The Killers

by Peter McCurtin

  Dunstan nodded confidentially.

  I figured why not. “Morning, Sheriff,” Fallon called out when I stepped into the street. “Sure is a fine morning.”

  Fallon was in real good humor; maybe he thought he knew how to handle me.

  Dunstan didn’t even nod at me. “What are you fixing to do, Fallon?” I asked. “Build a hotel for consumption cases? Sure is a fine climate for that.”

  Mayor Dunstan glowered at me. “We were having a private conversation,” he protested. “Nothing to do with you. This is business.”

  The way I butted in didn’t bother Fallon. His two gunslingers were watching from the hotel porch. I guess Fallon felt safe enough; in command of the situation, as the military fellers say when things are going good.

  Fallon laughed, making me out to be a card. “That’s a good one, Sheriff,” he told me. “A hotel for consumption cases! Not a bad idea if the railroad ever runs a line south.”

  Dunstan said, “I said this was a private conversation.”

  I grinned at him. “Not the way Fallon shouts.”

  “Mister Fallon to you,” Dunstan blustered. “You don’t have any better manners than your cousin.”

  Men like Dunstan can say things like that without getting a gun barrel laid across their skulls. They’re old and fat, more like old women than anything else, and that makes them safe.

  “Poor bringing up, I guess,” was all I said to Dunstan.

  “Show some respect,” Dunstan said. Every big ear in town was turned our way, so Dunstan said it again.

  “All right,” I said to Dunstan. “You’re the businessman. You do the talking. This new business Mister Fallon ... ”

  “No need to mister me,” Fallon said. “Malachi Fallon’s plain as an old shoe. Call me anything you like. Just don’t keep me out of the gravy.”

  “Suppose you ask Fallon about the Eldredges,” I told Dunstan. “I guess you know about the Eldredges, Mr. Mayor?”

  This time Dunstan looked uncomfortable; more uncomfortable than he did usually, I mean. “I’m not about to ask Mr. Fallon anything,” he said. “Mr. Fallon is a man who is known to me by reputation.”

  “Loved by one and all,” I said.

  Fallon was all good nature. “You know, Sheriff Carmody, if I didn’t know better I’d say you didn’t like me.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” I asked Dunstan.

  “Certainly not,” Dunstan said, sweating in the fierce heat. He turned to Fallon. “You want to have that talk now, Mr. Fallon?”

  Dunstan was madder than hell at me and Fallon, always a friend of the plain man, took up for me. He poked the mayor in the ribs again, and winked. “Don’t mind the sheriff,” he said. “Wouldn’t be a good lawman if he didn’t suspect everybody came to town, even me. We’ll have that talk later, if you don’t mind. I hope you got some good whiskey. To celebrate, I mean.”

  I don’t think Mayor Dunstan ever had a drink in his life, but he managed a good-feller smile. “It’s an honor to have you in Salter City, Mr. Fallon. And now good morning.”

  Fallon smiled at Dunstan’s back and then he smiled at me. He wasn’t wearing his bullet-holed hat and sweat trickled out of his crinkly hair and ran into his eyes. He wiped it away with a handkerchief, then stuffed the handkerchief into his sleeve.

  “How did I do?” he asked in a low voice.

  “You did good,” I said. “Dunstan bit hard but you didn’t yank on the line. That was good, you slimy son of a bitch.”

  “Too late to kill me,” Fallon said.

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  “I think you should have done it yesterday. Now it’s too late. Soon it’ll be later than that.”

  “Don’t count on it, Fallon.”

  Fallon, maybe not so sure for a moment, looked to see if the two gunslingers were backing his mouth with their guns. They were.

  “You know what I count on, Carmody?” Fallon answered his own question. “Money and then some more money. More money on top of that. And so on. I can tap one bank that never runs dry. Why don’t you get to thinking the same way? Start sucking on that hind tit before the rush starts. Man, don’t you see? No one man can go against the power of money.”

  I wiped the sweat off my own face and thought it was funny, me and Fallon talking in low voices while all the big ears in town strained to hear what we were saying. Fallon, I guess, had thought a lot about the power of money, as he called it. So had I, but not in quite the same way.

