The Killers

  Wounded, and barely managing to stay one step ahead of a posse, Carmody came up with the perfect cover – acting sheriff of Salter City, a quiet little town in the middle of nowhere. But things didn’t stay quiet for very long. A green-eyed blonde named Sally had run away from her kill-crazy husband, one-time Civil War raider Sam Thornton, and straight into the arms of the notorious Eldredge clan, the meanest bunch of sheriff-hating wool hats who ever shot a man in the back. Caught between these two factions was a dangerous place to be … as Carmody quickly found out!

  THE KILLERS

  CARMODY 2

  By Peter McCurtin

  First Published by Leisure Books

  Copyright © 1971, 2015 by Peter McCurtin

  First Smashwords Edition: March 2015

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Cover Painting © Edward Martin

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges ~ Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.

  Chapter One

  My cousin Luke is the kind of sheriff there ought to be more of. It wouldn’t help to make folks any more honest, but there would be a better feeling all ’round. Luke had been sheriff of Brewster County in South Texas for close to ten years when this business with Big Sam Thornton got started. Of course, I didn’t know that or I’d have stayed away from Salter City, where Luke was headquartered. Not that old Luke would have turned me out, but, after all, do you know any sheriffs would have jumped to claim a feller like me as a cousin?

  The fact was, I didn’t know where Luke was or what he was doing. I thought about Luke about once every two years, and that’s how worried I was about his welfare. I got shot during some trouble up in New Mexico, and one of the holes in me was still giving me trouble. The law was interested in me for a few things, and I figured to take what money I had left and ride down into Old Mexico and drink tequila in the sun until I felt better and was ready to plan new business.

  Salter City, in Brewster County, was on the way. Down that way it’s hot and dry and wilder than the Dakota Badlands, country fit only for Gila monsters and Texans. I was being nice to myself, lying late in my blankets, traveling by day till I got sick of it, then bedding down early. When I got to Salter City I stopped for a drink and a meal cooked by somebody else.

  It was about noontime, the town baking in the sun, and I was in some saloon drinking a warm, flat beer when Luke came in. I saw the badge before I saw who was wearing it. When you’re on the dodge, which is what I seem to be most of the time, you get that way. Sometimes the lawmen in the real quiet towns are the worst, because they have nothing better to do than walk heavy around strangers passing through. I got set for the same old questions and answers. “New in town, ain’t you”—all that hoss-piss.

  There was none of that. This sheriff was grinning all over his leathery face. “What took you so long, Carmody?” the sheriff asked.

  “Hello, Luke,” I said, surprised and glad to see him—and not so glad. We’d done some wild things together as kids, but that was a long time ago—close to twenty years—and now Luke was a sheriff and I was dodging down to Mexico.

  Luke came up close, grinning like mad. “That all you got to say, cousin? All these years and you say hello. You won’t believe this, but you’re the man I just been thinking about.”

  “What were you thinking?” I asked, still tensed up a bit.

  Luke laughed and told the bartender to put another glass on the bar. “What in hell are you standing up for, Carmody? Come on over here and sit down.”

  Luke carried the bottle and the glasses. Looking at him, I couldn’t see that twenty years had done much to Luke. Leathery sure, but then Luke had always been leathery; of no special age. I guess he sort of looked like me; about three years older was all. One thing he still was, and that was lazy. Even as a boy, Luke would never stand up when he could sit down, and never sit when he could lie. A big eater, too, and now it showed.

  “We’ll drink your bottle first,” he said, “but you won’t pay for it. I won’t pay for it either. Folks around here just hate to take my money. A sheriff’s money is no good, they tell me. How the hell are you, Carmody?”

  I don’t remember what I told him.

  Luke grinned at me and knocked back two quick drinks. “Nobody asked you what you been doing, cousin. I said how you feel?”

  “Good, Luke,” I said. “On my way to Old Mexico.”

  Luke poured a drink for me. “There you go again, cousin. Telling me what you been doing and what you plan to do. A word—I know what you been doing.”

  “Not in Brewster County,” I said. “I guess that’s what you are—sheriff of Brewster County.”

  “You guess fine, Carmody. It ain’t much, but it’s all I got. Another word—I got it good.”

  The son of a bitch hadn’t changed one bit. Back home, Luke used to worry his folks sick with all his schemes to get rich the easy way. First, after reading about Cyrus McCormick and Sam Morse, it was inventions all the time. One of Luke’s earliest inventions was a real pip. Naturally, we all thought he was crazy. This invention was for city men, and the way Luke saw it, it would be a godsend and an act of mercy. You know what it was? It was a thing where a city man could tip his hat to a lady without taking his hands out of his pockets. It worked by squeezing a rubber ball with a rubber tube running under the clothes from pocket to hat. The squeezed air caused some damn thing under the hat to rise. Luke was good and mad when he wrote to the Patent Office in Washington and was told that some other fool had invented the same thing....

  I mentioned the hat-tipper to Luke.

  “Never did catch on, did it?” he said.

  “Someday they’ll see how wrong they were,” I said.

