Day of Independence (2 page)

Black John Merritt was a big man, and heavy, and Hank Cannan had a hard time getting the gunman draped across his horse.

Cannon's own bay wandered back with the pack mule, but the Ranger was all used up and it was a while before he mustered strength enough to climb into the saddle.

After the gnawing pain in his side subsided a little, Cannan sat his horse and thought things through.

He'd lost Dave Randall's trail two days before in the deep ravine country up by Dagger Mountain. Figuring the outlaw might head for Mexico, Cannan had scouted as far south as the Chisos Mountains when Merritt decided to take a pot at him.

Now, at least one bullet in him, he was in need of urgent medical care. But around him stretched miles of hostile brush desert and raw, limestone mountain peaks that held themselves aloof and didn't give a damn.

As Cannan had told himself before, he was in a hell of a fix.

Unless...

Cannan stared at a sky slowly fading into turquoise blue at the end of the burned-out day, as if to seek the answer to the question he hadn't yet asked.

Could there really be a settlement due south of here on the big bend of the Rio Grande?

Cannan told himself that it was a ridiculous notion.

All this land would grow was a fair crop of rocks and cactus, and starving cattle would soon leave their bones on the desert sands, as would those who owned them.

If there really was a Last Chance, by now it was a ghost town inhabited by owls, pack rats, and the quick shadows of people long gone.

Cannan decided to take the gamble.

Last Chance was the only card he had left to play.

At best, he'd find a town. At the worst, a ruined roof to sleep under.

Or die under.

 

 

Hank Cannan would remember little of his ride south.

He'd later recall that the mule and the dead man's sorrel stud ponied well and didn't try to pull his arm out of its socket.

The yipping coyotes challenging the rising moon—he remembered that, and the far-off howls of a hunting wolf pack.

Cannan didn't remember trying to build a cigarette and cursing as both tobacco sack and papers fell from his weakening hands.

Nor would he recall staring at Black John's face in the moonlight, bone-white, the wide-open eyes glinting behind slate shadows.

And perhaps it's best that he'd never bring to mind Merritt's ghostly, hollow voice whispering to him that hell is not hot, but cold... colder than mortal man can imagine.

“You're a damned liar!” Cannan yelled. “You're burning in fire. I can feel your heat! You're making me burn with you.”

Black John whispered that hell is a gray, soulless place, covered in ice, and it has a constant north wind that cuts and slashes like a knife edge, and leaves deep, scarlet scars all over a man's naked body.

Then Black John said, his voice like a death knell, “Feel them, Ranger... feel the winds of Hades...”

And Cannan did.

He was hot before, but now he shivered as an icy blast hit him, and it cut like a saber and stank of sulfur from the lowest pits of hell.

“Hell is a wind!” Black John screamed. “A wind that blows bitter from Satan's mouth!”

“Liar!” Cannan yelled. “Liar, liar, your pants are on fire... in hell!”

Then suddenly he felt burning hot again.

Then cold.

Then hot.

And when he rode into the moon-splashed town of Last Chance, windows stared at him with blank, emotionless eyes... and all at once the ground cartwheeled up to meet him...

And then Hank Cannan felt nothing... nothing at all.

“Ah, the sleeping beauty awakes.”

Hank Cannan thought he recognized the man's voice, but he lay still amid the soft comfort that surrounded him, unwilling to move.

“This may come as news to you, huh? But you're alive, Ranger Cannan. I saw your eyelids flutter.”

Cannan opened his eyes and groaned.

“Baptiste Dupoix,” he said. “Then I must be in hell.”

“Close,” the Creole gambler said. “You've been raving about Black John Merritt and a ghost town. But to set your mind at ease, you're in a burg called Last Chance, and you're a current resident of the Big Bend Hotel.”

“What are you doing here, Dupoix?” Cannan said. “I thought I hung you years ago.”

“No, you haven't yet had that pleasure,” Dupoix said. “Though God knows you tried.”

Cannan lifted his head off the blue-and-white-striped pillow and tried to rise to a sitting position.

