Winter Kill

by Bill Brooks

  He left and Cole sat there, staring after him through the window, watching as he crossed the street with that slight hitch to his gait and headed for the hotel. Cleo came out of the kitchen and said: “You look like a ghost has jumped into your hide. What did that man want?”

  “His wife,” Cole said.

  “Good Lord, don’t men know that when a woman disappears on them, she’s not looking to be found?”

  Cole stared out the window onto a half-frozen world that was as forbidding as a bitter heart, and he knew he’d have to find Ella and learn the truth no matter where that truth led him. He would be leaving Cheyenne, but not in the way he’d planned.

  If Cole knew anything at all about her, Ella Mims wasn’t the kind of woman to commit murder no matter what the circumstances. But if he didn’t find her before the others did, there would be no way to prove that. He knew Teddy Green was right about their chances of going it alone as opposed to throwing in together, but he’d learned a long time ago that you didn’t buy a pig in a poke. He had to make sure Teddy Green’s story wasn’t a pig.

  Every time Cole got to thinking the dance had ended, the old grim fiddler started it up again.

  Chapter Two

  Cole walked to the telegraph office and sent a wire to a man he knew in Denver—a one-armed old cowpuncher from his droving days who’d ended up striking it rich by marrying a wealthy widow twice his size. Now, instead of sleeping in his soogan on a muddy trail somewhere along that thousand-mile stretch between San Antonio and the Kansas boom towns, he was sleeping in a canopy bed on satin sheets. His name was Harve Ledbettor. He’d lost his arm while serving as a city constable in Rock Creek, Wyoming, nearly chopped off by a madwoman with a hoe after her man shot him through the jaw. Harve told Cole later it had been a bad day all the way around and had convinced him that he wasn’t cut out to be a peace officer. He’d gone to Denver to a hospital to recover and it was there that he had met the rich widow who was volunteering as a nurse. Her name was Zerelda Beechcomb and she took to Harve like a preacher to whiskey. Harve called it a case of mad love.

  Cole knew all this because the last time he had been in Denver with Bill Cody, they had run into Harve Ledbettor in an outlandishly opulent restaurant Cody had insisted they eat in—they had an oyster bar and Cody liked to be seen by the blue bloods. Cody’s surprise was such that when he saw Harve, leaning against the bar wearing a fancy black suit and a cravat with a ruby stickpin, he dropped an oyster into his lap. Cody called Harve over and asked him what bank he’d robbed. Harve brayed like a mule and bought a round of drinks and told them the story of his good fortune.

  “I fell into it, boys, like a mud cat into a two-holer. I was lost, and now I’m found.”

  He looked blissful. Cody looked envious. Cole figured, if a man lost something as dear as his arm, he had a right to whatever good fortune came his way after that. The three of them got as hammered as a keg of roofing nails. Every time Harve tossed back a tumbler of gin rickeys, he would flap his empty sleeve and crow for the waitress to bring them another round.

  Cole thought about that night now, as he waited for the telegrapher to send the telegram, the stuttering clack of the key of small comfort to him. He was grasping at straws, trying to find out what he could about Ella’s life in Denver. He needed to learn what he could about the killing and Harve Ledbettor was his only source of hope. His mind still wasn’t accepting the things Teddy Green had told him about Ella. Part of him wanted to believe Green was a man with a mission but not necessarily the one he claimed. If it was true that he’d been married to Ella, maybe she was running from him, and maybe she had a reason. Cole needed to get to the truth and find out what he could. And if anyone knew anything about the sins of the high and mighty in Denver, he figured it to be Harve Ledbettor. He was married into it. Cole was counting on Harve’s being able to tell him something he didn’t already know about the murder and the players involved.

  “Make sure and tell the operator at the other end to send someone to deliver that message pronto,” Cole said.

  The telegrapher peered at him from under his green eye shade, then tapped out some more code, and sat back and waited. “May take a while to get a reply back,” he said.

  “I’ll check in with you later,” Cole told him, and headed up the street to the railroad station. He needed to buy a ticket on the next flyer to Ogallala. From there, he’d rent a horse and ride out to the ranch that Ella Mims’s aunt owned. That was the last place he’d seen Ella, the place he’d left her while he went off to find Ike Kelly’s killer. He’d wanted to go back long before now, but the winter had come and killed everything. When he’d left her last, whatever future they had talked about was hanging by a thin string. Ella had told him when he left that she wouldn’t wait forever for him to make up his mind. Now Cole was sorry as hell he’d taken so long.

  He was halfway to the station when he ran into Karl Cavandish, the town’s undertaker. He’d buried some of Cole’s enemies and most of his friends, and as soon as the ground thawed, he was going to bury a few more. His features were more gaunt than usual and his stovepipe hat was battered and muddy and angled to one side. His gait was unsteady and he smelled like a saloon.

  “Awful early to hit the juice, ain’t it, Karl?”

  Cavandish’s eyes tried to focus on Cole but were having a devil of a time doing it. “John Henry?”

  He started to topple, and Cole caught him before he landed in the mud. “Easy, Karl.”

  Through the broadcloth coat, Cole could feel bones. Cavandish seemed like a man without flesh, his frame as starved as a lobo after a hard winter. He hadn’t shaved or had a haircut in some time and had the odor of the unwashed mixed with the stink of liquor. That stench caused Cole to shift downwind of him. He knew Cavandish as a man who normally took fastidious care of his person, and certainly not a man given to displays of public drunkenness.

  Cavandish gripped Cole’s shoulder with one claw of a hand and steadied himself. “I’ll buy you a whiskey if you’ll drink it with me,” he said.

  “It’s nine o’clock in the morning, Karl.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, hell then, we’d better get started before they close up the saloons.”

  “It’s none of my business,” Cole said. “But if you fall down in the street and don’t get up, a wagon might run over you, or you could suffocate in all this mud.”

  Cavandish swayed slightly, looked about, then settled his gaze on Cole again. “Hardly would make a difference if I did, John Henry.” His eyes welled with tears and his hands began to shake.

  “José?” Cole said.

  Cavandish nodded. The kid he’d been taking care of, the one Long Bill Longly had shot through the spine and crippled, had apparently also been claimed by the harsh winter.

  “When?” Cole asked.

  “This morning,” Cavandish said, his voice quavering. “I went in his room and found him staring at the ceiling.”

  “You did what you could for the boy, Karl. Maybe it’s for the best. His suffering is over. We’ve still got ours.”

  “I know,” Cavandish said. “I know to hell it is, and he is in a better place than this crap hole. But it don’t stop me from wanting to get drunk and go dig up Long Bill and shoot him in the god-damn’ face for what he did to José!”

  “Well, hell. If it will make you feel better,” Cole said, “let’s go get some shovels and do just that.”

  Cavandish looked at him for a moment, saw that Cole wasn’t just making fun, then smiled at Cole like a proud father. “You’d do it, too, wouldn’t you?” he said. “Go dig him up with me so I could shoot him in the face?”

  “Hell, yes. I’ve got nothing better to do right now anyway except buy a train ticket.”

  “I’m glad they hanged that son-of-a-bitch,” Cavandish said. “But I’d still like to shoot him in the face.” He seemed to be talking more to himsel
f now than to Cole. He muttered something Cole couldn’t make out, then looked at Cole again like it was the first time he knew Cole was standing there. “Ticket?” he said. “You leaving?”

  “For good this time, Karl. The winter took all my livestock and killed off all my friends but you. I’ve got no reason to stay. I guess I wasn’t cut out to be a rancher. What I know about raising cows you could stick in your hat. A man ought to stick to what he does best. Besides, there’s some business I have got to take care of.”

  “Hell,” Cavandish said, looking all around him, “we all got reasons to leave this god-forsaken place!”

  “You going to be OK?” Cole asked. “If I turn loose of you, you won’t fall down in the street and get run over by a wagon or smother in the mud, will you?”

  Cavandish straightened himself mightily and Cole felt his bones go stiff. “I may be miserable and drunk,” he said. “But I am too dignified to fall down and let some damn’ ignorant teamster run over me or drown with my face in the mud.”

  “Good,” Cole said. “I don’t need to lose any more friends.”

  “None of us do,” he said. “By the way, where you taking the train to?”

  “Nebraska,” Cole said.

  Cavandish blinked, staggered a step, caught himself, and said: “Pitiful choice.”

  Cole waited until Cavandish had made it across the street and into the Blue Star before going to the station to buy his ticket. The next train to Ogallala wasn’t for another two days. When he came out of the station, Cole saw Teddy Green standing across the street, smoking a cigar. He nodded and Cole kept walking.

  Chapter Three

  Cole’s horse was hitched to the rail in front of Shorty’s Café, but his gear was stowed in a back room of Sun Lee’s laundry just across the street. He’d thought last year, when he’d bought the ranch, that he’d never have to sleep in a room the size of a jail cell again, that he’d have plenty of space to sprawl his lanky frame and let fly his elbows, and lots of windows to look out of. And for a time on the ranch he did. Now Cole was right back where he’d started the first day he’d set foot in Cheyenne. Texas was beginning to look good to him again, and for him that was a bad sign.

  The old Celestial was spooning some soup into his puckered mouth, drops of it glistening on his chin whiskers, when Cole walked in and closed the door behind him.

  “Mistah John Henly, you back already,” he said. “You want me to fix you some soup. It’s got some chicken in it?”

  “No thanks,” Cole said. The soup was a thin yellow water and he sure didn’t see any chicken floating around in it. “That must have been a pretty small chicken, Sun.”

  He grinned until his eyes disappeared behind the waxy folds of his skin. “Most the chicken gone now, just some of the feet all that’s left. But still pletty good.”

  Chicken feet soup had never been a favorite of Cole’s. Sun Lee couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds with lead in his pockets. It wasn’t surprising; all the man ever consumed was soup and tea. “I’ll be leaving the day after tomorrow,” Cole said. “You can rent out my room after I’m gone.”

  Sun Lee looked up from his bowl. It was a glass bowl with little blue fat-bellied figures painted on it, the same as the ones on his teacup.

  “You leave for good, Mistah John Henly? You not coming back?”

  “First train out,” Cole replied. “I’d like to settle up with you for the room.”

  Sun slurped down more of the soup and watched Cole with the curious gaze of a cat. “Three dollah,” he said. “Should be enough.”

  Cole took the money from his waistcoat pocket and set it on the table next to Sun’s teacup.

  Sun eyed it for a moment, then went back to eating his soup.

  “Sorry to see you go, Mistah John Henly. You a funny man, always make Sun laugh. Ha, ha.”

  Cole had never understood why Sun Lee thought him a funny man, but then there was a whole lot he’d never understand about him. You would look into his eyes and you knew that they’d seen some strange and mysterious events, things you’d like to ask him about. But perhaps like Cole’s, or like any man’s, Sun’s private world was better left undisturbed. “You’ll have to give me the recipe for that chicken feet soup,” Cole said.

  Sun’s laughter sounded like rice paper being ripped apart.

  Cole packed what few possessions he owned, but his mind was still turning over the events of the story Teddy Green had told him. It didn’t seem possible that Ella could or would be involved in murder. And it seemed even less likely that she’d be running with the likes of Gypsy Davy, a notorious individual, according to Teddy Green. The question for Cole was—who was Gypsy Davy and why was Ella in his company?

  Cole made a shuck and smoked it slowly and stared out the one lone window that looked onto an alley. The snow lay in dirty clumps, but above the roof lines he could see a triangle of flawless blue sky, the world in contrast between its beauty and its ugliness.

  Cole wondered how he could have been so wrong about Ella, then he realized that, the truth be told, he’d known the woman for a total of only six days—plenty of time for a man to let himself be fooled, especially if the object of his foolishness was a russet-haired beauty with soft hands and a warm smile. But he also remembered looking into her eyes and knew that what they’d shared couldn’t have been a total lie. Somewhere between the idea and the reality stood the truth, and now Cole aimed to find out what it was. Regardless of what secrets or sins there were, he felt he would be damned before he allowed any harm to come to her.

  There was a knock at the door, and, when he opened it, a kid stood there with a telegram in his hand. He was a waif with dirty cheeks and rolled-down socks who Cole recognized from around town running odd jobs and errands. He’d heard his folks died of diphtheria and he was an orphan, twelve, maybe thirteen years old. The West was full of orphan kids, and they were forced to grow up fast or perish. This one had the eyes of an old man, tired and distrustful.

  “Telegram, mister. Old Man Kersaw told me to bring it to you.”

  He stood there after handing Cole the telegram and Cole gave him half a buck. He looked at it, then put it in his shirt pocket and thanked Cole.

  “Hey, kid. What’s your name?”

  “Eli, mister. Why you asking?”

  Cole’s own son would have been about this boy’s age had he not died of the milk sickness as an infant. “No reason, kid,” Cole said. “Thanks for bringing me the telegram.”

  Cole waited until he left, then read the wire.

  God damn and Jesus. I heard you was dead, killed and buried in that hell hole Texas! Stop. I guess you ain’t. Stop. I got information you requested but will deliver it in the living flesh. Stop. Catching the afternoon flyer. Will be in Cheyenne tonight. Stop. Don’t leave till I arrive. Stop. Loaded for bear and ready for adventure. Stop. Yours, H. Ledbettor, Esquire.

  Cole read the telegram again, disbelieving the message. He wondered—what the hell was that crazy fool up to? He hadn’t requested that he come to Cheyenne, nor did he want him here. His plan was to travel fast and light. Unless he was wrong, Teddy Green would be on the same morning flyer to Ogallala, dogging Cole’s steps. That was fine, because Cole planned on renting the fastest horse in Nebraska and shaking him off his tail once he was mounted. He went directly to the telegraph office and sent a wire to Denver.

  “Just two words?” Kersaw asked when he looked at what Cole had written.

  “Send them,” Cole said.

  Kersaw nodded and tapped out the words—Don’t come.—then charged Cole a nickel.

  “You could have gotten a full line for the same price,” he added, but Cole was already halfway out the door. The last thing Cole needed was a Texas Ranger and a one-armed cowpuncher riding his heels while he looked for Ella Mims.

  Chapter Four

  Strange things happen when men a
re left with too much idle time on their hands. The Chinooks were easing the cold and warming the air enough that icicles dripped steadily from the overhangs, turning the main drag into a slop of mud. But even warm winds weren’t enough to relieve some of the madness the killing winter had wrought.

  Cole had walked across the street to Shorty’s Café to get a cup of coffee and tell Cleopatra that he was leaving on the next flyer and that, if she was smart, she would sell the café and leave, too. The place was full and she was busy. Cole had to stand around until a pair of bachelors vacated a table near the window.

  Cleo had hired one of the local prostitutes to help her in the café after Shorty Blaine’s death. The whoring business had nearly died along with everything else that winter. It was an arrangement that suited both women.

  The younger woman’s name was Katy O’Brien. She had copper hair, green eyes, and a shanty Irish brogue. The way Cole had heard it was that she’d come from Brooklyn, New York, and worked her way West with a theatrical troupe. In Cole’s view how she had ended up in Cheyenne was just a matter of misfortune, like almost everybody else who’d ended up there, himself included. Cole found her pleasant to look at, and after he took a seat, she came to his table. She wore a prim but simple calico dress and a white apron; her hair was bunched atop her head and held with Spanish combs.

  “’Marnin’, sar,” she said, and offered Cole a half-hearted smile.

  He ordered coffee and she poured him a cup from the pot she carried and asked if there would be anything else. For a full moment their eyes met, then Cole nodded that the coffee would be all, and she left. He forced himself not to let his gaze follow the swing of her hips. The winter had been long and lonely and Katy O’Brien was the only other woman in the place besides Cleo. But his mind was on another woman and he needed to keep it there. As he thought that, he looked out the window and saw more of what the winter madness had wrought.