Ride With the Devil (18 page)

“Who is to say that a gust of wind didn’t blow open your front door and knock over the lantern?”

“I locked my front door when I left,” Cyrus said. Then he added, “I think.”

“All Culpepper’s defense attorney would need is some other plausible explanation as to how the fire might have started,” Judge Watermeyer said.

“Damn, Judge, he doesn’t need a defense attorney as long as he has you,” Heissler said.

“George!” Cyrus said sharply. “That was totally uncalled for! The judge is on our side, remember?”

“I’m sorry, Judge,” Heissler said. “I’m just frustrated.”

“Apology accepted,” Judge Watermeyer replied.

“So basically what we are saying is, there’s nothing we can do about it. The Regulators are here to stay,” Heissler said bitterly.

“If there is nothing we can do about it, then what the hell are we holding this meeting for?” Baldwin asked.

“I didn’t say there was nothing we could do about it,” Cyrus said. “Maybe we can’t fire them, but I think I know a way to make them quit of their own accord.”

Cyrus’s words got everyone’s attention.

“Oh? And just how do you propose that we do that?” Castleberry asked.

“We could pass a resolution right now, repealing the enabling act,” Cyrus said.

Heissler shook his head. “The enabling act?”

“You may recall that after we hired Culpepper, we passed the enabling act,” Cyrus said. “The enabling act is what authorizes the Regulators to collect tax.”

“But how are we going to do that without violating the contract?” Baldwin asked.

Cyrus held up his finger. “Ah, if you recall, gentlemen, the deputies are not under contract. Only Culpepper is. After the contract, he came back to us, seeking funds that would enable him to hire deputies. That’s when we passed the enabling act. That authorized taxes to be raised to pay the deputies, but we did not enter into a contract with the deputies. They are Culpepper’s responsibility, not ours. If we take away the tax, Culpepper won’t be able to pay his men. And I doubt that they are such civic-minded and
noble-spirited men that they will continue to work without pay.”

The others laughed.

“You know, I think you may have something there, Cyrus,” Poindexter said.

“Thank you, Abner.”

“I move that we repeal the enabling act,” Poindexter said.

“I second the motion,” Baldwin said.

“All in favor say aye,” Mayor Green said.

“Aye,” the council said as one.

Cyrus smiled. “Gentleman, the enabling act is repealed. The Regulators can no longer collect their own, private tax.”

“How are we going to let the merchants know that they no longer need to pay the tax?” Baldwin asked. “We no longer have a newspaper.”

“We’ll call a town meeting,” Cyrus said. “Paddy, can we use the Golden Calf?”

“Absolutely,” Paddy replied.

Culpepper didn’t need to attend the town meeting. He learned of the town council’s act within minutes of its passing. Not only did he know that they had repealed the tax, so did all of his deputies.

“If we ain’t goin’ to collect any taxes, how are we going to make any money?” Vox asked.

“Who says we aren’t going to collect any taxes?” Culpepper asked.

“Why, the town council did,” Vox said. “They passed a law about it.”

“And tell me, Vox, just how are they going to enforce that law?” Culpepper asked. “We are the only law enforcement arm for the town of Salcedo. Are we going to enforce the law that says we can’t collect taxes?”

Vox thought about it for a moment, then laughed. “You’re
right,” he said. “It don’t make no difference what the town council says, does it?”

“Not as long as we control the town,” Culpepper replied.

“You think we can control the town?” Vox asked. “I mean, if they all got together or something. There’s only seven of us. There’s got to be forty or fifty of them, if they all got together.”

“We can control the town,” Culpepper said easily.

Culpepper had not mentioned it to any of his deputies, but he had already made arrangements. When he got off the train in Marva, on the way back from Austin, he met with Emil Slaughter. Culpepper and Slaughter had ridden together in the Missouri Raiders, the guerrilla unit Culpepper had joined after leaving Lee’s army following the defeat at Gettysburg.

His original idea for talking with Slaughter was to have him put together a group of men that he could use to replace the deputies he now had. But with the town throwing down the gauntlet, he had a change of plan. Instead of replacing his deputies, he was going to use Slaughter and his men to augment his deputies. That would bring his strength up to twelve.

