Day of Independence Page 8

  To the west, far, but closer than the aloof mountains, sprawled a maze of canyons, some shallow, others as deep and dark as the basements of hell.

  Dupoix watched a dust cloud rise a couple of miles south of the canyon lands. At first he thought it might be a sandstorm, but the cloud didn’t move on a broad front. Instead it was strung out, like a moving cattle herd.

  Was a rancher bringing up a herd from Mexico? It seemed unlikely. No sane man would make a drive across hundreds of miles of scorched, waterless desert in the middle of summer.

  Suddenly Dupoix felt too used up to even speculate, the savage heat of the sun getting to him.

  The dust cloud was what it was, and no concern of his.

  He poured water from his canteen into his open hand and let his horse drink. When the water was all but gone, he took the last couple of swallows, then swung into the saddle. The silver that decorated the horn and pommel were hot to the touch.

  Dupoix took a last look at the dead father and son, their bodies already buzzing with fat, black flies.

  Somehow he felt the dust cloud near the canyons and the two dead Mexicans were connected. But he was too worn out to make a connection.

  He swung his horse north, back toward Last Chance.

  He’d let Hank Cannan do the thinking.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Baptiste Dupoix was still an hour south of Last Chance when Mickey Pauleen killed another man.

  It was said later that Jake Stutter had clearly stated his intentions when he drove a buckboard into town with a rough pine coffin in the back and a chalked sign that read:

  RESERVED FER

  MICKY POLEEN

  There’s a hell of

  shootin goin on

  It would be pleasant to record that Stutter sought out Pauleen to avenge the death of a friend or relative who’d died under the little gunman’s Colts. But that was not the case.

  A driven man, Stutter felt only the need to prove that he was faster on the draw than Mickey Pauleen.

  That and nothing else.

  It was Nora Anderson who told Pauleen that a man was calling him out. She took great delight in bringing him the news.

  “Saw him from the window of my room, Mickey,” she said.

  “Who the hell is he?” Pauleen said, sitting up in bed.

  “I don’t know,” Nora said, drawing her robe closer so her large breasts stood out in relief. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  Spindle-legged in his long-handled underwear, Pauleen stepped to the window, drew back the curtain, and glanced outside. After a moment, he said, “Never seen him before in my life.”

  Pauleen turned from the window, stretched, yawned, and said to Nora, “I was up early this morning and need more sleep. Tell him, whoever he is, to come back in an hour or so.” He grinned. “Then you come and join me in bed, Nora.”

  “Not a chance of that,” the woman said. “But I’ll convey your message.”

  “Don’t say no chance until you make a trial of it,” Pauleen said. “You’ll be my woman one day real soon, so you might as well get used to me, huh?”

  “I’ll never be your woman, Mickey,” Nora said, moving to the door. “Even the thought repulses me.”

  “But you will, depend on it,” Pauleen said, his eyes ugly. “And you’ll rue this day.”

  Nora stepped out of the hotel and into the street.

  A few early morning shoppers, mostly matrons in fluttering, white cotton dresses, were on the boardwalks, shopping baskets over their arms, determined to buy their groceries now and escape the heat of the day.

  Jake Stutter stood in the middle of the street. Behind him was the buckboard, and a black horse, its head hanging, tied at the rear.

  Nora was struck by the difference between the gunman and the soft, white bulk of Abe Hacker on one hand, and the diminutive stature of Mickey Pauleen on the other.

  Stutter was thirty years old that summer. He was tall, very lean, his face browned by exposure to sun, snow, and wind. The blue eyes under the wide brim of his hat were carved into wrinkles at the corners as though he was a man who smiled readily or had stared at too many far horizons.

  He wore a Remington low and handy on his right hip, and looked what he was... a professional gun for hire who could not abide the thought that somebody, somewhere, was faster than he.

  Stutter’s eyes flicked over Nora, lingered on her breasts for a moment, and then dismissed her.

