Marshal and the Moonshiner

by C. M. Wendelboe

  Maris suddenly ran toward me from out of the darkness. She doubled over to catch her breath when she reached the car. “Notch set Dutch up in that vacant building. Got him a sleeping room there.”

  She headed for the car when I whispered, “Where you going?”

  She stumbled back. “We need to follow Notch—”

  “No, we don’t,” I said. “We know Dutch is in there. That’s all we need for now.”

  “You’re right,” was all she managed to get out as she sucked in air, and I almost offered her another smoke to clear her lungs.

  She followed me to the door where we saw Notch go in to and come out of the building. I tried the door but knew it would be locked.

  “See anything to jimmy the lock with?” Maris said as she searched the ground.

  I did. I stepped back and hit the door with my shoulder. It splintered and fell cockeyed against the wall. Dutch looked up, wild-eyed, from a pan he was stirring something in on a hot plate. Too slow, he leapt for a holstered gun hanging over a captain’s chair beside a Philco radio. In two long strides, I’d crossed the room before he got his gun and slammed a fist between his shoulder blades. He crumpled to the floor and rolled over on his back, shielding his face with his arms.

  When I hoisted him erect, he swung feebly at my head. I backhanded him, and he slumped to his knees, but I hauled him erect once more. When I drew back to hit him, he turned his face and his arms went high to protect himself. “I’ll talk. Sweet Jesus, Marshal, don’t hit me again. I’ll tell you why I went AWOL.”

  “Maybe I don’t want you to talk.” I slapped him hard on the cheek. Blood dripped from his nose and my knuckles from one of his four teeth cutting my hand. “I don’t care about you going AWOL.” I slapped him again.

  He started to bawl, and I reared back again when I stopped and turned to Maris. “What do you think? Should we let Dutch tell us about his relationship with Johnny Notch, or should I do some wall-to-wall interrogation?”

  “Notch?” Dutch said, his eyes wide as he realized why we were there. And it had little to do with his going AWOL from the army.

  Maris stepped close to Dutch and cocked her head to look at him from a different angle. She picked up a lantern from a card table stacked with crackers and cheese and plates that needed washing sometime yesterday and held it to his head. “Maybe we ought to give him a chance, Marshal. One more slap and there might not be anything left to arrange.”

  I wrapped my hand around his hair and dragged him kicking across the floor to a chair and tossed him down hard. He eyed his gun stuck in the holster. “Don’t even think about it.” I pulled up another chair and turned it around backwards in front of him. “Now we talk.” I sat and faced him.

  “About what?”

  “Amos, for starters.”

  “Amos who?”

  I cocked my hand to hit him again. His hands went to his face. “All right. All right, don’t hit me again. But Amos’ll kill me if he knows I talked with you.”

  “I’ll kill you right here if you don’t,” I threatened. “Except my kind of death will be slower.”

  He dropped his head. “What do you want to know?”

  “First off—why’d you desert and head to Wyoming?”

  “You know about that?”

  “We know a lot of things.” Maris blew smoke in Dutch’s face. “Tell the marshal all about it, or I’ll walk out and leave the two of you to dance alone.”

  “All right. Wyoming.” Dutch straightened himself in the chair. “I went there to convince Amos to move back to El Reno. I’d been buying my moonshine from Vincent, but figured if I could run my own stills, I’d do a lot better. I thought if Amos built them—I already had the customers—and provided some muscle, we’d both make money.”

  “And cut out Amos’s brother?”

  Dutch shrugged. “Where money’s involved, there is no blood relative.”

  Dutch motioned to his shirt crumpled on the floor. “I got a bandana in the pocket . . . you don’t mind?”

  Maris reached down and picked up the shirt. She held it at arm’s length while she searched the pockets. She tossed Dutch a bandana, and he wiped the blood from his nose and face.

  “You kill Selly Antelope?” I asked.

  “No way,” Dutch answered. “I was there, but I didn’t kill him. You can’t pin that on me. I might have cut the fence—”

  “And let Amos’s heifers wander into Antelope’s pasture? Why?”