  Luke took off his hat and set it on the table. For a man who said he was doing so good, Luke was dressed more like a drunken dentist with dirty tools than a moneyed sheriff. He wore one of those white shirts that are supposed to go with a collar, except that Luke didn’t have a collar and the shirt wasn’t anything like the driven snow the lady poets like so much.

  “Being county sheriff is the best invention of all,” Luke said. “Works as smooth as a Massachusetts watch if you keep it oiled right. Of course, there are folks keep trying to feed sand into the works. That’s why I was thinking on you a while back. This very morning, in fact.”

  “You told me that, Luke.”

  Luke was still grinning, but his eyes were careful. “You ain’t tried to kill President Garfield? You never spit on the flag? Don’t suppose you never killed a man didn’t need killing in some way?”

  “I suppose,” I told him, not getting his point, whatever it was. There was no telling with Luke.

  “Glad to hear it, cousin,” he said. “How’d you like to be acting sheriff of Brewster County for a spell? Maybe three weeks.”

  I pointed to the half-empty bottle and Luke laughed. After that, he poured two more drinks and looked at the single bartender who was looking at us. “Fetch another bottle, Charley, then go out back and feed the chickens or something,” Luke suggested.

  “Thanks for reminding me, Luke,” the barkeep said.

  “You’re not drunk and maybe you’re not crazy,” I said. “Then what?”

  “Careful,” Luke said, “is what I am. You want the job or not
?”

  I said no.

  Luke put a doleful look on his seamed face. “Twenty-odd years a man don’t see his cousin, then he asks one small favor, and gets told no. That ain’t right, cousin. Since the family spirit seems dried up in you, does four hundred—say five hundred—change your mind?”

  I was low on folding money. “Say it straight, cousin,” I said.

  “You married, Carmody?”

  I guess Luke knew the answer to that, because he didn’t wait for an answer.

  “Me neither,” he said. “But I’m fixing to be. Been corresponding with the daintiest little thing through one of those matrimonial agencies in Baltimore, Maryland. Exchanged pictures and everything. This little gal allows that I’m sort of handsome in a craggy kind of a way...”

  Luke looked at me like a country shit-kicker, but who was I to call the lady a liar?

  “In a nut, I proposed and was accepted,” Luke said. “Lorena, that’s her name, says she’s ready to come out West by herself, but I won’t have it. This is no country for a woman, a pretty woman, on her lonesome. I told her that more than a month ago and now I’m afraid she’s getting kind of jittery. That’s why I got to go East and fetch her.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “Nobody here I can rightly trust with the job,” Luke explained. A popular man I am with some folks—not with everybody. A man leaves the store untended or in the wrong hands, there’s no telling what might happen. Sure would like to get married. Much as I’d like that, I’d hate to lose what I got here. Cousin, I’m too old to work.”

  “You always were,” I said. That five hundred looked good to me, but Luke was still my cousin; and some things count.

  “I got posters on me,” I said. “You know that.”

  “I don’t know what you got on you. You got nothing on you here.”

  “Not in Brewster County.”

  “I don’t see beyond that. Beyond that I got bad eyesight and poor hearing. Will you do it, cousin? I got nobody else. Three weeks. Not more than that.”

  “Sure,” I said. “How soon you plan to leave?”

  “Soon’s I can saddle my horse,” Luke answered cheery as blazes. He fished an extra star out of his vest pocket and leaned over to pin it to my shirt. “No need to get up, cousin, just raise your right hand and repeat after me...”

  That was how I got to be acting sheriff of Brewster County, Texas. Luke said there was nothing to it. “We got some pretty wild boys in these parts, but mostly they’re good boys. Saturday is the most trouble. Keep the peace, don’t let them burn the town, and don’t shoot anybody ’less you have to. Then shoot low. Now I got to announce the new appointment.”

  I followed Luke outside into the sun, feeling just a mite foolish. Luke was a simple feller in some things. His way of making an announcement was to pull his gun and let off a couple of shots in the air. That brought them to the doors and windows.

  “That gent with the sour face is Mayor Dunstan,” Luke whispered to me. “We don’t exactly get along, but there’s not a thing he can do about it.”

  Jerking his thumb in my direction, Luke yelled out the good news, but I must say the town folk didn’t start any wild cheering. Maybe I looked too much like Luke. “Carmody’ll take good care of the town,” Luke roared. “A more dedicated acting sheriff there never was.”

  Now that it was done, all Luke could think about was getting to Baltimore. I managed to pry loose fifty dollars from him before he waved and started for the livery stable at a heavy trot.

  “Ain’t you going to pack?” I called after him.

  In a minute, Luke was a cloud of dust heading north out of town. And there I was, standing in the middle of the main street with a sheriff’s badge on my shirt.

  I guess I’d been in Salter City all of twenty minutes.

  Chapter Two

  I was sitting in a rocker in front of the sheriff’s office when four men rode in behind a man in fancy clothes driving a buckboard. Luke had been gone two days, and when somebody said hello to me I said hello right back. That was about as deep into the job as I’d gone at the time.

