by Bill Brooks
Bone had given some thought to killing all three Masterson brothers but figured if Ed and Bat bit the bullet, Jim would hightail it out of town, being the most fey of the trio, and thus save Bone some on the killings. Bone also planned a little surprise for Two Bits too, when he came to claim the rest of his money—the surprise being the derringer there in the safe next to his considerable sums of money from which he counted out the three hundred. Why, the town would see him as some sort of hero for killing the man who assassinated the Mastersons. They’d probably elect him city marshal—now wouldn’t that be choice, he thought.
“Them other two besides the Mastersons,” Bone said. “One is named Frenchy LeBreck—he runs the Paris Club, not far from here. Little prissy feller with thin moustaches. The fourth one I want dead is the son of a bitch that shot my toes off and is the one Frenchy hired to kill me, a lanky cuss name of Teddy Blue.”
“Looks like you was lucky he only shot your toes off,” Two Bits said, stuffing the cash into his pocket.
“Lucky my ass. You ever had your toes shot off?”
“Can’t says I have and can’t says I’m planning to. Where will I find this yahoo?”
“I asked around, he’s staying at the Dodge House, room twelve, top of the stairs.”
“Twelve sounds like an unlucky number. Least it will be when I finish with him.”
“Was me, I’d start by killing the easy ones first.”
“I don’t need you to tell me my job. They’ll all be dead by morning.”
“Good, good, and when they are, come see me and I’ll give you the rest of your cash.”
“You can count on it, bub.”
Two Bits slipped out as he’d slipped in, through the back door and down alleys until he found the Paris Club.
He ambled to the bar and asked for Frenchy.
“He’s back in his room,” the barkeep said.
“It’s important I talk to him. I got some money for him,” Two Bits said, pulling out the fold of cash. “Three hundred dollars, I owe him. I know he wants it bad.”
The barkeep whistled.
“Back down that hall,” he said, pointing with his eyes.
Two Bits took the journey slow, walking on cat’s feet. The noise from the main room seemed to follow him. He came to a door and could see a light spilling from underneath it a few inches into the hall. He put his ear to the door and listened. He couldn’t hear anything. He pulled out one of his pistols and turned the knob and it gave way. He opened the door suddenly and stepped in, closing it quietly behind him. There in the middle of the room was a big copper tub full of water. Candles were lit and flickering all over the room, their little lights dancing along the walls. It felt spooky to Two Bits, the way the shadow and light intermingled, and it raised the hair on the back of his neck. He listened hard. Then he heard some sounds coming from up in a loft there the other side of the room, where a little set of steps led to.
Two Bits figured maybe Frenchy was up there asleep and the sounds he heard were snores. He didn’t favor shooting nobody in their sleep—it seemed cowardly somehow to kill a sleeping man. But these were desperate times and if he had to, he’d shake the feller awake then shoot him. He moved to the foot of the steps. Then he heard voices. The voices were saying little love things.
“You are my little sad dove,” a man’s voice said.
“I have broken my wing and you have taken me in,” a woman’s voice said.
“I am your refuge,” the man’s voice said.
“I am your little sad dove,” the woman’s voice said.
“I can’t believe my good luck, having the Rose of Cimarron in my bed.”
“That’s all well and good,” Two Bits said soon as he mounted the stairs and saw two people lying on a small cot together. One of them had moustaches and he looked prissy.
“You must be Frenchy.”
“Oui,” Frenchy said. “That is who I am, who are you?”
“Mr. Butcher sent me.”
He saw then the looks on their faces and felt sorry for them and said, “Maybe it would be better if you closed your eyes,” then took a pillow and shot them through it. A spew of feathers fluttered in the air like tiny doves, then drifted downward. Just two quick shots and it was finished.
“Boy, oh, boy. I sure am beginning to hate this line of work,” Two Bits said to himself looking at the woman and then gently closing her eyes because she seemed to be staring straight up at him. She was the first woman he ever had to shoot. It upset his stomach some.
There was a bottle of wine next to the cot and Two Bits took a long swallow from it, then another. It wasn’t sweet like he heard wine was supposed to be. Almost tenderly he covered the two lovers with the quilt, then slipped out again.
Now he needed to find either the Mastersons or the one called Teddy Blue. Two Bits had a good memory for names. He decided to shoot this Blue feller first, since shooting one man was a bit easier than shooting two—especially two like the Mastersons. He slipped quietly out the back door of the Paris Club and into the night just moments before Leo, Frenchy’s number-one bartender, brought the tray of food Frenchy had ordered earlier to the back room. The tray contained oysters on the half shell, various cheeses, and a nice bottle of champagne. Frenchy had it in mind to propose marriage to the Rose of Cimarron. He’d bought a small silver ring with a garnet he was going to present right after they’d feasted.
Leo knocked politely on Frenchy’s door. No answer. He knocked again. No answer. He tried the knob and the door opened without protest. He saw the many candles flickering, the tub. He touched his fingers to the water and the water was cool.
