Shawn O'Brien Manslaughter Read online

  “They’re going to come in on us,” Shawn said. He tossed his Winchester to Sedley. “Do what you can with that.”

  He drew his Colt and a second from the waistband.

  Shawn fought down a sudden spike of fear and forced himself to steady for what was to come. A defiant rebel yell surged in his throat, but he let it choke into a whispered question: “Now what the hell are they doing?”

  Sedley’s lips were pale and dry. A man who can’t shoot has no business being in a gunfight against odds, and he knew it well.

  “Having second thoughts?” he asked. His voice creaked.

  Shawn followed the eyes of the horsemen. Their heads were tilted back and they seemed to stare beyond him, but high up, to the top of the canyon wall to his right.

  Sedley had also read the signs. He turned in the saddle and his eyes widened. “What the hell?” he said.

  A man with long, white hair to his waist sat a huge dappled gray, a powerful animal with the muscular confirmation of a medieval warhorse.

  Despite his ivory hair the rider did not seem aged.

  The way he sat the saddle, poker-backed as an armored knight at the lists, suggested enormous vitality without a hint of weakness. Adding to his gothic mystique, a black cloak fell elegantly from the man’s shoulders and draped across the hindquarters of his horse. His right hand rested on top of a battle-ax with a massive steel blade, a vicious skull-cleaver Shawn had seen only in history books.

  The mysterious rider removed a foot-long, S-shaped pipe from between his teeth and used it to motion to the horsemen in the valley.

  A moment later Sedley said, “They’re quitting, turning round, and pulling out.”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Shawn said. “But I’m not counting on it.”

  He reached behind him into the saddlebags, found his field glasses, and trained them on the white-haired man.

  Shawn was stunned. Shaken. Disturbed as a condemned getting his first glimpse through the portal of hell.

  The white-haired rider’s face was turned to him, shadowed slightly under a black, floppy-brimmed hat. He had a wide, cruel mouth, eyes as cold as gun sights, and his every feature twisted into a demonic mask of hate. This was a man who knew nothing of love or kindness, only avarice, greed, pride, anger, lust . . . the scars left by deadly sins etched deep in every line and wrinkle of his face.

  It was the face of a savage.

  Shawn remembered his father, Colonel Shamus O’Brien, telling him once that the deadliest desires spawn the deepest hatreds.

  The rider on the great horse seemed to possess both desire and hate in equal measure.

  Now the man’s gaze was fixed on Shawn’s face, and he felt as though the skin was being flayed from his skull.

  The rider raised the battle-ax above his head, and a thunderous voice that echoed around the canyon roared, “Get out!”

  The pounding drums had been silent since the other riders left, but now they reached full crescendo as the man on the ridge turned his horse, slowly rode over the crest of the hill, and disappeared.

  The drumming abruptly stopped, replaced by a brooding, echoing silence.

  “What the hell was that?” Sedley said. Under a recent sunburn, his pale, gambler’s face was a shade paler.

  “A gent who obviously doesn’t want us here,” Shawn said.

  “He’ll cut his finger on that damned tomahawk, and it will serve him right,” Sedley said.

  Shawn smiled. “One time my brother Patrick brought an ax like that home. He was hunting butterflies and found it in a cave.”

  “An O’Brien hunting butterflies?”

  “Yeah. Patrick’s head is always full of strange notions. Anyway, he said the ax had been left there by the old Spanish men who explored the New Mexico Territory hundreds of years ago. Patrick said they called it a hacha de guerra, or war hatchet.”

  “Damn, that thing could put a hurt on a man,” Sedley said.

  “Yes, it could split his skull wide open. And that’s why we’re getting out of here while we still can.”

  Sedley shook his head. “A crucified miner, a man with a meat cleaver, there’s something mighty strange going on here, Shawn, and I don’t like it.”

  “Me neither. Let’s go talk to Sheriff Purdy and ask him what he makes of it.”

  Sedley made a face. “Him? All he’ll do is piss his pants and run to mama.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Yeah, when a man is tied to a cross and nails driven through his hands, I’d say he was crucified all right,” Shawn O’Brien said.

  He wondered if Sheriff Jeremiah Purdy was stubborn or just plain stupid.

