Gut-Shot Read online

  “What kind of animal?” Flintlock said, his pale eyes probing the distance ahead of him.

  “Nobody knows. But one of its leg bones was as tall and big around as me. Later they dug up a jaw with a row of teeth that were six inches long. Teeth like that could bite a man in half, and maybe they did back in the olden days.”

  “Where did the bones and stuff go?” Flintlock said.

  “Some fellers with spectacles and long beards came in from a museum in New York City and took all the bones and teeth away.”

  “Maybe folks had some mighty big coyotes, back in the day,” Flintlock said.

  “Maybe so,” the marshal said. “And maybe the folks themselves were giants.”

  Flintlock stopped in his tracks.

  “What the hell?” he said.

  “You wanted to meet Hack Weight. Well, he’s in there. You could offer to shake his hand but I doubt if he’ll hear you.”

  Ahead of Flintlock stood open cemetery gates and arching above them a wrought iron sign that read: REST YE AND BE THANKFUL.

  “I really cotton to a peace officer with a sense of humor,” he said.

  “Follow me,” Lithgow said, grinning.

  Hack Weight lay in a fresh, unmarked grave. Someone, no doubt one of the town’s more charitable matrons, had placed a small bunch of pink wildflowers on the mound of sandy dirt.

  Flintlock’s face was bitter.

  “You sure it was him?” he said.

  Lithgow nodded.

  “It was him all right.”

  “How do you know fer sure?”

  “Before ol’ Hack passed, he confessed to his many crimes and said he’d die sure in the knowledge that the Good Lord had forgiven him his sins.”

  “Yeah, well I haven’t,” Flintlock said. “He was worth three thousand dollars to me. Who the hell plugged him, Lithgow? You?”

  “Nobody plugged him. He died of consumption and I buried him myself ten days ago. Weight didn’t have much weight to him by then.”

  “Funny, Lithgow. Real funny.”

  The big marshal grinned.

  “You could always dig him up, put a couple of bullet holes in him and take him to Fort Smith and claim the reward.”

  “And send you half, huh?”

  “If you felt so inclined.”

  “I’m not inclined to dig up a man who died of consumption and has been in the ground for ten days.”

  “If you’d told me you were coming, Flintlock, I’d have kept him longer. But this is summer and the town doesn’t have much ice, so I don’t know about that.”

  “I never took you fer such a humorous man, Lithgow,” Flintlock said.

  “I’m not. I just wanted to see your face when you realized that three thousand dollars was gone . . . phhht . . . just like that.”

  Flintlock opened his mouth to speak but Lithgow turned on his heel abruptly and walked away, still grinning.

  “You’re an idiot, Sam’l. I always thunk that and now I know it.”

  Flintlock knew the voice and followed it to the top of a piñon tree where old Barnabas sat peeling an apple, a coil of bright green skin hanging down like an overstretched spring.

  “I don’t need you to tell me that, Barnabas,” Flintlock said.

  The old mountain man sliced a piece of apple and stuck it in his mouth. He wore buckskin with fringes on the arms and legs fully two feet long. There was no wind, but Barnabas’s long hair tossed around his face.

  “You found your mama yet?” he said.

  “Not yet.”

  “She needs to tell you the name of the gambling man that spawned you on her. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

  “I’m still looking. I’ll find her.”

  “You’d better. A man should have a name.”

  “You gave me a name.”

  “Damn you, boy, Flintlock ain’t a name, it’s a rifle.”

  “Then why did you give it to me?”

  “Because it was all I could think of at the time.”

  “Ma is your daughter, Barnabas. You could have given me your name.”

  “I ain’t your pa, Sam’l, thank God. You need to take the gambling man’s name. That’s how it’s done.”

  “Always before you came to me in a dream, Barnabas. What the hell are you doing in the top of a tree where the squirrels live?”

  “Sam’l, only an idiot like you would take advice from a dead man who comes to you in a dream. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Where’s Ma, Barnabas? Tell me.”

  “I figure down Louisiana way in the swamps. But I could be wrong.”

