The Revenger

by Peter Brandvold

  Chaney glanced around self-consciously and said tightly through his teeth, “Carleen, I didn’t murder my own brother, and if you don’t stop sayin’ it . . . !” He glanced at Sartain, as did Carleen.

  She acquired a smug look as she switched her gaze back to Chaney. “What’re you gonna do, Warren? Looks like there’s a new dog in town. One with a bigger gun and bigger balls than the soft little marbles you got danglin’ between your legs.”

  A man laughed loudly, briefly, as several others amongst the crowd snickered with sheepish delight. Chaney turned to the man who’d laughed loudest, and the man turned his head away and brushed a fist across his nose.

  Celeste moved toward Carleen. “Come, Carleen. Let me take you to the house, get you cleaned up and—”

  “No.” Carleen backed away. She glanced at the stocky Mexican standing behind her. “I’m going with Vicente. He’s the only one around here who stayed loyal to my pa. He was more a brother to him than you ever were, Warren, you yellow-livered, murdering bastard!”

  She sobbed again and turned to the stocky Mexican, who wrapped his thick arms around her, gave her a quick hug, and muttered something into her ear. Then she turned away from him and walked over to the wagon’s left side, and climbed into the boot. The Mexican walked off down a wide break between buildings on the west side of the street.

  “Carleen, where are you taking him?” Celeste asked, frowning up at the girl whom Sartain assumed was her cousin. “Your father should be buried up at the house. His own father will want to see him one last time.”

  Carleen disengaged the brake. “I’m burying him up in the mountains, far away from here and everything Chaney. You Chaneys killed him. Warren just finished it. I only brought my father to town so everyone could see Warren’s handiwork. So they could see what he did to his own brother.”

  She raised her voice and looked around the crowd of stockmen, drummers, painted ladies, burly prospectors, and apron-clad shopkeepers, as well as several round-faced, domesticated Apaches who likely did menial labor in and around the town.

  “You’ve all seen what Sheriff Chaney did to his own brother. The reward stands. I will pay in gold dust as soon as I’ve been given confirmation that Sheriff Chaney is dead! Hi-yahhh!”

  Several men dashed out of the way as she shook the reins of the paint in the traces, and horse and wagon and its slack cargo dashed off down the wide break between buildings, on the heels of the stocky Mexican, Vicente.

  Chaney glowered at Sartain. The corners of his mouth rose with a devilish smile. “You can toss that big hogleg down in the dirt, now, stranger.”

  “Can I?”

  A deep, rumbling voice behind Sartain said, “Yeah, you can.”

  The Revenger heard the unmistakable click of a gun hammer being cocked.

  Chapter 7

  Sartain looked over his right shoulder.

  A big, savage-looking hombre in a too-tight three-piece suit that made him look even more savage by contrast stood about ten yards behind the Revenger. Wearing a deputy sheriff’s tin star on his left lapel, he was aiming a double-barreled Greener straight out from his right shoulder, his head canted slightly over the barn-blaster’s rabbit-ear hammers, both of which were rocked back to full cock.

  He grinned, showing two gold front teeth.

  Sheriff Warren Chaney smiled with satisfaction. “Toss it down here in the dirt, or my deputy here, Mr. Amos McCluskey, is gonna blow a hole the size of Texas through your brisket.”

  Sartain tightened his grip on the heavy revolver and offered a snide grin of his own. “I never toss my weapons in the dirt. Scratches the finish and fouls the action.”

  Chaney’s smile faded. His left nostril twitched. Another angry flush rose in his cheeks.

  Sartain broadened his own smile as he kept the LeMat aimed at Chaney’s chest.

  “This piece has a hair trigger,” he warned. He didn’t have to add that if Deputy McCluskey’s Greener went off, the LeMat would go off, as well. Sartain might get his spine turned to shards, but a .44 pill drilled through Chaney’s heart would kill the sheriff just as dead.

  Chaney’s left nostril twitched again. A murmur rose from the crowd still staring at the hubbub from up and down the street. The sheriff’s rage shifted to embarrassment, then back to rage again with a good touch of frustration added.

