The Last Shootist (2 page)

“Let's get a drink. I'll make you famous, kid, but I need your whole story.”

Opened in the fall of 1885, the Gem Theatre was a full-service establishment with a restaurant and saloon in front and its gaming rooms moved upstairs by order of a reformist town council. A stage at one end of the barroom hosted variety musical shows with singers and dancing girls, sometimes even dog fights and boxing matches, which were heavily bet.

“My name's not kid. It's Gillom Rogers.”

“Fine. But hide those guns, Gillom, or somebody will shoot
you
to steal 'em.”

Gillom stuck the Remingtons carefully under the waistband of his woolen trousers, covered by his light wool coat. Dobkins steered him into one of the red leather wine booths in a back corner.

“
Two
beers, Jimmy! McGintys!” Pulling a small notebook and pencil from his coat pocket, the ace reporter got right down to business. “So at J. B. Books's behest, you summoned Jay Cobb, Jack Pulford, and that Mex, what was his name?”

“Serrano. El Tuerto. Cross-Eye, they called him. He was one bad
bandido
from Juarez.”

“So why were all three of these gunslingers summoned to the Connie today?”

“'Cause they were all good with guns. Mister Books was dying of cancer and expected one of those gunmen would save him the trouble of doing himself in.”

“
Cancer?
Books?”

“Yup. Doc Hostetler told him he didn't have much time to live. That's why my ma let him stay on in our bottom guest room even after all our other boarders fled, after those two jaspers tried to shoot him in bed earlier this week. He had nowhere else to go.”

Dobkins chewed his pencil. “Fits. I did hear a rumor Books was dying, but after what he did to me…” The journalist made a face at the sour memory of the great gunman booting him ignominiously in the ass off Mrs. Rogers's front porch.

The rotund barkeep put one huge mug of warm beer in front of Mr. Dobkins, but he gave the young customer the fisheye. “Kid's too young to drink in here, Dan.”

The reporter shook his head. “Not today he isn't, Jimmy. This is the young man who just killed John Bernard Books.”

The barkeep gave Gillom a long stare. “On the house then. For helpin' rid El Paso of our last
pistolero
.” Jimmy left to go draw another beer. Dobkins slid his stein of ale across the table to young Rogers, who grinned as he sucked it down. The teenager found killing worked up a thirst.

Dan gave him a smile oily enough to grease a locomotive.

“Okay, Gillom, who shot who first?”

“Well, most of the blood had been spilled by the time I snuck in there. Books had shot 'em all—Cobb, Pulford, that Mex, and some other joker I don't even know. All the hard cases he invited to his funeral.”

Gillom gulped more beer as Jimmy approached with another huge mug, named after the McGinty Band, El Paso's famous musical drinking society. The journalist's eyes drifted to the ceiling.

“Invitation to a funeral … or, or, a gunfight. What a headline.… Or the title of a book…”

Gillom nodded, remembering. “Yeah, the gunsmoke and pistol fire echoing off those tile floors burned my nostrils and deadened my hearing. Heavy…”

Dobkins nodded, transported. “A vibrating mantle … of death. Like something out of Poe.”

Gillom slugged his beer. “Who?”

“Edgar Allan Poe. Dissipated Baltimore poet you might like.”

“Listen, Dan,” said Gillom. “It's after five. I gotta get home for supper.”

The reporter snapped out of his wonderment. “Me, too. Gotta see if that photographer's gettin' those death photos. Crucial with a headline. So Books actually asked you to shoot him?”

“He was bleedin', wounded bad, dyin' anyway. Whispered ‘kill … me.' So I blessed him with a bullet.”

Dan Dobkins listened transfixed. “A bullet's
blessing
…”

Gillom's chair scraped as he got up, remembered his manners. “Thanks for the beer.”

Dobkins hastily rose, too. “Sure, kid, uh, Gillom. Gonna make you famous. Tomorrow's paper.”

They shook hands a little awkwardly under the circumstances.

“Thanks, Dan. Maybe this'll lead to a good job. Something exciting involving firearms is what I fancy.”

“Finish your schooling first. You're a game young man, Gillom Rogers. More education, you'll go far.”