  Dutch looked down at the floor, and Maris kicked his foot. “Tell him.”

  Dutch spat blood into the cloth, and a tooth dropped onto the floor. He was down to only three now. “I figured if I started a feud between the Antelopes and Amos, he’d get fed up and have a reason to come back to El Reno with me.”

  Dutch looked to the floor, and I jerked his head up by his chin. “The tribal police back there say Amos’s cows broke through more times than they could count. You do that?”

  Dutch nodded. “I heard the fence had been down a few times before I got there. Amos never was much of a rancher, letting his fence line go to hell. I figured the Antelopes were good for cutting the fence those other times.”

  “Tell me about that day Selly got shot.”

  Dutch remained silent, and I drew back to slap him when Maris intervened. “Let’s come back to Selly later. Let’s talk Johnny Notch for now. He your protection?”

  “He’ll kill me, too.”

  “Dutch,” said I, “remember our little agreement where you talk, and I don’t kill you slow? Now tell Maris.”

  Dutch threw up his hands. “All right. It’s no big secret. Notch sees to it that I don’t get hassled at the fort. And he makes sure no one else horns in on my customers. I got sole rights to sell shine in Canadian County.” He chuckled. “Who better than the deputy who heads up liquor enforcement here as your guardian angel.”

  “And Johnny showed up for his payment tonight?” Maris asked.

  “Cost of doing business.” Dutch shrugged. “But since I had to go AWOL, I ain’t been able to collect from my customers at the fort like usual. Left me a little short of money.”

  “How short?” I asked.

  “Short enough that Johnny said he was coming back in a couple hours. Said I’d better have the rest of what I owe him.”

  I stood and stretched. “Back to Amos. Where is he hiding?”

  Dutch shook his head. “Probably back working for brother Vincent. We had a bit of a falling out once we got back here. Right after his brother offered him more than I could.”

  “Once again: did you kill Selly?”

  “No.”

  “Then who did?”

  He kept silent, and I hit him flush on his face. Another tooth popped out and landed at my feet. Dutch fell off the chair and landed on the floor hard. He rolled over onto his knees and wiped blood from his mouth. I saw too late that he had gathered his feet under him, and he sprang for Maris. He caught her looking at his bloody tooth and wrapped a thick forearm around her neck. He lifted her kicking off the floor while he clawed for her gun with his free hand.

  My hand went for my own gun but too slowly. He skinned Maris’s gun, and Dutch’s first round caught me high on the shoulder. Hot lead sliced through muscle, and I dove for the card table. Dutch’s second shot tore a furrow into the floor right where I’d been a heartbeat ago. By the time he tracked me with Maris’s gun, I had mine out. I steadied myself on the overturned chair and paused a split second to breathe. My bullet caught him just above the left eye, spraying Maris with gray matter and blood. A startled look came over his face before he fell backwards onto the floor.

  Maris coughed violently and rubbed her throat. She wiped her face with her shirtsleeve as she crawled on all fours toward where I sat against the wall catching my breath. “You could have hit me.”

  “But I didn’t. You all right?”

  “I am,” she sputtered. She snatched my bandana from around my neck and wiped her face. “But are you all right?�
��

  “Of course not,” I answered. “I’m shot. But I’m in a whole lot better shape than Dutch.”

  She stood and spat on his dead body before she started kicking his corpse. I let her have her little piece of vengeance before I stood on teetering legs and staggered to her. I wrapped my good arm around her and let her sob onto my chest. After a few moments, she looked up as if seeing me for the first time. “I could have died. Dutch could have shot me. You could have shot me.”

  “But you’re not shot,” I said as I wiped Dutch’s blood from one cheek. “You’ll clean up just fine.”

  She felt the blood from my shoulder wound and doubled the bandana. She unbuttoned my shirt and stuffed the neckerchief over the wound. “This will have to do until you can get patched up.” She turned to Dutch’s body and kicked him a last time. “What do we do with this piece of shit now? If we leave him here, Notch will know you talked to him.”

  “Does that cooler in back of Leonard Brothers still keep meat cold?”

