Relentless Read online

  I slogged through the mail. There was a time when I thought illiterate people were stupid. I’d graduated high school myself. But I’d been out on the street long enough now to know that the opposite was true. Illiterate people could be awfully smart and literate people could be awfully dumb. A lot of the letters of complaint I get are in a kind of pidgin English. I’d gotten pretty good at translating. What all these letters came down to was that they wanted help. Most of them were immigrants, Germans, Irish, a handful of Jews and Swedes, who were finding America less accommodating than they’d expected. The problems they described weren’t monumental, but it was easy to see that they were ongoing and frustrating problems-mostly having to do with getting hired and getting a line of credit and finding a neighborhood that would accept them-and so I helped any way I could. I usually went to the party they were having trouble with and pleaded the immigrants’ case for them.

  And got some satisfaction. If you approach most people reasonably, they’ll respond reasonably.

  I was halfway through the pile when Tom Ryan said, “That Hastings kid is still looking for you. He’s been here a week now.”

  “Aw, shit,” I said.

  “Says he wants to ‘fight the man who outdrew Sansom.’ ”

  “I didn’t outdraw Sansom. He was so damned drunk he fell into the path of my bullet.”

  Tom grinned. “Well, that still hasn’t stopped people from turning you into a legend. Peace-loving lawman kills notorious killer. That kind of thing.”

  “And Hastings traveled all the way from Mesa, Arizona, to fight me?”

  “That’s what I’m told. I guess some yellowback writer said if he managed to kill you, he’d write a book about him.”

  “He came all the way up here because of that?”

  “He’s nineteen, Lane. You know how you are when you’re nineteen.”

  “Thank God I was never nineteen that way. I wasn’t any wizard, but at least I knew better than to take the word of some asshole who wrote yellowbacks for a living. Where’s he staying?”

  Tom looked surprised. “You aren’t going to fight him, are you?”

  “No, but I’m going to have a little talk with him before I swing out and see Lucy Daly with the good news.”

  “He’s at the Excelsior.”

  I got through the mail before I left. Most of it went into the wastebasket. I stood up, grabbed my hat, and said, “I’ll be back around three.”

  “You need any help?”

  “Last time I looked, Lucy Daly weighed about eighty pounds and was blind in one eye. I think I can whip her.”

  “Very funny. I mean with the punk.”

  “Thanks for the offer, Tom. But I think I can handle him, too.”

  Perry Dolan, the day clerk at the Excelsior Hotel, nodded when he saw me approach the front desk. “You look pretty serious this morning, Marshal. You must’ve lost some money in one of Gunderson’s card games upstairs.”

  I smiled. “I’m smart enough to stay out of those, believe me.”

  “You looking for somebody?”

  “You got a kid named Ned Hastings.”

  “I figured that’s what it was about. He ran his mouth all over town last night. We had to carry him up to his room.” Dolan had a round, friendly face. “He ain’t in no danger of becomin’ a beloved figure.”

  “He’s going to fight me?”

  “That’s what he tells everybody.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got a few other things on my mind. I need to settle this fast.”

  “He’s up there if you want him.”

  “Give me the extra key.”

  He did.

  “You going to shoot him, Marshal?”

  I smiled. “Sure, Perry. Shoot him in his sleep. That’s pretty much what I’m known for, isn’t it?”

  He laughed. “You know what I mean. You going to force him into a gunfight?”

  “Can you remember any gunfight happening in this town since I became marshal?”

  He hesitated. “Say, that’s right.”

  “And there won’t be any this time either.” I nodded to his coffeepot. “How about giving me a cup of that to take upstairs?”

  He looked puzzled, then shrugged and got the coffee.

  ***

  The hotel was pretty much empty for the day. The drummers who stayed here would all be out drumming, and the new folks hadn’t yet arrived for tonight. An orange tomcat sat at the top of the landing, his fur being bombarded by the dust motes in the golden sun streaming through the window.