  “You could be wrong this once,” I said. Kind of a fool thing it was to say, but I said it. Maybe I sounded a bit lame. So would you, then and there.

  “Never been wrong except those two times I ran for office,” Fallon said. He wiped his face again. He raised his hand to take off his hat, then remembered it wasn’t there.

  “That proves it,” I said.

  “Proves I didn’t spread enough money around,” Fallon said. “This time I will. It isn’t my money, so I can heap it on with a trowel. I tell you, Carmody, I’m going to turn this whole town against you. First with promises and then with money, if I have to. The money is only the start, you understand. Usually it’s the start and the finish.” Fallon did a take-off on Mayor Dunstan’s whiny voice. “You want to have a little talk?”

  “Not just yet,” I said.

  Chapter Six

  That night Fallon gave a party at the hotel. I wasn’t invited, but I guess that was an oversight. Anyway, I don’t know that sheriffs get invited too much. People figure sheriffs just naturally show up at parties. They don’t get invited, but nobody keeps them out when they come to bend their heads over the punch bowl.

  Killing Fallon was still a good idea—a useful idea, anyway—but it came to me that it would be a better idea if Sally Eldredge took her pretty self far away from Salter City. The more I thought about it, the better it looked. With the chair pulled close to the door of the jail where I could see things, getting Sally gone from Salter City looked better all the time. The thought came to me, as thoughts do, while I was building a smoke. It wasn’t important enough to make my hand shake, but it was worth thinking about. Here and there, trying to keep busy, watching the town, it kept coming back all through the day. With Sally gone Fallon would go too. It was a nice idea, simple as hell. Sally would go and Fallon would go, leaving me with nothing better to do but wait for Luke to get back. I liked the idea. Luke would bring his new bride back, maybe let me kiss her in a cousinly way, and then, having done that, I would take the money Luke owed me and head for the border. It would be fine, I thought, to wipe the dust of Salter City off my scarred boots.

  I liked the idea so much I decided to do something about it the first chance I got. When that chance would come I had no notion. Sally with the yellow hair and the body to think about wasn’t making the trouble—Fallon was making the trouble and would always make some kind of trouble— but that wasn’t the point. With Sally gone, the trouble gone with her, it would be hard not to kill Fallon to make things tidy. There would be times, I guess, when I was feeling mean and thought about it, when I would kick myself for not killing Malachi Fallon on general principles. I knew the feeling would pass.

  How to talk Sally Eldredge into wiping the dust of Salter City off her shoes was what I was thinking about, early that evening, when I heard the music over at the hotel. It was the first music Salter City had heard for a dog’s age. I thought one thing Salter City needed was more music. Of all the miserable towns I’d been in, Salter City needed music more than any other. I finished the drink I was drinking, poured another, and listened to the music.

  I didn’t know how I’d get Sally out of Salter City. That was what I wanted to do, and I didn’t know how to do it. A girl with kinfolk not as numerous, not as trigger-happy, could be approached and asked in a reasonable way. Doing that, with all the Eldredges pointing guns at me, was something I hadn’t thought out yet.

  Maybe all that figuring had left me a little drunk.

  I corked the bottle and left it
on the desk and went to the door. The single saloon looked much the same; all the whoop-dee-do was at the hotel. The music sounded like a mechanical harp being interfered with by a fiddle and banjo. A horn joined in, or tried to, while I stood there and listened. None of it was good, but it didn’t have to be. I knew it had to be Malachi Fallon heaping some of Big Sam Thornton’s money on with a trowel.

  I gave it a while. It was dark, not long so, and no party I ever knew got going till the first empty bottles were knocked over by somebody setting down the second empty bottles. I gave it a while, still thinking about Sally Eldredge in the same, and different, ways. It was easy to think about Sally.

  I locked the jail and walked down to the livery stable. There was a lantern burning out front under the sign. I went in and the talky kid was asleep in his blanket on a heap of straw. The one called Todd was huddled up close to a lamp reading a book. He put his finger in the book to mark his place and asked me which one I thought was the smartest—Harriman or Gould?

  “Harriman,” I said.

  “I wonder,” the kid said.

  No, he told me finally, no strange horses had been put up. It was still the same as before.

