Authors: Ed Gorman
F
rom what I could see, he was tall, rangy, and looked at least partly Comanche, even though his work shirt and denims weren’t what most Indians wore, not even on reservations. He seemed to have a discoloration the size of a silver dollar on the left side of his face, though in the dim light I couldn’t be sure.
Also, he wasn’t alone. As he took my Colt from me, somebody came up from behind and hit me with enough force to drop me instantly.
I woke up tied to a chair in a small storage room of some kind. Boxes of various kinds were stacked high on all four walls. The Indian and a Mexican sat at a table watching me.
The Mexican reached into the pocket of his vest and extracted a railroad watch. He studied the face of it then handed it across the table for the Indian to see.
“You lose,” the Mexican said.
“You bastard. I never win with you.” The Indian shoved the watch back across the table. “You didn’t bring me any luck, Ford. We bet on how long it would be before you woke up again. I had you at under five minutes. You were out six. Now I have to pay up.”
“Glad you two are having such a good time.”
“You’re lucky we didn’t kill you already,” the Mexican said.
“Grieves said we should torture you if we don’t get what we want.”
“I personally enjoy torturing,” the Mexican said, “do to you what all them Texas Rangers did to me when I was a young man. But my friend here, he’s a Catholic and he says torturing somebody is a mortal sin.” He smiled. “Can you believe that, here I’m a Mex and I don’t believe none of that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost bullshit, and here he’s raised wild and the missionaries get their hands on him and they’ve got a believer for life.”
Though my head hurt, and the trickle of warm blood down my back made me uncomfortable, I couldn’t let it pass. I looked right at the Indian. “So torture’s a mortal sin but murder isn’t?”
“To me it’s a worse sin, torture, I mean. You can kill a man clean and leave him die in dignity. But you can’t kill a man clean with torture. He has no dignity then. So the torture is a much worse mortal sin.”
“Even to a nonbeliever like me, that makes sense. But of course I don’t believe in mortal sins of no kind. The priests just tell you that to keep you in line.”
I glared at one then the other. “So what is it you two assholes want from me, exactly?”
“You got some mouth, señor.”
“At least I don’t kill women,” I said.
“Who kills women? Not me and the breed here.”
“You killed Molly Kincaid.”
“Bullshit,” the Indian said. “We killed her uncle but we never killed her.”
It was simple. I believed him. “Why’d you kill her uncle?”
The Mexican snorted. “Grieves, he was in town one
night all liquored up and he seen this Molly girl and so he gets all crazy about screwing her. But she won’t go back to his room so he takes her uncle and her out for some steaks. Figures he’ll impress them and get in her that way. But all he does is end up bragging about how he’s gonna get rich. But in the morning he can’t remember what he told her and her stupid uncle, you see? So he had us kill the old man. He didn’t want us to kill the girl because he thought he could still screw her. When it comes to women, man, he don’t think logical at all.”
“Woman crazy,” the Indian said.
“He says he’s gonna get into that Turner woman tonight before he kills her and her husband. He’ll get the money from them first, though. He ain’t that woman crazy.”
“And then you kill me.”
“You know the kind of people we are,” the Mexican said. “This is a lot easier than workin’ on a ranch.”
I’d always thought that there was a factory somewhere that turned out men like these. They even looked alike no matter what color they were. Rarely shaved, rarely bathed men who preferred grubby clothes and valued only two things—money and the kind of guns they packed. The factory sold them by the dozen. And if you bought two dozen at a time, you got a discount.
“You file any reports on Grieves yet?” the Indian said.
“No.”
“What if we don’t believe you?” The Mexican this time.
“Then you don’t believe me. You asked me a question and I gave you an answer.”
“Grieves is afraid you already let Washington know everything. He’s real worried you’ve already sent more federales after him.”
“I don’t file reports until everything is finished. This isn’t finished yet.”
The Indian grinned. “You think you’ll be around to finish it, do you?”
“I plan to be around. I want to see this grenade for myself.”
“How do you know it’s a grenade?”
I smiled. “Well, Dobbs’s work is in creating handheld weapons. He spent years on different types of grenades. I went out to the quarry and saw what it did to the limestone.”
The Indian laughed. “Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Think of that on a battlefield. Just think what that grenade can do to people.”
I can’t tell you when the noises started to build. I’m not sure I heard them at first. But they did go, once I was aware of them, from virtual silence to a tumult of shouts. And then feet slamming down from above—the stairs leading to and from the third floor, somebody descending at a furious pace, shouts behind him then. And then finally gunfire, the thunder of it booming and echoing off the vaulted ceiling and the immense walls.
