Marshal Jeremy Six #2

  It started out with four drunken gunslingers raising the devil in a local saloon. Jeremy Six, marshal of Spanish Flat, knew it was going to be tough enough to silence that bunch.

  But Spanish Flat was in for more than just that little ruckus that night. The tough little crossroads town was in for a blizzard that would make the roads impassable, that would drive the temperature down to zero and the frustrated anger of its frontier toughs boiling.

  And then would come the refugees from the storm—the chilly-eyed killer riding in from the outlaw trail and the two-legged wolves from their rangeland hideouts.

  They’d all be playing hell in Spanish Flat. And if there was to be a town still standing there tomorrow, it would be up to Jeremy to survive … the night it rained bullets!

  MARSHAL JEREMY SIX 2:

  THE NIGHT IT RAINED BULLETS

  By Brian Garfield writing as Brian Wynne

  First Published by Ace Books in 1965

  Copyright © 1965, 2018 by Brian Garfield

  First Edition: December 2018

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Cover Art by Gordon Crabb

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.

  Chapter One

  Jack Lime, when he was drunk, was tough enough to handle. When he had his three friends with him, he was impossible.

  That was what Jeremy Six was thinking while he buckled on his revolver and stubbed out his cigarette with a show of disgust and impatience. He was going to have to tame Jack Lime tonight. It wouldn’t be the first time. But Jeremy Six hadn’t had to tangle with all four of them at once, before. It would take strategy and care; and it would take help. He was town marshal: maybe it was his job to keep the peace. But the town wouldn’t be any better off with him dead.

  Dominguez came into the office. When the big Mexican pushed the door open, a cold draft licked inside. Dominguez shut the door and rubbed his hands together. “Cold as my woman the day before payday,” Dominguez observed.

  Jeremy Six was turning to the gun rack to bring down a short-sawed shotgun. “They still in the Glad Hand?”

  “Still there.”

  “And still raising Hell?”

  “Unless they passed out since I left.”

  Jeremy Six grimaced and punched a pair of buckshot shells into the shotgun. He let down both hammers to safety cock and hung the gun through the bend of his elbow while he buckled up his sheepskin coat.

  Dominquez talked more like an Alabaman than a Mexican: he drawled. “Reckon I might need one of those too.”

  “Help yourself. Only don’t get trigger-happy.”

  “I guess not,” Dominguez said. He was a big man, a head taller than Jeremy Six, and Six was an inch or two above average. Dominguez was one-fourth Yuma Indian, one-fourth Pennsylvania Dutch, one-fourth Spanish. He didn’t seem to know about the other one-fourth. He had been Six’s deputy since summer. The last deputy, a scrappy little fellow called Gutierrez, had been killed by outlaws. i

  Dominguez at first had refused the job: “This town goes through deputies too fast.” Two weeks later he had lost all his money betting on a horse race between an Apache on a pinto and a Texan cowboy on a sorrel that looked as though it was on its last legs. The cowboy had won the race.

  Dominguez had been broke, then. The summer had been rough—mostly dry—and the ranches had not been hiring. Dominguez had a black-haired woman to feed and she liked to eat. Dominguez had pinned on the deputy’s badge and kept it. Up to now nobody had shot at him. Jeremy Six studied the big moon-faced deputy and wondered how Dominguez would handle himself when the air started to stink of gunsmoke.

  It probably wouldn’t be long before they would find out. Jack Lime was raising the roof at the Glad Hand and it was time to stop him.

  “Might as well get going,” Dominguez said tentatively. He rarely displayed any particular expression on his bland face.

  “I’m waiting for Bill Dealing.” Dealing was the night marshal; ordinarily he handled the three-in-the-morning-to-three-in-the-afternoon shift. But tonight Jeremy Six intended to muster every hand he could raise.

  “Might not be smart to wait too long,” Dominguez said.

  “I sent a chico after him. He’ll be right along.”

  “Anybody else got a hand in this besides the three of us?”

