Bloody Season (10 page)

“That is thin.”

“Doc never leaves Tombstone unless he has a better game somewhere else.”

Wyatt sat back. “Thank you for coming over, Harry.”

The lawyer didn’t rise. “You should know they are saying that you failed to find Leonardhead and Crane because you didn’t want to.”

“Who is?”

“There is talk.”

“Where do you stand?”

“If I gave it any credit I would not have come over.”

Wyatt looked at his ham. “Are you seeing Billy Breakenridge anytime soon?”

“Why?”

“It isn’t important. I will talk with him myself.”

Jones got up, bending again to kiss Sadie. She asked him to give her love to Kitty.

“Johnny will take care of that,” said Wyatt.

The skin tightened across the lawyer’s cheeks. He hovered a moment, his hands twitching at his sides. Then he left the restaurant.

“I cannot feature a cuckold.” Wyatt picked up his fork.

“He is always the wild card.”

Sadie said, “Kitty told me Johnny has offered to deputize him. What does that mean?”

“It means he gets a cut off every dollar he collects in county taxes. Billy Blab packs Curly Bill with him when he visits the ranches so he doesn’t come back with his own pockets turned out.”

“Is that why you want to talk with him?”

“I will tell you if it comes to anything.”

“It is too bad about Harry.”

Wyatt ate. “I cannot feature a cuckold.”

Chapter Seven

“M
aria, es el diente oro,” Doc said. “No esta el diente oro. Toma un otro.”

“I cannot pull one of the others. The gold one is the one that’s impacted. Shit, what’s the word? Decaimiento. It must come out.”

“No est decaimiento. Mucho dinero.”

“It will cost you a lot more if I don’t pull it now. Do you want to lose your whole jaw? Mandibula?”

They were in one of the gilded boxes that had given the Bird Cage its name. The curtains were open to let in sunlight and Doc half-straddled a fat Mexican woman in pale green taffeta sprawled with a swollen jaw in one of the cigarette-stung seats. His rose-colored shirtsleeves were rolled up his thin sinewy arms and he had a pair of iron pliers in one hand. She clamped her mouth shut. Her eyes were murderous in her brown face.

“Damn it! Lottie!”

A moment later the curtains at the back of the box moved and a large woman in charcoal broadcloth and black lace entered. Her hair was caught with silver combs and she had enough paint on her face to make it seem as if there were no paint on it at all. Doc said, “I could shoot her and pry her mouth apart, but pulling the tooth would not do her much good in that condition.”

The woman turned to Maria and spoke to her in rapid Spanish. The Mexican woman listened with her eyes stony on Doc. As Lottie continued, the woman’s expression thawed. “Si esta bien,” she said after a short silence. She closed her eyes and opened a mouth with more spaces inside it than teeth.

“What did you say to her?” Doc asked.

“I said I would have the gold filling melted and made into earrings for her. I will, too.”

“Lottie, you have always had a way with whores.”

“So have you. But Mr. Hutchinson’s and my living depends on it.” She went out through the back, carrying her skirts.

Doc settled himself firmly astride Maria’s broad lap, spread the fingers of his left hand across her face, bracing himself, and clamped the offending molar between the pliers.

The rafters were still ringing with her screams when he clanked the pliers and raw tooth into the shallow basin Lottie Hutchinson had provided. This event drew furious whistles and hand-smacking from the boxes across the room, where some off-duty whores had gathered to watch the show with their ruffled dressing-gowns hanging open. Doc bowed gracefully, filled a tumbler with gin from a bottle on the box’s little table, drank off part of it, and handed the rest to his patient.

“Enjuaga y escupi.” It was the only phrase in Spanish he could deliver without hesitating.

She chugged the gin around inside her mouth and spat a bright pink stream into the basin as he held it. Then she drained the glass and swallowed.

“Gracias, Señor Doctor. Quiere usted paga ahora?”

“Pay me later. I have climbed on you all I care to for one day.”

He was losing his audience. He handed her the basin, then tugged down the points of his vest and put on his frock coat and gray hat.

He descended the stairs carrying his dusty black bag and found Morgan Earp slouched in the third row of seats in the auditorium. His long arms rested across the shoulders of a redhead and a brunette hooked into dresses as tight as sausage casings. Neither of the women looked less than forty under the powder. Morgan himself was in his late twenties, his face boyishly good-looking under peeling sunburned skin and the trademark Earp whiskers. One loop of his string tie hung below its mate, tied carelessly in a manner that always infuriated Wyatt. Doc believed that this was Morgan’s purpose.

