Trackdown (9781101619384) (18 page)

He waited until Virgie was gone before he approached the house. Bassett couldn’t get off scot-free from what he’d done. And there was no hurry about getting back. Virgie might worry if she found that he was gone, but let her worry. Let her stew in it.

Tom knocked on the back door, not loudly but insistently enough that Bassett had to hear it.

The door swung open, and Bassett said, “What’s wrong, Virginia? Did you forget—”

He stopped short as Tom raised the gun, pointed it at his face, and eared back the hammer.

“Yeah, she forgot something,” Tom said. “Forgot that she had a husband, you bastard.”

“Gentry! My God, man, be…be careful with that gun.”

Bassett’s voice held the accent of his eastern origins. He held his hands up as he backed away. Tom stepped into the kitchen and kept the gun trained on him.

Bassett wore a shirt and trousers but was barefooted. His brown hair was in disarray, probably from rolling around in bed with Virgie. He was handsome, in a weak way, Tom supposed. Virgie probably thought so, anyway.

“My wife’s been paying you visits,” Tom said. “I thought it was past time I did, too.”

“Whatever you’re thinking, it…it’s wrong, Gentry,” Bassett protested. “There’s nothing going on between Virginia and me. We’re just friends. We were acquainted in Wichita—”

“I’ll just bet you were,” Tom cut in. “So you knew her before I did, eh? I’ll bet that’s not the only thing you did before me.”

“Please don’t be crude. There’s no need for a scene—”

Tom interrupted him again.

“What there’s a need for is for me to pull this trigger and splatter your brains all over the wall.”

Bassett’s eyes widened with terror.

“But I’m not gonna do that,” Tom went on. “I don’t think a sorry son of a bitch like you is worth the price of a bullet.”

He tipped the gun barrel up and lowered the hammer. Relief flooded Bassett’s face.

That reaction lasted only a second. Then Tom took a swift step forward and smashed the gun across Bassett’s face.

Bassett cried out in pain and went down. Blood poured from his broken nose and welled from the long cut on his cheek that the gun had opened. He clapped his hands to his face and might have screamed if Tom hadn’t kicked him in the belly, driving all the air from his lungs. After that all he could do was lie there gasping.

“Stop your damn sniveling,” Tom said as he loomed over the fallen man. “You deserved a lot worse, messin’ around with a married woman that way. I could kill you and most folks would think I did a good thing. You better remember that. And if I was you, I’d pack up and leave Redemption, first thing in the morning.”

He turned away. Behind him, Bassett mewled in pain. Disgusted by the man, Tom stalked out of the house and turned toward his own place.

He seemed to be walking in a daze. He hadn’t really planned what he was going to do tonight. He hadn’t actually known that he was going to confront Bassett until his steps were carrying him to the man’s back door.

Now, though, he knew that he couldn’t wait any longer about letting Virgie know how things were going to be. The secret was out. If he waited, Bassett would tell her that he knew about their affair, and Tom wasn’t going to let that happen. He wasn’t going to deprive himself of seeing the look of surprise on her lovely face.

He slammed the door as he came into the house. Virgie popped instantly out of the bedroom, showing that she was still awake. She came toward him, tying the belt of her robe around her waist and saying, “Tom? Is that you?”

He struck a match and lit the lamp in the living room.

“It’s me,” he said as he turned toward her. “Didn’t even bother to check and see if I was still in the spare bedroom, did you, Virgie?”

Her gaze dropped to the gun he still held in his hand. Maybe she saw Ned Bassett’s blood on it. Her eyes widened and she cried, “Oh, my God, Tom! What have you done?”

“Something I should have done a long time ago. You won’t be havin’ any more truck with Bassett.” A humorless laugh came from him. “Hell, the way I left him looking, you won’t
want
to have anything to do with him.”

“You killed him,” she said in a hushed voice.

Tom shook his head.

“No, he was alive when I left. Hurting, but that’s all. It’s over between the two of you, Virgie. I’ve seen to that. I told Bassett to get out of town.”

He set the gun on the table next to the lamp.

She breathed, “You can’t…Tom, what do you think was…was going on?”

“I know damned well what was going on! You want me to spell it out for you? Better yet, why don’t you tell me all about it? Why don’t you tell me all the things that he did to you…and that you did to him?”

He saw the look of cold hatred that swept over her face, along with pain as his words lashed at her.

“Why don’t you just go to hell?” she snapped.

Unwanted though it was, a feeling almost of contrition came over him. He shook his head and said, “I didn’t want this, Virgie. I just wanted you to love me again.”

She shook her head.

“That won’t ever happen.”

“No, I guess it won’t.”

He had thought when he came in that he would beat some sense into her, but that seemed futile now. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, she loved Bassett,
he supposed. And the hot rage inside him had been replaced by a cold feeling of emptiness.

He started past her, saying, “I’ll get my gear and move out to the ranch in the morning.”

She moved behind him. He heard a noise, the scrape of metal on wood, and some instinct warned him what she was doing. He whirled around to see that she had picked up the revolver from the table and was pointing it at him. The barrel shook as she said, “Don’t look so surprised. You’ve got it coming.”

Her finger tightened on the trigger.

When nothing happened, she looked shocked. So shocked that Tom had to laugh.

“You have to cock it first,” he said.

He didn’t give her a chance to do that. Instead he sprang forward, his left arm coming up and around in a sweeping blow that struck her right arm and sent the gun flying from her fingers. She let out a cry.

