The Killers

by Peter McCurtin

  Zack was roaring again, a South Texas Abraham in dirty overalls. With all that roaring, Fallon’s name wasn’t spoken once. “Any man wants to ask questions about my girl—now’s the time,” the old man bellowed, adding that this man, whoever he was, was nothing less than an offal-eating, cross-eyed, yellow-backed son of a mangy bitch.

  I thought that was a fair description of Malachi Fallon, except for the cross-eyed part.

  Zack, louder than before, was telling the silent town what they did to men like that back in Georgia. “A town that takes up with a man like that deserves the fire and brimstone ... ”

  I didn’t care about the brimstone, so I warned the old man about fire. “Not this town,” I said, shifting the muzzle of the eight-gauge shotgun. Just a touch on the trigger and Zack and about five of his boys would go flying home to hell. The girl too.

  “You figure to stop us with that, do you?” the old man wanted to know, taking notice of the shotgun for the first time. “We ain’t geese, mister.”

  That was for sure: they looked more like a hungry wolf pack. “Gun’s been worked on,” I said, telling him what he already knew. “Tell the girl to move before you decide.”

  A glint of hard humor showed in his eyes. “You’d have a better edge if she stayed put.”

  “Your daughter,” I told him. “Now I say you won’t burn this town. Least you won’t, Zack.”

  “Not today I won’t,” Zack announced. “Didn’t plan to do it today. If I did the place would be falling over by now.” He was off and roaring again. “When we come—if we come—it’ll be in the dark. Why, friends and neighbors, we’ll make Lawrence, Kansas, look like a church supper. That’s the sermon for today, you town-living nest of snakes, and if you’re slow getting the point, here it is. No more talking about my daughter, no more taking sides. The next man even speaks my girl’s name is going to get killed … ”

  “You going now?” I asked.

  “Not just yet. We come and go as we please. Now we please to stay for a while. Drink a few drinks, lay in some provisions. Kind of let the town see us up close. Don’t you fret about my boys getting out of line. First one does a wrong thing I’ll kill him. He’d be surprised if I didn’t.”

  I told him to keep the killing in the family. “You said your piece, now leave the town be. Fallon knows you mean business.”

  “Is that his name?” the old man sneered. “Never heard of him. About the town. I’ll leave it be just so long. But not because you say so.”

  He turned and told his boys to drink some whiskey, and they were more than ready to do that. The boy took the buckboard to a hitching post and Sally Eldredge got down.

  “That’s a good-looking gun,” the old man said, nodding his hat brim that way. “What is it—a Davenport?”

  “Eight-gauge, thirty-six inch barrel. The barrel’s shorter now. They say one blast knocks down a grizzly.”

  “It won’t knock me down,” Eldredge said.

  Chapter Ten

  “Come in,” I said to the light tap on the side of the open door.

  Sally Eldredge walked in wearing a different dress than I’d seen her in out at the farm. It was fancy, and so was she. “Time we had a talk, Carmody.”

  I thought so myself. More and more I’d been thinking that she ought to leave town. I asked her if she wanted a drink. When she didn’t answer I set out bottle and glasses. “This parade your idea?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “You don’t want to talk about that. Talk about something else.”

  She didn’t want to sit in my new chair. It was the only chair I had. She walked the length of the office; not much of a walk.

  “Your turn,” she said. “You ask and I’ll answer—maybe.”

  “How’d you get mixed up with Thornton?”

  Sally looked at me like I wasn’t overburdened with brains. “How’d you think? I was just a kid when we left Georgia. It was bad there and worse in Texas, if that’s possible. You saw what it looks like. I still got some brothers who don’t see me as different from any other woman. I can handle them now, but I couldn’t then. Anyway, that was just part of it. Anyway, I lit out when I was sixteen. Daddy chased me for a bit, then gave up.”

  “Daddy’s not as determined as Thornton,” I suggested.

  Sally flared up at that. “Don’t you start dumping on my father,” she said. “Even if I do hate the son of a bitch.”

  “No harm meant,” I said. “Go on.”

