Nemesis

by L. J. Martin

  My smile faded. “And a sister and brother-in-law and two beautiful nieces.”

  “You do what you think you have to do, Tag McBain. I never knew a man worth his salt who didn’t do just that, even if a woman hates the fact.”

  “I’m truly sorry, Lizzy, as there’s nothing I’d like better than to head for the sunset with you. This is not something I like doing, it something I have to do.”

  She sighed deeply, then offered, “I’m going in to see what’s up in the place. If I learn anything about what’s up in town, I’ll come back out and let you know. Meanwhile, you should get a little sleep before things liven up this afternoon.”

  I had the hunch she knew I was there for Colonel Dillon himself, and maybe that I knew he met with Brighid Fimple every Saturday afternoon at the Mystic Hotel, then she stopped at her doorway, turned, and confirmed it.

  “You’ll make sure Brighid doesn’t get hurt?”

  “Damn sure, if it’s in my power.”

  She paused before she continued, and her voice got that same low quality that warmed my backbone. “And if you live, you’ll head out to San Francisco?”

  “Lizzy, that’s an offer only a fool could turn down.”

  She nodded, and left, closing the door softly behind.

  My backbone continued to stiffen, and occasionally shudder, as I knew there was a fight coming. I could always tell I was getting near a battle when my mouth dried out and I didn’t have enough spit to swallow.

  Lizzy had a beautiful Seth Thomas clock in her drawing room, and if I looked at it once, I looked at it a hundred times as the afternoon wore on. I left the house only once and that was to grain and loosely saddle the gray. I’d given Jackson the mule to Angel and his brother along with a twenty dollar gold piece, as it was the least I could do for the boys, and wished them well with instructions to head out for the sheep county in south Arizona, or into the San Joaquin Valley of California, where I’d heard there were huge herds, mostly tended by Mexicans.

  I wanted to be upstairs in the Mystic when my target arrived, so I set out down the back alleys at three thirty. I was only seen by one woman, who was smacking a rug hung over her line. She paid me little heed.

  There was an outside back stairway to the upper floor of the Mystic, and I took little time in mounting it and, happily, finding the rear upstairs door unlocked.

  By the spacing of the doors, I could tell the front two rooms were the largest, and knowing what I did of Dillon, new that he would select only the best. Both of them, to my surprise, were unlocked. So I flipped a coin, and entered the one on the left. Both had bay windows that stuck out over the boardwalk below, and the street could be seen for it’s total length. I presumed Dillon, even though he was having an assignation he would want few to know of, would enter by the front door.

  The doors to the rooms were in slight indentations, and I’d opened the one I entered open just a sliver, but because of the recession it occupied I could only see ten feet or so down the hallway. To my surprise, I heard footfalls coming down the hall. It was my plan to take it as it came; if my room was entered I’d confront them then and there, if not, I’d wait until they were in flagrante delicto, if my Latin didn’t fail me, or in flaming offense, otherwise well occupied at the task at hand. There was something about finding holier than thou Dillon with his pants hanging on the butlers valet at the end of the bed that appealed to me.

  With my eye to the crack, I saw Bridgit Fimple in her skinny bony best enter the room across the hall. It seemed I was in luck. I hurried back to the front windows, and was not to be kept waiting long, as Colonel Mace Dillon came striding down the boardwalk right on time. The hell of it was he had his nephew in tow. And both of them were heeled; each with side arms and the boy carrying a lever action.

  That was good news and bad, as I had the nephew on my list as well, but I’d planned to make Dillon squirm for a good long time before I put one in his knee, one in the other knee, one in his personals, one in his gut, and finally one between his lying eyes just to get him to quit screaming.

  Then I wondered, was he bringing his young nephew along to give him a lesson in the fine art of pleasure women? Or worse, for some other illicit purpose? Nothing would surprise me.

  Maybe the nephew was some kind of a lookout, and would wait downstairs, making sure no trouble came up the stairway.

