Death Ground Read online

  Death Ground

  Ed Gorman

  LEISURE BOOKS NEW YORK CITY

  No Surrender

  Kriker spun, his rifle ready. “You defendin’ them?” His eyes were something Guild could not bear to see.

  “No. I’m just sayin’ it was probably an accident is all.” Guild paused. “I’m gonna have to take you back along with the money.”

  “What?” Kriker said.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Kriker cocked his rifle. “You try to take me in, bounty man, and we’re both gonna die. Right here and right now.”

  “I don’t want to have to kill you,” Guild said.

  “You can’t kill me.” Kriker leveled the rifle.

  To Sara Ann Freed, my good and gentle phone friend.

  I would like to thank Tom Owens for his help with my books.

  a cognizant original v5 release october 07 2010

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  No Surrender

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Other Leisure books by Ed Gorman

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  You could tell it was a well-kept house. On the way up the stairs with the straw-haired girl in the gingham dress and the high-button shoes one size too big, Leo Guild had to step aside to let an Indian woman toting a bucket of soapy water pass by him. She carried a mop and had a forehead shiny with sweat, and she sure looked as if she knew how to keep things clean. If the girls took equal care of themselves, Guild tonight would have himself a pleasant if slightly lonely birthday. He was fifty-four today.

  The girl said, half an hour later, “I bet you’re mad.”

  Guild said nothing.

  “I bet you wish you woulda picked one of the other girls, don’t ya?”

  Guild still said nothing.

  “I can’t help it. Sometimes I just can’t do it. Sometimes I get to thinkin’ about all the things the preacher used to say, and then I just can’t do it. I just can’t.” She paused. “It’s nothin’ personal. I mean, you don’t offend me or nothin’.”

  “Gosh, thanks.”

  “You just got a kind face. I figgered you’d understand. Some men do and—”

  “—and some men don’t.”

  The girl got flustered and looked scared.

  In the small room with the too-soft bed and the melancholy shadows of kerosene light, Guild laughed somewhat sadly. “I guess it’s just the way luck’s been running.”

  “Bad luck, huh?”

  “Tracked a man six hundred miles through the snow and damn near lost a finger to frostbite, and the day before I caught up with him and the two-thousand-dollar reward I would have gotten, he dropped dead of a heart attack.”

  “Gol.”

  “Then I signed on as a stagecoach guard and before I reached the first stage stop, the company went bankrupt.”

  “Cripes.”

  He looked her over in the lamp glow. She hadn’t taken her clothes off. She looked like a farm girl dressed up for a Saturday night with a farm boy. His body wanted her, but his soul didn’t because her soul didn’t want him. He never liked it in the houses, but he was fifty-four and in many ways he had lived too much and in many ways he had lived too little, and even though he couldn’t talk about too much or too little with anybody, he could hold somebody in the darkness, and the mere fact of holding them would be enough to get him through this night of fifty-four years.

  But the girl, too skinny and plain to ever be particularly profitable for a house like this, did not want to hold him, so now he took the rye from the bedstand and the cigarette he’d rolled earlier in the day and he had his own little celebration.

  “You mad?”

  “Nope.” He smoked his cigarette.

  “You gonna tell Patty?”

  “Nope.” He drank his rye.

  “You gonna hit me?”

  “Nope.” He stared into the deep shadows of the room and listened to the cold October night rattle the window. Then he thought of the little girl. Sometimes it happened like that. Suddenly she was there in his mind, and so was what he’d done.

  “You look sad, mister.”

  “Old is all.”

  “Fifty-four ain’t old.”

  “Some fifty-fours ain’t old. Mine is.”

  He was already up and straightening his clothes, the black suit coat and white boiled shirt and gray serge trousers and black Texas boots. He eased the black Stetson onto his gray hair. Finally he tugged the holster holding his .44 around his waist and into proper place.

  She glanced up at him with her quick kid face. “You sure ain’t gonna tell Patty?”

  He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “I’m not going to tell Patty.”

  He left the money on the battered bureau, and then he ducked his six feet under the door frame and went on downstairs.

  Several men sat anxiously in the parlor, waiting. They might have been at a train depot waiting for some big black engine to take them someplace fantastic. They looked that excited.

  Patty, the woman who ran the place, came up and said, “She good?”

  “Real good.”

  She poked him in the ribs and grinned. She had food in her teeth. “All my girls are good.”

  He went to the door, and on the way out she said to his back, “All of them.”

  He was ten steps down the sidewalk, dead leaves scraping the boards of the walk, the silver alien moon full and ominous in the cloudless sky, when he saw a short man in a three-piece suit carrying a Winchester hurrying toward him.

  The man, breathlessly, said, “You Guild?”

  Guild nodded.

  “I’m Deputy Forbes.”

  “Glad to meet you.”

