Authors: William W. Johnstone

Shawn O'Brien Manslaughter (7 page)

BOOK: Shawn O'Brien Manslaughter

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C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

“Go looking for trouble, Pete,” Burt Becker said. “I want you, Little Face, and June to do some serious killing.”

“How many are up there in the hills, boss?” June Lacour said.

“Last I heard a dozen and the crazy doc makes thirteen, an unlucky number.”

“For them or for us?” Pete Caradas said, admiring his morning bourbon in the glass.

“You three are the fastest guns that ever came out of Texas,” Becker said. “So I say unlucky for Tom Clouston.”

He stood and stared out the window of his hotel room, and his back still turned, he said, “Kill as many as you can and the rest we'll leave. But Clouston himself will be your main target.”

“You ever seen him, boss?” Little Face Denton said.

Now Becker turned, the black cigar in his hand wreathing smoke. “No one's seen him since he was drummed out of the medical profession,” he said. “But he'll be the ranny in charge so you'll recognize him.”

Becker stepped to the table and splashed more whiskey into his glass.

“Gentlemen, I want this done quickly and I want it done well. There's millions, maybe tens of millions, of dollars at stake here. Don't get into a prolonged gunfight, just get among them, kill as many as you can, and then get the hell out of there. Don't be heroes. We'll mop up later.”

“What about the Chinese?” Caradas said.

“They'll play ball. I can hire as many as I need for fifty cents a day per man. Leave the business side of our enterprise to me.”

June Lacour looked at the others, then said, “We got the whole day ahead of us, let's go get it done.”

“I'll give a three-hundred-dollar bonus to each of you when the job is done. Kill them all and I'll double it.”

“We'll do our best, boss,” Caradas said. “I'll kill the crazy doc for you personally.”

Pete Caradas and the others rode out of Broken Bridle under a blue morning sky that was still lightly tinged with pink. The morning promised heat to come, and a breeze blowing from the south would do little to cool the day.

Unseen by the three riders, Sheriff Jeremiah Purdy watched from the shadows. His face was deeply troubled.

After an hour, the three gunmen were within earshot of throbbing drums that warned them their coming had been noticed and any chance of a surprise attack was gone.

Little Face Denton drew rein. He seemed concerned.

“Hold up, boys,” he said. “This just don't feel right.”

“You mean it doesn't sound right,” June Lacour said. “Drums in the morning never bode well. Well, as far as I know they don't.”

Pete Caradas stood in the stirrups and his eyes reached into distance. He saw no sign of movement. Ahead of them lay a narrow draw, and something heavy crashed around on its brushy floor.

A bear probably, Caradas decided. The men they hunted were unlikely to make a racket like that.

“What do we do now, Pete?” Denton said. He was unsure of himself and his mouth was dry. “We can't ride in, shoot 'em up, and then ride out again. They know we're here for God's sake.”

“Drums scaring you, Little Face?” Caradas said. But his unease showed in his eyes and his right hand never strayed far from his gun.

Before Denton could answer, Lacour said, “He's got a right to be scared, Pete. Those damned drums can get into a man's head, and right now they're saying, âCome right on in, fellers. We're waiting for you.'”

“Maybe that's the idea,” Pete Caradas said. “The crazy doc trying to keep us off balance.”

“He's succeeding,” Lacour said.

Little Face, neither as smart nor as brave as his companions, said, “I say we go back.”

“And I say we go ahead and do what we came here to do,” Caradas said. “Clouston and his boys are running scared. That's why they're banging on drums to drive us away.”

Lacour said, “Pete, they know we're coming so they'll be laying for us.”

“I reckon I know that. We'll scout a little ways ahead, and if it even smells like we're riding into an ambush we get the hell out of there and try it again some other day.”

“Or night,” Lacour said.

Caradas nodded. “You got an idea there, June. All right, we move slowly and see to your guns.”

“I don't like this,” Denton said. “I don't like this one bit. It just don't set right with me.”

Lacour looked at him but said nothing, his mouth tight under his mustache.

A ribbon of game trail led through the draw, then wound through some thick brush and timber country toward a V-shaped gap in the hills. A long-ago lightning fire had blackened about ten acres of ground to the south, and the charred trunk of a wild oak still stood, a single skeletal branch pointing the way to the break.

The rangeland on both sides of the trail was dominated by sagebrush, but here and there sego lily, prickly pear, larkspur, and bitterroot added flowering splashes of red, yellow, pink, and orange.

The straw man was fixed to a stand of cactus.

Pete Caradas drew rein next to the prickly pear and took down the effigy. It was crudely made but was unmistakably a male figure.

“What the hell is that?” June Lacour said.

“A child's toy maybe?” Little Face Denton said. “But what's it doing all the way out here?”

“It's not a toy,” Caradas said. “It's a warning.”

