Wild Justice

by Loren D. Estleman

  Reloading as I walked, I retraced my steps, found the dimple in the earth where the first bullet had buried itself, and poked around with the blade of my clasp knife. After a moment it touched something even harder than the packed dirt. I slid the point to the bottom and pried, teasing the object free like a splinter from my thumb. When the slug came to light I plucked it up between thumb and forefinger, rolled it into my palm, and flipped it a couple of times, coin fashion, guessing its weight. It confirmed what I’d expected from the sound of the report, and opened a new mystery regarding space and time.

  The print of my boot where I’d stood was still visible in the grain dust that covered the floor. Two inches separated the toe from where the lump of lead had stopped. That was more than a near-miss: It was surgery.

  EIGHTEEN

  “You’re gonna wear that bit o’ lead down to a BB, doncha know.”

  I stopped turning the slug around in my fingers and looked at the man seated across from me in his bentwood rocker. He was a Swede, tall and thin but for his belly. He was basically a garden hose with a croquet ball stuck halfway down its length. His striped trousers would belong to his Sunday suit, the belt fastened above his paunch. His shirt was white, clean but threadbare at the elbows where pink showed through, and buttoned to the neck. Swags of skin hung down over where the collar would go if he wore one. His face was two sizes too large for his skull; if he had eyes in the slits that canted down from the bridge of his beak of a nose it would take a bull’s-eye lantern to locate them. His hair was white, fine as sugar, and combed in three precise lanes across his long skull. His name was Lundergaard, and he was all that stood between the good citizens of town and the lawless abyss. I don’t know if the community issued him a badge; in any case he wouldn’t put holes in what was probably his one good shirt.

  “It’s a small round for the work it was put to.” I examined it once more before slipping it into the side pocket of my coat. “I thought maybe you’d know someone who packs light.”

  He pulled at his lower lip, which didn’t return to its earlier position when he let go. He was seventy, figuring charitably. “I don’t believe I’ve seen a hip gun round here in years. The rifles and shotguns don’t come out till hunting season, doncha know. Just at this moment I can’t say for sure what I did with my Dragoon.”

  “Check the sugar jar.”

  We were in the parlor of his house. It was one of the original log cabins from lumber camp days, but someone with a yen for civilization had sided it with clapboard and smeared the interior walls with plaster and paper. Bulging gilt frames hung high on the walls, allowing some old wheezes with monkey whiskers and sharp-faced dragons in bombazine to scowl down at us from beyond the grave. You couldn’t blow your nose without bumping into something on a pedestal. A parlor stove glowed through colored mica. You could can preserves in that room without a kettle, and on a fair spring day; Marshal and Mrs. Lundergaard hadn’t broken a sweat since Buchanan. I shifted my weight on the fainting couch, hoping not to stain the peach-colored cushions.

  “I had to guess, I’d say some young sprout found his papa’s squirrel gun after morning services and took a poke at a crow. You and the livery just got in the way.”

  “That doesn’t explain the note.”

  He hooked wires over his big ears and peered again at Rossleigh’s note through thick panes of glass, moving his lips over the words. “I still don’t see this feller’s beef, or why he’d take the trouble of tying himself to your killing by signing his name.”

  “There’s no reason you should. That’s as good a reason as any to find him, so we can ask.”

  “I’ll look into it if you like.” He returned the note. His jowls went on shaking after his mouth stopped, doing for his head what he was too polite to do himself.

  I let him stew a few seconds. He’d be as useful in a manhunt as a screen door on a diving bell, but that was no reason not to stir up his dried-out perspiration glands.

  “It isn’t worth your valuable time, Marshal.” I got up and held out my hand. “Thanks for seeing me.”

  He took it, in a grip I’d have thought he’d left behind at Appomattox. “Don’t be in such a rush, son. You’ve not lived till you sampled Esther’s cracklin’s.”

  The house smelled of hot grease. I cleared my throat to cover the grumbling in my stomach. I hadn’t eaten in fifteen hours. “Next time through,” I said. “The Judge won’t keep much longer.”