  “Nobody else gets paid for it,” Jeremy Six said shortly. He pulled his hat down across his eyes and walked to the door. He listened for a moment, waiting for the thump of boot heels on the boardwalk outside; then he swung the door open and nodded briskly to Bill Dealing, who was coming toward the office. All Six had to say was, “Lime’s got a crowd liquored up at the Glad Hand.” Dealing was an old warrior at this game: he didn’t need to have it spelled out. Dominguez came outside and shut the door.

  The night air was brisk; the last sliver of February’s moon hung over Spanish Flat and the town seemed quiet enough. But the marshal’s office was on the main street. If trouble came, it usually started back in Cat Town.

  Walking down to the end of the block a pace ahead of his two men, Jeremy Six flexed his hands to keep them limber against the chill. The shotgun hung in his elbow and as he turned down the side street he shifted it into his hand, to warm the metal lock plate against his palm. The back streets seemed unusually quiet: he could hear the tramp of Dealing’s walking-boots and the scuff of Dominguez’ moccasins, and that was unusual. It struck him that the music of Cat Town had been silenced.

  Word must have gotten around about Jack Lime and his crew. Cat Town waited, now—curious, shadowed, maybe making odds on the outcome. The porch of Fat Annie’s was dark: somebody had blown out the red welcoming lantern. At Madam Lisa’s there weren’t even any lights on inside, but, glancing at the place as he walked past it, Jeremy Six thought he saw faces pressed to the glass. With sudden anger he thought, What do they want, another O K Corral fight? They don’t care who wins—they just want blood. It was no better than a cockfight: an entertainment, something to spice conversation for the next week or so. Someone might die tonight but Cat Town wouldn’t remember it very long. He felt like chucking the whole thing away—the town, the job.

  But he couldn’t do it right now. Not at this particular moment. Because if he did, the awful name would follow him for the rest of his life: coward.

  It was all just a passing whimsy. Jeremy Six had no intention of running out, If he had been inclined that way he never would have taken the job in the first place.

  That was another question: why had he taken it?

  There wasn’t time to work out an answer to that one. His footsteps carried him around a corner and then there was the Glad Hand, half a block away, and the night was no longer silent. He could hear voices calling drunkenly and high laughter, the smash of glass and a lighter sound that must have been cascading poker-chips falling to the floor from an overturning table. At first it sounded like a crowd but listening to it he realized it was only a few voices making all the racket. Jack Lime, he thought, and his three wild men. They had the saloon treed and if they weren’t stopped now they might try treeing the town next, and kill someone in the doing of it.

  The Glad Hand would survive it. It had been
there a long time. A Mexican had built it back in the days when Spanish Flat had been just a trading post on the Butterfield Road. It had adobe walls several feet thick; it was narrow across the front but it went back quite a distance in length. Walking up to the place, Jeremy Six thought, I hope to hell Clarissa’s all right.

  The piano wasn’t playing. Its absence struck him right away, with sudden anxiety: there wasn’t much that would make Nimble-Finger Buchler quit playing the piano. Nimble-Finger was dying of lung consumption anyway and there wasn’t much that could frighten him.

  A very cold wind swept down the old street. Heavy clouds were building over the mountains. Dominguez murmured, “Bad weather coming fast. I figure a blizzard, pretty quick now.”

  They had stopped outside the narrow doorway. It looked like a tunnel through the thick adobe wall. There was a sliver of lamplight under the door. Inside, somebody whooped. Jeremy Six heard something skitter across the floor and fall: a chair, or maybe a small table. There was a lot of laughter from two or three voices and Bill Dealing said, very drily, “I’m so glad the boys are havin’ fun.”

  Six muttered, “I wish this place had a back door.”

  Dominguez said, “What do we do?”

  Six made up his mind. “The bar’s on the right-hand wall. Bill, you’ll go in first. Don’t raise a ruckus. Just go inside, turn left, and walk down the wall to the front corner. Don’t show your gun. Let them think you’re scared. Dominguez will go in with me. Dominguez, you head for the nearest end of the bar as soon as we get inside. If they get tough, take cover behind the bar and give them both barrels.”

