Epitaph (51 page)

“Don't worry” was what Ike said, but what he thought was this:
Don't trust nobody.

“YOU KNOW WHERE DOC IS?”
Wyatt asked Morgan that night, over at the Alhambra. “John Meagher says he took a couple of weeks off.”

“Yeah, I was afraid he was sick again, but Molly Fly said he looked fine and he was going to Tucson to visit a friend for a while.”

“Well, go on up there and find him, will you?”

“In Tucson?”

“Quick as you can,” Wyatt said. “I need him here, Morg. It's important.”

“NO,” KATE MOANED.
“No. No. No. No. No.”

She didn't sound alarmed, only annoyed, so Doc kept his eyes on the table until the cards played out half a minute later. “What is it, darlin'?” he asked then, but when he looked up, he knew what had upset her. Morgan Earp was standing in the doorway of the gambling hall, searching faces.

Doc raised a hand. Morgan came straight over.

“Wyatt needs you,” he said.

“Did that other molar finally crack in half? Morgan, I warned him—”

“No, it's something else. He wouldn't tell me what's going on, but he needs you back in Tombstone right away.”

“No!” Kate cried. “No, no, no, no,
no!
”

“DOC,
WHY
?”
she demanded, back in their room. “Wyatt Earp crooks his finger, you don't even know what he wants, and you go running! Why?”

“Because Morgan asked me to.”

“And I'm asking you not to!”

Doc opened the wardrobe and pulled out his valise. “I don't believe this will take long, darlin'. While I'm in Tombstone, I'll close out my affairs. When I get back to Tucson, we'll go on up to Globe and do the same for you. Then, I promise, we shall stamp the dust of Arizona from our feet.”

“I'm coming with you.”

Deliberately misunderstanding, Doc turned, a shirt in hand. “Of course, you will! Colorado's as much your decision as mine—”

“No. I'm going with you to Tombstone.”

“Morgan and I will be takin' a freight train to Benson, darlin'.”

“If you can take a freight, I can take a freight.”

“And it's a bad road from Benson to Tombstone—”

“If you can do it, I can do it.”

He'd learned this much: When Kate made up her mind, he might as well quit arguing. “Suit yourself,” he said.

T
HEY WERE ALL TIRED. THAT WAS PART OF IT.

The McLaury brothers got up long before dawn on the day of the gunfight. Their youngest sister was getting married, and Tommy needed to clear up some business in Tombstone before he and Frank left for Fort Worth. That's where their brother Will lived with his three little kids. The six of them were going to take the train north to Iowa so they could all be there for Sarah Caroline's wedding.

Virgil Earp was still recovering from a punishing but fruitless effort to track down three men who'd broken out of jail a few days earlier. His posse had covered nearly 100 miles when a sudden torrential rainstorm left them with no trail to follow. On October 25, they returned to Tombstone, frustrated and beat.

Before leaving on that goose chase, Virg had deputized Wyatt as a town policeman so that Officers Flynn and Bronk had backup during the chief's absence. A few hours after he went to bed, Wyatt was called out when a brawl erupted between the day-shift miners of the Goodenough and the Tough Nut. Near as anybody could make out, a disputed call in the eighth inning of a baseball game played the previous Sunday had inspired a lingering sense of injustice that flared up in the middle of the night.

Morgan and Doc were weary as well, having just completed the
rushed trip from Tucson at Wyatt's request. Doc got Kate settled in at Molly Fly's a little after midnight on October 26, but he and Morg decided they'd best find out what Wyatt was so nerved up about. Morgan went looking for Wyatt, and Doc went over to the Alhambra to wait for them.

Always randy, Little Willie Claiborne and his best friend Billy Clanton had ridden into Tombstone for some fun. They spent the final hours of Billy's life drinking, gambling, and whoring. Which he might not have regretted, even if he'd known what was going to happen.

