Hell's Half Acre

by William W. Johnstone

“All right,” Jess said. “It’s about time I made my rounds.”

  Dr. Sun said, “Tuesday night is a quiet time in the Half Acre. We can see the sights at leisure.”

  Jess rose from behind his desk and filled the empty chambers of his revolver, leaving the one under the hammer unloaded.

  “Lead on, Doc,” he said. Then, remembering, he asked, “How are Zeus and Nate Levy coming along?”

  “Zeus is a strong man. He is recovering very well. Mr. Levy is older, but he has heart. He will be fine.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Jess said. He shrugged into his slicker.

  * * *

  Main Street was much less crowded than usual, the rain and thunder keeping people inside. The sporting crowd and the hustlers were content to leave it alone and rest up for Wednesday, the middle of the week, when things started to snap.

  In a steady downpour Jess and Dr. Sun walked only as far as 14th Street, where the little physician made a right turn past the Variety grocery store. After a stretch of dark, open ground the lamp-lit Du Louvre Hotel stood at the corner of 14th and Rusk but Dr. Sun stopped short of the building and said, “Now we cross the waste. Be most careful of mud puddles.”

  Fastidiously, Dr. Sun carefully studied the ground before every tiny tread, his highly polished shoes hovering for just a moment before committing themselves to another step. For his part Jess walked boldly, a booted man having no such concerns.

  Through the rain-swept gloom Jess saw a series of cabins, their iron chimneys smoking against the damp, then a larger structure with four windows on the wall facing them, each draped with red curtains.

  “And here lies our destination, my friend,” Dr. Sun said. “See the alley there? That’s where we will gain entry.”

  Jess peered through the rain. “It’s a pretty big place,” he said.

  “It should be. This house is owned by Mr. Koenig and he loves to do everything on a grand scale.”

  “What is this place?” Jess said.

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” Dr. Sun said.

  The house was situated in a vile-smelling alley that ran between rank, run-down tenements. “Those are where the poor of the Half Acre dwell,” Dr. Sun said. “The tenements are places of poverty, misery and despair, of beaten women, abused children and drunken, violent men. Hear the wails, my friend, the female screams, the roar of drunkards, all of which Mr. Koenig helped create, since most of the tenements are owned by him.”

  Thunder roared, lightning flashed and Jess Casey unbuttoned his slicker to free his gun. This was a terrible place, a stinking slum he hadn’t known existed. It was hell on earth.

  Dr. Sun rapped on the door with his cane and it opened a crack, just enough to allow a Chinese face to peer out. The man at the door smiled in recognition and beckoned the physician to come inside. Jess, wary, followed him.

  What he saw horrified him.

  The entire building was a single, long room with a low ceiling. The air was thick with brown smoke that smelled like musky incense and lining both sides were tiered wooden berths, like the crowded bunks of an army barracks. Bodies lay stretched out in the berths, both male and female with no attention to modesty, some of them Chinese but most white. The room was dark but here and there the red coals of long pipes winked first bright then dull then bright again. Most of the smokers lay in silence, their eyes closed, but others mumbled to themselves and a few laughed at some joke they heard only in dreams. A few stooped Chinese moved among them, offered new pipes and spoke in whispers.

  “What is this?” Jess said.

  “It is an opium den,” Dr. Sun said. “People come here to dream.”

  A tiny Chinese girl ran to offer Jess a pipe, but Dr. Sun waved her away. The girl took no offense but merely turned and vanished into the red-winking gloom.

  “I’ve heard of opium,” Jess said. He realized he was whispering and said louder, “But I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  Dr. Sun said, “My friend, opium is a most wonderful drug, a gentle, caring lover who embraces you in angel wings and takes you to paradise, giving you a few years of warmth and affection. Then, without warning, one day the lover turns into a snarling beast that leads you down to the depths of hell. The dreams it imparts become nightmares.”

  “You’ve smoked the stuff?” Jess said.

  “I was addicted to both opium and morphine,” Dr. Sun said. “Together they almost destroyed me. Even now I yearn for a pipe or two or the needle. I want so badly to visit paradise again . . .” The little physician’s black eyes glittered. He violently shook his head. “But there is no going back, not now.”

