Doc: A Novel (26 page)

“He says you’re wanted in Dallas and Denver and Atlanta for murders. He says you gutted a gambler in a knife fight out in California. He says you gunned down three Negroes back in Georgia, and that’s why you came west. He says you’ve killed so many men, you don’t even count Mexicans.”

Holliday was a poker player. His reaction might have been an elaborate pantomime, meant to throw an opponent off, though it appeared genuine enough. The dentist stared, openmouthed, and shook his head, eyes wide. He started on a laugh, but it got tangled up in a cough. He fished out a handkerchief to hold over his mouth and then just sat there, waiting to see what his lungs decided. Finally he cleared his throat and put the handkerchief back in his pocket.

“Well, now,” he said softly. “Seems that the cup of my iniquity overflows! If I am such a bad man, I wonder why Sheriff Masterson has not arrested me for my manifold misdeeds? Ought to be some sort of reward offered, wouldn’t you think?”

Which was a good point.

Doc took a careful sip of bourbon. “The dust this time of day,” he said in explanation and set the glass down so carefully, it was all the more startling when he rose without warning.

There it was: a feline suddenness that could make you think he’d pull a knife and slice you dead, just like Bat said. Alarmed, the salesman quickly gathered his things and left. The cattlemen sat back and watched, ready for whatever might happen.

Wyatt felt the calm come over him.
Try it
, he thought.

“We are of a height,” the dentist observed. “Six feet?”

Wyatt’s eyes narrowed. “Near enough.”

Doc stepped back a pace and took in the physique that had controlled six-hitch freight teams from the age of seventeen. The woodcutter’s shoulders. The thighs solid with saddle muscle. “I would wager that you have fifty, sixty pounds on me,” he said judiciously. “How much do you weigh, Wyatt? Hundred and ninety, maybe? Two hundred?”

“About that. What diff—”

Doc sat carefully, gathered the deck, and shuffled. “I was never big,” he said, beginning another round of dummies, “but since this illness took hold, I haven’t been able to keep any weight on. Doesn’t matter what I eat.”

He went around again with deft efficiency. Ten of clubs, flush developing. A second nine. Seven, possible straight. “I don’t believe you are gettin’ enough rest, Wyatt. You look tired. Please. Have a seat.”

Wyatt pulled out a chair, irritated. The cattlemen got bored and went back to their negotiations.

“Let us consider the plight of the rattlesnake,” Doc suggested softly, eyes on the cards. “The rattlesnake is feared and loathed, and yet he has no claws, no legs. He does not look for fights and gives fair warning if he is threatened, but if he is attacked, he cannot flee. All he has is his mouth …”

Partly, it was the fancy way he talked. Partly, it was the slow, slurry sound of Georgia. Mostly, it was just that the dentist didn’t think like anybody else. Wyatt looked away and back again. “I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about, Doc.”

“
Reputation, reputation, reputation
,” Doc recited, slapping out cards one by one. “
It is idle and most false, oft got without merit and lost without deservin’
.” He looked up. “You ever take a beatin’, Wyatt?” Doc turned away, coughed hard once, and cleared his throat again. “I don’t mean take a sucker punch. I mean, did you ever lie on the dirt and think, Why, this big, ignorant sonofabitch is about to kick me to death. I will die in this jerkwater town, just for bein’ able to count.” The slate-blue gaze came up: steady and humorless. “Ever take a beatin’ like that?”

“Not … for a long time.”

Doc’s brows rose at that. “Ever been shot?” he asked next.

“No.”

“I was. Last year. A quarrel over cards—which I did
not
start,” Doc emphasized, his voice rising momentarily. “No one expected me to live, myself included. I make a narrow target, but if a bullet comes my way? Chances are, it’ll hit something important. So I do what I can to make myself a less invitin’ mark.”

He dealt again. “There’s the flush busted,” he observed. “You may not have noticed it, Wyatt, but the sheriff of Ford County is a shockin’ gossip. Why, you tell Bat Masterson any kind of story at all and no matter how foolish it is, you can just about depend on it bein’ all around town before dawn.” Doc looked up, as though reminded of something. “Is it true, I wonder, what they say about you and Michael O’Rourke? Word is, you faced down a lynch mob and saved his sorry neck for a proper execution.” Doc’s voice, always soft, became even quieter. “Or was it your brother Virgil did that?”

There was just the slightest of tells, but Doc saw it.

