The Crack in the Lens

by Steve Hockensmith

He wasn’t worried about any lynching.

  He was counting on one.

  34

  Law and Disorder

  Or, Tommy Uses His Noodle, and Our Troubles with Rucker Come to a Head

  Staring down the barrel of a six-gun is no fun, I assure you. On the other hand, letting Rucker walk us out of that jail? That would have been sticking our heads in a cannon…with a lit fuse.

  So it wasn’t as hard as you might think to just stand there when the sheriff snapped out another “Move!”

  “Why would we set foot outta this cage knowin’ what’s gonna happen to us out there?” I asked.

  “Because you don’t know what’s gonna happen out there. Whereas this is a dead certainty.”

  For what felt like the thousandth time that week, a Colt was pointed at my forehead. I was beginning to think I had a bull’s-eye pinned up there.

  “If you don’t do as I say,” Rucker growled, “I’m gonna paint the wall behind you with your brains.”

  Yet still Gustav and I didn’t move—except, in my brother’s case, to shake his head in disgusted wonderment.

  “Here you are cleanin’ up after your pals Ragsdale and Bock, but do you even know what they’ve been up to? The things they’ve done?”

  “Look,” Rucker said, “if you think I ain’t got the eggs to pull this trigger, just take a peek at that crowd outside. No one around here’s gonna complain if I put lead through both your heads.”

  “Milford Bales might,” Old Red said.

  Rucker chuckled. “I ain’t scared of no barbers. And guess what—Bales ain’t around anyway, is he? He don’t even know what’s happenin’ here. Instead of bein’ on hand for the damned riot, he had to go off ‘investigatin’.’”

  The sheriff snorted to show what he thought of lawmen who’d waste their time on such useless pursuits.

  “I’m here,” Tommy said.

  Rucker didn’t even bother looking back at him.

  “And a very nice doormat you make, too,” he said.

  “But the marshal told me—”

  “And now the sheriff is telling you something else. So do yourself a favor and run home to mama.”

  “But—”

  “This conversation is done, you understand?” Rucker thumbed back the hammer on his .45 just in case anyone didn’t. “You two. Out. Now.”

  Gustav and I looked at each other.

  Would Rucker really gun us down in cold blood?

  Dear Lord, yes.

  We put our hands up and started for the stairs, Old Red in the lead.

  “So,” I said to Rucker as he swiveled to keep his sights squarely on my skull, “you already tell the boys out front we’re comin’, or is this gonna be more of a surprise party?”

  “Shut up,” Rucker said.

  Tommy scuttled out of the way as we neared the top of the staircase, and Old Red slowed to look him in the eye.

  “You let him do this, Tommy, our blood’s gonna be on your hands, too.”

  “He’ll learn to live with it,” Rucker said. “Anyway, he’s got his own blood to worry about. You get me, kid?”

  He most certainly did. In more ways than one.

  “What the hell?” I heard Rucker snarl just as I started down the stairs.

  I whirled around to find Tommy snatching off the man’s hat.

  “Are you cra—?”

  The sheriff got no further before the butt of Tommy’s gun came down atop his head. He dropped his Colt (which, by a happy miracle, did not go off), stumbled forward a half step, and toppled to the floor.

  “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry!” Tommy jabbered as the sheriff fell. “You didn’t give me any choice!”

  Rucker was in no condition to accept apologies. He just lay there facedown on the floorboards.

  “Nicely done, Deputy! See how much difference that hat trick makes?” I said. “Only now you mighta hit him too hard.” I crouched next to Rucker and wrapped a hand around his wrist. “Yup. No pulse.”

  “What?” Tommy bawled.

  “I think you killed him.”

  “Oh, God!”

  Tommy knelt down to check for himself.

  “I sure am sorry,” I said, “but you gotta be extry careful with the ol’ gun butt to the noodle.”

  “Hey,” Tommy said, finally noticing that Rucker wasn’t behaving much like a corpse, what with him breathing and having a heartbeat and all.

  That’s when my brother—who’d slipped behind the deputy and picked up Rucker’s Colt—whipped off Tommy’s hat and very carefully but very firmly gave him the ol’ gun butt to the noodle.

