Marshal Jeremy Six #6 Read online

  “Shotgun?”

  “Yes,” Six said, and on his way out added, “Let’s hope there’s no call to use it.”

  Two

  The town gunsmith of Spanish Flat was a softly handsome man of thirty-one named Gene Lanphier. He was a good craftsman and a self-contained man, shielded from social relationships by one overriding passion: he was so much in love with his wife that he had little time for any other friendships.

  There was no denying Sheila Lanphier was a beauty. She was a full-breasted redhead with sparkling green eyes and a great flowing mass of fine hair; her manner was laughing and flirtatious, but all her coquetry was directed at her husband. They were very much in love with each other.

  She came into the gun shop at noon, folded her parasol and slipped out of her raincoat. Lanphier kissed the tip of her nose and went to hang her coat by the door. She said, “I’m told the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. I made you a sandwich.” She unwrapped an oilskin pouch and put it on his workbench.

  Lanphier said, “Slices of last night’s dinner, I’ll bet,” and laughed gently. “That’s all right. We don’t need money, do we?”

  “We’ve got our love to live on,” she answered, eyeing him brightly past the tumbling fall of her hair.

  “Well, I’m still sorry we don’t make much money,” he said. “I’d like to buy you everything there is.”

  “You’d be unhappy doing anything but this,” she said wisely.

  “Sure, darling. I’m a tinkerer, always will be.”

  “I never expected anything else,” she breathed; close to him, she pressed herself against him and turned into the circle of his arms. He kissed her with the easy tenderness of unhurried love, then he said, “You’re funny. You and—your freckles.”

  “I do not have freckles!”

  “Three of them. On your nose. Right on your nose.”

  “I do not.” She pouted, and kissed him again.

  The door slammed open and two hard-bitten men stamped in, drenching the floor with rain. Lanphier unhurriedly unwrapped his arms and his wife stepped aside.

  “Something I can do for you gents?”

  Both of the toughs were big, but one outsized the other by a good fifty pounds. The smaller one had a dirty moustache; the bigger one had little button eyes that darted wickedly around, taking in the disorder of tools and metal gun parts, holsters and ammunition and weapons of all sizes that cluttered the walls and counters of the shop. The bigger one’s face was mottled with red blotches; he was a thoroughly disagreeable sort, stuffing pieces of hard candy into his mouth and chewing bovinely. His smaller partner twisted the points of his moustache and hitched up his gunbelt; he had the look of a would-be dandy. He said, “Look at these two, now, Candy. What do you think of that? Ain’t true love sweet?”

  “What do you want?” Lanphier said sharply.

  “Fix guns, don’t you?”

  “That’s what the sign says.”

  “I got a gun needs fixing,” said the smaller one. “I’m Fred Hook. Maybe you heard of me.”

  Lanphier studied his face. “I know who you are,” he remarked. “Darling, you go on home now. I’ll be along for supper.”

  Sheila gave the two toughs a contemptuous look, walked wide around them, took her raincoat and parasol and went out. Fred Hook turned on both heels and kept his hungry glance pinned on her until she was out of sight in the rain. Hook reached out and closed the door, and only then walked over to the gunsmith’s counter. He took the revolver out of his belt holster and laid it on the workbench.

  Lanphier said, “What’s the matter with it?”

  Instead of answering, Hook glanced back at the door, where his candy-eating partner stood solemnly chewing. “Pretty wife you got. Real Sunday kind of woman.”

  “You want this gun fixed or don’t you?”

  “Sure. Gentle down, friend.” Fred Hook picked up the six-gun and drew the hammer back to full cock. He held it up under Lanphier’s nose. “See that? The cylinder sometimes doesn’t line up straight when you cock it. Doesn’t lock into place. Man could be in powerful trouble if that happened when he needed his gun to work fast.”

  “Probably needs a new locking bolt,” Lanphier said. “Let’s have a look.”

  Hook uncocked the gun slowly and grinned; and shoved the gun across the counter. “You do that.”

  Candy said petulantly, “I’m getting hungry, Fred. When’re we going to eat?”

  “Soon as we’re done here.”