  I didn’t want to get into an argument about Jay Gould, so I walked down to the hotel.

  In the sad old days when Salter City got started, the man who built the hotel included a ballroom. It wasn’t much of a hotel, not much of a ballroom either, but now they had moved the dust around and opened it up. The ballroom opened off the lobby and the clockwork harp and the other noisemakers were banging away when I went in. All the notes were sour, but I guess I was sourer than most, because the clerk turned his face grim when I went in.

  It wasn’t much of a crowd, but then no crowd in Salter City would be much of a crowd. The whole town plus all the locals who scratched out a living wouldn’t make much of a crowd. I winked at the clerk and made my way into the ballroom.

  People were dancing like people who hadn’t paid for their liquor. Two young fellers I didn’t know were behind a makeshift bar, planks laid across trestles, pouring as fast as they could move the bottles. Other gents, not wanting to wait, were helping themselves to the free whiskey. A punch bowl for the ladies stood on a table by itself.

  In honor of the occasion, whatever it was, Mayor Dunstan was dipping that ladle into the punch bowl. A bitter-faced woman who could only be his wife was waiting for him to fill her glass. Maybe she was naturally bitter and maybe being married to Mayor Dunstan helped.

  I didn’t look for Fallon, I looked for his two gunslingers and any others who might have arrived. They were there all right, still just the two of them, and so was Fallon. The two gunmen saw me right away, but Fallon was too busy with a soft-faced fat woman to give me more than a quick look.

  Mayor Dunstan spilled some of his wife’s punch when he saw me. I smiled at him and went to the bar and let one of the bartenders pour me a drink. I tasted the free whiskey. It was about average. Every town has good whiskey, if you dip down to pay for it, but Fallon hadn’t dipped down that far. It was a fool thought at the time, but I wondered how much Fallon cheated on his bills to Sam Thornton.

  Fallon was still jollying the fat woman. Her husband, fat like herself but with nowhere like the muscles, came up and stood beside them, waiting for the big man from up Pecos County way to say hello.

  Fallon didn’t just say hello. He dug the fat gent in the ribs and bear-hugged him. I guess the timid fat gent was the town carpenter and part-time coffin maker. I sort of recalled who he was; he looked different without his apron.

  Fallon chucked the fat woman under the chin and turned to look at me. With all that noise, I don’t know how he knew I was there. Not wanting to lose Fallon’s attention, the fat woman grabbed at his arm. Fallon squeezed her high on the arm and the fat woman darted a look at her husband and giggled.

  “You’re awful, Mr. Fallon,” she said.

  Fallon, looking at me, told the fat woman to dance with her husband. The fat woman didn’t like that, not much anyway.

  “You can have this one, Mr. Ryker,” Fallon warned the fat woman’s husband. He winked at the carpenter. The carpenter winked back and made a bold attempt, maybe his first, to sweep his fat wife into the tangle of a fast waltz.

  “You’re drinking—good,” Fallon said to me. “How d’you like the party?” He spoke over his shoulder while he went to the bar and came back with a full glass.

  “It’s a good party,” he said.

  “You forgot to invite Sally Eldredge,” I said.

  Fallon answered after he bit into his drink. “Wrong, I did invite them,” he said. “Sally and all the Eldredges. Maybe they’ll show up later.”

  “You won’t like it if they do.”

  “They won’t show up.”

  Another swallow killed Fallon’s drink. At the far end of the dusty ballroom, the mechanical harp made a grinding noise, as if it needed oil. The live musicians played louder to cover it up. They were a game trio, those three live musicians; the horn player worked hardest of all. The harp twanged away the same as before; after a while the grinding grew quieter, then faded away.

  Fallon said: “Drink up and enjoy the party.” He kept his voice down. “I decided not to build the hotel for lungers, Carmody.” He hiccupped and rubbed his rubbery mouth with the back of his hand. “A railroad south to Mexico is what this town needs.”

  Never in my life had I met a man with so much crook to his character. All crook was what Malachi Fallon was, no mistake about it. I looked across the ballroom at his two gunslingers looking sour because they didn’t have drinks in their hands.

  “South to Mexico with the railroad. I haven’t decided which line yet.” Fallon grabbed at my glass and I let him have it.

