But then The Revenger usually sensed something like that deep in his bowels. The signals went up his back like scuttling crickets, and a low ringing often sounded in his ears. At the moment, he neither felt nor heard any of that.
All he was feeling at the moment was befuddlement.
Footsteps sounded behind him. He swung around, raising the Henry and clicking the hammer back. He held his fire as a Mexican shopkeeper in a paisley waistcoat and white apron stopped in a doorway, dropping the match to which he’d been cupping to a cigarette, his fear-bright eyes on the Henry in the Cajun’s gloved hands.
“Christo!” the man said, lurching back, scowling. He slammed his shop door and swept the curtain across the top glass panel.
The match smoldered on the boardwalk where the shopkeeper had dropped it.
“Sorry, there, amigo,” Sartain muttered, depressing the Henry’s hammer.
He turned back to the three-story hotel. Its large, gaudily painted sign was stretched across the top of the third story. Two horses were tied to one of the two hitch racks fronting the place. One of the horses turned its head to give Sartain a dubious look, then turned it back, kicked at a fly, and gave its tail a hard, single switch.
“All right,” the Cajun said decisively and walked out from behind the wagon.
Resting the Henry on his right shoulder, he strode across the street. He mounted the broad steps, crossed the gallery, and stood staring over the tops of the heavy scrolled oak batwing doors into the murky shadows. The drinking hall was cave-like, albeit an elegant cave.
There was a horseshoe-shaped bar on the right, with an elaborate back bar. The mirror shone like polished diamonds. A thick wine-red carpet stretched across the floor. The tables were all dark, glistening mahogany. There appeared to be a gambling layout to the right through a broad arched doorway overseen by the head of a giant elk no doubt shot in the mountains Sartain had just ridden through.
The air of the place smelled like molasses and sage cut with the cloying smell of cheap tobacco.
Two cowboys sat playing cards at a table about halfway in and on the left, near a cold brick fireplace. A beefy, blond-headed bartender stood behind the bar. He stood so still that he might have been a stone representation of an Irish ale-slinger, large, freckled arms crossed over his barrel-like chest. He was straining the seams and buttons of the three-piece suit he wore beneath a cream apron.
Sartain didn’t see anybody else in the place. The only sounds were the two cowboys calling, raising, flicking their cards, and occasionally rattling their coins. There were no sounds, that is, until Sartain pushed through the batwings and took two long strides toward the three steps dropping into the sunken drinking hall.
Then a lazy, menacing voice off his right flank said, “Okay, hold it right there.”
Sartain’s heart picked up its pace. The shadows had obviously hidden the man from the Cajun’s view. Sartain gave an inward wince as he waited for a bullet.
“Now, you know you don’t come in here packin’ iron, friend,” said the man behind him in a puzzlingly non-threatening tone.
A figure moved on the Cajun’s left. Sartain swung that way, saw a man reaching for a pistol on his hip, and triggered the Henry.
The bullet smacked the man’s still-holstered revolver. The man screamed and jumped nearly two feet in the air. Sartain wheeled again, cocking the Henry automatically, and leveled his rifle on the gent behind him.
The man was sitting in a Windsor chair near a tall wooden coatrack, one leg crossed over the other. He sat casually, a drink in his hand. His other hand was empty. He tensed now. His bushy brows beetled while his gaze drifted to the barrel of the rifle aimed at him, and his lips parted slowly.
He too wore a three-piece suit. He was shaggy-headed, bearded, and maybe in his early thirties. “Hold on, now,” he said slowly, softly. “No reason to go makin’ nasty. I was just remindin’ you of the rules, friend.”
The other man, the one with the bullet hole in his holster, was cursing and casting his bewildered gaze between his holster and the man who’d put the hole in it. “Jesus Christ!” he said.
He wore a three-piece suit as well. He was slender and bulbous-eyed, and he had thin, dark-red hair combed straight back from a pronounced widow’s peak.
The bartender said loudly in a stout Irish accent, “If this is a robbery, I might be able to find a dead mouse at the back of the cash box. If you’re lucky. Try the cantina across the street bucko. They do a better business this time of the day than we do, ya goddamn bloody fool!”
