Hell's Half Acre

by William W. Johnstone

  The cutting was of a minor nature, a woman who spiked her husband in the ass with scissors because he was drinking all the rent money. Jess warned both parties to behave and sent them on their way.

  But before he left a shabby-looking man in a long black overcoat and bowler hat sidled up to him and said, “I seen something, Sheriff. Heard something, too.”

  Jess stared at the little man. He had a thin black mustache and expressionless eyes the color of Mississippi River mud. “What did you see?” Jess said.

  “Buy me a drink and we’ll sit at a table and I’ll tell you,” the man said.

  “If you’re wasting my time you’ll be scratching your name on the jailhouse wall tonight,” Jess said.

  “I don’t know what my information is worth, but it’s at least worth a whiskey,” the man said.

  “We’ll see,” Jess said. But he bought the man his drink and then crossed the floor with him to a shadowed table. The saloon smelled of boiled cabbage and sour beer, but there was no hint of opium.

  Jess lit a cigarette, watched the little man sip his whiskey. Finally the man sat back in his chair and licked his lips as though about to say something. A vein pulsed in his neck. He stayed silent.

  “Tell me what you saw,” Jess said. His gaze slid over the dozen or so working-class men standing at the bar. Nothing there alarmed him.

  “What’s your name?” Jess said.

  “Michael.”

  “All right, Michael. Tell me what you saw.”

  “What I seen wasn’t here in the Half Acre, it was up near the stockyards where all them big houses are,” Michael said. “I did some yard work for Mrs. McClelland—you know Mrs. McClelland? No? Well, anyway it took me the whole day and then she gave me corn bread and buttermilk, so it was dark when I finally set out for home. I live on 13th Street, you see.”

  “So what did you see, Michael?” Jess said, sighing out the words, slightly irritated.

  “Like I said, I was near the stockyards and I heard the sound of running feet, light feet, like a woman’s,” Michael said. “And it was a woman, or a girl, because I heard her sobbing. Then I heard a man yelling at her to stop and a second man shouted out to her, calling her a very bad name.”

  “What did he call her?”

  Michael looked over his shoulder, then whispered, “He called her a whore. A black man’s whore.”

  Jess nodded. “Then what?”

  “I was scared, so I crouched down behind a fence post and then I saw the woman fall. She was nicely dressed but her clothes were torn. The two men grabbed her and a man, a big, powerful man, slapped her across the face and she went limp and almost fell again.”

  “Then what happened?” Jess prompted.

  “Well, then, I think it was the big man, called her a whore again and they carried her away.”

  “Did you see where they went?” Jess said.

  “No, sir. I was too scared to stay around. I ran all the way home and bolted my door.”

  “When did this happen?” Jess said.

  “The night before last, Sheriff. I’ll never forget it.”

  “Did you get a good look at the men? See their faces?”

  Michael shook his head. “No, they were in shadow. I just saw their shapes.”

  “Recognize their voices?”

  “I thought the big man’s voice sounded familiar, but I don’t know. I couldn’t place it.” Michael’s muddy eyes were hopeful. “I hope what I told you was useful, Sheriff.”

  Jess nodded. “It was.” He reached into his pocket and gave the man five dollars. Dixie’s dollars. “You be careful,” he said. “Keep what you told me to yourself.”

  Michael swallowed hard. “Do you really think I’m in danger?”

  “Yes, I do. You were seen talking to me and that’s enough. Take my advice, buy a bottle, go home and bolt your door. Don’t answer it to anyone.”

  Jess rose to his feet. “Wait until ten minutes after I leave before you go outside. Understand?”

  The little man nodded. He looked scared.

  * * *

  The little man’s name was Michael Hannah. He’d been a nonentity all his life, an odd-job man who eked out a meager living doing menial tasks nobody else would do. But suddenly he saw a way to make himself important, to be a somebody, for a few hours at least.

  He stepped to the bar, put his five dollars on the oak and loudly ordered whiskey. “I’m celebrating tonight,” he said. “I just helped the sheriff solve a very important case, a mystery about a beautiful kidnapped girl.”