“Better go see what the hell’s going on,” the Indian said. “You watch him.”
“Thinks he’s the boss of me,” the Mexican said, his dark eyes unhappy as they watched his partner leave.
More footsteps on the stairs leading down to where we were. Then in quick sequence: the Indian shouting, quick exchange of gunshots, a mortal cry, a body collapsing on the floor.
Another sequence: shouts from those still descending the staircase, more gunfire, somebody rushing toward our room in an abrupt silence.
“Too bad he didn’t get killed,” the Mexican said pre
suming, I guess, that it was the Indian scurrying back to our room after the shooting was finished.
He shoved his six-shooter back into his holster. He seemed to be under the impression that whatever had gone wrong—obviously Grieves’s men up top had been chasing somebody—that everything was right again.
But that was quickly disproved.
The inward-opening door was flung open and there stood the bloody and ragged figure of Glen Turner. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t give the Mexican any chance at all. He shot him twice in the face. The Mexican’s hand hadn’t even had time to drop to his holster. He was blown back against the wall, his skull cracking on impact. He was already long dead.
Turner slammed the door shut, bolted it quickly. “There’s only two of them left out there.”
He sneered when he saw I was tied to the chair. “The big bad federal man.”
“You don’t look like you’ve been doing so well yourself.”
“Grieves is a sadist, let me tell you, that boy is ready for the asylum.”
“Where’s your wife?”
His face, which he valued so much, got ugly. “The way the bitch has treated me lately, I just left her up there.”
“You left her with Grieves?”
“Spare me the speeches, Ford. You and I both know what Grieves is going to do to her. The question is do I care and my answer is no. She’s slept with everybody else, she might as well sleep with him.”
As he said this, he started untying me.
“She slept with you, too. Right, Ford?” Pause, then: “Right?”
T
he first thing he did after untying me was to hit me square in the mouth. He might have been something of a fancy lad but in the last few minutes I’d gotten to see that he was good with both gun and fist. I suppose, strictly speaking, that I had it coming, having slept with his wife and all. But I didn’t like it and planned to return the favor when I got the chance.
His punch gave me a bloody lip. One punch wouldn’t do it for sleeping with his wife, even though he’d apparently cheated on her many times, too. But now wasn’t the time to worry about their marriage.
When he moved in for another one, so angry he’d forgotten to cover himself, I sailed a punch of my own in right above his belt. And then as he was doubled over and was staving off vomiting, I rabbit-punched him on the back of his head. He went down to his knees where he hovered for just a moment before he started splashing his last meal all over the place.
He was a good vomiter. Noisy and dramatic. His whole body jerking about the second time a whole bunch of the orangish stuff came up.
Much as I liked being around vomit, I decided to take a look around the immediate darkness outside
our room. Before I did that, I grabbed the lantern and turned it out. No sense making myself a target as I was backlit in the doorway.
Behind me, Turner was stumbling to his feet. Quiet he wasn’t. He kept bumping into things. I kept looking at the staircase to the third floor and the other staircase down the hall. That would be the right spot to put men in place so that they could sneak up on us. I didn’t know how many men Grieves had left. But one or two would be all he’d need to ambush us.
Turner crept out of the door, looking around in the darkness for me. I whispered, “Over here.”
When he reached me he said, “We’ve each got our reasons to get up on that third floor.”
He paused, looking around some more. He’d taken the Indian’s gun. He now had two of them. “You want Grieves and I want the money and the grenade.”
“Not your wife?”
“Hell, he can have her. It’s one thing when a man is unfaithful but when a woman is—”
“Spare me. Cheating is cheating.”
“That’s just minister bullshit.” Then, slyly: “You want her for yourself, don’t you?”
“No offense but she’s a little fast for me.”
“Then you’re on my side.”
I was going to answer his ignorant remark but that was when one or two of them opened up from behind the staircase down the hall.
Two shooters, I knew after counting the bullets in the first assault. We ran for cover behind our own staircase. We returned fire. A muted cry gave me the impression that we’d gotten lucky and that we’d hit one of them.
I could hear the unwounded one talking to him. Not the exact words, the tone more than anything. Trying to convince him he was going to be all right. That they’d
get him fixed up real soon. They sure made a lot of noise as they moved around. They didn’t have careers as ballerinas ahead of them. If they’d made any more noise they could have shaken the roof. One of them even sneezed.
They could be friends or even brothers from the worried tones of the gunny who hadn’t been wounded. He now had two things to worry about. The wounded one dying on him and us trying to kill him.