  Dominguez said, “That’ll leave you right in the middle,” and suddenly, warmed by the man’s concern, Six knew Dominguez would handle himself all right. Six said gruffly:

  “I’ll take care of myself. Let’s go.”

  Six had both hammers cocked and his finger across both triggers when he ducked his head to go into the Glad Hand. But he had the stubby shotgun behind his back where they wouldn’t see it right away. He went in with Dominguez and immediately, as if he had been doing this kind of thing all his life, Dominguez turned right and walked to the bar—without hurry, coolly competent. But Six wasn’t watching him.

  Six’s triangular eyes were making a rapid sweep of the long room, placing the four drunk wild men. They weren’t hard to find. Everybody else was flattened back against the walls.

  Jack Lime’s three toughs were of assorted sizes and shapes. One of them was folded over the center of the bar, looking sick: that one wouldn’t be any trouble. A second one, known simply as Peso, was at the far end of the bar with a whisky glass in one hand and a gun in the other. The gun was aimed at the bartender.

  The third tough, Quirt Ross, sat on the bar with his legs dangling, boots swinging back and forth, spurs digging into the wood with every swing. Ross was frozen in a strained attitude, with a bottle lifted halfway to his lips and a gun on the bar by his right hand.

  And Jack Lime. Lime was a big blond man with a carefree, friendly face belied by a pair of coal-black eyes. Lime was against the back wall, beside the office door, standing where he could see everything and where no one could come at him from a blind spot. Even when he was drunk Jack Lime didn’t lost lose his wary vigilance.

  All four of them were looking at Jeremy Six the way a man with a flyswatter looks at a fly he is about to squash.

  The silence that fell over the room came like an abrupt indrawn breath. Jeremy Six brought the shotgun into sight, not aiming it at anyone in particular, and said in a level voice:

  “Fun’s over, boys.”

  Jack Lime had a quick rash grin. “Maybe it’s just commencing,” he suggested.

  “Maybe,” Six murmured. “Been counting up the odds, Jack?”

  “What odds?”

  “Sing out, boys,” Six said.

  To his left, in the front corner, Bill Dealing made a half-turn and pushed his coattail back from his holstered gun. “One here.”

  At the near end of the bar, Dominguez lifted his scattergun and laid it quietly on the bar, his hand on the lock plate, finger across both triggers. “And one more.”

  Jeremy Six said, “You gents can disarm yourselves or we can do it the hard way. Which do you want, Jack?”

  Jack Lime was drunk enough to need time to puzzle it over. He had one hand on the butt strap of his holstered gun. He dragged the other hand across his mouth, thinking. His obsidian eyes never left Six’s face. The crowd, flattened against the walls, kept quiet and wide-eyed, hoping they wouldn’t be in the line of stray bullets.

  That was when a graceful figure swayed into the open doorway of the office, at Jack Lime’s left shoulder. Lime’s head swiveled around and he found himself looking down the twin bores of a .42 derringer. Clarissa Vane had a long neck and cascading black hair and a mock-sweet smile. She said, “Be a good boy, Jack.”

  Jeremy Six cursed under his breath. Why hadn’t she stayed out of sight? He didn’t want Clarissa hurt—and especially not on account of trash like Jack Lime.

  Quirt Ross let his legs become still. The thump of spurs against wood stopped. Quirt’s hand lay white-knuckled over the revolver, on the bar by his thigh. Peso had his revolver trained on the bartender and Jeremy Six could see in Peso’s eyes that Peso was trying to decide whether he could swivel the gun around and shoot before Six knocked him down with the shotgun. There was a bold light in Peso’s eyes and Jeremy Six said tautly, “Don’t die for a ten-dollar fine, Peso. It’s not worth it.”

  Peso was a little fellow, dark, all whipcord and rawhide: he had a brand of personal pride that stretched taut as piano wire. But just now Peso was figuring up his chances and in the end he only switched his eyes to Jack Lime, leaving the decision up to Lime.

  Jeremy Six said, “We haven’t got all night, boys.”

