Sliphammer (6 page)

Tree was down on one knee; he got up and strode forward and kicked the gun out of the man's fist, and then had a look at the man.

The eyes were open, losing focus. It was the same man he had seen talking to McKesson—the man who had pointed him out to McKesson. Black bile formed in his throat; he wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and laid his fingers along the man's skinny throat, feeling for a pulse. There was none.

Ears still ringing, Tree walked down the hall to the lobby. He still had the gun in his fist. The clerk, alarmed by the noise, stared at him and trembled.

Tree said, “Get McKesson and bring him back here.”

Swallowing, voiceless, the clerk nodded in spasms and ran flapping out the door.

Tree went back to the room, stepped across the body, and opened his carpetbag. He took out the spare gun and threaded the holster onto his gunbelt; he was buckling the rig around his hips when McKesson came in, red-faced and out of breath.

McKesson's boot heels skidded when he came to a stop. He wore a gun, but it was holstered. His white hair was awry.

“For crying out loud,” McKesson said helplessly.

Tree bent down and picked up the intruder's gun; glanced at it and handed it to McKesson. “One thing before you start making a speech. That's a .38. You can tell he fired it by the smell, and you'll find the bullet in the wall out there in the hall. He was waiting back in that corner when I opened the door.”

McKesson took it all in his eyes, without moving from his stance in the doorway. When he spoke, he was surprisingly crisp: “Why did he miss?”

“He telegraphed. I came in low and he shot over my head.”

“If you knew he was in here why didn't you speak out?”

“He heard my boots in the hall. He saw me open the door. If he'd had anything to say to me he had plenty of time to say it.”

McKesson gave him a sharp look. “You're a tough son of a bitch, aren't you?”

“I'm still taking nourishment,” Tree said. Then his temper broke: “Who the hell was this bastard? I saw him toll you onto me.”

McKesson nodded. “Grady Jestro was his name.”

“And that's all you're going to tell me?”

McKesson said, “I'm not obliged to tell you a damned thing. It's within my power to run you in for homicide.”

“You can try,” Tree intoned.

“If that's a threat I'll ignore it. This sizes up as self-defense. Justifiable homicide. I'll release you on your own recognizance as a courtesy to a fellow peace officer.”

“Still trying to show me what a good friend of mine you are.”

“Yes—whether you want to believe it or not.” McKesson moved into the room and Tree saw the little knot of onlookers crowded into the hallway. McKesson turned his head and said, “You two make yourselves useful. Get this out of here.”

Two men came inside; one of them said, “Where to?”

“For Christ's sake the undertaker's—do I have to draw a blueprint for you?”

“Okay, Ollie, keep your shirt on.” The man grimaced and bent to gather up the corpse. They carried it outside; the crowd made plenty of room for them. McKesson closed the door rudely in the onlookers' faces and turned to Tree: “Now about Grady Jestro. He was a hired tough.”

“Strikebreaker?”

“Yes. The day after the Earps arrived here, ‘Jestro made a pass at Wyatt's wife, not knowing who she was. It got Wyatt a little angry, to say the least, and Jestro's been trying to make up for it. Buttering Earp up, running errands, trying to please Earp.”

“Did Earp put him up to this, then?”

“Knowing Earp I would say definitely not Jestro probably had the idea he'd be doing Earp a favor by killing you. If he'd succeeded I imagine he'd have found out Earp wouldn't have appreciated it one bit. But the world is full of misguided idiots and when one of them gets his hands on a gun it's disaster.”

“Yeah.” Tree brooded toward the bloodstains on the bed blanket and on the floor. He went to the door and opened it. The crowd had mostly gone away but the clerk was still there, halfway down the hall, scrubbing his hands nervously together. Tree said, “I'll want another room. You'd better get somebody to clean this one up.”

“Yes, sir. You can take the room across the hall there. Door's open. I'll bring the key.”

Tree went back inside, buckled his carpetbag shut and picked up his coat; carried them across the hall into a room with a slightly higher ceiling and a smaller window; there was no other distinction. McKesson followed him as far as the door and said, “What'll you do now?”

“What do you suggest, Sheriff?”

“You already know my advice. Get back on the train and go home to Arizona.”