  Ned Hastings was snoring loudly enough to rattle the door. I let myself in. He looked like every would-be tinhorn gunny I’d ever seen. He’d been so drunk he slept in his clothes. Fancy leather cowboy boots. Fancy white six-guns riding in a fancy black holster rig. A fancy black vest that would have looked nicer against the white shirt if the white shirt hadn’t been soiled with vomit, beer, and blood. His nose was bloody. Drunks were always hurting themselves. Or letting other people hurt them.

  A carpetbag sat in the comer. On the bureau was a framed reverent photograph of a striking young woman who bore a definite resemblance to Ned. Either his sister or his mother in her youth. Hard to say.

  I didn’t have any trouble with his six-guns. He went right on snoring. Every once in a while he farted. The room was starting to suffocate me with its hothouse odors.

  When I finished with his guns, I grabbed his hair and yanked him to his feet. He cursed, managed to get his eyes open, cursed some more, tried to swing at me, and made a choking sound convincing enough so that I let him go long enough to throw up in the chamber pot.

  While he was wiping off his mouth with the back of his hand, I handed him the steaming cup of coffee. He needed a shave, a bath, and a little humility.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “The first clue,” I said, tapping my marshal’s star, “is that I’m the law.”

  “I shoot somebody last night?”

  “You probably tried.”

  He sipped some coffee, made a face. “This tastes like shit.”

  “Drink it anyway.”

  He was gradually coming awake. He glanced at the bureau. “What’re those?”

  “Bullets.”

  “I know they’re bullets.” Then he looked down at his guns and said, “Hey, those’re my bullets.”

  “That’s right.” I took out my Colt. Held my hand out, palm up, emptied my own gun. Set the six bullets on the bureau next to his. “And this is my gun.”

  “What the hell you trying to prove anyway?”

  “That you’d be crazy to fight me.”

  “You killin’ Sansom doesn’t scare me none.”

  “I didn’t kill Sansom. Sansom killed Sansom. He was so drunk, he fell into my bullet. He stumbled at the exact moment my bullet was going past him. It was a warning shot was all.”

  He touched a trembling hand to his forehead. This was probably too much for him to grasp in the first hot, dehydrated, spooky moments of hangover. “So what’s the point of empty guns?”

  “When you finish your coffee, I want you to draw down on me.”

  “With an empty gun?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because if there were bullets in our guns, I’d kill you. And I don’t think your mom or your sister or whoever’s in that picture over there would appreciate that.”

  He grinned with bad teeth, his wisp of a mustache looking like spider legs on his upper lip. “You gonna teach me a lesson, huh?”

  “I’m going to try. And if you’re smart, it’s a lesson you’ll remember.”

  “This is damned silly. People’ll laugh when they hear it.”

  “It’s not any sillier than fighting with bullets. Most things can be worked out by talking them through. Unless the people involved are drunk or stupid. Now put that damned coffee down and draw on me.”

  He made a big show of starting to feint to the left, setting his coffee on the b
ureau. But what he did, of course, was angle to the right and grab one of his guns. Even with his momentary head start, my Colt was clear and pointing right at his chest before his had even cleared leather.

  “You sonofabitch.”

  “You’d be dead, kid.”

  “You got me at a bad time. I’m still sorta drunk from last night.”

  “Kid, I spent six years in the Army. Dullest job I ever had. We mostly pulled sentry duty. But instead of walking post, we played a lot of cards and worked on our draws. I was about your age. I got pretty fast, but I was slow compared to a lot of the other soldiers. There never was a Wild West, kid. Not in the way you think there was. There were a lot of drunken back-shooters and ambushers and men like Sansom who were so drunk they stumbled into bullets. But actual gunfights between sober men? The old duels in the South, those were gunfights. And they had strict rules. But you’re trying to live out some bullshit you read about in a dime novel. That’s up to you, kid. But you’re not going to live it out in this town, you understand? There’s a train at three and a stage at four. Take your choice. Be on one or the other.”

