The Lawmen (2 page)

3

“What kind of trouble?” Clay asked, as he and McCarty followed the messenger down from Boot Hill, leaving the four outlaws to their birthday celebration.

“Bull whacker on a whiskey brave,” the messenger replied. In the distance there was a gunshot. “That’ll be him now.”

The three men hurried across the sandy waste. “Where is Tom Anderson’s?” Clay asked.

“The Triangle,” the messenger said.

“That’s our red-light district,” McCarty explained to Clay.

Another shot sounded as the three men reached the Triangle, an area formed where Apache Street angled off for the silver mine. A crowd gathered around them, and Clay’s gut tightened. He knew they were all watching the new marshal, waiting to see how he would handle his first test. Clay was determined to do his best. He had run this far from his past, and he would run no farther.

Tom Anderson’s Place was a small adobe building with a sign over the door advertising Border Beer. More people were gathered outside. As Clay arrived, there was a pistol shot from inside, followed by the sound of breaking glass and a coyote-like howl.

Men saw the badge on Clay’s chest and made way for him. He paused outside the swinging doors, thumbing his shotgun hammers onto half cock. Peter McCarty saw Judge Saxon and Miles Dunleavy in the crowd, and he joined them.

“Here it comes,” the fork-bearded Saxon told Dunleavy confidently. “Your new marshal won’t even make it through his first day. You owe me fifty dollars, Miles.”

Another shot, more breaking glass, another wild yell. Clay took a deep breath, pushed aside the doors, and walked into the saloon.

It was dark inside and surprisingly cool. It took Clay’s eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light. On one side of the room was a bar with a five-gallon keg of whiskey on it. Behind the bar were crude shelves with bottles. There was a scattering of tables and chairs. The bull whacker stood on one of the tables—big, bearded, and dirty, his long bullwhip coiled around his neck. There were two pistols in his hands and two more in his belt. The saloon keeper had taken cover behind the bar. Those customers who had not been able to escape were behind the bar, too, or under the tables. One of them peeked up, and the bull whacker snapped a shot at him, crowing, “I’m half horse, half alligator. I can lick my weight in wildcats, and I eat a bear for breakfast.”

This was followed by a shot that shattered yet another of the bottles, with glass and liquor showering the bar. The gap-toothed bull whacker put back his head and howled. Then he saw Clay. His bloodshot eyes focused with difficulty. “Who are you?”

“I’m the marshal,” Clay replied calmly.

The bull whacker howled again. “Marshal! I have a marshal for breakfast. I use him to wash down the bear. I ain’t scared of no badge-toter that ever lived, and I ain’t scared of you.”

Clay edged closer. “I’ll have to arrest you for disturbing the peace.”

“Well, you just go ahead and try,” the bull whacker raised his pistol.

“Wait!” Clay said.

The bull whacker regarded him suspiciously. “What’s wrong—trying to yellow out? You son of a bitch, I’m gonna shoot you so full of holes you’ll look like one of them furrin cheeses.” He cocked the pistol.

“Wait now,” Clay said calmly, moving closer. “Wait. We can shoot it out if that’s what you want, but innocent people might get hurt, especially if I open up with this scattergun. Why don’t you come off that table, and we’ll settle this with our fists—man-to-man.”

The bull whacker waved his pistol. “Hell, no, I want to--”

“Scared?” Clay asked.

“Scared? I’m scared of no man. I’m half horse, half alliga—”

Clay moved closer still, lowering the hammers of his shotgun. “Then come on down and prove it, loudmouth.”

The bull whacker’s thick brows knit. Behind his beard he flushed with anger. He stumbled off the table. “Barkeep! Take these. Hold ’em for me.”

The terrified saloon keeper rose while the bull whacker handed him all of his pistols, then lifted the coiled whip from around his neck and handed him that, too. “I’m gonna teach this marshal a lesson. I’m gonna turn that face of his into mush.”

He turned, fists raised. As he did, Clay swung his shotgun as hard as he could by the barrels, hitting the bull whacker across the ribs with the stock.

“Ow! ” The bull whacker bent over. Clay shifted the shotgun and cracked the bull whacker behind the head with the steel barrels. The bull whacker dropped to the dirt floor.

“You didn’t put down your guns,” the bull whacker complained.

“No shit,” Clay replied. “I’m not that stupid.”

Outside, the excited crowd pressed around the saloon, watching the action. One-armed Peter McCarty turned to Judge Saxon and the lawyer Dunleavy, beaming. “I told you he’d do.”

Inside, the bull whacker rolled onto his back. Clay sat on the bull whacker’s chest and started going through his pockets. “Ow! My ribs!” the man squealed. “My ribs! I think you broke them.”

“Sorry,” Clay said, shifting his seat to the bull whacker’s thigh. The bull whacker bit his lip, holding back the pain. In one of the man’s shirt pockets Clay found a leather purse. He pulled it out and looked toward the saloon door. “Judge Saxon! What’s the fine for drunk and disorderly in this town?”

