A Dangerous Man (3 page)

Tam Sullivan woke to someone pounding on his door.

“Open up in the name of the law.”

“It's open,” Sullivan ground out. “The key only works sometimes.”

The door slammed open and a big-bellied man with a walrus mustache and eyebrows to match stomped inside. A few flakes of snow clung to the shoulders of his mackinaw. “All right, what's the big idea? And give me no sass or backtalk either.”

“Town sheriff Frank Harm, I presume?” Sullivan said, sitting up in bed. Robert E. Lee scowled at him from his perch on the wall.

“Damn right it is,” the lawman said. “You the one who left a dead man on my front stoop?”

Sullivan picked up the dodger he'd laid on the side table by the bed. “Is this him?”

“Yeah. It's him all right.”

“Then he's mine.” Sullivan said.

Harm scowled in thought, his head cocked to one side like a great, prehistoric bird of prey, as he tried to place a face. “Here, I remember you. Big Tam Sullivan. You done fer Salty Stidger down in Fort Worth that time.”

Sullivan nodded. “He was notified, but Salty never was a listening man.”

“He was good with a gun,” Harm said.

“Well, he thought he was, but he wasn't. Fast on the draw and could shoot all right, but he had a problem hitting what he shot at. Kinda like Crow in that respect.”

Harm frowned. “I have no liking for bounty hunters, Sullivan.”

“Hell, Frank, you was one yourself.”

“Yeah, I was, but I suddenly got religion.”

“A bullet can incline a man in that direction, I guess,” Sullivan said.

“The dodger says twenty-five hundred dollars,” Harm said. “I don't have that kind of money.”

“You got a Butterfield stage depot?” Sullivan asked.

“No. Hell, mister, we got but one hoss in this town and we share it around.”

“Two. I sold Crow's horse to Clem Weaver.”

“Then he robbed you.”

“He surely did. But beggars can't be choosers. Isn't that how the old saying goes?”

“I wouldn't know about no sayings, but it seems to me you have a choice, Sullivan. Either wire Butterfield direct or ride to the nearest town that has a stage depot.”

Sullivan shrugged. “You have a wire?”

“Yeah, at the train station.”

“I didn't know there were rails around here.”

“There aren't. We built a station, but the railroad spur never came. That's where the wire is. In the stationmaster's office.”

“You still have a stationmaster?”

“Yeah. His name is Isaac Loomis. The Acheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe never got round to firing him, so there he sits, year after year, getting a check in the mail every month.”

Sullivan smiled. “Must get pretty lonely for him, huh? A man waiting for a train that never arrives?”

“No, it doesn't. Isaac thinks the trains arrive every day. Get me? He'll sell you a ticket to Timbuktu if you want, only you won't go nowhere.”

Harm read the doubt in Sullivan's face.

“The wire works just fine between here and Santa Fe, unless the Apaches have cut it again.”

“Then I'll send a wire.”

The sheriff watched a cockroach crawl up the far wall then lost interest. “I'll identify Crow Wallace should Butterfield ask. He wasn't much.”

Sullivan nodded. “All draw and no shoot.”

“Give me three dollars, Sullivan,” Harm said.

“For why?”

“To bury your dead, that's for why.”

Sullivan picked up his wallet from the bedside table and gave the lawman a five. “Bury him decent, Frank.”

Harm took the money and turned to leave, but Sullivan's voice stopped him.

“You hear that Bill Longley is in town?”

The lawman said, “Yeah, I heard. Him and a lowlife by the name of Booker Tate. Two rotten apples in any barrel.”

“I'd keep a watch on your bank, if I was you. Them boys could be inclined to a robbery.”

“I already spoke to Perry Cox, the banker, but he don't care. He's a church deacon, but he says he'll do business with the devil himself if there's profit in it. Kind of like you, Sullivan.”

“You got a dodger on Longley or Tate?”

“Nope. And if I did, I wouldn't tell you.”

“Prefer outlaws to bounty hunters, huh?”

“One's as bad as the other, but that's not the reason. I don't want you to get your damned fool head blown off in my town. Sullivan, you ain't in Bill's class. You never was and you never will be.”

“And what class is that?” Sullivan needled.

