The Shotgun Arcana (35 page)

“Leesen to him,” one of the men with the rope said. “He’s skeered.” All the men laughed.

Macomber and two other men climbed off their horses as well. They all had shotguns trained on Mutt. “Jon Highfather ain’t always gonna be sheriff in this town,” Macomber said. “He was a damn fool to put his trust in a stinkin’ red-skinned desert ape like you anyway.”

“Max!” one of the mounted men shouted. “Got company.”

A lone figure on horseback made its way up Prosperity Street, headed for the path up Rose Hill. The rider paused when he saw the silhouettes of men and horses at the tree and rode across the field to join them. It was Harry Pratt.

“What’s going on here?” Harry said, seeing the noose and Mutt standing at gunpoint.

“Little rope party for me, Harry,” Mutt said. “Didn’t you git your invite?”

“None of your nevermind, Mr. Mayor,” one of the masked gunmen said. “Keep on riding.”

“This man is a deputy,” Harry said. “You can’t just string him up like a common criminal.”

“You hold your peace, Pratt,” Macomber said. “This fucking Lamanite had his hands and lips all over a white woman and there is no way in hell we’re going to stand for that. Figure our little citizens’ vigilance committee would have something nice hanging in the trees to welcome folks tomorrow morning. Now ride on up the hill to your fancy house your daddy built and let real men get to their work.”

“You want to kill this man because he was with a white woman?” Harry asked. He looked at Mutt.

Mutt shrugged.

“Go on now, Harry,” he said. “I got this.”

Harry looked at the circle of armed hooded men, a few with blazing torches.

“Clearly,” Pratt said. “Let him go, Max.”

Macomber turned suddenly to face Harry, who was climbing down from his horse. “How the hell did you…?”

“A mask can’t hide as much as you think it can,” Harry said, walking up to face Macomber. “Let him go, Max.”

The men chuckled nervously. Macomber pulled the sack off his head. His mean, tiny eyes burned. “Or what, Pratt? You got no gun, and even if you did you wouldn’t know what to do with it, unless you could get a vote out of it. Run on home.”

“Not without him,” Pratt said, nodding to Mutt.

“Fine by me,” Macomber said. “Just means it’s that much easier to get Rony Bevalier’s boy elected next year. Kill this dandy son of a bitch!”

Harry reached under his duster. The man beside Macomber emptied both barrels of the shotgun into Pratt at point-blank range. The horses pinned their ears back and their eyes grew wide at the blast of gunfire. Several of them rose up and pawed the air. Harry flew backward and landed with a thud and was still.

Mutt moved the instant the shotgun was fired. He grabbed a gun away from one of the men next to him, spun to put the unarmed man between himself and the circle of gunmen. Mutt stuck his face in front of one of the spooked horses and snarled. The terrified horse snorted and turned and ran, tossing its rider to the ground with a sick crunching sound. The equally spooked circle of men opened fire and the blasts cut the unarmed man Mutt was ducking behind almost in half. As the dead man fell, Mutt returned fire on one of the shooters and watched him stumble backward, missing most of his face, and fall to the ground.

Mutt turned straight into the twin barrels of Max Macomber’s shotgun. Macomber smiled and pulled the trigger. Just as the hammers clicked, there was a blur of brilliance—silver reflecting moonlight, and sparks—as Macomber’s shotgun was sliced cleanly in half. Macomber held a stock and part of a trigger, as well as part of his finger. The rest, including the first two joints of his trigger finger, tumbled to the grass. Harry Pratt spun in one fluid motion and disemboweled another of the gunmen with the Sword of Laban, before the pieces of Macomber’s gun and finger had finished falling. The last man on horseback spurred his horse and began to ride toward town. Harry brought his blade to rest under Macomber’s chin. Macomber had fallen to his knees and was looking at the severed stub of his finger and the blood gushing from it.

“You,” Harry said, “are under arrest. You know, I always wanted to say that!”

“You did that real fine, Mr. Mayor,” Mutt said as he loaded the shotgun in his hands. He walked over and tapped the ornate breastplate that Harry had strapped on over his shirt and vest and under his coat. The jewel-encrusted armor didn’t show the slightest sign of wear from the two solid 12-gauge slugs it had stopped. “Interesting evening apparel for a ride,” Mutt said. “I’m sure you got a story for why you got all your getup on.”