“Why, fifty dollars is the usual amount,” the judge replied, taken aback.

Clay poured out a handful of gold eagles and counted five. He tossed another coin to the saloon keeper. “That’s for the damages. He done anything else in here?”

“Yeah,” the barkeep said. “He pissed in the corner.”

Beneath Clay, the bull whacker cried, “Hey, that’s not fair—everybody pisses in that corner.”

Clay considered. “I think we’ll let you go on that one,” he told the bull whacker. “No need for you to go to jail, either. I saw a veterinary’s shingle on Tucson Street, though. You might want to make an appointment.”

Clay rose and started for the saloon door. He was met by drunken cheers and laughter from the crowd in the street. Stopping, he handed Judge Saxon four of the gold eagles. The fifth he put in his pocket. “My ten percent,” he said. He looked at Saxon, McCarty, and Dunleavy. “I could get to like this job.”

Then he went down the street.

4

Evening settled into night. Clay patrolled Topaz’s streets. He was made welcome everywhere. The entire town seemed to have heard about his encounter with the bull whacker at Tom Anderson’s Place, and it seemed like everyone wanted to buy him a drink.

Clay refused them all. “Not while I’m working,” he said. Truth was, Clay had never been able to hold his liquor well, and he didn’t want to be half swozzled the next time he had to go up against a troublemaker.

As the night wore on, the noise level in the town grew. Every night was Saturday night in Topaz. Lights blazed, music blared; the clink of bottles vied with the rattle of poker chips and men shooting pistols at die moon. There were fights for Clay to break up. He spent close to an hour searching for a horse that a drunken cowboy reported as stolen, only to find that the cowboy had misplaced it.

There was a near riot on Grant Street, where the town’s two fanciest brothels faced one another, and whose madames—Dutch Annie and Francie de Lisle—were conducting their own version of the Franco-Prussian War. Francie had her girls on the porch singing a fractured version of “La Marseillaise.” Dutch Annie, a German by way of Hoboken, responded with two shotgun blasts in the direction of Francie’s place. Francie’s girls and bouncers were about to retaliate when Clay showed up. There was a lot of screaming and threats and refighting of battles Clay had never heard of, but at last Clay got tempers calmed and the situation smoothed out.

After that, Clay wandered south of Grant Street, to the dimly lit cribs of the Line, where the poorer prostitutes lived. He found himself on a nameless alley of run-down shacks, from which poured drunken laughter and off-key singing and music.

In front of Clay there were sudden angry yells. There was a crash and a door flew open, releasing a shaft of weak light. A woman stumbled out the door, sobbing. A bearded man, wearing only his trousers, ran after her.

“Bitch!” the bearded man shouted. He kicked the woman in the rear, knocking her to the ground. She got up and started to run away. The man caught up to her from behind and hit her alongside the head with a terrific right hand. The blow lifted the woman off the ground. She somehow managed to keep her feet as she landed, but she was dazed and hurt and stumbling.

The bearded man went for her again. “Give me my money!” He turned the helpless woman around, grabbing the front of her dress and slapping her face.

Clay ran forward. “Hey! Stop that!”

The bearded man looked over his shoulder.

“I’m the marshal,” Clay said. “What’s going on here?”

The bearded man held onto the woman with one hand and pointed with the other. “This whore stole twenty-five dollars from me. Took it out of my pocket while I was sleeping.”

“That ain’t so,” the woman sobbed through bloodied lips. “I didn’t take nothing from him. He’s drunk. I don’t know what he did with his money.”

“You lying bitch.” The bearded man raised his fist to hit her again.

Clay grabbed the man’s wrist. “I said, stop.”

The bearded man turned and swung his left hand at Clay, who ducked the blow and kneed the man in the groin. The man bent over with a loud woof, his face scrunched up in pain. Clay let go of the bearded man’s arm and with his own right hand slugged the man in the jaw. The man dropped to the ground and lay motionless.

 Clay caught the battered woman and steadied her. She was blond, of medium height. She might have been pretty when she was younger. Her longish nose was skewed to one side where it had once been broken, and there was a deep scar down each side of her face, from cheekbone to jaw.

“You all right?” Clay asked her.

The woman struggled to get her feet planted beneath her. Her eyes swam into focus. “I been better, I guess. Been worse, too. I’ll survive. Thanks, Marshal. . . ?”

“Chandler. Clay Chandler.”

“Then thanks, Clay Chandler. I'm Julie Bennett.”

Julie moved her head gingerly, opening and closing her bloody mouth as if to make sure that everything was still working. She touched the side of her head, where the bearded man had hit her, and winced. “Thanks for the help. A lot of law types don’t care what happens to girls on the Line.”

“I’m new to the job,” Clay explained. “I figure you should treat everybody the same.”

She tossed him a look. “You
must
be new, if that’s what you think.”

Clay couldn’t help staring at the scars on her cheeks. She noticed and said, “You’re wondering about my face.”

