Born to the Badge

by Mark Warren

  “Didn’t know you drank,” he said, his voice dry and cracking.

  “I might on special occasions.”

  This brought up Wright’s guarded face. “And this is one?”

  Wyatt stood as still as a store mannequin. “Could be.”

  The two men stared at one another without a word between them. Wright was first to lower his gaze.

  “Thought you might want to step over to the Alamo with me,” Wyatt said. “See what we might find over there . . . to quench our thirsts.”

  Wright swallowed audibly and began shuffling through the papers again. “I can’t get away now,” he said irritably. “Some other time.”

  Wyatt watched the man’s discomfort turn to anger as the merchant kept sorting uselessly through the same papers. Wyatt looked slowly around the store at the shelves filled with various items of clothing.

  “Prob’ly make a good livin’ at this, don’t you, Bob?”

  Wright lost his count again, hastily gathered up the papers, and shut them in a cigar box. “I do all right,” he snapped. “Why?”

  Wyatt pursed his lips. “Ever hire on anyone special . . . to help out with special problems?”

  Wright straightened a ledger and pencil on his counter. “I don’t know what you mean. Look . . . I can’t have a drink now. I have some work I have to do.” He opened the box again, snatched out the stack of papers, and flattened them on the counter. Licking a finger he began flipping through the pages with a practiced dexterity that did not match the disconcerted expression on his face.

  When Wyatt walked to the door and stood looking out at the street, he heard the papers stop rustling behind him. Pushing Bob Wright from his thoughts, he took in the scene on the plaza. The traffic on Front Street was typical for a late morning: an empty wagon from Zimmerman’s lumberyard returning to its livery; laborers from the stockyards walking in pairs toward the diners; a skinny boy loading boxes into a wagon in front of the grocery; two women carrying covered trays of food toward Doc McCarty’s infirmary.

  Across Second Avenue Wyatt spotted Bat Masterson hurrying into the district attorney’s office. Inside a minute Bat reappeared holding a shotgun. Moving more cautiously now, he eased into the shadowed doorway of the post office and nodded to two men who walked past him under the awning.

  Wyatt stepped from Wright’s store out onto the boardwalk, leaving the door open behind him. Turning immediately left into the Alamo, he saw Ab Webster behind his bar conversing with a customer. Webster looked up, his eyes open wide and bright as candle flames.

  “Everything all right here, Ab?”

  Webster motioned Wyatt closer and leaned over the bar. When Wyatt approached, the barman lowered his voice to a whisper.

  “Clay Allison, the gunman . . . he was in here. He was heeled and talking about running the law officers into their holes.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Don’t know.” Webster pointed east. “Paid for his drink, then breezed out o’ here like a ghost. Might’ve walked down to the Long Branch.”

  Wyatt stared at the saloon owner for several heartbeats. “Did you send word for me to come see about Allison?”

  Ab Webster’s face twisted into a mass of creases. “What? I never sent for nobody . . . not today anyway.”

  Wyatt nodded once. The other men in the room watched him with their drinks held suspended in their hands. In the complete stillness of the saloon Wyatt heard laughter coming from next door at the Long Branch. He walked to Webster’s front entrance and paused with a hand on the swinging door. Marshal Bassett now stood in the alleyway on the east side of the post office, shotgun in hand. Duffy, a sheriff’s deputy, was on the west. Bat had relocated to the corner of Wright’s store.

  Wyatt pushed out the door, turned left toward the Long Branch, and came face to face with a lean man dressed in a dark blue blouse and gray trousers. His slate eyes were as empty as spent shell casings. A sparse beard spread across his scarred cheeks. A bone-handled Colt’s jutted from a holster strapped high on his waist.

  Neither man spoke. Watching Wyatt carefully, Allison sidestepped toward the building, his movements uneven as he favored one leg. The boot of that leg turned inward a few degrees, like a badger’s. Letting indifference dominate his face, Allison slouched against the wall and began rolling a cigarette. He appeared at once relaxed and defiant. After licking the paper and sealing the tobacco, he smiled.

