Slocum and the Comely Corpse

by Jake Logan

  At the front of the building, the facade rose three feet above the top of the flat roof, forming a waist-high wall. Slocum sheltered below it, crouching beside it, out of sight. A folded blanket lay beside him, on which were laid some weapons and a few bundles of sticks.

  It had turned colder and the snow was now sticking, layering the empty streets with white. Enough time had passed since the shooters had taken their position in the empty store diagonally across from the jail for the snow to have covered up the tracks of their footprints. That was good. Slocum had worried about it until the snow had blotted them out.

  In the store were Pete and a couple of his boys. From time to time, Slocum could hear the click of one of their gun barrels rapping against the store window. If he could hear it, so could Pierce. It hadn’t happened for the last ten minutes, allowing Slocum to hope that they had settled into a silent wait.

  The empty store and the jailhouse formed a kind of inverted L in the southeast corner of the square, a potentially deadly trap with Pete’s group in the store, Wessel and Maud and the others armed and waiting in the jail, and Slocum up on the roof, smoking a cigar, waiting.

  He’d rigged things so he was the only one waiting outside in the snowstorm. Some planning! On the other hand, he wouldn’t have trusted anyone else in his spot.

  The cigar was burning down, more than half gone. Slocum wondered if it was time to light another. He couldn’t be without a cigar when the critical time came, fumbling around with matches during the showdown.

  He was about to reach into his pocket to fire up another of Hix’s fine cigars when he heard the riders coming.

  At first, he wasn’t sure he’d heard it. Then the wind blew, and he couldn’t hear anything. Then the wind fell, and he could hear the sound of riders approaching again, and when the wind blew again, hard, he could still hear them coming.

  He peeked over the top of the facade wall. A dozen riders entered the square from the north end. The snow muffled the sound of the horses, like cloths wrapped around their hooves. But they were so close now that there was no way not to hear them.

  They rode up in front of the jail, reining in. Slocum ducked his head back, out of sight, but not before seeing that the riders were masked, bandannas and scarves hiding the lower halves of their faces.

  They were right below him, and he could spit on them. Instead, he touched the cigar’s lit end to the fuse that was sticking out of the top of some bundled sticks of dynamite.

  The fuse caught, sputtering, then sizzling like a Fourth of July sparkler.

  Below, a mask-muffled voice said, “Now we’ll finish off those Doghouse scum for good, men!”

  “And the other prisoners? We finish off them too, Pierce?”

  There was a shot, a bullet hitting flesh, a horse rearing up, a body falling to the ground.

  “Idiot! Calling my name!” said the first voice that had spoken. The other would speak no more.

  “Tell our friends inside to open up,” Pierce said.

  Slocum stuck his head over the top of the parapet, holding the lit bundle of dynamite. Even though he was masked, there was no mistaking Pierce, the sheer animal bulk of the man seated on a mount the size of a quarter horse. He was almost right below Slocum.

  Slocum said, “Heads up, Pierce!”

  Pierce’s head whipped around, trying to see who had spoken.

  The gun he held in his hand was still smoking.

  “Up here!”

  A few of those on the far edge of the group got it first, since their angle of vision took in more of the top of the jail. Some started pointing and shouting, and a few guns began to swing up.

  Following the direction they were pointing, Pierce looked up in time to see Slocum drop a bundle of dynamite in his lap.

  Slocum ducked back, behind the parapet.

  The blast shook the building, knocking some bricks loose. Heat, fire, noise, and smoke filled the street.

  Pierce sailed into view, rising above the top of the parapet. The blast had lofted him skyward—half of him anyway, the upper half, from the waist up. The lower half was somewhere down there in the chaos, shredded to atoms.

  There was a crash of breaking glass as windows were knocked out, followed by crashing volleys of a cross fire from the shooters in jail and those in the store.

  Pierce dropped out of sight. Slocum lit another bundle of dynamite, shouting, “Heads up!”

  The shooting stopped, as the defenders reacted to the signal by taking cover. Some shots crackled as the outlaws began to return fire.

  Slocum tossed the dynamite in their midst, unleashing another blast. The effect was terrible, wonderful.

  His only regret was what it did to the horses.

  More cross fire, than a pause as the third and final bundle of sticks was thrown. After that, all that remained was to pick off the last holdouts who still had enough life left in them to shoot a gun.

  In less than sixty seconds, they were gone too.

  “A turkey shoot,” said Slocum.

  Then the silence was broken by a shout from Stringfellow: “No! Don’t!” drowned out by a shotgun blast.

  As Myrtle later explained, “He yelled.”

  Church bells started to ring.

  23

  “What’s going on with those damned church bells? Why don’t they stop ringing?” Wessel glanced toward the church, frowning. “They’ve been clanging and clanging for a long damned time.”

  “Maybe we better go see,” Slocum said.

  They started toward the square, leaving behind the jailhouse and the smoking remains of the gang.

  Maud raced after the others, falling in beside Slocum. “I’m not letting you out of my sight,” she said.

  “What’s Chase going to say about that?” Wessel said.

  “It’s not what you think,” Maud said, sniffing. “My interest in Slocum is purely business.”

  “Shucks, I’ll bet you say that to all the fellows,” Slocum said. “Whatever did happen to Chase?”

  “Who cares? Useless bastard,” Maud said.

  “The last time I saw him was this afternoon, when he was lighting out of town in search of you, Slocum,” Wessel said. “I haven’t seen him since.”

  “I hope he finds me soon. I want to get my gun back.”

  “You’ll get it a bullet at a time,” Maud said.

  They all had to speak loudly, to be heard over the bells. Abruptly, the tolling stopped, its last steely note shivering away in the swirling snow.

  A small crowd had gathered in front of the church. They stood looking up at the steeple. They were joined by Wessel, Maud, and Slocum.