  “I’m starting to feel dizzy from the smoke, Doc,” Jess said. “I’ve seen enough of this place. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Wait, there is still something I brought you here to see. Step over here. Now, do you recognize her?”

  Jess’s eyes widened in shock. “Oh my God, yes, that’s the girl who told me about Zeus getting beat up in the alley. Her name is Lillian Burke.”

  “And she’s a morphine and opium fiend,” Dr. Sun said.

  The girl lay on her side, her eyes closed, the pipe smoking between her lips. Her expensive clothes were in disarray and her undone hair fell across her face.

  Jess kneeled beside her berth and touched the girl’s naked shoulder. “Lillian, it’s me,” he said. “Sheriff Casey, remember?”

  The girl did not respond though her parted lips moved slightly.

  “She can’t hear you, Sheriff,” Dr. Sun said. “She is deep in dreams.”

  “I’m taking her home, out of here,” Jess said.

  “She won’t thank you for it,” Dr. Sun said.

  A Chinese man tried to push Jess away from the unconscious girl, but Dr. Sun said a few sharp words in his own language and the man bowed and left.

  Jess took the pipe from Lillian’s mouth then lifted her in his arms. The girl’s head dropped against his shoulder but she did not waken. He was surprised how light she was.

  Jess walked to the door, pushed it open and stepped outside, deeply inhaling the clean, rain-washed air. When Dr. Sun stepped beside him, he said, “Where does her father live?”

  The physician said, “No, take her to my home. Miss Burke’s addiction is known to me and when she regains consciousness Mei-Xing will attend her. It is a service she has performed many times before.”

  “Should her father be told?” Jess said.

  “Her father already knows. Lillian is twenty-two years old. He can’t lock her away in a convent.” Dr. Sun pushed an errant lock of hair from the girl’s forehead and said, “Don’t let what you’ve seen tonight influence your relationship with Kurt Koenig. It’s too early to draw a line in the sand.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jess said. He did his best to protect the girl from the rain with his slicker. “I’m sheriff, of Hell’s Half Acre at least. I can arrest him.”

  “And you’d be dead less than an hour later,” Dr. Sun said. “No, that is not the way, at least not yet.”

  “Then what do you reckon I should do?” Jess said.

  “For the moment just lie low and do your job. We will talk about this again very soon.”

  Lillian Burke stirred in Jess’s arms and Dr. Sun said, “Come, we will go to my home now.” Then, his face a study in suppressed anger, “Seventeen in three months, my friend.”

  “What does that mean?” Jess said.

  “That is the number of drug fiends I have buried, and the toll still grows.”

  “And Koenig supplies the morphine?”

  “Yes, and he’s making himself rich in the process. Now come.”

  Jess carried the girl into the darkness. The rain fell on her face but there was not a thing he could do about it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Scar Moseley needed a woman. Any woman so long as she was young. Well, youngish. Hell, not old.

  The woman who’d just wrung the neck of a chicken and now stared at Scar from the coop would do nicely. S
he was youngish, thirty maybe, and plump. Her brown hair was pulled back in a bun and her large, motherly breasts strained against the thin stuff of her calico dress.

  Scar watched the woman over the rim of the horn cup that he’d taken from the brick rim of the well. Nothing stirred in the sway-roofed cabin. Was she alone or were her menfolk asleep? “Hey, ma’am,” he said. “You need some help around here?”

  “Take a drink and ride on,” the woman said. “We have nothing to give you.”

  “Having fried chicken for supper, are ye?” Scar said.

  “That’s none of your business,” the woman said. She had brown eyes and under the hem of her dress her feet were large, bare and dusty.

  “Your tone is not friendly,” Scar said.

  “We don’t like strangers here,” the woman said. Then, in a shout, “Henry!”

  After a few moments the cabin door opened and a bald, middle-aged man stepped outside. “What is it, Effie?” Then his eyes locked on the tall, sinister figure of the man at the well. It was the last sight they ever saw.

  Scar drew from his brass-studded holster and shot Henry through the heart.

