Saving Masterson

by Bill Brooks

  The only thing that pleased Mosely about the boys was that they always brought along a bottle of store-bought whiskey, which beat hell out of the homemade snakehead Mosely could afford. Mosely called it forty-rod liquor, what the boys brought. It had such a kick to it, it would knock a man forty rods.

  “You had her first last time,” one of the twins said. Maybe Bernard.

  “Ah shit, that don’t mean nothing, let’s ask her which one of us she wants to go first.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Ma’am,” one of them said into the back of the wagon, “which one of us would you prefer to go first?”

  “I don’t give a coon’s ass which,” she said in a loud impatient voice. “Let’s just get on with it, I’ve got gooseflesh.” The boys sniggered, because they’d been into the forty-rod too.

  Mosely was thinking how pretty his wife had been when he met her, how pretty and sweet and thin she was. She was like a waif, an angel, a fairy, he reflected. She was so light he could carry her in one arm, and did. But, she’d started letting herself go after Mosely married her. She had grown thick and moon-faced and her temperament had gotten bad as well. He figured the laudanum she’d come to love so much had something to do with it.

  A single raindrop fell from the overcast sky and thunked Mosely on the tip of his nose. He looked up, thought, Christ, it’s going to rain on me.

  The twins were fumbling around in the pockets of their britches for a coin to flip to see who would go first with Mosely’s wife. Finally one of them came up with one, said, “Call it,” and flipped what looked like to Mosely a perfectly shiny standing Liberty silver dollar into the air. And when it came down, the boy who flipped it caught it and slapped it atop his left wrist just before the other boy said, “Heads.”

  That was exactly when Two Bits shot the one who caught the coin.

  The bullet almost knocked him out of his boots. There was a long frozen moment when nobody moved or said anything except Mosely’s wife from back of the wagon.

  “What the hell was that, thunder?”

  The shot boy lay there with his legs jerking like a frog that had been gigged. He lay atop what looked like a whole bucket of blood flowing out from underneath him.

  Then Two Bits shot the other boy and the shot about knocked him out of his boots as well, flung him against the side of the wagon and he collapsed like a rag doll.

  “It’s the Rapture!” Mosely screamed. He’d read about the Rapture in the Bible—Book of Revelations—though he hardly understood most of it except for the part where the world would end in fire and brimstone and some would be taken up into heaven and others would be left behind. Or something like that.

  Mosely reached for the whiskey bottle. He could see there was still a swallow’s worth that needed drinking. Mosely’s wife’s head popped out of the back of the wagon. She saw first the one twin then the other.

  “Mosely, did you shoot them boys out of jealousy?”

  “No,” Mosely said.

  She was sure that Mosely had shot them and it filled her with a sense of anger and love for him. Anger because he’d shot two perfectly good customers, and love because only an extremely jealous man would go to such extremes to protect his wife’s honor, especially if she had no honor to protect.

  “Well, I ought to be mad at you,” Mosely’s wife said, exiting the back of the wagon. She’d wrapped her gooseflesh in an old moth-riddled quilt. “I just wish there was another way to show your displeasure other than shooting them boys, Mosely.”

  “I didn’t shoot them,” Mosely said.

  “Who did, if you didn’t?”

  “He did,” Mosely said, pointing to the man walking up from a little stand of pine trees. He was carrying a big bore rifle and he had a pair of pistols stuck inside his belt and he looked scraggly in the face and everywhere under his hat.

  “You going to shoot us too?” Mosely asked when the man got close enough.

  “No, I ain’t going to shoot you,” the man said.

  “Why’d you shoot them nice boys,” Mosely’s wife said, “if you ain’t a dirty killer and ain’t planning on killing Mosely and me too?”

  “I shot ’em because I got paid to shoot ’em,” the man said. “Nobody’s paid me to shoot either of you. Unless you want to pay me.”

  “I ain’t got even a nickel to my name,” Mosely said.