  The old man chewed on another piece of apple, then said, “I’m not here because of you, Sam’l. I was bored was all.”

  “How the hell can hell be boring?”

  “I can’t tell you that, but it is. Hear that sound?”

  “I don’t hear a thing.”

  “It’s Old Scratch sounding his horn, calling us back. I got to go.”

  “Barnabas, is Ma really in the Louisiana swamps?”

  “I think so . . . maybe . . .”

  Barnabas faded like morning mist until only his voice, now thin, distant and echoing, remained.

  “Sam’l, bad times are coming down,” he said, a whisper in the sunlit morning. “Now don’t you walk into no shooting scrapes and get yourself gut-shot . . .”

  After Barnabas vanished, for a while Flintlock stood alone in the sun, a wild oak casting dappled shadow around his feet. From somewhere close he heard the buzz of bees. To his right was an aboveground tomb where mourning angels, each as tall as a man, stood on either side of mildewed bronze doors. The angels had never shed a tear from their stone eyes, but their expressions were suitably anguished as though both suffered from a bad case of dyspepsia. A crow perched on the peak of the tomb’s Greek temple roof and regarded Flintlock with mocking eyes that were black with mortal sin.

  “Bad times coming down, bird,” Flintlock said. “But for who? Me?”

  If the crow cared about the question it didn’t let it show. It cawed, flapped its wings then sat hunched, its eyes slowly opening and closing, planning deviltry.

  Flintlock turned his back on the bird and stepped back to the grave.

  “Damn you Weight I should dig you up and shoot you out of spite,” he said.

  The crow thought that funny and cackled.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The meadow was, in the opinion of retired physician Dr. Isaac D. Thorne, an ideal habitat for the elusive Papilio multicaudata butterfly, popularly known as the two-tailed swallowtail.

  With a wingspan of five inches at maturity, the yellow and black Lepidoptera would make a most welcome addition to his collection.

  In addition to a host of wildflowers, Dr. Thorne’s keen eye detected thistles, milkweed, buckeye and lilac, from which the swallowtail sipped such exquisite nectar. Ah, indeed the creature must be here, flitting like faerie queen from blossom to enchanted blossom, waiting to pop into his net.

  The doctor wore a tweed suit, stout leather ankle boots and a deerstalker hat that he’d purchased in London’s Savile Row from a tailor’s shop once patronized by the great Lord Horatio Nelson, butterfly collector and sailor.

  In addition to his net and muslin collecting bag, Dr. Thorne carried a British howdah pistol of the largest size, a necessary precaution in a land abundant with bears, bandits and belligerent Indians.

  After an hour of search, Papilio multicaudata continued to elude the physician and given the heat of the late morning and a growing appetite for lunch, he took shady refuge under the wild oak where he’d left his picnic basket.

  Dr. Thorne smiled and rubbed his hands together. Mrs. Grange, his housekeeper, had done him well, God bless her. Fried chicken, a slice of boiled ham, a pork pie and a bottle of mineral water would settle, one atop the other, very nicely.

  The physician tucked a blue-and-white-checkered napkin under his several chins and raised a chicken leg to his open mouth.

  B
ut the tasty morsel was stilled and Dr. Thorne’s mouth remained open as he caught a glimpse of a yellow flutter close to the tree line to his left, an area he had not yet hunted.

  Could this be it? The two-tailed swallowtail was too rare a prize to ignore.

  The physician reluctantly tossed the chicken leg back into the basket, grabbed his net and with amazing agility for a man of his portly girth jumped to his feet. He ran in the direction of the trees, the net poised above his head like a rotund David about to decapitate Goliath.

  But a moment later Dr. Thorne knew he’d made a mistake.

  It was an error that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  A girl’s slender body sprawled in the grass, the hem of her yellow sundress lifting in the wind. Her arms were outstretched, as though in supplication, and blades of grass threaded through her hair. Her blue eyes, wide open, gazed without expression at a sky she could no longer see.

  “My dear child, are you asleep?” Dr. Thorne said, his now florid face concerned.

  The girl did not respond, and he took a knee beside her.