Harry didn’t answer. Instead he looked out across the field in the direction the lone escaping rider.

“And don’t worry none about old Conn getting away, there.” Mutt smiled as he pulled Macomber to his feet. “Even a genius like him is bound to slip up sooner or later.”

*   *   *

By the time Mutt and Harry returned their prisoners to the jail, word was out about the girl murdered in Johnny Town tonight. Mutt decided he’d head over to the crime scene once he wrapped things up at the jail.

Macomber’s hand was patched up by Doc Tumblety, who seemed damned put out to be having to make a late call to the clink, especially for Mutt.

“I just came from performing surgery, damn your half-breed hide!” Tumblety growled.

“Francis,” Pratt said to the doctor with a sigh. “Just do it, please.”

Tumblety mended the stub of an index finger the best he could and staunched the blood. The gunman whose horse had thrown him and broken his collarbone was in another cell, feeling little pain thanks to Tumblety’s laudanum. The doctor said he’d be by tomorrow to see about a cast for the man’s arm and shoulder. The dead in the field had been collected by one of Clay Turlough’s men and were on their way to Clay and then to Boot Hill. Their kin would be notified in the morning, if they had any.

Mutt and Harry walked out onto the porch of the jail. The deputy closed the iron door behind them.

“So you were coming back from practicing your sword work with Professor Mephisto over at the theatre?” Mutt said. “I thought you were already pretty good with that big, shiny pig-sticker?”

“I am,” Harry said. “Very. I need to be better.”

“And the Prof is better?” Mutt said. “On top of all the other stuff he knows and all the things he’s studied? Damn.”

“The man has studied with Domenico Angelo in London and Thomas Hoyer Monstery as well,” Harry said. “He’s as quick with a blade as he is with his wit.”

“Why the armor?” Mutt asked, leaning against the rail.

“I need to be used to the weight of it while fighting,” Harry said. “Not that it has much weight, thing is as light as a feather, but I still need to know how I can move in it and can’t move. It’s lucky for both of us I was headed back from practice tonight and was too tired to take it off.”

The two men sat in the still of the dark, their faces hidden by deep shadow. A distant gas streetlight puffed, then its flame brightened.

“Why?” Mutt said finally. “You hate me. You always have. And to acknowledge the corn, I hate you too. Why risk your own skin for me?”

Harry was quiet for a time, then finally spoke. “You were out with Maude Stapleton, right?”

“Yes,” Mutt said.

“You love her?” Harry asked.

“That’s none of your damn business.”

“I thought so,” Harry said. “I’ve seen how you two look at each other, how sometimes you want to touch each other so bad and you just … can’t because then the sky would fall and a whole world of stupid narrow-minded little men like Max Macomber and his idiots would rain down on you and her, and you’d rather cut your own skin off than have her be hurt by you.”

Mutt said nothing; his shadow looked out past the porch. “The reason I hate you is because you’re free, Mutt. You say what you damn well want, to whoever you damn well please, and you don’t care what people think of you, don’t care what names they call you. I hate you because I wish to God I could do that, be that. But I can’t.”

“Why not?” Mutt asked. “It’s your damn life, Harry. Don’t belong to anyone else.”

“Actually it does,” Pratt said. “I have so many eyes on me, all the time, expecting me to act a certain way, do a certain thing. More eyes now, a lot more. Even my father’s dead eyes looking at me, all the time, judging me. If I fail, if I don’t live up to those expectations, I let a lot of people down, and it’s just not in me to say, ‘To hell with all of you, I’m doing what I want.’ I tried that, I ran away from here, but I had to come back. Some days I still want to run—hell, most days. But I wasn’t raised that way. I wish I had been.

“I stopped tonight because it burns like hell to know we live in a world where you can’t just love who you love, be who you are, where someone who is free, like you, can be hung up in a tree for loving, for being free. To know you have to hide your love, like it’s a dirty secret. It’s unfair and it made me angry. For all his faults, my father taught me that, too, that something wrong’s got to be made right.”

Harry stepped off the porch, falling into the moonlight and out of shadow. He climbed onto his horse. “’Night, Deputy. See you tomorrow.”

“Night, Mr. Mayor,” Mutt said.

Mutt watched Harry ride off and finally disappear in the darkness beyond the few working streetlights on Dry Well Road.

Mutt rubbed his face and let the tension of the last few hours slide out of him with a sigh. He walked off the porch and began the walk over to Johnny Town.