  Off course you couldn’t see the rear stairway from downstairs, so I presumed he would accompany the Colonel up and perch himself on a bench at the end of the hallway, near enough to my door that one stride would put me on him.

  Or maybe we would accompany the Colonel into the room with skinny Bridgid, or into the room I occupied. It could be that both of them would occupy separate rooms if they were to stay over until Sunday service. That brought a smile to me, thinking of them fresh from a visit with Brighid to a visit with Preacher McGregor to cleanse their souls until they could soil them again.

  And I proved to be right, as it was a murmur of conversation and two sets of footfalls coming down the hall. I didn’t risk keeping the door ajar, but heard the Colonel instruct, “wait here. Don’t be going down for coffee or a damn thing. You watch the door. I don’t want to be disturbed. You know what to do if that damned Slade shows his face.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll stay alert.”

  “Good.”

  Then I heard the door across the hall open and close.

  I gave it fifteen minutes, by the mantle clock over the small fireplace in the fancy room I occupied.

  Having no interest in alerting Colonel Dillon with gunfire, I flipped my Army Colt around and took a good grip on the barrel, opened the door standing so as to be out of sight of the bench and nephew, took a quick step out and caught him rising from the bench, looking as surprised as if a scorpion had been in his underwear and chomped down on his personals. The blow took him dead center in the forehead and he crumpled. I caught him and eased him to the floor.

  I’d deal with him after my primary prize was taken care of.

  I reversed the Colt, eased the hammer back, and tried the door to give Dillon and Brighid a bit of a surprised, and found Dillon to be a prudent man. It was locked.

  A boot to the door near the hardware took care of that problem with one hard blow from the sole of my boot. The problem then was trying to quickly recover from the pain that shot from thigh up my backbone to the back of my neck, feeling as if I’d been the one whacked in the head with a heavy revolver.

  But the anger coursing through my veins made me recover quickly and in two strides I was inside, to find Dillon scrambling, in the condition God had delivered him to earth, to grab for his sidearm, hanging on a doorknob to what I suspected was an adjoining room, and Brighid sitting up in bed, the covers raised over her upper body as if she had something not seen by half the male population of Nemesis.

  My best laid plans of a slow death were for naught, as he got a hand on his revolver and I had no choice but to let fly with a shot that took him in his prodigious gut, and spun him back against the wall, knocking a nicely framed sampler flying. But he still had weapon in hand. I had to pause as Brighid went flying by, screaming for her blessed mother.

  Dillon, to his credit, got a shot off but it was way wide. I shot him in the shoulder of the arm holding the weapon, again slamming him against the wall, and he dropped the revolver, and couldn’t make up his mind to reach with his remaining good arm to cover his still erect phallus, for the shoulder wound, or to try and stop the blood pumping from his gut.

  “You dirty bastard,” he managed, convincing me to slow down the process.

  “You ordered your scum to burn my sister out, and she and her husband and her two beautiful daughters died over a trickle of water.”

  To my surprise, he looked guilty, and suddenly remorseful.

  “I did no such thing. I ordered Cavanaugh to scare them off the place. To accept my offer to buy the place. The man reached for a weapon, and it got worse from there.”

  “T
hat’s a damn lie. Ignacio Sanchez saw it all. Cavanaugh shot him down in cold blood.” He didn’t respond to that, knowing that Cavanaugh would lie to him if the truth was better. So I continued. “Well, sir, you were, as the lawyers and judge would say, the proximate cause. And I’m the jury and executioner at the moment, the only one at hand.”

  “I’ll pay you—“

  Now, that made me angry, and I fell back on my old plan, and pulled one off, blowing apart a knee. He collapsed, and again my plan went awry as he fell within reach of his revolver, and reached for it, which encouraged my next shot. Rather than between his lying eyes as I’d planned, it took him behind his ear and put a goodly portion of his face across the wall behind.

  He was no longer the well dressed, well groomed dandy.

  I took a deep breath and walked out to find the nephew, Seth Rheinhart, recovering and sitting up on his butt, his legs splayed out in front of him. His eyes were still rolling like a couple of buggy wheels, and his rifle was more than an arms length away and his sidearm still holstered.