“Strange kind of warning,” Lacour said.

“It must mean something to somebody,” Caradas said. “But I'm damned if I know what it is.”

“It's one of us,” Denton said. “It's a straw man, made to look like me or one of you.”

“It doesn't look like anybody,” Caradas said.

The straw man was about a foot tall and hurriedly made. It had small black hairpins for eyes.

“How do we play this, Pete?” Lacour said. “I say we get the hell out of here.”

Caradas stared at the straw man for a few moments, then said, “I still think they're trying to scare us away. They don't want to fight.”

The drums suddenly stopped, leaving a strange, ominous silence.

“Pete, today is not our day,” Lacour said. “Like the drums, that straw man can talk. He's telling us to light a shuck.”

Caradas tossed the effigy away, then said, “I reckon he's saying just that, June.” His eyes searched the hills. “I don't see anything.”

Denton said, “You two can do whatever you want, but I'm heading back to town.” He swung his horse around and kicked the animal into motion.

The horse trotted forward, but Little Face didn't.

A loop snaked out of the brush and yanked him, yelling, from the saddle.

“What the hell?” Lacour said, drawing his Colt.

But a second loop pinned his arms to his sides, and a moment later Lacour left the saddle and crashed to the ground in an ungainly heap.

Taken completely by surprise, Caradas didn't immediately react. A rope reached for him, but he turned his horse quickly, slipped the noose, and palmed his gun. He shot a man running at him with a rope in his hand, shot him again as he dropped the rope and reached for his revolver. His prancing horse kicking up clouds of dust, Caradas held his gun high and looked around for another target.

He found none. Both Denton and Lacour had disappeared, dragged into the brush. Dust slowly sifting back to the ground marked their last desperate struggles.

Heat hammered from the sun that burned like a red-hot coin in the denim-blue sky. A heat haze stretched to the horizons, and the Rattlesnake Hills shimmered and looked as though they floated on a lake. It was hot, stifling, and sweat trickled down Caradas's back and his gun hand felt slick on the ivory handle of his Colt.

He stood in the stirrups and yelled, “June! Little Face!”

Echoes mocked him. Then the drums started again.

Pete Caradas had sand, but there's a limit to every man's courage and even to his foolhardiness. He kicked his horse into a gallop and took to the trail. After a couple of moments a rifle bullet buzzed past his left ear like an angry hornet. Then another stung his right, drawing blood.

Pete Caradas knew then that the marksman could easily have killed him. The shots were meant only to scare.

For the first time in his life the Texas draw fighter felt fear. No, much worse than that, he experienced a few moments of terror so bad that the gorge rose in his throat. He gagged, then leaned over the side of his running horse and threw up strings of green bile.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

It was an hour before noon when Shawn O'Brien and Hamp Sedley rode into Broken Bridle. Sedley's face was solemn, a man nursing a grievance. And before leaving the Four Ace ranch he'd made it known to Shawn.

“Some men,” he said, “are worth saving. But the college boy sheriff isn't one of them.”

“Don't fold on him just yet, Hamp,” Shawn said. “I think Jeremiah Purdy is worth one last try.”

The upshot was that Sedley was determined to ignore Purdy and spend whatever time he had left in town in the saloon, fleecing the rubes. Or so he hoped. He'd been trying to outrun a losing streak for two years now, but a gambler is a man who makes his living out of hope, and Sedley figured Lady Luck, his fickle lover, was due to return to his side.

“Let the cards fall where they may,” he said as he and Shawn rode onto Main Street.

“Huh?” Shawn said.

“Nothing. I was just thinking out loud,” Sedley said. He turned his head to say something more, but the words died on his lips.

Beside him Shawn had stiffened in the saddle, his eyes fixed on the street ahead of him. He looked like a hawk about to swoop.

Sedley followed the younger man's gaze. A couple of delivery drays passed each other and a woman shaded by a parasol crossed from one boardwalk to the other.

But then Sedley saw what Shawn had seen.

Burt Becker, his back to them, had just left the hotel and was crossing the street in the direction of the saloon, waving to people on the boardwalk as he went. Very few returned his salute.

Without a word, Shawn kicked his startled horse into a gallop.

“No!” Sedley yelled. He was too late.

Shawn drove his big sorrel directly at Becker.

The man heard the pound of hooves behind him and began to turn.

But the right flank of the horse slammed into Becker and knocked him sprawling on his back.

Shawn drew rein and swung off his rearing, wild-eyed stud. His ribs hurting, the bed weakness still on him, he knew he had to end this quickly or Becker would kill him.

Cursing, Becker scrambled to his feet and Shawn met him with a hard straight right to the chin. The big man staggered back but Shawn crowded him, jabbing with his left before landing another haymaker right to Becker's jaw. The punch shook Becker, but he didn't fall.