  The man in the buckboard touched his hat with his finger as he went by. I didn’t remember who he was until he climbed down in front of the town’s one hotel and gave the reins to one of the riders. Malachi Fallon was who he was, and suddenly I got the feeling that life in Salter City wasn’t going to be all that simple. Even without Fallon, the four hard cases would have been enough to tell me that.

  Just about everybody in South Texas knew Malachi Fallon from his campaign posters. Some years back they were tacked up on every tree and barn door in that part of the state. He never did get to Washington or even to Austin, and after two windy campaigns he gave up. The last I’d heard of him he was running his own candidates up in Pecos County, trying to get at the pie in a roundabout way. Texans don’t always show good sense, but they knew what they were doing when they voted down Malachi Fallon. Some men are unfortunate in the way they look, and Fallon was one of them. One look at him and you knew he was a crook, not an honest crook, which is what you have to be to succeed in politics; Fallon was a crooked crook, though that didn’t keep him from being popular with some people.

  I wasn’t a bit happy to see him in Salter City. It was the kind of forgotten one-horse town that you didn’t come to unless you had a damn good reason, or you just stumbled over it, like me. I knew he wasn’t passing through because there was nothing but badlands between the town and the Mexican border. Suddenly I found myself grinning. Here I was starting to act like a real sheriff.

  Whatever it was, Fallon’s business must have been fairly important, because it wasn’t ten minutes later when he came out, climbed into the buckboard and took the road south out of town with the four hard cases trailing behind.

  “Did you see who that was?” the hotel clerk said when I went over there to pass the time of time. “Malachi Fallon himself. I voted for him both times he ran.”

  That told me something about the clerk.

  “Where did he go?” I asked.

  The clerk was still rattled by his brush with the great man. “Well, I don’t think that I should say. Mr. Fallon spoke to me in confidence ...”

  I did what Luke would have done. I wasn’t mean about it. In fact, I was smiling when I reached across the desk and took a firm hold on the clerk’s necktie. Using it to pull him forward, I whispered in his ear. “It’s all right, you can tell me,” I said. “Now where’s Fallon gone?”

  “The Eldredge place,” he said. “Two or three families, all related, live put there. I warned Mr. Fallon about them. They’re a bad bunch.”

  I let him go. “And what did Mr. Fallon say to that?”

  “Nothing. He said nothing. And he didn’t say what his business was.”

  The clerk smirked at me, the only way he could get revenge for his crumpled tie. “Maybe you’d better ask him yourself. That’s not to say you’ll get an answer.”

  I went to a three-stool eating-place down the street. It was run by a gabby old geezer who looked like he never got out in the sun. While he was frying up some ham, I asked him what he knew about this Eldredge clan. That bothered him because all he wanted to talk about was Malachi Fallon.

  He turned the ham in the skillet and pointed a fork at me. “A bad bunch. Came out here from Georgia some years back, the whole bunch of them. Can’t even say how many of them there is. Anyway—a lot. Sheriff’s had trouble with them from time to time. Mostly they keep to themself. I guess the sheriff made kind of a deal. They don’t bother the town, he don’t bother than.”

  That sounded like Luke all right, but it didn’t tell me a thing.

  “Trash is what they are,” the old man said. “What they do out there is anybody’s guess.”

  I finished my breakfast and went back to the jail. When I got sick of sitting out front in the rocker, I went inside and looked to see what Luke had in the way of guns. The gun that interested me was what they call a goose-gun, a
heavy monster, big-bored and with the barrel cut short, more like a carry-about cannon than a shotgun. It was clean as a whistle, but I worked on it anyway, to pass the time.

  I chained the guns to the rack and took myself a walk. I could see that being a sheriff took a lot of practice at doing nothing in particular. Funny thing, just before Fallon and his hard cases rode in I’d just about made up my mind that Salter City was the deadest town in Texas. Now I wanted to keep it that way.

  It must have been close to two hours later when I heard them coming back. I watched them through the office window. Now there were three hard cases instead of four and Fallon had lost his fancy hat somewhere along the way. The horse moved while Fallon was getting down, and the big man from Pecos County hauled off and kicked the animal in the side. Then he stomped into the hotel with the three gunmen trailing him like watchdogs.

  It still wasn’t law business, so I moped about some more. I broke open a bottle and drank some whiskey, and thought about Fallon. I thought about going over to say howdy-do, then decided against it. Maybe Fallon would come to me.

  I set the chair where I could watch the hotel through the window. They didn’t come out. Two boys from the livery stable came to take away the buckboard and the horses. Nothing else happened for a couple of hours.

  I heard some shouting down the street and went outside to see what it was. It was trouble, the start of all the trouble. A thickset man with a beard was driving a wagon with a saddled horse tied behind. I stepped into the street and waited for the wagon to pull up. I knew there was a dead man in the bed of the wagon before I looked inside.

  The farmer didn’t have much to say. “Got something for you, Deputy. Found him dragging from the stirrup. Dead before that, I reckon.”

  The dead man was one of Fallon’s hard cases. The farmer was right. Being dragged by his horse wasn’t what killed him. There was a hole in his forehead, and he was long dead by the time his animal spooked and ran.

  “Never seen him before,” the farmer said. “You know him?”