.45-Caliber Desperado (19 page)

She was likely passed out by now, leaving the watchdogging and bulldogging to a bent-up old ex-railroad inspector named Steaves and his double-bore shotgun, while the girls went about their business.

The board squawk in the hall was probably just a customer taking his leave from his few minutes of frolic and, having heard the jubilation in the half-built saloon, was heading that way. From somewhere below, a girl laughed loudly and phonily.

Spurr sank back down in the tub and reached once more for his bottle. He'd no sooner gotten a gnarled hand wrapped around the whiskey, however, than a shadow moved in the hall beneath his door. The shadow stopped moving and remained beneath the door. There was no sound from the hall. At least, none that Spurr could hear above all the other noises.

The fractious crab in his chest twisted, belched, and flicked its leathery tail. The withered organ was like a creaky old man itself, trying to heave himself up out of a chair and groaning and panting with the near-fatal effort.

Slowly hoisting himself up out of the water, trying to make as little noise as possible, Spurr kept his gaze directed at the unmoving shadow. The person out there might be the whore he'd been waiting for, as he'd ordered one sent up to him after enough time for him to have had his badly needed bath.

On the other hand, the shadow wasn't moving . . .

Spurr's recalcitrant old ticker squawked almost audibly as he drew a breath and slid his big Remington from his holster on the chair beside the bottle. Quietly clicking the hammer back, he lifted one old veiny leg over the side of the tub, then the other. Dripping wet and blowing water from his lips, he felt like a fool as he knelt down on the other side of the room's single bed, which lay perpendicular to the tub.

Spurr drew another breath then hollered, “Come on in, little darlin'! Ole Spurr's been awaitin' on ye!”

Spurr's yell hadn't finished echoing around the room before the door blew open as though from a dynamite blast.

It slammed against the wall, causing the room to shake and for Spurr's bottle to tumble off the chair and hit the floor with a thud. A man burst into the room, stopping the door's bounce with his left boot—a red-haired gent with blue eyes and a cherry-red, clean-shaven face. Eyes spitting sky-colored fire and gritting his teeth, the man extended a walnut-gripped pistol and drilled three shots at the tub that stood six feet in front of him.

Plink! Plink! Plink!
went the slugs hitting the water before clanking against the tub's copper bottom.

The shooter held fire and stared wide-eyed at the tub he seemed to just now notice was empty. No more than a half second had passed, however, before he saw Spurr kneeling behind the bed, and he swung his gun in the old lawman's direction.

Spurr had him dead to rights.

Bam! Bam! Bam
-
Bam!

The redheaded bushwhacker was picked up off his feet and thrown straight back out the door and against the wall on the opposite side of the hall, cracking it. He seemed to hang there for several seconds against the long jagged crack, moving his arms and legs as though trying to climb the wall backward to some perceived escape hatch in the ceiling.

Then his chin dropped to his left shoulder. His knees hit the floor with a loud thud. He slumped forward, rolled onto his side, sighed heavily, and died.

As the usual shouts and screams rose around him, and doors opened, and jakes flanked by whores rushed out to see what had spawned the fireworks, Spurr shambled barefoot and naked into the hall himself and looked at the stiff. He didn't recognize him. Or maybe there was a dim recollection. He couldn't remember.

He swung his cocked Remington around at three men filing toward him—two naked, one in balbriggans, all wielding pistols. “Drop them hoglegs or join your friend in hell!”

The three lowered their guns. Spurr turned to face the other direction, where a portly man nearly his own age and with long snowy hair hanging down from a bald pink pate was also shuffling toward him. He was clad in only moccasins and a shell belt, squeezing an old Patterson revolver in his pudgy, brown hand.

“Drop that horse pistol, Samuel!” Spurr was surprised to remember that Samuel Loggins was the man's name. An army packer and whiskey drummer, he was sometimes a fort sutler when he was in the government's good graces. Spurr had also known him when the man had professionally skinned buffalo hides.

“Spurr?” Loggins scowled in disbelief. “I thought for sure you'd be stakin' a claim on St. Pete's back forty long before now!”

“Drop that pistol, Samuel.”