  There were men at the bar who wanted to hear the story, but there was another man who already knew the story and how it would end.

  He could not let Michael Hannah, suddenly the cock of the walk, live for too much longer.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  She could have been a whore who had crossed her pimp, Jess Casey reckoned, and had been beaten up and dragged back to the brothel.

  Or had Lillian Burke attempted to flee her gilded cage, and had the men Michael seen and heard chased after her? But Lillian was not a whore. She was not a black man’s whore or a white man’s, for that matter. Why did the big man call her that?

  Big man. Could Kurt Koenig be the one who had decided to make Lillian his kept women? It was possible, but unlikely. Destiny Durand was Kurt’s steady gal and from what little Jess had seen of her she was not the type to stand idly by and let Koenig replace her. Unless it had been Destiny at the stockyards that night. Had she run away from Kurt?

  Jess rose from his desk and stared out at the morning. A cattle herd had crossed the Trinity at first light and had been driven through town to the pens. The signs of its passing were littered all over the street.

  Jess shook his head, clearing his thoughts. Later he would talk to Dr. Sun and get his opinions, but first a routine matter required his attention. A landlord had reported a murder at his boardinghouse on 13th Street.

  The realization hit Jess like a fist. The little man called Michael lived on 13th Street.

  Jess saddled his horse and made his way through the Half Acre’s heavy traffic, an almost immobile sea of freight wagons, carriages, handcarts, riders and heedless pedestrians. He saw two drivers get into it over the right of way and rode around them as they exchanged both punches and curses. A woman walked among the crowd with her baby on top of her head. The child didn’t seem to mind, peeking out of his blankets and looking around at the sights.

  The boardinghouse on 13th Street was one of the earliest three-story structures in Fort Worth and its age showed. It was a ramshackle building held together with rusty nails, string, and prayers and above the main entrance a wit had hung a painted sign that read: ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.

  Just a few short weeks before Jess would have left his horse in the street. But growing wise of the ways of the Half Acre he hired a passing urchin to guard his paint with the promise of a dollar if it was still there when he got back.

  * * *

  The man called Michael had not died easily.

  His small room off the top story hallway was spattered with blood. The little man’s tongue had been cut out and laid on top of his chest, prompting the owner of the building, a big-bellied, blue-chinned man wearing carpet slippers to gloomily observe that the tongue was probably severed while the victim was still alive.

  That was also Jess’s opinion. The little man’s throat had been cut but he’d been made to suffer terribly before he was killed.

  “His name was Michael Hannah, Sheriff,” the blue-chinned man said. “He wasn’t much, but why kill him like that? I mean, so much pain and blood.”

  “He talked too much to the wrong people,” Jess said.

  * * *

  Before he returned to his office, Jess rode to the stockyards where the bellowing herd was now penned up, and scouted around the area. There were a few large houses nearby and he’d read in the newspaper that even bigger homes were to be built on a rise just north of the yards that the press had al
ready christened Quality Hill.

  After an hour of fruitless searching, Jess swung into the saddle and that’s when he saw a man walking purposefully toward him. The man was short, stocky and wore a gun as though it were part of him. There were many gunmen of one sort or another in Fort Worth, but this man had the arrogant stamp of a seasoned professional.

  Jess watched him come and some instinct told him that this was not going to end well. Horseman-style, his Colt rode high on his waist just behind the hip bone and was unhandy for the draw and shoot. Jess reached behind him, eased the gun from his holster and rested it on the saddle pommel.

  The man stepped to within twenty feet of Jess and said, “You the local sheriff?”

  “I reckon I am,” Jess said.

  “I thought so,” the stocky man said. He smiled . . . and skinned it.

  * * *

  As the gunman made his draw Jess was already falling out of the saddle, but a bullet burned across his ribs on the left side and a second cracked the air beside his ear. He hit the ground with a sickening thud and most of the air was knocked out of his lungs. Luck always plays a part in a gunfight and Jess Casey was lucky that day.