  “The old story,” she said. “This and that. Clerking in a store, waitressing in dirty restaurants, making beds in a hotel, stuffing pillows in a factory. Those were some of the good jobs I worked at. You’d think a girl like me could do better than I did, but I couldn’t. There was always some wet-handed bastard laying to lift my skirts for free. Men, with all their brag, are such lousy cheapskates. I did the whole tour, all the big dirty towns. There were a lot of men and never much money. Then I got a job dealing cards in Mossy Jennings’ gambling place in New Orleans. Then I got Mossy himself—I was glad to grab that fat old man.”

  She paused and I kept quiet.

  Sally put a tough look on her face. “I didn’t like Mossy and I didn’t hate him too much. He was old and easy to handle. About once a month was Mossy’s speed. It might have worked out if Thornton hadn’t come around to ask Mossy why he was taking so long to make up his mind about coming in with him. Thornton was putting the boots to every gambler and brothel-keeper in New Orleans. I was there when Thornton came to call with three of his top gunmen. He kept looking at me. Mossy decided in a hurry, but that wasn’t enough for Thornton. Mossy got his back up about that and said the deal was off. That night he went out and never came back. Nobody ever saw him again. That same night Thornton’s men came to get me ... ”

  That could be the way it happened; there might have been a fat old man who couldn’t go faster than once a month. Or, knowing something about women like Sally, it could be just one more hard-luck story. “You didn’t argue and here you are,” I said.

  “Nobody argues with Sam Thornton,” she said. “Besides, Mossy was dead and I was alive.”

  I said that was a sensible way to look at it. I didn’t mean it as a slap in the face. “If you were so sensible about it, what caused the trouble?”

  “Not me,” she said. “I didn’t ask Thornton to take me to his fancy house. A room in a fair hotel would have suited me better. I didn’t ask him to marry me, but that’s what he said he wanted. All right, I was ready to keep my part of the bargain. I had a big house with servants, and what happened in bed wasn’t that important to me, not after the way I’d lived. But Thornton, being a lot older than me and not much good to any woman, didn’t want to believe I was on the level. Couldn’t believe I wasn’t always looking to sneak off with some man. One minute he was mushing all over me, the next throwing me down the stairs.”

  I knew that part was true; Sam Thornton was known to have a way with women.

  I let her go on.

  “Jesus, it was pure hell not knowing what to expect. He’d start asking questions about Mossy Jennings, about other men. No matter what I said, I was a liar and an ignorant no-good Georgia cracker slut. I don’t know why a dirty East Texas pig farmer would want to call me that. Then he’d say he was sorry and start slobbering all over me again. He kept giving parties all the time for his politician friends—the ones on his payroll—but if any man less than sixty danced with me he’d get killing mad. One night he got so drinking mad he shot one of the colored men in the orchestra. Now why in hell did he have to do that?”

  “Less trouble than shooting a state senator,” I said. “What else?”

  “What else is there? He didn’t get worse. He was worse when he started. I thought I could stand it long enough to get some money together before I made a break. I never did manage to get very much. Thornton watched me all the time and when he wasn’t watching me somebody else was.”

  I finished rolling a cigarette and put it in my mouth. “So you didn’
t get any money out of all that grief,” I said. “You cut and ran empty-handed?”

  “Less than a hundred dollars. I’d call that empty-handed.”

  “Pretty much,” I agreed. “Seems a shame you didn’t get something out of it. No argument about Sam Thornton—he’s an animal.” I put a match to the tobacco, looking at her through the first curl of smoke. “You know about the woman and kids he burned when you married him?”

  I expected her to say no. Most women would have said no. This one didn’t. Maybe she wanted to say no, but figured I wouldn’t believe her. “I knew something about it,” she told me. “It’s still talked of in New Orleans, not out loud though. The truth is, I didn’t give a damn. That was Thornton’s business. My business was me.”

  “And here you are,” I said again. “The question is—do you stay?”

  Instead of answering she asked me to fix her a smoke. “Never could roll one,” she said.