“Ah, shit—I don't have no beef with you, Spurr.” Loggins depressed the big pistol's hammer, lowered the gun to his naked white thigh mottled with blue cornflower veins.

“Memory's getting' so bad,” Spurr growled, “that I'd have forgotten if you did have a reason. Can't believe I remembered your name.”

“What's his name?” Loggins gestured his pistol at the dead redhead who seemed to be staring at a black spider crawling across the floor near his nose.

“I don't remember . . . if I ever knew it.” Spurr looked at the other men, a couple of whom had already slipped with their whores back into their rooms, the entertainment being over. “Anyone know this kid?”

“Rusty Hammond.” This from down the hall. Spurr stared past two men and a blond girl who'd just come up the stairs carrying a bottle of whiskey, to a door on the hall's left side. Two eyes and a nose peered out from behind a cracked door. “Waddie out at the Crosshatch. He seen you ride in last night, Marshal. Said you took his brother, Omar, to be hung by Judge Parker in Fort Smith last year.”

“Ah, shit,” Spurr said, mostly in response to having his memory nudged.

He remembered Omar Hammond's bright red hair, apple-red cheeks, and eyes so frosty that just a glance would freeze a man's pecker. Hammond had killed three Indian girls along a freight road near Sutter Creek, Nebraska Territory, after he'd led them all by pistol point into the breaks of the Niobrara River, raped each one before he'd locked them all in a farmer's springhouse, then shot them through the walls. Him and a friend of his, Wheeler Whitfield, whom Spurr had not been saddened to have gut-shot and caused to take a long, loud time dying . . .

Spurr looked at the eyes and the nose in the foot-wide gap between the door and the frame. “You might have talked him out of dyin' for a no-account brother.”

“We figured it was a family matter.” The door closed. The latch clicked.

Spurr snorted, cursed again.

Downstairs, a woman started to yell profanities. May, no doubt. Presently, old Steaves appeared, wheezing at the top of the stairs at the far end of the hall, holding his shotgun as though it weighed as much as a steel-shod wagon wheel. “Sorry for the commotion, sir,” Spurr said. “I reckon you can have this one buried with the others out yonder.”

Spurr lowered his pistol and grabbed the arm of the blond girl, who was staring down at the dead redhead and cradling a whiskey bottle, baby-like, in the crook of her right arm. “Think I'll return to my room and flush out the old boiler. Come on, missy. You're mine, ain't ya?”

“I reckon, mister,” the girl said tonelessly, still staring down at the dead redhead. “If you're the one they call Spurr, that is . . .”

Stiffly, she followed Spurr into the room. He closed the door and looked down at her, pleased to see that she was a full-bodied gal, with large, creamy breasts jutting from her pink corset, full hips swelling from a waist that was pleasantly plump. Not fat, mind you. Plump. The way a girl oughta look. Too many of them were so thin that you could snap them between your fingers, like a stove match.

Curly blond hair fell to her shoulders. It was sort of layered and adorned with a black ribbon. The locks on the right side of her head were pulled taut against her right ear and caught under the black silk choker she wore around her neck and which was trimmed with a small, fake diamond pin. Her face was small and china-doll pretty. One might even call the girl beautiful. At least, to Spurr she was comely enough to give his leaky heart a painful tickle.

He wished she wasn't blond, because it reminded him of the blond Murphy girl. But you couldn't have everything.

The girl turned reluctantly from the door and looked up at him. “You do that a lot, do you? Shoot . . . men . . . ?”

“Only when they try to shoot me first, especially while I'm bathing. I don't take baths all that often, and when I do I consider it a private affair.”

Spurr took the bottle from the girl, who still appeared shocked by the dead man in the hall though girls in her profession should be accustomed to such experiences. Brothels were colorful places.

“I do apologize for my appearance, but I'm clean enough.”

He set the bottle on the dresser that was missing its mirror, a brick propping up one short leg. “I'd dress if we was goin' to an opry or somesuch, but, since . . .”

He grabbed a mineral-stained water glass, splashed whiskey into it, and threw it back. He shook his head against the delightful burn and raised a hand. It shook. He frowned at it, troubled. Killing men who'd tried to kill him first usually didn't trouble him. So why was he shaking?

