by J. Lee Butts
My thick-gutted guide said, “ ’S heere, senor. Thees ees Seenator Webb’s grande hacienda. La hacienda de las muñecas . Jesus was correcto, no? That bartender at the cantina, he lie like a yellow dog. He knows where ees Seenator Webb’s hacienda. Everyone knows.”
Ole Jesus didn’t say another word or wait for anything by way of a reply. He simply flashed a toothy grin, tipped a sombrero the size of a wagon wheel, threw a one-handed wave over his shoulder, and stumbled off into the all-enveloping darkness. Suppose he couldn’t have gone more than a dozen steps when I heard dogs yapping again. Big dogs. Kind of animals a feller wouldn’t want chasing him. Then, there was a round of hot-sounding Spanish that I took to be rather pointed curses.
I stepped off Grizz and tried the gate. The heavy entryway swung open on well-oiled hinges with absolutely no resistance. I could easily see, from my new vantage point, that several rooms in the house were still lit. Bushes outside the casa’s windows, and the trees scattered around the courtyard, dripped with all maner of dolls that looked like some kind of odd fruit. A big ole live oak, in one corner of the courtyard, sported dozens of those tiny figures. Eerie sight sent a cold wave of chicken flesh up my spine.
Kerosene lamps, or perhaps candles, bathed each of the visible, interior spaces with a dancing, yellowish-orange, near unearthly glow. Someone moved from room to room, then stopped.
I pulled one of a pair of hand-braided lariats from a thong on my saddle. All rolled up, that piece of leather felt like a length of coiled steel. Strolled over to the nearest puddle of light bleeding through a set of glass-paned double doors on the ground floor. Took up a spot just on the edges of the shimmering glow, so as not to be seen. A dull, watery radiance oozed from a large, central room behind the glass doors and spread across the sheltered, tile-covered veranda highlighted by a fountain that made a pleasant trickling sound.
Inside the house, directly across the room from where I hid in the darkness, a man stood in a chair and worked at balancing himself. He had his back to me as he ran both hands along the edges of the wooden frame that surrounded an enormous, colorful painting of a bullfighter. The picture dangled from a thick piece of wire draped over a nail driven into the wall above the fireplace mantel. With as much stealth as I could manage, I slipped across the terrace’s open space and tried one of the horizontal, metal door handles and found it locked.
I thought the situation over for a racing ten seconds or so. Suppose I could’ve kicked the door to pieces. Wasn’t much there but milk-colored glass held together by some flimsy-looking wooden framing. But I figured as how shattered glass and yelling people might bring a crowd. Gunshots could easily prove even worse. I did not care for the possible results brought on by either eventuality.
Made a hasty decision and headed for the hacienda’s front entry. Gave the door about half a dozen hard-fisted raps. I held my lariat against one leg and turned a bit sidewise and away from the spot where I figured the light would fall on me.
It took a spell, but the door suddenly popped open. Gent I’d seen standing on the chair carried a kerosene lamp in one hand. He peeked around the opening he allowed for several seconds, then stepped out so I could see him. Up close, he bore an astonishing resemblance to the slightly older Nathan Webb’s bullet-riddled corpse. He peered at me across the threshold, as if he wanted to slap me nekkid.
A wicked sneer curled his upper lip when he growled, “Who’n the hell’re you and whatta you want this time of night, mister?”
I whipped off my hat and bowed slightly. Stuffed the hat back on, then flashed my badge. Tried to sound humble and apologetic at the same time when I said, “Lucius Dodge, Texas Ranger. Sorry to be a bother, sir, but are you Senator Webb?”
26
“... WE’VE SEEN MORE’N OUR SHARE OF BLOOD . . .”
AXEL WEBB TURNED at the waist and cast a nervous glance over his shoulder, as if he thought someone might be trying to sneak up behind him. He glared at me again, shook his head, and looked even more irritated, but also a bit puzzled. His confusion appeared to have abated a bit, when he said, “No. Sorry, but Senator Webb can’t be contacted at the moment. He, well, he’s out of town on business. Yeah, out of the state actually. In Denver, I believe.”
“Might I inquire as to when you expect him back, sir?” I said.