  I said yep.

  “Here I stay,” she said. “I been everywhere else since I ran off.”

  I gave her the cigarette and lit it for her. “He found you here,” I said. “Where’s the difference?” It wasn’t very gentlemanly, trying to edge her out of town that way, but it was one way to get rid of the trouble.

  What I’d said made her smile. “Maybe finding me won’t do him any good. I’m safer here than with the whole New York police force guarding me. A lot safer, the way bluecoats take money. I got me a lot of kinfolk, and from Cousin Willy to Daddy Zack there isn’t man nor boy can’t break a thrown bottle with the first shot. You yourself didn’t get far.”

  It was funny to hear her bragging about her dirty dangerous clan. I knew how well they could shoot, and how ready to do it. I knew Fallon, if left to himself, would shy away from them. So would I.

  “You got a good family to stay away from,” I said. “I’d say that because I’m a man with some sense. How much sense does Sam Thornton have?”

  “Not much when he gets mad,” she admitted. That made her think of something. “I guess you don’t know the real reason he killed that farmer’s family?”

  The killing down on the Nueces River had happened a long time ago. Before he started telling people he didn’t do it at all, Thornton used to yarn about how the dead farmer had been a Yank guerilla in the War; how this Confederate-hating farmer tried to bushwhack him and his men, all good veterans of Hood’s army, when they rode in like lambs to beg for provisions. Thornton used to say he didn’t know the woman and kids were in that barn when he burned it. In self-defense, naturally. That’s what I repeated to Sally.

  Her laugh had iron filings in it. “Thornton burned them because they had no whiskey on the place. They were temperance people, Quakers—something like that. That’s the plain truth of it. No whiskey when Sam was thirsty, so he killed a whole family. You know how I know? He told me himself.”

  She was trying to get me on her side. I believed what she said, but I wasn’t going against Sam Thornton because of something that had happened a long time before on the Nueces River. I didn’t like her to try to get at me that way. She was the one who had married the child-killer.

  “Sam always did like a drink,” I said. “And that answers the question about his good sense.”

  The story about the farmer had turned the argument against her, but she kept at it. “Then you don’t think Thornton will give up when Fallon sends back word how hard it is to take me?”

  I was thinking about another kind of taking. Looking at her, listening to the rustle of her silk dress, the smell of her perfume, I didn’t blame Sam Thornton one bit. I would never send a bunch of hired guns to fetch any woman, but for this one I’d do some hard riding on my own.

  I said, “My guess—Fallon doesn’t have to send back word. I think Fallon has his orders—bring you back, or something happens to Fallon. You don’t happen to know what Thornton is holding over Fallon to make him work so hard?”

  She didn’t know exactly—but something important. Then she told me what I’d figured already; that Thornton had picked Fallon because he thought Fallon could do it the easy way, the quiet way, keep his name out of it, buy off or scare off the local law, use his political pull to wet-blanket any future trouble.

  “Thornton’s still hoping to buy a pardon,” she told me. “That’s why he doesn’t want any trouble in Texas. Otherwise ... ”

  I finished it for her.

  She had a thought—not a new thought.

  “You’re the local law, Carmody. Not even the steady law. Why aren’t you bought off? Your rich daddy sending you money?”

  “All I got is a cousin and he’s the sheriff,” I said. “You know that. What you don’t know is he’ll sell you down the river if this thing drags on till he gets back. Much as I hate to say it—that’s Cousin Luke.”

  “And you won’t try to stop him?”

  “Not my own kin. You ought to understand that, having such a family feeling as you do. Besides, I wouldn’t be sheriff any longer.” I tapped my chest. “Off the payroll and out from behind this badge. Out of town too, since Luke won’t be begging me to stay. We’re cousins, but we’re not real close.”

  She moved in close to me. I liked how she smelled: perfume and soap. All that traveling around had taught her things. From a wild mountain girl she had come fairly close to looking and sounding like a lady. She ran her hands across my face like an old blind lady checking out her long lost son.

  “Then you can’t be bought,” she suggested.

