Hell's Gate Read online

  O’Hara tore his eyes from the house, turned to Flintlock and said, “Hell, what do we do? Knock?”

  “It’s my house and I will do no such thing,” Lucy said. She gave O’Hara a sidelong look. “Knock, indeed!”

  The closer the girl had gotten to the mansion the more assertive she’d become, and while Flintlock admired her pluck, to just storm into the place would be foolhardy, to say the least. He grabbed Lucy by the arm and halted her in her tracks just as O’Hara said, “Sam, up there on the peak of the house.”

  Flintlock looked up and saw old Barnabas, his dead grandfather, perched like a gargoyle on the sharp spine of the V-shaped roof. The wicked old mountain man glared at Flintlock, made an obscene gesture at him and then vanished.

  “Well, we know there’s at least one spook in this place,” O’Hara said.

  “Barnabas isn’t a spook,” Flintlock said. “He’s a damned nuisance . . . and I mean damned.”

  Lucy looked confused. “What do you see, Sam? I don’t see anything.”

  Flintlock was spared having to answer because just then the front door of the mansion swung open and four men walked onto the porch. One of them stepped to the edge, peered into the crawling mist and said, his voice sounding hollow, “Who goes there? Identify yourself. I can see you.”

  “I’m with the owner of this house,” Flintlock said. “She wants you to leave.”

  “Instanter,” O’Hara said.

  A laugh from the porch, then, “The hell you say? Git away from here.”

  Flintlock walked forward. He had no rifle but his Colt was shoved in his waistband. Now the men on the porch could see him clearly. “Name’s Sam Flintlock and I’m here to see justice done.”

  “The Texas bounty hunter?” a man said.

  “Texas and other places,” Flintlock said.

  “Seems I heard about you a time or two,” the man said. “I’m Shade Pike and I’m one mean son of a bitch. Name mean anything to you?”

  “I would’ve remembered that name and the natural fact that you’re a son of a bitch,” Flintlock said. “No, I never heard of you.”

  “There’s a pity,” Pike said. “You should have.”

  He was a tall man, hatless, who wore a black frock coat and pants of the same color tucked into knee-high boots. The boots and his wide cartridge belt that supported two holstered Colts and a sheathed bowie knife were all of the same color, a deep mahogany brown. He also wore a Colt in a shoulder holster, and his left hand rested on the silver knob of a walking cane, a vanity he’d stolen from Bat Masterson.

  Flintlock thought Pike a cheap, tinhorn imitation of a better man.

  His three companions were not so well dressed but they weren’t shabby either and their boots, gun rigs and revolvers were all of good quality. How sudden they were with the iron and whether or not they would stand and get their work in, Flintlock didn’t know. But by the hard, confident look of them he guessed they were game enough.

  Lucy pushed past O’Hara and said, “Mr. Pike, I want you to please vacate the premises.”

  “Instanter,” O’Hara said, enjoying the word.

  Pike grinned. “All right, little lady, you’re as pretty as a field of Texas bluebonnets and I’ll deny you nothing. So here’s what’s coming down—you can claim your house but we’ll linger for a spell and you and my boys can get acquainted, like.” As the other men let loose with a vulgar chorus of ribald laughter, Pike said to Flintlock, “As for you and the breed, light a shuck before I cut that bird off your throat and use it for a hatband.”

  Unfazed by the man’s threat, Flintlock said, “What the hell are you doing here, Pike? And why are you riding army horses?”

  “The horses we got from four Yankee soldier boys who don’t need them anymore,” Pike said. “We were on the scout after a bank job we pulled in Texas, and our mounts just tuckered out on us. Lucky them soldier boys were close. Then we heard about this house from a lawman in El Paso. He said he’d heard the story in Mansion Creek, a pissant burg west of here,” Pike said.

  “What did he hear?”

  “That there was gold hidden in every room, he said. Make you rich overnight, he said. Well, we’ve been all over this pile and there’s no gold to be found. We was duped into coming here by a no-good law dog who wanted rid of us, but now”—Pike smiled as he stripped Lucy naked with his eyes—“maybe it’s been a worthwhile trip after all.”