  Beside him Hamp Sedley’s disdainful face revealed that he harbored no such doubt. He obviously believed the latter.

  “Savages?” Purdy suggested. His voice was weak.

  “Indians don’t crucify their enemies. Only white men do that,” Shawn said.

  “We saw them,” Sedley said. “Who is the ranny with the long hair, a battle-ax, and a bad attitude?”

  Purdy shook his head and his pleasant young face shutdown. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  A brewer’s dray trundled past the sheriff’s office, and when it was gone, Shawn said, “You heard the man. Who is he?”

  “And didn’t he hear me? I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

  “There are men in the Rattlesnake Hills and they scare you,” Shawn said. “Why?”

  Purdy tapped the Smith & Wesson on his desk, his eyes defiant. “I stopped being scared around the time I got this,” he said.

  “Damn it all,” Sedley said. “That’s a two-bit, tinhorn answer to a fair question. Now tell us why the white-haired man scares you.”

  For a few moments Jeremiah Purdy looked like a trapped animal seeking a way out. He found none such and in a small voice said, “His name is Thomas Clouston. Doctor Thomas Clouston.”

  “He’s a sawbones?” Sedley said.

  “A psychiatrist, and once a highly respected, though from all reports, an exceedingly humble, one.”

  “He didn’t look too exceedingly humble up on that hill with an ax in his hand,” Sedley said.

  Purdy ignored that and said, “When I was at Yale the professors talked admiringly of Dr. Clouston’s early work with the insane. But his downfall began after he gave a series of lectures in Berlin, Rome, and Paris. When that was concluded he crossed the Channel to study under the famous psychiatrist Dr. Edwin Strait at his hospital in London.”

  “So what happened?” Shawn said, happy to finally draw Purdy out of his shell.

  “Dr. Strait believed that in most cases insanity was caused by too much alcohol and other pleasures of the flesh and a lack of self-discipline. To restore patients to mental health all a doctor needed was a firm hand and a strict regimen of sternly worded lectures, fresh air, and exercise.”

  Sedley said, “Too much booze and pleasures of the flesh, huh? Then I’ve been nuts for years.”

  “I know. But I never wanted to mention it to you, Hamp,” Shawn said, his face empty.

  Sedley growled something about people in glass houses, but Shawn wasn’t listening.

  “So Clouston returns home, buys himself a battle-ax, and camps out in the Rattlesnake Hills?” he asked.

  Purdy managed a smile. “Not quite. He opened a mental hospital in Philadelphia and put Dr. Strait’s treatments to work. But he took them too far, administered beatings, ice-cold baths, and confinement in underground bread and water cells, all in the name of instilling the notion of self-discipline.”

  “I guess he killed a heap of loco patients that way,” Sedley said.

  “He did. Too many. In our modern hospitals, using the latest treatments, the tuberculosis death rate among patients is about sixty percent. In Dr. Clouston’s clinic the rate was closer to ninety percent. At one point he was burying three or four a day.”

  “Cut to the chase, Sheriff,” Sedley said. “How did this Clouston feller end up k
ing of the hills, and how come he didn’t try to kill Shawn and me?”

  “I’ll answer your second question first. No matter his past crimes, Dr. Clouston is a fine psychiatrist and he can read people. He studied Shawn, and maybe you, Mr. Sedley, as men who live by the Colt’s gun. He knows your breed and probably figured on that particular day his butcher’s bill would be too high.”

  “So he decided to let us go?” Sedley said.

  “That would be my guess.”

  Purdy’s chair creaked as he sat back. His eyes flickered to the street, almost opaque from yellow dust kicked up by wagons, horses, and foot traffic, then back to Shawn.

  “As the death toll at Dr. Clouston’s clinic rose, the Philadelphia authorities finally took notice and raided the place. They removed a hundred dead or dying patients, and Clouston was warned never to practice medicine in any form again or face hanging.”

  Purdy looked up from the cigarette he was building and said, “Perhaps Dr. Clouston could have weathered the disgrace, but his beautiful young wife couldn’t. Suddenly cut dead by Philadelphia’s high society, she lay in her bathtub and cut her wrists.”

