Sliphammer (2 page)

Now Virg said something to Josie—Warren didn't hear what it was—and Josie stiffened and said, very loudly, “Horse shit,” and turned to walk away. Warren watched her buttocks as she walked. She went past the end of the casket and Wyatt reached out and gave her rump an affectionate slap. She went on to the far end of the car, knowing Wyatt was watching her: her awareness of his attention put an extra hip swing in her walk, put more of an arch in her back so that her breasts thrust out against the. fabric of her black dress.

She stopped at the far end and turned around. When she glanced at Virgil, her mouth was sucked in with a tight look of disapproval.

Wyatt said, “Something wrong with you?”

She shook her head mutely. Wyatt's leonine head turned toward Virgil. Virg, in his unhurried, unrufflable way, smiled slowly and said, “I asked her if she knew how to fry an egg.”

Wyatt laughed. “She wouldn't know what to do with herself in a kitchen. Would you, girl?”

Josie said, “Horse shit. You tell them to quit picking on me.”

Wyatt said, “Time you learned the difference between what's funnin' and what's serious. Now we'll talk about what's serious for a minute. Virg, Doc, pay attention. The message was that Frank Stillwell's waiting in the railroad yard at Tucson with a rifle and two belt guns.”

Doc Holliday drawled, “Alone?”

“I suppose.”

Holliday nodded. “Yeah, who else would be left? You killed the other two.”

Wyatt said, “He's the last of Morg's killers. Save me the trouble of looking for him.”

Josie's face had changed. She said, “There's going to be trouble, then.”

Wyatt had a tired, confident, masculine smile that worked slowly across his mouth. His heavy, deep voice was loose at the edges. He said: “Not for me, girl.”

Holliday, without comment, had got to his feet. He was unbuckling the straps of a carpetbag; when he turned around he had a double-barreled shotgun. He walked over to Wyatt and handed him the gun. Wyatt broke it open, inspected the loads, and snapped it shut, setting both hammers on safety half cock.

Warren moved in away from the open doorway. “I wish to Christ somebody'd let
me
have a gun.”

Holliday drawled, “What for, to shoot off your foot?”

“In my opinion I'm a pretty damn good shot:”

“Sonny, your brother isn't interested in your opinion.”

“Nobody ever is.” Warren grumbled. He went back to the door. His movements were graceful but self-conscious, in imitation of Wyatt: he carried himself like an open bottle.

Josie said, “Doc.”

Holliday's glance shifted. “What?”

“Go shit in your hat,” Josie said, and grinned.

Holliday muttered an oath and went back to the card game. Texas Jack, holding his hand of cards down so Holliday couldn't see them as he went by, looked up and said lazily, “Yew thank yew need any hep, Wyatt?”

And Virgil, his heavily bandaged right shoulder gleaming in the half-light, said, “Maybe you could use a backup, Wyatt. You're a little tense. A man who's tense makes mistakes.”

Wyatt shook his head. “Keep your seat, Jack. And”—to Virgil—”please don't presume to advise me how to handle Frank Stillwell.” With a quick snap of his big shoulders he turned away from the casket and walked over to join Josie, indicating that the discussion was ended. He appeared to have put the Stillwell threat clean out of his mind; Warren faintly heard him say to Josie, in an exaggerated hick-country drawl, “Ma'am, you look slicker'n a schoolmarm's elbow.” Then both of them laughed and Josie squeezed herself against Wyatt. Warren wondered what it would be like to have those soft breasts pushing against his own chest.

Across the swaying car, Virgil moved away from the wall and came forward to the head of the casket. He braced his good hand against it and stood there, brooding. Virgil had been ambushed a few weeks before Morg's death—the same shotguns. They hadn't killed him but Virg's right shoulder had been smashed, probably beyond repair; in time the bandages would come off but it was doubtful the big man would ever use his arm again. The tracks of pain and bitterness had etched deep creases in his long-jawed face. Warren wondered what he was thinking. Virg had been laid up in bed when Wyatt and Holliday and the others had gone after the ambushers who'd crippled Virg and killed Morgan. Wyatt had killed Cruz at a desert ranch, and the day of Warren's arrival Wyatt had ridden into Tombstone and announced he had caught up with Curly Bill back in a canyon and left Curly Bill there dead. Nobody had found the body but Warren had no reason to disbelieve his brother. It left one ambusher at large, and Wyatt said that was Frank Stillwell, and now Stillwell was waiting for them in Tucson, a few minutes ahead. What was Virg thinking? A right-hander, he couldn't be much use with a gun left-handed. Was he, in his mind, talking to Morgan in that quiet, manly, reasoning voice of his?