  “I saw some good-looking chocolate cream pie in that Chinaman’s cafe up the street.”

  “Hell, will you quit whining about your belly for just a minute?” Hook said. “You aren’t going to starve to death.” He explained to Lanphier, who was taking the gun apart with a screwdriver, “Candy’s got a sweet tooth. That’s how come they call him Candy. Candy Briscoe, maybe you heard of him too, hey?”

  “Can’t say as I have,” Lanphier muttered. He was squinting into the innards of the six-gun; he poked the screwdriver up into the interior of the dismantled frame and began to unscrew a spring.

  Fred Hook chuckled. “Hear that, Candy? He ain’t heard of you, but he’s heard of me all right. Ain’t that right, friend?”

  “Didn’t say I’d heard of you,” Lanphier said. “I said I know who you are.” He glanced at Hook briefly and returned his attention to his work. A handful of small parts, removed from Hook’s six-gun, lay scattered across the surface of the workbench. He picked up one of them and held it up to the light.

  Hook said, “What do you mean? What’s the difference? How can you not have heard of me and still know who I am?”

  “I used to live in Silver City,” Lanphier said. “Saw you around there from time to time. Your name wasn’t Fred Hook then.”

  Hook’s eyes had narrowed down. “I think that’s about enough out of you, friend.”

  “I’d be obliged,” Lanphier murmured, “if you’d quit calling me ‘friend.’ I’m no friend of murderers.”

  Candy Briscoe laughed coarsely through a mouthful of peppermint stick. “He’s got you pegged, Fred. How about that.”

  “Yeah,” Hook breathed. “How about that.”

  Lanphier held out his palm with the small part in it. “That spring’s just about to break off the tail end of this bolt. That’s your trouble.”

  “I don’t want no speech,” Hook said. “Just fix the thing.”

  “A man ought to know how his gun works,” Lanphier said, “especially if he lives by it. Not knowing how your gun works, that’s a mistake that could get you killed.”

  “Shut up,” Hook said. His lip curled back in a snarl. “Any more jaw out of you and I might just take a notion to see about that pretty woman of yours. Hey, Candy, what you think about that? That redhead woman sure brings it all with her, doesn’t she?”

  “I reckon,” Candy agreed amiably.

  Hook said, “So maybe you ought to forget you ever saw me around Silver City, friend. Maybe you ought to just do that, if you want your pretty redhead woman left alone.”

  Lanphier made no immediate answer. He pulled up a high stool and sat down at his workbench, picked up a box of new gun parts and selected a small dark metal part. He reached for a file and bent close over the work, filing the spring to fit Hook’s gun. He finally spoke, without heat.

  “If you lay one finger on my wife, Hook—”

  “If I do, you won’t forget it easy,” Hook cut in. “Remember that, friend, and keep your mouth shut about me and Silver City. Otherwise I could take a powerful shine to that wife of yours. Might shine her up a bit, too, kind of. You know what I mean?”

  Lanphier’s hand reached along the workbench and picked up another piece of metal. The file scraped back and forth, making a light rasping sound that cut across the hoarse sawing of Hook’s breath. Lanphier said mildly, “I’m a gunsmith, not a bounty hunter. Leave me and mine alone, that’s all. You hear me?”

  “You threatening me, friend?”

 
“No,” Lanphier said. “Just telling you. Touch my wife and you’re dead, Hook.”

  Hook’s brittle laugh, wholly without humor, erupted across the cluttered shop. “Real tough, ain’t you, friend?”

  “If I have to be,” Lanphier answered evenly.

  Hook kept laughing for a while. Lanphier didn’t pay much attention. He put the six-gun back together, put a few drops of oil into the mechanism, and unloaded the gun. When he was sure the chambers were empty he pointed the gun at the ceiling and cocked it and pulled the trigger. He did that about a dozen times before he handed the gun to Hook.

  “Here, you try it. I think it’s all fixed now.”

  Hook dry-snapped the revolver half a dozen times. “Works fine. Didn’t slip once. You’re a pretty good gunsmith, you know that?”

  “Dollar for the new part,” Lanphier said coolly.

