by Lou Cameron
As his men fanned out to secure the area the sheriff rose to his booted toes for a look-see behind the bar. When he sighed and said, “Aw, hell,” Stringer peered over the mahogany, too.
The male barkeep lay, face down, across his scatter gun. Miss Gina lay, face up, on the blood-spattered duckboards, a bitty pearl-handled .32 near one dead palm. There wasn’t much left of her face. The sheriff said, soberly, “She was such a pretty little thing, too. I sure feel stupid, now, with the advantage of hindsight. For I knowed all the time the gang had to be strangers to these parts and she hadn’t been here all that long.”
Uncle Don grimaced down at the tom-up but still shapely corpse to remark, “She had the hideout and the manpower. She had one of the few telephone lines to keep in touch with the ones down in San Andreas, too. But I thought you said that Marlowe gent was the one who come up with the plan in the first place, Sheriff.”
The sheriff said, “He may have knowed her of old. Crooks do like to keep in touch. On the other hand, he could have just persuaded a crooked gal with a mighty good setup to throw in with him. It don’t matter, now. For both of ‘em are dead and both of them was fools. Considering all the hell they was raising, we seem to have stopped ‘em afore they could do whatever in thunder they was planning on doing. You boys reckon it could have been the long-lost loot of Joaquin Murrieta they was really after, or could I be missing something?”
Uncle Don said, soberly, “You don’t miss much, Sheriff. As I follow your drift, you think they had something bigger and more real in mind, like say the mine payroll over to Sheep Ranch or hell, anything more here and now, right?”
Stringer tried, “They might have just wanted to use the Montez place as another hideout, the gang being so big, and this place being so public.”
The sheriff nodded and said, “That works. They might not have felt as safe bringing their loot back here. But since we got ‘em afore they wound up with any loot, I see no need to pick nits. We got us a mess of tedious paperwork as it is.”
As if to confirm this, the deputies sent upstairs commenced to herd a raggedy mess of painted doves, including the ugly bar gal who wasn’t supposed to be there, down to join the considerable crowd. So Stringer and his uncle excused themselves and got out of there before they got into any more trouble with the law or Crazyauntida that night.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
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It was the sworn duty of the coroner and his jury to issue a forensic opinion as to how come so many folk had recently wound up dead in Calaveras County. They were forbidden by constitutional law to decide the guilt or innocence of anyone still breathing.
It was their unanimous conclusion that while old Hernan Garcia had doubtless died of pure old age, everyone else had been killed pure and simple by gunshots, suffered in various parts of his or her anatomy, and that it was all right to bury ‘em.
The San Andreas District Attorney, on reading the sheriff’s sworn statement on recent wild events, saw no need to bind anyone over to the grand jury. It hardly seemed right to try anyone on the sheriff’s side for ridding the county of such pests, while as for the few confused survivors of the gang, mostly females in the habit of keeping bad company, it was less trouble to run them out of the county forever on peace bonds than it might have been to try them for whatever the hell they might have been up to.
So, less than forty-eight hours later Stringer was back in that glass box at the San Francisco Sun with old Sam Barca, getting a lecture on feature writing whether he wanted one or not.
As he rolled a smoke, Barca crossed out another line of the piece he’d handed in and said, “Dammit, MacKail. I may get a good price on these blue pencils. But surely you should know by now there’s no such word as ‘alleged’ when it comes to selling newspapers!”
He used his blue pencil again and said, “That’s better. It was just dumb to say Joaquin Murrieta was alleged to have held up the El Dorado stage just before old Harry Love was alleged to have lopped his head off down near Tule Lake.”
Stringer sealed his smoke with his tongue and said, “I call ‘em as I see ‘em, boss. My conscience is clear as long as it’s your editorial decision.”
Sam Barca growled, “You’re damned A,” and reread what he’d just reworked before he shook his head and said, “I dunno, kid. All this stuff on Murrieta is just what I wanted. But why all this crap on some lunatic named Marlowe and a mining-camp whore?”
Stringer lit his smoke, took a deep drag, and let it out before he said, “Dammit, Sam, that part’s news, not nostalgia.”
“Yeah, yeah, I see your hick sheriff had to blow away a mess of rustic ruffians, but so what? Our readers aren’t interested in a sordid tale of petty crooks and painted ladies, kid. Hell, we get that sort of stuff off the police blotter, here in town, every night. I don’t see how these last pages tie in with the feature I asked you to write.”
Stringer couldn’t tell him, so he didn’t. Sam Barca read it all over, once more, and decided, “I’ll tell you what. I want to be fair. I’ll give you a column on this bit about Murrieta and I’ll even see if we can ran your cathouse brawl as a separate news item, provided you can tighten it to less than six inches. It shouldn’t be hard. All it boils down to is, ‘Sheriff sees crooks. Sheriff shoots crooks.’ Your attempt to tie modern thugs into a feature about the Old West was a nice try, kid. But it just reads wrong.”
“I guess I have a lot to learn,” said Stringer, dryly.
Sam Barca nodded smugly, mollified, and said, “Your main thrust dealing with the real Joaquin Murrieta isn’t bad at all, even if it is a little short. Are you sure you want this by-line you signed, though? It reads a little odd.”
“‘Stringer MacKail’ will do just fine, Sam. Working for you, I tend to write a little odd.”
You can find all of Lou Cameron’s Stringer series available as ebooks:
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Stringer (#1)
On Dead Man’s Range (#2)
Stringer on the Assassin’s Trail (#3)
Stringer and the Hangman’s Rodeo (#4)
Stringer and the Wild Bunch (#5)
Stringer and the Hanging Judge (#6)
In Tombstone (#7)
Stringer and the Deadly Flood (#8)
Stringer and the Lost Tribe (#9)
Stringer and the Oil Well Indians (#10)
Stringer and the Border War (#11)
Stringer on the Mojave (#12)
Stringer on Pikes Peak (#13)
Stringer and the Hell-Bound Herd (#14)
Stringer in a Texas Shoot-Out (#15)