“Already on my way, thanks just the same.” With a spring in his step, Gillom was off, checking the weighty guns in his waistband as he bounced through the Gem's swinging front doors. Dan Dobkins smiled as he dropped four bits on the table, leaving an uncharacteristically decent tip. Headline story this hot might make
him
famous, too.

 

Two

 

The McGinty Coronet Band, its brass blasting and drums rattling, marched up El Paso's main street to its free Saturday night concert in the Gem. Dobkins elbowed his way through the marching throng to reach the bottleneck outside the Constantinople's front doors.

“Make way for the press! Please!
Daily Herald
coming through!” A strong hand pushed back his chest. The imposing, red-necked man was one of the smaller marshal's muscles. Turning to catch Walter Thibido's eye, the deputy got the nod to let the press in.

Dobkins stepped carefully into the saloon's mess. He noted the bullet holes in the carved mahogany bar, the jagged glass teeth left in the wide, shattered mirror behind it. Amazingly only one light fixture, designed like a cluster of glass grapes, was broken. The burnt gunpowder filled his nostrils with an acrid scent of sulphur, like the devil's vapor trail.

Moving around the big stranger's body near the front door, Dobkins gave a kick to a short-haired mongrel licking brain slime off the green and white floor tiles next to the gaping hole in Jay Cobb's head. The dog let out a yelp, but circled out of boot range to go lap more blood from the viscous pool around the other stranger's torso.

Marshal Thibido mopped his brow with a blue silk handkerchief. “Books hasn't any relatives I know of, so I'll handle his personals until this shooting investigation's finished. Where are his guns?”

The lawman was addressing Skelly, the photographer, who was propping Books's upper body against the bar's mahogany front, closing eyelids over vacant orbs, arranging the corpse in a position more suitable for infamy. The gunman's skeletal features, emaciated by his prostate cancer, were ghastly gray to look at, but aside from wiping away blood splatters, there was nothing much Skelly could do to improve J. B. Books's gaunt death mask. No time to get any face powder, makeup from his studio. Skelly had to tilt the gunfighter's Stetson to cover up the hole on one side of his head. Luckily the bullet hadn't exited through the face or he couldn't shoot a saleable photograph.

“No weapons on him. No watch, no wallet, no money. He was robbed, Marshal.”

“Goddammit, he used those guns.
Deputies!
I want these shooters' guns confiscated, especially Books's.
Find 'em!
They're valuable … evidence.”

Dan Dobkins curried favor. “Kid's got those pistols, Marshal. Gillom Rogers took 'em before finishing Books off, that shot to the head there.”

“You saw those Remingtons?”

Dan nodded. “Ten minutes ago, talked to Gillom. He's gone home.”

Thibido blew relieved air. “Well, least we know where they are.”

Mr. Skelly positioned his equipment, angling the maple Conley eight-by-ten camera on its tripod down on Books before ducking under green baize cloth to adjust the focus on its twelve-inch rectilinear lens.

Pushing his opening, the lanky reporter began to drill. “So, Marshal, what have you concluded from this gory mess?”

Thibido surveyed the big saloon. “Well, all of El Paso's hard cases seem to have convened to gun each other down. I'll propose to the city council we pay for these burials, since they've done us a civic favor. No innocents lost in here today.”

“Any idea who shot first, or why?”

“Nope. Except to burnish their bad reputations? Pulford and Serrano were mankillers. Jay Cobb was just a pimple-faced punk, a sharpshooter only with his mouth. Jerk didn't stand a Chinaman's chance against these gunslingers. And J. B. Books, well, his reputation rode into town before he did.” The marshal sighed, exhausted at just the thought of how much legal trouble cleaning up this big mess was going to be.

“I'll tell you straight, Dobkins. We've had bloody hell here these past ten years, since John Selman blew Wes Hardin's brains out in the Acme in '95. Then Scarborough killed Selman. Then some tough killed Selman. Before that marshal Stoudenmire shot Hale Manning and his brother Frank retaliated, killing the marshal.” The short, well-dressed lawman gestured around the barroom with vigor.

“Now I'm standing at six-shooter junction. If these shootists don't stop invading our fair city to assassinate each other, there's going to be nothing left of El Paso but burnt dirt!”