  Lucy’s face flushed. She was used to lustful looks from men and she dismissed Pike’s hungry eyes with contempt, but she was angry nonetheless. “Who was the officer of the law who lied to you that there is gold in my home?” she said. “Give me his name and I’ll see that the proper authorities deal with him.”

  Pike said, “It doesn’t matter who told me. Hell, when there’s gold involved everybody knows about it anyhow.”

  “Yeah, it’s hard to keep talk of gold and treasure maps secret,” Flintlock said. “Seems like somebody in Mansion Creek spread the good word.”

  “Well, there ain’t a treasure map either,” Pike said. “Me and the boys have been all over this place and all we found was damned spiderwebs.” He glared at Flintlock. “Answer me a question, tattooed man.”

  “Ask away,” Flintlock said. “But be polite when you’re asking it.”

  Pike said, “I told you to light a shuck. So why the hell are you still here?”

  It was then that mistakes began to be made that would have deadly consequences.

  “I’m here because I intend to throw you and your boys out of this house,” Flintlock said. He was tense, ready. “Are there any Texas dodgers out on you, Pike? A dodger for a big-enough reward would make it worth my while keeping you alive, at least for a while. Understand?”

  Then came the first mistake to be made . . . and Pike’s boys made it.

  The three were frontier thugs, brave enough when the chips were down, but they were former cowboys, not Texas revolver fighters. They stood in awe of Shade Pike’s speed on the draw and shoot and figured him in the same class as fast guns like John Wesley Hardin and Wild Bill Longley. It was a mortal error, but a grinning, not-too-bright bunch, as they urged Pike to “gun the son of a bitch,” the three toughs were unaware of it.

  Then Shade Pike made another mistake. Sure, he was a fast gun with five kills to his credit. But none of the five were named men. A couple had been drunk punchers and another a fifty-five-year-old gambler whose reactions had slowed ten thousand whiskeys before. The only man who’d even came close to being a gun was a Nacogdoches livery station owner called Denham or Denning who had a local rep as a bad man to cross. Pike outdrew and killed the man, consulted his watch and then went to breakfast. Like his companions, Pike believed his own brag that he occupied the elite tier of the revolver fighter hierarchy. But when he made the mistake of drawing down on Sam Flintlock he instantly realized that there was only one top-class shootist present . . . and it sure as hell wasn’t him.

  Shucking his iron from the waistband Flintlock shot Pike between the eyes even as the gunman cleared leather. Pike staggered back, his face white with shock at the time and manner of his death, and the men with him knew that mistakes had been made. They’d set store by the man’s flashy, two-gun draw and now they didn’t want to make another blunder. One of them, a bearded man with alarmed eyes, yelled, “Flintlock, we’re out of it!”

  Gunsmoke drifting around him, Flintlock said. “You’re out of it when I say you’re out of it.” He stepped to Pike’s body and said, “Yup, he’s as dead as he’s ever gonna be.”

  A younger man with freckles all over his face like a sparrow’s egg stared openmouthed at Flintlock and said, “But . . . but Shade was fast. Everybody said he was fast.”

  “Who was everybody?” Flintlock said.

  “Folks . . .” the youngster said, confused.

  “Folks were wrong,” Flintlock said. “He wasn’t near fast enough, and the proof of that is lying right there at your feet.” He took a step back, his Colt in his hand. “Any
body else object to my presence here?” He waited and then, “Anybody? All right, I got no answer. Now, you men mount up and get the hell away from here. If I see you around this house again, hell, if I see you anywhere in the Arizona Territory, I’ll shoot you on sight.” An unforgiving enemy, Flintlock motioned to Pike’s body. “And take that with you.”

  The bearded man said, “Mistakes were made here today.”

  “And you made them,” Flintlock said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The mist that had shrouded the crag throughout the day thickened as darkness fell and lapped around the ground floor of the house like a gray, primordial sea. Uneasy on its rocky foundation the mansion creaked and groaned constantly, and from his refuge in what seemed to be the library Sam Flintlock fancied that from upstairs he heard heavy curtains flap like the wings of gigantic bats.

  Lucy Cully tilted her head to one side, listened for awhile and then said, “I hear that. It’s only the wind.”

