Sidewinders (20 page)

For a long moment, Scratch could only stare at Sarlat. Finally he said, “Now I know for sure that you're loco. Bo doesn't have a twin brother. Never did.”

“Not that he knows about,” Sarlat insisted. “The story goes back many, many years, my friend—”

“I ain't your friend.”

“You'd be wise not to interrupt me again,” Sarlat said, his eyes narrowing in anger. “Listening to this story is keeping you alive, after all.”

Lauralee said, “Go ahead, mister. I'd like to know what you're talking about. I've known Bo for years, and I never heard him say anything about a twin brother, only the younger ones who live on the Star C.”

“As I said, Creel isn't aware of any of this. It all happened when he was too young to remember it. How old do you think I am?”

The question took Scratch by surprise. He frowned and said, “About as old as me, I reckon. Maybe a little older.”

“If you're roughly the same age as your friend, then I'm more than twenty years older,” Sarlat said. “I attribute my youthful appearance to many years of consuming the same tonic that I sell from my wagon. It revives and restores the body.”

Scratch found that hard to believe, but he didn't argue with Sarlat. As good as that tonic had made him feel, maybe the professor was right . . . about that, anyway.

“At any rate,” Sarlat continued, “as a young man I actually was a medical doctor. I practiced in Arkansas. In those days, Texas was still part of Mexico, and American settlers from Tennessee who were bound for Texas often passed through the area where I lived. One day such a family of would-be colonists sought me out. A man, his wife, and their twin, infant sons, one of whom was very ill with a terrible fever. The child was doomed, in my opinion. There was no way he could recover. When I broke the news to the poor parents, the mother was horribly distraught, as you can imagine. She told her husband that she couldn't bear to watch one of her sons die. In the spirit of generosity, I offered to care for the boy until he passed on and then see that he was properly laid to rest. In an attempt to make the best of these tragic circumstances, the father agreed, and the family moved on.”

“I don't believe it,” Scratch said, unable to hold the reaction in any longer. “John Creel never would've done such a thing. He wouldn't have abandoned his own flesh and blood.”

“He did,” Sarlat insisted. “He did it to spare his wife's feelings and blunt the pain of her loss. The Creels left their son Jake with me and moved on to Texas with the other boy, your friend Bo. Before they drove off in their wagon, I heard Creel tell his wife that they would never speak of Jake again. Bo would be raised never knowing that he'd had a brother.” Sarlat shrugged. “I think that perhaps Mrs. Creel wasn't very stable, emotionally or mentally, and that was the only way her husband thought he could prevent her from suffering a complete breakdown.”

“What an awful thing she must have gone through,” Lauralee said. “She must have thought about that lost child every day for the rest of her life.”

Sarlat said, “I have no way of knowing about that. What I do know is that Jake stubbornly clung to life for several days, and then something miraculous occurred. The fever broke, and he began to recover.”

“How come you didn't send word to his folks, so they could come back and get him?” Scratch asked.

“How was I going to find them? They'd gone off to the wilds of Texas. And I'll admit, I was perhaps a bit selfish in the decision I reached. I had no wife, no prospects for children. And I became quite fond of Jake right away. It didn't seem
that
bad for me to keep him and raise him as my own.”

“Was he . . . was he always like he is now?” Lauralee asked.

Sarlat nodded solemnly.

“Yes. The high fever must have damaged his brain. It wasn't apparent at first because he was so young, but as he grew older I began to see signs that something was wrong. Learning was a great struggle for him, and he never was able to grasp some of the things that normal children could. I asked myself sometimes if it was possible that Jake was being punished for my sins, but then I realized that I had done nothing wrong. I simply tried to help his family in the only way I could.”

Scratch's voice was hard as flint as he said, “Until you turned him into a killer.”

“That came much later,” Sarlat snapped. “Jake had as normal a childhood as I could give him. He grew into a young man. We would have stayed there and lived out our lives, but then . . . an elderly patient of mine died, and some money that belonged to him went missing—”

“You mean you stole it.”

“I told you about interrupting me. Don't try my patience, Morton.”

Lauralee said, “Go on with the story, Professor. We're listening.”

Sarlat smoothed a hand down his frock coat and said, “Very well. That incident raised questions about me and some of the other patients I'd been unable to save, and with all the suspicion and speculation swirling about, I thought it might be best if Jake and I left and made a fresh start somewhere else.”

In other words, they'd gotten out of town one jump ahead of a mob once folks figured out that Sarlat was filching his patients' money and letting them die . . . or maybe even easing them out of this world and into the next. Scratch wouldn't put that past the varmint for a second.

