White Lightning (2 page)

He had the plan worked out. Wait for the wagons to be battened down and start on their way, and follow one that led him in the most convenient direction. Overtake it on the trail and get the drop on its two passengers—the tricky part—and take them into custody. The wagon and its cargo would suffice as evidence to justify search warrants, and he’d come back with reinforcements for the rest.

Easy. Unless something went wrong.

But Tanner wasn’t worried. He could handle two men, plug the guard if necessary—hell, plug both of them if they left him no other choice. Try not to kill them, since Judge Dennison was touchy on that score, sometimes, but the first rule of marshaling was always come back home alive, yourself. If some of these boys felt like dying for a load of moonshine, Tanner thought he could accommodate them.

How much longer for the loading, now? The two-man team on Tanner’s left had roughly half their cargo stowed and squared away. The others weren’t as fast, despite the foreman riding them to finish. It was almost noon, and all of them were slowing down. Not dogging it exactly, but he thought they’d likely break for lunch before they finished.

Lunch. It made his stomach growl, and Tanner lowered the binoculars, opened the buckskin bag that lay beside him in the grass, and palmed a corn dodger. Stuffing the whole thing in his mouth, he chewed it slowly, raised the glasses to his eyes again, and focused on the job at hand.

“You see it? On the ridge?” Jed Walker asked.

“I see it,” Grady Sullivan replied. Sun glinting in the distance, maybe off a spyglass lens. “Keep working. Just act natural.”

“What are you gonna do about it?”

“Something,” Sullivan replied and eased off toward the barn, careful to keep from glancing backward as he went. Inside the barn, Lon Burke and Mickey Shaughnessy were lounging by the wall of crates still waiting to be loaded, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and snickering at something till they noticed Sullivan approaching.

“I need you two saddled up,” he told them.

“What’s the matter?” Shaughnessy inquired.

“We might have someone spying on us from the ridge, off west,” said Sullivan.

“Might have?” Burke frowned. “You isn’t sure?”

“I’m pretty sure. Go check it out, the two of you. But careful-like. Ride south until you’re out of sight, then double back around and come in from behind,” said Sullivan.

“What if it’s nothin’?” That from Shaughnessy.

“Then you’ll have got some exercise for once. It wouldn’t kill you,” Sullivan replied. “Get to it.”

Lon said, “Sure, Boss. Only, if there
is
somebody…”

“Bring him back to me. Alive. I’ll wanna talk to him.”

“He may not care to come with us,” said Shaughnessy.

“Persuade him, then. But when I say
alive
, that’s what I mean. No accidents.”

Sullivan left them to the chore of saddling up their
mounts and moved back into the April sunshine where his teams were busy working, four men toting crates from barn to wagons, while the others got them lined up square and proper in the wagon beds. Five minutes later, Shaughnessy and Burke rode out behind him, turned their horses south and spurred them to a lively trot.

Sullivan guessed that it would take twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, to complete the circuit at their present pace. They’d have to slow down, coming up behind the watcher—if there
was
a watcher—to avoid alerting him. Or them, whichever it turned out to be. Sullivan wondered for a moment if he should have sent more men, then put it out of mind.

He made a show of taking off his hat, sleeving the perspiration from his forehead, which permitted him to glance off westward without seeming to. Another flash of sunlight, bright on glass or metal, and he tried to think of any explanation other than a spy watching his people load their crates. Came up with nothing innocent and hoped the men he’d sent remembered what he’d told them about bringing the intruder back alive.

They had him cold on trespassing, for starters, grounds enough to question him and see what he was up to. Where it went from there depended on the watcher’s story and identity. Whatever he was up to, though, Sullivan couldn’t think of any answer that would save his life.

You simply couldn’t know some things and live.

He started thinking past the kill now, keeping an eye on Jed Walker to see that he didn’t go stirring things up. If the workers started acting nervous, sneaking looks up toward the ridge, they might scare off the spy before Sullivan’s men could drop in and surprise him.

And that wouldn’t do at all.

