High Lonesome Read online

  “And somebody else has the same idea?” Lassiter asked.

  The whore, drunk enough now, shook the empty bottle. Lassiter waved at the waiter for another. Even saloon whores could get in a non-commercial mood with enough whiskey in their bellies. He wished to hell she’d finish the story before she got too drunk to be any good in her crib.

  Over in the corner the player piano was murdering “Dixie.” Some of the drunken gunnies at the bar were yelling their approval of the old Southern tune. Lassiter noticed that a lot of the hired guns had cornpone accents like the big deputy outside town. But there were others too—greasy Mexicans, thick Irishmen, dumb Swedes, even some Germans with little piggy-blue eyes. And they all had guns.

  “The trouble starts when Major Caulfield come here and bring Sheriff O’Neal along with him,” the whore told Lassiter. “Before that Mr. Danvers— Colonel Danvers—run this whole part of Socorro County. Mr. Danvers—Colonel—was in the war too. From Massachusetts or Rhode Island, I hear. He come down here to New Mexico because he has bad lungs. A very rich man with a lot of money. A lot of influence back East in Washington. Doesn’t like Southern people, you know.”

  The Mexican waiter came back trying to push another bottle of whiskey. Lassiter told him to go to hell. The Mex shrugged and went back to the bar. Lassiter finished the story for the whore.

  “So you have the Major and his pet sheriff on one side and this Colonel Danvers and his bad lungs on the other. They don’t get along. They want the whole country, so they don’t get along. Little things get worked up into big trouble. People get shot. Sometimes it’s an accident. Both sides claim to have the legal law on their side. Then some more people get shot and everybody starts taking sides. Peacemakers try to make peace and it doesn’t work. Finally, both parties start hiring fast guns.”

  The whore looked at Lassiter with admiration. “You know everything. Why do you ask me for answers.”

  Lassiter finished his drink and that drink finished the second bottle. He shrugged. “It’s the history of the West, honey,” he said. He wanted to ask her about Wesley Boone—not that he really had to ask her why Boone was in town—but the whore looked sleepy. Lassiter didn’t want to waste any more time on talk. He wanted a woman now.

  “You sure you got the money, mister?” she wanted to know.

  Lassiter showed it to her.

  Chapter Three

  Serafina’s tiny room upstairs over the bar in the McDade Paradise was like all the whores’ cribs Lassiter had ever been in. Lassiter had straddled whores, when he needed to, all the way from the Canadian border to the state of Morelos, in Mexico. At other times, when he was in the money, and sometimes when he was not, he had bulled the most beautiful of ladies in canopied beds with silken sheets and goose-down pillows.

  Lassiter had bulled an old Senator’s young wife. He had bulled the most famous and most beautiful Italian opera singer ever to sing in the Opera House in Denver. He had bulled a sixteen-year-old virgin inside the walls of a convent in Vera Cruz. Now he was getting ready to bull a mixed-blood whore in a smelly little room upstairs over the McDade Paradise.

  The whore’s bed was a single, and not by any accident. That way a drunken customer didn’t get to fall asleep after he’d finished straddling the girl. As long as the girl stayed on the bottom, there was nowhere else for the customer to go but out. Lassiter thought about this and smiled because he felt he could use some real sleep in a real bed. Even a whore’s bed that was more dirty than clean.

  The whore wasn’t wearing anything under the black beaded dress. She flung the dress over the back of the single hard chair, kicked off her shoes, and bounced herself onto the bed, legs wide open. “Start riding, mister,” she called out, drunk from all that whiskey but not as drunk as she should have been. Lassiter had met only a few whores who liked their job, but maybe he was going to be in luck this time.

  The whore was good all right. The whiskey had her steamed up the point where she seemed to forget that the big man on top of her was a paying customer. Though Lassiter hadn’t worked on a woman for a week, the rotgut inside him slowed him down just enough so it wouldn’t be too short a ride. The whore kept calling him by some name he couldn’t make out. John or Don—something like that. Probably some village Romeo back in some farmers’ town in Louisiana. Lassiter didn’t care one goddam bit what the crotch-thumper called him as long as she stayed enthused about the job on hand. It was just plain luck, he grinned, to find the one whore in the whole New Mexico who gave back as good as she got.