  “You the law around this pig’s sty?” He continued to look down at his cigarette, his thick southern drawl like the lazy slither of a fat snake.

  Wyatt stood relaxed, his weight evenly distributed over both legs. He eased a hand into his coat pocket.

  “I am.”

  “Well, well,” Allison purred and looked up. He allowed an amused smile to tighten his lips into a shallow vee. “Which one are you?”

  “The one you need to see,” Wyatt said.

  Allison nodded as if he had expected such a reply. When he pinched the rolled smoke in his lips and smiled around it, the cigarette rose like an erection. Wyatt stepped beside Allison, so close that they stood shoulder touching shoulder, each with his back to the wall.

  “On your way out of town?” Wyatt asked.

  Allison smiled again, this time showing his teeth. They were small and surprisingly white in orderly rows.

  “What makes you say that?” he said, with feigned curiosity.

  Wyatt stared into the formless gray void of the man’s eyes. It was like looking into an abandoned well of tainted water.

  “You’re wearing a gun. That’s against the law unless you’re comin’ or leavin’. I figure you’re leavin’.”

  Allison breathed a whispery laugh that hissed through his teeth. “You ain’t even heeled, so I can’t see what you’d have to say about it.”

  Wyatt’s expression remained unchanged. “I got everything to say about it. You’re leaving.”

  Allison smiled and eased his right hand toward the butt of his pistol. Feeling the movement, Wyatt, with his right hand gripped on the Colt’s in his pocket, pivoted toward Allison and pressed the muzzle of his revolver through the pocket into the gunman’s gut. The gun barrel pressed against Allison like a railroad spike about to be sledged into his spine.

  The surly man had taken hold of his weapon but stayed his move. Now his face went slack, losing all its defiance for the moment. Realizing his error, Allison parted his lips, causing the cigarette to dangle. His nostrils flared rhythmically like the slow wing beat of a dying moth. He tried to affect a smirk, but his embarrassment was as obvious as the salty scent lifting off his skin.

  In the silence as they stared at one another, the crisp click, click of the hammer of Wyatt’s Colt’s delivered its own message. The hard muzzle of the gun drove deeper into Allison’s belly, and all traces of humor left the gunman’s face as his hands slowly rose to the height of his shoulders.

  “Put your right hand inside your shirtfront,” Wyatt ordered.

  Allison plucked the unlighted cigarette from his mouth and flipped it into the street. Then, sliding his fingers between two buttons at his chest, he stood like a man posing for a photographic portrait. His eyes narrowed as he spotted the lawmen across the street and at the east end of the block.

  “That hand comes out of your shirt,” Wyatt said quietly, “and I’ll open up your gut.” With his left hand he lifted the gunman’s revolver and stuffed it in the other coat pocket. Then he backed away two steps.

  Something new registered in Allison’s face, and Wyatt realized the gunman was weighing the odds. If Allison carried a backup gun, Wyatt could not see it. The mercenary’s cool gaze turned to amusement, and he cracked a crooked grin. Wyatt had heard the rumors that Clay Allison was crazy. Or maybe he was one of those rogue saddlers who simply didn’t care whether he lived or died.

  The moment hung like a stone just before it’s dropped into the dark eye of a well. Then, just as quickly as the wild look in the killer’s eyes had flared, it snuffed out. His
face turned guarded. He filled his chest with air, and then he let it seep out slowly, the sound like a hopeless sigh.

  “Guess I am leaving town,” Allison said, chuckling. With his thumb he pointed over his shoulder in the direction where Jim Masterson approached along the boardwalk. Allison cleared his throat and swallowed. “My horse is just around the corner.”

  “Keep your hand in your shirt until you reach your horse,” Wyatt instructed. “You turn around . . . I’ll kill you.”

  Allison touched the tip of his tongue to his upper lip and raised his chin to point toward Wyatt. “What about my gun?”

  “Just walk,” Wyatt said.

  Allison’s eyebrows lifted as he pushed away from the wall. He pursed his lips and blew a stream of air like a man who had forgotten how to whistle.

  “I’m going now.”