  “Pauleen, Mickey Pauleen!” he yelled, his eyes on the glass door of the hotel that still swung on its hinges after Nora’s exit. “I’m calling you out fer a damned, back-shooting, Yankee liar.”

  Nora stepped closer to the gunman and said, smiling, “Begging your pardon, but Mr. Pauleen is still abed. He asks if you could come back in an hour or so.”

  Stutter’s head turned in Nora’s direction, slowly, menacingly, like the gun turret of an ironclad. Through bared teeth, he said, “He asks what?”

  “Looks like there’s something going on outside the Cattleman’s Hotel,” Roxie Miller said.

  She’d been arranging Hank Cannan’s pillows, but now stood at the window, hugging one to her body.

  “If it involves Baptiste Dupoix I don’t want to know,” Cannan said. He felt sour that morning after a restless night.

  “I don’t think so,” Roxie said. “That Nora Anderson woman is talking to a man in the street.” She turned and smiled at the Ranger. “The feller looks like maybe’s he’s a lawman and he’s got a pine coffin on a buckboard and a sign on it.”

  “What does the sign say?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t read it from here.”

  “Roxie, help me get out of this damned bed,” Cannan said.

  The woman shook her head, hands on hips.

  “No, Ranger Cannan. I have to cut your hair and trim your mustache, so you’re staying right where you’re at.”

  “Damn it, woman, is Baptiste Dupoix paying you to torture me like this?”

  “Yes he is, and I need the money, so behave yourself.”

  “Well what’s happening now?”

  “I’ll take a look,” Roxie said.

  Jake Stutter was two hundred pounds of slow burn.

  “He wants me to come back in an hour?” he said.

  Nora nodded, her smile sweet. “Yes, that’s what Mr. Pauleen said. He had to get up quite early this morning on business, and now he needs an extry hour of slumber.”

  Stutter drew himself up to his full height and a strange shudder convulsed him. Eyes bulging, head cocked to one side, he roared, “Git him the hell out here!”

  “As you wish,” Nora said.

  Her back stiff, she stepped into the hotel.

  “See anything?” Cannan said.

  “Yes. Nora went back inside, and the man standing in the street looks like he’s mad enough to eat bees,” Roxie said.

  “What did she say to him?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t hear anything from up here.”

  Roxie was about to step away from the window but suddenly stopped in midstride. “Wait a minute, the hotel door just opened again,” she said.

  Mickey Pauleen stepped onto the hotel porch. He wore only pants, boots, his undershirt, and a sour expression.

  “Who the hell are you and what do you want?” he said, glaring at Stutter. “And why are you disturbing a man’s sleep?”

  “My name’s Jake Stutter. Ever hear of me?”

  Pauleen smiled. “I reckon I once heard somebody mention a two-bit piece of white trash by that name.”

  Stutter seemed to take the insult in stride. “I’d watch your tongue, Pauleen, since I’m the man who’ll kill you this morning. Make me angry enough and you get it in the belly. Take you a long time to die.” He thumbed over his shoulder. “The coffin is reserved for you.”

  Stutter sounded confident, but all the while an alarm bell clamored in his head.

  Pauleen wasn’t wearing his crossed gun belts.

  He’d carelessly shov
ed a Colt into his waistband, almost like an afterthought, as though Stutter didn’t rate any higher.

  The tall man tensed, braced for the draw.

  Pauleen would make him realize his mistake soon enough.

  “I think the stranger is going to draw down on Mickey Pauleen,” Roxie said.

  “Help me get up,” Cannan said.

  “You’re not going down there,” Roxie said.

  “It would take me until nightfall to get down there,” Cannan said. “Help me to the window.”

  Roxie thought about that and then crossed the floor to the bed.

  Cannan swung his legs over the side and stood.

  Immediately his head swam and the room cartwheeled around him.

  “Hold on to me, Ranger,” Roxie said.

  Cannan was a tall man, who tipped the scale at two hundred and twenty pounds, but Roxie was a strong, capable woman, and she helped him stagger to the window.

  “Grab the window frame and I’ll get a chair,” she said.