Suddenly Shawn was worried.

He'd not fully realized how huge Burt Becker was. The man was massive in the chest and shoulders and his hands and wrists enormous. He looked as formidable as an enraged grizzly.

And Becker was enraged, mad clean through and ready to kill.

“O'Brien,” he said through a bloody split lip, “I'm going to cripple you.”

Becker came in with both fists swinging, and Shawn took a wicked left to the chin. His head exploded with stars, and he was surprised to find himself on his back in the street.

Far off, he heard men roar and a woman cried out for the sheriff.

Becker stood with his legs spread, a triumphant grin on his face and a terrible, raging hatred in his eyes.

“On your feet, O'Brien,” he said. “You got a lot more coming. I'm gonna take you apart.”

Shawn forced himself to stand upright, his broken ribs paining him mercilessly. Becker stepped in on him, and Shawn threw a feeble right that the big man effortlessly parried. A sadistic light in his eyes, Becker pounded Shawn back to the ground and then stepped in quickly for the kill.

But Shawn rolled into Becker's legs, and, unable to stop, the big man tripped and fell on top of him. Shawn, lean as a lobo wolf and flexible as an eel, wriggled out from under Becker and scrambled to his feet.

He had to end this thing. Now. Before it was too late.

As Becker pushed himself to his feet he dropped his head for a moment, and Shawn smashed a powerful kick into the man's face. Blood sprayed in a scarlet arc as Becker's head jerked back, and Shawn stood wide-legged as the man staggered to his feet. Shawn measured the distance and then landed a roundhouse punch to the big man's chin.

Becker fell on his side and Shawn waited for him to rise.

Groggy now, when he got up off the street Becker lowered his head and charged like a maddened bull. But he held his enormous fists low. It was a bad mistake and it cost him.

As the big man got within range, Shawn drove his hard, horseman's knee upward into Becker's face. He felt the man's nose shatter.

Becker might have fallen, but Shawn stepped inside, held Becker upright by the lapels of his frockcoat, and head-butted him hard, smashing bone between the big man's eyes.

Becker groaned and dropped. But there was much anger and no mercy in Shawn now. This was skull and boot fighting as it had been taught to the brothers O'Brien by wicked old Luther Ironside. The beaten man was not expected to walk away from such an encounter.

But there was no quit in Burt Becker that day.

He staggered up again with stony determination, his face a nightmare of blood and bone, both swollen eyes almost closed. For a moment Becker just stood there, swaying, and shook blood from his face.

Drawing on the last of his fading strength, Shawn hit him with a right that sounded like an ax hitting a tree trunk.

Becker staggered, then fell flat on his face, and Shawn knew the big man had no fight left in him.

Hamp Sedley handed Shawn his hat.

He glanced at Becker's huge frame sprawled in the dust and shook his head. “Not one to hold a grudge, are you, Shawn?” he said.

“This was of his own making,” Shawn said. “He called it.”

A tall, middle-aged man detached himself from the crowd of gawkers and said, “I'm Doctor John Walsh.” He studied Shawn's face and said, “I think you'd better come with me, young man.”

“I'll be just fine, Doc,” Shawn said.

“The cut above your left eye needs a couple of sutures,” Walsh said. “And I can treat those swollen hands. Any jaw pain?”

Shawn shook his head and then nodded to Becker, who was now groggily sitting up.

“What about him?”

“A couple of strong men will carry him to my office. It's at the end of the boardwalk with the hanging sign outside. Follow me, please.”

“Go ahead, Shawn,” Sedley said. “I'll put up the horses.”

Dr. Walsh, a thin, austere man with a shock of gray hair, split his time between Shawn and Becker, after both men left their guns at the door.

He finished with Shawn first.

“No broken bones, but the fractured ribs you already have are still several weeks away from healing. I suggest no more fistfights for at least a month.”

Shawn smiled. “I've no great desire to try one of those again anytime soon, Doc.”

“Good. And the salve I gave you will work to reduce your swollen hands and eye.”

“How is Becker?”

“He took a bad beating,” the physician said, a slightly accusing note in his voice. “He has three fractured ribs, a broken nose, and, worst of all for a great trencherman like Mr. Becker, his jaw is broken.” Walsh shook his head and said, “The jaw will be bound up for at least six weeks, I'm afraid. He'll need to eat soft foods and he'll find it very difficult to talk.”

Shawn O'Brien flexed the fingers of his right hand. The knuckles were swollen and painful. “Becker brought this on himself,” he said. “You heard what happened in the saloon?”

“Yes, I did. Violence begets violence, I suppose.”

The doctor lifted his head and listened into the day. “The drums have started again,” he said.

Shawn nodded. “I think the violence you speak of is yet to begin,” he said.

BOOK: Shawn O'Brien Manslaughter

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