  “Oh, you keep doing that to me,” she kept on saying, mentioning that feller’s name every so often. “I feel it and what I feel is good.”

  This whore Serafina had a good body for a saloon girl. A few bruises here and there but no burns. The whore was still young enough and good enough at her job so she didn’t get the customers mad at her. The burning with cigarillos, and the beating, started when the customers got mad at themselves.

  Downstairs, right under the bed it seemed, the miserable clockwork piano was murdering “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” Lassiter couldn’t altogether believe the whore was coming to a climax. But there it was, and she wasn’t trying to fool him as far as he could see. Well, I’ll be damned straight to hell! Lassiter thought. No man in his right mind would ever believe such a story, that is if he had a mind to tell it, which he hadn’t.

  The whore was bucking under him like a spunky little pony trying to unseat a heavy rider. Don or John—whatever it was—she kept calling out that god blasted name. Lassiter thought he felt pretty good, which was about as good as Lassiter ever felt, about the whole entire business. For two silver dollars this was about as good a value as a man could find. With the whiskey starting to wear off somewhat, Lassiter felt his own need very strongly. He held the little whore steady with his large-knuckled hands, massaging the tight muscles of her behind, bulling her strong and deep. “Oh sweet Christ!” the whore began to yell. “Oh dear sweet goddam Christ! I’m starting to go!”

  The minute the whore reached her climax, Lassiter let go. Man, I needed that bad, he told himself. Inside the whore’s tiny room it was hotter than Hades. The bottom sheet—there was no top—was sweated right through. Most of all there was the stink of cheap perfume mixed with some kind of disinfectant. “I expect you want me to vacate,” Lassiter said, still weighting down the girl. Tell the truth, he could do with some rest.

  “You don’t have to leave just yet,” the girl said.

  Lassiter didn’t know what to make of this. The usual rule was to get the paying customers in and out fast.

  “This my day off,” the whore said.

  “You just liked my looks, is that it?” Lassiter asked, not believing it one bit.

  “What’s wrong with that?” the whore said, offended at the notion that a saloon girl couldn’t have any bed encounters outside her work.

  “Not a thing,” Lassiter said easily, lifting himself off the girl. “I just figured maybe you might have some kind of special interest in me. You or somebody else, that is.”

  While she was chewing on that, Lassiter buttoned up his pants and buckled his gunbelt into place. Hot damn, he thought, I could do with a soak in a hot tub. He started hunting for his boots.

  The whore had an answer ready. She wasn’t all that good at the playful stuff, but she gave it a try. This girl didn’t have a big future in the whore business, Lassiter decided. Lots of brass but no real nerve.

  “You object to my having an eye for you?” she asked, coy as she could make it. And that was so coy it could make a man sick.

  Lassiter sat on the edge of the grubby little bed and stomped on his boots. The badly applied rouge on the girl’s cheekbones was smeared. She was still young enough so that the rice powder and messed-up rouge made her look like a sassy child playing fallen woman. The smile she flashed at Lassiter was as fake as an Indian agent’s goodwill.

  Smiling so she wouldn’t know what to think, Lassiter reached out one big hand and grabbed her
by the throat. He squeezed just hard enough to let her know he wasn’t fooling. When she tried to say something, Lassiter’s hard fingers tightened on her neck. The girl’s brown eyes widened with real fear. “I’ll do the talking, honey or senorita or whatever you are,” Lassiter told her. First off I want some answers to some questions. You hear now, first the questions, then the answers. When I let you talk, you better talk. Understand?”

  Half choked, the whore nodded as vigorously as she could.

  “Now,” Lassiter said, “I want to know who sicced you on me. By any chance would it be a gent called Wesley Boone. And if it wasn’t Boone, then who was it?”

  Lassiter loosened his hold just enough so he could shut off her wind if she decided to holler for help. Maybe he should have paid more attention to the door behind him than to the girl. He heard the door opening all right but not the doorknob turning. By then it was just one bit too late. A voice he didn’t know said, “Stay right where you are, cowboy. Move and I’ll blow you to kingdom come.”

