The Six-Gun Tarot (18 page)

“Huang, I really need to know who he was out here to see tonight.”

The old man met his stare for a moment and then nodded. “You are a moral man, Sheriff. You seek harmony in a world out of balance.”

“I’m just trying to keep the peace, Huang. Help me out, here.”

“He was with a girl, one of his regulars. I can vouch for her character and innocence.”

“I’m sure.”

“He met with me briefly after his time with the girl and before he departed, as I said, alone. It was a very … unpleasant conversation. I gathered he wanted my help and protection, but the specifics were rather vague. He was afraid of someone.”

“Who?”

“Bick,” Ch’eng said.

“Malachi?” Highfather said.

“Yes, but I’m sure he is not your killer, Sheriff.”

“Why?”

“Because you found the body.”

The old man smiled, bowed and took his leave. His ring of bodyguards encircled him and he vanished into the thinning crowd.

Highfather sighed. “I’ll talk to Bick,” he said to Jim and Mutt. “Jim, I want you to get home and get to sleep. You think you can do that without getting in any more trouble?”

“Yessir,” Jim said.

“Mutt, you go tell the widow what’s happened. I want her to hear it from us, not some drunken town crier.”

“I’m … I may not be the fella to do that, Jon,” Mutt said. “I ain’t exactly a comfort in my storytellin’; maybe I could roust the preacher?”

“No. If she’s able, ask her what business her husband and Bick were mixed up in.”

“Might be able to help there. Seems ole Art had done gone and lost the deed to the Argent Mine to a couple of lick-fingers named Deerfield and Moore in a card game over in Virginia City a few weeks back.”

“Why would Bick sell the deed to that land to Stapleton?” Highfather said.

“I guarantee you that he sure didn’t expect it to travel,” Mutt said. “A schemy fella like old Malachi would sure not take kindly to Stapleton messing up his plans, whatever they were, by raising when he should’ve folded.”

“I’ll go ask him about that. You talk to the widow and see what she might recall about any of this, but do it gentle-like.”

“Yep,” Mutt said, spitting as he walked away. “Gentle is my damned middle name, Jon.”

Highfather walked with Jim back as far as Prosperity Street.

“Doesn’t this Bick fella pretty much own most of Golgotha?” Jim asked.

“Yep. His family was here even before the Pratts and other Mormon families rolled into town. Old money.”

“I know the type,” Jim said. “Think since they own all the land, all the stores, they own the people too.”

“Pretty much. I’ve been dealing with old Malachi for a long time, though. I don’t know if you’d call it mutual respect, but I can usually expect pretty plain talk from him, in most cases.”

“Good,” Jim said.

There was silence until they reached the point where they would part company.

“You aren’t telling me everything,” Highfather said. “About you, about what you were doing there tonight, are you?”

“No, sir,” Jim said. “But I promise you I will.”

The sheriff frowned. “Git home,” he said.

Jim ran down Prosperity, toward Rose Hill. He turned right and headed back to the Widow Proctor’s place. He couldn’t tell Highfather everything yet. He’d think he was hopping crazy like a loon. How could he tell Highfather he was trying to unlock the secret of his dead father’s jade eye, that the eye had shown him things that simply couldn’t be real but were? How could he tell him that the old Chinaman—Ch’eng Huang—had glanced at him for an instant and spoken directly into his mind.

I know what you seek, young man,
he had said silently.
I can answer your questions about what you hold—about your father’s legacy and yours. I will be waiting.…

Jim ran home to bed. When he finally did sleep, he stumbled through endless tunnels with wet things moving under his skin.

The King of Wands

It was a hair trigger to dawn when Highfather walked into the Paradise Falls. It was grand, especially for a cattle-trail town like Golgotha. The stage was dark and the red-velvet curtains were down. Kerry Duell, one of Bick’s men, pushed a broom across the empty boards. Georgie Nance, looking for the world like a human basset hound, tended the almost empty bar. A few patrons still nursed a drink. One of Bick’s girls worked a pair of Dakota cowboys passing through on their way to the next cattle drive. She laughed when they laughed and between rounds touted the comfort and privacy of Bick’s hotel, next door.