  “Sheriff wants to see you.”

  “He say why?”

  “He said why, but he also said I wasn’t supposed to say why.”

  Guild, expansive on the rye, said, “He say why you weren’t supposed to say why?”

  “Your cheeks cold?”

  “No, but my nose is.”

  “Good,” Deputy Forbes said. “Then let’s go back to the office and we can discuss this in a nice warm place.” Then he raised his young, pudgy face to the fancy house whose light faltered in the prairie shadows behind. “She’s got some good girls in there, that Patty does.”

  “Yes,” Guild said, “that’s what I heard.”

  Chapter Two

  Decker was typical of the kind of law you saw in the Territory these days. The old kind, the gunfighters who’d roamed town to town taking a piece of prostitution and gambling and liquor, were gone. Just this summer four of them had been hanged in Yankton. The territorial governor had called it “a symbol of our new dedication to law and order.” Such statements always made Guild smile. If it was your neck in the noose, it was a lot more than symbolic.

  Decker stood maybe five-eight and weighed maybe one-forty. He
had a handsome but unremarkable face and wore eyeglasses. His brown hair was thinning and he wore a three-piece brown suit on the right lapel of which rested the smallest three-pointed star Guild had ever seen. He looked like a banker who might get tough with you after a few beers.

  His office continued the impression that he was a businessman. Behind a wide mahogany desk was a glass-paneled bookcase with enough law tomes to make a young lawyer envious. On the desk itself was a tinytype of Decker, a pretty plump woman, and two pretty plump little girls. To the right of the desk was a long glass case filled with rifles and shotguns. The floor had a gray hooked rug. On a small service table to the left of the desk was a nickel-plated coffeepot from which Decker poured Guild a cup without asking.

  Guild thanked him for it and sat down.

  “Across the alley is the back door of the undertaker’s,” Decker said.

  “I see.”

  “We put two men in there about an hour ago.”

  Guild sipped his coffee. He knew what was coming.

  “One of them was Merle Rig. He a good friend of yours?” Decker said.

  “Actually, he was sort of an enemy.”

  Decker put down his tin cup and seemed to give Guild a reassessment, as if Guild had been hiding something only now revealed.

  “Kind of funny you would be a bodyguard for a man you consider an enemy.”

  “He paid me.”

  “Still.”

  “Winter’s coming and I’m fifty-four and I don’t have much money. He paid me two hundred dollars.”

  “Why was he your enemy?”

  Guild shrugged. “Ten years ago we were doing some bounty hunting together. The day we were to collect, he knocked me out and went in and got the reward for himself.”

  “But you agreed to be his bodyguard anyway?”

  “I was passing through town here and he heard about it and he came to me and said that somebody was after him. He said he’d been sick the last week or so and couldn’t defend himself and would I watch him.”

  “Ever wonder why he didn’t come to me for protection?”

  “Didn’t have to wonder. I assumed he was in trouble the law could only make worse.”’

  “You lived in a nice world, Mr. Guild.”

  “It’s the only one that’ll have me,” Guild said, thinking about the little girl again and how people reacted once they knew who he was and what he’d done.

  “A month ago he robbed the local bank here of fifteen thousand dollars,” Decker said. “He and a mountain man named Kriker.”

  “The hell.”

  “I’m sure it was Kriker who came into town and killed him and the kid.” He paused, following Guild’s eyes to the certificate on the wall. These days in the Territory, lawmen went to one of the territorial capitals where they taught courses in being a lawman. Decker said, “The kid has a mother here. You shouldn’t have gotten him involved.”

  “I’m sorry I did, but he wanted to. He said he wanted to be a deputy but you wouldn’t let him.”

  “He was too raw. He had a head full of fancy notions that wouldn’t do this office or himself a damn bit of good.”

  “He wasn’t a bad bodyguard. He stayed sober and he was punctual and he was reasonably good with a Remington. That’s why he was there tonight. Spelling me.”

  “He was back shot.”

  Guild sighed. “You talk to his mother?”

  “That’s a privilege I’m going to give you, Mr. Guild. Technically, you were his employer. Seems to me it would only be fitting.”

  Guild finished his coffee and set the tin cup carefully on the fine shiny wood of the desk. Decker pushed a round leather coaster over to him. Decker was exactly the sort of man who would use coasters.

  Decker said, “Tomorrow two of my deputies are going after Kriker. You have any interest in joining them?”

  “Thought I’d just be moving on.”

  “They’re young and they could use help.”

  “You could always go.”

  “I could if I didn’t have to testify in a very important case tomorrow morning in the next county.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s time we got Kriker. You know him?”

  “No.”

  “Has his own little encampment up in the sand hills. Suspected him of a lot of things over the years but was never able to prove anything. There’s a thousand-dollar reward for the money and the men who robbed the bank.”