  Lassiter stayed rock still.

  Another man’s voice—familiar now—chimed in. “That’s him, Sheriff. That’s the big bad man himself. Had himself a little hayride, it looks like ...”

  “Shut up, Muley,” the first voice ordered. “You turn around now, cowboy. Slow and easy,” it said to Lassiter.

  Lassiter didn’t figure to try anything, but maybe they thought he might. The voice said next, “You think I won’t blast you with both barrels ’cause of the girl—you’re wrong, cowboy. One more time I’ll tell you—turn around.”

  Lassiter found himself looking right down the muzzles of two sawed-off shotguns. It was like he thought—the hayseed deputy from the trail. He didn’t doubt the other man was Sheriff Billy O’Neal. The Sheriff was a big wide man, not a day under fifty, and so naturally hard looking he didn’t have to act mean. The droopy mustache was more gray than ginger but the mouth half-hidden by it was thin and firm. A lot of the better known frontier lawmen got themselves up to look like preachers or gamblers but not Billy O’Neal. He had started out as a Texas trail herder, and he still looked something like that. Only cleaner.

  “You want to ask me something, Sheriff?” Lassiter asked quietly.

  The lawman looked him over carefully.

  The bigmouth deputy sprayed some spit. “Not so big now, are you, big man. Say hello to Sheriff Billy O’Neal, big man. And you call me Mister.”

  “I told you shut up, Muley,” O’Neal said. “And stay shut up till I tell you.”

  The whore struggled up off the bed. She glared at Lassiter. “He try to kill me, Mister O’Neal,” she started off. “Dirty stinking pig. I give him a real good ride and he try to kill me.”

  The whore’s feelings were hurt and she had given Lassiter what she called a good ride. The Sheriff gestured for her to get out but she kept right on. “I do just what you tell me, Mister O’Neal. When you speak with Muley here and tell me get this stinking pig up here. You didn’t mean you’d shoot me...”

  “Course not, girl,” O’Neal lied. “Now you open your mouth one more time and I’ll let Muley have you.”

  Lassiter wished the hell they’d get on with it.

  “I’d surely like that,” Muley chortled.

  The Sheriff gave the whore one more look and she hurried out of there. Under the watchful eye of O’Neal’s scattergun, Muley snatched Lassiter’s gun out of its holster. The hayseed deputy showed his broken teeth in a wide grin. He wanted to stay for the fun but O’Neal shooed him out.

  After that O’Neal took it slow and easy. Lassiter had heard that Billy O’Neal didn’t smoke or drink. The fact was he didn’t do much of anything. Lassiter figured he was the sort of man who saved his speed and his strength for when he needed it most.

  Downstairs there was a lot of yelling and somebody fired a couple of shots into the player piano.

  The music faltered, then went on at a crazy tempo. O’Neal didn’t even blink. “Now, mister,” he said. “Suppose you just lay down flat on that bed and fold your hands nice and neat. Like, say, you were in an undertaking parlor. Now me, I’ll just take the chair and we’ll have ourselves a little talk.”

  There wasn’t much else Lassiter could do—for now. This O’Neal was a mean son of a bitch. And he wasn’t pretending, not even a little bit. He hadn’t stayed alive as long as he had by making statements he couldn’t back up.

  “Now, mister, what I want from you,” O’Neal said in his slow voice, “is who you are, where you come from, what you’re doing in this town. And ’specially what you want with Wesley Boone.”

  Telling the truth didn’t always get Lassiter out of tight places. Sometimes it did. He told the Sheriff about the fat saloonkeeper in El Paso. “Boone shot down this man’s brother without a chance,” he told the lawman. “I get two-hundred-and-fifty dollars if I bring him back. It’s that simple.”

  O’Neal’s face crinkled in something that might have been a grin. Lassiter wondered how many young cowboys O’Neal called “son” before he kicked their teeth in.

  “Nothing’s ever that simple, mister. Lassiter or whatever your real name is. Not that simple a-tall, if you get my drift. Matter of fact, the whole business could be mighty complicated.”

