Forty Times a Killer (27 page)

“Ah, the sleeping beauty awakes.”

Hank Cannan thought he recognized the man's voice, but he lay still amid the soft comfort that surrounded him, unwilling to move.

“This may come as news to you, huh? But you're alive, Ranger Cannan. I saw your eyelids flutter.”

Cannan opened his eyes and groaned.

“Baptiste Dupoix,” he said. “Then I must be in hell.”

“Close,” the Creole gambler said. “You've been raving about Black John Merritt and a ghost town. But to set your mind at ease, you're in a burg called Last Chance, and you're a current resident of the Big Bend Hotel.”

“What are you doing here, Dupoix?” Cannan said. “I thought I hung you years ago.”

“No, you haven't yet had that pleasure,” Dupoix said. “Though God knows you tried.”

Cannan lifted his head off the blue-and-white-striped pillow and tried to rise to a sitting position.

“Here, let me fluff that for you,” Dupoix said.

The gambler reached behind Cannan, pounded the pillow into shape then propped it against the brass headboard.

He helped Cannan sit up and smiled, his teeth very white against his dark skin. “There now. Comfy?”

Two oil lamps, lit against the darkness outside, cast shadows in the room, especially in the corners where the spinning spiders lived.

“What the hell time is it?” Cannan said.

“Early. It's just gone six.”

“Morning or night?”

“Dawn soon. When a sporting gent like me should already be in bed.”

“But you postponed slumber to visit me, huh?” Cannan said. “Out of the goodness of your heart.”

“Bad enemies are like good friends, Cannan. They're to be cherished.”

“I've got a dozen questions,” Cannan said, ignoring that last.

He lifted the sheets and saw that he was naked, but for the bandages around his waist and thigh.

“How I got here will be one of them,” the Ranger said. “But first tell me what happened to the dead man I brought in.”

“You mean Black John?”

“How many dead men did I have?”

“Only him, and he'll be sorely missed.”

“I promised him I'd bury him decent.”

“The nice folks of this fair town buried him, with all due pomp and ceremony, I assure you.”

“When?”

“Why, two weeks ago.”

Cannan was shocked.

“I've been lying in this bed for two weeks?”

“Uh-huh, that's what I said. The doctor told me you were at death's door.” Dupoix grinned. “It was a mighty uncertain thing. Touch and go, you might say.”

Cannan waved a hand around the hotel room. “Who did all this?”

“Not me, I assure you. My hypocrisy goes only so far. No, the town fathers put you up here. There are some really nice people in Last Chance.”

Dupoix, a tall, elegant man who moved like a cougar, thumped a bottle of Old Crow and a couple of glasses onto the table beside Cannan's bed.

“I did do something for you, though,” he said. “A couple young ladies of my acquaintance took care of you. You were out of it, but you did take nourishment now and again. Chicken gumbo mostly, made to a recipe handed down by my swamp witch grandmother back in Louisiana.”

Dupoix poured whiskey into the glasses.

“It's a bit early, isn't it?” Cannan said.

“Early or late. It doesn't make any difference to a man confined to his bed. Oh, and remind me to tell you about my grandmother sometime. She's a very interesting woman.”

“How did you know that I was the Ranger who brought in Black John?” Cannan said.

“From the description I got from the men who picked you up off the street. Big man, they said, maybe four inches over six feet with shoulders an axe handle wide and the face of a dyspeptic walrus. Who else fits that description?”

Cannan accepted a whiskey, then said, “Do you have the makings?”

“No, I've never succumbed to the Texas habit, but I can offer you a cigar.”

“That will do just fine,” Cannan said.

“I thought it might.”

After Dupoix lit Cannan's cheroot, the Ranger said from behind a cloud of blue smoke, “Now tell me why you and I are breathing the same air in a town a hundred miles from anywhere.”

“You first, Ranger Cannan, since you're feeling so poorly.”

“I was tracking a feller—”

“Dave Randall. Yes, I know.” Dupoix read the question on Cannan's face and said, “He's here in Last Chance.” The gambler smiled. “And so is Mickey Pauleen.”

