Colonel Rutherford's Colt

 

Colonel Rutherford's Colt

 

 

by Lucius Shepard

 

 

 

 

ElectricStory.com, Inc.
^®

C
OLONEL
R
UTHERFORD'S
C
OLT
Copyright © 2001 by Lucius Shepard. All rights reserved.
Ebook edition of
Colonel Rutherford's Colt
copyright © 2001 by ElectricStory.com, Inc.
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-59729-082-1
Published by ElectricStory.com, Inc.
ElectricStory.com and the ES design are trademarks of ElectricStory.com, Inc.
This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locales are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously to convey a sense of realism.
Cover art by and copyright © 2001 Cory and Catska Ench.
Edited by Bob Kruger.
Ebook conversion by ElectricStory.com, Inc.
For the full ElectricStory catalog, visit www.electricstory.com.
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C
OPYRIGHT
N
OTICE
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Contents

 

 

Colonel Rutherford's Colt

 

Also by Lucius Shepard

 

Other Ebooks from ElectricStory

 

Colonel Rutherford's Colt

 

 

R
ITA WHITELAW AND JIMMIE ROY GUY
seemed like a strange couple to everyone but themselves. No one could understand how this boyish man of twenty-nine had come to partner with a flinty Blackfoot woman ten, eleven years older and looking every day of it . . . though even her harshest detractors would not deny that Rita was of a type certain men found alluring. She stood nearly six feet tall—taller yet in her fancy boots—and wore a hawk feather woven into her braid. Her finely sculpted features brought to mind a long-dead movie actress whose name folks could never quite recall. But there was something off-putting about her, something distinctly not-beautiful. Too much crazy luck and reckless living in her eyes. She gave the impression you might strike sparks from that hard-held mouth if you brushed her lips with a kiss. By contrast, Jimmy was towheaded, several inches shorter, with an amiable hillbilly face and grayish blue eyes whose steadiness supported the air of distracted calm with which he met the world. Some would tell you that he wasn't right in the head, and Rita was taking advantage of him. Then there were those who argued that the situation was exactly the reverse. Whatever their opinion, when people saw Rita and Jimmy sitting behind their tables at the gun shows, they found no reasonable way of fitting them together, no evidence of love or any ordinary mutuality. The only thing they appeared to have in common was each other.

Thursday, the opening morning of the Issaquah Gun Show, began as did many of their mornings in a campsite just off the expressway, this one a twenty-minute drive west of the Cascades in Washington State. A heavy mist ghost-dressed the landscape, lending the bunkerlike building that housed the bathrooms a mysterious presence and making shadowy menaces of the sickly fir that sentried it. The rush of high-speed traffic sounded like reality had sprung a serious leak. Rita had thrown on a plaid wool jacket over a denim shirt and leather pants, and was stuffing sleeping bags into the rear of a brown Dodge van with Guy Guns lettered in black and yellow on the side. Jimmy, wearing jeans and a tan suede sport coat that had seen better days, was standing off a ways, his head tipped back as if contemplating a judgment on the weather.

“Believe we got one coming today,” he said. “One with some move on it.”

“You always say the same thing,” Rita said curtly. “About half the time you wrong.”

“I can feel them out there,” he said. “They all trying to come our way, just sometimes they don't make it to the table.”

She slammed shut the rear door of the van. “Yeah . . . we'll see.”

They drove the slow lane for nine miles to the Issaquah exit and turned off the access road into a strip mall. Rain began to slant against the windshield. There were deep puddles everywhere. The blacktop was a regulated river running straight between one-story banks of burger taco pizza, with big shiny metal fish passing along it two-by-two. They ate a McDonald's breakfast in the van, staring out at a tire dealership bulking up beyond a row of dumpsters—a huge tire with a white clown face bulging from its middle was stuck on a pole atop the roof. Jimmy had gone for the sausage-egg-and-cheese biscuit. Rita was working on a Whopper and fries supersized.

“How you eat hamburger damn near every morning of your life, I'll never know,” Jimmy said, and had a bite of biscuit. “That ain't no real breakfast.”

Rita said something with her mouth full and he asked her to repeat it.

“I said”—she swallowed, wiped her mouth with a napkin—“you're eating lard.” She took a swig of Diet Coke. “That thing you're eating, meat's about half lard. Biscuit, too.”

“ 'Least it tastes like breakfast.”

Rita let out with a give-me-strength sigh, like she knew she was dealing with a child. They continued eating, and into Jimmy's mind, which generally ran along unimaginative lines, came the image of a sapling palm bathed in golden early morning sun. As the image hung there, superimposed over the customary traffic of his thoughts, it began to acquire detail. Dew beaded its dark green fronds. Glowing dust motes quivered in shafts of light like excited atoms. A speckled lizard clung to the trunk. When it faded he said, “Now I know we got one coming! It's talking at me already.”

Rita popped a fry into her mouth, chewed. “What's it say?”

He told her about the palm tree.

She was studying the fine print on the back of a candy bar wrapper she was preparing to tear open. “Sounds like a real pretty story.”

“I know it ain't talking at me,” he said, annoyed by her indifference. “It's a figure of speech is all. I ain't as simple as you think.”

