Carmody 5
Carmody rode into the Sangre de Cristo hills looking for a girl. The girl was worth $10,000 if he could get her away from the Garrison bunch, the meanest killers in the whole southwest. Carmody knew what the Garrison bunch would do to him if he failed. That didn’t bother him. What bothered him was the fat man who hired him and the girl he was supposed to rescue. There was something about then that wasn’t right. But for $10,000 he was willing to live with it. Or maybe die for it.
HANGTOWN
CARMODY 5
By Peter McCurtin
First Published by Belmont Tower Books in 1970
Copyright © 1970, 2016 by Peter McCurtin
First Smashwords Edition: February 2016
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 image © 2015 by Edward Martin
Series Editor: Ben Bridges
Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.
Chapter One
The stage from Yuma had stopped in front of the President Diaz Hotel. The dust-caked, sweat-streaked horses had pulled the stage all night, racing the dawn to the Mexican border. Now, with the sun full up, they rested and twitched in the traces. A hot wind spun balls of tumbleweed in the dust, bringing the wild, dry smell of the desert into the stink of Salida. It was quiet in the bandit town of Salida, with no sound, no movement in all that crackling desert heat.
The stage, the horses, and a fat man stood in the sun-blasted street.
Carmody watched the fat man pause in front of the hotel porch, blinking his eyes in the white glare, shading his eyes nervously with a pudgy hand.
The fat man was in a black suit. He was red-faced, with ginger-colored whiskers. He held a flowered carpetbag in his hand. His quick-darting eyes flickered up and down the dusty street, resting for a moment on Carmody’s horse tied at the rail in front of Don Emiliano’s cantina. Standing in the shade, Carmody didn’t know if the fat man had seen him.
The loungers on the porch of the President Diaz Hotel watched the fat man come up the steps with the soft, gliding motion fat men sometimes have. They watched him carefully but without interest. They sat with the backs of their chairs against the buckling, raw-wood porch. They watched the fat man because there was nothing else to look at in Salida.
Carmody had watched the fat man for ten minutes. He knew him. His name was Ledbetter. After he climbed down from the stage he walked down the street, mopping his red face with a huge bandanna. Now he was speaking to the loungers in front of the hotel. It was too far away for Carmody to hear what he was saying.
Carmody finished rolling a brown-paper cigarette and went back into the cantina. There was nobody else in there. “Tequila,” he said to the serving girl, Elinora, behind the bar. Her white teeth flashed in her dark face. He watched the tear in the armpit of her dress as she reached for the bottle. This Elinora was a big woman, big for a Mexican. Carmody liked them that way. This Elinora said she came from Sonora, that her father had been rich, that she was working now as a serving girl only because her rich and respected father had been killed by bandits. Every girl in every dirty cantina south of the Rio Grande had a story like that. A man got used to it after hearing it the first hundred times. Whatever she was, she was a lot better than the girls in the cribs down the street.
Carmody was thinking about the fat man when Elinora leaned over and put the tequila in front of him, with the bowl of salt next to it. He didn’t know how she knew about the fat man so soon, but she knew.
“Que te pasa?” she asked him.
“Nada,” Carmody answered. “Everything’s fine.”
“Un senor quiere verte,” the girl said.
“Let him look,” Carmody said.
Elinora asked in English, “A friend of yours?”
Carmody’s eyes narrowed at the question. He sprinkled the salt on the back of his hand and threw the raw liquor against the back of his throat. It burned. He sprinkled the salt again and had another drink before he moved toward the door. “You asked a lot of questions, honey,” he said.
“Will you be back?” she asked him as he went out of the cantina.
Carmody didn’t answer.
The bat-wing doors flapped behind him and he stood for a moment on the boardwalk, feeling the fierce heat from the street. The loungers were still on the hotel porch, but the fat man had gone inside. Carmody started down that way.