  CHAPTER 28

  * * *

  “You’re lucky,” Doc Catto said.

  “Funny, I don’t feel lucky.” I grimaced as he laced another stitch.

  He looked over his half-glasses at me and spoke as he worked. I liked that—a man who could do more than one thing at a time. “You’re lucky the bullet went clean through. Could have cut your subclavian artery. Hit a bone. And you’re lucky to have Maris as a friend. She’s the reason I’m here.” He chuckled. “That, and it might piss off that crooked bastard she works for. Along with that thug Johnny Notch.”

  Maris leaned over and inspected the doctor’s work. “All I can promise,” she said, “is that I’ll do everything to get rid of Johnny. Everything else will be icing on the fry bread.”

  Doc Catto looked through his glasses as he snipped the thread.

  “You must hear most everything that goes on around El Reno,” I said to the doctor.

  He paused as if he were reflecting. “Most. People trust me for some reason.” To punctuate that, he tugged at a stitch, and I gritted my teeth. “You’re the one who didn’t want it deadened.”

  I had insisted Doc Catto give me nothing for pain. I needed to remain clear-headed. And I didn’t need something like pain killers to cause me to drink. That happened already at the Portsmouth Naval Hospital after the Great War. “You hear anything of Amos Iron Horse lately?”

  He paused long enough to look up at the ceiling, then met my eyes. “I heard he came back to El Reno. Heard he killed a guy in Wyoming, and that you’re here to take him back.”

  “If I can find him.”

  He threw the last stitch in and pulled it tight—a little too tight, I thought. “I’ve known his mother-in-law and her daughter, Catherine, since they moved here from that reservation in Wyoming.”

  “And Amos?”

  Doc Catto shook his head and stepped to the sink. He grabbed a bar of soap and began washing blood from his hands. “I wouldn’t even want to try to figure out where he is. He’s one strange man.”

  “Strange how, Doc?”

  He shook his head. “Never figured out why he didn’t want that baby. She was sure a cutie. Looked just like Catherine.”

  I recalled the photos hanging on the wall in Celia’s home that she claimed were of Cat but that were just different enough that I knew she was lying.

  “What baby girl?” Maris asked.

  “Catherine’s baby.”

  Maris walked to the sink and bent to look Doc Catto in the eyes. “Cat had a baby?”

  He dried his hands on a towel. “When she was fifteen. Three years before she married Amos.”

  Doc Catto sat in a chair and shook out an Old Gold. He lit up and blew smoke toward the ceiling fan. “After Cat and Amos married, he decided he couldn’t live with another man’s child. They put the little girl up for adoption.”

  “Who was the father?” Maris asked.

  Catto shrugged. “Catherine and Celia wouldn’t say. And the baby’s birth certificate lists no father’s name. Not even sure where the father hailed from.”

  “Who did Cat hang out with when she lived here?” I asked anxiously as I fidgeted in the hard seat. “Is this all the faster it’ll go?”

  “You want speed, you buy me something faster than this old Studebaker.” The taillights of Notch’s Cadillac slowly became a pinprick of light. “None of the cowboys around here would mess with a girl as young as Cat.”

  “We’re losing him!”

  Maris clung tightly to the wheel, and I knew she goosed the car for all its six cylinders would do. By the time we’d sneaked out of the Catto Hospital, Notch had discovered Dutch missing from the abandoned building. We kicked it around and decided Notch would put the bite on Dutch’s other partner—Vincent.

  Now, nearing the city, Notch had slowed and allowed us to close the distance. But only for the moment as Maris slid around a corner on the outskirts of town. “Shit!” she banged the steering wheel hard enough I thought she’d break wood. “Where’d he go?”

  I motioned her to keep driving in the direction we’d last seen Notch. She looked out one side of the car, me the other. “Where would he go . . .”

  “Where else?” I said. “Head right on over to Vincent’s shop. With any luck, we’ll get there before they kill each other.”

  Red and amber lights bounced off buildings even before we turned the corner. Police cars sat two abreast in front of Iron Horse Services. A policeman in a bright blue uniform, his black Sam Browne belt secured around his waist and by a shoulder strap across his broad shoulders, stepped out into the street.