“You don't know what I think,” she said flatly, and peeled back the wrapper; she had a bite of the candy bar.

“What the hell you see in me?” he asked. “It can't be much. You treat me like a damn idiot about half the time.”

The rain picked up, filming across the windshield, washing the tire dealership into a blur of blue and white.

“How I treat you the rest of the time?” Rita asked.

“You treat me nice,” he said sullenly. “But that don't . . .”

“Well, maybe you oughta consider that before you snap at me. Maybe you oughta assume when I don't treat you nice, I got things on my mind.”

That worried him. “What . . . ? Something bothering you?”

“Something's always bothering me, Jimmy.” She stuffed the empty fry carton into the McDonald's bag, balled it up, rolled down the window and heaved the bag in the direction of a dumpster. Rain slashed at her shoulder as she wrangled the window closed. “I'm thinking about bills. If it ain't bills, it's about getting the van looked at. About whether we should do the show in North Bend. About all the shit you don't have to handle.”

“I can do my share, you just let me.”

“Oh, yeah! I seen you do your share. Last time I left you to handle things, we had collection people calling every five minutes. You want to know what I see in you?” Her black eyes nailed him so hard, he felt stricken. “I tell you that, chances are I won't see it no more.”

She turned the ignition key, gunned the engine. “Finish your breakfast. Y'know they won't have nothing good at the show.”

He was remembering the palm tree, wondering where it grew, Mexico or Brazil . . . maybe Cuba. It took him a few seconds to respond.

“I ain't eating no damn lard,” he said.

 

* * *

 

Tucked into a corner of the Issaquah armory, away from the central pathology of the gun show, where beneath ceiling-long trays of fluorescent light, teenagers with tipped hair, relief-map acne, and Satanist T-shirts fondled assault rifles, and wary militia types with graying prophets' beards passed out tracts to Kiwanis Club members and fat men with trucker wallets, and novelty dealers sold Buck Owens switchblades and WWII bomb casings, and families shopped at the fancy booths for a nice pearl-handled carry-along with decent stopping power for Mom . . . far from all that, tucked into a rear corner of the building, were the two tables assigned to Guy Guns. Unlike the other dealers, Jimmy and Rita suspended no banner behind their tables. They appealed to a select clientele, and the people with whom they did business knew how to find them. In their display cases a .42-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver that had once belonged to Teddy Roosevelt, a .38-caliber Beretta with a golden grip presented to Elliot Ness by the Chicago Chamber of Commerce, and a single-shot derringer wielded by the Civil War spy Belle Star nested in among weapons of less noble yet no less authentic pedigree, some dull and evil-looking amid folds of purple velvet, others with fancy plating and inlays appearing harmless as jewelry. Most people who wandered back into their corner would glance at the price tags and skate away. Occasionally a man wearing a T-shirt bearing a brave slogan such as If You Want My Gun You Can Pry It from My Cold Dead Hand would linger over the cases and ask a question or two before moving on. And once a group of Russian men who had been buying switchblades in volume debated whether or not to make an offer on the Ness Beretta.

“Is Elliot Ness the Untouchable guy, yes?” their spokesman asked, and when Jimmy said Yeah, it was indeed that Elliot Ness, and showed him the certificate of authenticity, the Russians huddled up. After a brief discussion, the spokesman—a burly, affable sort with a a watermelon gut and his head shaved to stubble—came back with an offer that was about two-thirds the asking price.

“This gun's got a lot of move,” Jimmy told him. “It's bound to move before end of business tomorrow.” He dangled the price tag in front of the bewildered Russian's face. “But it ain't moving for a dollar less than it says right here.”

“We coulda used that sale,” Rita said as they stood watching the Russians push into the crowded center aisle.

“He'll be back before closing.” Jimmy lifted the top of the display case and gently placed the Beretta next to a delicate fowling piece embellished with mother-of-pearl—male and female together. “Come Saturday night he'll be hauling it out at a party, telling everybody he's”—he did a mud-thick Russian accent—“ ‘the Untouchable guy.' ”

“Your call,” said Rita and went back to her magazine.

One o'clock came, and Jimmy's stomach started growling. All the food concession had to offer were corn dogs and warmed-over fries and rotisserie-grilled Polish sausages that resembled blistered rubber tubes. He was debating these choices when a woman in a blue flowered dress approached the table. She had smoky hair bobbed at the shoulders and a fair complexion. Peaches and cream, his daddy would have said. A little plump, but pretty in a TV-housewife way. She would have looked a lot prettier, he thought, if she'd been less worried. Her mouth was screwed up tight, her brow furrowed. Dark pouches beneath her eyes suggested that she hadn't been getting much sleep. She had tried to fix herself up with powder and bright cherry lipstick, but this had not disguised the effects of whatever was troubling her. He guessed she was about Rita's age, though it would have been a neat trick to find a pair of women more opposite. Where Rita was all lean angles and cheekbone sharpness and aggression, this woman was diminutive and gave the impression of vulnerability and soft curves everywhere. She kept an arm wrapped about a large brown purse, as if afraid what was inside would squirm out should she let go.