  I grinned at her. “Now that is a fool thing to say. I’m always ready to be bought for a good cause. Even a not so good cause. Just not as dirty as Fallon’s.”

  It was nice having her plastered up against me. Nice, too, having her kiss me like her life depended on it, which in a way it did.

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” she said. “Good to meet a real man for a change. I think you better put the bar on the door.”

  I thought that was a right smart idea. I didn’t know what I’d do if Daddy Zack came a-calling, but you learn not to get ahead of yourself.

  “I’ll be good to you,” she murmured, leading me into Luke’s iron-barred bedroom. And so she was, going at it a mite faster than is usual, but not so hasty that anything was wasted. I wondered what crazy Sam Thornton would do when he heard, if Fallon had enough nerve to tell him, that his wandering wife had spent the best part of an hour inside a locked jail with a lanky galoot named Carmody. Maybe this time he’d slaughter a whole band of musicians.

  Already we were like an old married couple.

  “Do me up,” she told me, getting back into her dress.

  I was a bit fumble-fingered, but I managed to button her up. She turned around and said, “Well?” as if she expected me to sign a contract, or make some sort of binding statement.

  I didn’t know what to say. “Fine” was all I could think to say.

  Impatience broke through at last. “Never mind that,” she said quickly. “Will you help me?”

  “About the money,” I started.

  She got it in about two seconds, but she went back to playing wide-eyed. “I don’t understand. If you mean do I have any money—I don’t. I told you that. Was that what you meant?”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “Afraid not. Hate to talk money at a time like this, but might as well. I figure you feathered your nest before you left New Orleans. Yeah, I know what you said—Thornton spying on you night and day—but you’re a smart girl. You’d figure a way. Now’s the time to spread it around. Nothin’ cements a friendship like money, I always say.”

  Spots of red burned in her face and her voice shook with anger. She did it well, but I knew this girl was tough as boardinghouse steak. “You’re worse than Fallon,” she said. “No, wait a minute. I’m sorry I said that. I know what it’s like to want money.”

  Some women move around when they tell big lies, when they start giving a performance for a man. The tough ones, the real sm
art ones, can sit still and lie to your face. Sally wasn’t that tough yet. She walked up and down smacking one hand against the other. She even managed to squeeze out a few tears.

  I was busy buttoning my pants.

  Stopping, she chided me with, “I thought you’d be different.”

  I pulled on my boots and buckled the gunbelt. “Why is that—do I look different? I thought I looked about average greedy.”

  Ignoring that, she said with a sad, fake smile, “I’m in bad trouble and I know it. Don’t you think I’d offer you money if I had any?”

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  “You don’t have to sneer at me, Carmody. If you want money bad enough to step on a woman you should have listened to Fallon.”

  She was fighting hard to keep her temper from running wild. She repeated what she’d said about Fallon. I guess that was supposed to make me feel just awful, something lower than a crawling snake.

  “You could be right,” I agreed. “Maybe I should listen.”

  Her temper came out suddenly like the bull in a Juarez bullring. I moved the bottle and glasses so she wouldn’t have anything to throw, if it came to that. She wasn’t as strong as the blacksmith; she couldn’t throw the desk. I smiled at her.

  She was still looking for something to throw. When she stopped that she asked how much. “I asked you a question, you no-good bastard. How much?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How much do you have?”

  She said that was her business and her money. I suppose I had taken what they call unfair advantage of her, letting her seduce me that way, letting her believe a fine upstanding acting sheriff like me could be bribed by a roll in the hay. But, truth to tell, I didn’t feel like any kind of snake or barn rat. Truth to tell, I felt fine.

  “What about a hundred dollars?” she asked next.

  I said what about it.

  She told me not to act dumb. “That’s the limit,” she said. “All I can afford and ... ”

  “I know,” I said. “And you can’t afford that. Tell you what, I won’t be greedy. Cousin Luke’s paying me five hundred to watch the store. Match that and I’ll watch you too. This offer will not be repeated more than ten times. Save time, honey—say yes.”