“Frenchy,” he called up toward the loft. No answer. Maybe they had fallen asleep, Frenchy and the lovely Rose.
The tray clattered all the way down the steps when Leo climbed them and looked at the quilt-covered lumps on the bed and saw the big bloody wet stains.
Bat Masterson had just finished his brother’s rounds north of the deadline and was about to head south of it before retiring for the evening. He had in mind a few hands of poker and a big steak before going over to see Bone Butcher. He wanted to feel good and relaxed before he started beating a confession of conspiracy out of him. He had a head full of ideas of how he’d get Bone to talk; shooting him in the same foot Teddy had shot him in was one of the options Bat considered. He rather relished the idea.
But then he saw Leo running up the street still wearing his apron, shouting, “Sheriff, Sheriff!”
“Who did this?” Bat said, after viewing the bodies. There were bloody feathers and a shot pillow scattered on the floor.
Leo shrugged.
“You didn’t hear a gunshot?”
“It’s loud out in the main room.”
“He was smart, whoever he was. He shot ’em through the pillow to muffle the sound. It’s that goddamn…” Bat started to say the name Bone Butcher, but thought better of it. He didn’t want a lynching, and he couldn’t be a hundred percent positive it was Bone’s hand in it. Besides, Bone was laid up with a shot foot and wouldn’t have done this dreadful thing himself. So it would have had to been someone Bone sent to do the dirty work. And that thought led to another darker thought, one that sent a little chill through him. If this was Bone’s doing, if he had hired someone to kill Frenchy and the Rose, then it was real possible that the same person had been hired to kill him and Ed as well.
Jesus. Could there be more than that trio of morons Dirty Dave put together to assassinate him and Ed? And with Ed laid up, it would be just him alone to face whoever was out there. Unless…
He went to find Teddy Blue.
Chapter 29
She came again that night and knocked on his door and when John opened it and saw her standing there, he wasn’t surprised and he wasn’t unhappy about it, but he wasn’t pleased either.
He looked beyond her into the dark brown dusk and didn’t see the priest out there as he had on other occasions.
She had a bowl of fruit
she held forth to him like a gift.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said.
Her large dark eyes searched his face.
He stepped away from the door and she wedged herself into the room as though she were shy or as though he might strike her, and set the bowl of fruit on the small table, one of the two pieces of furniture in the room—the other being the small bed in the corner.
“Thank you for the fruit,” he said.
She looked at him, her eyes full of questions that she could not ask because she was a mute.
“You probably should go,” John said. “Seamus will be waiting for you.”
She shook her head and her thick black rope of hair seemed to him like a thing he wanted to touch but he’d refrained so far and would now.
“Look, Selena,” he said. “If it were other than what it is between you and him, I’d take up with you in a heartbeat. But you belong to him and I respect that and I won’t come between the two of you. And if he does leave and doesn’t take you with him, you’re free to come live here with me. But I just can’t be part of…”
She came to him and laid her head on his chest and put her arms around him, and she was like a sad little child who needed to be held and he could not refuse.
She felt warm and slight to him like a child. They stayed that way for a time but then he eased her away.
“You must go back,” he said.
She mouthed the question: “Why?”
“Because I know what it is like to be on the other side of something like this. I know what it is Seamus must feel, knowing that you come here to visit me. I’ve been in his shoes and the outcome wasn’t very pleasant.”
She didn’t understand, of course, and he didn’t feel like going through the whole story over again with her about his having shot the woman he’d been in love with, the one he’d caught with another man.
And the reminder of that tragedy was fresh in his mind, since the telegram had arrived this noon warning him that Hoodoo Brown had come to Dodge and had Teddy arrested and that John ought to get into the wind and find another place to lay low.
His first thought had been to go north and help his old amigo out of his jam. But, he rightly reasoned, by the time he got to Dodge, Hoodoo would have hauled Teddy back to Las Vegas—or worse—a thought he didn’t want to contemplate—killed him on the trail and left him buried in an unmarked grave.
John figured to go north anyway, not to Dodge, but to Las Vegas, and await Hoodoo’s arrival back in that town with or without Teddy Blue. And one way or the other, he’d either save Teddy’s hide or kill Hoodoo Brown. That was John’s fate as he saw it, but the constant visits from the mute woman were complicating matters more than he wanted.
She looked at him now with a great sadness that he would not accept her. She took a piece of paper and wrote something on it and handed it to him and he had to bend down to the lamplight to read it, for his eyes were failing him.
Is it because I can’t talk that you don’t want me?
“No,” he said. “No, Selena. It don’t have anything to do with it. You’re beautiful and any man would want you. But there is already one man who loves you.”
She wrote again.
He is going to leave me and go north.
John read it, straightened and said, “When that day comes, I’ll be waiting here for you.”
She mouthed silent words he could not understand.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. “I have to go north for a time myself, but I aim on coming back soon as I finish up some business there.”
He saw then that she didn’t believe him. She wrote:
You are leaving me too.