  “Then I guess you won’t get shot today,” the man said. He looked Mosely’s wife over real hard. She looked him over real hard as well.

  “Those were customers of mine you shot,” Mosely’s wife said.

  “Customers?” The man looked from her to Mosely. “You mean…” the man started to say.

  Mosely just looked off toward some mountains he could see in the distance. They had snow on their peaks. He felt as cold inside his heart as he thought that snow was cold.

  “Well,” the man said to Mosely’s wife. “I guess there wouldn’t be nobody to say anything if you wanted to take the money out of those boys’ pockets.”

  “You mean rob the dead?”

  “Well, it don’t look like that one feller is quite yet, but he will be soon.”

  Mosely sat there watching his once sweet and slender wife waddle over and pick clean the wallets of the twins, giving each a little kiss on the forehead as she sobbed loudly, “I’m sorry, boys, but you won’t be needing this, and me and Mosely will. I just wish you hadn’t wasted so much time arguing over who would go first and would have got to take your pleasure one last time before this tragic thing happened to you…”

  “She always carry on so?” the man said. “I’m Two Bits, by the way.”

  “I’m Mosely,” Mosely said, and, “She didn’t use to. She use to be sweet and kind of on the quiet side.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll be getting on,” Two Bits said.

  “Mind I ask you who it was who paid you to shoot them boys?” Mosely said. “Except for their foolishness, they seemed like rather nice boys.”

  “Somebody who wanted ’em dead,” Two Bits said. “You want anybody dead you’re willing to pay for?”

  Mosely looked toward his wife who was counting out the money she’d taken from the bloody wallets of the twins.

  “No, I don’t reckon,” Mosely said. “And even if I did, like I said before, I don’t have a nickel to my name.”

  Two Bits looked at Mosely’s wife.

  “How about you?” he said. “Anybody you want to pay me to shoot dead now that you’ve come into some money?”

  Mosely’s wife looked at Mosely. She shook her head.

  “Well, then I’ll be getting on,” Two Bits said again. “I’ve got other work waiting for me down in Kansas. Seems like when it rains jobs, it pours ’em.”

  They watched him go off into the trees.

  “There’s almost forty dollars here,” Mosely’s wife said.

  “I wouldn’t care if it were a thousand,” Mosely said. “I don’t feel good about what happened. I feel near sick.”

  “Maybe we should get down on our knees and pray,” Mosely’s wife said. “I think maybe this is a sign for you to stop drinking and me to stop whoring. I think God is giving us a second chance, Mosely.”

  Mosely looked at that last little bit of liquor in the bottom of the bottle the twins had brought with them. It looked like temptation, those last few drops of liquor. It looked just like wet brown temptation, and so too did that silver dollar lying by the outstretched hand of the dead boy. Winking as it was in the morning sun, just like a temptress’s eye—winking at Mosely, to where he couldn’t stand it anymore and went and picked it up and put it into his pocket.

  “I reckon you could be right,” Mosely said to his wife. “It could be a sign of some sort telling us to repent.”

  Mosely looked at his wife and she looked at him. They both knew that their hearts were in the right place, but that it might be a lot harder road to travel than it seemed. Then they looked at the dead twins and knew salvation wasn’t a thing easily had.<
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  A bluebird chirped merrily in the top of a tree.

  Chapter 8

  Dog Kelly arrived almost with the sun. Early. Teddy opened the door and there Dog was standing under his slightly crushed stovepipe hat, still wearing the same dusty swallowtail coat and looking hollow-eyed.

  “How’d you make out in your investigation last night?” Dog said.

  “I made the rounds south of the tracks. I put the word out I was a gun for hire. Figured it was a good ploy.”

  “Smart,” Dog Kelly said. “I should have thought of that ploy myself.” Dog wasn’t exactly sure what the word ploy meant, but figured it had something to do with the Pinkerton man’s overall plan.

  “Bat and Ed is back in town. They come in late last night.”