“Not absolutely certain. But there’s every chance he won’t return for several weeks—most likely. In my estimation, the senator could be gone as long as a month. Perhaps more.”
I tried my best to feign the aspect of a man utterly surprised and deeply disappointed. Toed at the foot-square, rust-colored Mexican tiles beneath my feet. “Damn. That is a shame,” I said. “Real shame. My superiors felt certain we could find him here.” Patted the front of my jacket. “I have important communications for the senator. Rode all the way from Austin. Didn’t even stop along the way.”
A more than inquisitive look crept onto Axel Webb’s softly lit face. “Well, I’m his brother. Closest and only kin he has that’s still living. You can tell me anything you wanted to tell him. Shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll make sure he gets any message you might choose to leave.”
I cast a series of suspicious glances around the empty courtyard behind me, then turned back to the brazen killer. He took a half step back when I leaned into the doorway and whispered, “Well, don’t want to be a bother, but I think it would probably be best if I came inside, sir. Wouldn’t want anyone to accidently pass by in the street and hear what I’ve got to say. ’S a matter of fairly significant state business, you see. Great deal of money at stake. If the information I carry should get out, could result in dire consequences, dire. Sure you’ll understand.”
“It’s that important, huh? Money, you say?”
“Indeed, sir. Indeed, yes. Communications I carry on my person come directly from the capitol. Office of the governor, you see. My instructions were that I should hand these documents over to Senator Webb himself. But, if he’s not here, I suppose it’d be all right if I left this particular bit of news with you, sir. Seein’ as how you’re his brother and all.”
I could still feel a degree of resistance and lack of enthusiasm when Ax Webb testily placed the lamp on a table just inside the door, stepped to one side, and waved me over the hacienda’s rugged threshold. ’Course, I gallantly removed my hat and motioned for him to lead the way.
We’d just crossed into the room off the patio, where I’d first spotted him, when I whacked the brigand across the back of his head with that heavy length of twisted leather. The lariat made a slight hissing sound just before it caught him below, and behind, his right ear. The son of a bitch struck the floor like a man who’d got hit in the head with the butt end of a .10 gauge coach gun. Thought sure I’d knocked him into the black oblivion of the next week.
Must admit I was some surprised when the hardheaded bastard bounced up off that tile floor like a kid’s rubber ball. He came to unsteady legs and turned on me with all the ferocity of a caged tiger. Didn’t do him any good though. I used the lariat to give him another resounding wallop across the face that knocked him sidewise.
The stink-spraying skunk stumbled and tripped over a low, wooden table sitting in the middle of the room. He rendered that piece of furniture to splinters when he went through it and landed on the floor again. There was a loud, watery, smacking sound when his thick skull ricocheted off the floor. In a matter of a second or two, he was rolling back and forth in a puddle of blood and groaning like a man dying.
I didn’t wait that time but grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. Got him to his feet again. Brought the rope up from a spot about level with my spurs and laid it across his jaw. Force of the blow put him back on his knees. He swayed like a creek-side willow in a stiff, south Texas wind.
I tossed the length of braided leather aside and took a good, balanced stance. Delivered an iron-fisted haymaker that bounced off his eye socket. My other fist caught him in the temple. Soon’s he was down again, I set to kicking the
hell out of him. Kicked that child-killing son of a bitch all over the room. Kicked and stomped on him till I got downright tired. He bled like a stuck hog. The sorry cuss moaned and groaned as if he was about to pass on for final judgment as I maneuvered him into a chair and lashed him down good.
I rummaged through a cabinet near the door, once I got him situated the way I wanted. Found an unlabeled bottle of what I figured had to be some kind of rye and poured myself a full tumbler. Pulled me up a second chair a few feet in front of the insensible wretch, flopped into it, and waited for him to find his way back to consciousness.
Took ole Ax almost half an hour to come around from the hellacious stomping I’d put on his sorry ass. Blood dribbled from a broken nose and a number of nasty-looking facial lesions when willful perception finally grabbed hold of him again.
Spitting red when he dragged his head up enough to see me, he said, “Who’n the hell are you?”