  In the belfry were two struggling figures, battling desperately.

  Slocum said, “That’s Nedda, but who’s she fighting with up there?”

  “Why, I believe that’s Deacon Mulch,” said Wessel.

  Now Slocum recognized Deacon Mulch, the preacher whose horse he’d stolen. The deacon clambered up on the sill of one of the pointed belfrey arches, trying to get away. Nedda lunged. The deacon slipped, falling.

  The crowd recoiled as the deacon fell screaming, crunching to earth at their feet.

  Wessel winced. There were some groans, and one of the spectators, a man, screamed.

  Somebody else pointed, shouting, “Now what’s that crazy woman doing?”

  Nedda tied a noose in one end of the bell rope, pulled it tight around her neck, and stepped off into the steeple shaft. She fell about halfway to the floor before she reached the end of the rope. Her neck snapped, breaking the thread which held her to life, catapulting her death-ward.

  She hung bobbing from the bell rope, ringing the bell. Slocum and Wessel approached the deacon. “Pore little fellow,” somebody said behind them.

  Wessel and Slocum leaned forward, peering. Wessel said, “What’s that in his hand? Looks like he’s holding something.”

  “A gold chain,” Slocum said, for the ends of a broken gold chain were protruding from the deacon’s clenche
d fist.

  He stepped on the dead man’s wrist, prying open pudgy fingers that had clenched something in a death grip. It was a sapphire brooch.

  Slocum pocketed the blue stone. “That tears it. Now we know who’s the Big Boss, the leader of the gang.”

  “The little deacon?” said Wessel, astonished.

  “None other.”

  The bell kept ringing. Maud was waiting, with her hand out.

  “Time to pay the piper,” Slocum said. He lowered his voice confidentially. “Say, Marshal, there won’t be any trouble in putting through that reward on Bannock?”

  “Well, now, that could be a problem, since you didn’t kill him.”

  “That’ll be our little secret. Otherwise, that bounty’s going to go to waste.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thanks, you’re a real friend.”

  “Provided I get half.”

  “What! You’re a crook! Okay, half,” Slocum said.

  “Done,” said Wessel.

  “You’re both crooks,” Maud said. “And I want a third.”

  24

  “Sometimes, Maud, a man’s got a certain hunger, a burning need inside that he’s just got to fill, no matter what, come hell or high water,” Slocum said. “I’m sure a woman of the world like you understands such things, Maud.”

  “Sure, I understand. Indulge yourself,” she said. “Eat hearty, because you’re going to need all your strength for later, when I get you upstairs.”

  They were in the kitchen in the back of Maud’s house, where they’d gone after the celebration in town broke up. They were alone in the house, just the two of them. Slocum sat at a table, facing the back door. He was feeding the inner man with a meal of cold chicken, bread, cheese, and wine, with apple pie and coffee waiting on the sideboard.

  Slocum was ravenous, wolfing it down. Between mouthfuls, he said, “You cook good, Maud.”

  She laughed. “I don’t cook. Nedda was the cook around here.”

  He paused, eyebrows lifting. “Hope it’s not poisoned.”

  “It’s not. I had some for lunch.”

  “I was dying of hunger anyhow.” He went back to his meal.

  Maud finished counting her money, for the second time. “Lucky for you it’s all here.”

  “I told you, I’m a man of my word!” he protested.

  “Uh-huh. Well, it’s all here anyway.”

  Slocum cleaned his plate. Outside, the night waned, the grayness beyond the curtained windows lightening. “How about seconds?”

  She came over, standing beside him at the table. “I hope your other appetites are just as keen.”

  “Oh, they’re keen, all right.” He pulled her down on his lap, nestling the soft rounded warmth of her bottom against his thighs and groin.

  She put her hands at the back of his neck. He embraced her, giving her a long kiss before coming up for air.

  “Ummm,” she said.

  “That’s the sweetest thing I’ve tasted yet,” Slocum said. “Course, I haven’t tried the apple pie yet.”

  A shadow fell across the curtained back door window and the door was suddenly kicked open from the outside.

  Standing framed in the doorway was Chase, holding Slocum’s gun, pointing it at Slocum seated across from him at the table. The middle part of his face was taped and bandaged where his nose had been broken. A triangular guard built up around his squashed nose to protect it made him look like a white-beaked snowbird.

  “No pie for you,” he said, his voice distorted and made comical by the face wrappings. He could afford to sound comical. He had the gun, the drop.

  Slocum eased Maud off his lap, saying, “It’s me he wants.”

  Chase shook his head. “I want it all. The money, the blue stone, the jewels, all! I’ve been sitting outside with my ear to the keyhole, listening. Laughing. Just like I’ll be laughing in another minute, when you’ll both be dead and it’ll be all mine.”

  Maud stood up straight, her eyes and voice level. “You’d kill me, Chase?”

  “I’m tired of you,” Chase said, watching her face closely for the reaction, disappointed when there wasn’t any.

  The overhang of the tablecloth where it fell off the edge of the table hid Slocum’s hands from Chase’s view, and Chase was mostly watching Maud, so he didn’t see Slocum reach into his hip pocket for the instant it took him to fish out Maud’s ivory-handled little silver pistol and bring it up past the table, and when he did see it, he was still an instant too late.

  Slocum shot the eyes out through the back of Chase’s head. Chase fell backward.

  Slocum got up, went to the body, and relieved it of its holster and gun.

  “Thanks for returning my gun. I’d have hated to lose it,” he said to the body.

  “Take him out the back door and dump him with the rest of the garbage,” Maud said.

  Slocum looked at her.

  “I was tired of him anyway,” she explained. “Hurry up and let’s go to bed.”

  “I still ain’t had that apple pie yet,” he said.