“I guess not.”

“It's your funeral.” McKesson turned out of sight and Tree heard his boots bang stiffly down the corridor. When the sheriff had gone beyond earshot Tree closed the door and sat down on the bed and waited for the needles to go out of his knees. His hands, he saw, were steady; but his heart pounded and his eyes throbbed and the pulse in his throat seemed loud. He closed his eyes very tight and held them, making fists, drew great ragged breaths into his chest, lay back on the bed, and stared at the ceiling. Then, abruptly, he jumped up and ran around the foot of the bed to the basin on the commode, and vomited his breakfast into it.

Bathed, shaved, still tasting his lunch, he stood on the boardwalk and scrutinized the ornate facade of the Inter Ocean Hotel. The second story boasted gabled windows and corner gargoyles. The balconies were carved in friezes and spiral rails. The building covered most of an entire block. Three separate street entrances gave admittance to the hotel lobby, the dining room, and the saloon bar. The building had a fresh coat of brown paint with crimson trim. The sidewalk in front of it was broad and shaded by wooden awnings that ran the length of the building like a Southern veranda. Gaslamps were posted at ten-foot intervals. It was just past noon; cooking smells issued from the dining room and wafted along the street on the light, cool breeze.

A few yards down the walk from him, a little knot of jackbooted miners in overalls stood tight-packed and grumbling in muted voices calculated to reach no one's ears but their own. The man doing most of the talking was a shrill little man, nervous'and narrow, who wore miner's clothes but didn't look like a miner. His hands, which gesticulated frequently toward the hotel with angry sweeps, were pale and fluttery. His face was feral, big-nosed and rodent-toothed. Several times Tree heard the miners growl angry assent to something the little man said.

He forced his attention away from them and took his reluctant, tall body across the street onto the veranda. He stopped at the lobby door and looked inside through its glass panes. The room was high-ceilinged and long, with rich dark beams and heavy furniture and a thick dark-cherry carpet. The only occupant was an emaciated old man with urine spots on the front of his pants, who wandered from the front window to an overstuffed chair and sat down to read a newspaper. Tree walked the forty feet to the dining room window. The place was crowded but not with anyone he cared to meet. It was strange: he had never met Wyatt Earp or seen a picture of him but he was certain he would know the man when he saw him.

He saw him when he stepped into the saloon bar. The entrance was on the intersection corner and, consequently, was set into the corner of the saloon, giving admittance at a forty-five degree angle so that the entire huge room was in sight at once. The polished maplewood bar ran the length of one wall, backed by two big mirrors, the obligatory ten-foot painting of a hefty naked woman draped in translucent veils, and a shelf of ornate beer mugs each of which had its owner's name painted on it. Two sweating bartenders served the medium-thick throng of patrons standing at the brass rail along the eighty-foot bar.

The rest of the rpom was given over to chairs and tables of various sizes, ranging from small square ones to big round ones seven feet in diameter and covered with green felt. The room was carpeted in deep luxurious brown; the walls were stained dark and had the look of mahogany—a considerable feat since they were probably constructed of aspen or pine. There was no dance floor, no stage, no piano or bandstand; it wasn't that kind of saloon. This was Gunnison's gentlemen's club.
Only the Rich Need Apply.
Even the chairs at the card tables were upholstered armchairs. Altogether, what the place reminded him of most was a railroad baron's private car he had once entered to make an arrest. The men who had built this room had money and wanted everybody to know it.

It didn't make him uncomfortable but it didn't make him feel at home. He would always be an outsider in a place like this; it occurred to him obscurely that this gave Wyatt Earp an immediate advantage over him. He didn't dwell on the thought. He had entered and absorbed the place with one glance; his attention had narrowed like a cone to focus on the five people sitting around the biggest of all the felt-covered card tables—four men and a woman. The table was back toward the rear corner. Gaslights on the windowless walls shone on the woman's reddish auburn hair and the thick tawny hair of two of the four men—the Earp brothers. He didn't have to be told.

The woman was slim with nubile roundnesses and skin made deep gold by the lamplight; she threw her head back to drink, displaying a long, swanlike neck. They all had drinks but they were not playing cards; they seemed to be engaged in desultory conversation.