Warren walked to the casket and leaned both hands on it. “Wondering what he'd want us to do?”

“Something like that, maybe. You know it didn't make any sense, kid. They had no fight with Morg. It was Wyatt and me that ran the Cat Town quarter. But Morg was at the OK Corral and that's all they cared about, I guess. He shouldn't have been there.”

“You're his brothers.”

“Aeah, but Wyatt and I carried city badges. Morg was a private citizen. It wasn't his fight.”

“The way I heard it,” Warren said carefully, “that fight at the OK Corral had nothing to do with the law. Would it have stopped the fight if you hadn't been wearing a badge?”

“Kid,” said Virg, “you keep a civil tongue in your head, hear?”

“I was just asking, Virg.”

Virg nodded. “Wyatt's not the only one tense. I'm sorry I jumped at you.”

“That's all right.”

Warren looked around. The light was getting very poor—sundown. Holliday and the three ruffians played cards without talk. Wyatt and Josie stood in murmuring embrace at the back of the express car. Here in the exact center of the car the casket stood across a pair of two-by-fours. It was an expensive diamond willow casket. Eight black horses had drawn the ornate hearse that had brought Morg to the train. Warren remembered the crowd that had come down to see them off—gamblers, whores, politicians, and mineowners—all dressed in black like the pleasent occupants of the express car, black made dusty by the desert wind.

Virg cleared his throat and Warren looked up at him. Virg said, “Let me tell you how it was, Warren, because maybe you got a lot of lies from Doc and the rest of them. It wasn't like the dime novels will tell it, but it wasn't like Behan's
Nugget
newspaper will tell - it either. Wyatt and I took over Cat Town down there because the town needed somebody to run it, so it wouldn't get out of hand with tinhorns. We ran clean houses and clean gambling, which is not against the law, and the Tombstone council appointed me city marshal because they figured Cat Town would take orders easier from one of its own. So I had a city badge and brother Wyatt had a federal deputy's badge because he volunteered to collect the taxes in Cat Town, which was a job that paid high but didn't offer good chances to live long. I don't apologize for us, kid, but I want to make you see. You take a tough boom camp like Tombstone and you need a place where folks can blow off steam. That was Cat Town. We weren't hired to close it down. We were just there to keep the peace. We're businessmen, Wyatt and me, and you don't take any profits from dead men.”

“What about the OK Corral, then?”

“I'm coming to that, kid. You've spent your whole life in Ohio and I think you've read too damn many dime novels about this' here Wild West of ours. You read a lot about plainsmen and cowboys and other claptrap like that. Your brothers and I, we've never been cowboys, never want to be. About the only time we spent riding the range was back when you were half grown, when the price of buffalo hides was so high Wyatt and I made a little fortune hunting buffalo for two months. But out here's just like back there, at the bottom of things—a man's still got to make a living, which is what the dime novels don't tell you when they bleat about heroes of the plains and Indian fighters and all that hogwash. The Earp brothers are businessmen, kid, not penny-dreadful heroes. We've owned saloons in every town from Ellsworth to Tombstone. It may not be heroics but it makes a profit, which is a thing that can be hard to come by in a country that gets dumped on its butt by financial panics every other year and half wiped out by blizzards and droughts and a crash in the price of silver. It's all accounting, kid, whether you're a rancher or a hard-rock miner or a saloonkeeper. So you had better get a lot of notions out of your head before you go around begging for somebody to give you a gun you can strap on. A gun's just a tool you use when you haven't got a more profitable way to settle your quarrels.”

Warren said, “But what about the OK Corral?”

Virg shook his head. His face, in the deepening shadows, was hard to make out.

Finally he said, “That started in Kansas, you know.”

“In Kansas?”

“Back right after the war. Before you were hardly out of baby pants. Texans brought their cows up to Kansas, hating Yankees, and Kansas hired a bunch of people to keep the Rebs in line. Wyatt and I did that kind of work for a while because Kansas paid high to get fighting men. That was some years back and we were some younger and looser than we are now.”