“I decided to put my medical abilities to good use,” Sarlat went on, “and started selling the elixir I'd developed for my own use. We did that for a number of years, traveling around mostly in the South. I feel like I was actually doing good work, helping people with my elixir.”

“Why didn't you just keep sellin' it?” Scratch asked. “You must've made decent money at it.”

“Decent, yes, but I always felt that I could do better.”

“Where did that French girl come from?” Lauralee wanted to know.

Sarlat smiled.

“Ah, the lovely Veronique,” he said. “I first encountered her almost ten years ago in Louisiana. She was barely more than a child, but her mother, who was something of an opium fiend, had sold her to a house of ill repute in New Orleans. As you can imagine, she was quite popular with the degenerates there. I took pity on her. With Jake's help, I stole her. We took her out of there and gave her a new life.”

“Travelin' with a medicine show,” Scratch said.

“Which was infinitely better than the existence to which she was doomed if she had stayed where she was,” Sarlat said, his voice hardening with anger. “I helped her, just like I helped Jake.”

“Maybe you just wanted her for yourself.”

Sarlat's face flushed even darker. He insisted, “I've never laid a lustful finger on the girl. You can ask her yourself if you don't believe me.” He laughed coldly. “If you're still alive when she gets back here, that is.”

Scratch didn't see any point in pressing the issue. He said, “How'd the rest of it come about? The killings and whatever else it is you've got in mind for Bear Creek?”

“The three of us fell in with a band of desperadoes. They would have just robbed us, killed Jake and myself, and had their sport with Veronique before murdering her, as well, if I hadn't come up with a way to make them into allies instead of enemies. Their leader is a man named Deuce Ramsey. Perhaps you've heard of him.”

“No, but I don't know every two-bit owlhoot west of the Mississippi.”

“Ramsey may be a two-bit owlhoot, as you put it, but he also possesses a keen native cunning. He saw that the plan I put together could be successful. If we could come up with a way to leave a town defenseless, it would be easy for him and his men to ride in and clean out the banks, the stores, the saloons, and all the other business establishments. They could sack the town like vandals of old.”

“And the easiest way to get all the men out of town was to lure 'em off on a wild goose chase after a crazy killer,” Scratch guessed.

“Exactly. All it took in each town was a series of killings to stir up the population, and when the hysteria reached a peak, then a carefully selected confederate of mine, one of the locals who was trusted by the citizens, would find a way to send them all thundering off in a posse on the trail of the man who had been murdering their saloon girls and prostitutes.”

“Barney?” Lauralee asked in amazement. “You're saying that Barney Dunn was working with you?”

Sarlat threw his head back and laughed in genuine amusement this time.

“Yes, Barney had you all fooled. I came into town several months ago in disguise and looked around, cultivating acquaintances until I found someone suitable to recruit for my plan. You may not realize this about him, Miss Parker, but Barney is a very greedy man. He's also desperate to return to his life in the East. He considers the frontier . . . uncivilized.”

“I can't believe it,” Lauralee muttered. “I always treated him decent. And then he goes and throws in with the likes of you.”

“I'll allow that not-so-veiled insult to pass,” Sarlat said. “Barney cooperated splendidly. He told the story I wanted him to tell with absolute conviction. His artistic ability was an unexpected bonus. Usually all people had to go by was a description of the killer. Barney provided them with visual evidence, as well.”

“He drew a picture of Jake,” Scratch said, “but then somebody said it looked just like Bo Creel.” He frowned. “I don't get it. Did you come to Bear Creek knowin' that it was Bo's hometown?”

“That was sheer happenstance. The sort of turn of fate that most people would consider a wild coincidence. But what they fail to realize is just how much of everyone's life is coincidence. A man rides down one trail instead of another and is murdered by Indians or bandits. A man walks down a different street than he usually does, sees a woman, convinces himself he's in love with her, and pursues her until they're married, when all the time a much more suitable mate might have been just around the corner if he had taken his usual route. These things happen all the time. We call them destiny or fate or the hand of God, when all that's really happening is pure dumb luck!” Sarlat laughed again, obviously pleased with his speechifying. “So to answer your question, no, I had no idea this was where the Creel family ended up. The first I heard of it was when Barney, during one of our clandestine meetings, told me about how his drawing of Jake had been identified as Bo Creel. When I heard about that, the memories of what happened in Arkansas came back to me. The situation seemed far-fetched at first glance, but I knew it had to be true. And so I set out to take advantage of it. Let everyone think that Bo Creel, one of Bear Creek's wandering sons, had returned home and set out on a murderous rampage. My plan worked just as well that way as any other.”