  He glanced around Sartain at his deputy. “Amos.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  Sartain heard the shotgun’s hammers click softly down. Sartain curveted Boss and then backed the horse to the left side of the street so he could have both Chaney and big Amos McCluskey in his view. McCluskey let the Greener hang down at his side.

  Sartain offered an affable grin and depressed the LeMat’s hammer.

  “All right, then,” he said.

  A couple of people in the crowd sighed as though they’d been all worked up for action, and now that it didn’t look like they were going to get any—at least any more, now that Miss Carleen had made her exit—they were disappointed. The crowd started to disperse, murmuring their chagrin at having to return to the humdrum workaday world without having gotten to see any blood shed.

  Chaney looked around cautiously. Sartain knew the man was thinking about that bounty Carleen had put on his head. He was wondering who, if anyone, was going to try to collect.

  And if they weren’t going to collect it here—where?

  Sartain would be wondering the same thing, as would most men. He had to smile at Chaney’s predicament. He was constantly in predicaments like that himself, and he knew it was like living between two steam-saw blades.

  Besides, while he knew little or nothing about what had just occurred here on Bittersweet’s main street, he sensed that Chaney deserved the position he was in. What made it even more satisfying was that the arrogant lawman had been placed there by a young woman who thought the sheriff was responsible for her father’s death.

  “You’d best mosey, amigo,” Chaney said, staring hard at Sartain. “You’d best mosey real fast-like. We ain’t even met, and I can tell I don’t like you. And when I don’t like a man, I tell him to leave. And if that man’s smart—and you don’t look overly stupid—he leaves.”

  “Thanks for the high compliment,” Sartain said. “I was just gonna stay long enough to do business with your mercantile. But now you done piss-burned me, and, while it’s not for me to say how smart or stupid I am, I can tell you that I am sensitive. Bein’ told to leave a place just sorta makes me wanna stay on. So I think I’ll hang around a while. And if you decide to do somethin’ about it, I can almost double-dee-guaran-damn-tee you it’s gonna be a pair of Chaneys bein’ buried.”

  He looked at the big, stupid-looking deputy with the two gold front teeth. “Or a pair of Chaneys and one deputy sheriff.”

  The big deputy gritted his gold teeth in fury and stepped forward, raising his shotgun. Sartain’s LeMat roared, and the big man groaned as he brushed a hand across his cheek. He looked at the blood on his hand, and his face turned red.

  “Why, you son of a . . .”

  Sartain said, “I wasn’t whistlin’ ‘Dixie.’ ”

  Chaney glared at him, opening and closing his hands at his sides. “Who are you, mister?”

  “I’m a man lookin’ for a livery barn.”

  With that, the Revenger holstered his LeMat, pinched his hat brim to the sheriff, touched spurs to Boss’s flanks, and rode off down the street. The Federated Livery and Feed Barn sat two blocks up and around a bend from the courthouse.

  An old man with a straggly goat beard and smoking a corncob pipe stood outside, watching Sartain approach. Apparently, he’d been watching the festivities out in front of the courthouse.

  “Boy, you sure piss-burned Warren Chaney good, mister.”

  “I did, didn’t I? Will you stable my hoss? He’s an owly coyote around the fillies, and he eats like a blue-ribbon bull.”

  “My fillies can handle him. They’re west Texas fillies, don’t ya know.”r />
  As Sartain swung down from the saddle, the old man stepped forward, puffing his pipe. “Was that really Waylon Chaney lyin’ in the back o’ that wagon?”

  “That’s what his daughter said.”

  “I’ll be damned. Waylon dead after all these years.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Taking Boss’s bridle reins, the old man studied the horse’s rider. “What do you mean—‘what does that mean?’ ”

  “Sounds like Waylon Chaney cut quite a swath through these parts.”

  “You obviously ain’t from here, young fella. Louisiana?”

  “How did you know?”

  The old man snorted. “Bayou Country, by the ’lect.”

  “Gulf Coast. New Orleans. French Quarter to be exact.”

  “Oh, hell. I know who you are.”

  “Yeah, well keep it under your hat, will you Mister . . .?”

  “Pap Chisolm. Yeah, I’ll keep it under my hat but”—Chisolm gave a mock-devilish grin as he knocked the dottle from his pipe—“I ain’t gonna promise I won’t try to collect on that bounty you got ridin’ your shoulders. What is it—two thousand?”

