The Killers Page 3

  I went over to the hotel and went upstairs without speaking to the clerk. The same hard case opened the door, and he was as pleased to see me as he’d been the first time. But there was no smart talk, and I was glad of that. It had been kind of a long day for me, and I was about ready to knock out his front teeth with a gun barrel if he started bad-mouthing me again.

  “The sheriff,” he said over his shoulder to Fallon.

  “Let him in, Dutch,” Fallon called out, sounding a bit drunk. “No, better ask him what he wants.”

  “What do you want?” Dutch asked, looking at the hat I held in my left hand. The hole in the hat got as much attention as the hat itself.

  I grinned at Dutch. “Tell Fallon I found his hat.”

  I couldn’t see Fallon because the gunman was blocking the door. “Take the hat, Dutch, and give the sheriff a dollar. Tell him thanks for me.”

  Fallon was having a good time, or making out that he was.

  “Naw, that isn’t polite. Let the sheriff in.”

  The window was closed and the room stank of cigar smoke and whiskey. Nothing else had changed except that Fallon was more bleary-eyed than usual. Still on the bed, a glass in his hand, he didn’t look as good-humored as he sounded. Fallon’s crinkly ginger hair was mussed and he made a big to-do about combing it back with his fingers.

  “Got to show respect for the law,” he told the two gunslingers.

  That started them laughing.

  Fallon snapped his fingers and pretended to frown. “None of that, boys,” he said. “Fetch the sheriff a chair, Clem. You, Dutch, you fix the sheriff a drink.”

  I’ll say one thing for Fallon: he drank a good brand of whiskey. That’s all I could say for him. The slack-mouth son of a bitch pointed to his own glass, and Dutch filled it. Spilling some of the whiskey, Fallon raised his glass and said, “Your good health, sir.”

  “You want your hat?” I enquired, putting my finger through the hole in the crown.

  “No,” Fallon said. “It’s got a hole in it. Hope you didn’t go to too much trouble to get it.”

  There was no hole in my hat, so I was able to lie. “No trouble,” I said. “By the way, Sally sends her regards.”

  I tossed the hat onto the bed and turned toward the door.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Fallon said, putting his big bare feet on the floor. “Slow down there.”

  “Slow down for what?”

  “You haven’t finished your drink.”

  I said I had.

  “Then have another,” Fallon said. “Don’t tell me it isn’t good—it’s the best.”

  Dutch filled the glass and I sat down. “Sally sends regards, is that it?” Fallon said. “Sally a good friend of yours?”

  “Pretty good,” I answered.

  “You’re a liar,” Fallon said quietly. “I bet you don’t even know what she looks like.”

  I said I knew what she looked like. I said I liked everything about Sally.

  Fallon watched me carefully, trying to size me up. “That kind of talk could get you in trouble,” he said. “Maybe you better forget about Sally.”

  The bluff was working, but I still didn’t have any answers. “That’d be kind of hard to do,” I said. “A lady in distress, as the feller said. Being sheriff, it’s my job to help her every way I know how.”

  Fallon sidetracked for a while. He tried to sound easy, maybe even friendly, but I knew his crooked lawyer’s brain was working hard to figure me out. I figured he would try the soft talk first, then the threats. He pulled his rubbery lips back in what was supposed to pass for a smile. It looked more like a cowardly vicious dog trying to get up enough nerve to bite somebody.

  “You haven’t been sheriff long, have you?” Fallon said.

  I knew he’d been checking around town. “Not long,” I said.

  “Sort of temporary, the way I hear it,” Fallon stated. “That means you’ll be looking for another job. How’d you like to work for me?”

  “Doing what?”

  “What I tell you. That’s what Clem and Dutch do. They don’t ask the reasons—they just do it. They’re good boys. They’d gun you in a wink if I said so.”

  ‘‘Maybe not,” I said. “Mike did what he was told and he’s dead. Any time Dutch and Clem want to try ... You too, Fallon.”

  “That’s what I like, a man with guts,” Fallon said. “You want to work for me or not?”

  “Not,” I said.