“Until Bo and me actually rode in and Bo got himself arrested. You couldn't have planned on that.”

“That was an added complication,” Sarlat admitted. “Again, the sort of coincidence that seems unbelievable on the face of it, even though such things happen all the time. As I said earlier, though, I can think quite well on my feet. In fact, sometimes it seems to me that my brain works even better than usual when I'm forced to improvise, as I was on this occasion. I was prepared to deal with your presence.”

“Then Bo went and got himself locked up. You couldn't have that, because with the killer in jail, there wouldn't be a posse to go hellin' off after him. That's why you offered to help me bust him out.”

“Indeed,” Sarlat agreed with a nod. “With the way that fellow Fontaine was stirring up the town, I knew most of the men would stampede out of Bear Creek on Bo Creel's trail if he got away. The arrival of Creel's family was simply a stroke of good fortune that made his escape even easier.”

“You didn't arrange for 'em to show up when they did?” Scratch asked.

“I had nothing to do with it. But I didn't hesitate to take advantage of the development, either.”

“That wasn't enough for you, though. There were still enough men in the settlement to put up a fight when your outlaw pards rode in. So you cooked up this deal with Lauralee to get rid of them, too.”

Sarlat inclined his head in acknowledgment of Scratch's statement.

“There's one thing I don't understand. If you didn't know Bo lived around here, why did that bartender draw a picture of Jake? Why would you want him identified as the killer?” Scratch asked Sarlat.

“That was a misunderstanding. Jake had seen Barney drawing one day and he asked him to draw a picture of him. Barney had it at the bar working on it when someone saw it and thought he was drawing the killer and someone else identified it as Bo. After that it all snowballed, so Barney went along with the idea that the drawing was of the Butcher.” Sarlat paused. “And now you know everything.” He reached out and picked up the gun from the table beside him. “I bear you no ill will, Mr. Morton, and none toward the lady, either. But now that you've heard my story, it serves no purpose to keep you alive. Regrettable, but true.”

He pointed the Remington at them and pulled back the hammer. It made a sinister metallic ratcheting that sounded like death.

Bitterly disappointed that he wasn't going to be able to question Barney Dunn, Bo loaded the bartender's body on Dunn's horse. There was nothing left for him to do except follow Scratch and the medicine show wagon back to Bear Creek. Bo fetched his own horse and set off toward the settlement, leading Dunn's mount with its grim burden.

He was only about halfway there when he heard hoofbeats in the night. They sounded like quite a few riders were coming toward him in the darkness, so he pulled off to the side and rode into a grove of oaks. The trees were putting on their spring growth, so the leaves cast thick shadows that concealed Bo, the two horses, and Dunn's body.

The riders were coming from the north, instead of from the settlement. Could the posse have circled around after all, Bo wondered, instead of continuing west like he and Scratch had expected?

As the men on horseback came closer, Bo began hearing voices mixed in with the hoofbeats. His eyes narrowed in the darkness as he realized there was something familiar about them. After a moment he heard a raspy growl that he knew as well as his own voice, and when he did, he took a chance and heeled his horse into motion, riding out of the trees to intercept the men.

They reined in sharply and Bo heard startled exclamations, along with the unmistakable sound of guns being cocked. He called, “Hold your fire. It's me.”

“Bo!” John Creel said. “Is that you?”

Bo walked his horse closer to the dozen or so riders.

“Yeah, it's me,” he said again. “Good to see you again, Pa . . . even though I can't see you very well right now. I reckon that's the rest of the boys with you.”

Bo's youngest brother, Hank, said, “We've been looking for you all night, Bo. We figured you were too smart to keep heading west, so we let the posse go on that way and circled back around here.”

“Have you seen Scratch and that medicine show wagon from town?”

Riley said, “We haven't seen anybody. What medicine show wagon?”

“It doesn't matter now,” Bo told him.

John said, “That looks like a carcass on that horse you're leadin', Bo. I'm glad to know it ain't Scratch. Who is it?”

“Barney Dunn, one of the bartenders from the Southern Belle.”

“The one who identified you as the Bear Creek Butcher,” Cooper said.

“Did you kill him?” Riley asked tightly.

“Blast it, you ought to know better than that,” John snapped.

Bo said, “No, I didn't kill him. He was trying to get away from me and wound up being dragged by his horse. His neck broke. But that didn't happen until after Scratch and I found out he's been working with the folks who are really behind all this trouble.”

“Who's that?” Hank asked, his voice eager.

“Professor Sarlat from the medicine show and his assistant. And one other man.” Bo paused, and when he resumed, his voice was flat and hard. “Pa, I'm going to ask you a question, and I want an honest answer. Have I got a twin brother somewhere I don't know about?”