  “They find the men they were after?”

  “They did.”

  “Good for them.”

  “Not so good. Dirty Dave and his bunch busted out of the jail down in Liberal after Bat and Ed locked ’em up down there. Dug their way out with spoons. Spoons! Goddamn, what sort of piss-poor jail they got down there, I says to Bat when he told me. Bat says, just that, piss poor, walls made out of mud. That’s twice they went after them boys and twice they missed ’em.”

  “Bad luck,” said Teddy over his shoulder as he pulled a clean shirt from the drawer of the bureau. “When are you going to introduce me to Bat and Ed?”

  “Bat’s having coffee down to the Lone Star. Ed ain’t as early a riser.”

  “What time is it?”

  Dog Kelly took a big pocket watch from his vest pocket and snapped open the case. “Almost seven in the morning.”

  “You don’t look like you got any shuteye.”

  “I don’t sleep much. Find it to be a lot like death, sleeping is…Don’t care for it at all.”

  Teddy pulled on his coat and took his hat off a hook on the back of the door and they walked down the stairs and out the front door. Sun was just breaking through a bank of clouds far off to the east. The winter-brown prairies looked golden in the light. Dog Kelly was a heavy walker; his boot heels clunked hard on the boardwalk. He wasn’t that big of a man, but the way he walked made him sound like he was.

  The Lone Star was empty except for Bat, sitting at a table drinking a cup of coffee, and his sibling, Jim, stocking shelves from a crate of whiskey arrived a few minutes earlier.

  Bat looked up when Dog and Teddy entered. Jim did not.

  Bat’s face was saturnine. He let his gaze fall on Teddy and Dog without any change of expression.

  “This is Sheriff Masterson,” Dog said. “And this is Teddy Blue, the Pinkerton I sent for.”

  Bat nodded toward the chair opposite him, said, “Take a seat.”

  Dog Kelly went to the end of the bar and filled two tin cups with coffee from a pot heating on a woodburner in the corner.

  “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” Bat said.

  “In Cheyenne last year,” Teddy said. Bat’s features relaxed a little.

  “Yes, I remember now, you killed Hank Rain…I was there, saw the whole thing go down.”

  “It was an unfortunate incident,” Teddy said, just as Dog Kelly set the cups down on the table.

  “You damn right it was unfortunate,” Bat said. “For Hank Rain.”

  “Killing’s not my game.”

  “Killing’s not your game?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you doing working as a Pinkerton? And why’d you come to a hellhole like Dodge?”

  “It’s a long story. Suffice it to say, I go where I’m told.”

  Dog made a mental note of the word suffice. He had an old dictionary behind the bar at his establishment, weighing, he guessed, ten pounds—yellowing pages, some missing. He’d look up suffice first chance he got.

  “You don’t strike me as the sort to just go where you’re told.”

  “We can sit and debate what sort of man I am if you want, but that’s not what I think the mayor here is paying for.”

  Bat looked at Dog, who was blowing the steam off his coffee.

  “Hotter’n a stove lid,” Dog said. “Tastes about like it too.”

  “They got coffee places other than mine,” Bat said. “You don’t have to drink it here.”

  “Look, Sheriff, I know you’re not too damn happy about my presence here, but Mayor Kelly’s right about one thing; nobody knows me here, and I can possibly learn information neither of you can about this conspiracy.”

  “Conspiracy, huh?”

  “Whatever you choose to call it.”

  “He’s right, Bat,” Dog said. “Let him do his job, let me do mine and that way you and Ed can do yours.”

  “I’ve nothing against you personally, Mr. Blue. I just don’t need a nursemaid and neither does Ed.”

  “I never thought you did. Tell you what, let me try and help you find out who the men are who want to assassinate you and your brother, and you can handle them any way you deem fit. How’s that?”

  “It’s a free country, where a man can do what he wants, ain’t that what they say?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  Bat sipped some more of his coffee. Teddy gauged Bat and Jim to be close in age, only Bat looked like he had a lot more frontier in him than most that age.