Atop the balcony curving over the main drinking hall and horseshoe bar, a door clicked and groaned open. A very short man stepped out. Or was he wheeling out...
As the figure glided up to the balcony rail and lifted his chin to peer over it, Sartain saw that he was indeed in a wheelchair. “Who’s shooting up the place, consarn it?” He’d shouted, but he’d seemed to have trouble raising his weak and raspy voice as high as he’d wanted.
He stared over the rail at Sartain, who suddenly felt like the bad boy in church. Neither the man behind him nor the man to his left, the one with the ruined gun and holster, appeared in a hurry to draw another weapon, and no one else was hurrying toward him.
The cowboys stared at him warily and the barman stared at him belligerently, but the apron wasn’t wielding so much as a bung starter.
They’d all seemed taken by surprise.
Sartain depressed the Henry’s hammer and raised his voice loudly enough for the wheelchair-bound gent to hear. “I’m looking for Lucius Creed.”
“Oh?” said the man in the wheelchair. “What do you want with this Creed fella?”
Sartain glowered up at the man. “Don’t tell me you’re him.”
“All right, I won’t. Why don’t you tell me who you are so we can get that cleared up?”
“Sartain.”
“Oh, hell,” said the man behind the Cajun, who’d climbed to his feet and was still holding his drink and nothing else. “That’s what that crazy Dan Tucker was talkin’ about.”
“What’s that, Les?” said Creed.
“Dan Tucker sent a telegram a couple nights ago. Said something about The Revenger. Came in late. I thought he was drunk and tossed the flimsy away without thinkin’ no more about it.”
The man in the wheelchair hammered his fist on the balcony rail. “Consarn it, Les, would you kindly chew it up a little and then spit it out?”
“This man here, Sartain...he’s The Revenger, Mr. Creed.”
“The Revenger...” Creed said as though he should know what that meant but didn’t.
“Hired gun, Lucius,” said the barman, eyeing Creed now.
Creed said, “I’m comin’ down.”
He wheeled his chair down the hall on his right and stopped near the head of the stairs. The barman walked out from behind the bar and into the shadows beneath the balcony. There was a contraption there with a winch attached. Sartain couldn’t see it very clearly, but it looked like a series of cables stretching from the floor to the balcony above.
The big barman threw a lever on the winch and began turning the handle. As he did, Lucius Creed appeared to be sucked down into the balcony floor.
He kept dropping in herky-jerky movements, his wheelchair disappearing in increments and his head jerking down beneath the balcony rail.
The winch squawked noisily.
The barman kept turning the wooden winch handle until Sartain saw a platform dropping out of the shadows beneath the balcony. Creed’s chair was on the platform, and in less than a minute, Creed and the chair were on the floor of the main drinking hall.
Creed slid down in his chair to kick away a low wooden rail attached to the platform. The barman walked around behind him and pushed the chair off the platform and along the sunken floor of the drinking hall until his employer was sitting seven feet away from Sartain at the bottom of the three steps.
Watching him roll toward him, Sartain’s incredulity had grown. Lucius
Creed was a spindly little man with long, stringy gray hair and the gaunt face of a cadaver. His eyes were so sunken it was impossible to tell their color. He had a mole the size of the tip of the Cajun’s thumb on the left side of his nose. One eye cast crookedly around the obstruction.
Creed was dressed in ragged long-handles and heavy red wool socks drawn up nearly to his knees. Over the long-handles, he wore a deep-purple parlor coat with red lapels. The robe hung loosely, its gilt cord dangling down over the chair’s wheels.
Sartain found himself wrinkling his nose against the man’s sour stench.
He smelled like meat left too long in the hot sun.
Creed appeared to take satisfaction in his aroma. He gazed up at the big, handsome, shaggy-headed man before him and said, “Don’t mind the stink. I don’t.” He stretched his badly blistered lips in satisfaction at the joke. “Cancer,” he explained. “I got one that size on my spine.” He shaped the gap between his gnarled hands into the size of an orange. “Another one that size on my right lung.”