The next instant, he buried his fist in her belly.

Tom Gentry had never hit a woman in his life, not even a whore. But what was that Virgie had just said? The words echoed in his head.

Don’t look so surprised. You’ve got it coming.

She sure as hell did.

The pounding on the door of the marshal’s office roused Mordecai from his restless sleep. He had locked the door before he turned in, but the key was still in the lock. All he had to do was go out there, turn the key, and open the door.

Easier said than done, he thought as he used his good arm to lever himself up from the cot in the storage room. His
wounded arm ached, but not too bad. The injury slowed him down, though, as he climbed to his feet and started from the back room into the office.

“Hold your dang horses!” he yelled to whoever was out there hammering a fist on the door. “I’m gettin’ there, I’m gettin’ there.”

It occurred to him that the door pounder might be looking for trouble. Lawmen had enemies, after all. He hadn’t made any really bad ones in the time he’d been working as Marshal Bill Harvey’s deputy, at least as far as he could remember, but there was no telling about these things.

Getting rousted out of bed like this in the middle of the night was nearly always bad news, Mordecai told himself. He detoured back to the desk and slipped the revolver from the holster and coiled shell belt he had left there.

When he reached the door, he realized he was going to have trouble holding the gun and turning the key at the same time. Since he only had the one good hand right now, he called through the door, “Who in blazes is out there?”

The pounding stopped. Somebody said something, but the voice was so thick and muffled that Mordecai couldn’t make out the words. He leaned closer to the door and asked, “Who is it? What’s the trouble?”

This time he understood when a man said, “I need help…I’m hurt…”

More likely drunk than hurt, Mordecai thought. On the other hand, the hombre really could be injured, and he had promised Bill he’d look after the town. It wouldn’t be fittin’ for Bill to get back to Redemption and find that Mordecai had let somebody die on the doorstep of the marshal’s office.

“All right, hold on,” he grumbled. He was wearing only his long underwear, so there wasn’t really any place to put the gun. He bent over and set it on the floor, then reached for the key.

As he swung the door open, the man outside said, “You’ve got to stop him…I think he’s going to kill her!”

The man had been leaning against the door as he knocked on it, and when Mordecai opened it, that threw him off balance.
He stumbled toward the deputy, who thrust out his good hand and caught the man by the shoulder.

“Whoa there!” Mordecai exclaimed as he held the man up. “Who are you, mister? What’s that you said about somebody gettin’ killed?”

The man held one hand to his face. Dark smears on his features might be blood, Mordecai thought.

“Virginia…Gentry.” The man’s voice had a peculiar bubbling sound to it that Mordecai recognized from dozens of fracases over the years. His nose was broken, and blood still flowed from it like a river. “Her husband…I’m afraid he’s going to kill her!”

Mordecai had to think about it before he knew who the man was talking about. Virginia Gentry was the daughter of Walter Shelton, the hombre who had tried to shoot it out with those robbers in the bank. She was married to…Mordecai drew a blank on that.

“Settle down, settle down,” he said. “What happened to you?”

The man took his hand away from his face. Most of the businesses along the street were closed for the night and dark, but the saloons were open and gave off enough of a glow that Mordecai was able to make out some of the damage to his caller’s face. The fella’s nose was busted, all right, and he had an ugly gash across his left cheek. He’d been holding it together. Now the wound sagged open grotesquely.

“Tom Gentry did this,” he got out. “H-he pistol-whipped me. Then he went after his wife.”

Mordecai didn’t like the sound of that. When a man went after another man like that and the first hombre’s wife was involved, usually there’d been some sort of improper fooling around going on.

“It ain’t the law’s business to get mixed up in problems ’twixt a husband and wife,” he said.

“But he’s going to kill her!” the man insisted. “That’s murder!”

Even that was debatable in the eyes of the law, thought Mordecai. But on the other hand, he didn’t want Bill coming
back to find that there had been an unnecessary killing while he was gone.

Mordecai recognized the name Tom Gentry, too. The fella was one of the Gentrys who had a horse ranch outside of town. Mordecai had had a run-in or two with old Burk Gentry, the patriarch of the family, and considered him to be an arrogant, high-handed troublemaker. If his son Tom was anything like him…

“All right, damn it,” he said. “Let me get my pants on. You go in and sit down. You’re hurt.”

“I…I’ll be all right. I’ll come with you. I can show you where they live.”

That would save time, all right, since Mordecai didn’t have a clue where that was. He was familiar with the big Shelton house on the edge of town, but not where Shelton’s daughter and son-in-law lived.

“What’s your name, mister?”

“Bassett…Ned Bassett.”

“Fella who repairs watches and clocks? Yeah, I know who you are. Hang on.”

Mordecai picked up his gun, went back to the desk, and holstered it. He opened a drawer and found a rag, then took it over to Bassett.

“Here. Mop up some o’ that blood.”

Bassett took the rag and held it to his face while Mordecai retreated to the storeroom where his cot was and awkwardly climbed into his trousers. He pulled on his boots and returned to the office to buckle on the gun belt. It wasn’t an easy chore to perform one-handed, but he had learned to manage.

“All right, come on,” he told Bassett. “Lead the way, mister.”

They moved swiftly through the darkened streets. Mordecai listened tensely for a gunshot. If Tom Gentry had pistol-whipped Bassett, that meant he was armed. He might decide to shoot his wife. Obviously that was what Bassett was afraid of.