  Waves of yellow hair cascaded over the girl’s slim shoulders and on the middle finger of her left hand she wore a silver ring with a red stone.

  Dr. Thorne picked up the girl in his arms and then jerked back in alarm.

  Why, it was Polly Mallory, the schoolteacher.

  Over the years Dr. Thorne had seen death, his mortal enemy, in many guises, from a native water bearer savaged by a Bengal tiger to a British soldier lying gut-shot and screaming on a bloody stretcher during the Bhutan War of ’65.

  And the physician again recognized his adversary’s work.

  By the bruises on her throat, the girl—he placed her age around twenty—had been strangled, her trachea crushed, by someone with immensely powerful hands. As far as Thorne could tell, death had come quickly and the girl had not put up a desperate struggle. There were no shards of her assailant’s skin under her fingernails and no blood.

  After a quick examination Dr. Thorne saw no evidence of sexual assault. It seemed that someone, probably a man judging by the girl’s injuries, had met her in the meadow and coldly and casually murdered her.

  The physician stood and rubbed his chin with a forefinger. It was possible Polly knew her assailant because of the lack of evidence of a struggle prior to her death.

  “Perhaps my arrival may have scared away the murderer after he’d concluded his devilish task,” Dr. Thorne mused aloud. “Hello, what’s this?”

  He bent and picked up a small, metal object from the grass.

  “What the deuce!” he said. “Now this is passing strange . . . but it may be a clue of the greatest moment.”

  A plain silver cross, about an inch high, lay in the palm of his hand. It had a pin at the back and Dr. Thorne knew he’d seen it before, affixed to the lapel of a young man’s coat, the chap who worked at the bank.

  The doctor shook his head, shocked by his own terrible thought.

  Could Jamie McPhee, the owner of the cross, have committed such a terrible crime?

  It was unthinkable. He was such a mild, shy, retiring creature who wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Yet the evidence in his hand was proof of the young man’s guilt, torn from his coat during young Polly’s last despairing moments.

  It was a two-mile walk back to town and the girl’s body would have to remain where it was until Marshal Lithgow investigated.

  Dr. Thorne’s round face assumed the steely-eyed, stalwart look that English gentleman always adopt when they’re determined to do their duty for Queen and Empire.

  He left his butterfly net where it was and returned to the wild oak.

  Anticipating a need for sustenance during his expedition back to Open Sky, the physician filled his pockets with fried chicken, then pork pie and mineral water in hand, he set forth.

  Soon a vicious criminal would be brought to justice or by the lord harry, his name wasn’t Isaac D. Thorne.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “This is where you found the cross, Doc?” Marshal Tom Lithgow said.

  “Yes. Right there where I indicated,” Dr. Thorne said.

  “Any idea how long she’d been dead?”

  This from Pike Reid, a sour-faced man who was one of Lithgow’s deputies.

  “No more than an hour,” Dr. Thorne said.

  “Time of death?” Lithgow said.

  “I arrived at the meadow around ten o’clock and embarked on a hunt for Papilio multicaudata—”

  “A Mex?” Reid said.

  “No. A butterfly,” the physician said, his face stiff.

  “Go on, Doc,” the marshal said.

  “Well, after an hour my prey had eluded me and I stopped for light lunch. That’s when I saw poor Polly’s dress stirring in the wind.”

  “So she was murdered some time before ten in the morning?” Lithgow said.

  “Shortly before would be my guess,” Dr. Thorne said.

  The pork pie, eaten on the march, had given him dyspepsia and he felt most uncomfortable.

  “Hell, Tom, we know who done fer Polly,” Reid said. “That damned milk-drinking sop Jamie McPhee.”

  “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “Everybody knows him and Polly Mallory were walking out together.”

  “It could be his cross all right,” Lithgow said. “Or one like it.”

  The big marshal stood head bowed in thought for a few moments, then said, “Let’s go talk to McPhee and see if he’s still got his cross.”

  “I know what happened,” Reid said. “McPhee lured Polly to this meadow and tried to have his way with her. Rather than face a fate worse than death, she refused and he killed her. Simple as that.”