  “Go ahead,” Wyatt said and removed from his pocket his right hand with the Colt’s. His motion was smooth, slow, and efficient as he leveled the barrel at Allison’s chest. The hammer was still fully cocked.

  When Allison turned and walked, Jim stepped off the walkway into the street and stood like a sentry with the shotgun held diagonally across his torso. He looked briefly at Wyatt, as though instructions might be forthcoming, but Wyatt’s attention on the visiting gunman was complete.

  Clay Allison turned the corner at Beatty and Kelley’s restaurant, his arm still awkwardly bent and his hand remaining inside his blouse. Wyatt stepped into the street and stood with his body turned sideways to the empty corner where the gunman had disappeared. The Colt’s hung down beside Wyatt’s leg.

  In half a minute the sound of a horse’s hooves clopped on the side street and Allison reappeared on a dappled gray stud. Pulling up the reins with his left hand, he stopped and looked at Wyatt. Half smiling, he glanced at Jim Masterson in the street and then at the three officers who had moved closer from their assigned posts. Then, squinting at the sky, he smiled openly, like a man who had just remembered a good story from his past.

  “I don’t ordinarily come out on the short end of these things,” he said easily. He leveled the smile on Wyatt and made a little two-fingered salute that he thrust forward from the brim of his hat.

  “I’d say you came out pretty good,” Wyatt said, “considering the alternative.”

  Allison’s body bounced once with a silent laugh. “Yeah, well . . .”

  “You make any money off this deal?” Wyatt asked.

  Allison shrugged and allowed a passing glance at Wright’s store. “Man’s got to earn a living somehow,” he drawled, his tone almost friendly.

  Wyatt slipped his revolver back into his pocket, walked to the gray, and opened one of Allison’s saddlebags. Into this he stuffed the confiscated pistol and lashed the leather flap back in place.

  “Go earn it somewhere else. You ever come back to Dodge City . . . I’ll shoot you on sight.”

  Allison gave Wyatt a long, hard look. When he got no rise out of Wyatt, he smiled at the other officers who had gathered. There were faces crowded in the doorway and windows of the Long Branch, but he paid them no mind. Leaning, he made a chick, chick sound in the side of his mouth. The horse wheeled around and started at a slow walk paralleling the railroad tracks along Front Street.

  “Cocky sonovabitch, ain’t he?” Bat said as the backup lawmen assembled around Wyatt.

  “ ‘Loco’ is more like it,” said Bassett. “He’d kill his mother if there was good money in it.”

  Wyatt gave a nod to the men gathered in the street. Walking past them, he stepped up on the boardwalk in front of Wright’s store, where he stopped before the window. On the other side of the glass, Bob Wright stood staring back, pale as a sheet. The councilman opened his mouth as if to speak but then thought better of it. Briskly he turned and straightened the drape of a veil covering the blank face of a female mannequin.

  Wyatt turned on his heel and began crossing the plaza, making his way steadily toward the city offices.

  CHAPTER 19

  Late summer, 1878: Dodge City

  Wyatt walked his rounds in the heat of the September night, first checking the shops and saloons on the north side of the deadline. Walking up the side street by the Dodge House, he passed the hotel livery and paused to consider the private homes lined up along Walnut Street. Here was a class of people who seemed to have set their course by a star that made their lives more stable, more secure than that of a policeman on the frontier. They had families. And their children would probably follow along on the same path and bypass the suffering that seemed to wait in ambush for those men without a good course of action defined for them.

  At thirty years old, Wyatt stared at these upper-class homes, lighted from within, and wondered about their interior lives, considering them to be as foreign to him as sovereign nations on another side of the world. He realized his aspirations for higher office had transformed from an unspecified plan waiting somewhere in the future to a nagging sense of urgency. Charlie Bassett, he figured, would make a bid for county sheriff again, now that he was eligible after a term as city marshal. The county tax collecting carried out by that office made the sheriff’s badge pure gold. Wyatt could probably slip right into the marshal’s job. No one was better positioned for it.