Now that we were ducking behind the stairwell, it was easier to talk. “I’m going to sneak upstairs and look around. You stay here and hold this one down.”
Turner sneered. “Yeah, right. You kill Grieves, get the money and the grenades—and my wife. Holy Matrimony. Or maybe that’s a term you’re not familiar with.”
“Sure, Turner, like you and she practice it all the time. All I want is Grieves and the grenades. Neither Nan or your money interests me at all.”
“How’m I supposed to believe that?”
“Right now, I don’t give a shit if you believe it or not. Now I’m going to be on those stairs in the full moonlight and our friend down the hall can pick me off with no trouble. As soon as I’m in position to jump onto the stairs and start running, I need you to open fire and keep him pinned down.”
“And what if I don’t?”
“Then I’ll be able to see you from the staircase and I’ll kill you on the spot.”
By staying to the left side of the staircase, I had a good view of the open area at the top of the stairs. Turner would have a similar view of the right side. If a shooter
appeared on either side, one of us should be able to pick him off. That was the theory, anyway.
The problem was keeping relatively calm as I waited for the inevitable battle at the bottom of the stairs to break open. Turner and the other shooter were very much alive and ready to kill each other.
And then I was jarred maybe half a foot off one of the wide marble steps when the gun battle broke out below. Apparently, Turner had put the Winchester I’d left behind to good use.
This wasn’t Grieves’s “boom boom boom” but within the decorous halls of the hotel, the explosions and echoes of explosions were plenty loud. The gunfire cracked back and forth, back and forth, echoing off the ceiling with enough force to bounce around on the lower floors. The usual curses rang out, too, men agitated by flying bullets, any one of which could kill them.
And then came the cry. And I knew that Turner had made contact. The shooter he’d hit was sobbing, the way you hear young men of all colors, creeds, and courage cry out when they know instinctively that they’ve been mortally wounded. Even old men sometimes cry out for their mothers for the bullets have reduced them to children again, children reaching out into the dark cosmos for the arms that had held them and the breasts that had fed them.
The shooter cried out in Spanish and I wasn’t sure what he was sobbing about; just that he knew he was dying then as his friend had died a little earlier.
All I could do was use that time of gunfire and death to move faster up the stairs, my eyes never leaving the top right of the stairs where another shooter could be hiding. The problem was I couldn’t see much of the stairs to my right. And I damned near lost my life because of it. I was five steps from the top when a young
gunny raced into view with a carbine. He clipped off two shots that between them took a piece of my shirt at the shoulder and then a piece of flesh from just above my bicep.
But he didn’t know how to cover himself. He would’ve been just fine if he’d wounded me or killed me but a knick on the arm left me just as deadly as ever. I ducked under the unending line of his bullets and got three clean shots off into his chest. And as he started to fall face down on the stairs, I got him in the forehead.
This time, I took the stairs two at a time.
The third floor was still and murky. Windows at either end of the long hall revealed starlight that lent light for a few feet. The center of the hall was in complete darkness. There were probably twenty doors up there. Grieves would be holed up in one of them, in a suite even a sultan would envy.
This was the worst kind of situation. I had no idea where Turner was, so no backup. There were too many doors to open and close without being heard as I moved up and down the hall. And, after counting my bullets, I realized I had eleven shots left.
But at least the real battle was finally at hand. I’d found Grieves. Or was about to, anyway.
I started working the doors, my skeleton key opening them easily. That section of the hotel hadn’t been touched by the fire. The first few rooms I searched were as elegant as they’d always been. The view from up there was something only the wealthiest would ever have. You could scan the plains, the forest, the river, and the mountains with godlike sweep. Night had never looked more mysterious or lovely than it did from up there. This was something the astronomers got to see every night but not us mere mortals.
Six rooms and nothing. I kept listening for any kind
of sound as I went in and out of them. Nothing that sounded like a human being moving about.
In the seventh room I found the dead girl. I thought of Grieves’s fondness for prostitutes. Given the makeup this one wore, given the gaudy modern dress she’d been wearing, it was easy to forget that she’d been a real human being. Very young, she probably hadn’t left the village or hamlet or farm more than a year or two before. Being summoned to that hotel had probably sounded like fun.
The room was strewn with empty champagne bottles and male clothes and underclothes, all belonging to the same man, Grieves no doubt. While waiting for the Turners to show up, he’d had himself a miniature orgy, the thought that he’d become a traitor not seeming to bother him at all.