  The woman screamed, ran to her husband and in a flurry of white petticoats threw herself on his body. Behind her, a tall, gangly youth stood in the doorway, a shotgun in his hands. “Ma?” he said.

  Then he saw the man dressed in black standing by the well. In his hand was a Colt trailing smoke from its barrel.

  After a moment of confusion, the youth read the signs and lifted the scattergun. Scar shot him and the boy fell back into the cabin, triggering a shot that went into the air.

  “Unfriendly folks, Effie,” Scar said.

  The woman rose and ran to her son. Scar, irritated, had to pull her out of the cabin by her kicking feet. “I like doing it outdoors, don’t you?” he said to the now-terrified woman.

  Then he threw himself on her.

  * * *

  Women were strange, Scar Moseley decided as he watched the naked woman washing herself with handfuls of dirt she’d scooped up from the yard. He hands, face and body were soon streaked with black, and that annoyed Scar greatly. It was as though she was trying to turn herself into a colored woman. Born to prejudice, he would not even touch a black woman, let alone screw one.

  “Stop that,” Scar said. “Go wash with water. We’re riding soon.”

  The woman called Effie ignored him, rubbed dirt over her heavy breasts and softly sang something that sounded like a hymn.

  Effie had gone to a distant place from where she’d never return, and Scar felt a twinge of disappointment. He’d planned on keeping her for a few months, but he was damned if he was taking a crazy woman to his place. He shot her with regret, not for her but for his ruined plan.

  Scar retrieved his pocketknife. It was time to leave his carte de visite and ride on before anybody happened this way.

  On the door of the cabin he carved his own profile, exaggerating the size of his nose as he always did, and then he added a livid, jagged scar that matched the one on his left cheek. Like an artist admiring his work, he stepped back and studied the carving for a while. Then, satisfied, he mounted his horse and rode away.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “What I just told you, Sheriff, I saw with my own two eyes,” Len Hawley said. “Henry, Effie and their son, Thomas, all dead. Effie was nekkid and all covered with dirt and she’d been shot just like her old man and son.”

  “Was robbery the motive?” Mayor Harry Stout said, his face stern.

  “Nothing taken that I could see,” Hawley said. “Even the Clark’s old plow horse was still in the barn. And there was a dead chicken lying in the yard.”

  “Dead chicken?” Jess said.

  “Probably Effie had wrung its neck afore she was . . . well, you know.”

  Hawley, a puncher for one of the local ranches, reached into his shirt pocket and produced a page from his tally book. “And there was this carved into the door. I made a drawing.”

  Hawley tried to pass the paper to Jess Casey, but Stout, as bullying as ever, grabbed it out of his hand. He studied the drawing and after a moment his face turned ashen.

  “Oh my God, he’s back,” he said.

  “Give me that,” Jess said. He grabbed the paper and looked at it. It was a crude drawing of a man with a big nose, long hair and there was what looked like a scar on his cheek. “You know this feller?” he said to Stout.

  “I know of him,” Stout said. The fat man appeared shaken, his original complaint about the number of stray dogs in the Half Acre momentarily forgotten. “His name is Scar Moseley, a killer out of the New Mexico Territory. He’s murdered and raped his way across Texas and last I heard he’d killed sixty people, men and women and children. He sometimes works as a gun for hire and he’ll cut anybody in half with a shotgun for fifty dollars.”

  “You said he’s back,” Jess said. “Was he here in Fort Worth?”

  “Yes,” Stout said. “He worked for Kurt Koenig for a spell, but even Kurt couldn’t handle him, so he fired him.”

  “Did Moseley take it hard?” Jess said.

  Stout said, “Hell no. He and Koenig are two of a kind, ruthless and good with guns, and he got a good payoff, so he’d nothing to kick about.”

  “Then why is he back?” Jess said.

  “I can’t even guess,” Stout said. “But I bet there’s a wanted dodger for him around this office somewhere. Last I heard there was a five-thousand bounty on Scar’s head, dead or alive.” The mayor smiled. “If there’s anybody crazy enough to try to collect it.”