“Exactly who I said when I came through the door.”
“Texas Ranger? You’re a Texas Ranger?”
“Yes.”
“Got a name, ranger man?”
“Told you before, Lucius Dodge.”
“Ah, ah. Now that I think on it, seems I’ve heard of you.”
“Good chance you have.”
“Whatta you want with me, Dodge?”
“Oh, come now, Ax. Just really put your mind to it for a few seconds. Bet you can come up with something. Surely you still have the mental capacity to ferret out the hint of an idea on the subject hidden somewhere in that muddled, criminal brain of yours.”
He torqued his head around, raised one shoulder, and tried to rub his split, bleeding lips on his shirt. He eyeballed me again and said, “No. No. Can’t think of a single thing. Nothing. No reason for you, or any like you, to come in here and beat on me like this.”
I took a sip of my drink, then placed the glass on the floor beside the chair. From behind steepled fingers, I said, “Me’n my friend Boz Tatum buried your brother and most of his entire family out on Devils River the other day. Sorriest spectacle either of us have ever had to deal with.”
Of a sudden Webb stopped struggling. A look of focused fear spread over his bruised, lacerated, sweat-dripping face.
“And me’n Boz, doin’ the kind of work we do, well, we’ve seen more’n our share of blood, by God. Tracked the men who did those sorry murders down and killed them one and all. In the process found out that you’re the man behind all that needless butchery.”
His wide-eyed gaze darted around the room. Then, for some seconds he stared into the ash-laden fireplace. When he finally brought his fractured attention back to me, he said, “Suppose there ain’t no denyin’ it then, is there?”
“Nope. None a’tall.”
“You killed Murdock, Atwood, and the Pickett boys?”
“That we did.”
“Those were some damned tough men, mister. Kinda fellers you could bounce cannonballs off of. All right if’n I don’t believe a word of what you said concernin’ them, lawdog?”
“Sent Mad Dog Cutner to hell as well.”
Don’t think Axel Webb would’ve been any more surprised if I’d pissed in his hat, then tried to make him drink it. He made a kind of halfhearted, non-believer’s hissing sound, then said, “You killed Eagle Cutner?”
I couldn’t help but smile when I said, “Yep. Well, let me amend that a bit. I gave the man a simple choice. But I’m pretty sure he picked the right path.”
Webb coughed and spit a mouthful of blood onto the floor. He bit his already lacerated lip, then said, “What the hell does that mean?”
“Simple. I handed him a gun with one bullet in it. Pretty sure he’s shoveling coal in Hell this very minute. Swappin’ lies with Satan’s imps. Wonderin’ why he let a man like you lead him into his own death.”
“Eagle Cutner killed himself? That’s bullshit. I don’t believe a damned word of it. You’re a lyin’ son of a bitch.”
Locked him in a cold-eyed glare and said, “You gave your sixteen-year-old niece to that crazy bastard, Webb. We took her back and, given some fairly limited choices, Eagle ‘Mad Dog’ Cutner decided to end his own life. Personally, I think he made the right decision. Had I set Boz Tatum loose on the man, you would’ve heard him begging for mercy across nearly fifty miles of some of the roughest terrain in the whole of Texas.”
Webb sagged in his seat. Sounding defeated, he stared at the floor between his feet and mumbled, “Bullshit.”
I leaned back and pulled a hand-rolled ciga-reet from my vest pocket, fired it to glowing life, then pitched the smoldering lucifer onto the paper-and-dirt-littered floor. Calm as a horse trough in a drought when I blew a tub-sized smoke ring then said, “No, Ax, all those men you got to commit the equivalent of biblical murder are gone, along with your brother and most of his family. Now death has come for you, ole son. And you’ve been lookin’ right into his face, since the second you opened the front door.”
That’s when he started trying to bargain with me. “Look here, now, I never meant for Nathan’s wife or kids to have the smallest part in any of this. Only bad feelin’s I harbored were reserved for my brother. Didn’t know his family’d been rubbed out until Murdock and Atwood dropped the news on me over in Del Rio. You cain’t hold me responsible for what those idiots, and them half-witted Pickett boys, went and done.”