  Startled, his horse, never trained to stand in the presence of gunfire, reared and swung to its right. The gunman’s third bullet, aimed at Jess as he tried to scramble to his feet, slammed into the paint’s left flank. The horse screamed, turned and ran in the stocky man’s direction. He jumped to the side, cursing, then turned and looked for Jess.

  But he was too late. Jess Casey was on his feet and firing. His first bullet slammed into the gunman’s chest and then Jess stepped toward him, thumbing off shot after shot.

  “Do you like it?” Jess yelled. At that moment a little insane, all the stresses and strains he’d kept buried inside him flaring to the surface. “How does it feel to be on the receiving end, you miserable, low-down son of a bitch.”

  The gunman dropped to his knees, his face shocked that this was happening to him. He said as much. “This can’t be . . .”

  “Damn you, it can,” Jess said as he fired his last round into the gunman’s belly.

  The man rose, backed up one staggering step and the Colt slid from his dying fingers. He tried to speak again, but the words choked in his throat and then his knees buckled and he pitched forward on his face.

  There were several cowhands hanging around the pens and they quickly gathered around the dead man. “Hell, I know him,” a lanky man wearing shotgun chaps said. “He’s Earl Broadwell out of San Antone. He killed Jeff Link down on the Brazos that time, remember? Jeff rode with Bill Bonney and his hard crowd. They say he just got out of the New Mexico Territory ahead of a hemp posse.”

  “What has he done since?” Jess said.

  “Hired out his gun. Some say Earl killed eighteen men, but I don’t hold with that. I figure he gunned ten or eleven, tops.”

  “Is that all?” Jess said.

  But his irony was lost on the puncher. “Earl got started late. He was a lawman for a spell.”

  “Sheriff, we saw it all,” another puncher said. “He drew down on you and you defended yourself. Pity about the horse.”

  Jess had been staring at his dead mount. The paint had been a good little horse. Never complained much.

  “He had you marked, Sheriff,” the lanky man said. “He’s been planning to kill you fer sure. I’d say he followed you here.” The cowboy had just built a cigarette and Jess took it from his fingers. “I need that more than you do,” he said.

  “Smoke away, Sheriff,” the puncher said. He had an open, good-natured grin. “The man who killed Earl Broadwell deserves a cigarette. Earl was a real bad man. No mercy in him, if you catch my drift.”

  Jess nodded. “Well, Big Sal will be pleased.”

  “Huh?” the puncher said.

  “Nothing. Talking to myself.” Then, to the puncher again, “Wilson J. Tucker is in town. What does that tell you?”

  The man grinned. “It tells me this is a bad time to be a lawman in Fort Worth.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The lanky cowboy and Jess Casey rode two-up back to the sheriff’s office. The puncher said he’d bring the saddle on his way back out of town.

  Dr. Sun was waiting for Jess when he stepped back into the office.

  “You’ve been shot,” the physician said.

  “I got burned across the ribs,” Jess said. “A man, a hired gun, tried to kill me.”

  “Tucker?” Dr. Sun said.

  “No, a man called Broadwell,” Jess said. “He wanted to kill me real bad.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Dr. Sun said, “Your shirt is ruined.”

  “I know. And it’s my best,” Jess said. “My dress-up-go-to-prayer-meeting shirt.”

  Dr. Sun removed the shirt and then opened the bag he always carried. “You’re not hurt badly. This salve will help.” Then, “But I’ve got some bad news, Jess.”

  “I’m dying, right?”

  Dr. Sun’s smile was tight. “No, not that. The Alamo Saloon has reopened by order of the mayor. It’s selling opium again and maybe the new drug that’s starting to scare me real bad.”

  “The mayor? You mean Mayor Stout?” Jess said.

  “Is there another mayor I don’t know about?” Dr. Sun said.

  “Who told you this?”

  “Told me? Nobody told me. I was there to treat a broken leg, the result of a fall by an inebriated patron.”

  “Why would the mayor do a thing like that?” Jess said.

  “Larry Kemp took great pleasure in telling me that the closure was in violation of the city charter, whatever that means,” Dr. Sun said.

  “It means Mayor Harry Stout didn’t want to lose his cut of the Alamo profits,” Jess said.