  Clarissa was still in the office doorway with the derringer—cocked, primed, ready to fire. Jack Lime was looking into Clarissa’s eyes, and a mocking smile spread across his face. “My old Mama taught me never to fight the drop,” he said. “Especially when it’s four barrels of buckshot and a derringer point-blank. Do what the marshal wants, boys.” His tongue was a little thick but Lime was in command of himself. Probably the threat of death had sobered him considerably.

  Bill Dealing unsheathed his revolver without sudden motions. When he cocked the weapon, the four sharp clicks echoed through the room with brittle clarity. Jeremy Six could hear the sighing escape of pent-up breath from a score of men along the walls. The bartender, who had stiffened himself wide-eyed against an expected bullet from Peso’s gun, slowly relaxed. Peso threw a reluctant glance at Jack Lime; then Peso let down the hammer of his revolver with slow care, placed the gun on the bar, and took two deliberate paces away from it. He stood, weaving slightly on his feet, regarding Jeremy Six with petulant bloodshot eyes. Then his glance swung to bear on Jack Lime, and Peso’s expression became resentful. Peso liked the taste of blood and when it was denied him, he turned spiteful like a child whose toys had been taken away.

  Quirt Ross, who had a slur of beard down his jowly cheeks, grunted an explosive oath and shoved his gun away. It slid down the bar, skittered off an empty beer-mug, and tumbled to the floor, making a racket.

  The other tough, Orozco, was passed out, folded over the bar. It left only Jack Lime, and Lime now turned to Clarissa Vane with a sardonic smile that lifted one side of his mouth. Lime slowly lifted both hands, empty, and faced Clarissa while she reached out with care and took the revolver out of Lime’s holster. Clarissa stepped back into the doorway.

  Jeremy Six heard a long breath wheeze out of Dominguez. Sweat stood out on Dominguez’ brown forehead. Six briskly, “All right. Quirt, pick up Orozco and lug him over here. Peso and Lime, come on. I want the four of you lined up against the front wall. Let’s go.”

  He dipped his head in signal to Bill Dealing, and strode across the room. Lime was walking toward him, still grinning, and Six gave the man a shove with the shotgun, prod
ding him toward the front of the room. Six went right on back to the far end and said to Clarissa, “Why in hell didn’t you stay out of it?”

  “Damn it, I should think you’d be grateful.”

  “And how’d I have felt if you’d ended up dead?”

  “We all end up dead, sooner or later,” she said. “Simmer down, Jeremy. You’re keyed up like a guitar string pitched too high. Don’t take it out on me.”

  Her talk was soft, designed to carry no further than his ears. Time had enabled Clarissa to learn all the subtle signs of emotion in Six’s outwardly guarded manner. She knew his weaknesses; and in that she was practically alone. When a man carried the star, he could not afford to let his human side show.

  Six said gruffly, “I’ll talk to you later,” and wheeled back through the saloon. The crowd had come away from the walls. Fear had dried their throats and there was a run on the bar: the bartender sweated to fill orders, but took time out to slug down a quick half pint of beer. Six had to push through the knot of people. They all crowded around him, slapping his back, reaching for his hand, congratulating him. He fought his way through with no show of good nature.

  At the front of the saloon, Dominguez and Bill Dealing held the four toughs at bay, lined up along the wall, disarmed. Dominguez was tossing a knife up and down lightly in his left hand; as the knife spun, lamplight raced along its blade in glittering fragments. When Six came along, Dominguez pointed the knife at Peso. “Found this in his boot.”

  “He’s probably got two or three others on him,” Six said. “How about it, Peso? Do we search you or do you hand them over?”

  Peso’s eyes glittered frostily. His timing and speed were dulled by too much whisky, and Peso knew it: otherwise he might have made a break. But with a muttered curse, Peso reached up to his collar and undid a rawhide thong tied there like a throat piece. When he pulled up the rawhide, it dragged a sheathed knife up from its hiding place, down the back of his shirt. Six pocketed the knife. “Any more?”

  “No.”

  Jack Lime said drily, “He carries a folded razor in his right hip pocket.”