He passed the long, low adobe building where the whores who worked for Don Emiliano had their cribs. The door of the nearest crib opened as Carmody passed and two men came out buckling on their gun belts and laughing. They were two of “Marshal” Clegg Jackson’s deputies, and they stopped laughing when they saw Carmody. Clegg Jackson was Don Emiliano’s town tamer, paid well to keep the peace among the deserters, killers and long riders who made up the population of Salida. There had been trouble with Jackson and Carmody knew it would come to more than mean looks, sooner or later.
The two gunmen stood on the boardwalk, looking after Carmody.
He pushed through the heavy doors of the hotel and went inside. After the glare of the street, it took his eyes some time to get used to the dim light of the lobby. The lobby was one big room, and now it was empty except for the clerk behind the desk and the fat man sitting in a broken-backed leather chair beside a dusty potted plant, the hotel’s one and only attempt at elegance.
There was the smell of dry rot, ancient wax polish, and sweat. The smell of sweat was gaining on the others, Carmody decided. He looked at the fat man as he made for the stairs. The fat man was reading a crumpled newspaper, the Tombstone Star, and he didn’t look up as Carmody went by.
The clerk’s name was Charlie Betts. He had a silky moustache and a bent nose run through with broken veins, and he wore his ratty hair in what the soldier boys called a “Prussian cut”. Carmody had never figured out why a room clerk wanted to wear his hair like that. Carmody asked him if there was anything he should know.
“Not a thing,” the clerk said, and his eyes flicked over to the fat man, then back to what he was doing with a stack of papers.
Carmody went upstairs without looking at the fat man again. He pushed open the door to his room and felt the stuffy coolness inside. There was a bed and a chair and a battered dresser. Dust was thick on everything and he hadn’t wiped it off or asked to have it done. It wouldn’t have done any good if he had asked. Don Emiliano ran the hotel as well as everything else in Salida, and if a man got a bed without bedbugs he counted himself lucky. Carmody had slept in a lot worse places.
Thinking about the fat man downstairs, he dug into the rumpled blankets on the bed until he found what was left of a quart of tequila. There was a candleholder on the chair beside the bed. When he put away enough raw spirits to hold him for a bit, he put the bottle on the chair and built himself another brown-paper smoke. Carmody had spent enough time in Mexico, some of that time in Mexican jails, to like the taste of Mexican tobacco. It was strong and bitter, like tequila, like the coffee the Mexicans boiled and re-boiled until it was black enough to stain a new parlor floor.
Carmody had spent most of the morning cleaning and oiling his guns. There wasn’t a whole lot else to do during the day in Salida. It helped a man to while away the long hot daylight hours before the serious poker playing started in Don Emiliano’s cant
ina, but apart from that it was something that had to be done. There seemed to be more metal-punishing, grey-white dust in Salida than any place he had ever been. That wasn’t true, of course. What was true was that nothing ever happened in Salida. That was kind of peculiar in a way, since the town was filled at any given time with some of the meanest gun-happy hombres from five states and territories. But Don Emiliano, with the help of his special town tamer, Clegg Jackson, managed to keep the peace. Any man who started trouble in Salida died shortly afterward. Right or wrong, he died. It didn’t matter a hang if the other feller started shooting first. Clegg Jackson’s boys killed the survivor. There was no use appealing to Don Emiliano. Usually, there wasn’t time, but even if there were the answer was always the same. Don Emiliano, who was so old that it was rumored he had fought against the Texans at the Alamo, would be polite and regretful. But the law was the law. Carmody figured it was fair enough.
Putting away another drink from the bottle, he reminded himself to ask Elinora at the cantina for some salt to take to his room. Tequila was a fine drink—something to burn a man’s gullet and make him sit up and take notice—but it wasn’t the same without salt. Farther south, in the fancier cantinas where the barkeeps fought the cockroaches to a draw, they took their tequila with a slice of lemon. One time Carmody had it like that in Hermosillo. In Salida you took it with salt and were glad to get it.