  Flintlock smiled. “There is no wind.”

  “Yes, that’s right, there is no wind.” Lucy shivered and hugged herself. “I wish O’Hara would get back.” Since the killing of Shade Pike the girl had kept her distance from Flintlock, staying close to the solid, reassuring presence of the breed.

  It seemed that old Mechan Cully had no time for newfangled oil lamps but there was a plentiful supply of candles and candlesticks to hold them. The light in the parlor came from a couple of four-armed candelabras that cast a fitful yellow glow around the table where Flintlock and Lucy sat but deepened the shadows in the corners where the eight-eyed spiders lived and spun.

  Flintlock had earlier made a foray around the kitchen and found a couple of cans of meat and one of peaches. Lucy had dismissed the former as “greasy, gristly and most unappetizing,” but had eaten some of the peaches. Now she pushed her plate away from her and said, “Sam, why did you kill that man?”

  “He gave me no choice,” Flintlock said. “As to whether or not Shade Pike needed killing, I don’t know. But when he drew down on me I didn’t have time to ponder the question.”

  Lucy shook her head. “All day I’ve been blaming you for the man’s death but now I begin to realize that it was myself who was responsible. If it wasn’t for me, Shade Pike would still be alive. Now I wonder if I made a big mistake coming here. Maybe I’m not cut out to live on the frontier and it would be better for everybody if I’d never left Philadelphia.”

  “This is your house, Lucy, and you didn’t make a mistake,” Flintlock said. “This is the West, where sometimes both men and women must fight to keep what is theirs. Don’t make any decisions until the coming week is over. By then I reckon you’ll feel better about living here.”

  “Will I feel better?”

  “Yeah, because you’ll know the old place isn’t haunted and that you and your intended belong here.”

  “I hope so, Sam. I really do,” Lucy said. “But I don’t want to be the cause of any more deaths.”

  Flintlock nodded. “That’s a good way to be. Killing a man takes its toll on a person and the memory of it never goes away.” He shrugged. “But there are some men who need killing, so there it is.”

  The grandfather clock that stood in the hallway outside the kitchen chimed twice, one of a number of clocks in the house that, with considerable dedication, O’Hara had wound and set to the right time.

  Lucy Cully yawned. “I’m all used up, Sam. I think I’ll retire.”

  “I’ll see you to your room,” Flintlock said.

  The girl smiled. “Thank you, Sam. I’m so nervous tonight that I declare, if I saw a ghost on the stair I’d go into a most aromatic faint.”

  Flintlock picked up a candelabra. “Miss Lucy, the only ghosts in this house are the ones in our own imaginations,” he said. It was a small lie. Old Barnabas was around and he could feel his unwelcome, malevolent presence.

  Flintlock led the way upstairs, each guttering candle a dim halo of light in the darkness. The floorboards creaked as he and Lucy walked to the door at the end of a hallway that smelled of mildew and old age. Paintings of important people lined the wall opposite the balustrade, most of them dead Confederate generals with startling amounts of facial hair. Surprisingly in such a reb gallery, there hung a portrait of the gallant Custer draped in black crepe, his disapproving blue eyes following Lucy’s and Flintlock’s every move.

  Holding the candelabra high, Flintlock opened the door and stepped inside the master bedroom. Large and sparsely furnished, it contained a fireplace, a huge four-poster bed, a couch and two chairs of wine-colored leather and a much worn Persian rug that covered the floor. Opposite the door were a pair of casement windows with latticed panes, and Flintlock guessed that their view would be of the sky and the dizzying drop of the crag’s sheer cliff to the jagged rocks below. The room smelled of burned pine logs, pipe tobacco and dampness, a dark, dead, dreary, empty, echoing space, the life that once dwelled within its walls long gone.

  There was no bed linen, only a worn, patchwork quilt and a pair of blue-and-white-striped ticking pillows. Flintlock held the candelabra in his left hand as he tested the bed with his right. “It’s soft enough, Lucy,” he said.

  The girl nodded. “I’ll be quite comfortable here.”

  “You don’t walk in your sleep, do you?”

  “No, I never have.”

  “Good. Don’t go near those windows. If you fall, you’ll drop for a mile.”