  “I rode in with my own horse.”

  “Tough shit. Train or stage. I’ll have deputies at each depot to make sure you get on board.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “Then you go to jail.”

  “For what?”

  I smiled. “I’m not sure yet. But I’ve got a pretty good mind when it comes to thinking up ways to keep youngsters like you in jail.”

  He did it. I expected it. He did it and I did it, and I beat him to it even faster than I had before.

  “And in every town you go to, kid, there’ll be ten men even faster than I am. And they won’t be gunnies, they’ll just be average citizens all settled down and married. They do their fast draws at family reunions and picnics to show off to the grandkids. They wouldn’t get into a gunfight any more than you’d try to jump off a mountain and fly. That fast-draw stuff is strictly for yellowbacks, kid. And you’d better learn that before it’s too late.”

  He threw a lot of dirty words at the door I was pulling closed behind me. I hoped he’d take the train or the stage. I didn’t like him. I didn’t want him in my jail.

  Perry Dolan looked up as I walked over to his front desk. “You take care of him, Marshal?”

  “Shot him four times in his sleep. In the back.”

  “You ever gonna let me forget that?”

  I laughed. “Not anytime soon.”

  “Hey,” he said, “what’s this?”

  He hefted a large envelope on the palm of his hand, then held it up for me to see. It had my name on it. No stamp, no other markings.

  “Where’d this come from?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I had to step down the hall a minute. I guess somebody must’ve put it here when I was gone. Anyway, here you go.”

  ***

  I took the envelope with me. I headed for the livery. I was looking forward to giving Lucy Daly the good news.

  About a block from the livery I opened the envelope and peeked inside. I didn’t have any time to give it a proper count, but a rough guess put the value of all those greenbacks inside at somewhere around $10,000.

  There was a simple card with a typewritten note on it.

  FROM A FRIEND

  THREE

  THE ENVELOPE RODE in my saddlebags all the way out to Lucy Daly’s and back. Even when Lucy was hugging me and making me eat one of her locally famous muffins, all I could think about was what that envelope meant. She got a little teary at the end, Lucy did, so thankful that I’d been able to strike a deal with the tax assessor, who’d come up with some alternative way to assess her. She looked worn and sweet and lonely standing there on the porch of her faded little ranch house. She made me wonder about my own folks back in Nebraska. I really did need to see them soon. I wasn’t getting any younger and they sure as hell weren’t either.

  My first hour back in town was taken up with a squabble between Larry Carstairs, who runs one of the two general stores, and his competitor Max Barlow, who runs the other one. They’d gotten into a fistfight right in the middle of the street over something that one of them allegedly said about the other. The person who’d started the fight was one Kenneth T. Blaine, a haberdasher who loved to start trouble.

  When he couldn’t do it by passing along legitimate gossip, he just made it up.

  Now, a fistfight isn’t usually a big problem for a peace officer. No guns, no knives, just fists. You angle yourself in between the fighters and give each of them a shove in the opposite direction.

  But there’s something you have to know about Carstairs and Barlow. Larry’s sixty-eight, and Max is seventy-one. Larry has a heart condition, and Barlow has asthma so bad you can hear him coming a block away.

  There is always an element of folks who’ll turn out for any kind of fight-dogs, cats, kids, doesn’t matter as long as there’s combat of some sort.

  But this was ridiculous, two old coots swinging wild like this, either one of them perfectly capable of dropping dead on the spot.

  I didn’t give either of them a shove. I was afraid to. What I did was get my arms around each of their necks and start moving them toward the shade of our town park. We’ve got some nice elms standing over park benches there.

  I didn’t pay any attention to what they were saying. I just told somebody to run and get their wives.

  With that suggestion, both men quit their angry babbling.

  “What you want to go and do that for?” Larry said.

