Wild Justice

by Loren D. Estleman

  The widow and I barely spoke while riding in the day coach, but she proved an energetic conversationalist when we sat opposite each other in the dining car. Caspar, the silent cook, had a way with sidemeat and boiled rutabagas that likely was missed at the Last Chance Hotel in his absence, but his coffee would peel the hide off an elephant. We both added liberal amounts of sugar and cream to our brew.

  “We differed in entertainment,” she said; I’d already noted that she usually referred to her late husband in pronouns only. “He liked acrobats and dancers, while I preferred the legitimate theater. I well remember the row we had when I suggested dragging him to ‘East Lynne’ for the third time.”

  “I never heard a cross word between you.”

  She stirred the sludge in her cup. “Living in Washington, cheek-by-jowl with the families of other representatives, one learns to keep one’s voice low. I can assure you we aired our disagreements; but his quick temper was as swift to spend itself.”

  That hadn’t been my experience. I’d found him short-fused but slow to forgive.

  I asked her what her plans were once the Judge was in the ground.

  “My sister wired an invitation to move in with her and her husband. He is a lobbyist for the sugar interests in Cuba, where there is talk of our going to war with Spain, so I do not imagine he will much be underfoot. I do not envision it as a permanent arrangement. I’m left with enough to support myself. A small accommodation will serve, and I suppose the drearily rewarding existence of an aged widow engaged in volunteer work.”

  I’d begun to enjoy her company. A relative crowding in with a married couple, who mentioned the likelihood of her male host being “underfoot,” was uncompromising; one who referred to charitable deeds as tedious was just the kind of woman Blackthorne would have chosen to spend most of his life with. The mystery remaining was how he’d come to light upon me for the rest.

  Or from the start, had he seen in me the raw material he required, and placed me in the charge of men who knew what he wanted and how to achieve it? God knew he had them to spare, snatched from cells and scaffolds and offered one last chance to turn their talents in a better direction. Was he that devious, or had so short a time and so small a distance away from his actual presence already painted a picture more cold-blooded than the original? In only a few days he had begun to take on the stylized graven outline of something cast in bronze.

  SEVEN

  “I’m Cocker Flynn. You can call me Flynn till I say different.”

  I said, “If you don’t like your given name, why not change it?” This happened twenty years in the past. I was still young then and inclined to be curious.

  “Already did. Who’d christen his kid Cocker?”

  He was a banty rooster, shorter even than Blackthorne, with bow legs, steel splinters in his handlebars, and twice as many knuckles as any man I’d ever met. I figured he hadn’t broken them swinging at fence posts. He wore clothes made up of pieces of different suits: checked waistcoat, striped trousers, plain black jacket, all of which may have looked elegant when he first put them on, but his bony knees, barrel-stave ribs, and knobby elbows had gnawed the material almost through, giving strangers a fair idea of how he’d look stripped to his raw red flesh. For some reason he wore a Mexican sombrero with a brim the size of a bicycle wheel. With his short braided frame it turned him into a thumbtack. Not that anyone would say it to his face, because he had something of the hornet about him: sting first, ponder later. I had the luck to witness that part of his character from the sidelines.

  His real name, I found out five years later, when it was engraved on a brass plaque dedicated to deputies slain in the service of the court, was Cornelius; the Judge held no truck with aliases on formal occasions. Flynn had been four years with the federals in Kansas, and was among the first wave of peace officers Blackthorne asked to relocate to the territory based on his record. He’d retired undefeated at forty from the bare-knuckle ring, and in Topeka, Hays, and Dodge City had a reputation for drawing his pistol only when his target was out of range of his fists.

  Chances are the nickname had come to him by way of his passion for cockfights. In the time I knew him I’d seen him bet a month’s wages, earned by dint of sweat and spilled blood, on the outcome of two scrawny birds locked in a struggle to the death.

  “I’d not challenge him,” Blackthorne had counseled me. “He’s killed two men in physical combat, and after two years a third has yet to awaken.”

  “What’s the job?” I asked Flynn, when we met.