  Lucy smiled. “A singularly unpleasant thought, Sam. But I’ll make a point to steer clear of open windows, I assure you.”

  “Then I’ll leave you,” said Flintlock, mildly disappointed that there was no invitation to stay. Then a pang of guilt. Lucy was a respectable woman and soon to be wed, not the kind of loud, brassy and obliging female he was used to.

  “Can you find your way down in the dark, Sam?” Lucy said. “I’d like to keep the candles here.”

  Flintlock smiled. “Sure, I’ll be just fine. In my time I’ve walked down a lot of staircases in the dark.”

  * * *

  “I fell down the stairs, that’s why,” Sam Flintlock said, irritated that O’Hara had noticed his limp. Then, by way of explanation, “It was as dark as night under a skillet.”

  “Some folks can’t see in the dark,” O’Hara said. “You’re probably one of them, Sam. Not a good way to be, but if you stick to walking down stairs in the daylight you’ll be just fine.”

  “I can see in the dark as well as you can, maybe better,” Flintlock said, groaning as he sat at the table, the pain in his back, hips and right leg nagging at him. “Why the hell were you gone so long? And why did you take my Hawken?”

  “Who left this?” O’Hara said, picking up a plate of greasy canned beef and peaches.

  “Lucy. She didn’t like the meat.”

  “Then I’ll eat it,” O’Hara said, digging in with the girl’s discarded fork.

  The breed’s long black hair fell over his shoulders and in the gloom of the kitchen Flintlock thought he looked more like a bronco Apache than a half Irishman. O’Hara looked up from the plate and said, “I took the Hawken because it always brings me luck.” He chewed energetically on a piece of gristly beef. “I didn’t expect to pull the trigger on the old smoke pole.”

  “And did you?” Flintlock said.

  “No, I was strictly an avant-courier.”

  O’Hara had used the mountain man words for scout, something he may have picked up from the specter of wicked old Barnabas, who’d spent much time around the French trappers who’d first used the term. Flintlock thought O’Hara was showing off but he didn’t press the matter. “What were you doing wandering around out there for hours? You might have fallen over the side of the crag and broke your fool neck.”

  O’Hara let his fork drop onto the empty plate. When he leaned across the table his breath smelled of canned peaches. “I got news, Sam. Shade Pike’s boys are all dead,” he said.

  Flintlock let his surprise show. “You done for them?”


  O’Hara shook his head. “Not me. Somebody else.” He reached out, took the makings from Flintlock’s shirt pocket, and his eyes sought the other man’s in the candle glow. “Or some . . . thing... else.”

  Not by inclination a smoking man, O’Hara made a mess of the papers and tobacco and Flintlock said in irritation, “Here, let me do that.” Then, “You don’t smoke.”

  “Do you have any brandy? No? Then tonight I’m smoking.”

  Flintlock built the cigarette, had O’Hara lick the paper and then he rolled it closed. He thumbed a match, lit the smoke, waited until O’Hara’s coughing fit had passed and said, “Tell me.”

  Wheezing out his words, the cigarette smoke coiling in his fingers, O’Hara said, “After darkness came down I felt uneasy about Pike’s boys. I figured they might come back here looking to even the score for ol’ Shade.”

  “Thought that my ownself,” Flintlock said. “But I didn’t reckon it was likely. Those three boys seemed mighty beaten down when they left.”

  “I didn’t want to take a chance on them,” O’Hara said. He inhaled deeply on the cigarette and immediately went into a paroxysm of coughing.

  “Give me that damned thing,” Flintlock said. He grabbed the cigarette, dropped it on the floor and ground it into shreds with his boot heel. “Don’t let me catch you smoking again, O’Hara. Tobacco sure don’t fit your pistol.”

  “Doctors say (cough) that smoking (cough) is good for your (cough) health,” O’Hara said. “Strengthens the chest and clears the lungs.”

  “Yeah? Well, doctors don’t know everything,” Flintlock said. “Now take a deep breath and tell me what happened.”

  It took O’Hara a few moments to recover, and then he said, “I found them all dead on the switchback. Sam, they were naked and it looked like they’d been cut about by somebody using one of them meat cleavers you see in a butcher’s shop.”