  I let myself out. I could feel his relief all the way to the door.

  * * *

  “He’d see that old fool was broken down to streetsweep,” Mrs. Blackthorne said.

  He would be the late departed; in her world there was only one masculine occupant. “I told you not to expect too much,” I said. “We’re the invaders here. As he sees it, we brought the trouble with us. Every community has some charged-up boy you can blame for any disturbance. No self-respecting part-time peace officer would find himself without one handy.”

  “Then you still suspect Rossleigh for what happened to our conductor.”

  “If it is Rossleigh, he didn’t care one way or the other about the conductor except as a potential obstacle. He had to be sacrificed in order to clear the way to the target.”

  “But who is the target, you or me?”

  “I’m hoping it’s me. I make more sense, and I’ve taken care of myself in that situation enough times to count on experience. If—and pardon me for the suggestion—the situation were reversed, and it was you in that box in the caboose and the Judge sitting in this coach, my money would be on the Judge. When it comes to enemies, he was as rich as J. P. Morgan. I’m just well-to-do.”

  “He always said his mortal foes were beads in his Rosary. He never explained why he felt it necessary to invoke the Church of Rome.”

  “I’m still wondering how Rossleigh beat us to town. There’s no sign of The Javelin.”

  Outside, a moose roared.

  “What on earth was that?” she asked.

  It came again, a long guttural, like a creature moaning in anguish.

  I was sitting opposite the widow in one of a pair of facing seats. I got up, the Deane-Adams sliding into my hand on its own. “If this was Canada, I’d guess—”

  Another noise came on the heels of the first, fully as deep but brassy. Then all hell joined in: The bow dragging across the strings of a cello, the measured flatulence of a tuba, the ting of a triangle, and the general conspiracy of trumpet, bass drum, cymbals, flute, and slide trombone:

  After the ball is over;

  after the break of morn,

  After the dancers’ leaving,

  After the stars are gone …

  “Oh, dear Lord.” She closed her eyes.

  I bent to look out the window. The members of the band hadn’t taken the time to change out of their Sunday best; I could practically smell the moth powder drifting from the platform where they’d assembled to saw, blow, and beat at their instruments, splintering the notes sharply enough to pierce the Judge’s coffin and roust him from his heavenly rest.

  Whatever else he was to the citizens who’d placed him in office, Karl Lundergaard was the town crier. Harlan Blackthorne’s reputation had made it to Minnesota.

  * * *

  Caspar entered the car square on the end of the last sour note. He bowed to Mrs. Blackthorne and rotated a shoulder toward the rear of the train. I holstered the revolver, not too tightly to slow its retrieval, and followed him through the dining car, sleeper coach, and caboose. That elaborately plain wooden box hadn’t budged an inch, in spite of all the grades we’d climbed and descended and joints we’d bumped over; the man inside was as impossible to dislodge from his current place as he’d been from the bench.

  We stepped out onto the vestibule, where a circus barker awaited us. Barely five feet, with the chest of a puffer pigeon, a straw boater pushed back from his bald forehead, windowpane suit, and gray kid gaiters on his shiny shoes, he stood with his thumbs hooked inside the armh
oles of his waistcoat and spoke in a baritone so deep I felt the tingling in my feet.

  “Marshal Murdock? The Weekly Democrat. Welcome to our city.”

  I decided he managed that timbre through the counterweight of his moustaches, great swooping ginger-colored things that supported his jowls like flying buttresses.

  “Deputy,” I corrected. “Do I call you Mr. Democrat or what?”

  “I ask your pardon. On the Lord’s day I’m apt to forget my business manners. Eli Ferris: Publisher, editor-in-chief, staff reporter, founder of the firm, and keeper of the cistern. I understand you are accompanying the great jurist’s mortal remains to their eternal resting place in Delaware.”

  “Right so far.”

  “May I speak to the Widow Blackthorne? My female readers in particular would be interested in reviewing the Judge’s colorful career through the perspective of his lifelong partner and confidante.”

  “She’s unavailable.”