  He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. He was standing in the street with his back to Belle Crafton’s Castle. I was facing him. Like Chicago Joe’s Coliseum, it was a toney place with bronze carriage lamps set between windows shrouded in purple swag, beveled-glass double doors, and the name standing out in copper letters across the front. You twisted an engraved oval brass knob next to the doors, a bell rang inside, a rectangular panel embossed with a peacock slid aside, and if your face was familiar or looked respectable enough, you won admission. Belle, it was rumored, had turned away a high-ranking agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs because his breath stank of trade whiskey.

  “One of the girls refused to lay with a drunk miner till he came back from the Cathay Gardens smelling like lilacs instead of prairie-dog shit. He’s taken it as an insult and now he’s making noise about blowing her spine out through her belly. Got him a Russian forty-four that’d sure enough fill the bill.”

  “Not prizefighter work.”

  He blew air through his moustaches—in regret, I thought—and unshipped his sidearm, a stubby Colt .44 with a two-inch barrel, converted from cap-and-ball. It was short enough to carry in the saddle pocket of his coat but heavy enough to make it bag. The worn amber handle leaned out from his hip when undrawn. “I asked for help thinking you could keep him busy while I snuck up behind and rabbit-punched him; but he’s gone and set himself up with his back to the wall and the girl tighter to his chest than a good hand of cards.”

  I fingered the Deane-Adams in my holster. I hadn’t had the chance to try it out; which was a step back from confidence going into a desperate situation, and the cause of many an early passing. “I’m not certain I could make a kill-shot that would avoid his twitching.”

  “I might could give you a piece of a second. Reckon you can manage that?”

  Just for reassurance I slid out the weapon, freed the cylinder, and spun it. I don’t normally hold with spiritual communication between flesh and mineral, but everything about the action said it would perform as intended. I re-seated it, lifted it again, and let it fall oh so gently into place, hoping for that little air pocket that might keep it from settling in tight for the winter. The fast-draw was mostly an invention of the romantic pen, but lives had turned on the flick of an eyelash, and to enter with guns drawn might trigger a maniac into action.

  You’ll find all this in a manual, probably; written by some military expert at West Point, who’d never heard a shot fired outside the range. It doesn’t necessarily work in practice.

  Hereupon Cocker Flynn, who’d read all these things, in the tone of my voice and the language of my body, dismasted me with a wolfish grin.

  “Just look to the miner’s right eye—that’s the target, as he’s right-handed, so’s he’ll have it cocked away from the girl—jerk and fire to the line of your vision. It’s like swinging an axe; so long as your keep your eye on the spot to cut, the blade’ll hit it every time.”

  “When do I fire?”

  “Oh, you’ll know.”

  We spread the doors, walked Indian-file down a narrow corridor, swung open the batwings associated with the trade (superfluous as they were, they were as endemic as the three globes above the entrance to every pawnbroker’s shop in civilization), and spread out inside the big room with its baize-topped tables, long mahogany bar, brass rail, and plump gauze-clad reclining beauties in oils on the walls (along with the obligatory portraits of Washington and Lincoln in chipped gil
t frames). The peanut shells were in place on the floor, the reek of beer, whiskey, and tobacco as thick as fug on the third day at Gettysburg, and the clever signal-devices in place on the walls; an arrow attached to a screw twisted in the direction of the name of the hostess whose services were required by the last customer.

  The girls were young, good-looking, and ladylike—up to the point of negotiation—and would stay that way just as long as the mines kept paying out. When the shafts went dry, you wouldn’t have to ask the sourdoughs to learn the bad news; every dewy-eyed thing in town would be on the stage road to Deadwood or Creede or Tombstone, or wherever the color was still bright, leaving behind the slatterns who were either too worn down to travel or wrinkled and scrawny beyond the ability to pull stake and stand the fare. That was the barometer of success (or failure) in prospecting camps: the comeliness (or lack of it) in their hostesses. You had only to look at them to know whether to stay or move on.