He had seen it happen time and time again during the war. Twelve armed and ruthless men, ably led, could prevail over fifty men, if those fifty were not organized.

That evening every businessman in Salcedo gathered in the Golden Calf saloon to discuss the action of the town council.

Flaire came to the meeting, as did Violet McGee, who owned a business called Vi’s Pies. Violet and Flaire were drawn together by the fact that they were businesswomen. In Vi’s opinion, she and Flaire were the only businesswomen in town, but that was because Vi didn’t count Darci.

In fact, though Flaire felt a little more kinship with Darci
than she did with Violet McGee, it was Mrs. McGee who sat at the same table as Flaire. Darci stayed at the back of the room, by the piano, near Hawke, who was sitting quietly on the piano bench.

Hawke had decided to attend the meeting, though at first he had suggested that since he wasn’t a businessman, he had no place here. But Paddy pointed out to him that, like Darci, he was a self-employed businessman since the tips he made from playing the piano were greater than his salary.

Hawke considered the comparison of what he did to what Darci did, then laughed.

“Sometimes the truth comes from the most unexpected sources,” he said. “For, like Darci, I am a whore.”

Paddy didn’t understand the subtlety of the concept of prostitution of talent. But he didn’t question it. He was just glad to have Hawke involved.

One of the businessmen who seldom visited the saloon was Ken Wright. He was back from his trip to the Bar-Z-Bar ranch, and he stood quietly at the back, watching as the other businessmen arrived. A few looked toward him and reacted, not in opposition to his being here, but in surprise at seeing him.

As the last of the businessmen arrived, including even Gene Welch, the undertaker, Mayor Green stood up and raised his hands.

“Could I have your attention please?” Cyrus called.

“Wait a minute, Mayor,” Poindexter interrupted. “I know it’s askin’ a lot of a politician not to get into all this speechifyin’. But keep your remarks brief, will you? We don’t want this here meetin’ to last all night.”

The others in the room laughed.

“I’ll keep that in mind. I want to thank all of you for coming. I called you here to discuss the Regulators and the action we of the town council recently took to get rid of them.”

“Yes, it’s all over town what the council did,” Beadle said.
Beadle owned the general store. “You repealed the Regulator tax.”

“That’s right,” Cyrus said. “That means you don’t have to pay the tax anymore. None of you do.”

“That’s all well and fine for you to say, Mayor. But this afternoon, even though the taxes have been repealed, Deputies Bates and Spellman come into my store to collect.”

“Did you pay them?”

“You damn right I paid them,” Beadle said. “You think I wanted to get beat up in my store, in front of my customers? Or maybe even worse? I mean, I shouldn’t have to tell you, should I, Cyrus? Didn’t they burn down your newspaper?”

“They probably did,” Cyrus admitted. “But that’s neither here nor there. The thing is, you shouldn’t have paid them. And, after today, if they come around to see any of you, don’t pay them.”

“Well, I don’t intend to pay them one more penny,” Darci said.

There was a smattering of laughter from some of the more prudish businessmen, but many recognized Darci’s position and admired her for her stand, even if quietly.

“I don’t know about the rest of you folks,” Ken said. “But I’d already made up my mind I wasn’t going to pay them anymore. So, Mr. Mayor, you can count me in as one of the businesses that’s goin’ along with your plan.”

“Thank you, Ken,” Cyrus said. He looked out over the assembly. “Most, here, seem to be going along with it. Is there anyone who is opposed?”

No one spoke up.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I think it is fitting that we are taking our stand in the form of refusal to pay taxes, because like those patriots of old did when they threw the tea into Boston Harbor, our own revolution has begun.”

“And, from now on, beers will be a nickel,” Paddy said.

At the prospect of nickel beer, most of the men at the meeting cheered.

“Mr. Hawke, play us a ditty, will you?” Cyrus asked.

Smiling and nodding, Hawke turned toward the piano and began playing “Dixie.”