  Trying again while he bit off the end of a cigar and dipped it in his whiskey, Fallon asked me how I’d like a soft law job up in Pecos County. “I could fix it,” he said. Dutch and Clem smiled. “People listen to me up there. People all over listen to me when I talk. That kind of deal sound good to you?”

  I pretended to think about it. “Maybe,” I said. “Depends what I’d have to do.”

  “That’s the good part,” Fallon told me. “You don’t have to do a thing.”

  I helped myself to more whiskey, and Fallon seemed to take that as a good sign. “Drink up,” he said.

  “About Sally ...” I began.

  “That’s it,” Fallon said. “I was coming to Sally. You don’t do a thing about Sally. I’m counting on you to take that job in Pecos County.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “All right then, here it is,” said Fallon. “You ever hear of Big Sam Thornton? I guess everybody in Texas has. Well, sir, this Sally is Mrs. Sam Thornton of New Orleans. It seems that Mr. and Mrs. Thornton had a disagreement about something and Mrs. Sam decided to light out for home. Home is here on the Eldredge place. You know how married folks fight, Sheriff, except that it’s a bit more complicated than that. Mr. Thornton wants his pretty young wife back, but she doesn’t want to go. That’s what she thinks, being a woman. Mr. Thornton doesn’t like that. That’s why I’m here with the boys, to sort of persuade her ...”

  Fallon talked on, enjoying his own windy statements. I was thinking about Big Sam Thornton. Like Fallon said, everybody in Texas knew who Sam Thornton was. Sam was a nice feller all right, maybe the meanest outlaw Texas ever produced, and that was saying something. Sam and his wild bunch still called themselves guerillas long after the War was over, but folks didn’t get too excited about the bank robbing and train wrecking. They didn’t get their backs up until one night Sam and his boys herded a farmer, his wife and four kids into a barn, barred the door and set the place on fire. After that there was no amnesty for Thornton, no place he could hide—not in Texas. After he ran away from Texas he robbed and murdered in Kansas and Oklahoma. Chased out of there, he holed up in Louisiana, the only state without an extradition law. In the ten years since he’d stopped running from the law in three states, Thornton had become something of a leading citizen in New Orleans, meaning that now he was rich and powerful enough to hire other men to do his killing for him. Powerful enough to get men like Fallon to jump when he cracked the whip.

  “Mr. Thornton wants his wife back,” Fallon was telling me. “He won’t take no.”

  “Maybe he should come himself,” I said, laying down my glass. Now the pieces of the puzzle were all together. Thornton couldn’t come back to Texas or they’d hang him. It figured that Fallon was tied in to Thornton from the old days. Maybe Thornton had something dirty on Fallon, or maybe the price was right. It was well known that Thornton had a way of reaching out from his big house in New Orleans and getting what he wanted.

  “’Course they’d hang him if he did,” I said. “Not even President Garfield could pardon him for what he did, the dirty child-killing son of a bitch!”

  “Hold it, boys,” Fallon said quickly. To me he said, “You’re talking crazy. What you’re saying is a pack of rotten lies. Sure Mr. Thornton did some wild things in his time, but, I swear, he had nothing to do with killing that farmer’s family. There never was any proof of that. I suppose you didn’t know Mr. Thornton has a standing reward of ten thousand dollars for the real killers. One of these days Mr. Thornton is going to clear his name in this state.�
�

  His own words were getting Fallon worked up. I must have looked doubtful because he made one last try to convince me that Big Sam Thornton was a man wronged. He shook his head sorrowfully, surprised at me for thinking he was a bad feller. “You don’t think I’d be helping Sam Thornton if I thought for a minute those charges were true. Oh, for God’s sake!”

  The big man from Pecos County, the man who ran his own candidates and had connections everywhere, had asked me a question. “I think you’d do just about anything, Fallon. Look what you’re doing now.”

  In a way, I hoped the two gunmen would try to finish me then and there. If there had been three of them I might not have been so eager. But I knew I could handle these two and then turn my gun on Fallon. No doubt Sam Thornton wouldn’t give up on his pretty yellow-haired runaway wife, but I figured he might have trouble finding another go-between like Fallon.