  Helena was prospering, if the young woman with the wild eyes was any indication. Her waist, corseted or otherwise, was narrow enough for the customer’s arm to encircle it tight, and the only lines in her neck radiated from the muzzle of the barrel-heavy Smith-and-Wesson revolver pressed against it. If he’d truly intended to relocate her spine by way of her belly, he was no student of the human body. But a slug of that size through any vital spot was all that was necessary.

  He didn’t look like such of a much of a desperado; a fellow in his early twenties, if that, retaining pouches of baby fat in his cheeks, whose fuzz he could scrape off with a thumbnail, a St. Christopher’s cross winking from a chain around his neck, and the general look of a kid who’d wandered into something he hadn’t prepared for and that offered no way out. I’d seen the same expression in the eyes of a mule too tangled in the muck of the Rocky Fork and too exhausted from the struggle to climb the bank and save itself, and me without a lasso handy. I’d seen the moment when it decided to give up and let go. The aim here was to do something the moment the boy came to the same conclusion and before he acted on it. Until that tiny window opened, he was like a mainspring wound too tight, set to break at the touch of a trigger.

  We could have saved him, if that was the job. But the whore was the job.

  It was the woman’s eyes that decided the thing for me. I’d been prepared for a wild stare, the irises surrounded entirely by white, like a spooked horse. But hers were dull, like tarnished coins, as if she’d expected all her life for her curtain to close in just such a circumstance as this. She wore the hem of her skirt hitched up on one side, a local advertising tradition, exposing a band of white flesh above her garter, which in the manhandling had let loose of her black stocking; it crumpled at the knee like a snakeskin in mid-slough. But after all these years I remember most that look of numb resignation on her face. However this thing came out, whatever new horror came along to end her existence, whatever happened here, was at best nothing more than a delay of the inevitable.

  “Look to his eye,” Flynn said beneath his breath; beneath it, literally. We were so close I could almost hear his unspoken thoughts. The blood surging through his arteries was like a cataract pouring over a near hill.

  As there was just one eye visible, that seemed simple enough; although I didn’t know what I was supposed to look for in it. A glint of intention? An instant of weakness? There wasn’t time or the means of expression necessary.

  “One step more, you sonsabitches!” The muzzle of his weapon pressed deeper into her flesh, constricting her windpipe. The wheeze of short-drawn breath that followed might have been a leak in a gas pipe.

  Flynn wasn’t a man for words. Aiming from the hip he pressed the trigger of the squat-barreled Colt and shot the woman through her exposed thigh. The bullet entered the pale flesh two fingers directly above the rosette that decorated the garter.

  She folded, as anyone would with a slug fired through a limb at a distance of no more than eight feet. Blood left the wound in a high bright arc and splatted the tessellated floor.

  In that instant I had a four-foot field of vision, broad enough to punch a hole through a window shutter anywhere I pleased; but the miner’s eye was my target of direction. The Deane-Adams’ front sight was set solid.

  His left eye starred red. A piece of his skull struck the wall behind him with the sound of a poker chip falling to the floor. His finger tensed on the trigger, not strong enough to work the hammer. He fell in a sort of spiral, his knees twisting left, his torso twisting right, and sort of screwed himself to the floor, making no more noise than a load of wet laundry landing at the bottom of a chute; his arms tensed briefly, as if trying to push himself upright, but not enough to raise the weight of his body far enough to show daylight. He settled to the floor like wet mortar between the forms.

  His S&W Russian had fallen a few inches away from his hand, which continued to twitch. I kicked it out of his reach while Flynn drew his bandanna from around his neck and twisted it around the woman’s thigh above the wound, staunching the gush of blood. The flesh looked doughy. It excited no more lust than tallow.

  As he worked he spoke. “Lost two telling ’em to duck. They was both struck like statues and I lost ’em. Bullet makes the decision for ’em.”

  “Then you’ve worked this before.” I was breathing shallowly; the English pistol hung at the end of my arm heavy as a broadaxe.

  “Couple of times. This the first one on the end of a bastard’s gun come through alive.”

  “He’s the first one I ever killed.”

  He glanced up from his labors, his eyes as flat as stove lids.

  “I heard you fit in the war.”