  A brewer’s dray trundled past the window with the name BURKE’S BEER painted on the side. A couple of ragged urchins rode on top of the barrels, a precarious and dangerous perch.

  “Ah well,” Stout said with the air of a man closing the matter, “thank you for the information, Len. I’ll send out Big Sal with a burial party to bury the poor, hurting dead.”

  “Where is the Clark place?” Jess asked the puncher.

  “About six, seven miles to the west of us, on the big bend of Bear Creek,” Hawley said. “I reckon Big Sal knows where it is. She’s buried folks from miles around.”

  The cowboy rose to his feet, touched his hat and left.

  “Good man, that,” Stout said after Hawley left. “And now to the business on hand, Sheriff Casey. I’m getting many complaints from merchants about the number of stray curs in the Half Acre and I want you to—”

  “What about Scar Moseley?” Jess said.

  Stout’s florid face registered surprise. “What about him?”

  “He just killed three people, a family.”

  “Let Scar be, Sheriff. He’ll be brought to justice soon enough. You can bet that the Rangers are on his trail.” Stout shook his head. “No, no, your responsibilities lie here in Fort Worth. Now about those curs—”

  “I’m going after him, Mayor,” Jess said. “I’m either a lawman or I’m not.”

  “Or you want the reward.”

  “I don’t care about the reward.”

  “Damn it all, man, don’t think for one moment you can raise a posse in this town,” Stout said. “No one, and I mean no one, will take on Scar Moseley. He’s . . . he’s . . . an infernal machine.”

  Jess rose to his feet. “I’ll bring him in, Mayor. You can hang him at your convenience.”

  Stout sighed and shook his head. “All right, maybe Kurt Koenig can talk some sense into you. Don’t leave until we get back.”

  Alone in the office after the mayor stormed out, Jess tried to analyze his decision to go after Moseley. Was it the reward? He didn’t think so. How about an act of bravado, trying to prove what a big man he was? Jess dismissed that thought immediately. Then there could be only one reason: he was taking his job as a peace officer seriously.

  Jess considered that and could not dispute it.

  He rode out of town a few minutes later. He didn’t wait for Mayor Stout to return.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 
Big Sal had not yet visited the Clark farmstead on Bear Creek. The bodies were still there, buzzing with fat, black flies.

  The cabin was situated on a pleasant spot, surrounded by stands of ash, juniper and wild oak. Jays quarreled among the trees and rainbow-colored butterflies fluttered among meadows of wildflowers.

  Jess Casey brought sheets from the cabin and covered the bodies. He felt strangely ashamed that he had seen Mrs. Clark’s nakedness, and for some reason his stove-up back and wrecked knees began to ache.

  Jess was far from being an expert tracker, but the hoofprints left by a large horse were clear enough on the ground. Scar Moseley’s trail headed north, into grass and brush country.

  Groaning, Jess stepped into the saddle and followed the tracks. The sun was hot, the sky pale blue, all trace of the rain of yesterday gone. But the moisture had softened the ground and most of the time the tracks were well defined and deep. The drowsy day lulled Jess and once he almost dozed in the saddle. But his horse stumbled and he was startled awake.

  All was still, the land around him silent but for the insects making their small music in the grass. Sweat trickled down Jess’s back and he smelled only dust and sunbaked grass. There was no sign of Scar Moseley.

  Thanking himself for remembering to fill his canteen at the pump behind his office, Jess drew rein and drank. He felt hot and sticky and his washed-out blue shirt clung to his back and shoulders. A fly buzzed around his sweaty face and he waved it away.

  Jess kneed his horse forward then rounded a massive, humpbacked rock rimmed with cactus. Just fifty yards away, a saddled cow pony nosed for graze among the dry grama grass. He drew rein and his eyes scanned the area around the little paint and saw nothing more.

  Jess dismounted and his hand on his Colt, he stepped carefully toward the pony. The little animal’s head jerked up and it stared at him curiously for a few moments, then went back to cropping grass.

  His foot in the stirrup, Jess got ready to mount again, but then he saw a boot sticking out of a patch of brush. He watched the boot for the space of a minute, wary of a trick, but then stepped carefully toward it. And then he saw the fallen man.