“Well, now,” Doc said reasonably. “Easy mistake to make, you Earp boys lookin’ so much alike. Still, a reputation can be a useful thing. Odds are better for all you boys if you don’t argue the details. What Virgil does gives you an edge. What you do gives Morgan one.”

Another card.

“You still considerin’ that dental work I recommended?” Doc asked. “No rush, of course, although at least four of your remaining teeth are doomed, and I’d appreciate the business. I am a damn fine dentist, if I say so myself, but I fear Miss Kate is right. There is no money in it out here. Poker, by contrast, can be a good and honest livin’. Takes nerve, not muscle.”

He studied the hands.

“My edge is that I can count,” he said quietly, “whereas the men I play against are rarely overburdened by education.” He laid a seven on the nines. “No help,” he said, “but sometimes a pair of nines is all you need … This will not fill,” he predicted, and added a jack to the eight-high straight. “See? Busted.”

Another card, and he paused, eyes on Wyatt’s own. When John Henry Holliday spoke again, his voice was almost too soft to hear, and there was no bravado to be seen or heard.

“I killed a man in Denison. It was awful. He wanted me
dead
, Wyatt. He went for his gun and—Everyone agreed it was self-defense. The charges were dropped. You can wire and ask. Those boys back in Georgia? Nobody got hurt. It was just pups, barkin’ at one another. I have paid fines for gamblin’. That is the extent of my trouble with the law. I have never set foot in California, let alone San Francisco! Which means,” he whispered fiercely, “Sheriff Masterson made that up out of whole cloth, and he is a contemptible slanderin’ sonofabitch! As for the rest of it: I have Mexican and black
kin
, Wyatt. They were fostered but so was I, and they count no less than blood with me!”

Doc looked out the restaurant window, toward the tracks. He was trembling, as some men will when they have been very angry, or very frightened.

Presently, the dentist took as deep a breath as he could and let it out slowly. Cool again, he said, “I myself do not believe that it is cheatin’ to calculate odds by takin’ note of cards layin’ in plain view on a table. Do you believe that is cheatin’, Wyatt?”

Wyatt shook his head: No. Of course not.

“And yet,” Doc said, “when some men lose to me, they reckon it theft, and when such men believe they have been cheated, they are not inclined to express their dismay with a well-turned phrase.”

The cattlemen completed their business and rose to go, tipping their hats to Nora as they left. With the door open, you could hear the competing pianos, the drunken shouted threats, the raucous singing across the tracks.

That was when Doc looked Wyatt in the eye and dropped his voice again. “So, while I may not be quite as fearsome as I sometimes make out, if you were to noise that around …?”

Morgan’s age, Wyatt thought, but built like young Warren was at sixteen. All bone, no beef. Sickly. Scared.

Wyatt nodded. Some of the tension went out of Doc’s face.

“Thank you, Wyatt,” he said graciously. “I ’preciate your delicacy in the matter.” Back in control, the Georgian gathered up the deck. Tapped it into alignment. Tucked it into a breast pocket. “Naturally,” he added, ever so softly, “you and all your fine brothers may rely equally upon my own discretion.”

It might have been a threat. Hard to tell.

“You’ll excuse me?” Doc inquired courteously. “I am off to spend another evenin’ in the temples of unreason. Like everybody else in this godforsaken wilderness, I need to make a livin’.”

Snake-slender and casual in fresh-pressed linen the color of cream, John Henry Holliday pushed himself to his feet—slowly this time—performed a slight bow, and left Delmonico’s.

Wyatt watched him saunter off across the tracks.

The sunset beyond shone vermilion through the dust.

Next morning, Wyatt sent out the wires. All his queries were answered by the end of the week.

“No outstanding warrants in Texas, Colorado, or Georgia,” he told Morgan over pancakes and bacon. “He’s clean.”

“Told you he was quality,” Morg said. “What about—?”

“The police never heard of him in San Francisco.”

“Well, hell, if he did what Bat said—”

“There’d be something on the books.”

“So Bat just—”

“Looks like it.” Wyatt sat back and stared out the kitchen window of the little frame house he and Morgan had started renting. “Morg, did you see what happened when Ed Masterson was killed?”

“Hell, yes. I was coming out of the Lady Gay. Ed was rousting drunks at the Lone Star, and one of them—Jack Wagner, his name was—he up and pulled a gun. Gut shot, point-blank. Ed didn’t have a chance.”