Carmody began to think the girl had been wrong about the fat man looking for him. Maybe Ledbetter had mentioned his name. Maybe he had asked for a lanky Texas rider with grey-blue eyes and a dun-colored horse. That could be Carmody, or it could be a lot of people. A man like Ledbetter got around more than most fat men in the heat, and he knew more than a few people. It didn’t matter one way or another. Ledbetter worked—and moved—slow and cautious, and Carmody had no plan to go anyplace at that particular moment. In a week maybe, but not right then.
The money Carmody had taken from the Greenwood bunch up in the Indian Territory was just about gone. That was more than six months before, and if he were the thrifty type it could have lasted two or three years. But he wasn’t, and it didn’t. It seemed like a man’s money just dwindled away in those high-stake poker games in Nogales and El Paso, Carmody thought with a grin. Pretty soon he would have to think serious-like about getting himself another bankroll. There were several possibilities, none of them too clear in his head as yet. He had, he figured, about seventy-five dollars left from the money Luke Greenwood had stolen and he’d stolen back. Prices were high in Salida, from tequila to stolen beefsteaks, and if the bad run of luck he’d been having at poker held up, the seventy-five dollars might not last as long as another week.
Carmody heaved himself off the creaking, broken-backed bed and made room for his gun-cleaning gear on the chair. Working on his guns always relaxed him. A town like Salida snapped at a man’s nerves, and the tequila and the cantina girl Elinora helped, but not all the time. Besides—and he grinned at the idea—a man couldn’t drink and bull his brains out twenty-four hours a day. Taken by itself, it was a fine idea, and he had nothing against it as an idea, but it just didn’t work.
Cleaning the guns, working on them slow and careful always worked. As Carmody saw it, a man couldn’t give his weapons too much care. A gun in working order was better than any friend. Oiled and ready, a gun just lay there until a man needed it. Carmody guessed a fat man like Ledbetter liked money better than anything else, except maybe filling his belly till it stood out from the rest of him like a wide-bellied woman with twins.
Carmody knew somehow that Ledbetter would be along sooner or later. It was possible that the girl in the cantina was wrong, but he didn’t think so. Whatever Ledbetter had in mind had to be important, and that could only mean important money, or else a fat, careful man like that would never risk his neck by coming to a hellhole like Salida. Carmody knew Ledbetter and he knew of him, and there was nothing to like. Ledbetter—Josiah Ledbetter—was a go-between, a bribe taker and a bribe-giver, a trader and, above all, a man with connections in high places, meaning in places where robbers without guts hired other men to be brave for them. During the Grant administration, when every yellow thief in broadcloth had been running wild, Ledbetter had made money off the goddamned Indians. He cheated the red bastards on Government rations and at the same time sold them rifles that blew up in their faces and whisky that blew up in their guts. It seemed like the fat son of a bitch was mixed up in everything that made other men puke.
Lying on the scoop-middled bed, Carmody jacked the shells out of the new .44-40 Winchester he’d bought in Nogales. He up-ended the rifle and squinted through the barrel and cursed at the dust in there. There wasn’t enough dust to bother another man, but Carmody cursed at it. He wished to hell somebody would come up with a lighter gun oil. The sons of bitches back in Connecticut had been talking about it long enough.
Carmody grinned at himself. Salida was one hell of a town, to make a man get burry like that. After another swallow of tequila he blew the dust out of the barrel and reloaded the Winchester. He pumped in the shells, enjoying the way they slipped in without a catch. He put the rifle beside him on the bed and prodded the shells out of his handgun. The handgun was new too, a .44-40 like the rifle. It was right handy, he thought, to have two weapons that took the same loads. It gave him the edge of being able to shoot in close or out far with the same kind of bullets. Truth to tell, he wouldn’t have gotten rid of his old .45, edge or no edge, if the cylinder stop spring hadn’t been acting up ...
Somebody knocked on the door.
Chapter Two
Carmody’s handgun was back in its holster, close to his hand. “It’s open,” he said.