Both men were distracted by the sight of two young boys playing with Jack Pulford. The cardsharp was slumped against the back wall of the Constantinople. J. B. Books had killed him from sixteen feet, both men standing and firing at each other. One shot, right in the heart. But the bullet, stopped by fibrous heart muscle, hadn't exited, and now the two boys, who must have snuck in the back door, were bent over Pulford's corpse, playfully lifting his slack left arm up and down. With each lever action of his pump handle arm, blood swelled from the wound in the deceased's chest. The mischievous boys were pumping a dead man dry.

Appalled, the city marshal yelled to another deputy. “
Jackson!
Get those damned kids outta here! Playin' with the corpses.
Christ!
”

“So Marshal, you have
no idea
how five noted gunslingers managed to show up in the same saloon at the same time in broad daylight for the shoot-out of the century, right under your nose?”

Walter Thibido had had enough.

“No, by ginger, I
don't
! And I've had quite enough of
you
today, too.” His face flushed red, one neck vein began to pulse as he shouted. “I want
everyone
not involved in this police investigation out of this saloon
right now
!” The marshal pulled his own pistol to wave above his head. “That includes children, dogs,
and
journalists!”

At that moment, Skelly puffed hard into the brass pipe in his mouth, squeezed the bulb, and his exhalation blew the alcohol flame through the rear of the tin trough he was holding and ignited the magnesium powder in the trough. For a second the barroom lit up like the Fourth of July.

Everyone—children, dog, deputies, the marshal, frightened bystanders—jumped. They might have all been standing in Hades' waiting room. The photographer quickly extinguished the flame, put down his flashpan, and began fanning away the cloud of smoke. Five corpses never moved a muscle.

 

Three

 

Gillom avoided details over his mother's supper that night, saying only that people had been shot in the Constantinople that afternoon, probably Books, too. Bond Rogers had decided to move her son out of his smaller upstairs bedroom and open that one up to another boarder, if any roomers
ever
showed up on her doorstep again after all this bloody mayhem. She wanted Gillom staying in J. B. Books's larger downstairs room. The shootist had left nothing behind but his notorious reputation and the fact he'd shot two country cousins who'd tried to kill him in that very corner room only a week ago. No respectable person would rent a room housing those murderous ghosts till long forgot. She also thought it would be easier to keep track of her delinquent son in a main-floor room, right below hers.

Gillom was happy to help his mother move his clothes downstairs to Books's suddenly vacant quarters. His nostrils still caught scent of the faint mix of flaming gunpowder and urine from when Books had doused the burning bedsheets with the contents of his piss pot after those two jaspers had tried to murder him right there. His mother had bought new bedding and a mattress, to which he quickly gave a bounce test. Gillom rose from the refurbished bed and went to the west and then the south windows, sliding their wooden sashes higher to let in more cool night air.
These glassed downstairs windows will make my comings and goings easier,
he realized.

Gillom returned to bed, pulled his bedspread up higher against the spring chill. But he was restless, squirming under stiff, new sheets, nerves still taut from the events of his momentous day. The seventeen-year-old jerked again from bed, padded in nightshirt and bare feet to the curtained closet. He groped the top shelf inside where he had dumped his cowboy hat and leather baseball glove and pulled Books's whiskey bottle from a cubbyhole his mother had missed. A corner of redeye remained.

Hurling himself back into bed, Gillom made the wooden frame sway and creak. Nestling with his prize, he pulled the cork with his teeth, grimaced as the whiskey seared his palate. He mused:
Men drank whiskey, tough men like J. B. Books. I'll have to get used to this harsh taste. My sarsaparilla days are over.

Burning alcohol slid down his teenaged gullet and mixed with the warm beer he'd gulped six hours earlier. Gillom Rogers relaxed, remembering the first time he'd encountered the famous gunman, just a week ago. Books had spotted him spying, grabbed him by the throat and yanked him right up to this very room's window. Nearly choked him out before the sick old man had collapsed on the windowsill, exhausted. Gillom dozed.

He awoke to whispers on the wind. Curtains in the west window to the side of his headboard moved in the morning breeze. Bright sunlight. A giggle and a loud
sssshh
.
I'm not dreaming, somebody is spying on me!
Eyes wide, Gillom leapt out of bed, jumped to the open window, thrust his head outside.