“Who got Wagner?”

“Ed. He didn’t die right away. He was on the ground, but he got his pistol out and put three bullets into Wagner. Ed died about half an hour later. Wagner died the next day.”

Wyatt snorted. “Bat told me he killed the man who got his brother.”

Morg’s eyes widened. “Well, Bat shot
at
Wagner, but he was way down by the billiard parlor when Ed got it.” Morgan shook his head as though to clear it. “I guess maybe Bat could have hit Wagner, but the odds’re against it—Bat was coming on at a dead run.”

For a time they both sat there, taking it in.

“What’s that?” Wyatt asked then, lifting his chin toward the book Morg had propped against the sugar bowl.

Morg put a finger in his place and showed Wyatt the spine. “It’s not what I expected,” Morg admitted, “but it’s good.”

“
Crime and Punishment …
’Bout time you read a law book.”

“No, it’s a story, but it’s not like anything I ever read before.”

And it wasn’t easy, either. There were a shitload of words he had to look up or ask Doc about. Not just foreign ones like
dvornik
or
batuchka
, either.
Hypochondria. Subterfuge. Torpor
. And, damn, the names! Raskolnikoff. Lebeziatnikoff. Amalia Fedorovna Lippevechzel. Who in hell could get his mouth around words like that? Even Doc had trouble with a lot of them, and sometimes they asked Kate about how to say something.

“Don’t worry about the names,” Doc advised. “Just read. People are people, in St. Petersburg or Dodge.”

So Morg kept on, and Doc was right. The people in the book were all familiar. Drunks, prostitutes, politicians, policemen. Rich and poor, side by side. Men who beat horses and men who beat women. Good women gone bad. Bad women who weren’t so terrible when you got to know them.

“It’s like you can listen inside everybody’s mind,” Morg told Wyatt. “You can hear them think in this story. The fella it’s about—Raskolnikoff? I can’t work out if he’s got a fever or if he’s plain crazy, but his thinking’s all mixed up. And you find out about people’s lives, and how they got that way. I was about ready to turn temperance by page thirty.”

“Wouldn’t hurt you none.” Wyatt finished his coffee and stood. “Tell Fat Larry I’ll be a few minutes late.”

Deacon Cox wasn’t behind the desk at Dodge House, so Wyatt went down to Doc’s office and then upstairs to check his room on the second floor. No one answered the knocks. He tried Delmonico’s next, and found the dentist having dinner there, with his woman practically in his lap. When the whore saw Wyatt through the window, she sat up straight and looked like she wanted to spit.

Wyatt stepped inside. “Doc, I need a word.”

“
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell?
” the dentist inquired warily. “If you have come to accuse me of some new crime, sir, you may do so in front of my companion. If I am to be locked up, she will consult an attorney on my behalf.”

“No, it’s nothing like that. Everything you said checked out.”

“I am pleased to hear it,” Doc said tightly.

“Could we go outside?”

Doc got to his feet and turned to Kate. “If you will excuse us, darlin’?”

They left the restaurant. Wyatt waited for the passersby to clear the boardwalk before he said, “Look, Doc, I’m sorry about the other day.”

“You were doin’ your job. Let us put it behind us.”

“Yeah. Good. Anyways … About my teeth. I have other debts,” Wyatt said. “Could you take two dollars a week for fifteen weeks? I want to do all of it.”

The dentist seemed surprised, then pleased. “A wise decision,” he said warmly, “and one you won’t regret. Come by my office after your shift. Bring your brother Morgan, too, if you will. I’ll need to take a few measurements from his front teeth. Say eight o’clock tomorrow mornin’?”

Wyatt nodded and looked away. Needing something always bothered him, even if it was dentistry. He noticed Kate, still sitting at the table, glaring at him through the plate glass. What’d I ever do to her? he wondered.

“Didn’t expect to see you two back together,” he said.

“Miss Kate is possessed of a passionate Hungarian nature,” Doc murmured. “Our reunions are compensation for her occasional lapses in good taste.”

Just then, a burst of laughter from across the tracks took their attention. Bat Masterson was telling some story to his cronies, using his gold-topped walking stick to mime a rifle. The men around him were loudly appreciative.

Eyes narrowed against another brilliant sunset, Wyatt said nothing for a time, watching pink light flash off Bat’s fancy chromed Colts. Even at this distance, you could see the stone in his cravat sparkle.