  “Just to let you know,” Teddy said. “I put the word around south of the tracks I’m a gun for hire. The hope being of course that whoever wants you dead will hire me to kill you.”

  Bat looked at him with those dark sad eyes from under the bowler.

  “Make you a deal,” Bat said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Go three rounds with me in the ring. If you’re still on your feet at the end, I’ll shake your hand and give you my full cooperation.”

  “I’m not a fighter.”

  “You damn well better become one if you intend on staying in Dodge.”

  “Okay,” Teddy said. “Set it up.”

  Bat smiled, Dog did too.

  “Noon, right here. We’ll clear the floor and I’ll have Jim put up some ropes for a ring.”

  “I’ll keep the time,” Dog said.

  “And I’m guessing you’ll take bets too,” Teddy said.

  “Of course,” Dog said. “It wouldn’t be no fight without bets laid down.”

  Teddy stood and said, “See you at noon, Mr. Masterson.”

  “You whip my ass, you can call me Bat, Detective Blue.”

  Teddy could see that Bat Masterson, though not a tall man, was solid as a stump all over. Still, it was an opportunity to show the rest of the town that he and Bat, and by proxy the other Masterson brothers, were at odds over something.

  “Tell you what, Mayor,” Teddy said. “Pass the word around while you’re promoting the fight and laying down bets it’s some sort of grudge match.”

  Dog smiled and Teddy thought maybe he saw a half smile of recognition on Bat’s face as well.

  “I’ll do her, boy, I’ll play her up big,” Dog said enthusiastically.

  Teddy walked over to the Wright House after he left the Lone Star. Mae was there. He could see her waiting tables through the plate glass. He went in and took a seat. She saw him and came over.

  “You must put in a long day,” he said.

  “Every day. It helps me save my money faster, working long hours. Breakfast?”

  “Of course. Make it a big one, I’ve got to fistfight a fellow in a few hours and will need my strength.”

  She looked at him askance, saw the slight grin playing at his mouth.

  “You like boxing matches, Mae?”

  “I don’t care for any sort of violence,” she said.

  “I do this right, there won’t be that much violence to it.”

  “Don’t count on me being in the audience.”

  “Flapjacks,” Teddy said. “Lots of ’em and several slices of fried ham too.”

  She went away and came back later with his meal and set it before him and poured him coffee and stood for a moment w
atching him eat.

  “What?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “Men…” she said, and walked away.

  Noon found him back in the Lone Star, a lot more crowded now than earlier. Men lined the walls. A hasty ring of ropes tied to support posts and chairs had been constructed. Every eye fell on Teddy when he walked through the doors. Dog rushed up to greet him.

  “I see you got the word out,” Teddy said.

  “This time of year, things is slow, folks would pay to see a good spitting match, but this is even better.”

  Teddy went over to a chair and took off his hat and jacket and set them there.

  “Since you’re new in town, I’ll work as your second between rounds.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Teddy said.

  Bat walked over.

  “You ready to take me on?” he uttered in a low voice.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be. I guess we better make it look good for those who would like to see you dead.”

  Bat offered him a lopsided confident smile.

  “I’ll try my best to make it look real good, laddy.”

  Bat ducked between the ropes into the ring. He took off his shirt and handed it to brother Jim. Ed, who looked a lot more like Bat than Jim did, came over.

  “He hits like a mule,” Ed said. “Just so you know.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Everyone, including all three of the Masterson brothers, had confident smiles, like they shared a huge secret among themselves.

  Teddy took off the shoulder-rig holster and handed it to Dog, who admired the lean tall frame of the detective. Dog held apart the ropes for Teddy to step into the ring.

  The crowd surged forward and Teddy could hear bets being laid down, most all of them on Bat Masterson. A few bet on Teddy because the odds Dog was giving were ten to one in favor of Bat.