  When Roxie returned Cannan sank gratefully into the chair and directed his attention to the street.

  He was just in time.

  Even a pang of self-doubt about his gun skills can slow a man on the draw and shoot. And Stutter knew that better than most because he’d killed men whose doubt indulged became doubt realized.

  Pauleen had dismissed him as a no-account and undermined his confidence just a shade, but enough.

  He had to prove him wrong.

  Fast.

  Stutter drew.

  And a moment later wished he’d died quick.

  Two bullets from Pauleen’s .45 slammed into the big man’s belly and he staggered, screaming, then joined his shadow in the dirt.

  Mickey Pauleen stepped off the porch and held his gun high.

  To the crowd that had gathered, gawping at Stutter who was dying hard, he said, “Stay back. I’ll kill anyone, man or woman, who tries to help this trash. Let him lie there like a dog.”

  “Then you’d better kill me, Pauleen,” Ed Gillman, the general store owner, said. He pushed through the crowd and took a knee beside Stutter, whose face was twisted into a mask of pain, suffering an agony that was beyond any man’s ability to endure.

  “Son, make your peace with God,” Gillman said. “Your time is short.”

  Blood in his mouth, Stutter grabbed the front of Gillman’s white apron in a scarlet fist and pleaded, “Help me.”

  “I’m afraid you’re beyond help,” Gillman said. “But I won’t let you die in the street.”

  “Yes, you will,” Pauleen said.

  He pushed the muzzle of his gun into Gillman’s temple, the triple click of the cocking hammer loud in the silence. “Touch that man again and I’ll scatter your brains,” he said.

  The moment Gillman kneeled beside the dying man, Hank Cannan had seen enough.

  He made an attempt to raise the window, but it was beyond his strength. “Help me, Roxie,” he said.

  The woman took in at a glance what was happening in the street, and she helped the Ranger struggle the window open.

  Cannan didn’t hesitate.

  He stuck his head out the window and yelled, “Pauleen, shoot that man and I’ll see you hang!”

  The little gunman hesitated, his snake eyes darting as he tried to pin down the source of the voice.

  Then he spotted Cannan and grinned.

  Pauleen cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted, “Ranger!” Then, before Cannan could answer, “You go to hell!”

  “Leave Gillman be, damn you,” Cannan said.

  “Or what, sick man? You’ll come down here and arrest me?”

  Pauleen pushed the muzzle of his gun harder into Gillman’s temple. “Git up, you,” he said, his words venomous.

  The storekeeper ignored Pauleen, his attention fixed on Jake Stutter. The man’s agonized death shrieks were terrible to hear.

  It’s a natural fact that no matter how game he is, in the end a gut-shot man screams like a woman in the midst of a difficult labor.

  “Mickey! No!”

  Two words, as loud and authoritative as rifle shots.

  Abe Hacker stood on the hotel porch, dressed in broadcloth and brocade, a massive gold watch chain across his belly.

  Then before anyone could speak, Hacker said, “What happened here?”

  “This trash called me out,” Pauleen said.

  “Most unfortunate,” Hacker said. “How is he?”

  “Dying like a gutted hog,” Ed Gillman said.

  A smart man, Hacker had sized up the situation immediately.

  “Then let Mr. Gillman succor the dying, Mickey,” he said. His little eyes telegraphed a warning to Pauleen. For the benefit of Gillman and the crowd of onlookers, he said, “The Ranger is right. We need no more unpleasantness this morning.”

  Accusation edged Gillman’s voice. “Pauleen is your boy, Hacker,” he said.

  “Yes, and he was called out. Mr. Pauleen was only defending himself from a dangerous desperado. Look at the coffin on the wagon and read the sign. Doesn’t that tell you all you need to know?”

  Stutter’s bellow of pain and the sudden, tense bow he made of his back attracted everyone’s attention.

  After a moment that seemed to last forever, the people of Last Chance heard the gunman sigh and death rattle in his throat.

  Gillman closed Stutter’s eyes and stood. He stared hard at Hacker.