  Hook laughed. “Take it out of my hide—if you’ve got the guts. Come on, Candy.” He strode to the door, and paused as he opened it. “Remember what I said about your woman, friend. Remember it good—and keep your lip shut. Understand?” He laughed again and went outside.

  Candy Briscoe poked a peppermint stick in his mouth and went out after him. The door slammed. Lanphier sat at his workbench running his thumbnail up and down the file he had been working with. It made a soft scratching sound. He shook his head slowly and got up, moving heavily, as if a burden had descended on him. Before he left the shop he buckled a worn gunbelt around his hips and took out the revolver to check its action and its loads. It was a long-barreled forty-five.

  The rain began to let up toward evening. At suppertime Jeremy Six went into the Glad Hand Saloon, threading the tunnel-like doorway through its thick adobe wall. The house professor, Nimble-Finger Buehler, sat gauntly hunched over the keyboard of the battered piano, pecking at the keys. Six threaded a path through the rain-sodden crowd to the back door. He banged his big knuckles on the door and when it opened he took his hat off. “Howdy.”

  “Howdy,” said Clarissa Vane. She gave him her warm smile and stepped back to admit him.

  She had supper prepared—dinner for two; it had become a ritual, three nights a week, and this was Monday night. Ledgers and an open cashbox littered the open roll top desk that was Clarissa’s office, but the rest of the room was entirely her private domain, furnished and curtained as her feminine tastes wished. This was the haven to which Clarissa Vane retreated from the realities of the eye-and-tooth life that took up the hours of her business day.

  The meal was laid out with polished silver and elaborate china and a decanter of wine. Six held Clarissa’s chair and then went around to sit down. “It always amazes me how you do this,” he said.

  “You mean here on the wrong side of town?”

  “I didn’t mean exactly—”

  “We don’t have to waltz around with each other, do we, Jeremy?” She once again gave him that curious smile of hers, part quizzical, part faraway, part secret. “We never ask each other questions very much, do we?”

  “Do we need to?”

  She made an indeterminate gesture. “I carry all this with me because it’s all I’ve got left of what I started with. I grew up in New Orleans. We were pretty well off until the panic of ’Seventy-three. My daddy was in the cotton business and even the Civil War didn’t cripple us, but when the panic came we went broke on three-cent cotton and my daddy just couldn’t face any of us, I guess. Somebody said he shipped out on a tramp or a Horn clipper. I never really did find out what happened to him. My mother died that winter and I thought I’d go to California and see if I could find my father. I packed up everything I still had—there wasn’t much; you see it all in front of you. Tried to make my way from place to place by gambling. This was as far as I got. I played cards in this room with the man who owned the place and Hal Craycroft and a few others. Maybe it was just that he’d never played cards with a woman before and got flustered, but the owner of this place had a losing streak like I’d never seen before. Before I knew it I was the owner of the Glad Hand and everything in it. Which wasn’t too very much.”

  Six didn’t speak, and after a moment she added, “That’s about all there is to tell. A little while later you came along. They hired you to clean up the town. I remember it took six months before you unbent enough to take your hat off for me.”

  It made him laugh. “That was a little while ago. You’ve got the damnedest memory for things that embarrass a man.”

  “As far as you were concerned, I was the wrong-side-of-the-tracks type and that was that.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “My book of rules is pretty thin, but that makes what little’s in it all the more important. Takes quite a while for me to admit there’s a loophole in one of my rules.”

  “I’m glad you’re like that,” she said. “The world’s too full of men who’ll change their rules at the toss of a coin, Jeremy. You stay the way you are.”

  He smiled. “I was about to warn you that I wasn’t about to change any. You’ve just got to put up with me the way I am—hidebound and crotchety and stubborn as a long-ear jackass.”

  He lifted the decanter and poured the wine.

  Afterward he sat back with the loose heaviness that followed a good meal; he clamped a cigar in his mouth but in deference to Clarissa—and the small confines of the room—he did not light it. A worried frown settled slowly on his face and prompted her to say, “You’re still troubled about Wade Cruze.”