“The Clantons didn't come from Kansas.”

“They came from Texas, kid, and they carried along that hate of Kansas Yankees, which meant us. One night Wyatt had to throw Ike Clanton out of a saloon of ours. I tangled with Johnny Ringo once or twice. And Doc took some stolen cows away from old man Clanton last summer. Not for law but to sell the cows himself, down in Mexico. Nobody could prove they were stolen.”

“How'd Doc get tied up with you, anyway?”

“He had a girl friend that worked in one of Wyatt's houses. But that's a long story. You asked about the OK Corral and I told you. It was Texans and Kansans and we were fighting the goddamned Civil War again, is all it amounts to, because I've yet to meet a Texan who really believes the war's over and Texas lost. So you see kid, it's not heroes of the plains versus villains with black mustaches, it's just a goddamned stupid feud between people who ought to grow up and learn better.”

“You were there—at the OK Corral.”

“I didn't like it.”

“But you were
there.
”

“I was there,” Virg said in a low, harsh voice. “I was there, kid, and I got nicked by a bullet or two, and I helped kill three men-for no good reason I could think of, and afterwards they put enough buckshot in this shoulder to fill a soda cracker keg, and after that they killed our brother here, and after that Wyatt went out and killed a couple more of them, and now somebody else is gonna get killed, and I just want to know where the spittin' hell it's all ever going to end.”

His face completely masked in shadow, Virg wheeled away and tramped back to a dark corner. Warren stared down at the coffin under his hands.

The engine whistled, several short hoots. The train was beginning to slow down. Warren looked toward the shadowy back end of the car. He could make out Josie back there but Wyatt was no place in sight. His glance traveled the length of the car. The poker game was suspended; Holliday and Texas Jack were getting to their feet. Wyatt wasn't with them, either. Wyatt wasn't anywhere in the car.

The grab of brakes threw Warren against the coffin. He righted himself and turned toward the half-open door, but Doc Holliday shouldered past him and growled, “Stay put right here, sonny,” and went on to the door with Texas Jack right behind him. Disobediently, Warren followed them and stood behind Texas Jack's shoulder.

The train racketed to a stop with a sigh of sliding brake shoes. Warren saw a lot of freight cars on sidings in the twilight and a man dimly visible standing on the dusty ground beside the express car.

The man said, “Where's Wyatt Earp?”

Doc Holliday said, “
Buenos
fucking
tardes,
Stillwell.”

“Up yours, Doc. The great man too chickenshit to come out of there behind you?”

Warren shifted to the side; he saw, now, that Stillwell had a rifle pointed right at Doc's belly and cocked. The rifle shifted an inch and Stillwell yelled, “Where the hell is he?”

“Right here.”

Warren jerked. Wyatt's deep voice had shot forward from the shadows
behind
Stillwell.

“Right here, you son of a bitch!”

Stillwell wheeled, frantic. The rifle didn't turn as fast as he did. Two brilliant stabs of flame lanced from the shadows between two freight cars. Warren felt the concussion of the shotgun's earsplitting roar.

The double ten-gauge blast slammed Stillwell back. He pitched and toppled, aglisten with raw meat and gristle from rib cage to shoulder.

Warren was unable to swallow. He felt needles in his knees. His eyes refused to blink.

Wyatt stepped into sight. It was too dark to make outhis face. Stillwell was down flat and moaning.

Warren felt weight behind him—Virg, breathing through his teeth, and Josie. Warren felt the hard grip of her hands on his arm. He couldn't rip his eyes off Stillwell. Stillwell was grumbling deliriously; Doc Holliday drawled cruelly. “Don't be a poor loser, Frank.”

Wyatt Earp snapped, “He wasn't playing a game.”

“Sure he was—sure he was. What else you want to call it?”

Warren's legs began to tremble. The man wasn't even dead yet. Warren saw Wyatt step across Stillwell and drop the empty shotgun across Stillwell's legs. Wyatt stood below them, looking up. Behind Warren, Virg began to curse in a dead, flat, obscene monotone.

Somewhere in the ensuing run of moments, Stillwell died. Wyatt bent over him to make sure. Josie breathed, “Sweet, sweet Jesus.” Wyatt reached up for a grip and climbed into the express car.