He indicated a tumor the size of a grapefruit.
Apparently enjoying his guest’s revulsion, he shaped another grin. “And you’re here to kill me?”
The man with the ruined holster chuckled. Creed favored him with a bland look, which cowed the man. Then Creed tipped his head back to look up at the barman. “Wheel me around, Jim. We’re goin’ to the billiard room. I’d like a bottle of cold beer. Bring two.”
“You sure, Lucius?” the barman said. “Remember, the doc said...”
“Just bring the bottles, Jim. Suds ain’t gonna kill a dead man.”
As the barman headed for the bar, Lucius Creed wheeled his chair back toward the rear of the main drinking hall, toward another broad arched doorway. He stopped and glanced over his shoulder at Sartain, who’d found himself stuck in place, as though his boots had turned to lead.
“Come on, killer. Have a drink with your prey.” Creed stretched another devilish grin, the one eye bending to peer around the growth jutting from his nose. “It’s the least you could do.”
Sartain glanced at the two men flanking him and then dropped down the three steps into the main hall. He caught up to Creed and, placing his rifle under one arm, grabbed one of the chair handles and pushed the dying man forward.
“Thanks,” Creed said. “I can do it myself, but it’s always nice to have help. Don’t have much of it left. My boys have been driftin’ away like flies after the first frost, but I still got me a handful of stalwarts.”
“Where we goin’?” Sartain said.
“In there.” Creed jerked his head toward the broad doorway to the right of which a grandfather clock stood sentinel, ticking woodenly.
Sartain pushed the withered outlaw into a long, broad, carpeted room trimmed with more game trophies and stocked with five pool tables and several dartboards. There was a dark, unmanned bar at the back.
Creed stopped at a table in the middle of the room and canted his head toward a wall rack. “Grab us a coupla sticks. I like to hit a few balls around now and then. Keeps my mind off the pain. Used to have girls around for that, but then my pecker stopped workin’ and I couldn’t take the aggravation of watchin’ ‘em parade around here half-naked. I gave ‘em all their wages and sent ‘em on their way.”
At that last, he started coughing violently. He fumbled a white handkerchief with red polka dots out of a robe pocket and clamped it over his mouth as he convulsed. Sartain saw that the handkerchief’s polka dots were blood.
Creed bent low in his chair, coughing loudly into the handkerchief.
“See there, Lucius,” the barman said as he brought a tray with two bottles and two glasses into the room. “You shouldn’t be drinkin’ nothin’ but warm tea, ya bloody fool.”
Creed coughed some more and then angrily chucked the bloody cloth at the bartender. “Just shut up about my health and pour the beers, Jim. What the hell else do I have to ease my pain? Warm tea, my ass!”
“Eases it in the short-term, but it’s gonna kill you...” The barman sheepishly let his voice drift off, flushing slightly.
Obviously, Creed already had one foot in the grave. One or two more beers weren’t going to make any difference. Sartain found himself marveling at how much the burly Irishman must have cared for the old outlaw.
He also found himself wondering just how badly he’d been lied to about Creed, and why...
Chapter 16
Jim poured the beer and left the room, drawing the doors closed behind him.
He stopped and glanced back, shuttling his cautious gaze from Sartain to Creed. “If you need anything, Lucius, just call out.” He gave Sartain another wolfishly threatening look and finished closing the doors.
Creed took his beer off the tray. “Come over here and get your beer. It’s a good ale brewed in Ohio. I keep it ten feet underground. Always enjoy a cool beer.”
Sartain took the beer from the tray and tipped the frothy mug to his lips. “Good,” he said. He’d only half-tasted it. He was too busy trying to wrap his mind around the fact that his so-called formidable quarry had been confined to a wheelchair, not to mention a body that didn’t weight ninety pounds.
“Go ahead and break,” Creed said, setting his glass down and taking up his pool cue. He chalked the tip.
The balls were already racked on the table. Sartain broke, pocketing three and then knocking in another one before bouncing the two-ball off the velvet. Creed took his turn, almost sweeping the table. His success seemed to work him up, but after he’d pocketed six balls in a row, he sat back in his chair, red-faced from exhaustion.