  “Can’t help it. The little fellow’s up to something strange and I can’t put my finger on what it is. Until I find out, I won’t know whether it means trouble or not.”

  “Hasn’t he said anything about what he’s here for?”

  “Not a thing that means anything. He’s having fun playing a little game, trying to puzzle the whole town. It’s his idea of a good joke. But there’s something more behind it than just a bad little joke. Cruze didn’t pack his crew this far from home just for the fun of starting rumors.”

  “And you can’t force him to talk or leave town unless he does something to break the law. One of your hidebound, crochety, jackass-stubborn little rules.”

  “That’s about how it is,” he agreed.

  She brought coffee and they sat across the table from each other, not talking, enjoying the ease of not needing to talk. But the irritation of Wade Cruze’s mystery kept nagging Six’s mind and he got up sooner than he usually did; he gathered his hat and rain slicker, walked around the dinner table, and tipped Clarissa’s grave face up with one finger. He let his kiss lie against her lips for a languorous moment before he straightened and said, “Got to see about keeping the lid on things,” and went out brusquely.

  It was not exactly raining outside, but tiny droplets of water hung in the air like mist, drifting around on cool currents of damp wind. The rainy season down along the border country here was usually a predictable matter: sometime between August and October the skies would start clouding up every afternoon in the west, and late in the afternoon every day for two weeks a sudden downpour would come smashing down onto the mountains and the desert, flash-flooding the arroyo ravines and bloating the desert cactus with enough storage-moisture to keep them until the January sprinkles. But this year was an odd one; here it was almost the middle of October and there hadn’t been any real thunderstorms yet, but just this steady misery of a drizzle all day long for three days running.

  It was enough, for sure, to put a gray blanket on a man’s good spirits. And to top it off, there was Wade Cruze and the close-mouthed Terrapin crew to think about.

  Six turned his oilskin collar up around his jaw and stalked through Cat Town on his first rounds of the evening. He put his head into the various saloons and dance halls of the back streets, mainly to remind the drinking folks of his presence; usually that was all that was needed to keep the lid on things, but after three straight days of rain that kept them indoors, a good many men were getting restless. Restlessness could mean trouble, when it was fueled by a few too man
y belts of red-eye whisky.

  So far, the town was quiet enough. He made his circuit through Cat Town and crossed over to the respectable side of town, where the only nighttime establishment other than his own office was the Drover’s Rest. The Drover’s Rest catered to the Brahmins of Spanish Flat—the important cattlemen and the owners of the town’s major businesses. In keeping with its function, it was decorated simply but elegantly, and was not the sort of establishment that tolerated rowdy behavior. If trouble started in Spanish Flat, it rarely had its beginnings in the Drover’s Rest. But tonight was different: Wade Cruze was in the Drover’s Rest, although most of his crew had scattered to the lower priced dives of Cat Town.

  On his way there, Six crossed the porch of the hotel and paused to glance into the lobby. A willowy girl, not beautiful but certainly attractive, stood by the hotel registry talking with the fat cattle buyer, Owen McQuarter. Curiosity turned Six’s steps inside and he went toward the desk, removing his hat.

  McQuarter spotted him coming. The fat man swiveled heavily—he had none of the nimble grace that was often erroneously attributed to fat men—and greeted Six as he came up, and added, “Marshal, this is my ward, Miss Marianne Holbrook.”

  The girl flashed a shining smile that changed the half-plain surfaces of her face and made her suddenly vivacious and pretty. She had soft, corn silk-blonde hair and a tall slim figure clothed fashionably in a high-necked print dress. She said, “You don’t need to be so formal, Uncle Owen.” To Six she explained, “I’m just an Army brat, Marshal, on my way to visit with Uncle Owen at Fort Dragoon.”

  “My ward is on her way to San Francisco,” McQuarter said. “She’ll be school-teaching there.”

  “Tutoring,” the girl corrected him. “I’m a tutor.”

  “Same thing,” the fat man said. “Isn’t it?”

  She laughed again and tossed her head toward Six. “I’m sure the marshal isn’t interested in the subtle distinctions between school-teaching and tutoring.”