  “Thereabouts. And thanks for the warning. I’ll be watchin’ for you.” Sartain smiled at the oldster, who looked arthritic and frail, his shoulders hunched, his face bristling with warts and liver spots.

  Chisolm shoved his pipe into a shirt pocket and reached under Boss’s belly to unbuckle the latigo. “I used to have a pistol around here somewhere . . .”

  “Make the first shot count.” Sartain shucked his Henry from its scabbard and hiked a hip on a water barrel. “Is the girl right, Chisolm? Do you think Sheriff Chaney killed his brother? I know it’s none of my business, me bein’ a stranger here an’ all, but I’m naturally curious.”

  Chisolm turned to him. “Listen, young fella: it don’t matter who you are or how good you are with that LeMat and Henry, or how many people you killed. Bein’ curious, natural or otherwise, is dangerous business around here. I don’t recommend it. And I ain’t one to go flappin’ my lips to folks who is over curious, neither. Talkin’ too much and bein’ curious—both’ll get you killed faster’n you can shake a dead skunk!”

  “Good advice.” Sartain slid off the barrel, hiked his Henry on his shoulder, and poked a cigar between his lips. “Thanks, Chisolm.”

  “You ain’t gonna take it to heart, are ya?” Chisolm asked as he led Boss up the barn’s wooden ramp.

  “Probably not,” Sartain said fatefully.

  Chisolm merely shook his head.

  Sartain walked out into the street and looked around. He saw a sign for a café—at least he figured it was a café, for the sign read TEN CENT MEALS in crudely painted letters—and after investigating and discovering it was indeed an eatery run by a fat Mexican couple, he sat down to a filling meal of carne asada preceded by a big bowl of thick menudo.

  He washed the spicy grub down with a couple of bottles of cerveza. The fat Mexican man had hauled them up from a deep root cellar, so the Mexican suds were cool and refreshing.

  While the Cajun ate, he went over in his mind all that he’d encountered here in Bittersweet. It had been, and probably still was, TROUBLE in capital letters, and he admonished himself to lay in trail supplies and continue on down to Old Mexico, as he’d planned. Bounty hunters as well as lawmen were starting to clog up his back trail.

  The trouble was, TROUBLE—in capital letters —had a way of attracting Mike Sartain, despite his troubled past.

  He was just too damned curious about Waylon Chaney to pull his picket pin just yet. His curiosity probably had as much to do with the dead man’s comely daughter, but there it was. He’d stay at least the night and see what he could turn up about the Chaneys and Miss Carleen and Miss Celeste. If there was a party here who needed help— Well, helping a person who couldn’t help himself or herself was his business.

  He tossed coins onto the table, nodded his gratefulness to the Mexican woman, donned his hat, and headed on outside. He stood on the boardwalk fronting the tiny adobe place and relit the stogie he’d been smoking earlier, the smells of the Mexican cooking and the eatery’s warm air wafting out from behind him.

  A couple of Mexican horsebackers were just now passing in the street before him. They turned down a side street where he’d seen another whorehouse earlier, when he’d been looking for food. It was a colorful little adobe with a wood frame and stone addition to one side, and the window shutters had all been brightly painted different colors.

  Likely a Mexican-run establishment.

  Sartain considered heading on over there, buying himself a chubby Mexican whore with whom to while away the waning hours of the afternoon, and maybe learn some gossip about the town in general and the Chaneys in particular.

  But then, if he was going to visit a whorehouse, why not the big one nearly right across from the sheriff’s office? He’d probably have a larger covey of painted ladies to choose from. Besides, it being so close to the sheriff’s office, and with the sheriff having patronized the place earlier, he might learn more about the Chaneys there.

  Something told Sartain that Sheriff Chaney was a regular.

  Yeah, that’s the brothel he oughta patronize. He wasn’t nearly as interested in having his ashes hauled, since he’d had them hauled so well the previous day and night, as he was in learning a few salient tidbits about the Chaney brothers.

  Puffing the stogie, he peeked back into the barn to check on Boss. Satisfied that Pap was tending the horse properly, giving the mount a good, thorough rubdown, he crossed the street and walked back in the direction from which he’d come. He glanced at the sheriff’s window in the courthouse.