“I thought you throwed away your shingle after Dodge,” said Morgan.

“I keep my hand in for when my luck goes sour. And a lady requested.”

“You better give a thought to closing that cut before Kate sees it and takes the wrong meaning from it.”

Doc touched a hand to the scratch leaking blood on his left cheek. “I think I will leave it open until she gets back. She has been taking me for granted lately.” Kate had carried two black eyes and some loose teeth into the red-light district south of town a few days earlier and he hadn’t seen her since. He couldn’t remember what they had fought about this time. “I heard you fellows ran out of trail down in Mexico.”

“It was that Buckskin Frank Leslie,” Morgan said. “Johnny brung him back from Tombstone and after Bat’s horse pulled lame and he left us Leslie put his muckety injun scout know-how to work getting us lost. I don’t trust him any farther than Johnny and I don’t trust Johnny as far as I can pick him up and throw him.”

“You should have brought me.”

“No one could find you, Doc.”

“I had a poker game in Charleston that night.”

Morgan goosed the redhead and rose. Both women took the hint then and left through the side door, bustles swaying. Morgan regarded Doc.

“They are saying you came back late on a fagged horse and got a fresh one from Dunbar and left it hitched outside all night, like you was expecting to have to light out in a Missouri hurry.”

“They were discussing the holdup in Charleston. I thought Wyatt might need me to ride posse, but he never.”

“You don’t usually play poker with a Henry rifle.”

“I do when I play in Charleston.”

Morgan chewed on that, shrugged. “O.K.” He put his hat on the back of his head. “You drinking?”

“Damn it, Morg, you know if I pulled that job I would have got the eighty thousand. Whoever shot Philpot never knew his gun from his bunghole. He should have dropped a horse.”

“Maybe he missed.”

“I shoot well enough sober and I wouldn’t stick up anything drunk.”

“I wouldn’t know you sober. Hell, Doc, I’m just asking because Wyatt is too polite to. I wasn’t riding shotgun on that shipment. It don’t swing no freight with me if you stuck up King Alexander of Russia.”

Doc said, “I sure would not have stuck it up with you riding it.”

After a moment Morgan took that the good way and grinned. They repaired to the Alhambra.

The spring rains came, pounding the last of the snow out of the Whetstones northwest of Tombstone and bringing out the desert blooms in broad streaks of orange and white and blue that withered quickly in the sun and were taken away as brown dust by the wind. The San Pedro spilled over its banks and began to recede. In May a prospector sifting dirt near Contention spotted a shaggy buffalo bull summering north of the border and it was getting to be such a rare sight that some miners left their claims to look at it and a few families came out from town in buggies and spring wagons so the children would have something to remember and tell about. For a time they watched it chewing unconcernedly on the spring grass, a big blade-humped graybeard with horn scars as thick as snakes on its shoulders and flanks and a yellow eye. Finally somebody shot it and everyone went back to what he was doing before.

Joseph Isaac Clanton rode up from Charleston on the last day of May but one, his skin burned brown and his hair and chin-whiskers gone red-gold driving herds north from Sonora. In Tombstone he caught a bath and a bottle and checked into the Grand Hotel on Allen wearing the suit he had carried rolled up with his gear. In the Eagle Brewery Saloon he was seen talking and sharing another bottle with Billy Breakenridge, who got up and left him with a slap on his shoulder when San Pedro regular Frank Stilwell came over carrying a beer and trailing smoke from a short cigar. Ike laughed and pretended to shield his eyes from the glare off the new deputy’s star on Stilwell’s vest. Behan did most of his recruiting in the lower valley. Later Ike shot pool behind Hatch’s and played poker with Virgil Earp and some others at Hafford’s. Tombstone was a good old place and the law was friendly.

He had come west with his mother and father to pan gold in California, worked cattle in Texas with the old man and his younger brother Phineas when Billy was still nursing and his sister Mary was in school, and migrated to the territory after his mother’s death when Texas cattle were being quarantined for the tick fever and couldn’t be driven north where the money was because the army and the Rangers were waiting at the border to turn them back. In those days Ike’s father was a hell-driven man, black-bearded and hard and as quick with his fists as he was with a quotation from Scripture, not white and cranky and stove-in as he was now. That Clanton wouldn’t have treated a peckerwood section hand like Curly Bill Brocius as a full partner while ordering his own eldest son around like a nigger.