  “And Clouston?” Shawn said.

  “From what I was told, he headed west and wandered for a couple of years. They say he shot a man in Kansas City, another in Denver, and was involved in a whore cutting in a saloon in Cheyenne.” The sheriff lit his cigarette and spoke from behind a blue haze of smoke. “Then, about a month ago, the doctor showed up in the Rattlesnake Hills with a gang of hardcases.”

  “Why?” Shawn said.

  “Nobody knows.”

  “What’s up there?” Sedley said. “Gold? Silver, maybe?”

  “All you’ll find in those hills is a fine crop of rock, cactus, and rattlers,” Purdy said.

  “Has Clouston threatened the town?” Shawn said.

  The sheriff shook his head. “No. But he’s warned a few people off, hunters and the like. He’s pretty much staked out the Rattlesnake Hills as his home range.”

  Shawn watched Purdy’s owlish eyes grow guarded as he asked, “What about Burt Becker? Could he be in cahoots with Clouston?”

  “No, he’s not,” the young sheriff said. “After his wife died, Dr. Clouston declared war on the world. He blames the medical profession and society, especially the upper classes, for his wife’s suicide and his own disgrace. He’s a man eaten up by hate. It rots him from the inside like a cancer.”

  Sedley smiled slightly. “Shawn, maybe it’s just as well Clouston didn’t know that your pa is the richest man in the New Mexico Territory.”

  “And one of the richest in the United States,” Shawn said. “Just to keep the record straight.”

  “There you go,” Sedley said. “That’s the only excuse he needs to chop you up into little pieces.”

  “The Colonel is rich, not me,” Shawn said.

  “I don’t think the mad doctor will make that distinction,” Sedley said.

  Shawn grinned and shook his head. “Hamp,” he said, “sometimes you’re a real pleasure to be around.”

  He rose to his feet and Purdy said, “I guess you’ll be moving on now. Nothing to keep you boys in Broken Bridle.”

  “Except a promise I made to look out for you,” Shawn said.

  “I can look out for myself, Mr. O’Brien. I’m in no need of your protection, I assure you.”

  “You’re hiding something, Sheriff,” Shawn said. “And I aim to find out what it is.”

  “Then I’ll stop you,” Purdy said.

  Shawn was surprised by the glint of steel he saw in the young man’s eyes.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Why did blood and brains splatter all over the doors of the Iglesia de los Santos Martires? Is that what you’re asking me?”

  “Only making conversation is all,” Little Face Denton said. “No offense intended.”

  “The fool was seeking sanctuary,” Pete Caradas said. “He thought he’d be safe in the church. Instead he should have seen to his guns.”

  “Blood and brains all over a three-hundred-year-old door brung all the way from Spain,” Denton said. “I bet that was a sight to see.”

  “If he’d gotten inside I would have spared him, I think,” Caradas said. “It’s bad luck to kill a man in church.”

  Denton picked up the bottle of rye they shared and poured into his glass. The whiskey glowed warm, like ancient Baltic amber.

  “Was Sergio Mendoza as fast with the iron as they said?”

  “In Mexico and parts of Texas he was a famous pistolero. But he knew I could kill him.”

  “And it was over a woman?”

  “A man needs a reason to fight.”

  Pete Caradas’s eyes moved to the saloon bar where a tired-looking woman in a bright red dress smiled and laughed at every word a skinny young clerk in a high celluloid collar said.

  “Little Face, look to the bar. Would you fight for what that woman has to offer?”

  Denton glanced over his shoulder, then turned back to his companion.

  “Nah. She ain’t hardly worth it.”

  Caradas nodded. “Mendoza’s woman was worth it.”

  “They say you washed the blood off the door by yourself,” Denton said.

  “Yes, with a bucket.” Caradas’s smile never reached his strange eyes, gray as graveyard mist. “And all the time I was doing it a priest beat me with a willow switch as thick around as his little finger.”

  “Why did you clean the door?”

  “Because it was a great sacrilege to defile the Church of the Holy Martyrs with blood. I knew that and the priest made me do penance. That’s why he made me wash the door and beat on me with the willow switch.”

  “In Mexico? Did anybody care?”