  “We can settle this our ownselves,” Max said.

  “Yeah, you were doing a fine job of it,” I said. “The temperature’s somewhere in the high eighties, you both have serious medical conditions, and between you you’re going on two hundred years old. Yeah, you were doing a damn fine job of it, all right.”

  “She’s gonna kick my ass clear into the next county, Sheriff,” Larry said, sounding like a scared little kid.

  “Good,” I said. “Maybe next time, you’ll keep that in mind.”

  “She won’t bake me a pie for two weeks,” Max said. “That’s how she always punishes me.”

  “I just wish that damned Kenny Blaine hadn’t told me what you said about me,” Larry said.

  “That’s what I was tryin’ to tell you,” Larry said. “I didn’t say it. And if I wanted to say it, I sure as hell wouldn’t say it to Kenny Blaine, who’d go right straight to you and tell you I said it.”

  I left it to their wives to sort through it all.

  ***

  I was just finishing up my mail when he came in. The sudden silence was what made me look up. Tom had been talking to another deputy about an upcoming court trial when the door opened. And then they stopped talking.

  I looked up to see what could possibly cause them to just quit speaking. And there in the doorway stood my answer.

  You think of important men as exuding their importance. Something lionlike in their look or manner or gait. You don’t think of them as small, slight men with small, slight voices and nervous little mannerisms. It was said that Paul could fill your ashtray with his fingernails. He was always anxiously chewing on them and spitting them out. This wasn’t to say that he wasn’t capable of violence. But he ordered it, he didn’t participate in it.

  He said, “I wondered if we might speak somewhere alone, Marshal.”

  Tom said, "Time for our break anyway, Lane. Why don’t we head down the street.” Tom always knew how to handle things.

  “Sure.”

  They left.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your day this way, Marshal.”

  “Why don’t you sit down, Paul?”

  He sat down. He wore a cheap suit, had a cheap haircut, and smoked a cheap little corncob pipe. He couldn’t have weighed more than one-thirty or topped five-five. How he’d produced his strapping, belligerent son had long been a subject of comic speculation.

  He bit a nail and said, “Did you get my pac
kage?”

  “Yes, I did, Paul.”

  “That’s a serious offer.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’m just trying to spare you and the town some trouble.”

  “I know that, too, Paul.”

  “This has changed him, Marshal.”

  “I see.”

  “I know that sounds like something any father would say, but it really has changed him. Made Trent see the kind of young man he’s turning into. Throwing his weight around and bullying people and everything.” He hesitated. Bit on a nail. “It’s kind of funny.”

  “Oh?”

  “My father was a big, burly man just like Trent is. He was always sorry that I didn’t turn out more like him. I suppose he figured it took a big man to oversee everything he’d built up for himself-two short-line railroads, a big cattle spread, three different factories right here in town, half-dozen banks-he didn’t think I could ever handle it all. I just wish he could’ve lived to see me triple everything he did. These days a man needs brains, not brawn.”

  I agree.

  Another gnaw on his nail. He spat the residue precisely into my empty ashtray. “He’s a throwback, Trent is. I’m working on him, Marshal. I really am. I want him to make something of himself before it’s too late.”

  I hated to say it, but I had to. I believed Paul’s contrition and humility. But he had to look at the facts. “He tried to kill me, Paul. I’m the law here. There are half-dozen witnesses to what he did.”

  He cleared his throat. “They’re not going to testify.” There was always a point in any conversation with Paul when you had to take a closer look at him. And when you did take a second look, you saw the big strapping soul of his reflected in his eyes. He might not have his daddy’s body, but he sure did have his daddy’s heart and spirit. He would do anything to have his way.

  “I see,” I said.

  “They’re good citizens, Marshal, that’s all. They don’t think a trial would be good for the town. People would take sides, argue. They love this town as much as I do.” He paused. “And as much as you do, Marshal. Because I know you love this town.”