“What the hell kind of a—” John Creel began angrily, but then he stopped short and sighed. “You had a twin brother, Bo, but he died more than fifty years ago.”

Those words struck Bo like a physical blow. He had spent his entire life never knowing that someone so close to him had even existed. It was a painful discovery, and the sense of loss that washed through him was powerful. He heard his brothers exclaim in surprise, too.

“How come none of us ever knew about this, Pa?” Riley demanded.

“Your mother didn't want to speak of it,” John replied harshly. “She didn't want to hear anybody else talking about it, either. You know how she was. Any time there was something that might hurt her, she . . . she just sort of pretended that it didn't exist. So I got in the habit of doin' that, too, where the boy was concerned.”

“You mean Jake?” Bo asked.

John stiffened in the saddle, and even in the dim light, Bo could tell that his father was staring at him in shock and amazement.

“How'd you know that was his name?” John asked after a few stunned seconds.

“Because he's still alive. I don't know what happened back then or why you were convinced he was dead, but he's not. He's alive, and he looks just like me.” Bo hesitated. “But he's not right in the head. He's a grown man on the outside, but I think he's not much more than a little kid on the inside. That's why Sarlat's been able to tell him what to do, even when it meant hurting those saloon girls.”

“My God.” John Creel took off his black Stetson and passed a trembling hand over his face. “My God. It can't be. He was dyin'. The doctor in Arkansas told us he was, when we were on our way here to settle in Texas.” John waved at his other sons. “None of these boys was born yet. There were just the two of you. Our f irstborn. And . . . and poor little Jake was dyin' . . .”

Bo had never seen his father this shaken. John Creel had always been a rock, as sturdy and unchanging as a mountain. Obviously, though, this news had pierced him all the way to the heart.

Riley said, “I'm not making sense of any of this. But if you've seen this fella with your own eyes, Bo, I reckon we have to believe you. And that means you didn't kill those girls after all.”

“I'm glad you can finally admit that,” Bo said. “But if you still believed that, why did you come to town tonight to help Scratch break me out of jail?”

“We didn't come for that,” Cooper said. “We found out about that hearing where Judge Buchanan said you had to be taken to Hallettsville to stand trial there. Nobody had the decency to let us know about it beforehand. Hank said we ought to go see you before they took you away. He talked us into it.”

“Shamed them into it, is what he means,” Hank put in. “I just said that no matter what you'd done, you were still our brother and we ought to stand by you. We wanted to find out if there was anything we could do to help . . . but by the time we got to Bear Creek, all hell was breaking loose.”

Riley said, “I'm glad you got out of that jail when you did, Bo. You don't deserve to hang for something you didn't do. But what are you going to do now?”

“Scratch and I found the cabin Sarlat's been using as a hideout,” Bo explained. “I don't know exactly what he's up to, but I think it's all coming to a head tonight. Scratch followed the medicine show wagon back to Bear Creek, while I tried to grab Dunn and ask him some questions. That didn't work out, though—” Bo inclined his head toward the corpse draped over the saddle of Dunn's horse. “So I was headed for the settlement to join up with Scratch again when I heard you fellas coming. I reckon now you know just as much as I do.”

“I never saw a murkier mess in all my borned days,” John said. “I reckon we'll all head for town and try to straighten it out.”

Bo nodded, feeling warmth spread through him as he realized he was back with his family and they were on his side this time. He didn't know what they would find in Bear Creek, but he was confident that as long as they were together, the Creels could handle it.

 

 

One of the ranch hands took charge of leading the horse carrying Dunn's body. As they rode toward the settlement, John told Bo about what had happened in Arkansas, all those years ago. Bo could tell how difficult that was for his father, how painful those memories were, but as John said before he started the story: “You got a right to know.”

Bo could tell, as well, that he wasn't the only one listening intently. His brothers had a stake in this, too, because it involved their family, and Pete Hendry and the other Star C riders who had come along tonight were drawn in by John's explanation, too, by the simple human drama of the events the old cattleman was relating.

“So I'm thinkin',” John said as the tale drew to a close, “this medicine show professor you were talkin' about . . . what was his name again?”

“Sarlat,” Bo said. “Thaddeus Sarlat.”

John shook his head.

“That wasn't the doctor's name, up yonder in Arkansas, but I'll bet a hat it's the same fella. Has to be. An hombre low-down enough to keep somebody else's child like that wouldn't be bothered by changin' his name if it suited his purposes.” John looked over at Bo. “You got to believe me, we never would've left Jake with him like that if he hadn't told us there was no chance the boy would live. I figured Jake wouldn't make it through the night, to tell you the truth, and I was afraid that when he passed, your ma might just give up and die, too, if she had to see it. So we ran out on him. Ain't no other way to look at it. And it's haunted me damn near every day since then. I swore to myself that I'd do the very best job I could raisin' the rest of you boys, to sort of make up for lettin' Jake down that way.”