“Evening, Sheriff,” Georgie said with his odd accent: not English, but close. No one knew where Georgie was from and the bartender never offered to clear it up for anyone. Sometimes he sounded Irish, other times like an Indian. The standing bet was a hundred bucks and a bottle off the top shelf if anyone could solve the mystery of where Georgie called home. The bottle was still up there.

“Heard you had some trouble over in Johnny Town, tonight. Somebody dead?”

“Really can’t say right this minute, George.”

“Right. Care for something? We’re planning on chasing everyone out in a spell.”

“No thanks. Your boss in?”

“Back table, same as always, Jon.”

Malachi Bick sat at an octagonal card table, overlooking Kerry’s performance on the stage with his broom. His back was to the wall. He carefully pulled cards from an oversized deck and laid them on the red-felt table, one card at a time. His black hair hung in loose curls that fell to his shoulders in a half shingle. His sideburns were long and he wore a goatee and mustache. Bick’s eyes were the color of sin, guarded by heavy lids that gave him a quality of inscrutability, like a reptile waiting, languid, until the moment of certainty when the prey could not escape.

He wore his expensive clothes casually. They were clean but rumpled from the day’s exertions. A wine-colored shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows and held with black garters; a black vest, black trousers and half boots that came to just above the ankles. His coat hung on the back of his chair. His silver-tipped walking stick rested there as well.

“I’ve been expecting you,” Bick said in a voice as rich and warm as pipe tobacco smoke. He picked a card off the felt and flicked it across the table to Highfather’s side. It depicted a bearded man with an eye patch hanging upside down from a tree—one leg crooked, the other straight. Two ravens perched in the branches of the tree.
THE HANGED MAN
was written at the bottom of the card.

“Playing gypsy again?” Highfather said, examining the card and taking a seat opposite Bick. “I guess that means you know why I’m here.”

Bick said nothing. He scooped up the cards on the table and began to shuffle the tarot deck. Highfather tossed him the Hanged Man. It was retrieved and quickly returned to the deck.

“Stapleton was afraid of you,” Highfather said. “Why?”

“Lots of people are afraid of me,” Bick said, fanning the cards facedown onto the tabletop before him. “I have a way about me.”

“You know I’m not.”

“Yes, that has always been true in all our dealings over the years. Even from the beginning.” He flipped a card over and studied it. “Why is that, Sheriff?”

“When I was seven, my father stood down some very bad men with an empty gun. He saved us—me, my brother, my mother—saved people he didn’t even know with that fool act. Saved himself too. He told me that you can never let a wolf sense fear in you, sense a way into you. They can smell it, and they’ll use it to eat out your heart.”

“I’m not a wolf, Sheriff.” He flipped another card, frowned at it. “I have no interest in eating hearts.

“Did you know,” he pointed to Highfather’s badge, “that symbol you carry is almost as ancient as mankind itself? A star imprisoned within a circle—a symbol of warding, of protection from the forces of evil, of binding evil. Did it ever occur to you how men of law, men who choose to stand between the innocent and the forces of chaos and evil, picked that particular symbol as a badge of their office? To stand for order and peace?”

“I’m not partial to games, Malachi. Did you and Stapleton fight tonight?”

“I’m just a businessman. I was expressing my displeasure with my attorney and someone I considered a trusted business partner.”

“So you and Stapleton did have words tonight?”

Bick tipped a card in the fanned pile. The entire pile flipped over in a graceful cascade; then with a flick of his wrist and gleam in his eye he flipped them all over again, facedown, except now one in the middle remained faceup. It bore the image of nine goblets. Highfather went out of his way to seem unimpressed.

“Yes,” Malachi said finally. “We had not spoken to any great length after he retuned from his business in Virginia City. He finally had the nerve to tell me what had happened with losing the mine property. That land has been in my family for a very long time. I was understandably distressed.”

“What possessed you to give him deed to that land?”

Behind Highfather, Kerry was turning the chairs up onto the tables. The saloon girl and her Dakota investors wandered out the door, casting drunken farewells to George.

“It’s rather legal and very complicated business, Sheriff. Much more so than locking up drunks, punching cattle or rescuing damsels in distress off railroad tracks. It is also my business and mine alone.”

“’Fraid not, Malachi. Not anymore. Whatever you are into this time, you’ve got a dead man hanging around your neck and that’s not going to just disappear.”