They got the cattle wild below the border, and if some domestic Mexican ranch beef got caught up in the drive there was no help for it, a man couldn’t stop to weed out brands from naked stock. There was no help for it either when the wild ones became scarce and grandee stock was all there was, in numbers so big no greaser don would miss a few hundred head, even if he had the vaqueros to prevent them from wandering all over Sonora and into American territory where they belonged to whoever spotted them first. Up here the clan ran off small parties of Apaches looking to steal the herds, and they’d been fighting them and the Mexicans when Tombstone’s first adobe was still yellow mud on the floor of the San Pedro. Like the cattle the place was as much theirs as anyone’s.

Ike spent the next few days loafing around town. He ordered a pair of Mexican boots at Tappanier’s, priced a Centennial Winchester with silver mountings at Spangenberg’s gun shop, bet on a Toughnut Street cockfight and lost, met with some cattle buyers in from Tucson at Dolan’s Saloon who were not very interested in purchasing stolen Mexican beef, ate in the Can Can Chop House and in the lunchroom at the Alhambra, and bucked the tiger at Luke Short’s faro table in the Oriental. Short was a sour-faced, dapper man who dealt with his straw hat tilted forward over his eyes and wouldn’t say what had prompted the late Charlie Storms to challenge him last winter. He carried a short pistol in a special pocket sewn into the lining of his suit-coat.

Ike’s poke was getting light, and he had still to catch Wyatt Earp alone.

On June 2, Ike was back in the Eagle Brewery drinking without help when Wyatt came in and shook his hand. The gambler’s palm was smooth but for a ridge of callus across the base of his fingers, and strung with piano wire. He asked what Ike was drinking and bought another tall whiskey for him and a beer for himself. The bartender wiped off a table and set down a mug and a glass with moisture beading the outsides.

“Seen Frank McLaury lately?” Wyatt asked.

Ike hesitated, then nodded. “Up in Galeyville.” He wondered if Frank was what this was about. It was a matter of some local talk that Hattie Earp, stepdaughter of James, the oldest of the brothers, was sneaking around with one of the McLaurys; although Ike supposed it was Tom and not his sawed-off, short-fused older brother. James, displaying considerable indignation for a retired whoremaster who had married one of his girls, had sprained his good arm birching Hattie within the hearing of neighbors.

“Did Billy Breakenridge tell you I wanted to talk with you?” Wyatt asked.

“Yes, but he never said what about.”

“If you are close to Frank you might want to bring him in."

It wasn’t about Hattie. “Well, it depends on your direction.”

“It is involved and private.”

“Sounds like money.”

“Thirty-six hundred dollars.”

Ike sipped at his whiskey. Above them the gas ceiling fan swished as it turned. He waited for the breeze to reach them. “Frank’s brother Tom is the range banker.”

“I am not looking to buy any greaser cattle.”

“Well, what then?”

“Meet me out front and I will tell you.” Wyatt got up, leaving his beer untouched.

Ike drained his glass and joined him on the boardwalk fishing for his plug of Levi Garrett’s. Wyatt charged his black pipe. The light was dying around them. A match flared yellow in the window of the Oriental across Fifth, then softened into the butter color of a lamp burning.

Wyatt got his tobacco going finally and flipped his match into the street. “You are aware that Wells Fargo has put up twelve hundred a head for the men who tried to hold up the Benson stage?”

“The shinplasters are all over the country.” Ike used his tongue to turn the chew around inside his mouth.

“Help me catch Leonardhead and Crane and you can have every cent of the reward.”

“Riding posse is nigger work.”

“Charleston is a small town. Everybody knows everybody else. It is common talk there that these three men stop at your ranches, the McLaurys’s and yours.”

“I am an honest cattleman.”

Nellie Cashman passed them in a white blouse and dark skirt and jacket. They took off their hats and she inclined her head, lowering her startling eyes. Wyatt pulled on his pipe and admired her trim figure from behind. “I do not think that it can be as tight as all that,” he said, out of her earshot.