  Fallon took the insult without blowing up. Maybe he knew what I had in mind. He took a deep breath and when he let it out his rubbery lips vibrated like a horse blowing wind. Rubbing the side of his head like a man tired out with arguing, he said, “You got a bad mouth … what is it? Carmody. Maybe that comes from pushing these yokels around. Maybe you think you’re good with that gun of yours. Maybe you are. Doesn’t mean a thing, not to me. You get in my way—really get in my way—and I’ll mash you like a bug.”

  It was that bug talk that got me. A man can threaten to kill me, and I don’t mind. Let him try. Then let him die trying. What Fallon had just said left absolutely no room for me to back off. Without knowing it—he had no way of knowing me—Fallon had made the last big mistake of his life.

  I got up and stood easy, still hoping the gunmen would move without Fallon’s say-so. When they didn’t I spoke my piece: “You may start the trouble here, but I’ll finish it. You think because you have the money to hire guns you can walk in here and take a woman doesn’t want to be taken. You’re the lawyer, you figure what charge that is. It won’t get to court because I’ll kill you. Maybe you’ll try to kill me first, but we’ll see who gets killed.”

  Fallon stopped rubbing his head and looked at me. “All right, I’m shaking in my boots. Just tell me one thing—why? You’re no lawman and you know it. You don’t even know the girl and it isn’t your town—so why? Don’t tell me you’re a friend of lost ladies, pretty or otherwise. You’re not the type.”

  “You’re one reason,” I told him. “You wouldn’t understand the rest.”

  “You can’t win,” Fallon said as I backed out of the room.

  Going back to the jail I had to admit that Fallon might be right. Maybe Fallon didn’t understand my reasons for taking a stand, and maybe I didn’t understand all of them myself. But there I was in the middle of something that wasn’t rightly my business.

  Talking to myself isn’t one of my habits; now I said: “Carmody, however did you manage to live so long?”

  Chapter Five

  I was bunking in Luke’s cell, the one with an Indian rug on the stone floor and pictures of his mail-order sweetheart tacked to a board that hung on the back wall. Luke, being the thrifty type, didn’t believe in wasting his easy-earned money on hotel rooms when there was a nice clean jail for the taking. There were some chains set into the wall out back where he shackled the more troublesome drunks on Saturday nights. I don’t know what Luke would have done if he had a real dangerous or important prisoner on his hands; likely as not, the problem would never come up.

  I didn’t think Fallon would try to get me in the jail if he hadn’t tried it outside. Doing things the underhand way was more Fallon’s style. A fixer and a crook, he wouldn’t go against the law head-on unless there was no other way. I wondered if I’d done right in not killing him and letting the game go on from there. Maybe I hadn’t killed him because of Luke. Luke wouldn’t be the one to pull the trigger, but ten to one Fallon’s political cronies had enough weight with the Governor to finish Luke as a county sheriff. I don’t mind telling you, I cursed Cousin Luke quietly and for some time.

  After I barred the jail door I loaded that monster goose-gun and laid it on the floor beside the Winchester. The town was quiet, and by the time I drank all the whiskey I wanted there were no sounds at all. For a long time I lay awake trying to figure how I’d handle the situation. After seeing Sally Eldredge, I didn’t blame Sam Thornton for wanting her back. But Sally didn’t want to go and Sam, being somewhat crazy, wouldn’t take no for an answer. Maybe Sally Eldredge thought she was safe surrounded by her gun-happy kinfolk; I knew better. In the end, the Eldredges would be no match for Thornton’s hired killers. There were only so many Eldredges, but in Texas alone Thornton, working through Fallon, could hire enough professional gunslingers to make a small army. Anxious to avoid a stink that would go far beyond Salter City, Fallon would try the crooked way first. But when the chips were down, Fallon would do what he was told. I didn’t know what Thornton had on Fallon, It could be something as simple as letting him live.

  Sometimes when you sleep on something you have the answer when you wake up. I didn’t. The wound in my side looked to be healing up, and that was the only good news I had on that particular morning. The sun was just warming up the dust when I unbarred the jail door and took a look at my Goddamned town.

  The sun was up full and hot by the time I finished the second cigarette. I didn’t want to walk in on any surprises when I got back, so I locked up the jail and took the key with me to the eating-place run by the old man. “Better just have the fried eggs,” he told me when I said ham and eggs. “The ham don’t look cured right to me. I’ll just chop it up and dump it in the pea soup. That ought to do it.”