And Ike? Ike was hitting the bars and drinking to drown the dread. He was scared again, and muttering to himself, and went looking for Wyatt, hoping for reassurance. Instead, he found Doc Holliday.

WHO WAS, BY THEN,
sitting in the Alhambra's restaurant, letting his split pea soup cool while he waited for Wyatt to show up and explain the abrupt summons to Tombstone. Doc had, in fact, just begun to eat when a shadow fell over his table and a man who looked vaguely familiar said, “If you told him, I'll kill you before he gets me.”

Blinking, Doc put his spoon down to free his hand. “Pardon?”

“If you told him, I'll kill you!”

Still trying to place the man, Doc frowned for a moment and then sighed. Elephant boogers, he thought, recognizing Ike Clanton, who stank of horse and sweat and liquor and fear.

Feeling very tired, Doc asked, “Told what to whom?”

“You know who, and you know what!”

“I assure you, sir, that I do not.”

“Don't you ‘sir' me! Don't you try to get around me! I know what you told him, and I'll by-god kill you for it! You hear me, Holliday?”

“People in El Paso can hear you,” Doc said, beginning to lose patience, “but I suspect they don't know what you're talkin' about, any more'n I do. Why not shout it at
them
, so we'll all know?”

It was about then that John Meagher sent a busboy to find an Earp or two, for while Doc Holliday was skinny and sickly, he did not take
much crap. Ike could get on anyone's nerves, and now he was yelling about how Doc had killed somebody. Though the rest of the diners seemed entertained by the farce, Meagher knew it was only a matter of time before dishes or a window got broken, so he went over to Doc's table to see if he could settle things down on his own.

“Anything wrong?” he asked Holliday.

Halfway between bewilderment and annoyance, Doc began, “Mr. Clanton here seems to have some notion about me—”

“I got a notion!” Ike echoed. “Damn right I got a notion!”

“—but I cannot seem to make this impenetrable block of drunken Arizona imbecility understand that I have no idea what he is shoutin' about.”

“Ike,” Meagher said, “if you're not going to play cards or get something to eat, move on.”

But Ike wasn't having that. “I know my rights!” he declared, with Frank McLaury in his head. “It's a free country! I'll go where I please!” And then it was Ringo inside him, making him yell, “Gimping around, bragging about it. Eye for eye! Tooth for tooth!” And then the old man took over and Ike sneered, “Our secret. Hah! Our secret. You can't fool me. I don't trust
nobody!
I never woulda turned on them boys if Wyatt hadn't made me that deal. And
you!
” Ike cried in summation, pointing at Doc. “You are a killer and a goddam liar!”

“Oh, Jesus,” John Meagher sighed, for while Doc would not have disputed the first assertion, he took violent exception to the second and would have caned Ike to the floor if John hadn't got between the two men, pushing Ike backward, meaning to dump him outside on the boardwalk.

“Take your hands off me!” Ike was hollering. “I know my rights! Take your goddam hands off me! I'll get you, Holliday!” he yelled over Meagher's shoulder. “I'll get you before he gets me!”

Which is where things stood when Virgil Earp arrived and coldcocked Ike without so much as a howdy-do.

A sudden silence fell. Fascinated diners around the room sat back to take in whatever happened next.

“Goddammit, Doc,” Virg cried, “what in hell was that about?”

Wide-eyed, Doc looked up from Ike's inert body. “Virgil, it beats me hollow. I have only been in town for half an hour—”

“And you're in trouble already?”

“I swear, Virgil! I was just eatin' my supper when that tragic example of nature's cruelty started accusin' me of tellin' somebody something, and I have not the slightest idea what he meant by any of it! I only came back to Tombstone because Wyatt said he needed me, and Morgan— Wait! There they are! Wyatt, what in hell is goin' on?”

Before either Wyatt or Morgan could say anything, Virg held up his hands for silence and then pressed his fingers against tired eyes. “Morg, take this idiot to the jail,” he said, nodding at Ike, who was beginning to come around. “No charges. Just let him sleep it off there. Wyatt, do you know what this is about?”