  He released an armhole to smooth the fertile growth on his lip, stroking his thumb straight out in both directions from the center. “I assure you I have no intention of disturbing her in her hour of grief, but to lift some of the burden by way of giving her the opportunity to share her memories with those of her own persuasion.”

  “She drew her share from the well of spiritual comfort at Grace Lutheran this morning.”

  “Perhaps, if the lady herself were to decline this request in person—”

  I hooked my own thumbs inside my belt, spreading my coat and exposing the butt of the weapon in its scabbard. “Mr. Ferris, this conversation is ended.”

  “I cannot accept that, sir. I’ve already ordered this week’s front page struck from the chase. When a man of Blackthorne’s stature, alive or dead, visits our peaceful hamlet, the event quite outstrips even a visit from a hot-air balloon.”

  I’d started to take hold of his elbow and steer him toward the steps. I stopped with my hand in midair.

  “Did you say hot-air balloon?”

  NINETEEN

  When Ferris scowled, the tips of his moustaches nearly touched under his chin.

  “Yes, and it was damnably inconsiderate of them to take off again before word could reach me. The biggest local story my journal has had since Eric Gunderson’s mill burned down with him inside, and I had to build it on the testimony of witnesses other than myself.”

  “With all due respect to the late Mr. Gunderson, when did the balloon come through?”

  “This morning, before dawn; too dark even to describe the colors of the silk. It touched ground square in the middle of John Engles’ potato patch and was gone within the quarter-hour. John’s got as much English as I have Norwegian, so I had to piece together his account with an old phrase book and the help of my idiot printer’s devil, who’s as ignorant in one language as the other.”

  “Did Engles speak with anyone aboard?”

  “D’ye think my luck changed in that regard? Unless the pilot or whatever he calls himself flew here straight from Skagerrak, I couldn’t quote so much as a sneeze.”

  “Did anyone get off?”

  “If he did, it was before Engles scrambled out of his nightshirt and into his overalls. It was the whoosh of the hot air the contraption let out to come down rousted him out of dreams of Viking plunder.”

  “Where can I find Engles?”

  “Refilling his Sunday-scoured soul with fresh sin down at Finlay’s general mercantile. The town’s dry, but Finlay’s back room’s as wet as the Red River.” He groomed his facial growth once again. “This interview’s commenced to run backwards. How’s about five minutes with the Widow Blackthorne in return for my generosity?”

  “That’s—”

  “I will speak with this man, Mr. Murdock.”

  Less than a week out from under the old eagle’s scrutiny and I’d begun to lose my edge. I hadn’t even heard the door open behind me, and there was Mrs. Blackthorne touching my elbow. I turned to meet her gaze, saw in it that she’d overheard enough of our conversation to know I needed a reason to alight from the train once again, and had provided it.

  Ferris pried his hat from the back of his head, bowing deeply enough to show that his hair ended precisely where the sweatband began; a perfect tonsure. I made introductions the way the Judge had taught me and waited until the pair had retired inside before stepping down.

  The band was putting away its instruments as I made my way through the small collection of residents still present on the platform. No one paid me any more attention than curiosity toward a stranger; evidently Howard Rossleigh’s blood-and-thunder account of my career hadn’t made it into the columns of The Weekly Democrat. Fame is largely a question of geography.

  Finlay’s store had a corner entrance that gave away the building’s origins as a saloon before the bluenoses had shut it down. As usual, reform had led to secret measures. Until the do-goods find a way to erase the process from history, fermented grain will find its way down every throat that seeks it.

  My own included. How the abstemious managed to gain entry to a place where the truth flows like mountain runoff, I’m not equipped to say. And I was thirsty.

  A window where the legitimate goods were placed on display provided a view of a tidy space, with floors scrubbed white, a plain wooden counter, shelves of cans and galvanized buckets reaching to the ceiling, and a dress form in a corner, indicating the existence of a Mrs. Finlay, or at any event a local female partner; the whistle-stop town would scarcely tempt an entrepreneur from outside. A homemade CLOSED sign with a backward S hung on the door, but that would be for the tourists and those customers genuinely interested in obtaining a flannel shirt or a sack of flour.