  “Not to me, Sheriff,” Lassiter answered. “Happens to be the plain, ordinary truth.”

  O’Neal was relaxed and chatty, the scattergun resting easily on his knee. A born killer if I ever saw one, Lassiter thought.

  “Well now, sir,” O’Neal said. “I sort of figure it out another way. I’d say what you just told me is a pack of lies. So why don’t you and me talk on a bit and try to figure out what the real truth might be.”

  Lassiter stayed very still. “I just told you,” he said, not even moving his head.

  With a smooth, easy motion, O’Neal set back the twin hammers on the shotgun. “I’d say you have all of sixty seconds to change your story, cowboy.” The Sheriff fished into his vest pocket and produced a thick silver timepiece. “Less than that, I reckon.”

  “You go to hell,” Lassiter answered, bracing himself. This would be one hell of a place to get it, in a smelly whore’s bed. The watch ticked on.

  O’Neal wasn’t the least bit keyed-up. “If you’re thinking I won’t blast you ’cause I’m the law—think again, cowboy. I ain’t just the law. I’m the Law! I can kill you like I was stepping on a bedbug. Nobody’s going to stand up for you, cowboy. Nobody’s even going to ask about you. An hour from now you’ll be eating dirt on Boot Hill. And you still got nothing to say?”

  Lassiter didn’t answer.

  “That about does it, friend,” the Sheriff said. “Your minute’s wasted away and now I got to put you out of your misery. Execute you, that is ...”

  “You sure do talk a lot,” Lassiter snarled, no longer giving a damn what happened.

  O’Neal laughed. It was a real contented laugh, the kind a man gives out with when life seems pretty good to him. There was a little bit of an old man’s laugh mixed up in it.

  “You got a heap of nerve, cowboy,” he said with ungrudging admiration. “And not just dumb nerve neither. You figure I got to kill you whatever you think to say. I suppose you know something about the situation round these parts. That whore been filling you in while you were filling her in.”

  O’Neal laughed fit to split a gut.

  “Sure she did. And now that your minute’s gone, I guess there ain’t no great hurry ’fore I kill you. The way I see it is—if you came here looking for Wesley Boone, then you must be working for Colonel Danvers. You come here to kill Wes Boone. You might dress something like a cattleman, but that’s something you ain’t. I think Danvers heard Boone was coming up here to work for us. And sent you to get him.”

  Lassiter said, “I sure picked a fool way to go about it. Riding in cold, saying I was looking for Boone.”

  “That could be one way to do it,” O’Neal said. “You could be a friend of Boone’s. It didn’t work, that’s all.”

  La
ssiter waited.

  O’Neal said, “You still don’t want to change that story of yours?”

  Lassiter didn’t want another round of smart talk with the Sheriff. He shook his head. O’Neal braced the shotgun, looking mournful now that the smile was gone underneath the drooping mustache.

  “So long, stranger,” he said.

  Lassiter looked right at the scattergun.

  Suddenly the Sheriff started to laugh. He laughed mightily, but he kept the shotgun level. “Oh, you got some nerve all right. Now suppose you get up nice and easy and we go and see Major Caulfield. The Major’s got a special interest in anybody rides into town during these unhappy times. And ’specially in anybody rides in asking about Wes Boone. Now you get up off that bed like you were laying on eggs.”

  Lassiter looked hard at the Sheriff. “I’d like to get a look at this Boone feller everybody’s so interested in.”

  O’Neal started to laugh again.

  “I bet you would,” he said, shaking all over. “I just bet you would.”

  Lassiter said in a flat voice, “All right, O’Neal, what’s so goddam funny?”

  The Sheriff shoved Lassiter toward the door with the muzzle of the shotgun. “Open it with your left hand,” he ordered.

  “Suppose I might as well tell you,” he went on. “If you come all the way from El Paso to kill Wesley Boone you got the shitty end of the stick, mister. ’Cause Mister Wesley Boone, fast gun as he’s supposed to be, is as dead as he’ll ever be. Happened last night. Right there in the street. And you know who killed him? A goddam nigger killed him, that’s who.”

  Lassiter went out the door with the Sheriff behind him.

  Chapter Four