“Here, let me fluff that for you,” Dupoix said.

The gambler reached behind Cannan, pounded the pillow into shape, then propped it against the brass headboard.

He helped Cannan sit up and smiled, his teeth very white against his dark skin. “There now. Comfy?”

Two oil lamps, lit against the darkness outside, cast shadows in the room, especially in the corners where the spinning spiders lived.

“What the hell time is it?” Cannan said.

“Early. It's just gone six.”

“Morning or night?”

“Dawn soon. When a sporting gent like me should already be in bed.”

“But you postponed slumber to visit me, huh?” Cannan said. “Out of the goodness of your heart.”

“Bad enemies are like good friends, Cannan. They're to be cherished.”

“I've got a dozen questions,” Cannan said, ignoring that last.

He lifted the sheets and saw that he was naked, but for the bandages around his waist and thigh.

“How I got here will be one of them,” the Ranger said. “But first tell me what happened to the dead man I brought in.”

“You mean Black John?”

“How many dead men did I have?”

“Only him, and he'll be sorely missed.”

“I promised him I'd bury him decent.”

“The nice folks of this fair town buried him, with all due pomp and ceremony, I assure you.”

“When?”

“Why, two weeks ago.”

Cannan was shocked.

“I've been lying in this bed for two weeks?”

“Uh-huh, that's what I said. The doctor told me you were at death's door.” Dupoix grinned. “It was a mighty uncertain thing. Touch and go, you might say.”

Cannan waved a hand around the hotel room. “Who did all this?”

“Not me, I assure you. My hypocrisy goes only so far. No, the town fathers put you up here. There are some really nice people in Last Chance.”

Dupoix, a tall, elegant man who moved like a cougar, thumped a bottle of Old Crow and a couple of glasses onto the table beside Cannan's bed.

“I did do something for you, though,” he said. “A couple young ladies of my acquaintance took care of you. You were out of it, but you did take nourishment now and again. Chicken gumbo mostly, made to a recipe handed down by my swamp witch grandmother back in Louisiana.”

Dupoix poured whiskey into the glasses.

“It's a bit early, isn't it?” Cannan said.

“Early or late. It doesn't make any difference to a man confined to his bed. Oh, and remind me to tell you about my grandmother sometime. She's a very interesting woman.”

“How did you know that I was the Ranger who brought in Black John?” Cannan said.

“From the description I got from the men who picked you up off the street. Big man, they said, maybe four inches over six feet with shoulders an axe handle wide and the face of a dyspeptic walrus. Who else fits that description?”

Cannan accepted a whiskey, then said, “Do you have the makings?”

“No, I've never succumbed to the Texas habit, but I can offer you a cigar.”

“That will do just fine,” Cannan said.

“I thought it might.”

After Dupoix lit Cannan's cheroot, the Ranger said from behind a cloud of blue smoke, “Now tell me why you and I are breathing the same air in a town a hundred miles from anywhere.”

“You first, Ranger Cannan, since you're feeling so poorly.”

“I was tracking a feller—”

“Dave Randall. Yes, I know.” Dupoix read the question on Cannan's face and said, “He's here in Last Chance.” The gambler smiled. “And so is Mickey Pauleen.”

That hit Cannan like a fist to the belly. “What's a killer like Pauleen doing here?” he said.

“Him, and Dave Randall. And Shotgun Hugh Gray. And a half-a-dozen other Texas draw fighters. But Mickey is the worst of them, or the best of them, depending on your point of view. The day after he arrived he shot the town marshal.”

“And where do you come in, Dupoix?” Cannan said.

“I'm here for the same reason Mickey and them are here. For gun wages. Two hundred dollars a day until the job is done.”

“What job? And who's paying you?”

Dupoix, elegant in a black frockcoat, boiled white shirt, and string tie, stepped to the window, then turned and said, “You've never forgiven me for that time in... what the hell was the name of the place?”

“Horse Neck,” Cannan said.

“Yeah, Horse Neck. A benighted burg at the end of a railroad spur, as I recall.”