  “You were there when the Bar M was burned?” I accused.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it, and I gave him a moment. To my surprise, he began to sob.

  “I was…I tried to stop it. Cavanaugh was crazy wild. He offered to shoot me down if I got in the way.”

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Seventeen, come my next birthday…in a month.”

  “Did you take part in killing my folks, my sister—“

  “Your sister isn’t dead,” he said.

  That took me mid-chest as if he’d shot me with his lever action.

  I gasped, sucking wind for what seemed a long time, trying to get that together in my head, then asked, “what are you talking about, boy?”

  “Cavanaugh took her. Up in the mountains to a line shack where he would ride up a couple of times a week, taking supplies and such. She was burned, trying to fetch her daughters. The Indian had dragged her outside and held her down, to keep her from running back into the fire. Her hands were burned, but healed.”

  “Where is she now?” I demanded.

  “Cavanaugh sold her.”

  “Sold her, you don’t sell people.”

  “I only know what Cavanaugh told me. He was in his cups and bragged about getting two bundles of furs from a bunch of Piutes or Shoshone for her. He used her until he was tired of her hating and cursing him, then he sold her.”

  “When was this?”

  “A couple of months ago.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder if the band I’d run across in the lava country might have had her prisoner. I might have been able to get her then and take her back to the Salmon country with me.

  The nephew was still blubbering and I could make out him saying, “God forgive me, God forgive me,” over and over.

  I holstered my weapon, contemplating if I wanted to shoot down a sixteen year old whelp, to go along with the seven I’d already killed.

  “Son,” I said, my voice quiet so he quieted himself, “I can only hope you’ve learned something from all of this.”

  “I told Wentworth, soon as Cavanaugh told me he had her captive…but he said I should mind my own business just like he was going to do.”

  “You told him?”

  “I did. He made me promise that I would not tell my uncle or Cavanaugh that he knew anything about it, and I did…promise I mean.”

  “But Wentworth knew?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Then I heard noises from down below. Apparently Brighid had put the town on me, not that I fault her for it.

  I kicked the rifle into the room I’d occupied, and instructed the kid, “throw that sidearm into the room, and back up to that bench and stay there.”

  He two fingered the sidearm out and threw it gingerly deep into the room, then backed up to lean against the bench.

  I spun on my heel and ran to the head of the inside stairway coming up from below. Wentworth led the pack, huffing up the stairs, carrying the double barrel from my old office, fully cocked.

  He was looking down, making sure he hit each stair.

  “Wentworth!” I shouted, and he looked up in surprise, stopping midway up the staircase.

  He made the mistake of swinging the muzzle up, and I shot him mid-chest. He yelled “Martha,” as he flung his arms up and went over backward. I could see it was the last of his wife’s fried pullets he’d enjoy. Both barrels of the scattergun went off, blowing a considerable hole in the wall, and I could see nothing but the disappearing backs of his followers as Wentworth rolled ass end over teakettle down the stairs, and his cohorts scrambled for cover.

  I hit the back stair way, and even with my thigh sending messages to my head bone to stop and rest before the leg gave out, I took the stairs three at a time.

  In a galloping limp I made the loafing shed behind Lizzy’s house, sucked up the latigo on the gray, and pounded out of there at a dust raising gallop, without a shot being fired behind.

  It would be a long ride back to find Knows-No-Horse and his people, and hopefully my sister. But I could make that journey now, as my business in Nemesis was finished. I have her journal in my saddlebags and I expect she’ll fancy it’s return.

  I wondered as I pounded on, following the Transcontinental tracks west to find my back trail to the Salmon country, would my sister enjoy a move to San Francisco?

  I knew I would, and to my great surprise, thought it was one I might be able to make.

  And now I should find the time and the peace to finish Mr. Twain’s book.

  I’m glad I’m again McBain.

  I rode out at a cantor, a killer, a horse thief, a wanted man…and totally at peace with myself and what I’d accomplished.