He tried to tell her that wasn’t the case, but she ran out, tears streaming down her cheeks. He stood in the door watching until the night took her. She ran toward the church, and at least that was some comfort for him.
He’d go and talk to Seamus in the morning. He’d reassure him that there was nothing between him and the girl and that he was leaving for the north and to thank him for his many kindnesses.
John closed the door and read the telegram again, feeling a knot in his chest as he did. He should have never let Teddy go north by himself. He reached for the bottle of tequila.
The boy, Chico, had encamped himself outside the priest’s window after a long day of labor. He’d purchased some warm tortillas and a bowl of frijoles for his supper and had eaten them with relish and haste. He often liked to eat his supper outside the priest’s window whenever the priest did not invite him to supper and listen to the man some said was his father singing there in the evenings. But lately the priest had forgone his singing and had taken to drinking mescal and cursing God.
It was because of the woman that the priest drank and cursed. Because she often went lately to visit the other gringo. At first the priest didn’t seem to mind, and often he invited the gringo to supper with him there in his hacienda and the three of them—the priest, the gringo and the woman would eat together. But lately the priest ate alone and drank alone and cursed the woman when she wasn’t there and cursed himself and God.
So the boy felt badly for him, felt the priest’s anger as well.
And so it was this particular night.
The woman had come in late and the priest had asked her if she’d gone to visit John Sears.
“You have, haven’t you?” Chico heard the priest say.
Of course the woman was a mute and couldn’t answer except by signaling with her hands or by writing it down.
Chico peered over the windowsill, saw the two of them there across the table from each other. The priest’s face was flushed red and his movements uncertain. There on the table was an olla and a glass half full of the greasy brown liquor, some of it spilled on the table in a wet puddle.
The woman held her hands, palms outward, as if to ward off the priest’s accusations. She shook her head no, the rope of her hair swaying.
The priest berated her and Chico could tell that he was drunk by the way he slurred his words and staggered.
“Oh, oh!” the priest said, then slumped into a chair and put his face into his hands. The woman tried to comfort him by placing her hands on his shoulders but he swept them aside.
“Betrayal,” the priest said. “You’ve betrayed me and I’ve betrayed myself…”
The woman began crying, her sounds muffled but the tears wet on her cheeks, as wet as the stain of mescal on the table. She stood opposite the priest and cried.
The boy felt the betrayal and he decided in an instant what to do about it.
John had begun drinking as soon as the woman left. He had a hard ride tomorrow and probably harder still what lay ahead of him, and he’d need all his wits about him once he began the journey to either free his friend or kill the marshal, Hoodoo Brown. But tonight he would drink and try and free himself from his desire for the woman and every other bad thing he felt in his life.
And by the time the boy knocked on his door, John Sears was about as drunk as he’d ever been.
He lay on the bed listening to the knocking. He thought it was her, Selena: that she’d returned to plead with him to take her in.
“Go away,” he said, reaching for the bottle of tequila he’d bought that very morning only to find that it was now empty.
Knock, knock.
He tried ignoring it.
Knock, knock.
“Oh, goddamn,” he muttered and rose unsteadily from the bed and fumbled his way through the darkness to the door.
“Who is it…?”
The boy was standing there with the pistol already in his hands.
John looked at it, looked into the boy’s eyes—this same boy he’d seen almost every day, the one he knew as an orphan, the one who reminded him of himself when he was a boy, the one he’d taught to shoot the gun he was now holding.
The explosion carried John back into the room.
He could smell cordite but could not feel his arms or legs
.
The sound of the gun still echoed in his brain.
He heard footsteps running.
He lay there thinking, so this is the way it ends.
He closed his eyes and thought, Death, be quick, don’t let me linger.
The priest came.
He knelt beside John and took his head in his hands.
“He thought he was doing me a favor,” the priest said. “I don’t know how to excuse it…”
John could smell liquor on the priest’s breath but it didn’t matter. Those lucid eyes that looked into his were of some comfort and if there truly was a Jesus, John imagined he had eyes like those of the priest.
“Don’t move me,” John said.
John could see the faces of many of the villagers crowded in the doorway.
His breathing was becoming more difficult; he wasn’t sure how much time had passed since he had been shot. He had passed out and then awakened again to find the priest kneeling next to him.
John turned his head and saw the woman there by the door, her face stained with tears.
“There was never anything to it,” he said, his voice raspy. “Me and her…”
“It doesn’t matter,” the priest said.
“To me it does. I just want you to know I’d never…”
“Do you want me to give you last rites?”
“I ain’t Catholic…”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It can’t hurt any if you did…”
The priest spoke words over him, rubbed the sign of the cross on his brow with his thumb. Some of what the priest said John heard, some of it he didn’t, as he faded in and out of consciousness. It was like a bad dream he couldn’t quite wake from, couldn’t quite fall into completely.
“Is there someone you want me to contact?” the priest said. “Your friend, Teddy?”
“Tell him…tell him…”
The priest could see John’s lips moving but could no longer hear what he was saying.
John’s thumbless hand opened and closed.