His ears were papery white.
He grabbed his beer off the tray and downed half of it, his hand shaking so badly that much of it dribbled down the corners of his mouth and into his lap.
“By thunder, I don’t have the wind of a newborn rat,” he said, mopping his brow with a fresh handkerchief.
Sartain pocketed two more balls, then hiked a hip on the table, staring down at the old outlaw in the wheelchair.
Creed stared up at him with that self-satisfied look again. But then his brows beetled and with a genuinely puzzled air, he said, “Who sent you? Merlin Sneed? Ephraim Blocker?” He canted his head slightly to one side. “Or was it—”
“Mangham.”
“Mangham?” Creed paused. “Hell, I don’t owe him any—”
“You damn near had him killed the other night.”
“I did?”
“Yeah. You sent Drew Jurgens and two other wolves after him. They beat the holy hell out of him...after they raped his daughter.”
Creed just stared at him as though he’d been speaking a language he couldn’t understand.
Sartain said, “Are you going to tell me you didn’t demand Sarah Mangham’s hand in marriage?”
Creed pursed his lips and shook his head. “No.”
“That you haven’t been trying to run Mangham out of business for the past couple of years so you could have the only stage business in this neck of the territory?”
“It sorta depends on what you mean by ‘haven’t. I was for a time, yeah. I asked Sarah to marry me a couple of months ago, yeah. Okay, I demanded the snooty little bitch marry me,” Creed added, chuckling. “Forgive me. That’s the man I am. Take me or leave me. I am...was...the biggest success story in these parts.”
“You were...are...a killer, Creed. An outlaw. You’re vermin, by all accounts.”
“Okay, if you wanna get personal,” Creed said, chuckling again before taking another sip from his beer mug and licking the foam from his lips with his jaundiced yellow tongue. “I’m vermin. I reckon once vermin, always vermin. I’ll die vermin. Likely go to hell and shovel coal for an eternity or two. Hell, someone’s gotta do it.”
That made him laugh until he spilled some of his beer.
“And I’d have loved to have seen Mangham dead, and likely would have gotten around to it by now if I didn’t wake up three months ago screaming from one piss-awful
pain in my chest. I hadn’t been feelin’ well for a year, but then the pain came and my legs turned to noodles. Just before my pecker did the same. Finally brought the doc in and he found them two tumors. Says I’m full of cancer. Probably grew slow at first. Deep in the bones. Now it’s a mother-lovin’ wildfire about to burn down the mountain.”
Creed glanced at the door and then turned to Sartain with a devilish gleam in his eyes. Keeping his voice low, he said, “You woun’t have a cigar, would you? Them boys out there refuse to give me any because the doc says they cain’t. You’d think they’d mind me in my last days, since I made them what they are, put food on their tables and clothes on their backs. But they just refuse to accept the fact I’m wolfbait.
“You see, we been through a lot together. Closer’n crows in a post oak. Them boys out there are three of only five I got left sidin’ me, and we all grew up together down South. ‘Bama. Fought in the War of Northern Aggression before we all headed west together and took up robbin’ and killin’ and growin’ crooked businesses and frightenin’ the women and children and generally runnin’ amok upon the land!”
The old outlaw wheezed a laugh and then spit more blood into his handkerchief.
“Christ almighty,” Sartain said, cutting his bayou accent loose as he lit a long-nine for Lucius Creed. “You must not mind the flames of hell ticklin’ your toes one bit. Law, law—I don’t believe I ever seen the like.”
He truly was amazed. Most dying men he’d known had made fast work of mending their ways, or at least of understating their transgressions, near their last. But Creed seemed proud of his!
Drawing smoke deep into his withered lungs, choking a little but smiling just the same, Creed blinked his heavy-lidded eyes and said, “Ah, now that’s a cigar.”
“That’s one of the cheapest on the market.”
“A rum-infused Cuban stogie to a dyin’ man.”
“Let me get this straight—you didn’t send those men to savage Sarah Mangham and rough up...or kill...her father the other night?”
The Revenger Page 85