  “What makes you think you can prove anything now?”

  “Day of the robbery the dead man and Kriker were seen together in a local saloon. Plus I’ve got a strong suspicion that we’ll find the money somewhere in Kriker’s encampment.”

  “Why would Kriker kill him?”

  “He was weakening, your friend. Or enemy. Or whatever the hell he was. He sent me a note.”

  “A note?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you get it?”

  “Just this afternoon.”

  “Funny he didn’t mention anything to me about a note.”

  Decker made a face that said a lot funnier things had happened.

  “You mind if I see the note?” Guild said.

  Decker opened a drawer and took out a long white envelope and opened the flap. From inside the envelope he took a piece of gray paper that had been folded several times. He handed it across the desk to Guild. The paper was cheap and smudgy. In a broad shaky hand were written the words: I’d like to talk to you about me and Kriker’s part in the First Citizen Bank robbery. It was signed Merle Rig.

  Guild frowned.

  “Something wrong, Mr. Guild?”

  “Far as I knew, Merle Rig couldn’t either read or write.”

  “Maybe he had somebody write it for him.”

  “Maybe.”

  Decker took the note back and put it in the envelope and put the envelope in the drawer and then put his social face on again, the one he wore in the tinytype with the plump Decker brood.

  Decker said, “I need you to go across the alley with me. All right, Mr. Guild?”

  There were two of them and they were naked. They lay on tables in a back room noisy with the banging of creaky shutters caught in a Halloween wind. Blood soaked the sheets that covered them.

  He looked at the kid first and nodded, and then he looked at Merle Rig and nodded. Rig had nickels covering his eyes. Pennies stained green.

  The undertaker, a stout man with the flushed cheeks and bloodstained apron of a good German butcher, started to draw the sheet back over Merle Rig’s face, but Guild stopped him.

  Guild wanted to stare at the face a moment longer. He wasn’t sure shy. They hadn’t been so different, not in the final tally of things, Rig and Guild. Rig made one kind of mistake and Guild another, and that was about all. He stood there and thought how he should have told Rig that he didn’t give a particular damn about Rig knocking him out and taking the reward all for himself. People were just people and sometimes they did terrible things. Everybody did.

  The Halloween wind came. The guttering kerosene lamps in the death room fluttered and cast long cavelike shadows.

  Decker said, “I don’t know about you, Mr. Guild, but it’s real easy to get tired of staring at dead people. How about letting him draw the sheet back up?”

  Guild looked up at the undertaker, who was wiping his bloody hands off on his apron.

  Guild nodded and the undertaker drew the sheet back over Merle Rig.

  Decker put a piece of paper in Guild’s hand. “Here’s where the kid’s mother lives.”

  “You don’t think this is your job?”

  Decker said, “I wasn’t stupid enough to hire him.”

  Chapter Three

  The woman lived in a boardinghouse that smelled of laundry soap and cabbage and pipe tobacco. She lived in a wide room built off the east end of the two-story frame house. He went up two steps and started to knock and then he looked through the glass and past the curtain to where the lamplight was like butter and
where she sat in cheap calico and a shawl, darning a pair of gray work socks. She was old not so much in years, but worn-out old. When he did knock finally and she looked up finally, he saw that in fact she was not older than forty and that buried in the rawboned face were beautiful blue eyes.

  She got up and came to the door and said, “Help you, mister?”

  “You’d be Kenny’s mother.”

  She knew right away something was wrong. She crossed herself. “My God.”

  Guild said, “I’d like to come in.”

  “You’re that man who hired him, ain’t you?”

  “Please,” he said, taking off his hat and nodding to the interior.

  There was a daybed covered now with a quilt and throw pillows so it would resemble a couch. Against the opposite wall was a bed. The furniture consisted of a rocking chair and a kitchen table and a cupboard and a stove. The air smelled of cinnamon. Guild thought of his own mother and his boyhood on a farm when even in the best of times you got twenty-five cents for wheat and two cents a pound for dressed pork.

  She put a hand on his wrist and said, “He’s dead, ain’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “My God.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  “You there?”

  “When it happened?” Guild asked.

  “Yup.”

  “No. No, I wasn’t there.”

  “Where was you?”

  He thought of the fancy house and the farm girl who hadn’t wanted to. “I had business. Tonight’s my birthday.” He thought maybe the last remark would buy him a little sympathy. Then he was ashamed of himself. Her son was dead. She should be the one seeking sympathy, not him.

  She backed into the room. She had the dazed look that often accompanies news of death. In Guild’s experience people tended to do one of two things: just kind of float and fade the way she was, or get angry. She floated over to the daybed and sat down, so light the springs didn’t squeak at all, and folded her old-woman hands one across the other in her lap and then looked up at him with her young-woman eyes.