Lawyers in Hell (21 page)

*

Their destination bore a simple legend:  Josie’s.  The first thing Alan noticed was that the interior seemed to be decorated with fewer bullet holes than either the opera house or the hotel.  The second thing he noticed was the man playing solitaire at a far table:  a tall, lean, sandy-haired man, sporting a broom of a moustache over thin lips.  He was dressed neatly compared to the other residents in New Bodie.  Even Masterson’s garb looked shabby next to this man’s white shirt, red brocade vest, black coat, and string tie.

“This him?” the man asked.

“Yep,” Masterson said.

The man raised his eyes from his cards, and Alan felt like he needed to take a step back.  It was a casually appraising glance that couldn’t have lasted more than a couple seconds, but Alan knew the man had sized him up in that brief moment, and it unnerved him.  He wasn’t used to having his measure taken so completely in a bare whisper of time.  The man turned up a couple cards, shifted another across the exposed piles, then looked up again.  Pale blue eyes fixed on Alan, and he said, “I hear you’re an attorney.”

“Yes, sir.”  Alan winced.  He hadn’t meant to throw the “sir” on there, but it had just slipped out.

“Looking to hire an attorney,” the man said.  “Harry Piper’s lost one too many times, and he claims my faro tables are rigged.”

“Are they?”

The man gave a short bark of laughter.  “In hell?  Don’t be ridiculous.  Trying to cheat here is an exercise in futility.  Hell itself cheats whenever it feels the inclination.  You don’t act like you been down here long, but you had to have noticed things don’t work the way you expect them to.”

“Well, yeah,” Alan said, remembering his office in New Hell.  “I learned fast not to take the elevators in the Hall of Injustice, and there was this coffee maker … worst coffee you ever tasted when it did work, which was only part of the time, the rest of the time it …”

Masterson and the other man were starring expressionlessly at him.  Alan shut up.  He swallowed and got back to business.  “My name’s Alan Bensinger.”

“Wyatt Earp.”

“Wyatt…”  Alan gaped.  “Wyatt Earp? 
The
Wyatt Earp?”

Earp scowled at Masterson.  “You didn’t tell him?”

Masterson grinned innocently and spread his hands.

“You were really at the O.K. Corral and all that?  With Doc Holliday and –” Alan broke off.  “You don’t look like Wyatt Earp.”

The man raised an eyebrow.  “Is that so?”

“Yeah, well, I’ve seen the movies, you know, Burt Lancaster and Kurt Russell, Henry Fonda….”

Masterson cleared his throat.

Alan shut up.  “Sorry,” he said.  “I guess that’s kind of silly, isn’t it?  I mean they’re just actors, you’re the real thing.”  He spun toward Masterson.  “That’s why I know your name.  You’re Bat Masterson!”

“Yeah, and I know,” he held up a hand to forestall any comments, “I don’t look like Gene Barry either.  Or Joel McCrea for that matter.  Rather wish I did.”

“How do you know what they looked like?  Never mind, never mind,” Alan said quickly.  Excitement ran though him.  Now this he could do.  He’d never been offered the chance to defend anyone famous back in New Hell.  New Bodie was looking up.  “So you want me to represent you?  Well, you’ve come to the right man, Mister Earp.  You see, I can win any case.”  Alan grinned.  “I got this deal, see, as part of my torment, as long as I lie in court, it’s a cinch.  A done deal.  We can make up whatever story you want, and if I tell it, it’ll stick.…”

The blue-eyed man paused mid-deal and gazed at him coldly, and Alan trailed off.  He’d been in a lot of hostile courtrooms, but that icy stare not only disapproved, it completely dismissed him.  The same glance flicked toward Masterson, and Earp said, “Throw him out.”

Alan’s mouth dropped open.

“Now, Wyatt,” Masterson said, “give the kid a chance –”

“You heard me.”

Masterson sighed and grasped Alan’s sleeve again without further ado and tugged him bodily toward the exit.  The man at the table kept playing solitaire without watching them go.

“Now wait a minute, wait!”  Alan’s objections went unheeded until they were outside in the stifling heat.  “What the hell was that about?  Man needs a lawyer, I tell him I can’t lose, that his case is a sure thing, and he
fires me
?”