  That much was obvious to an experienced tracker like me. At the base of the porch a trail ran around the side of the building, worn three inches deep by the tread of many a thirsty visitor.

  The sun was just this side of noon, and shining full on a back porch next to a full rain barrel breeding algae and wigglers on its surface; Finlay’s attention to his shelves appeared not to extend beyond the public room. A screen door hung at enough of an angle to invite newly minted mosquitoes to shake the scum off their wings and drink their fill from the clientele. I peered through the screen, but I couldn’t make out anything beyond the rusty mesh.

  That wasn’t true from the other side. I had my hand raised to rap on the frame when the door swung open, forcing me to backpedal to keep it from turning my face into a Belgian waffle. The man holding the handle stood on a disintegrating threshold with a butcher knife in his other hand. He wasn’t wearing an apron, so he didn’t seem to have been cutting meat.

  “A man dressed good as you ought to know his letters,” he said. “The store’s closed.”

  “This coat?” I spread it, exposing the revolver butt yet again. “I got it from Monkey Ward; but then I guess I’d need to know my letters to order it, so your point’s made. I thought the sign was just a suggestion. Somebody told me I could come here to cut the dust.”

  “Who was that?”

  He wasn’t much taller than Ferris the newspaperman, but the similarity came to a dead end there. He had a long yellow close-scraped face and combed his pale hair straight out in every direction from the crown in a thatch; it looked like a dandelion in bloom. The sleeves of his faded blue flannel shirt were rolled tight past his elbows, exposing hairless forearms as thick as half-grown stoats. The long muscle that ran up the right leapt and twitched as he flexed his fingers around the handle of the butcher knife.

  “I didn’t catch his name,” I said.

  “Folks hereabouts don’t take to sharing their affairs with every drifter. If it’s supplies or provisions you’re after, come round tomorrow. I’m passing the Lord’s day with friends.”

  “He said he was a friend of John Engles’. Is he here?”

  “You got a bum steer, stranger. All of Engles’ friends are right here in this room.” He started to draw the door shut, but I was standing in its path. The knife
came up a notch. It looked at home in his grip. I calculated the odds of drawing the Deane-Adams without losing the use of that arm. I didn’t like the numbers.

  From behind him, one of his friends let out a belch that started low and rose to a crack, like “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Someone who might have been the perpetrator said, “Aw, let him in, Floyd. I’m sick of looking at the same old faces.”

  He had a singsong accent, plainly Scandinavian. That was encouraging, if it wasn’t Swedish or Danish or Finnish. If Ferris were any kind of journalist he’d have come here for his interpreter when the balloon landed.

  Finlay didn’t look to be wavering. Moving slowly and using the hand opposite my holster, I fished out my poke and shook it so that the coins scraped against each other inside.

  That seemed to be the password. He executed a practiced maneuver, reversing the knife’s handle from underhand to overhand, and thrust it under his wide leather belt.

  “Two bits a pour.”

  “How long’s the pour?”

  He stepped aside, still holding the screen door, and canted his now-empty palm toward a shelf built from packing crates, lined with pint canning jars. I plucked loose a cartwheel dollar and dropped it into the palm. “That should get me started.”

  TWENTY

  It was a small room and close, papered with catalogue pages advertising plows, ladies’ undergarments, and Dr. Strauss’ Miracle Wormer, cut into crooked aisles by freestanding shelves of canning jars, mismatched wooden chairs, buckets of lard, and a coffee grinder with embossed wheels big enough to support a locomotive. A great hickory stump served as a cutting-table (the cleaver was sunk deep as Excalibur), next to a pickle barrel with a red-and-white enamel dipper hanging from a nail in the wall above it. The lid was off, telegraphing the smell of pure grain alcohol as far as ten feet. Two fresh sides of venison dangled from a single rope slung over a rafter, divided down the spine, probably by the same knife Finlay had under his belt; The Weekly Democrat had been spread under it to catch the drips. The red meat laddered by ribs had a pungent earthy odor peculiar to freshly butchered wild game.