  A CLOSED sign had been hung in the curtained window.

  The sheriff must have had enough excitement for one day.

  Sartain stepped up onto the broad stoop that fronted the whorehouse. Both windows right of the door had red velvet curtains drawn across them, and more curtains were also drawn across the door’s top window panel.

  He couldn’t hear any noise from inside. Hoping that all the whores, having grown bored with the drama on the street, weren’t now slumbering in the mid-afternoon, he tripped the door’s latch and stepped inside.

  Chapter 8

  He was instantly met with the fresh-cut timothy smell of marijuana tinged with the ground-cinnamon smell of opium. The room before him was nearly dark save for a foggy red glow from the sun shining through the heavy curtains.

  The room lay three steps away from the door, and it was carpeted in wine red with black dragons breathing yellow fire flying and flapping their bat-like wings. The room was a cozy, well-appointed parlor, though its furniture was somewhat in disarray. Three barely dressed girls lounged singly in plush chairs and on couches while two others were entertaining men.

  One girl and one man waltzed slowly on the room’s far side. A baby grand piano sat under a large oil painting of a naked black girl riding a white horse, but no one was playing it. Judging by the heaviness of the aromatic smoke in the room, the dancers were probably waltzing to music issuing from inside their own heads.

  Another girl lay on a sofa, her head in the lap of a rangy, middle-aged cowboy who sat up straight, staring toward Sartain, though it didn’t appear the cowboy was seeing much of anything. His watery blue eyes were opaque from the drug coursing through his brain.

  The girl lying with her head on his lap was as naked as the day she was born but a whole lot better filled out. She was talking vaguely, softly, as though to herself. Sartain couldn’t make out what she was saying. She seemed to be holding a very mundane conversation with herself, and the cowboy had no interest in it whatever.

  “Well, lookee here,” came a woman’s voice, this one deeper, fuller than the girl’s voice. “If it ain’t the tall drink o’ water who tied a knot in Sheriff Chaney’s britches!”

  The woman strolled toward him from the misty rear of the long room. She was short and fat, and she wore a red negligee that
revealed too much of her. She held a wooden cigarette holder in one hand and a delicate wine glass in the other.

  Sartain doffed his hat and moved down the stairs, feeling a little awkward bringing his rifle into such a room, but the Henry was a security blanket of sorts. He figured that, with all the men hunting him, he had a right to such security. The woman didn’t seem to mind. She drifted over to him, the negligee swishing around her fat, pale body, and smiled up at him.

  “Welcome to Nora’s, cowboy. Or should I say, welcome to Nora’s, Vengeance Man!” She winked and sipped her wine, letting her round, brown eyes trail him up and down.

  “Well, I’ll be damned if I’m not tired of my reputation precedin’ me wherever I go,” Sartain said, chagrined. “When did you recognize me?”

  “When you fired that first shot with your big LeMat. Very distinctive pistol on a very distinctive man. You’re handsomer than I expected. You got you a rakish southern charm. I done read about that in the papers, but them scribblers failed to give your appearance the credit it’s due.”

  “Well, hell, now you got me blushin’. I wish there was a horse apple I could kick.”

  “I was hopin’ you’d find your way to my place, Mr. Revenger. I’ll enjoy the notoriety of servicing such a noteworthy and, may I say, notorious customer?”

  “I’d just as soon you kept my identity under your hat, Miss Nora. Not that it matters overmuch, as the liveryman also called me by name, and I wouldn’t know him from Adam’s off ox.”

  “Of course! Indeed!” Nora tapped ashes from her cigarette into the wine glass she’d just drained. “My girls and I pride ourselves on our ability to be discreet, though I must say it would be good for business to know a man of your fame scrubbed his boots on my door mat.”

  She chuckled and looked him up and down again, puffing on the cigarette. “What’s your pleasure? I got me a dozen girls available. Two are down with buns in their oven, so they’re out of service and bein’ tended by the Chinaman down the street, but the rest are open for business. They’re clean as April rain, to boot. I know that for a fact because I just had the local sawbones in here last week, and he had him a good long peek up the pussies of every one!”