Harm smiled, a picket fence of teeth under his great mustache. “Draw down on him and you'll find out pretty damned quick.”

“Who do you suppose he is?” Booker Tate said. “I mean the dead guy.”

“Do you care?”

“I guess not, Bill. But it seems they'll bury him decent, nice coffin an' all. The big feller with the gimpy leg is Frank Harm, the town sheriff I told you about.”

“You didn't tell me anything about him except he's fat,” Longley said.

“Yeah, but I said you can take him. That's all you need to know.”

A heavy, sleety downpour clicked and clacked like castanets on the tin roof of the hotel porch. Longley and Tate sat in rockers, watching Harm and a couple of men manhandle the coffin onto the bed of a spring wagon. The Morgan in the traces snorted and pawed at the ground, kicking up gobs of mud.

Raising his voice a little above the racket of the sleet storm, Longley said, “I recognize that law dog's face from somewhere.”

“Wasn't you in an army stockade fer nine months at hard labor, Bill? Maybe Harm was a guard back in them days.”

“Maybe. But I seen him somewhere, that's for sure.”

Their wet slickers gleaming, the three men left the coffin on the wagon and stepped back into the sheriff's office. The morning was icy cold and Longley figured the lawmen planned to whiskey up before heading for the graveyard.

Longley lit his first cigar of the day and its plume of blue smoke drifted from under the porch roof and quickly got battered into nothingness by the sleet. Where the hell had he seen Harm before?

The question troubled him.

Longley did not care for any kind of uncertainty. It could get a man killed.

After the killing of Gregory, he'd tried to escape on a stolen army mule, but a couple Pawnee scouts tracked him down and dragged him back to Fort Brown. He'd protested his innocence but was tried and sentenced to thirty years at hard labor for murder.

“An Iowa State Prison gun bull, maybe,” Longley said.

Tate turned his head and looked at him. “Huh?”

“They sent an iron cage and a four man escort to take me to the pen,” Longley said. “Them fellers all had scatterguns and bad attitudes. Nowadays cons call them gun bulls, especially the blood-sweatin' Negro gangs in the cane fields.”

Tate smiled. “Hell, Bill, the law must've took ye for a mighty dangerous feller.”

“I reckon they did, but I fooled them. One of the army guards was a Texan and he helped me break out of the stockade. Left them Iowans in my dust. I think maybe Harm was one of them.”

“We'll ask around. Find out for sure.”

Longley shook his head, letting smoke drift from the O of his mouth. “I can't take a chance on him, not with thirty years hard time on the line.” He thought about it, weighing his options. “I'll kill him today,” he said finally.

“Hell, Bill, it's a chore to kill a man in this weather. Takes the sport out of it, like.”

“You can stay here. I'll go this one alone.” Longley got to his feet, stubbed out his cigar in the ashtray beside him, and stepped into the hotel lobby.

A harassed-looking woman stood by the front desk attempting to pry a stick of pink and white candy from the pudgy fingers of her squealing offspring. Longley smiled at her as he passed.

He emerged onto the porch ten minutes later, a Henry .44-40 hidden under an army oilskin cape. The brim of his hat was pulled down over his eyes and he wore black leather gloves. He congratulated himself. He'd timed it perfectly.

Harm, up on the seat of the spring wagon, urged the Morgan into a walk. His two companions sat behind him, flanking the jolting coffin.

The relentless north wind cut to the marrowbone. As the morning had grown colder, the sleet had piled up into small, icy parapets where the boardwalks met the mud. The street looked like a crocodile infested river somewhere in darkest Africa.

“Hell of a day for a killing, Bill,” Tate said. “You'll get soaked to the skin.”

Longley grunted and stepped off the walk into mire.

 

 

The bad weather kept people off the street but for one intrepid matron. With her small, meek husband in tow, she bustled into the general store, a shopping basket over her arm. Loudly, she demanded service.

Bill Longley followed the spring wagon but kept his distance. Trudging through ankle-deep mud, he watched Harm swing onto a narrow ribbon of wagon road that headed north out of town.