  “They cared. I wanted to live in that town for a while longer. I had Mendoza’s woman in my bed, remember?”

  Caradas stretched his long legs, elegant in gray broadcloth. His boots were black and fine, made on a narrow Texas last.

  “There was a buzzard squatting in the plaza that day,” he said. “It stared at me until the job was done, then it flew away. The priest said it was a sign.”

  “What kind of sign?”

  “He didn’t know.”

  Little Face Denton could not meet Caradas’s eyes for long. They reflected no light.

  When his eyes had died, Denton had no way of knowing. He guessed a long time before. Many kills ago.

  “It was my understanding you didn’t like talking to people, Little Face,” Caradas said. He had a slight Cajun accent born of the Louisiana bayous where he spent his boyhood with his widowed mother.

  “I don’t, but I like talking to you, Pete.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve killed eighteen men. Folks say that.”

  “Folks say a lot of things.”

  “Why do you suppose Shawn O’Brien is in town?”

  “Passin’ through, the man said.”

  “Is that all?”

  “His wife was murdered a while back. She was an English aristocrat, and beautiful, I was told. A man does some long riding to forget a thing like that, trying to leave it behind him.”

  Caradas reached for the whiskey bottle, but Denton intercepted him and poured his drink. “His brother Jake would be bad news.”

  Caradas smiled. “Yes, he would. Jake is a sight meaner than Shawn, but he can’t match his speed on the draw and shoot.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “I do say.”

  “Is he faster than you, Pete?”

  Caradas shook his head, his face unsmiling. “No, Little Face, he isn’t. Shawn O’Brien isn’t near as fast as me with a gun. No one is. Not now, not ever.”

  He held his glass to the light of an oil lamp over the bar. “Damn,” he said. “I’ve got a fly in my whiskey.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Hey waiter, I’ve got a fly in my coffee,” Hamp Sedley said.

  “I’ll bring you another cup,” the man said. He sighed. “There’s a he
rd in town and cows bring flies.” The waiter, a sleek-headed man wearing a white apron, leaned close to Sedley and Shawn O’Brien. “See the young redhead acting tough over there?”

  “Uh-huh, with the two-gun rig. Looks like he’s on the prod, don’t he?” Sedley said.

  “He is on the prod. He’s one of the drovers brought in the Rafter-L herd this afternoon and he fancies himself a shootist.”

  “He’s got no quarrel with us,” Shawn said.

  “You’re right, he don’t. But later you might care to wander down to the Streetcar Saloon. The kid says he’ll brace Pete Caradas there tonight. Says by midnight Caradas will be dead and he’ll be cock of the walk in Broken Bridle.”

  “Or he’ll be dead himself more likely,” Shawn said.

  The waiter left and returned with a clean cup. He winked at Shawn, smiled, and said, “Remember, don’t miss the fun.”

  Speaking around a mouthful of pork chop, Sedley said, “Think the kid can shade Pete Caradas?”

  “I don’t know either of them, so I can’t say,” Shawn said. “But I reckon the redhead’s on the brag and he’ll make a play just like he figures.”

  Shawn gave up on his tough steak and fried potatoes and let his knife and fork clatter onto the plate.

  As he expected, the red-haired kid jerked in his direction, scowling.

  Shawn smiled at Sedley. “Red’s on the prod all right,” he said.

  Maybe it was Shawn’s smile that did it. Or the ivory-handled Colt in his holster. Or the way he wore his hat. Or maybe it was nothing at all. Often a man on the prod doesn’t need an excuse to brace somebody.

  “You seein’ enough, mister?” the kid asked, loud, so it would carry across the crowded restaurant.

  “I reckon I’ve seen all I want,” Shawn said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” the redhead said. He had a round, pugnacious face, and it looked like his nose had been broken a time or two.

  “It’s supposed to mean nothing at all,” Shawn said, smiling.

  “Suppose I come over there and wipe that smile off your face with my fist?” the kid said, getting to his feet.

  “Suppose you bring a couple of your friends to carry you back,” Shawn said.

  “Here, that won’t do,” the restaurant owner said, a stout man with hairy forearms the size of hams. “I run a respectable place here.”