That hit Cannan like a fist to the belly. “What's a killer like Pauleen doing here?” he said.

“Him, and Dave Randall. And Shotgun Hugh Gray. And a half-a-dozen other Texas draw fighters. But Mickey is the worst of them, or the best of them, depending on your point of view. The day after he arrived he shot the town marshal.”

“And where do you come in, Dupoix?” Cannan said.

“I'm here for the same reason Mickey and them are here. For gun wages. Two hundred dollars a day until the job is done.”

“What job? And who's paying you?”

Dupoix, elegant in a black frockcoat, boiled white shirt, and string tie, stepped to the window then turned and said, “You've never forgiven me for that time in . . . what the hell was the name of the place?”

“Horse Neck,” Cannan said.

“Yeah, Horse Neck. A benighted burg at the end of a railroad spur, as I recall.”

“It was a hell-on-wheels tent town and I was sent there to keep the peace, Dupoix,” Cannan said. “You ruined it for me and nearly got me kicked out of the Rangers.”

“Cannan, those three gentlemen playing poker with a marked deck were asking for trouble. They took me for a rube.”

“That's why you shot them, Dupoix, because your pride was hurt.”

“They were notified.”

“You left three dead men in the saloon, then lit a shuck on a stolen horse.”

“The buckskin I left at the livery was a superior animal in every way to the one I . . . borrowed. Its owner got the best of that bargain.”

Cannan held up his cigar, showing an inch of gray ash at the tip.

Dupoix picked up an ashtray from the table and laid it on the bed.

“You did take a pot at me, you know,” he said. “My right ear felt the wind of your bullet. Now why did you do that?”

“I was aiming for the hoss,” Cannan said. “My shooting was off that day.”

“Ah, yes, as I recall you're no great shakes with a revolver.”

“I wish I'd brought my rifle along. Then I would have hung you for sure.”

“Suppose I tell you that those three Irish gents drew down on me first?”

“Wouldn't have made any difference, Dupoix. You took me for a rube and my pride was hurt.”

The gambler smiled. “Touché, Ranger Cannan.”

Dupoix refilled Cannan's glass then his own. He stepped to the window again and lit a cigar.

“You never answered my questions, Dupoix,” Cannan said. “Why—”

“Am I here and who's paying my wages?” Dupoix said.

“Well?” Cannan said.

The gambler pulled back the lace curtain. “Look out there,” he said. “A fair town with a schoolhouse and a church with a bell in its tower. It's got a city hall where the flag flies every single day of the year and the people dress in their best of a Sunday and go to worship.”

Dupoix turned his head to Cannan and spoke over his shoulder.

“Last Chance was started by tin pans,” he said. “They came here looking for gold, found none, and most of them left. But a few decided to stay and set down roots. In the early years they went through hell, but in the end they built something worthwhile.”

“You still haven't answered my questions,” Cannan said.

“Patience, Ranger, I'm answering them. Unless you're planning on going somewhere?”

“Funny, Dupoix. Go ahead.”

“All right. Now, where was I?”

“You were talking about folks trying to build a town in a wilderness where there shouldn't be any town,” Cannan said.

He suddenly felt irritable, from the whiskey or the pain of his still-healing wounds, he didn't know.

“The people of Last Chance worked together to irrigate the fertile bottomland with canals that carry water from the river. Despite droughts and floods and all the other things that plague farmers, they grew wheat, corn, oats, and now there's talk of planting cotton.”

“They built their prosperity on farming?” Cannan said.

“Not entirely. They act as middlemen for Mexican trappers who supply them with fox, beaver, wolf, and bobcat fur. Last Chance also trades hogs, turkeys, and bees with Mexico for hard cash, and a few raise cattle on the floodplain farther along the river.” Dupoix smiled. “You could say the hardy folks out there have turned this part of the desert into a Garden of Eden.”

“Then why are you and the other gun hands here, Dupoix?” Cannan said.

“Because, Ranger Cannan, we're going to take it all away from them,” Dupoix said.