  “What happened?” Maris asked.

  “Just drive around, ma’am.”

  “It’s miss.” Maris batted her eyes at the young patrolman, and I almost felt sorry for him. “What happened in there officer . . .”

  “McGavin.”

  “Officer McGavin.” She smiled again.

  He bent low to look in the car. “My dad and I were just out for a drive. What happened?”

  “You should be going—”

  She shuddered visibly. “Is it something I should be afraid of?”

  “Nothing for you to worry about, miss. The man who owns that business was murdered.”

  Maris feigned shock. “My Lord, how did it happen?”

  The policeman looked around quickly before bending low to Maris’s window.

  Sometime between stopping the car and talking with the policeman, Maris had managed to unbutton two shirt buttons. Which Officer McGavin stared at while he talked with her. “The victim was bludgeoned to death with a lead pipe.”

  I imagined it was the first time Vincent Iron Horse had ever been referred to as a victim.

  “Anyone with him?”

  McGavin shook his head. “He was alone. His brother found him dead and called it in.”

  My heart jumped. “Is the brother still inside the shop?”

  McGavin looked at me across the seat like I was a temporary annoyance to the dance he and Maris did right outside the homicide scene. “He isn’t. After he called it in, he said he was going after the killer.”

  “And the brother’s name?”

  “Didn’t give one,” McGavin answered before he turned his attention back to Maris, who put the car in gear.

  “Wait, miss, what’s your name?”

  Maris started to answer when Detective Larin ran from Vincent’s shop and yelled at McGavin. “Stop that car!”

  McGavin looked a little too long at Laurel and Hardy running toward our car. Maris mashed the foot feed, and the Studebaker bolted away on four of its six cylinders. She headed toward the police roadblock and did a perfect bootleg turn. She passed Laurel and Hardy going the opposite direction. It would give us scant moments’ head start before they caught us.

  She handled the car like she was running moonshine, dousing the lights as soon as she turned the corner. We skidded to a stop in an alley between Ollie and Frances Streets. From the south, sirens
cut the humid night air, tires biting hot asphalt, nearing. They sped past us, and Maris breathed a deep sigh as she buttoned her shirt. In minutes they would realize we’d given them the slip, and they would begin back-checking alleys and streets for a man and his daughter in a clunker.

  A couple drawn to the noise and lights emerged from a studio apartment in the back of a furniture store. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the dark alley before they spotted us. Maris jumped on my lap and wrapped her arms around my neck. She planted her lips on mine. “Moan.”

  I forced a passionate moan to escape my lips—it had been so long since I felt like moaning in ecstasy—until the couple giggled and walked hand in hand back into their apartment. I chanced a look. “I think they’re gone.”

  “Better not take a chance,” she said right before she kissed me again, deeply and lingering.

  I pulled back and caught my breath. “Maybe we ought to get away while we can.”

  She wiped her lips with the back of her hand and sighed. She slipped back behind the wheel.

  “Besides,” I said, “it wouldn’t do your reputation any good to be caught smooching your dad.”

  CHAPTER 29

  * * *

  The sound and aroma of coffee perking woke me the next morning, but I didn’t want to get up. I wanted to go back to sleep, where I’d been seduced by a Cheyenne maiden young enough to be my daughter. And beside the libido-charged wench sat a Mason jar of sugar moon inviting me to take a sip and shake off the morning sleepers. I didn’t want to let go. Of either the woman or the hooch.

  I swung my legs over the cot and tugged my trousers on. I pulled them down so they didn’t make me look like a kid in a pair of shorts. “It was all they had,” Byron insisted when he came back from the general store with my clothes yesterday.

  Byron had bought me a tube of Mennen Iced Menthol shave cream. I looked in the mirror suspended over a wash basin and lathered up generously. After I’d knocked down whiskers with the straight razor Byron had let me use, I pasted pieces of tissue where I’d nicked myself. I buttoned the red flannel shirt and emerged from the back room to a café packed with people.