  Tommy pitched forward, crossing Rucker like a t.

  I checked to make sure he was breathing, then gave the young man a pat on the back. “Like I said, Tommy…I sure am sorry.”

  Gustav rubbed the back of his head. “I ain’t.”

  Within a minute, we had the lawmen locked up in our old cell. (We gave Tommy the bunk, of course. Rucker got the floor. Still facedown, too.) Then we hurried downstairs, retrieved our holsters and carpetbags from atop the marshal’s desk, made sure the front door was locked, and headed past the staircase praying there was another way out.

  There was: a back door at the far end of a dusty storeroom. We hurried toward it—then froze side by side as I reached out for the knob.

  “So…,” I said.

  Gustav nodded slowly. “Yeah. So…”

  So where the hell were we going?

  So what the hell could we do?

  So, in a nutshell…what the hell?

  I looked at my brother.

  He looked at me.

  I said nothing.

  He said nothing.

  It was like we were in a staring contest, only the object wasn’t forcing the other fellow to blink. It was forcing him to make a decision.

  Which had never been necessary before. Gustav led, I followed, that had always been the way of things.

  It would be now, too, I decided…whether my brother would lead or not.

  What would Old Red Amlingmeyer do? I asked myself. Not the Old Red before me—the one so unsure of himself he’d look to me for guidance.

  No, it was the other one I was thinking of. The old Old Red. The one I’d been writing about. The stubborn, ornery, single-minded, Sherlock Holmes–worshipping hero.

  Then I knew. I knew, and I hated it—but the old Old Red always got his way.

  “Alright, fine—if you insist,” I said. “We pay a call on Ragsdale and Bock.”

  “It’s the only way,” Gustav said so firm and clear you’d never have known he hadn’t insisted at all. Why, he almost sounded like Old Red Amlingmeyer. “They’re up to their eyeballs in this thing, that we know. So if we only get one more shot, it oughta be at them.” He threw his carpetbag aside. “May as well leave these here. We’re gonna have to do us some serious skulkin’, and they’d just draw attention.”

  “Makes sense.” I tossed my own bag next to his. “You ready?”

  “Are you kiddin’?”

  “Yeah. Me, neither.”

  I opened the door. Just a crack at first, so as to peek out at the alleyway behind the marshal’s office. My brother pushed in beside me to take a look, too.

  It was dark back there but not pitch black, and after a moment we were satisfied no one was outside to ambush us. So out we slinked, and from there we skulked.

  For all of twenty feet. We were slipping between two of the buildings across the alley, making for a quiet cross-street to the north, when a shape appeared up ahead. And when I say “a shape,” I don’t mean a triangle or an octagon. This was the shape of a man—and another such shape quickly loomed up behind it.

  Gustav and I pressed ourselves into the shadows, backs literally to the wall.

  The shapes started toward us, one large, one small. They seemed to be slightly crouched, and what little light there was, they avoided.

  They were skulking, too.

  “You sure the jail’sh thish way?” the big
one “whispered” not half as quiet as he seemed to think.

  “Sure I’m sure,” his runty buddy replied. “If there’sh a back way in, we’ll fetch along the resht of the boysh.”

  “And the rope,” the big one giggled, and he tripped over his own feet and stumbled into his pal’s back.

  “Jeshush, Kettle-Belly! You can’t shneak no better than a three-legged elephant.”

  Kettle-Belly laughed.

  They were soused, that much was plain, and they hadn’t spotted us, though that wouldn’t last long. Even with the two of them seeing double. They were so close now, in fact, we couldn’t even turn tail without revealing ourselves.

  We could either fight—and give ourselves away to god only knew who else—or we could…something else.

  “Hey,” Kettle-Belly said, peering down the alley toward us. “Who’sh that?”

  Something else finally came to mind.

  “It’sh no good, fellersh,” I said, lurching out of the darkness. “If you’re aimin’ to go in the back way, you can forget it. I jusht tried myshelf, and that weashel Balesh hash a deputy on the back door with a damned shotgun.”

  “Really?” the little fellow asked.

