the two of them. He wanted good, deep graves.

  He worked a full day and a half on those graves and he was proud of them. He shot and killed six coyotes in the process. For headstones he took large round rocks that sparkled like fool's gold and drew their names in heavy pencil.

  He knew the coyotes would get them, but by then he'd be gone—and damned if he wasn't. Just going on eleven, he packed everything he owned and jammed it all into his father's carpetbag and then headed off to Dexter, the small town to the north. He'd already pretty much forgotten about his folks. They'd never especially liked him and he'd never especially liked them.

  Who he couldn't forget was Daisy. Poor little Daisy.

  Big for his age, and already with a frightening temper—it not only frightened other people, it also frightened him—he set off west.

  Three weeks shy of his fifteenth birthday, he met Rooney in a most unusual way. He was standing on a street corner in Denver and happened to see Rooney, a red-haired runt, snatch a bag of groceries from an old woman. Rooney took off with the groceries. A cop just happened along. One of those coincidences that happen in real life but that you could never get away with in books or on the stage. The cop started chasing him and was closing on him.

  Until Karl offered his services by innocently stepping into the cop's path and nearly knocking the man down. The thief got away. What Karl got was screamed at by the bully-faced copper.

  Three blocks away, Rooney fell into step with him and said, "You could come in handy, kid."

  The "kid" thing amused Karl. Rooney looked several years younger than he did.

  From then on, the two became friends of a sort, even though Karl didn't especially like Rooney or trust him or have any respect for him. Friends—even though Rooney thought Karl was stupid, sneaky, and too often reluctant to do what Rooney told him to—friends of a sort.

  All these years later, in a saloon in Junction Gap, waiting for a train that was still several hours away, talking to the man he didn't like, trust, or have any respect for, Karl Tolan said, "You think they figured out we paid off Valdez to give us the key?"

  "Not all men
are stupid, Karl."

  "Meaning what?"

  "Meaning that not all men are stupid."

  "Meaning me."

  "Uh-oh, Karl's having his monthly visitor again."

  "I hate when you say that."

  "Yeah, well, there are a few things I don't like to hear you say, either."

  "Yeah? Like what?"

  "I don't want to argue, Karl."

  "Just gimme one example."

  Rooney sighed. "You'll just get pissed the way you always do when I offer constructive criticism."

  "C'mon, just one example."

  "You never fucking take a bath."

  "Oh, yeah? I took a bath last week."

  "That's just my point, Karl. You need to take a bath more often than once a week."

  "What, so I can look like some dude the way you do?"

  "See what I mean? I offer you constructive criticism—and at your request, mind you—and you go and get pissy on me."

  "Nobody's getting pissy."

  Rooney smiled. Pure ice. "Yeah, I noticed that."

  "Maybe I won't be goin' to St. Louis with you, after all."

  "Fine. It's a free country."

  "Maybe I'll go to California."

  "Whatever you want to do, Karl. It's up to you."

  "Yeah," Karl said, sounding almost mystical, "California."

  Rooney just couldn't seem to resist.

  "Is this," he said, "anything like the time you were going to go to Montana or anything like the time you were going to go to Alabama or anything like the time you were going to go to Mexico?"

  "You really don't think I can pull away from you, do you?"

  Rooney gave him his most superior smile. "I was just asking, Karl. Just asking."

  With seven hours to go before train time, Rooney told Karl he was tired and would get some sleep back in his hotel room. Emphasis on his. Usually, the two men shared a room, not exactly being in the robber baron category.

  This time was different. And for a good reason.

  Before heading back to the hotel, Rooney stopped off at a shop, bought himself a couple of good stogies and some magazines to read on the train during the daylight hours.