Tree made a place for himself at the bar and ordered a drink. He had picked a spot from which he could appraise the Earps in the back bar mirror. Warren, the young one, wore his hair the same as Wyatt. His mustache and clothes were similar to Wyatt's. The way he sat in his chair, trying to look muscular and easy-sprawled all at once, was a direct imitation of Wyatt's unconscious position: chair pushed back, one knee crossed over the other, polished black boot swaying a little with easy rhythm as he talked, and one elbow on the arm of the chair supporting a half-full whisky glass held by a vertical forearm. It was significant that Wyatt held the glass in his left hand: Tree assumed that, unlike himself, Earp was right-handed. His right hand lay across his lap and it could be taken for granted a shoulder-hung gun was within six inches of his fingertips, just inside his coat lapel.

Tree's drink came. He stood at the bar and twisted the glass on the bar surface and picked it up, observing the wet ring it left. Without looking up he knew a good many eyes were studying him from all over the room. But if he looked in the mirror he would not find Wyatt Earp looking at him. He smiled to himself, briefly; he lifted the drink to his mouth. He had a fleeting vision of Grady Jestro's gun flaming at him from the dark corner of the hotel room. He closed his eyes momentarily and felt the whisky thunder into his blood.

He turned around, glass in hand, and hooked both elbows over the bar behind him, and stared straight at Wyatt Earp. Earp didn't seem to notice; he was talking calmly to the man next to him—a big dark man who wore an expensive suit that did not make him look genteel. One of the overnight millionaires of Gunnison.

Wyatt Earp had a wise, tough, worldly face. Tree felt neither disillusioned nor disappointed. Earp was long-legged, whipcord handsome, self-assured, a healthy man in his mature hard-gutted prime. He was, Tree knew, thirty-four years old, which made him an elder statesman among the righting gamblers of the Western circuit. He had a tough, sleepy look of leonine competence.

Tree wondered whether he ought to feel relieved or sorry. The job would be less disagreeable, if not less difficult, if Earp had turned out to be a buck-toothed, snarling savage.

Abruptly, Earp turned his head and looked straight at Tree. Evidently he felt he had given Tree time enough to size him up. Earp's free hand rose gently from his lap and he beckoned with a slow nod of recognition.

Tree made a gesture with his drink and walked forward without hurry, purposefully casual. Approaching, he glanced at the two other men at the table—the big dark millionaire and the muscular blunt-jawed tough who had to be one of the thug strikebreakers.

The girl looked up at him coyly from under lowered brows. Tree reached the table, facing Earp across it; Earp said to Warren, “Bring up another chair and make a place for friend Tree. How're you making it, Deputy? Enjoying the town?”

Three only nodded, still trying to feel out the direction Earp wanted to go. He didn't feel anything as specific as warning currents in the air, but it was an uneasy stretch of time.

Earp said, “The Deputy goes by the name of Sliphammer Tree. From Pima County, down in Arizona. He's going to keep an eye on our obedient servant, gentlemen.”

Warren Earp put a chair down behind Tree's knees and went back around the table to his seat. The two men on the near side of the table shifted their chairs to make room. The big dark millionaire said, “Howdy,” and offered a thick, hard hand. “I'm Wayde Cardiff, I own the Spurlock. Fellow on your left there, that's Reese Cooley.”

Cardiff had sweaty palms. He was a once-tough man gone soft: his breasts were womanly, his arms flaccid, his chin padded and underhung by loose flesh. But his eyes were flinty. Cardiff shook Tree's hand, hitched his suety belly and slumped back in his chair.

Reese Cooley, thuglike, had a horseshoe fringe of hair around a glossy bald spot. His chin was dark with heavy Mediterranean stubble. He had a greasy appearance. His handshake was a childish contest, as if to tell Tree he could break every bone in Tree's hand if he felt like it. Tree matched him for pressure, heard Cooley's grunt and saw the surprised respect in the blunt face, and set his drink down before he sat. He noticed that Wyatt Earp had not offered to shake hands; Warren, of course, had followed suit. Earp said casually, “My brother Warren, of course—you had that figured out. And this is Josie.”

Josie gave him a mock-sweet smile. He wondered what went on behind those flirty bemused eyes.