  As I drew closer, the shapes took on some definition, and I saw just what I’d expected—two men wearing cowboy-style denims and boots and Stetsons.

  And gun belts, of course.

  “Really,” I told them.

  “A www, heck,” Kettle-Belly groaned, and he stood up straight—or as straight as he could in his state—and started staggering back up the alley.

  His friend reluctantly turned to go with him, then stopped and looked back at me.

  “Really?”

  I threw him a big, swaying, sham-drunk shrug. “Why would I lie?”

  The cowboy grunted and set off after his compadre.

  “Drunk and stupid,” I said as my brother stepped from the shadows. “Our luck’s finally turnin’ around.”

  Gustav scooted past me, moving quick toward the end of the alley.

  “We’re gonna need more than dumb luck to do what we gotta tonight.”

  Before setting off after him, I patted myself on the back. Who else was going to do it?

  Over the next few minutes, we cashed in a heap more of our dumb luck. There was a steady trickle of riders and wagons and folks on foot headed for the town square, but time and time again we managed to find cover before anyone spotted us.

  Finally, after ducking into what seemed like every doorway and alley San Marcos had to offer, we reached Ragsdale and Bock’s wallpaper shop. A light glowed in one of the windows on the second floor. The rest of the store was dark.

  The front door was unlocked, and Gustav and I slipped inside. The only illumination to navigate by was a dull gray glow through the front windows and a little yellow line of light up high in the back. Between them was a long stretch of nothing we had to shuffle through blind.

  While my brother moved so silently I could only take it on faith he was still there at all, I walked into a display case, knocked over what I assume was a sample book, and set the floorboards to squeaking like an old rocking chair rolling over a mouse. If there’d been a bucket of marbles and a bass drum on the premises, I surely would’ve upended the former over the latter one way or another.

  After every stumble and bump, I’d stop and listen for noises from upstairs—voices, footfalls, the cocking of guns, the sharpening of knives, the bubbling of boiling oil—but I heard not a thing…until I got started moving again.

  After what seemed like a journey on par with Lewis and Clark’s, I made it upstairs to that bar of light, and I could make out the dim outline of Gustav’s boot toes beside it.

  It was the glow of lamplight under a door.

  We were just outside Ragsdale and Bock’s office.

  “Shall we?” my brother whispered.

  “Let’s.”

  My Bulldog was already in my right hand. My left groped down and found the doorknob.

  I flung the door open, and Old Red and I charged through.

  “Make a move and you’re dead!” I hollered.

  I needn’t have bothered. Ragsdale and Bock were there, alright, but they weren’t going to be doing any moving. Not till someone came to haul them off, anyway.

  They were both dead already.

  35

  The Thing

  Or, Gustav Tries One Last Deduction, and It’s Full of Holes

  A wispy-thin haze of smoke floated over the room. Through it, I saw what could have been the office of your average small-town attorney or registrar of deeds.

  Filing cabinets and gas lamps along the walls. Pictures and calendars nailed up willy-nilly. A worn-out rug on the floor. A couple desks.

  A few chairs.

  Two cadavers.

  Pete Ragsdale’s lanky body was hunched over one of the desks, facedown in a pool of blood. Gil Bock lay on the floor nearby, both his broad belly and his wide-open eyes pointed at the door I’d just come busting through. He had three gunshot wounds I could see—one to the right shoulder, one that clipped off most of his left ear, and another that put a hole the size of a dime just above his right eye.

  “I’ll be damned,” my brother muttered.

  Me, I didn’t know whether to curse or applaud. I’d weep no tears for Ragsdale and Bock, that was for sure. Though it was them we’d been counting on to clear us…somehow. Now we just had two more murders to swing for.

  “I’ll be damned,” Old Red said again.

  He started toward the bodies slowly, almost reverently, like a pilgrim approaching some holy shrine. As he moved, he tilted back his head and sucked in a long, deep sniff.

  I took a smell myself, catching both the acrid scorch of burnt gunpowder and the earthier odors that linger when the soul departs and the bowels unclench.

  When Gustav reached Ragsdale, he sent a lone finger gliding through the red ooze atop the man’s desk. He stared down at the stain on his fingertip a moment, then smeared it with his thumb.