“It was a hell-on-wheels tent town and I was sent there to keep the peace, Dupoix,” Cannan said. “You ruined it for me and nearly got me kicked out of the Rangers.”

“Cannan, those three gentlemen playing poker with a marked deck were asking for trouble. They took me for a rube.”

“That's why you shot them, Dupoix, because your pride was hurt.”

“They were notified.”

“You left three dead men in the saloon, then lit a shuck on a stolen horse.”

“The buckskin I left at the livery was a superior animal in every way to the one I... borrowed. Its owner got the best of that bargain.”

Cannan held up his cigar, showing an inch of gray ash at the tip.

Dupoix picked up an ashtray from the table and laid it on the bed.

“You did take a pot at me, you know,” he said. “My right ear felt the wind of your bullet. Now why did you do that?”

“I was aiming for the hoss,” Cannan said. “My shooting was off that day.”

“Ah, yes, as I recall you're no great shakes with a revolver.”

“I wish I'd brought my rifle along. Then I would have hung you for sure.”

“Suppose I tell you that those three Irish gents drew down on me first?”

“Wouldn't have made any difference, Dupoix. You took me for a rube and my pride was hurt.”

The gambler smiled. “Touché, Ranger Cannan.”

Dupoix refilled Cannan's glass then his own. He stepped to the window again and lit a cigar.

“You never answered my questions, Dupoix,” Cannan said. “Why—”

“Am I here and who's paying my wages?” Dupoix said.

“Well?” Cannan said.

The gambler pulled back the lace curtain. “Look out there,” he said. “A fair town with a schoolhouse and a church with a bell in its tower. It's got a city hall where the flag flies every single day of the year and the people dress in their best of a Sunday and go to worship.”

Dupoix turned his head to Cannan and spoke over his shoulder.

“Last Chance was started by tin pans,” he said. “They came here looking for gold, found none, and most of them left. But a few decided to stay and set down roots. In the early years they went through hell, but in the end they built something worthwhile.”

“You still haven't answered my questions,” Cannan said.

“Patience, Ranger, I'm answering them. Unless you're planning on going somewhere?”

“Funny, Dupoix. Go ahead.”

“All right. Now, where was I?”

“You were talking about folks trying to build a town in a wilderness where there shouldn't be any town,” Cannan said.

He suddenly felt irritable, from the whiskey or the pain of his still-healing wounds, he didn't know.

“The people of Last Chance worked together to irrigate the fertile bottomland with canals that carry water from the river. Despite droughts and floods and all the other things that plague farmers, they grew wheat, corn, oats, and now there's talk of planting cotton.”

“They built their prosperity on farming?” Cannan said.

“Not entirely. They act as middlemen for Mexican trappers who supply them with fox, beaver, wolf, and bobcat fur. Last Chance also trades hogs, turkeys, and bees with Mexico for hard cash, and a few raise cattle on the floodplain farther along the river.” Dupoix smiled. “You could say the hardy folks out there have turned this part of the desert into a Garden of Eden.”

“Then why are you and the other gun hands here, Dupoix?” Cannan said.

“Because, Ranger Cannan, we're going to take it all away from them,” Dupoix said.

Abraham Hacker heaved his great, naked bulk out of bed and used his foot to slide out the chamber pot.

“What are you doing, honey?” The blond woman who'd been lying beside him sat up on her pillows and regarded Hacker with blue, startled eyes.

“Taking a piss. Go back to sleep, Nora.”

“What time is it?”

“How the hell should I know?”

Years of using and abusing her body, flaunting it, selling it, had chiseled the woman's face into hard, tough planes, and her complexion was pale, seldom exposed to the light of day. Last night's makeup smeared her face and gave her a bruised look, yet she retained some of her youthful beauty, like a faded portrait in oils.

“Too early,” Nora Anderson said. She flopped onto her left side and was asleep within moments.

Hacker held the chamber pot at crotch level and his piss rattled as he waddled to the window, pulled back the curtain and looked outside.