EVEN AS THE MEETING WAS GOING ON IN THE SALOON, Culpepper had most of his deputies gathered around him in the Regulators’ office.

Vox pointed toward the saloon. “It’s just like I told you they was goin’ to do. They are down there, right now, organizing against us.”

Culpepper looked up, then, to see Deputy Hooper coming in. Earlier, he had sent Hooper down to hang out just outside the saloon so he could listen in on the meeting.

“What are they talking about?” Culpepper asked.

“Just what you said they’d be talking about,” Hooper answered. “They’re sayin’ they ain’t goin’ to be payin’ no taxes.”

“They aren’t planning an armed rebellion against us?”

“What? No, nothin’ like that,” Hooper replied.

Culpepper looked at Vox. “Still worried?” he asked.

“Well, I wasn’t worried,” Vox dissembled. “I mean, even if they was to all get guns, I wasn’t really worried.”

“That’s reassuring to hear,” Culpepper said, though his sarcasm was lost on Vox.

“So, what do we do now, Colonel?” Bates asked.

“I say we burn down the damn town hall,” Deputy Spellman said.

“Yeah, like we did the newspaper office. And we ought to burn down the saloon too. That’s the worst place of all,” Vox said.

“Hold it, hold it,” Culpepper said, holding up his hands and shaking his head. “We can’t do any of that. The governor’s not that far away from coming in here and declaring martial law as it is.”

“Then what do we do? Just stand around and watch them make fools of us?” Bates asked.

Culpepper smiled. “No,” he said. “We start enforcing the law.”

“What do you mean? We’ve been enforcing the law, ain’t we? Only now they say they ain’t goin’ to pay us,” Hooper said.

“That’s all right. We are going to show them what good citizens we are. We are going to enforce the law even if they don’t pay us.”

“What are you gettin’ at, Colonel?” Bates asked.

“When I say we are going to enforce the law, I mean we are really going to enforce the law. Every paragraph of every ordinance,” Culpepper said.

“Yeah,” Bates said. “Yeah, I think I see what you mean.”

“Let’s get started.”

Coming out of Beadle’s general store with a bag of groceries, Lester Thomas walked over to the porch and spit out the wad of tobacco he had carried in his mouth for the whole time he was shopping.

As he stepped down from the porch and started to put his groceries in the buckboard, Deputy Cole came up behind him and hit him with the butt of his pistol. When Thomas
came to in the jail a short time later, he was told he was under arrest for violation of the city ordinance against spitting on the sidewalk.

Arnold Fenton was arrested next, at gunpoint, for riding his horse faster than a man could walk.

By the end of the first day there were fifteen people in jail for everything from failure to pick up after their horse to not wearing a safety strap across the pistol in their holster.

It was late afternoon and when the door opened and Culpepper looked up from his desk, he expected to see another prisoner being brought in. Instead, he saw Hawke.

“Hawke,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“What are you trying to do, Titus?” Hawke asked.

“What do you mean, what am I trying to do? I’m not trying to do anything other than what I am contracted to do, and that is enforce the law.”

“You are going a little overboard with it, aren’t you?”

“Well, let’s just say that I want to show the town council that they made a mistake in taking away the tax. I want them to see what a good job I really can do.”

“You’ve got no call to hold these people. Let them go.”

“Are you threatening me, Hawke?”

“I’m not here to threaten you,” Hawke said. “I’m just here to find out what’s going on.”

“You know, Hawke, we shouldn’t be confronting each other like this. We grew up together, we’ve been friends for our entire lives. Hell, we’ve eaten from the same plate and drunk from the same cup. And yet here, so far from home, you are on one side of this issue and I am on the other. I don’t understand. Did they pay you more than I offered?”

“You know better than that, Titus.”

Culpepper chuckled and nodded. “I know. You always
have been one to do the right thing. Remember the sack of money that you found in front of the church that time?”

“Yes.”

“How do you think it got there?”

“I don’t know. I always supposed that the preacher must’ve dropped it.”