  “You know, I was beginnin’ to think I’d dreamed the son of a bitch up. That it was just Ragsdale and Bock all along. But this was him. We smoked him out of his hole after all.”

  “Just in time, too. You been sayin’ from the beginning we ain’t got no new trail to follow. No fresh data. But now?” I jerked my chin at the bodies. “That’s pretty damn fresh.”

  Old Red nodded. “We didn’t miss him by half an hour.”

  “Well, this is it, then. It’s just me and you and a roomful of clues. If the Method’s ever gonna clear this mess up, now’s the time.”

  “Yeah,” Gustav said. “If…”

  And he just stood there not moving, not acting. Afraid to try. There’d be no excuses now. Either he and Mr. Holmes could do it or they couldn’t.

  Gentle coaxing, words of wisdom—it all eluded me just then. A kick in the ass, though? That’d be easy.

  So I gave him one. Literally.

  Not hard, mind you. Just the side of an ankle to the back of the pants. Enough to spin my brother around eyes aflame.

  “What the hell you waitin’ for?” I said. “Deducify!”

  Old Red glared at me like he was thinking of adding another carcass to the pile.

  “Feh!” he spat.

  Then he turned away and got to work.

  He started with Ragsdale. The man was slumped forward but still seated, one arm stretched out over the desk, the other tight to his side. He hadn’t been wearing his lid, for once—his top hat, like his partner’s, had been placed just-so on the desktop.

  Gustav got a fistful of straw yellow hair and lifted up the head.

  Even painted red with blood, the expression on Ragsdale’s face was unmistakable. He’d died as he had lived: sneering. I almost expected him to tell me to go fudge myself.

  There was a hole in his forehead dead center, directly above his long nose. Around the wound was a circle of flaky black.

  “Muzzle was close,” Old Red mumbled. “Li
ttle gun, though, or the back of his head woulda been blowed out. A .22, I’d…hel-lo.”

  Something on Ragsdale’s right cheek sparkled dully in the gaslight. Gustav bent in close, then pinched the little whatever-it-was and pulled.

  It wasn’t just on Ragsdale’s face. It was in it. Embedded. Once my brother slid it out, he held it up to the light.

  It was a sliver of glass, dagger-ended like an icicle, about two inches long.

  Old Red and I both looked down at the desktop.

  “Where’d that thing come from?” I said. “Ain’t nothin’ glass on the desk there.”

  “Not now, there ain’t.” Gustav deposited the little shard in a shirt pocket, then lowered Ragsdale’s face with a gentleness the SOB never earned in life. “Whatever it was, the killer took it.”

  He moved over to Bock’s body and knelt down beside it. He didn’t stay there long, though.

  “Yeah, it’s like I figured. Three shots, no powder burn.” He stood up. “Bock died second.”

  There were chairs in front of the desks, and my brother walked over to the one facing Ragsdale and plopped himself down on it.

  “I figure it like this,” he said. “The killer was sittin’ here, talking to Ragsdale and Bock. About us, most likely. Congratulatin’ themselves on gettin’ us out of the way so smooth. Then the feller seated here, he hands something to Ragsdale. Something made of glass.”

  Old Red acted the moment out, leaning forward and stretching his left arm toward Ragsdale’s body.

  “Ragsdale takes it in hand, the two men are face-to-face, close, and…”

  Gustav whipped up his right hand, the forefinger and thumb jutting out to form a gun in the manner familiar to little boys everywhere.

  “Blam. One shot, and Ragsdale’s dead. But Bock, he’s harder. The man’s on the go, runnin’ for the door or reachin’ for a gun of his own. So it takes two shots to put him on the floor, and a third to the head to finish him. Then it’s time to tidy up.”

  My brother stood and stepped up beside the desk again.

  “He lifts Ragsdale, and he takes the…” Old Red shrugged. “Thing. Only Ragsdale, he’d pitched forward onto it, broke part off, and the killer don’t notice. He’s in a hurry, and the thing is probably drippin’ with blood. A little sliver’d be easy to overlook. So off he runs, and twenty-some minutes later, in we come. Then…”