Mary Russell - Doc

“Here’s your teeth,” James said, voice neutral. “Morg’s staying with Doc. Mattie Blaylock’s there, too. I’m going out to find Katie. McCarty won’t say it, but Morg’s pretty sure Doc’s dying. Kate’ll want to know.”

The rest of the day passed in a steady gray downpour.

Around six in the evening, Eddie Foy took Verelda and a bottle of whiskey over to Bessie’s. James led them to the kitchen, where Wyatt was sitting at the table, battered and remote. The room was small, so Verelda stayed in the doorway, curious but unwilling to go all the way in. She didn’t mind Morgan and she liked James, but Wyatt had always scared her.

“Our boy’s still alive,” Eddie reported, getting glasses down off a shelf. “Drink this,” he said, pouring a shot for Wyatt. “Good for what ails you.”

Wyatt stared at the glass for a few moments. Then he drank, grimacing at the burn.

“Well done,” said Eddie. “I believe I’ll join you. James?”

James nodded, and the three of them had a second shot before Eddie sat back in his chair.

“A man walks into a bar,” he proposed, like he was onstage. “He’s got a mountain lion on a leash. Man says, Bartender, do you serve politicians in this place? Why, sure, the barkeep says. There’s George Hoover right over there! Man says, All right then, I’ll have a whiskey, and my friend here will have George Hoover.”

Wyatt looked at him and spoke for the first time since the fight. “If tha’s a joke,” he mumbled, thick-lipped, “I’m too dumb t’ get it.”

“Wyatt, I’m from Chicago,” Eddie told him. “Let me explain politics to you.”

He poured them all a third and leaned across the table.

“The trick of it,” said Eddie, “is that you always ask, Who gains? Cui bono? That’s how the old Romans said it. Who gets the good of it? Ed Masterson dead, killed by a drunk. Damn bad luck for poor Ed, and the citizens are outraged! A city marshal, gunned down dead on Front Street, and everyone’s after asking, What’s it going to take to get a little law and order around here? Then Johnnie Sanders is carried off in that fire, and sure: wasn’t it Big George at the wake, buttonholing everyone in sight, noising it around that it was Demon Rum did the poor boy in? Drunks killing lawmen. Drunks setting fires. So, now, ask yourself: cui bono if another lawman gets killed this season? Who gains, when Dog Kelley only won by three votes last time, and the next election balanced on a pinhead, so it is! Another fine upstanding officer dead, and him a teetotal Methodist, honest as the day is long! About time somebody got tough on the saloons, don’t you know … Vote Reform, son. Vote Reform!”

Still in the doorway, listening, Verelda finally worked up the nerve to speak to Wyatt. “I don’t think it was George put the price on your head,” she told him. “It’s just a guess, but me? I bet it was Maggie.”

The men all looked at her curiously.

Emboldened, Verelda stepped closer, poured herself a drink, and slugged back the shot.

“Maggie was a bitch even before she found Jesus and swore off booze. Now she wants to be the governor’s wife: Mrs. Governor George Hoover!” Verelda sang with fruity ersatz propriety, waving an imperious hand in the air. “Presiding over Dry Kansas, like the goddam queen of Sheba.”

He should have slept. The fight, and then the liquor. He hadn’t had a drink in years, and it should have hit him hard, but in a stand-up contest, remorse and self-loathing can battle whiskey to a draw.

It was long past dark when Bat Masterson showed up at the kitchen door. James let him in. Bessie poured him a drink. Nobody said anything when he dumped Wyatt’s gun belt and star on the table. Wyatt himself barely glanced at them.

Bat shook the rain off his hat and shrugged out of his slicker. “Took a while, but I convinced Driskill his kid had it coming,” Bat reported. “And I told Bob Wright I’m off his payroll. He can get somebody else to ref his goddam fights. He still swears it wasn’t him put the price on your head, but now he’s claiming he ‘heard from somebody’ the offer was only good while you were wearing a badge—”

“Horseshit,” James snorted. “You could see it in his eyes, Wyatt. He wanted you dead! Why else was he out on the street at five in the morning? He wanted to make sure Driskill got you!”

“A look in somebody’s eyes ain’t gonna stand up in court,” Bessie pointed out.

Bat leaned over and tapped Wyatt’s star. “You put that on, I’ll back you,” he told Wyatt, choosing sides at last. “But if you need work? We can use a faro dealer at the Lone Star. Full-time. Soon as your hands heal up.”

Wyatt stared at the badge for a while. Finally, stiff and sore and silent, he got up and went to the window, where he watched the rain slide down the glass.

What the Irishman said about politics made sense. Big George Hoover would have campaigned waving Wyatt’s bloody shirt and he probably would have won. Maggie might well have tried to make that possible. Still … Tobie Driskill had a grudge, too. His brother Jesse had more than enough money to offer a bounty. They might have known George Hoyt down in Texas—

Except Bat had just admitted that he thought it was Bob.

And James was right, too. The sons of Nicholas Earp knew what scorn looked like. Wyatt had seen contempt in Bob Wright’s eyes, and felt an unleashed, vindictive malevolence in every blow that landed. He was sure of this much. If Tobie Driskill had killed him last night, Bob Wright would’ve danced on his grave.

But that could all be true, and it still might have been somebody else entirely who offered the bounty—someone who hated Wyatt’s guts for reasons Wyatt himself would never know. There were a lot of men in that category. He might never find out who put the price on his head in Dodge that year.

Doesn’t matter, he thought.

Humiliated, ashamed, certain Doc Holliday was dying, he was sick of it all. Sick of politics. Sick of being hated. Sick of Dodge. Sick of himself.

“Hell,” he said, thick-lipped. “I quit. They’re gonna fire me anyways.”

James slumped in relief and shouted, “Thank God!” Then he stood up straight and declared, “To hell with ’em! This town’s played out! Let’s all go down to Tombstone!”

“James!” Bessie cried. “I ain’t movin’ to Arizona! Dammit, there is nothin’ there but gravel and scorpions—”

“And silver and miners and money , honey!”

The two of them were still arguing when Wyatt heard footsteps coming up the back stairs and across the porch toward the kitchen door. “That’s Morgan,” he said, for Morg had grown up wearing Wyatt’s hand-me-down shoes, and he still kind of shuffled when he walked.

Waiting for the door to open, everybody got quiet.

This is it, they were thinking. Doc’s gone.

“Wyatt?” Morg said, standing just outside so as not to drip all over Bessie’s floor. “He’s asking for you. Best hurry.”

In the top drawer of Dr. Tom McCarty’s desk, there was an envelope labeled J.H.H . Inside it was a folded sheet of heavy rag paper bearing three lines of neat, copperplate handwriting.

DR. JOHN STILES HOLLIDAY

66 FORREST

ATLANTA, GEORGIA

Beneath that, in Tom McCarty’s own scrawl, was a note: Pt requests: notify post-mortem; ship body per instructions .

At the end of September, John Holliday had given Tom that envelope and ten dollars to cover his final expenses. “I would like to be buried next to my mother,” he said, buttoning his shirt over a chest dwindled down to bone. Tom tried not to show what he was thinking, but the dentist saw the look and recited, “ Youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies … ”