Haskell was angling his buckskin, trailing the grulla and the dead bushwhacking kid, toward the jailhouse when a loud crack rose from inside the place.
“Holy shit!” Haskell said, jerking back on the buckskin’s reins and clawing his LeMat from the holster on his right thigh. He frowned at the jailhouse, half expecting to see some owlhoot who’d somehow freed himself from a jail cell come running through the front door, shooting.
Bear glanced at Raven, who had her own pistol in her right hand and was scowling at the marshal’s office while also trying to steady her fiddle-footing pinto. Just then, the front door opened, and a big man in a wheelchair came rolling out onto the stoop. He rolled the chair with one hand. In the other hand, he held a fat, bloody rat nearly the size of a jackrabbit up by its tail.
He wheeled himself out to the edge of the porch steps, down one side of which was a plank-board ramp for his chair, and tossed the rat into the street. It landed with a plop, its dun-colored hair rippling in the wind.
“Goddamn rats!” he bellowed. Haskell saw that he had a brown bottle wedged between the chair and his right hip. Between his legs was an old Walker Colt pistol. He looked at Haskell and Raven and said, “The whole goddamn place is crawlin’ with ’em. Sometimes when I’m takin’ a nap, I dream the goddamn things is nibblin’ on my toes!”
Haskell gave a snort and depressed the LeMat’s hammer. When he’d returned the pistol to its holster and snapped the keeper thong over the hammer, he looked up to see the old man aiming the big horse pistol at him and Raven, narrowing one eye beneath a grizzled gray-brown brow.
“Who you got there?” the old man carped, glancing at the kid sprawled across the grulla’s back. “Come on, speak up, or I’ll fill you both so full o’ lead you’ll rattle when you walk!”
When he shifted his angry, drink-bleary gaze to Raven, he smiled lustily and added, “Or . . . maybe I’ll just shoot the big bastard full o’ lead. You, my dear, I might have a few other ideas for you.”
15
Haskell gave another caustic chuff as he regarded the man in the wheelchair holding the big Walker Colt on him and Raven.
The hogleg wielder was at least sixty. His face was fleshy and blotchy, with long, bushy gray sideburns and a two- or three-day growth of salt-and-pepper beard stubble. His brown eyes bulged from shallow sockets. He wore his gray-brown hair in a braided ponytail down his back. On his head was a faded, sweat-stained, salt-crusted Stetson that had seen far better days—as had its wearer.
“You the town marshal?” Bear asked.
“That’s what the badge says, don’t it?” The man pinched out his shirt to display the five-pointed star that appeared to have been hammered out of an airtight lid.
“We’re Pinkerton agents,” Raven said. “You can sheath that hogleg, marshal.”
“Pinkerton agents?” The marshal scowled uncertainly, raking his gaze from Bear to Raven and back again. “Pshaw!”
“You wanna see our badges?” Raven asked.
“I sure as hell do!” he said, canting his head to one side and narrowing a suspicious eye.
Bear leaned forward on his saddlehorn. “You ain’t gonna shoot me when I reach into my vest for my wallet, are you, old-timer?”
“Not if you do it slow. But if you keep callin’ me old-timer, I might.” The town marshal smiled at Raven, as though it was a private joke between them.
“Sorry,” Haskell said, and reached into the inside lower right pocket of his vest to pull out his wallet. He flipped open the case to show the man on the porch his copper-plated Pinkerton’s badge.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” the old man said, squinting and moving his lips as though reading the words on the badge.
When Raven had held up her own wallet, the old marshal said, “Well, I’ll be even damneder. A lady Pinkerton. And a good-lookin’ lady Pinkerton, to boot!”
“Why, thank you, sir!” Raven said charmingly, flipping her wallet closed and stuffing it down into the mouth of the leather cavvy sack hanging from her saddlehorn.
“Ah, hell,” the man said, obviously smitten. “It ain’t nothin’.” He shoved the big Colt into a holster strapped to the right armrest of his chair. “I’m Roscoe Peete. Been town marshal of Spotted Horse since the last one, Jeff Myers, disappeared, likely kilt by that gang led by them two bitches—uh, if you’ll pardon my farm talk, miss.”
“Consider yourself pardoned, Marshal Peete.”
He looked down at his skinny legs. “Oh, I know I ain’t much. Can’t even ride a horse anymore. This old cowpuncher got throwed and dragged once too often. But I’ll be damned if after Myers disappeared, no one else wanted the job!”
Peete slapped the arms of his chair. “So I figured, instead of spendin’ all my time drinkin’ and fuckin’ over at the Trough—uh, pardon my farm talk again, miss—I might as well don this here hunk of tin.” Loudly, proudly, he added, “What’s a town without a marshal—ain’t that right?”
Haskell smiled. “I’m Bear Haskell. This is Raven York.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintances,” Peete said, keeping his twinkling eyes on the girl. “Especially yours, Miss York.”
“Please, call me Raven.”
“Well, all right—I will, then.” After he’d feasted his eyes on the raven-haired filly long enough to grow embarrassed, he shuttled his gaze back to the body draped across the grulla’s back. “Say, who you got there?”
“That’s what we were hoping you could tell us,” Raven said.
“Bring him up here, and let me get a gander at him,” the marshal said.
Haskell clucked the buckskin and the grulla ahead several feet. He stopped the grulla in front of the steps, dismounted, tied the buckskin to the hitch rack in front of the marshal’s office, and walked back to where the kid hung over the grulla’s back, wrapped in an old, moldy saddle blanket that Bear had found in the swing-station barn.
He parted the blanket and lifted the kid’s head by his hair. The old marshal stared down from the top of the porch steps at the kid’s face. He worried his chin between his thumb and index finger, glowering.
“I think I should know him,” he said. “Just don’t recollect.”
He lifted his chin and cast his gaze across the street, toward the mercantile. “Duke!” the old marshal shouted above the wind. “Hey, Duke!”
Haskell glanced at Raven, who’d stepped down from her own saddle, and then they both looked across the street at the sprawling mercantile building, which, according to a small sign hanging beneath the eaves, doubled as a U.S. Post Office. Just then, a man in sleeve garters and a striped shirt under a brown vest adorned with a foulard tie and a gold watch chain walked out of the mercantile’s front door, which was framed with barrels sprouting rakes, hoes, shovels, and picks.
The man slowly, hesitantly crossed the porch, scowling toward the marshal’s office. A small blond woman in a prim, high-necked gingham dress stepped out behind him, holding the door open.
“Duke, come on over here, will ya?” the marshal called, jerking one arm, beckoning.
The man glanced behind him at the woman, who retreated back into the store and closed the screen door behind her. The man came down off the porch steps. He was a well-setup man about Haskell’s own age. His brown tweed trousers were shoved down into the wells of his high-topped boots, whose mule ears swayed as he traversed the street. Thick, brown, wavy hair tumbled down over his ears from his crisp bowler hat, and his eyes glinted behind round-framed spectacles in the washed-out, stormy sunlight.
As he stepped between the horses, the good-looking gent glanced at Raven, then glanced away. Immediately, his surprised gaze returned to the girl. Haskell had seen the expression on any number of men who had unexpectedly found themselves in the presence of the alluring Pinkerton.
This man flushed slightly, smiled sheepishly, and gave the brim of his bowler a tug wi
th his beringed right hand. Haskell gave an exaggerated wave to the man, who’d barely noticed him, and Raven cast her partner a blank, reproving stare.
“Duke, take a look at this kid here,” the marshal said, pointing at the grulla. “I know I should recognize him, but my brain’s done turned to mush ten years ago. I figure if anyone in town would know him, you would.” He said to Bear and Raven, jerking his chin at the handsome, dapper newcomer, “This here’s Duke Shirley. He owns the mercantile and the livery barn over yonder, not to mention the stage line that’s bein’ held up by them damn women.”
Shirley walked over, lifted the kid’s head by its hair, and crouched down to get a look at the face. He let the head drop back against the grulla’s side and said, frowning, “Danny Stoveville. He lives on a little shotgun ranch up north with his sister Dulcy. What the hell happened?”
“He dry-gulched us,” Haskell said, his voice and expression solemn, troubled. “I shot him.”
“Who’re you?”
“I’m Bear Haskell, Pinkerton agent. This is my partner, Raven York. We were sent up here to investigate the gang preying on your stage line, Mr. Shirley.”
“Oh?” Shirley said, taking another moment to let his bespectacled gaze play over Raven before knitting his brows and returning his eyes to the dead boy. “But I don’t understand why Danny . . .”
He let his voice trail off, holding his gaze on the kid’s head, the kid’s hair sliding around in the wind, which finally seemed to be dwindling now in the late afternoon.
“What is it, Mr. Shirley?” Raven asked him.
“I was just remembering that he was in town early yesterday morning. He and his sister usually come together once every two months or so. But this morning, only young Danny rode in on a saddle horse . . . and all he bought was a single box of forty-four-caliber cartridges for his Winchester.”
“Did he say where he was headed?”
“No.”
The wheelchair-bound marshal said, “Well, Sheriff Price will be here soon. He’ll have a talk with the kid’s sister—”
“He won’t be talking with anybody,” Haskell said.
Both Marshal Peete and Duke Shirley stared at Bear, whose dark gaze was still on the slack, dead face of young Danny Stoveville. “Why’s that?” Peete asked tonelessly, as though afraid of the answer.
Raven used one gloved finger to slide a long lock of black, windblown hair away from her left eye and said, “He and the two deputies that the Marshals office in Denver sent up here to investigate the stage robberies. We found them at the Devil’s Creek relay station. Ambushed.”
“We were looking around when the kid opened up on us,” Haskell said.
“Pshaw!” Shirley said. “Danny did?”
“I didn’t shoot him because I caught him stealing rock candy, Mr. Shirley,” Bear said. He knew he was misdirecting his anger—his regret and frustration at having killed a kid who’d barely started shaving—at the mercantile and stage-line owner, but at the moment, he didn’t have much control over himself.
“Easy, Bear,” Raven said.
“That’s not what I was implying, Mr. Haskell,” Shirley said, glancing warily up at the big detective, who stood a good four or five inches taller than he did. “It’s just that . . . I can’t imagine young Danny bushwhacking anyone, much less Pinkertons. Him and his sister, why, they’re just simple Butte kids. Loners, mostly.”
“What about killing two deputy United States Marshals and a county sheriff ?” Haskell said. “Can you imagine him doing that?”
“Why, no.” Shirley looked at the dead kid again. “No, I certainly can’t.”
“That’s how it looks, though,” Raven said. “Why else would he have been gunning for us? He must have been wanting to hide the fact he’d committed those murders. Which leads me to believe, Mr. Shirley, that maybe you didn’t know young Danny as well as you thought you did.”
“Hold on, now, Miss Raven,” Marshal Peete said. “Now, I admit I’m new at this law-dog business, but couldn’t it be that young Mr. Stoveville there maybe thought you killed them marshals and Sheriff Price? Hell, maybe he thought he was just killin’ killers!”
“What was he doing out there in the first place?” Bear wanted to know, directing the question at the kid himself, as though the kid might lift his head and give a satisfactory answer. “Those men had been dead a good two or three days. If he’d killed them . . .” He shook his head and raked a thumb through his dusty beard.
“Why didn’t he just bury ’em when he done the killin’?” Marshal Peete finished for him. “Then he wouldn’t have to worry about no one findin’ ’em.”
“That poor girl,” Shirley said, casting a wistful gaze through the break between his mercantile and the saloon beside it, toward the north.
“His sister?” Haskell asked.
“Yes, she’ll be alone now. Dulcy . . .”
Haskell sighed. “I’ll ride out with her brother’s body at first light. Her place hard to find?”
“I’ll ride out with you,” Shirley said. “I know Dulcy. Her and her brother have an account with me. We can stow the body along with your horses in the livery barn.” He looked toward the barn and yelled, “Sonny!”
Haskell looked in the same direction and saw a short, lean man in overalls and an immigrant hat standing in the barn’s open doors, a pitchfork in his hands. At Shirley’s call, the kid sort of jerked with a nervous start and continued to stare toward the town marshal’s office.