  “Why are you still in our town?” he said.

  For a moment Hacker seemed taken aback by the question. But he recovered and smiled, his little eyes vanishing under folds of fat. “I’m a businessman, just as you are, Mr. Gillman,” Hacker said. “I came to find gold, but discovered there was none.” Hacker gave a dramatic little sigh. “Well, in business we learn to take our disappointments just as well as we take our triumphs, with a certain amount of humility and grace.”

  “Then why are you still here?” Gillman said, clinging to that question like a terrier to a rat.

  The crowd had grown larger.

  “Ah, that is easy to explain,” Hacker said. “It was my intention to return to Washington in haste”—then a smooth lie—“especially since I was engaged to deliver a series of business lectures at Georgetown University.”

  Hacker had expected to impress the onlookers with that last, but he was met with a thin silence and stony expressions. The dead man on the ground made the atmosphere even more funereal.

  He forged ahead.

  “Then someone told me—was it Mayor Curtis? Yes, I believe it was—that the town planned to throw a crackerjack Independence Day party and that my good self and my associates were invited.”

  Hacker beamed, throwing his arms wide as though to embrace the crowd.

  “How could I leave after that? Yes, Washington, D.C., throws one hell of a shindig, and I knew that I’d disappoint many students, but I could not refuse such a kind invitation.”

  He turned his attention to Pauleen. “Is that not so, Mr. Pauleen?”

  “You got it, boss,” the little gunman said, grinning.

  Hacker saw Gillman open his mouth to speak, but he cut him off. “And all the expenses of our great patriotic celebration are on me,” he said. Then, his voice rising, “Abe Hacker will pay every last penny.”

  A few in the crowd smiled and one man let out with a halfhearted “Hurrah,” but Hacker’s generous pledge was met mostly with a stony silence.

  Pauleen had enough of Hacker’s niceties, hollow as they were.

  He stepped over Stutter’s body, walked to the wagon, and hauled off the coffin.

  He threw it to the ground, pointed at Stutter and said, “One of you rubes get the undertaker and tell him to bury that sorry piece of trash in the coffin he intended for me.”

  “Pauleen, you have no respect for the living, but have some for the dead,” Gillman said, appalled.

  “Shut your trap, storekeeper,” the gunman said.

  And a moment later Pauleen revealed his withering scorn for
Last Chance, its citizens, and the rule of law.

  He made as if to walk back to the hotel, but stopped in midstride, swung around, and thumbed off fast shots at the window where Hank Cannan sat watching the proceedings.

  “Ranger!” Roxie Miller yelled as three bullets crashed through the window and set showers of shattered glass flying everywhere.

  Too stunned to move, Cannan sat where he was.

  But Roxie reacted quickly.

  She threw herself on Cannan and drove him to the floor.

  “Stay down!” she said.

  But there were no more bullets.

  “What the hell?” Cannan said. “And you’re squashing me, Roxie.”

  The woman smiled. “Most men are glad to pay me for that.”

  “Not this one,” Cannan said. “I’m a happily married man.”

  “So are most of the men who pay me,” Roxie said.

  She pushed on Cannan, eliciting outraged groans from the Ranger, and scrambled to her feet, in the process revealing a considerable amount of shapely knee and thigh.

  “Help me get up,” Cannan said.

  After a considerable struggle, Roxie manhandled the Ranger into bed.

  “Who the hell did that?” Cannan said.

  “Mickey Pauleen took pots at you.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess because he doesn’t like you, Mr. Cannan.”

  “Damn, was he trying to kill me?”

  “No, just scare you. If Mickey wanted to kill you, he wouldn’t have missed.”

  “He’s a son-of-a-bitch and low down.”

  “Yup, he’s all of that.”

  Cannan breathed hard, hurting all over.

  Fragments of glass covered the floor under the window, and a few shards had reached his bed.

  Roxie bent over and picked a piece of glass from Cannan’s mustache. “There’s nothing you can do about Pauleen,” she said.

  “I could arrest him for the attempted murder of a law officer.”