  As chief enforcer, Wyatt had shown that he could control the rowdy Texans, often with only words and only as a last resort by the blow of a pistol barrel to the head of a troublemaker. The people of Dodge had seen him perform his duties, but that witnessing was a double-edged sword, he knew. Ordinary town folk wanted to be protected, but they did not want to be an audience to the ruthless cracking of a man’s skull. That was the irony of it all. A foot soldier like a deputy or an assistant marshal was forced to advertise his violent reputation. A reputation served him well in this regard, but it set him apart from the higher class of citizens.

  Meanwhile a marshal or a sheriff was seen mostly at his desk or attending community affairs. He even sent his underlings to collect the taxes, which gave him some distance from the unpopularity of that stigma. When elections came around, people were probably more inclined to vote for the administrative version of a lawman over a head basher. They seemed to forget that it was all the head bashing that put a lid on the city. If an administrator was polished enough, Wyatt had learned, he could take credit for the law and order in a community without connecting himself to the brutal nature of enforcing it on the street.

  As he did with most issues that grated together in his mind, Wyatt decided people would have to come around to his way of thinking. He was not going to be a hypocrite. He also knew he was not a politician. He didn’t have the pretention for it, just as he had no intention of loosening his grip on his duties for the sake of votes.

  But he would be the marshal. The citizens of Dodge would have to understand that he would pour just as much proficiency into his administrating as he had into his enforcing. Once he wore the marshal’s badge, he would leverage that position into something more profitable outside of the police business. He had convinced himself of this plan for years, but now he was determined to prove it.

  Heading back to the business district, he crossed the railroad tracks in the plaza and strolled past the open saloons on the south side of the line. Walking the boardwalk, he moved in and out of the lights spilling from these establishments, their interiors flashing with scenes that seemed to be part of a never-ending story that looped around on itself without promise of a proper ending.

  Through his experience here in Dodge, he could assess a room through a window and just that quickly check for any trouble. This late in the season there was little to be found. But he stopped in front of the Lady Gay, leaned against the window frame, and observed for several minutes. Doc was there, a drawer of poker chips sitting before him at the faro table, his quizzical smile giving away none of his internal thoughts.

  The Lady Gay Saloon had been the unofficial headquarters for most of the cattle outfits for the season . . . and, therefore, the most freq
uently visited point on the rounds of the law officers of Dodge City. Only a few hangers-on of the Texas crews remained in town, but Wyatt had instructed the deputies to maintain their vigilance . . . especially here. The season’s crime record had been a good one, and Wyatt intended to keep it that way.

  Stepping into the main room he moved to the bar, leaned an elbow on the polished countertop, and observed the clientele. Three soldiers drank whiskey with Kate Elder at the far end of the bar. Behind the bar at a small table sat the manager dipping a pen into a tiny inkwell and scratching figures into a ledger. Never looking up from his work he asked questions of the bartender, who stood beside him and counted whiskey bottles by poking his finger at the air as he inventoried the shelves.

  At the west wall, five drovers played poker at a table, each man dressed in a natty new outfit and well on his way to intoxication. A sixth Texan sat off to one side on a bench, his hatless head angled back to the wall as he snored loudly through a mouth hanging open like the bore of a cannon barrel. Two of these Texans had felt the sting of Wyatt’s gun barrel late one night outside the Varieties, but on this night every customer seemed as docile as a gray-whiskered dog.

  Zimmerman from the hardware store was talking business with two men at a front table. In the middle of the room a few merchants laughed together over a round of beers. In the back of the saloon where Doc ran his game, a blue-gray cloud of cigar smoke had spread and flattened against the ceiling.

  Holliday smiled for his customers and spoke with his soft Southern charm as he loaded the card box. Wyatt could not hear the words, but judging by the faces of the players at the lay-out, it was evident the dentist took his side profession seriously. For a time Wyatt kept his eyes on the thin gambler with an unpredictable demeanor, trying to discern the man’s shoulder holster and nickel-plated shooter. Wyatt couldn’t see it, but he knew it was there. Holliday had called it right, Wyatt knew: without that gun, the skin-and-bones dentist would be easy pickings for any man who ran up against him.