Culpepper shook his head. “I stole it,” he said. “I stole it, and I dropped it there. I knew that if I said I found it, everyone would believe I stole it, so I put it where I knew you would find it. I figured I could talk you into sharing it. If we had gotten caught, you would have told them we found it, and everyone would have believed you. But no, you turned the money back in.”

“It seemed like the right thing to do,” Hawke said.

“And you always were the one to do the right thing, weren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

Culpepper drummed his fingers on the desk for a moment, then chuckled.

“All right, Hawke, I tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to do the right thing this time and let everyone go. I won’t even charge anyone a fine. This was just to show the town that we are serious about enforcing the law, even if we don’t get paid. Why don’t you go back and tell everyone that?”

“I appreciate that, Titus.”

The smile left Culpepper’s face and he pointed his finger at Hawke.

“But this squares us, Hawke,” he said. “No more, we were kids together, no more we were in the army together, no more Chickamauga, no more Gettysburg. So you just go back and tell the town they had better watch their step. Because we will continue to enforce, with enthusiasm, every ordinance the town of Salcedo has ever passed.”

“Don’t step over the line, Titus,” Hawke cautioned.

“Uh-huh. And just who decides where that line is?” Titus asked.

“I do,” Hawke answered.

Darci was getting ready for work. Her skirt, filled with ruffles and trimmed in lace, ended just below her knees. The stockings were flesh-colored and skin tight. On her left leg, just above the knee, she wore a black garter with a tiny, red, artificial rosebud. She knew how to walk in such a way as to expose the garter without being obvious about it.

At the top she wore a blouse that was cut scandalously low, so low that one could see a generous spill of breasts. Another artificial flower that was tucked discreetly into her cleavage preserved a modicum of modesty, if not decorum.

She was about to tie up her hair with a red ribbon when the ribbon broke. She started looking for another ribbon, but couldn’t find one. She let out a frustrated sigh. Although she could go to work without tying up her hair, she was always very particular about how she looked, so she really wanted to do her hair right. But that had been her last ribbon, which meant she would have to go get another one.

The problem was, she was dressed for work, so she couldn’t go out into the street. She was showing too much cleavage and her dress was too short. There was a “decency of dress” ordinance that prohibited being seen on the street in clothes that were blatantly provocative. Darci would be disappointed if anyone thought what she was wearing wasn’t provocative. She had chosen this outfit precisely because it was.

Walking over to her armoire, she started to take out a dress that would be more acceptable to wear in the street, but as she looked at it, with all the corsets, bows, and stays it would take to get into it, she realized that by the time she changed clothes twice, she would be late reporting to work.

Paddy probably wouldn’t say anything. He was very good about that. But she didn’t want to put him in that position.

Finally she decided to just run down the alley to the back of Flaire’s dress shop. Going down the alley wasn’t exactly the same as going out onto the street. In fact, she was often in the alley, when she was taking men to her crib, which was just across the alley from the back of the saloon.

Flaire would have some ribbon, she thought. She could buy what she needed from Flaire and run right back, all within a few minutes. And the chances were that if she kept to the alley, nobody would see her.

Stepping to the front door of her crib, she opened it, looked up and down the alley, and seeing no one, hurried down to Flaire’s dress shop.

Reaching it, she raised her hand to knock on the door.

“Well, now, what do we have here?” a voice said.

Turning, Darci gasped in surprise and fear. Vox was standing in the shadows behind Flaire’s dress shop. His obsidian eyes were shining in the dark.

“Vox!” she said.

“It’s Deputy Vox to you, whore,” Vox replied. He took out a pair of handcuffs. “I expect you had better come with me. You know better’n to be out on the street dressed like that.”

“But I’m not in the street, I’m in the alley,” she said.

“It’s the same thing. You’re outside,” Vox said.

“Vox—I mean, Deputy Vox—please, I was just going to get some ribbon.”

“I love it when pretty girls beg me,” Vox said. “Now, turn around and put your hands behind your back.

Darci was tied to the bed in one of the jail cells. She was totally naked, and the clothes that had been ripped from her body were scattered on the floor around her. Deputy Gillis was over her, grunting out his need.

“Don’t use her all up, Gillis,” Cole said. “Save some for the rest of us.”