“Gotta be hired to be fired, son,” Masterson said.  He spread his hands.  “You didn’t make it that far.  Sorry.  But trust me, around New Bodie, you won’t lack for work.  Plenty of mining claim disputes, murder charges, robbery, assault and battery, rustling…  Just set yourself up, put up a shingle, and the clients will be pouring in.”

“But –” Alan deflated.  “I don’t know anything about mining law.”

“You have something against learning?”

“No, I …” Alan glanced back into Josie’s.  “What’d I do wrong, Mister Masterson?”

Masterson’s expression grew serious, and he said simply, “Wyatt don’t take to lying, that’s all.”

“I don’t either, that’s what got me sent here, I’m sure of it, but….”  He heard the old bitterness coming out in his voice and cut himself off.  Masterson wouldn’t want to hear about his past, and he sure as hell didn’t want to tell it.  It was too depressing.  “So, now what?”

“You can’t throw a stone around here without hitting a saloon or a cantina.  Go get yourself a drink.”

“Anything like the drinks in New Hell?”

“Worse.”

“No thanks, then.”  He recalled how, once upon a time, shortly after he had arrived in hell, he had thought he might be able to drink himself into oblivion.  That hope had died fast.  Alcohol had been no relief whatsoever.  He couldn’t get properly drunk, and all it had done was turn his gut into a sea of churning snakes and make him even more miserable.  If that was possible.

“Go take in a show then.”

Alan remembered the blonde singer and smiled to himself.

Masterson groaned and shook a finger at him.  “Just remember I told you so.”

“What?” Alan said.

“You haven’t heard her sing.”

*

She wasn’t singing when Alan returned to the opera house.  Another argument was in progress, this time between Sally Lockett and the composer of the opera, Giacomo Puccini.  In Italian.  Alan couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but he thought she was marvelous.  Fiery, passionate, beautiful – and she seemed to be winning whatever dispute they were having, as Puccini grew redder and redder.  Alan liked a woman who knew how to use words.

Then, almost as if she sensed his presence, she looked his way.  And that dimpled smile crossed her face again, in clearly surprised pleasure.  She’d remembered him!  At least he thought so for a moment, until she summarily ended the discussion by slapping Puccini hard and storming past him backstage.  Alan’s shoulders slumped.

Puccini held his cheek and stared after her.  The members of the chorus and the large rotund tenor slunk off the other way while he was distracted, but the movement caught the composer’s eye, and he cried out in a heavily accented voice, “No!  We must rehearse again! 
Andiamo!
”

No one noticed Alan at all, and, as the conductor raised his hands to the small rag-tag orchestra at the composer’s command, Alan solemnly left the theater.  Maybe she smiled at all strangers, anything to break the monotony of rehearsals. 

He walked right into her outside the theater doors.  “I’m so sorry!” he began, but she shushed him with a finger across her lips, grabbed him familiarly by the hand, and pulled him away from the theater entrance.

She’d changed clothes somehow, he noticed.  She wore a dress now, a blue and white checkered affair that seemed to cling to all the right places.  Her blonde hair had been swirled on top of her head where it seemed to stay as if by magic.

“You’re new here, ain’t cha?” she said.  “Ain’t seen you ‘round before.”

He stared at her a moment, trying to reconcile the image of an opera singer talking like that.  Then he remembered Masterson wincing at the thought of her singing.  Alan shrugged it off.  “Yes,” he said.

She smiled again, batting her eyelashes at him.  “Well, why don’tcha buy a girl a drink?”

By the time she’d had two drinks (and he hadn’t touched the one he’d felt compelled to buy out of old-fashioned courtesy), he’d learned that, growing up, she’d wanted to be just like Jenny Lind.  “You know, the Swedish Nightingale?” she had said, and Alan had nodded as if he had the slightest clue who she was talking about.  She’d studied to be a singer, but the War Between the States had broken out, and her teacher had gone off to fight.  She’d died herself of typhus that same year.

“I guess it was enough training though, ’cause here I am, stuck singin’ that cursed opera for that cursed composer.”  She downed the rest of her glass as if it were water, and Alan grimaced.

“How can you drink that stuff, doesn’t it…?”

“Curdle in my belly?”

“That’s not exactly what I was going to say, but…”

“Well, sure it does, honey.  I haven’t been able to get good and soused since I arrived down here, and let me tell you, that is hell.  You try singin’ to an audience full of riled up cowboys who wanna hear something good and get stuck with me and that damned opera.  Think we can do
Lucia di Lammermoor
or
La Traviata
?
 