  “It isn’t the same thing.”

  “That’s gospel. Them rebs was defending their home and you kilt ’em for it. Just now you saved a life, such as it is. Killing’s like snowflakes. No two are the same.” He grinned, baring only his lower teeth. “Good shooting, yonker. Welcome to Blackthorne’s court.”

  EIGHT

  The cold I’d been expecting ever since the Judge lay in state had arrived bang on time the first night of the trip. I lay down in my berth in my coffin-like compartment with a trickle in my throat and awoke to find my head packed tight with mortar. I spent an hour turning this way and that to clear the pipes, breathing through my mouth and sanding my gullet even rawer, then dressed and went to the dining car to sit. Caspar, the mute cook, was slumped on a stool behind the counter, half-dozing; which as the days rolled past I suspected was the closest he came to sleeping at all. He sprang from his station lugging coffee equipment, and filled a cup with lava from a blue enamel pot; the rising steam cleared my passages like a Turkish bath, but only so long as it took to cauterize my throat with the scalding brew and return the cup to its saucer. I’d wound a bandanna around my neck to catch cinders before they dived down inside my collar. I yanked it loose and blew my nose into it with a honk and a rattle.

  Caspar grinned. I had him down for one of those who drew cheer from the afflictions of others, but when he was back behind the counter he poured hot water from a pan into a glass tumbler with a thick bottom, spooned in at least a cup and a half of soggy buckshot that was probably actually blackstrap molasses, shook in coarse black pepper, lots of it, added a pearl onion, cut a lemon in two using a knife with a wicked-looking triangular blade, and squeezed both halves to a pulp in his fist over the brew, squirting in juice. He cranked open a can of sardines and with a flourish fed two into the glass by their tails, then churned the mess with a mixer, turning the handle briskly until the liquid assumed a gray liverwurst shade. He brought the glass to my table, trailing steam like smoke from a stack.

  When it was in front of me I stared at it with my palms flat on either side, as if he’d deposited a diamondback on the table and one twitch of a muscle would make it strike. He made a dumb show, pinching his nostrils between thumb and forefinger, tipping back his head, and raising a cupped hand to his mouth. He held it there for thirty seconds at least, working his throat the whole time. I
was to gulp it all down without stopping.

  I didn’t trust him or the drink, but my head was blocked again and just the thought of taking in air past the scraped and blistered lining of my windpipe made death by poison seem not so bad a fate. I’d eaten dog served by Cheyenne renegades, son-of-a-bitch stew in a mining camp where Gila monsters were the only four-footed game in forty miles, and was still here to review the bill of fare. I pinched my nostrils and tipped back my head. I felt the damn fool I knew I looked like.

  I took a deep breath, let it out, breathing iron shavings both ways, and poured the stuff down in a thin trickle, swallowing the glutinous mass of coagulated sugar, sharp onion, bitter lemon, suffocating pepper, greasy fish, and simmering water; it went gloop-gloop-gloop, like pouring axle grease. I nearly choked, but I got it all down in one long draught, slow as a load of anvils moving up a long grade. Caspar, knowing what was coming, withdrew a couple of yards down the aisle. I almost made it to the bottom before it changed its mind and backed up into my nose. I shot forward, coughing and spraying molten lead through every orifice in my face.

  Instinct cut in. I had the Deane-Adams half out of its holster when my head began to clear, holes opening in the dam as if bored by a swarm of carpenter bees; I heard little bells tinkling. I let the revolver slip back into place and sat back, sucking in great gusts of sweet air. It hadn’t tasted so good since the time someone cut me free of a noose back in ’80.

  I blew my nose again, checked the bandanna for blood, found none, and looked up at the cook with new eyes. “You ought to bottle this stuff. You’d never have to fry another egg.”

  He rolled his scrawny shoulders and tapped the pocket of his chef’s tunic where his watch chain came to an end. I didn’t know what he was about until I woke up at dawn with my skull heavier than it had been the night before. Caspar’s miracle cure lasted only till gravity took over. I figured I’d let the disease run its course without any more interference.