“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Go to bed, Virg. I'll take care of this.”

NOBODY IN THE RESTAURANT
was near enough to hear what was being said at the table in the far back corner. What they could see was Wyatt Earp leaning over his elbows, making his case with sober earnestness as Doc Holliday's face registered first confusion, then disbelief, and finally what appeared to be a retreat into prayer, for it was then that John Henry Holliday put his head in his hands.

“‘Laughter of children. Discretion of slaves. Austerity of virgins,' he chanted softly. ‘It begins in loutishness and ends among angels of flame and ice . . . '” He fell silent, rubbing his forehead rhythmically with fingers that were still so powerful with a pianist's musculature he could have closed them around Wyatt Earp's throat and crushed the man's windpipe flat. “I have despaired of many things,” he told Wyatt. “Health. Home. Honor. Myself. There remains just one thing I rely on,
one thing
I can put my faith in. Human folly never disappoints.”

“Doc, I know you're mad, but try to understand! I thought if I could bring in Leonard and Head and Crane, I could clear you. I was trying to protect you—”

“From
what
? There was nothin' but Kate's drunken petulance linkin' me to that stagecoach attack. The charges were dismissed for an utter lack of evidence. I am no more a suspect than Molly Fly!”

“But, see, when I made the deal, you were still—”

“A grown man, damn you!
Compos mentis
, and someone who should have been consulted, at least, before bein' dragged into the middle of whatever ill-conceived scheme you've cooked up with an ignorant, drunken, cracker cattle thief who is—and I will try to be perfectly fair to Mr. Clanton—a contemptible traitor to his own kind. Now that wretch is mortally afraid that I will expose his eagerness to sell his friends out, and that they will kill him for it. As well they might! Which places me directly between Ike Clanton and whatever peace his dim, blinkered, unlettered mind can yearn for! And you—” He stopped, trying and failing to control the cough. Pale when the fit was over, he continued: “And you expect
thanks
?”

“Well, not thanks, but something, I guess,” Wyatt admitted. “I didn't think—”

“That is just the trouble,” Doc cried, unknowingly echoing Johnny Behan. “Nobody ever
thinks!
” He closed his eyes for a moment and lowered his voice again. “You meant well. I understand that, but . . . Wyatt, you aren't afraid of any man on two legs. Call it confidence. Call it competence. Call it an abject failure of imagination! You don't understand how very much a fearful man wants to destroy what he fears . . .” Hands fisted, elbows on the table, he paused to get his breath back. He rarely spoke so much anymore, and it was hard to keep talking now. “Wyatt, you have made Ike Clanton fear
me.
The only way he can ever feel safe is if I am dead. And now I can't even leave town! If I do, people will say Ike Clanton ran me out of Tombstone and I will be fair game for every moron with a gun between Mexico and Canada.”

“Doc, I— I didn't mean for it to go like that. I was just trying . . .”
To be shrewd, he thought. To beat Johnny Behan at his own game. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“I am imperfectly consoled,” Doc snapped. “And I am damned if I see a good way out of this.”

SOMEBODY WAS BANGING
on Virgil Earp's front door. Again.

Ike Clanton had been released around four in the morning. Instead of going home or getting a room someplace, he'd been reeling from one saloon to the next ever since. Already two bartenders had come to tell Virgil that Ike was threatening to shoot the Earps and Doc Holliday on sight. “He's all mouth,” Virgil told them. “Ignore him.” This latest visitor was probably delivering the same news.

“Allie?” he called.

“I got it!”

Exhausted but past the point when there was a chance in hell of getting back to sleep, Virg sat up on the side of the bed and stared bleary-eyed out the window. Took a moment before he understood why it was so bright in the room. Huh, he thought, rubbing his face. Snow in October! Crazy damn weather . . .