Микки Спиллейн - Last Stage to Hell Junction

“Please call me Willa.”

They smiled at each other, Willa weakly but indeed smiling.

And then there it was, with a high-riding sign by way of identification: HALE JUNCTION INN in red-edged black letters, though the HALE here had also been replaced with a jagged scarlet HELL. The front of the place was wider than most businesses along Main Street, and though its windows were boarded up, the façade had seen a whitewashing within recent memory. The boardwalk out front bore no missing planks, and no vermin were in sight, except the human one escorting them. While it didn’t shout its difference from the neighbors, and did not stand out, the inn was not your usual ghost-town hovel.

For half a second, Willa took the small dark figure standing near the doors with arms folded for a cigar-store Indian, but then realized this statue with its immobile carved features was a living, breathing man — red turban, blue army jacket, buckskin trousers, high leather boots, knife at his hip, and a rifle propped against the wall. He was the guard at the gate. Only those dark watchful eyes moved.

This must be Broken Knife.

The women paused under the overhang before double doors, heavy carved dark wood ones that, unlike the school and church bells, for some reason hadn’t been scavenged; and the window panels were stained glass — unbroken!

“Allow me,” came the cultured baritone of their captor.

They hadn’t noticed Hargrave catching up with them, and Willa started a bit when he announced himself. Rita gave her a raised-eyebrow look.

“Your luggage will be brought to you,” he said, with a sweeping bow.

Was that supposed to be funny, Willa wondered, or could he really be that pompous?

The man in black and ruffled white opened both doors for the women, stepped aside for them to go in, then followed, shut those doors, and hovered. What the women found within was not lavish, but neither was it something normally found in a ghost town.

They were in a hotel lobby. Nothing else about it was as fancy as those stained-glass doors, and the interior had not been maintained as well as it might have been, had the rest of the town been alive and well. But this interior was relatively clean, and the various chairs and sofas, scattered around where the lobby opened up into a parlor at the right, were holding onto their stuffing, and even a couple of potted plants were apparently getting enough water to survive.

At the left stairs rose to guest rooms, apparently, with a check-in desk tucked back and facing them, behind which was a plump little man with a practiced smile waiting before his wall of keys — round-lensed spectacles perched on his red knob of a nose, his white hair was a wispy memory, his full cheeks home to the white bristle of an indifferent, infrequent shave, and his black vest and high-collared white shirt had a slightly dingy look.

The whole place did. The carpeting was faded and frayed, but it was carpeting, all right, with a fancy black-and-white pattern. The parlor’s stone fireplace way off to the right had Indian pottery along the mantle; antlers rode the surrounding wall. Something about the Inn reminded her of an off-season resort before a maintenance and cleanup crew had arrived.

Into this area, Randy guided Parker to an overstuffed leather chair, the businessman looking dejected and dazed. The boy lingered nearby, keeping an eye trained and his pistol in hand. Willa and Rita remained in the outer area with Hargrave.

“Welcome, ladies,” said the man behind the check-in counter.

The two women said nothing.

The desk man’s voice was a raspy, high-pitched, folksy thing. “No need to be shy, ladies. Step right up, step right up.”

After exchanged glances and eyebrow shrugs, they responded to this carnival-barker entreaty and walked to the counter, Hargrave looking on with obvious amusement.

“What a pleasant surprise you are!” the chubby elf of a man said. “Oh, excuse me. I should introduce myself.” He lowered his head and touched his chest with short, fat fingers. “I am the proprietor of the Hale Junction Inn — Wilmer Wiley. You’ll meet the Mrs. Wiley soon enough. Her name is Vera and she runs a tight ship.”

Rita asked, “We’re a surprise?”

“Yes, and, as I say, a pleasant one. I had not been told we would have guests of the female persuasion. But, as it happens, we can provide you lovely ladies with a room to share, as soon as our colored girl dusts and straightens up a bit.” He looked past the women. “Will that be to your liking, Mr. Hargrave?”

Hargrave stepped forward, his black hat in hand; he was always ready to take center stage.

“Quite suitable,” he said. “Add their rooms to my bill... and I will put money in thy purse for meals, as well.” His attention turned to Willa and Rita. “Ladies, there is no need for you to sign the guest register. This is a special sort of hostelry.”

What in heaven’s name kind of place is this? Willa wondered.

Hargrave was saying, “For the sake of civility, good ladies, what appellations might you answer to?”

Willa hesitated, but her companion said, “I’m Rita. This is Willa.” Last names were conspicuously absent.

He gestured with an open hand. “Lovely names for lovely ladies. We will get to know each other better when time allows. For the nonce, I must deal with my wounded comrade.”

Another bow, and he made his exit.

Rita raised an eyebrow and said softly, “For the nonce?”

“At least he’s a gentleman.”

Very softly Rita said, “For a kidnapping murdering stagecoach bandit.”

Their rotund, elfin host gestured toward the parlor. “Ladies, if you’ll make yourself comfortable, perhaps I could offer a potable? Not too early for wine, you think?”

Not for him, most likely.

Willa said, “Do you have coffee?”

“My, yes,” he said, eager to please. His twinkly eyes lived under bushy white brows. “And you, my dear?”

Willa said, “Tea, perhaps?”

“Tea it is.”

He came out from behind the desk and waddled through the wide archway into the parlor. The women followed him, hanging back some, then paused as he cut left. Through open double doors in a wall of wood and mostly glass, the innkeeper entered a typical if modest hotel dining room where tables bore no cloths and framed landscapes hung crooked. At the back left, he slipped through a door that was presumably to the kitchen.

Rita looked at Willa with wide eyes, and Willa did the same to Rita. Then the pair looked around at the overstuffed furnishings and stone fireplace and looming deer heads. Parker was already seated, lost in gloom.

Randy came over to the women, equally eager to please.

“Not what you expected, huh?” he asked, and laughed like a horse with something caught in its throat. “Like a fancy hotel in Denver or such like.”

“Oh yes,” Rita said.

Oh no , Willa thought. Nothing like Denver.

But exactly like a mining town hotel gone to seed. This must be what the Inn had been like during the months of Hale Junction’s decline into abandonment.

Only, why was it still here? And some kind of going concern?

“Make yourself to home,” the boy said, as if delighted he could show them such a good time. “I best get over to the livery and help Mr. Hargrave. You gals stay put.”

He started out, then stopped, turned, the friendliness gone.

“Best you pay heed,” he said firmly, gesturing with the gun in his hand, not threatening, just a thing he happened to be holding. “Ol’ Wiley’ll call the troops out on you, and his wife is mean as a rattler and will shoot you soon as look at you. And Broken Knife, standin’ guard out there? That’s just his name. His knife ain’t broke at all.”