Disposing of a body wasn’t difficult. The spread he supervised sprawled over some twelve hundred acres, ample room for one more shallow grave. Sullivan wasn’t sure they’d want to plant the prowler, though, if leaving him displayed somewhere would send a message to potential future trespassers. Much would depend on who he was and why he’d come to spy on them.

An idea came to Sullivan. He’d have to run it past the boss and get approval, but the more he thought about it, it seemed workable. Some of the burden fell on Burke and Shaughnessy, trusting the pair of them to follow orders, bring the prowler back alive and fit to answer questions. If they messed it up and shot him, Sullivan decided, they would have to dig the bullets out themselves, to make his scheme pay off.

Pulling out his pocket watch, he checked the time and guessed the cook would surface soon, clanging his triangle to signal lunch was served. Sullivan had been smelling stew the past two hours, his mouth watering, but now he was distracted, thinking that he’d likely miss his midday meal. Or if his men came back while everyone was eating, they could leave their captive hogtied in the barn and let him sweat a little, wondering what lay in store for him.

One hard last ride, screaming his life away.

Because they couldn’t simply ask what he was doing on the spread and take the first answer he gave as gospel. Everybody lied, particularly when they found themselves in trouble. It would take some time and effort to extract the truth, squeezing until Sullivan satisfied himself that there was nothing left to learn. Nothing to stop the wagons rolling on their way, although he guessed departure ought to be delayed a bit, until they made sure that the spy was working by his lonesome.

Otherwise…

Sullivan didn’t want to think about that, at the moment.

Look on the sunny side,
he thought. And nip their problem in the bud.

Tanner saw the work crew’s foreman leave his men and head into the barn, returning moments later with a sour expression on his face. Through the binoculars, it seemed that he was almost close enough to touch, and Tanner wished there was some way to pair the glasses with a camera to take long-distance photographs for evidence. Maybe one of the new kinetoscopes, invented by that fellow Edison he’d heard about, away up north.

Tanner wondered how a jury would react to seeing criminals caught in the act, on film. There’d be no arguing by some defense attorney over whether they’d been present at the crime scene, what they’d done, no claims lawmen on the witness stand were spinning fancy tales to lock away the innocent. Like now, for instance. He could film the wagons being loaded with their contraband and have a photographic record of the men responsible, with no room for a claim he’d been mistaken.

Maybe someday.

At the moment, though, he lay and watched the work continue. Soon after the foreman left the barn, two riders followed him, turned left out of the wide front door, and moved off to the south. He tracked them with the glasses for a while, until they passed from sight beyond one of the spread’s cornfields.

Some errand for the boss.

Corn was the only crop the ranch produced, and precious little of it ever reached a dinner plate. The bulk of it went into mash, which went into a vat with rye meal, barley salt,
water, and yeast, then was heated and distilled, producing whiskey that could knock your socks off—or, in cases where the purity was not controlled, leave drinkers blind or dead.

Bill Tanner had consumed his share of whiskey, and some more besides, but he was not concerned about the purity of what was being loaded on the wagons in his view, per se. His job today involved collecting evidence that liquor had been made, bottled, and sold without the proper taxes being paid to Uncle Sam. To prove that charge, he’d need some of the booze.

A wagonload ought to suffice, together with the men assigned to drive and guard it. After that, a raid to take the still and bag the men in charge, then he could move on to another case. Maybe pick up a commendation for his trouble if he made the job sound dangerous in his report. A little fudging did not harm, and truth be told, there
was
an element of danger when it came to hunting moonshiners. Tanner had heard of marshals getting killed on liquor raids—three in the past twelve months alone, but farther east, in Tennessee. It was the same as any other crime, he thought. Where there was easy money to be made, some folks would kill to keep it rolling in.

And he’d be keeping that in mind when it was time to brace the teamsters with their load of who-hit-John. Be ready with his Schofield—better yet, his Winchester—when he confronted them, and take no chances that they’d come up shooting to avoid arrest. Killing was a part of law enforcement Tanner didn’t relish, but he meant to be the one who walked away from any showdown with a felon, if he had a say in how it all turned out.