With a few finishing barks, Gillis rolled off her, then got up and reached for his trousers.

“Put two dollars in the bowl,” Culpepper ordered. He was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, watching as, one by one, his deputies took their turn with Darci.

“What have we got to do that for?” Gillis asked. “I don’t see no need in payin’ for somethin’ we can get for free.”

“You can’t get it for free,” Culpepper said. “She’s a whore and she charges two dollars. So put two dollars in the bowl.”

Grumbling, Gillis paid the fee.

“All right, now get out,” Culpepper said. “Cole, you have two dollars?”

“I’ve got it right here,” Cole said, holding the money up.

“Then you’re next.”

It didn’t take Cole very long. In fact, he finished before he started, and he complained that he should not have to pay since he didn’t actually get to do anything.

“You will pay,” Culpepper said.

With a disgusted snort, Cole put the money in the bowl, bringing the total to fourteen dollars. When Cole left, only Vox and Culpepper remained.

“All right, Vox, it’s your turn,” Culpepper said.

“You like this, don’t you?” Vox said.

“I like what?”

“Watchin’,” Vox said. “I’ve heard about you. You like watchin’. And I know it’s true, ’cause I can see it in your face.”

“Do you want your turn or not?” Culpepper asked.

“Hell yes, I want my turn.”

“Then shut up and take it.”

From the moment she was brought here, Darci had steeled herself to the ordeal. She was a whore and had been one since she was fifteen years old. She knew how to handle men, how to make them think she was enjoying it, and how to deaden her senses when it became too unpleasant.

That was what she had done tonight. She told herself that she was a log, with no sense of shame, or disgust, or pain. And holding that image in her mind allowed her to blur the men who climbed on and off her. She was barely aware of the change of men, and when Vox finished, it was almost as if he hadn’t even started.

“Damn that was good,” Vox said as he pulled on his trousers. “It’s your turn now. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to watch.”

“Get out,” Culpepper said.

“I won’t be no trouble,” Vox said. “You won’t even know I’m here, I’ll just sit over there—”

“I said get out,” Culpepper said, more forcefully this time.

“All right, all right, whatever you say,” Vox said as he packed his shirt into his trousers. “Hey, we goin’ to keep her around for a few days? I’d kind of like to do this again tomorrow, maybe.”

Culpepper said nothing, but his glare reemphasized his demand that Vox leave the room, so Vox did so.

With Vox gone, Culpepper went over to the bed and stared down at Darci.

Slowly, he unbuckled his belt, then unbuttoned his trousers and dropped them. His movements were so slow and studied, as opposed to the almost frenzied action of the others, that Darci couldn’t help but watch.

Culpepper stared into Darci’s face as he undressed, and there was something in his eyes, a melancholy that, despite her years of experience with men, she had never seen before.

Then, when he stood before her totally exposed from the waist down, she gasped.

There was nothing there!

Where there should have been a penis and testicles, there was a purple mound of misshapen flesh.

Darci looked up at him in surprise. “What…how?” she asked, so shocked that she was unable to formulate a complete question.

“It happened at Chickamauga,” Culpepper replied. “I just wanted you to know why.”

Culpepper pulled his clothes back up, then, almost gently, he began untying her.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“What does it look like? I’m untying you,” Culpepper said. “No hard feelings, I hope.”

Darci sat up on the edge of the bed, gingerly rubbing her wrists. She stared at Culpepper suspiciously.

“No hard feelings? I was brought here against my will and raped by all of your deputies. Now you tell me I shouldn’t have any hard feelings?”

“You weren’t raped.”

“What do you mean I wasn’t raped? Of course I was raped.”

“You are a whore,” Culpepper said. “You charge men two dollars for your services, and I’m told that sometimes you let them do it for less than that. Every man who was with you tonight paid the full amount.” He pointed to the bowl. “You have fourteen dollars there, minus the seven dollars that I intend to take out for taxes.”

“The town council said we don’t have to pay the tax anymore,” Darci said.

“Is that a fact?”

“You know it is. Why do you think people have been resisting you for the last few days?”