  He came back and handed me the glass. “How’s that for service?” he asked.

  “Not just a spurline,” I said, thinking what a son of a bitch this man was. “A real through line to Mexico.”

  Mayor Dunstan, still lumbering near the punch bowl, was trying to listen. Fallon raised his voice so he could be heard. “I tell you, Sheriff Carmody, this is going to be one lively town before long.”

  I swallowed my drink. “Livelier than you think, friend. You still got time to back off. Be the smart man they say you are—back off.”

  My voice was quieter than Fallon’s.

  “Money for everybody,” Fallon said so everybody could hear him. Bringing his voice down again, he said: “For you too, Carmody.”

  “You keep saying that, Fallon.”

  “Not much longer, Carmody. Think about it while you got the chance. I’m bringing the railroad south—that’s official as of tonight—so that makes me as popular as the man who invented money the first time.”

  I gave Fallon my empty glass.

  “You’re not going to leave so early,” he said, twisting his face into a satisfied smile. “Why, man, the party’s just getting started. Stay a while and watch me work.”

  I gave him a mean grin. “Not just a railroad?” I asked him. “That’s too modest for a man like Malachi Fallon. What else?”

  Suddenly I realized that Fallon had nothing personal against me. I was just somebody in his way; somebody he needed to get out of the way. Maybe he really didn’t know that some people, a few, won’t budge when they make up their minds to stay still.

  “You think of something I haven’t thought of and I’ll promise that too,” Fallon said. “You’ll say no, maybe you’ll say no, but I’m the one they’ll believe. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  Mayor Dunstan had gone up to the stage and was telling the musicians to keep quiet. The three noisemakers did what they were told; the harp, clockworked as it was, went on making noise.

  Mayor Dunstan looked like he wanted to kick the harp to death. I don’t think he was cursing, but he looked like he was. People laughed and yelled and the hotel clerk came running.

  The clerk did something to the harp; it twanged to a halt. Fallon turned to me while Mayor D
unstan was calling for quiet. “You can’t stop me, Carmody,” he said. “Don’t be foolish, don’t try.”

  I shrugged. Dunstan, red-faced, was calling on Fallon to get up there and make a speech. I didn’t want to listen to Fallon’s speech. I thought I knew what it would be like. Lies and more lies, all the bullshit they wanted to hear.

  The two gunslingers watched me go out.

  I was running low on whiskey, so I snagged a bottle from the bar and went back to the jail. That would please Mayor Dunstan no end. Fallon was turning the town against me, and it wasn’t hard to do. Buying off the town with promises, free whiskey and maybe a little money scattered about was Fallon’s way of taking out insurance. If Fallon had been a wild man like his boss, Thornton, he would have ridden into Salter City with all the gunmen it took to blast the Eldredges to kingdom come; then take the girl and hightail it back to Louisiana. And maybe that was Big Sam Thornton’s first thought. But Fallon wanted to stay in business after the trouble was over. It could even be that Fallon had checked to see who the sheriff was in Salter City. Maybe Fallon knew Cousin Luke by reputation; knowing the easy-to-buy sheriff Luke was would make the whole job seem easier.

  My brain was working too hard, and I gave it a rest. I drank Fallon’s whiskey and thought about Sally Eldredge, but not in a business way. That was a sure sign that I was getting well. Maybe other men can take the time to think about women when they’re getting over slow-healing bullet wounds; not me. Now I was ready to think about women, about one woman. The short time I’d been in Salter City hadn’t turned up any other woman worth clapping a saddle on.

  The party over at the hotel was going good. Nobody could say it sounded like a wild party— Salter City was no kind of a wild town—but it was probably the only party the town had seen for some time.

  I don’t know how much time had passed since I took the bottle and left, maybe two hours, something like that, when I heard voices coming across the street. I got up and closed the door but didn’t bar it. I moved the chair some distance from the desk and sat in it with Luke’s goose-gun across my knee. Anybody with nerve enough to kick open the door and shoot at where I usually sat would be making a small mistake. And a blast from the goose-gun would make them sorry for it. Naturally I didn’t think it would come to that, not yet; I was just being careful.