Микки Спиллейн - Last Stage to Hell Junction

York winced, shook his head skeptically. “Tulley, I’m fairly well known in the Southwest...”

“Sure you are, by way of drawin’s on dime novels and such. Never seen no photographs. When you rode into Trinidad, not all that long ago, did anybody say, ‘Well, look who it is! The famous Caleb York!’ ”

“No,” he admitted. In fact, he had stayed a stranger in town for some while before revealing his identity. “What do you think, Tulley? With this winter beard of mine, could I pass for an outlaw called McCory?”

“Only risk I see,” Tulley said, “is if one of Hargrave’s bunch ever rode with McCory. But he ain’t been heard of in New Mexico, or we’d a knowed about it.”

York studied the poster, then tossed it on his desk and strode back to the cell block again. Crawley was sleeping. York kicked the bars and scared him awake.

“Crawley! Another question for you.”

The prisoner glanced back wide-eyed and rolled off the cot onto his feet. He stumbled over to the bars and clutched them again.

“Try my best to help, Sheriff.”

Butter wouldn’t melt.

“Is one of Hargrave’s men called McCory? Bert or Bret or some such?”

Frowning, Crawley said, “Heard tell of a Bret McCory. He killed a marshal in Colorado. Never met the man.”

“How long have you been riding with the Hargrave gang?”

“Nigh on two year. Pretty much from the start of it. Afore that, Mr. Hargrave was play actin’.” Crawley frowned. “Me sayin’ I rode with him, that don’t constitute a confession of past sins, do it?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned, Burrell. Your best hope for a future that doesn’t include a rope is to tell me everything and anything you know about this current crime.”

Crawley grinned. “And of course I ain’t guilty of that, ’cause I been in Trinidad.”

Murdering some poor cowhand.

“Never heard tell,” York said, “of this McCory among the others in your bunch?”

“No, sir. Why?”

“You asking the questions now?”

Crawley shook his head. “Surely not.”

York changed the subject: “You had supper, Burrell?”

“No. I ain’t et all day. I was all doped on that happy juice the doc give me.”

“We’ll fix you up.”

The jail had an arrangement with the café.

York returned to his office, got behind his desk, and Tulley came over, delivering a fresh cup of coffee. York had a sip; it was hot and... well, it was hot.

York said, quietly, to his deputy, “I want you to go with me on this little jaunt. Won’t take much effort to find a deserted building across the way from that hotel. We can situate you and your shotgun in a window where you can take it all in.”

“Like the sound, Sheriff. Like the sound.”

“In the meantime, go over to the café and let them know we have a prisoner who’ll be needing meals, starting with right now. Then go over to Harris Mercantile. Newt’s likely closed, but pound on the second-floor door, up those stairs alongside the building. Tell him we need his older son to fill in as a deputy, as we’ll be leaving Mr. Crawley behind. And have Newt round up some road vittles for you — jerky, pilot bread, hardtack. Take a water jug. This expedition may take a day or two. Also plenty of ammunition for that scattergun of yours. Box of cartridges for me, as well .44 caliber.”

Tulley had been nodding all through that.

“Then go over to my hotel room,” York said. “The desk man knows to give you the key. Get my carpetbag out of the wardrobe. There’s a gray Stetson, kind of beat up, on the upper shelf. Bring that, too.”

Tulley was efficient, running all those errands in under half an hour, including delivering Lem Harris — a strapping boy who was dumb as a post but tough as the jerky his pappy sold. York gave the boy a deputy badge and simple instructions and entrusted him with a loaded rifle from the rack on the wall.

“I’ll get Gert loaded up,” Tulley said, meaning his mule, and headed out with his arms full of a sack of things from the mercantile.

York put the carpetbag on the desk, next to the Stetson his deputy brought him, and selected from the bottom desk drawer some spare clothes fit for riding the range — buckskin jacket, green santeen shirt, canvas trousers, old boots. His professional black apparel would not do. He was Bret McCory now.

Just another outlaw.

The shadows were long as Dr. Albert Miller rode in his rickety one-horse buckboard along the narrow rutted road out of Trinidad. The going was rougher even than usual for the doctor and his Missouri Fox Trotter, what with the muddy patches left by the brief but torrential rain of earlier that day. With the rain passed, it was cool for New Mexico and would be downright cold by the time he’d make it back from the Brentwood Junction relay station with Sheriff Caleb York’s latest addition to Boot Hill.

Not that those the sheriff dispatched from this life didn’t deserve the trip — York, to the doctor’s way of thinking, was himself a surgeon of sorts, highly skilled at removing damaged or diseased parts infecting the community. The doc was on his way to pick up the remains of just the kind of unwanted man in Trinidad who, paradoxically enough, was also likely a wanted one.

Ned Clutter, the sheriff had said, the dead man’s name was — one of those involved in this hijacking of the stagecoach bearing Raymond Parker, Willa Cullen, and Rita Filley. The doctor dearly hoped he would not meet any of those three good people in his capacity as Trinidad’s unofficial coroner.

On his way to the relay station, the doctor made a brief stop at the Trinidad cemetery. He always took this small side trip, when he traveled that road, whether to visit a patient or collect a corpse. His wife, Mildred, was buried here in the shade of the lone mesquite tree, far too gentle a soul to inhabit a place the residents called Boot Hill.

He’d seen that she got a nice stone marker, with the words BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER and 1835–1880. She’d died much too young, Millie had, and for several years after her passing, he had wedded himself to another: demon rum. His children came to visit from the East when he stopped answering their letters, and got him straightened around.

He felt lucky he hadn’t lost his practice during those dark years. But he’d done his drinking evenings and into the night — the hours he’d once spent with Millie — and he had not fallen so far that he’d neglected the living in his care.

But what a bitter pill it was to swallow, his wife — less than fifty years of age! — dying in her sleep with no malady to be treated or symptoms to serve as a warning. The only solace, though not a small one, was that she had not suffered. In this hard country, suffering often accompanied death. And it always accompanied life.

True, she’d been slight of frame and prone to every cold or minor ailment that could be visited upon a person. Her body was frail but her spirit was strong, and she had raised a son and a daughter with love and dedication. She had endured the life of a doctor’s wife, the terrible hours, the need for her husband to put others above her, their children, and himself.

And she had done it with good humor and loving ways.

As he stood with his hat in his hands, staring at the gravestone, he did not speak to her, as some did. Miller was, in his way, a man of science and he did not believe she was there in the ground. Only her bones. But this was still a place where he could visit the thought of her.

The pear-shaped little doctor in the rumpled brown shirt with a black string tie climbed up on the buckboard, got himself settled, shook the reins, and resumed his journey. A breeze riffled his thinning white hair. In the back of the buckboard rode a lidded wicker coffin, waiting to be filled. Also tagging along was his Gladstone bag, not that this “patient” would have any need of the services it implied. But Doc Miller didn’t go anywhere without the tools of his trade. You never knew when someone might need you.