Why, too, did he suddenly feel as hollowed out as an old corncob pipe?

He backed up to the bed, sat on the edge of it, and gave a phlegmy sigh. “Shit.”

The girl was unlacing her corset and watching him curiously. She had amber eyes. Her hair was nearly as gold-yellow as sunflower blossoms. “You all right, Mr. Spurr?”

Spurr watched the corset fall away from her breasts. Her tender, pale, pink-buttoned bosom spilled forth, but the wonderfully shaped orbs could have been a blank wall for all the feeling they evoked in Spurr's nether regions. He admired the girl's breasts as one might admire a beautiful oil painting or a sunset, but his dong did not stir.

“You look sorta pale,” the girl said, the faintest concern in her voice as she stepped out of her stockings while keeping her sheer, powder-blue wrap draped across her shoulders. Her full breasts swayed behind it.

“Must be the hot bath.” Spurr threw back the whiskey. “I'll be all right in a minute.”

The girl, naked now except for the wrap, walked toward him, rolling her hips slightly, staring at him with a coquettish little smile on her ruby lips, cupping her breasts in her soft hands. “Sure you will. Most fellas feel all right when they get under the sheets with Miss Lilly.” She stopped before him, slanting a sparkly-eyed look at him while continuing to cup her breasts.

She was a professional, this girl, and she'd overcome her distaste for what she'd seen in the hall to earn her keep here at May's. She was a right beautiful girl, but Spurr had liked her better before she'd put the phony lust behind her eyes.

He was old and ragged, big-boned but stringy as jerked beef, and everywhere the sun seared him he was the color of old saddle leather. Where it couldn't find him, he was white as talcum. His face was unshaven and the texture of a falling-down chicken coop, with brown moles and droopy eyelids.

Of course, he repulsed her. Age was beauty's nemesis. It was natural to shy away from it.

But you couldn't tell by her slightly parted lips, the tip of her pink tongue poking out between them, nor by the way she enticingly kneaded her breasts, shoulders rising and falling as she breathed. He usually liked older women, but this girl, at twenty, was as old as they came here at May's. She'd have to do.

Spurr held his glass out to her. “Pour me another drink. Then lets you an' me pound the pillow, darlin'.” He cracked his own phony grin, trying to drum up some of his old, rakish charm, and reached behind her to squeeze one of her plump butt cheeks.

“I bet you can really pound it, eh, Mr. Spurr?”

“It's just Spurr. And no, I can't really pound it. But I can give it a tap or two.” Spurr chuckled as the girl filled his glass. When she'd swung around from the bed, enough of her hair had slipped out from beneath the choker to reveal her right ear.

Or what had been her right ear before most of it had been hacked away, leaving little more than a ragged pink stub.

“Good lord,” Spurr said softly, rising up from the bed in shock, “what happened to your ear?”

The impulsive exclamation had escaped his lips before he'd realized it. He'd always been one for sticking his boot clean up to its mule ears in his mouth. The girl jerked her head toward him, flushing and covering her ear with her hand.

“Don't look!” she squealed, slamming the bottle back down on the dresser, then dropping her chin to her chest in horror. “You're not . . . no one's supposed to see! Miss May warned me—word gets out, she'll fire me!”

Spurr rose and walked over to her. “What happened, honey?”

The girl shook her head.

“Come on—you can tell ole Spurr. What happened to your ear, dear girl?”

She kept her head down, hand over the stub of her ear. “Market hunter. Crazy drunk. Decided to take a trophy, I reckon.”

“Ah . . . hell. I am sorry.”

“It ain't your fault.” She looked up at him skeptically, searchingly, wonderingly. Then she dropped her chin again to speak to the floor near her plump, bare feet. “If you'll turn away, I'll cover it back up. If you want me to stay, that is . . .”

Spurr's heart swelled again. He choked back a sob. Christ, what a world . . . The blond girl he'd killed flashed through his mind once more, and so did the children the slavers had been hauling across the prairie. The dead killer in the hall had been a shaver once, lumbering around in swaddling clothes . . .