Ledbetter came in. Carmody decided that Ledbetter wasn’t fat at all, just pumped full of wind. Full of wind or gas, like a balloon, or he ate too many fried onions and never got rid of them natural. Or maybe the bad air from the fried onions came out the other way, out of his wet little mouth, but not enough to get rid of the bloat in his belly.
Carmody had been drinking and cleaning his guns for a long time. Both had relaxed him to where he didn’t care about much. Nothing could make him like Ledbetter, but he was ready to let the fat man live and get fatter than he normally was, that is, if Ledbetter didn’t do anything real drastic to upset his mood.
Ledbetter had been blotting the sweat on his face. It was something he did wherever he was, in the Mexican desert or in Colorado in winter. The red bandanna he used was big enough to cover a small restaurant table. It had a wide check, and he could have sold it as a tablecloth. Now it was as damp as if a schooner of beer had been spilled on it—or a schooner of sweat.
“Is it always this hot, Carmody?” the fat man asked, flapping the damp bandanna like a bullfighter who wasn’t sure of what he was doing.
Carmody hadn’t seen Ledbetter sweat so much since the time back in Leadville, when a miners’ court had offered to hang him if he didn’t quote a more reasonable price for a consignment of Chinese whores he’d packed into Colorado all the way from San Francisco.
“You sit on the bed, Ledbetter,” Carmody told him. “I’ll take the chair.”
Carmody got up and cleared the stuff off the chair and the fat man put his weight on the bed. It creaked but it held him.
“You look all wore-out, Ledbetter,” Carmody said, putting his bony backside on the chair and stretching his long legs. “You sure you don’t want a drink or something?”
Ledbetter looked ready to drop. He always did. “What is it?” he asked.
Carmody told him what was in the bottle and the fat man made a face.
“No whisky?” the fat man asked, still flapping the sweated-through tablecloth.
Carmody looked at the wet bandanna and Ledbetter put it away. Beads of sweat twinkled in the fat man’s face whiskers. The sweat twinkled and gathered and then broke loose from the face hair and ran down his triple chin, like water seeping through the wall of a cave.
“No whisky,” Carmody told h
im, enjoying everything, “and no water. No water in Salida unless you want to get the green apple trots and then some. The trots wouldn’t suit you, Ledbetter.”
Carmody passed Ledbetter the bottle of tequila and he drank from it.
“Tastes like piss,” Ledbetter said, drinking anyway. “Damned if it don’t.”
“You should know,” Carmody said.
Putting away the tequila tired the fat man but not so much that he didn’t tackle the bottle again. When he go through he had to rest. He passed the bottle back to Carmody. Carmody made a lot of show about wiping the neck of the bottle on his sleeve. After it was clean enough he drank some himself.
Ledbetter got some of his strength back. He looked at the gun-cleaning gear where Carmody had put it on the dresser, then at Carmody. “Still at it,” he said.
“The hell with you,” Carmody said.
The fat man held his hand out for the bottle. Carmody didn’t give it to him. Instead, he finished it himself. “You better have a good reason to come looking for me, Ledbetter,” he warned. “A man like you could give the town a bad name.”
Now that the politeness was out of the way, Ledbetter got down to business. “You know who Marcus Yates is?” he started.
Carmody didn’t answer. It was a stupid question. Everybody on both sides of the Mississippi knew something about Marcus Yates, the copper baron. Mostly they knew old man Yates was one of the richest, most powerful men in the West. The grafting politicians knew him better than anybody else. Marcus Yates made Congressmen and Senators and Governors the way other men whittled wooden guns for youngsters.
Ledbetter could be direct when he wanted to. “Mr. Yates has lost his daughter and he wants her back.”
Carmody asked, “How much is he willing to pay?”
The fat man held up a puffy hand. “We’ll talk about that part later.” He dug into a pocket and handed Carmody a studio photograph backed by heavy pasteboard. “The girl’s name is Katherine, and you can see she’s quite a looker.”