A raucous clanging noise reached Tanner’s ears and made him turn his glasses toward the farmhouse, where he found a slender figure in an apron banging on a metal triangle
suspended from a wooden beam. A Chinaman, no less. The cook’s lips moved, presumably some variation on the theme of “Come and get it,” but his voice didn’t carry as far as the ridge.

Turning back toward the barn, Tanner watched as the foreman and crew made their way toward the house, stopping off at a pump in the dooryard to rinse off their hands. When they’d all passed inside, he set down the binoculars, wriggled back six feet or so, and rose for a stretch with the nearest oak blocking his view of the house.

If he couldn’t see them, Tanner figured they couldn’t see him.

He’d left his canteen propped against the tree and raised it now, to wet his whistle. As it turned out, lying in the shade and watching other people sweat was thirsty work.

Too bad I haven’t got a little taste of ’shine,
he thought, but it would likely make him sleepy and the last thing that he needed was to doze off at his post and let the whiskey wagons roll away without him. Old Judge Dennison would have a fit, and then some, if he botched the job after a week of following the moonshine trail.

The whicker of a horse reached Tanner’s ears, coming from somewhere down the slope in front of him. He couldn’t see his roan from where he stood, was stepping out to find a point where he could spot it when a
second
animal let go a whinny with an altogether different tone.

Tanner was reaching for his Schofield when he heard the
click-clack
of a lever-action rifle to his right, and someone said, “That wouldn’t be the smartest move you ever made.”

The marshal was a tough one. Grady Sullivan admired that in a man, though at the moment, it was also irritating. They’d
been working on him for the best part of an hour—knuckles mostly, working up from there—and hadn’t even got his name yet, for their effort. Not that naming him was worth much, in the long run. More important was the reason he’d been spying on them in the first place, and it wasn’t any secret.

Whiskey.

Knowing that, they could have killed him outright, but it wouldn’t do. Sullivan had to know whether the lawman had discovered them by accident, or if someone had put him on their trail. It was ridiculous to think he’d just been riding past—on private property, no less—and thought he’d stick around to watch some fellows loading wagons up with crates labeled
CORN SYRUP
, so he must have had a tip from someone, somewhere.

That was what they needed. Trace it back to the informer, then find out if he—or she—had spread the word around to anybody else. Their operation wasn’t secret, in the strictest sense, and couldn’t be when there were paying customers involved, but squealing to the law must be discouraged. An example was required to put busybodies on notice.

Sullivan heard screaming from the barn and went back in to see how they were making out. Lon Burke stepped back from where they had the marshal tied up to a wagon wheel, against an upright beam. The knife Burke held was dripping blood from where it had incised the captive’s naked chest.

“Still nothing?” Sullivan inquired.

“We’ll break him,” Burke said. “Don’t you worry.”

“I’m not worried.” Moving closer to the prisoner, Sullivan knelt and asked him, “Are you worried, Marshal?”

“Should I be?” the lawman asked him, through clenched teeth.

“I’d say so,” Sullivan replied. “You’ve horned in on a deal too big for you to handle. Now you’re done. The only question left is whether you go quick and clean, or slow and messy.”

“My choice, is it?”

“Absolutely,” Sullivan assured him. “Someone pointed you at us. Give me the name, and this all stops. I guarantee you won’t feel anything.”

“That simple?”

“Just like falling off a log.”

“Thing is,” the marshal said, forcing a smile of sorts, “there isn’t any name to give. I worked it out myself.”

“That’s crap. You didn’t find this place by chance,” said Sullivan.

“You’re right. Lucky for me, the idjits you’ve got working for you left a trail a one-eyed man could follow through a dust storm. Anybody ever tell ’em that they shouldn’t brag about their crimes in public?”

“Bullshit!” Mickey Shaughnessy stepped forward, looking twitchy nervous. “Grady, we don’t talk the business up to anybody!”

That
was bullshit, obviously, since they had to advertise the product where it mattered, to saloon keepers and such. Who else was in position to alert the lawman? Any customer who stocked their whiskey, any lush who drank it and inquired about its source, maybe some preacher with an ax to grind against John Barleycorn. The whole damned territory and a couple of adjacent states, the way their business was expanding.