Two shadows detached from the darkness and blocked his path. Mutt cursed himself for thinking too much like a man and ignoring his senses—this was twice in one night. He now picked up that there were four of them, all around him, and they moved quiet, easy, fluid, not huffing and puffing like most white men did.

One of the shadows stepped forward and his face fell into light. He was an Indian, dressed in white man’s clothing: work pants, boots, a collarless shirt and an unbuttoned vest. He also had on a gun belt and wore it like he knew how to use it. His long hair was pulled back and he wore a headband with a single black feather in it.

“We need you to come with us,” the Indian said in Paiute. “He needs to talk with you.”

“Fellas, my plate’s been kinda overflowing today, so let’s skip the mysterious bit, okay? Who? Who wants to see me?”

“Wodziwob,” The Indian said.

“Let me git my horse,” Mutt said.

The Three of Swords

The Galveston, Texas, newspaper called him the Annihilator. A clever and ambitious reporter there coined the term after his third victim and the killer rather liked it, finding it appropriately menacing and powerful. He wandered the streets of this booming, industrious, modern city and chose his victims with leisure and discretion. No one suspected him, no one was clever enough, or thought as he did enough, to begin to winnow out his process.

He wore a wooden African Dogon tribal mask when he killed. It had been a trophy from his first victim, a ship’s captain. The empty face of the mask spoke to him, it was more his true face than this capricious mockery of emotive skin he was cursed with at birth.

He dragged his victims—male, female, black and white—out of their beds. He slid an ice pick into their tear ducts while they slept, damaging their brains and making them docile, but still aware, as he dragged them out under the merciless stars and unleashed his fury upon them. He had claimed sixteen victims in Galveston when he felt it give him an inescapable pull west, toward his god, toward the face on the mask—toward even greater power and glory. Toward annihilation. His was number six.

The Page of Wands

Dawn brought with it the news that another horrific murder had occurred in Johnny Town last night. There were rumors that the mayor and the sheriff were considering a curfew until the killer was brought to ground. Many citizens disliked the idea of a curfew with Thanksgiving only a few days away. Already, Harry Pratt’s political opponents were making hay about the fact that women were no longer safe on the streets of Golgotha under the Pratt administration.

But politics were far from Jim’s mind.

The morning was still cool and quiet when he rode up to Mrs. Stapleton’s laundry. He tethered Promise to the hitching post beside the sidewalk, knocked and stepped inside, hat in hand. Constance was waiting for him, dressed in a very practical, and slightly oversized, man’s collarless shirt, tucked into denim work pants and boots. Her hat hung on her back, held by a stampede cord. Her long brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she smiled as Jim entered.

“You look beautiful,” Jim said.

Constance laughed.

“I look like a cow-puncher,” she said. “But thank you.”

Jim turned and waved to Maude. “Mrs. Stapleton.”

Maude looked up from the laundry pile in front of her.

“I understand it is your intention to ride off with my fourteen-year-old daughter, unchaperoned?” Maude said, locking eyes with the young deputy.

Constance looked away, trying to not laugh out loud, as Jim’s eyes grew wide with a mixture of fear and confusion. “Uh, well, yes, ma’am, but I wouldn’t exactly put it like that.…”

“Oh, I’m sure you wouldn’t,” Maude said. “Now, I understand from Deputy Mutt that you fancy yourself quite the dandy, Master Negrey? Is that so? Quite the thief of hearts, are you?”

“I … I ain’t no dude, ma’am, no sir!” Jim stammered. “I ain’t stole no hearts or nothing else, ma’am! Mutt … he … My ma raised me right, I swear it.”

Maude smiled at Jim and nodded to Constance, who was now outright laughing at the boy’s discomfort. “Yes, I think she did, Jim,” Maude said. “Just a little ways up Argent? Correct? Nowhere near the mining camp?”

“That’s right, yes, ma’am,” Jim said.

“You two be back by noon, and be careful,” Maude said.

“I’ll keep her safe, Mrs. Stapleton,” Jim said. “I promise.”

“Yes,” Maude said. “I’m sure you will, Jim.” She looked at Constance. “And you keep him safe as well.”

“I will, Mother,” Constance said. The girl slapped the still off-kilter Jim on the shoulder. “C’mon, you desperado, you. I packed us some food. Let’s ride!”