“Are you charging me in the murder, Sheriff?” Bick smiled. “I have numerous witnesses that can attest to my presence here all evening long.”

“I kind of figured that,” Highfather said. “But you and me have been dancing to this tune for a long, long time now.”

The sheriff leaned across the table and flipped one of the cards over. It depicted a tower collapsing under the assault of lighting.

“I intend to find out what you are mixed up in this time, Malachi, because I’m sure it has to do with my town and my people, just like I’m sure it has to do with Stapleton’s death.

Bick’s eyes remained fixed on the tarot card. “And what do you think you are so sure of, Sheriff?”

“You can feel whatever it is coming too, can’t you?” Highfather said, nodding. “Like a hot, gritty wind blowing off the Forty-Mile, carrying all the cries and the curses of all those bleached skulls out there back to us. The kind of wind that makes the dogs howl like babies. It’s coming and I’m damned sure you’re the harbinger of whatever trouble it is. So, this time I’m going to drag you into the light, Bick, and you are actually going to get what’s coming to you.”

Bick looked up from studying the Tower. The smile was gone from his lips, but there was still a dark light in his ebony eyes.

“Sometimes if you drag something into the light, Sheriff, you don’t get clarity, you just get blind.”

Highfather rose and walked out the doors of Paradise into the sun’s groggy greeting.

The Lovers

“They’re clearing out,” James Ringo said as he looked down from his apartment window at the dispersing crowd of townsfolk brought out by the spectacle of a murder in Johnny Town. “Finally! I’m sorry. I know you’re gonna catch hell from Holly, right?”

Mayor Harry Pratt groaned as he sat up in Ringo’s bed. He fumbled for his pocket watch next to the oil lamp on the night table, popped it open and shrugged.

“I really don’t give a damn. My darling wife is probably already drunk and asleep. If she isn’t then she’d give me Jesse about something, no matter what time I came in. It’s all right. To hell with her.”

Ringo was built wiry and lean. He was muscular, but in a compact way that didn’t draw attention to him. His hair was brown, shot through with coppery strands, and he wore it long, like many of the Indian men did. He was usually clean-shaven, but even then his shadow was dark and pronounced. He stood nude at the window and Harry couldn’t help but notice the valleys and canyons of scar tissue that made up the topography of his back. They matched the knife and bullet wounds on his chest, a testimony to a hard, violent life that had eventually led him to Golgotha six years ago.

“Now you can’t go in there like that,” Ringo said turning away from the window and letting the curtain drop. “You’ve got to be careful; you know that. That woman is half mountain lion and she can make your life a living hell if she gets a mind to.”

“I know, I know,” Harry said as he stood, pulling on his pants. “Holly’s nothing like Sarah. I’ve got one wife who could care less if I live or die as long as she’s got my name and my money and another one who I’m pretty sure wants to do me in herself, half the time.”

“You Mormons,” Ringo said as he sat down next to Harry on the edge of the bed. The mayor was busy pulling on his stockings and ankle boots. “Most fellas have a time keeping one woman from skinning them. Y’all like to live a drop more dangerously.”

“Not like,” Harry said, “have to. If you have a position like mine, if your family is as prominent as mine is … Well, you don’t get much of a say in anything. I had to dig in my heels pretty hard to just have the two of them. Father wanted me to have more. He hated Sarah, but she’s worked out very well. We really do get along in our own way. Holly was a mistake for her and for me. I wish…”

Harry paused from putting on his shirt and leaned forward.

“I would take one more vow,” he said softly as he cupped Ringo’s face. “If only there was a way.”

They kissed. The love in it was strong, welling up from deep inside of them, giving them power, making them gods. But it held a sweet, sad taste too—like it always did, especially when it was time to go. When it was over, Harry looked away and began to fiddle with his shirt again.

“Well, it can’t ever be that,” Ringo said, helping him with his collar. “Ain’t never gonna be that. It is what it is, Harry. Life ain’t cut out for more than that. You are the honorable mayor of this fine town, and a rising elder in the temple, with two faithful wives, and I’m a faggot piano player, working in a Chinese whorehouse.”

“Don’t talk about yourself that way!”

“Why? Because it makes you feel uncomfortable? I know who I am, Harry. I got the scars to prove it. Don’t feel sorry for me.”