Figure it had to have sounded like cold spit hitting a red-hot stove lid, when I growled, “Oh, but that’s where you’re dead wrong, Ax. I don’t give a bagful of rotten horse dung why you had those evil sons of bitches chase your brother down and kill him, but his wife and children are another matter. Don’t care what you might’ve done in the past that put you in prison down at Huntsville in the first place. Can’t raise the least bit of sympathy that your brother didn’t bother to get you turned out. But I can tell you this. Tonight is your last night amongst the living. Before the next hour passes, you’ll be with your friends, and I’ll be on my way back to Devils River to take care of your badly damaged niece.”
Webb shot a hot-eyed, trapped-rat glance up at me. “Just what’n the blue-eyed hell you gonna do, Dodge?”
A second or so of charged silence hung in the air between us before I near whispered, “I’m gonna drag you outta here and hang you from a limb of that tree out in the courtyard of this house. The live oak with all those kid’s dolls dangling from it. Figure you’ll just resemble something akin to a bit bigger doll to most folks passing by in the street. ’Specially after you’ve shriveled up in the sun like a sack of beef jerky for about three or four weeks.”
“No. You don’t mean that. You can’t possibly mean that. Can’t go and string a man up without so much as a by-your-leave.”
“Oh, but I meant every word. Never joke about hanging a man. Any man. No matter how low, sorry, or worthless he might be.”
“Now, wait just a damned minute. You’re sworn to uphold the law, you son of a bitch. You’re a ranger for the love of God. I-I’m entitled to a fair trial. Fair trial by a jury of my peers. I’ve got rights, by God. Rights. That’s the law. ’S in the Constitution. ’S in the Constitution, you son of a bitch.”
“Now where in the wide, wide world would any judge find a jury of your peers? You’re the man responsible for the brutal murders of your own brother, his wife, and three of their innocent children. Members of your own family for the love of God. Kind of murders branded on your soul tend to negate any constitutional rights, or privileges, as far as I’m concerned anyway.”
“Ain’t right. Just ain’t right. Can’t just go and hang a man without a trial.”
“Wouldn’t go bettin’ the ranch on that one if I was you.”
Webb threw his head back and bounced the chair up and down several times while he made strange and indecipherable noises. “Yep, far as I can see, you’re guilty of all those sorry killings as surely as if you’d pulled the trigger yourself. Might not have been out on Devils River in person, when the bloody act occurred, bu
t, far as I’m concerned, you’re as guilty as branded Cain.”
“Sweet Jesus, ain’t right.”
“And that’s not to mention the associated, kind of ricochet deaths, of those rank-assed bastards who escaped from prison with you and who you somehow persuaded to do the dirty deed.”
Webb jerked at his bonds and howled like a caged wolf. “Lemme go, you bastard. Lemme go. You cain’t do this. Cain’t just go and hang a man ’thout seein’ to the legalities.”
I leaned toward the man, blew smoke his direction, then added, “Almost as bad as all that, you handed your brother’s only living child over to an animal like Eagle Cutner. Lord God, man, what in the hell were you thinkin’? From what I saw of her, I’m not sure the girl will ever recover from whatever it was that snake did to her. Do you really, for a single moment, think that I’m gonna walk away from here and let you live after all that.”
For a moment Axel Webb stared at me as though he’d found some new form of poisonous scorpion crawling on his pants’ leg. Then, the man’s eyes got as big as dinner plates when he hissed, “Y-You really intend on setting me to kicking and pissing myself, don’t you?”
“Absolutely. Little more’n twenty paces from where we’re sittin’ right this moment.”
“No appeal.”
“None.”
“No mercy in your heart?”
Almost laughed when I said, “Not a single shred. Lost it all when I found Mad Dog Cutner and saw the consequences of what he’d done to your beautiful niece, Clementine.”
Webb went to struggling against the rope again. He bucked up in the chair and bounced it across the floor. Seat’s wooden feet skittered and squawked against the tiles. The thing almost toppled over a time or two. Panicked wretch was near out of breath when he huffed and puffed, “Goddammit, you can’t do this. Can’t just string a man up like a side of beef. Can’t just hang me like a common criminal.”