The Morgan strained into its collar as the trail began a fairly steep climb between rows of wild oaks and a few pines. Beyond the trees, on both sides of the road, lay flat expanses of brush, rock, and stands of prickly pear. Near a row of cottonwoods stood the remains of a stone cabin—three walls and a broken-backed roof—in mute testimony to an old Comanche raid and the deaths of a ma, pa, and kids that no one could remember anymore.

The day was bleak, the landscape bleaker. It was a desolate, achingly lonely place that tried a man's soul.

Soulless, Longley was unaffected by his surroundings. His only consideration was to find an ideal spot to hole up for a rifle shot.

The wagon climbed the hill and topped off at the crest. The graveyard took the entire space, an open, windswept area about ten acres in extent. Harm let the wheezing Morgan rest.

As though in competition with the sleet that clicked through the tree branches, a mist the color of smoked cotton laced among the wild oaks.

Longley left the road and stepped into the cover of trees, the Henry hanging from his left hand. He moved through the haze like a vengeful gray ghost.

The reason for the large burial ground was not because Comanche Crossing produced an inordinate number of dead. It didn't. Five years before, the town fathers had cleared timber from the cone-shaped crest of the hill and then cut off the top like a boiled egg, creating a last resting place with room to grow.

It might have looked like any other Boot Hill in scores of frontier towns but for one thing—a few of the dead were buried in above ground tombs.

The first mayor of Comanche Crossing, Armand Babineaux, was a Cajun and he'd introduced the idea of a City of the Dead, as was the practice in his beloved New Orleans. He was the first to be interred within a marble vault built in a Greek style, but few others had the fortune, or the will, to become his neighbors.

As the wagon rolled through wind-tumbled sleet to the pauper section where graves went unmarked, Bill Longley saw his chance. He crouched behind a stone angel that stood head-bowed over a low, sun-bleached tomb that was already scarred by a creeping black moss, and laid the Henry in front of him.

Then he waited. Smiling, his eyes glittered.

As Harm helped the other men haul the coffin off the wagon, one of the cheap pot metal handles broke off. The box tilted and thudded to the ground.

Longley was close enough to hear the sheriff curse then yell, “Hell, don't lift it again. We'll dig the hole and push the damned thing into it.”

“How deep?”

That also carried to Longley.

“Just deep enough to cover the damned thing and keep the coyotes away,” Harm said. “I don't care. He's not one of my dead.”

Harm stood to one side, his sleet-slashed slicker glistening, and watched his men dig. Their shovels threw up muddy clods of earth.

As the grave grew deeper, Longley smelled dank dirt and the loamy tang of rotting vegetation. Gunmetal clouds hung low in the sky and the mist prowled through the cemetery like a stalking beast.

Melted sleet ran down the stone angel's face like tears.

Only when the work at the grave slowed, and the men laid down shovels and arched their aching backs, did Bill Longley pick up his rifle.

He aimed at Harm's chest then moved up the sights to a point between the top of the lawman's right ear and the rim of his hat. Longley smiled, anticipating the mule kick against his shoulder, the acrid smell of black powder, and his noise-deadened ears that would follow the shot.

He'd been there before. None of those things troubled him.

He took a deep breath and thought
steady now
. He let out a little breath . . . squeezed.
Don't jerk the trigger
. . .

Fired.

Frank Harm's skull exploded and his hat blew clean off his head.

The two other men were not lawmen but laborers hired for the grave-digging job, and they were unarmed. Standing stiff as boards, their scared, horrified expressions pleased Longley.

He didn't wait to see the sheriff fall. He got to his feet and walked toward the men, working the Henry as he walked, levering shot after shot into the diggers.

Both men tumbled into the grave and Longley whooped in triumph.

When he reached the muddy hole, one of the men still showed life, his bloody, open mouth gasping like a trout on grass.

“Time to take your medicine, old fellow,” Longley said. “No hard feelings, I hope.”

He shot the man between the eyes.

Gun smoke and mist curling around him, Longley grinned as a good joke popped into his mind. He dragged the coffin and let it slide onto the bodies of the diggers then grabbed Harm by his boots and lugged the lawman on top of the heap he'd created.

Longley stood back and admired his handiwork. He grinned, delighted.

The piled-up grave, its bottom already an inch deep in watery blood, was a good prank he'd played on the town of Comanche Crossing.