“You were trying to protect Ma,” Bo said. “You were doing the best you could at the time. I don't think you let anybody down.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, son. But I'll wear my own scars.”

Everyone did, Bo thought. That was the way of the world.

As they neared the settlement, Bo saw that a lot of lights were burning in windows. He said, “We'd better hold up a minute, Pa. Looks like something is going on in town.”

“Maybe the posse's back,” Riley suggested. “They could have realized they weren't going to catch you and Scratch.”

“Could be,” Bo said. “Why don't I go take a look? The rest of you stay here while I scout around.”

“Are you sure that's smart?” Hank asked. “After all, you're the one they're looking for, Bo, not us.”

“Although we sort of had to light a shuck in a hurry,” Cooper added. “Ned Fontaine and his boys weren't too happy with us when we ruined their plans for a necktie party.”

“I wanted to stay and shoot it out with the bastards,” John rasped, “but they had us outnumbered too bad. Mark my words, there's a showdown comin' with the Fontaines, but it'll have to wait for another day.”

Bo said, “So it might be just as dangerous for the rest of you to ride into town right now as it would be for me. I'm the one at the center of all this ruckus, even if it wasn't my idea, so I ought to run the risk.”

“You got that Creel stubbornness in you, that's for sure,” John said. “All right, go ahead, but we'll be close by. If you run into trouble, fire some shots and we'll come a-runnin'.”

“Fine,” Bo said. He heeled his horse into a trot toward the settlement, leaving the others waiting behind him in the dark.

Over the years, he and Scratch had been in many tight spots where their ability to move stealthily through the darkness without being detected was the only thing that had saved their lives. Bo put that skill to work now as he approached Bear Creek. When he was a couple of hundred yards away from the buildings on the eastern edge of town, he dismounted and left his horse there to move closer on foot.

Something was definitely going on. In addition to seeing more lights than should have been burning at this time of night, he heard loud, angry voices. He had no doubt that Sarlat and Veronique were responsible for whatever was happening, and it wouldn't have surprised him to find Scratch in the middle of it, too.

He slipped along the narrow passage between a couple of buildings and crouched at the corner of one of them where he risked a glance into the street. A large group of men stood in front of the Southern Belle. Some of them carried torches, and by their flickering light, Bo recognized many of the faces. They belonged to citizens of Bear Creek. Bo didn't see Marshal Haltom or any of the bunch from the Rafter F, though, so he guessed the men in this group were the ones who hadn't gone with the posse to chase after him and Scratch.

The beautiful redhead standing on the saloon's porch was familiar, too, although Bo had seen her only once. She was Veronique Ballantine, Professor Sarlat's assistant . . . and his partner in crime. She held up a hand and motioned for quiet, and when that didn't work she thrust something in the air above her head. Bo's hands tightened on the Winchester he held as he realized it was some sort of garment heavily stained with blood.

“This is all I found of poor Lauralee,” Veronique said as the sight of the bloody dress shocked the men into silence. “M'sieu Creel must have eluded the posse and returned here to exact his vengeance on her for some reason unknown to me. But this time he has taken his victim's body with him! Perhaps she is still alive!”

Bo wanted to step out into the open and deny that awful charge, but he knew better than to risk it. The crowd was so worked up they wouldn't listen to any explanations from him, and a number of the men carried rifles and shotguns. Chances were that they would open up on him and blow him to pieces before he could say much of anything.

He felt cold and sick inside at the thought that something had happened to Lauralee Parker. He had never known a sweeter, kinder young woman than her. The only conclusion he could draw was that Sarlat had brought Jake back here and forced him to kill Lauralee, then left Veronique behind to whip everybody who was left in town into a frenzy. But why go to that much trouble?

An answer suggested itself to Bo when Veronique went on, “I heard a horse going south just before I discovered that my friend Lauralee had vanished. Creel must be taking her to his family's ranch. It is probably too late to save her, my friends, but you must try.”

A man in the crowd shouted, “The gal's right! Everybody get a horse and a gun! We're headed for the Star C!”

They wouldn't find anybody there except some of the hands who wouldn't have any idea what was going on, thought Bo. He hoped that nobody would get too itchy of a trigger finger and start shooting. Again he thought about revealing himself in the hope of heading off further trouble, but he knew he couldn't do that just yet.