  Cracked into bacon fat, the eggs began to sizzle. The old man made good coffee and the first cup burned away some of my sour mood. “I guess you know this town pretty good,” I said. “Know any likely fellers would like to hire on as deputies?”

  The old man turned the eggs and came back with the coffee pot. He was bright enough for an old man who had spent his life frying eggs. “I’d have to say no,” he said. “A couple of days ago I’d say yes. Times are bad hereabouts, money scarce. A couple of days ago you’d be knee deep in deputies. Not now, I reckon. Talk’s been going round since that gunman got himself killed by the Eldredges. What do you think?”

  I finished my eggs and got up. “I think you ought to send Fallon some of that pea soup. Do the same for Zachariah Eldredge. If you hear of any would-be deputies let me know.”

  On this morning, at least, Fallon wasn’t an early riser. I wondered how long it would take his gunman to get back to town. My guess was that he was heading for the nearest telegraph office; that would be where the railroad bent south, about a two-day ride from Salter City. That would be the obvious thing to do. But it was just possible, too, that Fallon hadn’t brought all his men into town.

  Thinking about that took me down to the livery stable. The two boys who worked there were having a stand-up breakfast of fried bread and buttermilk. No, sir, they told me, nobody had come in and put up horses during the night. One kid was talky and the other wasn’t. They looked like brothers, the mouthy one about sixteen, the quiet one a year younger.

  “You don’t have to do that,” the talky brother said when I flipped a silver dollar between them.

  The quiet one picked it up; only my badge kept him from testing it with his teeth. “Sure he does,” he said. “We’re orphans—remember?”

  “You two got names?” I asked them.

  They told me. Finley was the one who talked; his brother was Todd. I don’t think Todd was ready to settle down to a life of fried bread and buttermilk. The boy looked pinched in the face. “That other dollar should be for helping you with the dead man,” he told me. “Wanting us to tell you things we see ought to be worth another dollar.”

  Finley looked embarrassed. “Don’t mind him,” he said. “All he thinks about is money.”

  I went back to the sheriff’s office and, for want of something better to do, l
ooked through the sheaf of wanted posters on the spike. I had to grin at some of the faces in the pile; most of them I didn’t know. I was reading about some old murderer called Baldy Fitch when I heard loud voices out in the street.

  Fallon, looking all spruced up in a change of suits, was out there talking to the mayor. I don’t think it was a salaried job, being mayor of Salter City, but that’s what they called Dunstan, the man who didn’t get along so good with Luke. It was hot and quiet in the street, and I could hear every word Fallon let go.

  Fallon looked my way when I stepped out of the jail door. Then he looked away and put his arm around Mayor Dunstan’s shoulder and said again that, in his opinion, Salter City looked to be a town with possibilities. Dunstan, a fat, sour man, wanted to believe what Fallon was saying, but even he looked doubtful.

  Fallon shoveled some more bullshit. Even for a flannel mouth like him it was hard to work up a sweat about a forgotten hole like Salter City, but he did his best. The cattle business wasn’t good and any fool could see it wasn’t likely to be, so Fallon stayed away from that. “The finest climate in the world,” Fallon said vaguely, digging Dunstan in the ribs. The Mayor wasn’t the rib-digging sort, but, coming from Fallon, he liked it. “Good location too,” Fallon went on. “Water’s a bit scarce but we’ll face that problem when we come to it. I’d say the folks in this town have enough get-up-and-go to tackle any problem. Yes, sir, Mr. Mayor, I think I can safely tell my friends up north that Salter City has possibilities.”

  Mayor Dunstan, no doubt seeing a flow of money into his broken-down bank, wanted to hear everything Fallon had to say. Especially he wanted to hear what in hell Fallon had in mind.

  “A little early for that, Mr. Mayor,” Fallon said. “Sort of confidential, if you know what I mean. If it got out before the right moment, other towns would come clamoring for attention. Can’t let that happen, can we?”

  I couldn’t hear what Dunstan was saying, but I knew what it was. He was a businessman and he understood. “A little talk later in your office,” Fallon suggested.