I took a last look at the girl. Even in the dusky gloom of the room, you could see the strangulation marks on her thin neck. The perfect ending to a perfect orgy. Murder. I was just opening the door, just getting ready to step out into the hall again, when I saw him walking toward me, a sawed-off dangling from his left hand while his right tried the knobs on various doors, making sure they were locked. I couldn’t see much of him, he was just a silhouette. Was he just making his usual rounds or had he heard something and was looking to find the person loose up there?
I eased my way back in, closed the door. I could lock it from inside and he’d go right on by. But I needed to take out as many of Grieves’s men as I could so that when I finally confronted Grieves I’d have a chance of either killing him or bringing him in, whichever way he wanted to play it.
I left it unlocked and positioned myself so that when
the door opened inward, I’d be hiding behind it. I’d let him get a few feet inside and then jump him.
He never broke stride. Door to door to door at the same pace, always giving the doorknob a good jolt.
Then he got to where I was.
I could hear him curse sharply. The door he hadn’t wanted to find. The door that could mean anything. Maybe it had been accidentally left unlocked. Or maybe it held a killer, Ford maybe, the one they were looking for then.
I heard him pull back one of the triggers on the sawed-off. He obviously wasn’t a man who liked to take any more chances than he had to. If he had to walk into a situation like that one, he was damned well not going to take any prisoners.
He came slamming in, kicking the door hard and following it by running straight through the door frame and ending up in the center of the room, knocking over a small table for his trouble.
My idea was to hunch down low, throw the door away from me, and fire. But the door didn’t move at the rate I expected and by the time it cleared, the thug and I stared at each other in the dim starlight.
“You stupid bastard,” Turner whispered. “I could’ve killed you.”
“I doubt it,” I said.
I stood up and walked out into the room. “You see Grieves anywhere?”
“I haven’t been to the far end of the hall yet.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s where he’s at.”
“I just want to get the money back and get the hell out of here.”
“And your wife.”
He made a face. “And my wife. If you say so. But
you know what? I still think you slept with her, you prick.”
“Let’s go.”
“You’re never going to answer me, are you?”
“You hear what I said, Turner? I said ‘Let’s go.’”
Rolling darkness. A black fog. We pressed on down the hall. Not until we were closer to the end did the darkness begin to fade somewhat because of the light through the hall window.
A sob.
I froze like a dog on point. Apparently Turner hadn’t heard it. He kept walking. Finally realizing that I wasn’t two steps in back of him any longer, he turned and saw me.
I put my finger to my lips to quiet him. I touched my ear. Faintly but definitely, the sob again.
He nodded to the door on my left. I nodded. I put up a halting hand and then made my way to the door. Pressed my ear to it.
The sobbing was persistent. Sometimes piercing, sometimes muffled. I waved Turner over. “Cover me.”
He nodded. Raised the sawed-off.
I put my hand on the knob, half-expecting it to be locked. And I was right. I dug in my back pocket for my assorted burglary tools. Got the correct one. Went to work.
I nodded to Turner.
The doorknob yielded to the right and I flung the door inward, at just about the same moment diving across the threshold and landing on carpet. A pretty dramatic leap and a textbook example of how you enter a room packed with potential enemies.
That is, a textbook example if the room happens to contain enemies.
Liz and Terhurne were what it happened to contain.
They were lashed back to back, set in the middle of the floor.
The noise I’d heard was Liz cursing and trying to be heard through the gag that had been put in her mouth.
Terhurne was less upset. He just watched us as we walked over to him.
“I almost don’t feel like setting you two free,” I whispered to them. “I told you to wait for my signal so you go ahead and get captured and tip Grieves off that I was coming.”
Liz had plenty to say about that. Really angry. Fortunately for me I couldn’t understand any of it. She was still gagged.
“Do you know who he is?” she said quietly after I took off the gag. She was glaring at Turner.
“Yeah. Right now he’s helping us.”
“He and his wife are traitors.”
“We’ll get to that later.”
“Sanctimonious little bitch,” Turner muttered, defending his honor.
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. Calm down, Liz.” Then: “You know where Grieves is?”
Terhurne, trying to struggle to his feet, and showing his age in the process said, “Next to the end of the hall on the west side is a double suite. He’s holed up in there. There’s a boat coming for him tomorrow morning down at the dock there.”
“Who else is in there?”
Terhurne nodded to Turner. “Your wife, for one. And two bodyguards.”
“We can handle two of them,” Turner said.
“You’re forgetting something,” Terhurne said. “He’s got twelve hand grenades in there with him.”
“They were supposed to be
my
hand grenades,” Turner said.
“Aren’t you interested in how your wife is?” Terhurne asked.
Turner looked exasperated. “She’s probably having sex with him.”