A red and jade sky heralded the dawn and tinted the panes of the windows of the stores along the street dull scarlet.

There was no one about this early, and the hotel opposite showed only a single light.

It was the wounded Texas Ranger's room, Hacker knew, a fact he'd earlier filed away for future reference.

The lawman's presence was an unexpected inconvenience, but nothing Mickey Pauleen couldn't handle. The gunman specialized in getting rid of such bothersome details.

Hacker laid the foaming chamber pot on the floor, then stowed it under the bed again. When he bent over, the fretwork of bullwhip scars on his back, thirty of the best, stood out in stark relief in the cruel morning light.

On March 5th, 1863, at the Battle of Thompson's Station, Major Abe Hacker deserted his infantry brigade and fled the field. He should have been shot for cowardice in the face of the enemy, but powerful friends in Washington intervened and the court-martial ordered that he be stripped of rank, whipped, then drummed out of the Army of the Cumberland.

Hacker felt no remorse, no dishonor, and no sense of shame whatsoever.

Better a live coward with urgent, exciting things to do than a dead hero.

Now, twenty-five years later, he was a rich man who wanted to be richer, and he had plans, big plans.

And one of them involved the town of Last Chance.

 

 

Hacker sat by the window in a wicker chair that creaked under his weight, and his massive belly hung between his legs like a sack of grain.

His great size made breathing difficult, and the man wheezed through his thick-lipped mouth, but his small, blue eyes were never still, calculating, incisive as scalpels, as though making up for the weakness of his heart and lungs.

Abe Hacker was not a well man, but his ambitions kept him alive.

He reckoned he was big and powerful enough to do whatever he wanted, no matter how many people he trampled into the dirt to reach his goals.

Force, ruthlessness, and a readiness to kill were things he understood, never applied in anger, but with a cool head and a complete lack of conscience.

The woman in the bed stirred, sat up, and said, her voice slurred from sleep, “What are you doing, Abe?”

“Trying to think, Nora. So shut your trap.”

“Come back to bed, honey,” Nora Anderson said.

Hacker rose to his feet and rubbed his huge, sagging hips.

“Damned chair marked me,” he said. “My ass feels like the bottom of a shopping basket.”

“Come to bed, Abe, and I'll rub it smooth for you,” the woman said.

“God, I hate this town,” Hacker said. “It smells. Damned place stinks like a farmyard.”

“Then let's go back to Washington,” Nora said. “I hate it here, too. It's so damned hot.”

As though he hadn't been listening, Hacker said, “But you know what I don't smell? I don't smell gold, in the ground or out of it.”

“But Senator Huxley said he was sure there was a gold mine, Abe,” Nora said.

“Yeah, and he sold me a bill of goods.” Hacker rubbed a hand across his completely bald head. “The only gold around here is fool's gold, and I'm the fool.”

“Then why are the folks around here prospering in this wilderness?” Nora said.

“Dung. They're prospering because of dung. Damn their eyes.”

“Maybe they found the mine, Abe, and the gold is hidden,” Nora said.

“I told you there is no gold,” Hacker said. “Pauleen and Shotgun Hugh Gray questioned just about everybody in this town, and those two boys have a way of getting straight answers. But the response was always the same—no gold mine and no gold.”

Hacker peered through the shadowed bedroom and said, “One rube said, ‘Sure there's gold, white gold. We're planting cotton.'” He swore, then, “Damned idiot.”

“But Senator Huxley—”

“Heard rumors spread by the Díaz government that an Americano desert settlement on the Rio Grande was prospering mightily. Huxley jumped to the conclusion that it was gold.”

“He wanted his share,” Nora said.

“Of course he wanted his share, so did president-for-life Porfirio Díaz and half-a-dozen crooked U.S. senators. And I was supposed to supply the gold for them.”

Nora's teeth gleamed in the gloom as she smiled.

“Plant cotton, Abe,” she said. “It's white gold, remember?”

Hacker's wide, cruel mouth curled into a snarl.

“Nora, you are one stupid b...”