“No, I-”

“It’s all right, everybody does. I got in trouble with the Hopkins gang.”

“The Hopkins gang? Who are they?”

“You don’t know about them?”

“No,” Clay said.

“You will. They run this town. They have their fingers in everything—and everybody. I used to work at Francie de Lisle’s place. I complained about how much of my money I had to give to the Hopkins brothers. Then I started holding out on them, just a few dollars now and then. They found out about it, and ...” Her voice tailed off.

Clay’s eyes narrowed. “What did they use on you—a straight razor?”

Involuntarily she touched her right cheek. “Yeah. Two of ’em held me down, and Lee Hopkins did the job. Lee likes

that kind of work. The vet sewed me up. I lost my job at Francie’s after that. I had to take up one of these cribs. That means less money for me, and no protection. I’m just hanging on now, trying to make ends meet.”

“Why don’t you leave?” Clay asked.

“Leave for where? Things ain’t going to be better for me anyplace else, not with a face like this.”

The bearded man was sitting up now, rubbing his jaw. Clay hauled him to his feet. “If I see you beating up a woman again, they’ll be putting your head together with screws. You got that?”

“Yeah,” groaned the bearded man, who was still bent over from being kneed in the groin. “I got it.”

“Good,” Clay said. He turned to Julie. “Now give him back his twenty-five dollars.”

Stunned, Julie reached into the top of her dress and pulled out the bearded man’s purse. She held the purse out, and the bearded man snatched it with ill grace. “I’ll be getting the rest of my clothes now,” he growled.

Julie made a face at him as he hobbled back to her crib. “You going to be all right?” Clay asked her.

With her fingers she dabbed the blood from her lips and nodded. “You seem like a decent fella,” she said. “I hope you don’t end up like the last few that had your job.”

“You’re not the only one,” Clay replied.

“Come see me, why don’t you? If you want, that is. I won’t steal your money. ”

Clay hesitated. “I... I never really . . .”

“Visit whores?”

Clay nodded, sheepish.

“It doesn’t have to be a business call. I can make you supper. You probably ain’t had a home-cooked meal in ages. I know I ain’t fixed one.”

Clay remembered the last one he’d had. It had been in December of ’63, when he was home on leave from the army—when he still had a home. “It has been a while,” he admitted. “Could be I’ll take you up on that offer.”

She started away, and Clay said, “Stay out of trouble, Julie Bennett.”

She smiled. “Take care of yourself, Clay Chandler.”

At two o’clock Clay’s young deputy, Johnny Evitts, came on duty. Clay left his shotgun at the office and went in search of a place to relax. He ended up at the Equity Saloon, on Tucson Street, where it entered the Triangle. The Equity was a cowboy hangout. The adobe walls were decorated with cattle skulls, longhorns, branding irons, photographs of men and hangings. It was still crowded at this late hour—men drinking and talking, a loud poker game in one comer. There was a back room where whores circulated, trolling for customers.

Clay eased up to the bar. “Whiskey,” he told the bartender.

“Sure, Marshal,” the barkeep said. He set a glass and bottle in front of Clay. “Help yourself. It’s on the house.”

Clay poured a drink and tossed it down. The drink hit him like bursting shrapnel. There was a burning sensation from his stomach up through his nose. “What’s in this stuff?” he gasped. He sniffed the bottle. “It smells like turpentine.”

“That’s as good a guess as any,” said a smooth voice, and the lawyer Miles Dunleavy sidled up beside him. “Try this instead.” Dunleavy slid his own bottle over. It was called Prickly Ash Bitters. Clay poured some and drank.

“That’s better,” he said. The burning feeling had been replaced by a curious numbness.

Dunleavy wore a large diamond stickpin in his tie. His top hat was set at a rakish angle to his slick hair. “Interesting first day, wasn’t it, Marshal?”

“You could say that,” Clay replied.

“You seem to have a knack for this sort of thing. I believe I’m safe in prophesying that this town will be fortunate for having obtained your services.”

In the comer there was an angry explosion of voices from the poker game. “You palmed that queen!”

“The hell I did!”

“You cheating sonofa—”

A bottle fell to the floor, along with cards and chips, as one of the cowboys—hat hanging behind him, dark hair over his forehead—rose and started shooting.

It happened so fast that no one had time to get out of the way. Clay was caught with the glass of bitters halfway to his lips. There were three shots, then it stopped.

 The smoke cleared. The man opposite the shooter, a skinny redhead, was untouched. The two antagonists stared at each other. Then they burst out laughing. “You had me going for a minute there,” said the redhead, a shifty-looking fellow with freckled cheeks. “I thought you was serious.”

The shooter holstered his six-gun and shouted to the bar-keep, “Earl! Bring us a fresh bottle! This one’s broke.”

As the shooter sat, the redhead said, “Did you really palm that queen?”

“Hell, yeah,” the shooter said, “of course I did.” The two men started laughing again.

From the far side of the room came a pained voice. “Christ, Vance, you hit somebody.”