  “That could be,” Dr. Sun said. “I wouldn’t put a clean shirt on until the salve dries.”

  “It stings bad,” Jess said.

  “If it didn’t, it wouldn’t do you any good. In China we have an old saying that goes, ‘For cuts and bruises, the sting is the thing.’”

  Jess smiled. “Do you have any sayings for doctors who just make things up?”

  “No,” Dr. Sun said. “But I’m sure there are some.”

  “Doc, have you ever treated the mayor or his family?” Jess said.

  “Horny Harry has no family, unless you count the whores he visits regularly. And yes, I have treated him.”

  “For what?”

  “I am not at liberty to say.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Come now, Jess, you’re not talking about doing him an injury over the Alamo?” Dr. Sun said, his face concerned.

  “No, nothing like that. I’m just curious.”

  “He has a house up by the stockyards and he’s thinking of building another.”

  Jess was silent for a while. Then, “I wanted your thoughts on something, Doc. An incident that happened the night before last and ended in a dead body being found this morning.”

  “That sounds intriguing, Sheriff Casey,” Dr. Sun said. “We shall have a whiskey and you can tell me all about it.”

  * * *

  After Jess stopped speaking, Dr. Sun smiled and said, “Now I know why you asked me where Mayor Stout lives. But the man Michael Hannah saw only silhouettes in the darkness. There are many large men in Fort Worth. And he couldn’t identify the girl.”

  “Why did they call her a black man’s whore?” Jess said.

  “Presumably because she was just that. It seems she was unfaithful to someone.”

  “Could it have been Harry Stout?” Jess said.

  “The emerald that may have fallen from Lillian Burke’s brooch was found outside City Hall, and the girl, whoever she was, was chased and abused near his home.”

  “And Stout is a big man.”

  “Yes, those are clues that point in His Honor’s direction, but they are not proof. But remember that Kurt Koenig is a big man and his record with young w
omen is, well, spotty at least.”

  “But why would Kurt want Lillian Burke? He has plenty of women at his disposal, including Destiny Durand, a rare beauty if a little bit hard.”

  “And why would Harry Stout want her? He has his whores. But perhaps he wanted something different, an innocent, pretty virgin to mold into his ideal woman. When she told him she’d slept with a black man his dream was shattered and he couldn’t bear the pain.”

  “Did he kill her that night?” Jess said.

  “Perhaps.” Dr. Sun smiled. “That is, if Stout is really our man.”

  “But what you say makes sense, Doc,” Jess said.

  “Of a sort,” the little physician said. “But again, where is the proof?”

  “Somewhere in this town is a hired thug who knows what happened to Lillian,” Jess said. “And as God is my witness, I’ll find him.”

  “Perhaps even Wilson J. Tucker,” Dr. Sun said.

  “All things are possible.”

  “Then I’ll talk to him first,” Jess said. He winced as he shifted position in his chair. “Now my ribs are really starting to hurt.”

  “Enjoy the pain, Jess,” Dr. Sun said. “It means you’re still alive.”

  * * *

  After the physician left, Jess thought he was done with visitors for the night. But the door opened and Luke Short stepped inside.

  “Don’t you ever knock, Luke?” Jess said. “And show me your hands.”

  “I’m unarmed and sober,” Like said. “I heard you got shot today. You were lucky. Earl Broadwell was a shootist.”

  “How long has he been in town, Luke?” Jess said.

  “For a few weeks but he’s been lying low, especially after Wilson Tucker rode in. Those two were happy to step around each other in the past, but then you never know, do you?”

  “Who hired Broadwell to kill me, Luke?”

  “I’ve no idea, Sheriff. It wasn’t me.”

  “Why are you here?” Jess said.

  “Well, when I heard you’d been shot I hurried down here to see if you wanted to call in the favor I owe you. Or if you were dead.”

  “I was shot hours ago.”

  “Yeah, well I don’t hurry very fast.” Luke motioned to the glasses on the desk. “You got a drink for me or did the Chinaman drink it all? I don’t like him and never will.”