Shirley beckoned to the kid. “Sonny, come on over here and fetch these horses!”
Sonny jerked with another start. There was something about his demeanor and his glassy, anxious stare that told Haskell he was simple. Sonny leaned his pitchfork against one of the open barn doors, though it promptly slid down the door to the ground because the door was being buffeted slightly by the wind, and came running. Sprinting, rather, as though he were competing in the annual Spotted Horse Fourth of July Foot Race.
He stopped in front of Shirley, his slightly crossed eyes eager to please. Haskell could see that while he owned the demeanor, possibly even the mind, of a child, he was likely somewhere in his thirties.
“Y-yes sir, Mr. Sh-shirley!” Sonny intoned, tugging on the felt brim of his immigrant cap, spittle flecking his lips.
“Stable these horses, Sonny,” Shirley crisply ordered, leveling a commanding gaze on the hostler. “And very carefully, lay Danny’s body out on the tack-room bench. Cover him up with blankets, and close and lock the door. You make sure that coyote that’s been sniffing around lately and those cats you feed don’t get in there. Do you understand, Sonny?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Shirley!”
“All right, go!” Shirley said in a tone that Haskell didn’t find appealing. Just because the kid was simple didn’t mean he had to be treated like a dog. That was often how such folks were treated, but Haskell found himself not liking Duke Shirley overmuch.
Nervously, Sonny gathered up the reins of all three horses while Bear and Raven removed their rifles and saddlebags from the mounts’ backs. Clucking and tugging gently on the bridle reins, Sonny led the mounts to the barn.
Behind him, Haskell watched the body of the young man he’d killed flopping down both sides of the grulla. One of the young man’s hands came loose from the rope Haskell had tied around the blanket at the boy’s waist and flopped toward the ground, his fingertips dangling about a foot above the dirt and ground horse shit. The hand knocked against the frame of the broad open doors as Sonny led the horses on inside and out of sight.
Bear’s guts coiled into loose knots. He wanted to haul the boy’s body out to his ranch and see if he could find out from his sister why he’d been lurking around the swing station, why he would have taken pot shots at two people he’d never met.
Causing one of those two people to kill him.
To turn his
lights out forever.
But the wind was still up, and Haskell was tired. It would be dark soon. Dawn tomorrow would be early enough to ride out to the kid’s ranch and inform his sister that her brother was dead.
And that Bear himself had killed him.
Vaguely, he heard Raven say, “We’ll be wanting to meet with you men to discuss the robberies—where and when they occurred, exactly—so that we can get started with our investigation.”
“You bet, Miss York,” Duke Shirley said. “Later this evening, perhaps?”
“Why not?” Raven glanced at Haskell, who was still staring toward the livery barn.
He couldn’t get that dead boy’s face out of his head.
His partner studied him a moment longer, wrinkling the skin above the bridge of her nose. And then, turning back to the mercantiler, she said, “But first, is there a hotel where Agent Haskell and I can rent a couple of rooms and freshen up?”
Shirley told her of a place called the Overland and pointed toward the northeast, but Haskell had turned his attention to the saloon sitting to the left of the mercantile. A beer and a shot of bourbon beckoned to him like a siren call.
Suddenly, he heard Raven say, “Come on, Bear. Let’s get a couple of rooms and a hot bath. Do us both some good.”
He glanced around. Shirley was walking back across the street toward the mercantile. Marshal Peete was sitting in his chair on the jailhouse porch, studying Haskell with a skeptical gaze. Haskell adjusted the saddlebags on his shoulder, shook his head, and started trudging toward the watering hole.
“You go on ahead, Agent York. Get me a room, will ya? Me, I’m gonna have me a look-see at what kind of coffin varnish the Spotted Horse Watering Trough is peddlin’.”
16
Say, I don’t think it sits too good with Agent Haskell, shootin’ that kid,” said Marshal Peete, as Haskell mounted the porch of the Spotted Horse Water Trough and pushed through the batwings.
Wild to the Bone Page 11