  “You don’t know what happened, Pike. And I don’t know what happened either. But I aim to find out,” the marshal said.

  He nodded in the direction of Dr. Thorne. “Hell, the doc here could’ve done it. He was in the right place at the right time.”

  Dr. Thorne was not in the least fazed by the marshal’s statement. It was perfectly logical after all. Any decent London barrister would have raised the point in court.

  “I could have,” he said. “But I believe that a young, healthy girl like Polly Mallory would make short work of an old man like me with two bad knees and an unfortunate tendency to gout.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Reid said, his reptilian eyes malicious.

  Dr. Thorne’s choleric anger flared. “What an infernally nasty man you are, Mr. Reid,” he said.

  “You’ve noticed, huh?” Lithgow said, grinning.

  “Indeed I have, Marshal. I perceived at once that Mr. Reid has a most singular protuberance of his skull’s supraorbital foramen, which I’m very much afraid denotes a person of a dull and brutish nature and volatile temperament. As a keen student of the science phrenology that is my diagnosis and I will not budge an inch from my position.” He glared at Reid. “I say not an inch, sir.”

  Reid blinked a few times, then said, “Hey, Tom, have I just been insulted.”

  “Beats the hell out of me,” Lithgow said.

  “Well, when you study on it, let me know,” Reid said.

  “You’re a bounder, sir,” Dr. Thorne said. “There, that should be insult enough for any man. Old though I am, I’m willing to meet you with either pistol or saber, or both, if that be to your liking, on any field of honor you care to name.”

  The fact that the physician had served with the British army in India gave Reid pause. And so did the large pistol at the physician’s waist, a lethal monstrosity with two barrels that looked like it could blow a man apart. It was a gun to be reckoned with.

  In addition, Pike Reid was not particularly brave and he was happy enough to let matters drop when the marshal asked his help to lift Polly Mallory’s body into the spring wagon.

  The wagon with its sad burden immediately attracted a gaping crowd when it stopped outside the marshal’s office.

  Pike Reid immediately sought the l
imelight.

  “Murder!” he yelled. “Polly Mallory has been done to death.” Then, like a man enjoying the sound of the word, “STRANGLED as she defended her maidenly honor!”

  This grew gasps of horror from the onlookers, among them Sam Flintlock, who’d been shopping for tobacco and rolling papers.

  Tom Lithgow stepped from the wagon seat onto the boardwalk.

  “Marshal, is there a murderer among us?” a big-bellied, prosperous-looking man in broadcloth and gold watch chain said. “Or should we form a posse?”

  “No need for a posse,” Lithgow said.

  “Right, no call for that,” Reid said.

  “And what is your reason, sir?” the prosperous man said.

  “Because we know who done it,” Reid said. “And yeah, the murdering devil is in this very town and walks among us. Oh he’s a sly one, but me and the marshal have taken his measure, lay to that.”

  A matron, with the stern, lantern-jawed face of a prune juice drinker, called out, “Who is the fiend, Marshal? Are we in terrible danger? I fear for my daughter Ethel’s virtue.”

  “I will make an arrest very soon,” Lithgow said. “And your daughter is in no danger. This was a crime of passion.”

  For her part, Ethel, a scrawny girl who looked somewhat like a turkey, seemed aggrieved by the lawman’s last remark.

  Several women pushed and prodded Polly Mallory’s body, sniffing into tiny lace handkerchiefs like the grieving dwarfs around Snow White.

  Suddenly irritated, the marshal yelled, “You women get away from there. Someone bring Silas Strange. He’s got work to do.”

  The undertaker, a small, thin man in a clawhammer coat three sizes too big for him, flapped along the boardwalk like a crow with a broken wing. He took the dead girl away in a reusable canvas coffin carried by two burly assistants, their faces professionally solemn.

  Flintlock caught a glimpse of the bruises on the girl’s throat and dismissed the murder as indeed a crime passionnel, not an unusual occurrence on the frontier when eligible women were few and desires and jealousies ran deep.