Oh no, just
La Fanciulla
over and over and over.  And after they boo and shoot the place up, I can’t even drown my sorrows in a good whiskey.”  She shrugged, a lithe raising of her petite shoulders.  “But I keep figuring, maybe one of these days, one good drink will somehow slip in among the bad, you know?  Keeps me hoping.”  Her smile turned shy, and she looked up at him from under those big lashes.  “Sort of like meeting a man like you.  Keeps me hoping.”

Alan blushed and found himself speechless.

*

Alan stared in the mirror and rubbed a palm over his scruffy jaw.  He hoped Sally liked beards because he did not know how to use the straight-edge razor that lay beside the wash basin.  Even the smallest paper cuts tended to turn septic in hell; he dreaded the nicks and outright cuts he could give himself if he attempted shaving with that sharp blade.  There were bound to be barbershops around, but he wasn’t sure he trusted them either.  That old adage about being paranoid … it applied in spades to hell – everything
was
out to get him.  Or at least make sure he was as miserable as possible.

But then, there was Sally.  Meeting her wasn’t miserable.  Quite the contrary.  It was the best thing that had happened to him since arriving in hell.  They’d had dinner together last night in the Unlucky Strike Hotel’s restaurant, a relatively safe place to be when unruly drunks started their nightly fighting.  New Bodie’s streets, bursting with gunshots as rapid as firecrackers, sounded like a Chinese New Year celebration.  He dreaded the thought of venturing out there.  Anything that moved outside seemed fair game.  Sally blithely ignored the whole thing, her attention fixed solely on him.  And, he found himself increasingly charmed by her.

They had talked about inconsequentials, just two people discovering each other.  It felt almost normal.  More than that, he’d been
happy
, and that worried Alan immensely.  Hell liked to wait until you relaxed before it smacked you down again.  Nothing that felt good could last down here.

Could it?

His mind chewed over the possible consequences of his newfound happiness as he left himself unshaven and hurried downstairs to meet Sally in the hotel lobby.

“I found the perfect place for you to set up shop,” she said, arms snaking through his to lead him outside.  The heat sucked all the energy right out of him, but she bounced along at his side unfazed.  She was wearing a deep green dress today, that made her blonde hair seem even blonder.  “It’s right beside the opera house,” she said.  “A lovely building with real windows.  Furnished even!  With a room upstairs, so you can live there too and get out of this hotel.”

He didn’t tell her he liked the hotel.  Even in hell, there was something comforting about having your bed made up for you and meals available right downstairs.  So the bedbugs bit and the towels reeked of mildew.  But it was expensive, and the cash Masterson had loaned him would barely cover a week’s lodgings there.  He was going to have to find work fast, and a cheaper place might let him stretch that money a bit longer.  And he had Sally to wine and dine, too.

They sauntered down the boardwalk, and Alan jumped every time a gun went off or a hell-horse cantered down the middle of the dusty street.  Sally paid no attention, but he found himself distracted by everything, both by the newness of it and the worry that something was going to shoot him or run him down.  Somehow, crossing through rush-hour traffic in New Hell seemed less threatening than simply walking among the snorting, revolting hell mounts.

Alan drew up abruptly.  “Oh, no.”

“What is it?” Sally asked.

Dead Hat Joe was coming straight for him, his gorilla-like gait standing out amid his posse of flunkies.

“Quick!”  Alan steered Sally down the nearest alley.

“Alan –”

“Don’t argue!”

Decaying brick and mortar walls rose on either side, funneling them through smelly, dark shadows toward the brightness of the next street.  They came out, and Alan glanced over his shoulder.  No one had followed, and he sighed.

“There he is,” Dead Hat Joe’s wheezy voice called out.

Alan turned to see the miner swing around the corner of the building, retinue in tow.  He closed his eyes for a moment, contemplated running, and discarded the notion.  Joe and his boys were armed.  Alan wasn’t that eager to find out what getting shot felt like.  He tightened his arm around Sally, wondering how he could protect her.

The big man stopped a few feet away, his henchmen a fan of ugly support behind him.  “You sure do scurry like a broken-tailed rat.”

“The only rat around here is you,” Alan said.

“Oooh!”  Dead Hat Joe flailed his arms in mock terror.  “Lookee here, boys, he can talk for hisself!”

“That’s right, and if you dare lay a hand on me, I’ll file charges against you with the marshal.”