Like a man mesmerized, Hacker stood perfectly still, a grotesque marble statue in the gloom. Then, after a long moment, he grinned, clapped his hands, and did a little jig, his four hundred pounds shaking the hotel room floor.

“Nora, maybe you're not as stupid as I thought you were,” he said.

“Abe, lie down now,” Nora said, her voice alarmed. “Remember your poor heart.”

“The hell with my heart,” Hacker said. “I can salvage this. Gold or no, I can turn Last Chance into a nice little earner.”

Daylight touched the side of his face and picked out the gray hairs on his blue chin. His cheeks were veined with red from the harsh downstroke of the razor, and his wide nose looked as though a child had modeled it out of putty.

Hacker's pouched, pale blue eyes were scheming, bright with malice.

“But how?” Nora said. Disappointment hollowed her words. “I thought we were going home.”

“Thought wrong, didn't you?” Hacker said. “We'll go back to Washington when I add this place to my holdings. As to how I plan to do it, I could tell you but you wouldn't understand.”

Abe Hacker's holdings were already vast.

He had shares in railroads in the United States and Asia, Japanese and German shipping lines, diamond mines in Africa, Russia, and India, cattle interests in Montana and Kansas, and he owned fifty-one percent of a British manufacturer of heavy field guns, most of which were exported to the Far East and South America.

Hacker also owned a brothel in the Storyville red-light district of New Orleans, a ten-dollar-a-screw, brass-and-red-velvet mansion on Basin Street. Elsewhere in the city, in the Third Ward, he'd acquired a Chinatown opium den and had recently broken the knees of its Creole overseer, who had kept more than his fair share of the profits.

Hacker's empire also included three grogshops along San Francisco's Barbary Coast, a fruit stand in New York, a sawmill in Georgia, a mom-and-pop toy store in London, and nearby a small boating concern that rented skiffs and boxed lunches on the Thames.

In Hacker's avaricious world no business was too large or too small for his greed, and his pudgy fingers squeezed every last penny of profit from everything he touched.

He was a millionaire many times over, but, like an addict craving opium, he wanted more... more... more...

Money meant power, and it gave Hacker dominion over many lesser mortals.

But what he craved was the ultimate power... the presidency of the United States. Should Hacker make a bid, there were some influential politicians in Washington who'd guaranteed him their support, including a few army generals with loyal troops at their backs.

That his faltering heart might betray him before he could seize the White House was a concern. But he was determined, by the sheer force of his will, to live long. Men as rich and influential as he was could not allow themselves to die.

Last Chance meant little to Hacker. It would be a very small, backward province in his colossal empire. But the town prospered, made money, and, by divine right, Hacker considered that those dollars should be his.

That he must destroy the town in the process was none of his concern.

Hacker lit a cigar, then crawled into the protesting bed like a massive, albino hippo, his fat hips as wide across as the butt end of a wine barrel.

After he settled his back against the pillows, he kicked Nora awake again. “Go bring Mickey Pauleen here,” he said. “I need to talk with him.”

“It's too early, Abe,” the woman whined. “He'll still be asleep.”

“Then wake him.”

Nora looked distressed.

She had wide experience with men, most of them paying clients, and she could read them like a book. What she read in Pauleen's snake-green eyes she didn't like.

Every time they met, the gunman visually stripped her naked, and his thin lips flecked with white spittle as though his mouth watered in anticipation of the feast.

Despite years of male tugging, Nora's breasts were still high and firm, and a few days back Pauleen had palmed one as he accosted her in the hotel hallway. She'd just stood there, staring at him, until he dropped his hand, laughed, and walked away.

To visit his room in her night attire was inviting trouble. And she told this to Hacker, without mentioning the hallway incident.

“Hell, what have you got to lose? Your maidenhood?” Hacker said. “Now do as you're told or I'll take the back of my hand to you.”

From past experience, Nora knew Hacker did not make such threats idly.

She rose from the bed, donned a flame-red dressing gown, and went in search of Pauleen. Behind her, Nora heard Hacker laugh, but at what, or at whom, she did not know.