Bloody Season Read online

  BLOODY SEASON

  By Loren D. Estleman

  A Dimension W Western

  Dimension W is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright 2014 by Loren D. Estleman

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Photo and biographical profile by Deborah Morgan

  Since the appearance of his first novel in 1976, Loren D. Estleman has written nearly 70 books and hundreds of short stories and articles. Among those books: Writing the Popular Novel, from Writer’s Digest Books; the second in a new series featuring Estleman’s Los Angeles film detective, Valentino (Alone, featuring Greta Garbo, December 2009); Burning Midnight (the 22nd Amos Walker novel, June 2012); Roy & Lillie: A Love Story (between a reprobate Old West judge and a celebrated British beauty, August 2010); The Confessions of Al Capone (his largest project to date, October 2012); and a novel about hanging judge Isaac Parker, The Branch and the Scaffold (April 2009). There are several short stories in the hopper, and proposals for future novels in both the mystery and historical western genres. He recently finished writing the 23rd installment in the Amos Walker P.I. series, and is currently working on another standalone novel.

  Estleman has received fan letters from such notables as John D. MacDonald, The Amazing Kreskin, Mel Tormé, and Steve Forbes. He has acquired a loyal cult readership across the United States and in Europe, and his work has appeared in 23 languages.

  An authority on both criminal history and the American West, Estleman has been called the most critically acclaimed author of his generation. He has been nominated for the National Book Award, and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award.

  He has received twenty national writing awards: the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement from Western Writers of America, The Barry Award from Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, four Shamuses from the Private Eye Writers of America, five Spurs from the Western Writers of America, two American Mystery Awards from Mystery Scene Magazine, Outstanding Western Writer, 1985, from Popular Fiction Monthly, two Stirrup Awards for outstanding articles in the Western Writers of America magazine, The Roundup, and three Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. In 1987, the Michigan Foundation of the Arts presented him with its award for literature. In 1997, the Michigan Library Association named him the recipient of the Michigan Author’s Award. In 2007, Nicotine Kiss was named a Notable Book by the Library of Michigan.

  In 1993, Estleman was Guest of Honor at the Southwest Mystery Convention in Austin, Texas. He was Honored Guest at Eyecon ‘99 (Private Eye Writers of America Convention), held in St. Louis in July of that year. In June 2001, he was Guest of Honor (the first American chosen) at the Bloody Words Convention in Toronto, Canada.

  He has been a judge for many literary honors, including the prestigious Hopwood Award given by the University of Michigan. He has written book reviews for many newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, and in 1988 he covered the filming of Lonesome Dove for TV Guide.

  He’s worked hard to get where he is, beginning in the unheated upstairs of the 1867 Michigan farmhouse where he was raised. His fondest childhood memory is that of curling up in his robe with a mug of hot chocolate in front of the television to enjoy such grand western series as Maverick and Gunsmoke.

  When he was fifteen years old, he sent out his first short story for publication. Over the next eight years, he collected 160 rejections. He attributes his tenacity to ego, and he’s earned that, too. He and his brown-bag lunch commuted to Eastern Michigan University to cut expenses after his father was disabled and his mother went to work to support the family.

  Estleman often says he’s not a fast writer. He is, however, consistent, spending an average of six hours a day at his typewriter. He polishes as he goes, consuming a prodigious amount of cheap typing paper; a process he refers to as “writing for the wastebasket.”

  His favorite writers — and those who have inspired his work — include Jack London, Edgar Allan Poe, W. Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, and Edith Wharton.

  A sought-after speaker and a veteran journalist of police-beat news, Estleman graduated from Eastern Michigan University in 1974 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature and Journalism. On April 27, 2002, EMU presented him with an honorary doctorate in letters. He left the job market in 1980 to write full time. He lives in Michigan.

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  To Dick Wheeler, who helped me buck the tiger.

  No weather will be found in this book. This is an attempt to pull a book through without weather.

  —Mark Twain

  Remember to get the weather in your god damned book—weather is very important.

  —Ernest Hemingway

  BLOODY SEASON

  PART ONE

  FLY’S ALLEY

  As a general thing—as far as I could make out—these murderous adventures were not forays undertaken to avenge injuries, nor to settle old disputes or sudden failings out; no, as a rule they were simply duels between strangers—duels between people who had never even been introduced to each other, and between whom existed no cause of offence whatever.

  —Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889

  Chapter One

  He was dying faster than usual that morning, striping the sides of the dry sink with bloody sputum and shreds of shattered lung. His ears rang and his head felt hollow.

  When the first seizure of the day had passed he remained leaning on his palms on the maple washstand, shoulders gathered into a tent behind his lowered head, the stench of evaporated night-sweat stale in his nostrils. On such mornings his senses were painfully acute and he could not stand to be around himself. He poured blood-tinted liquid into a thick, smeared glass tumbler on the stand, set down the bottle, and drank, not lowering the tumbler until it was as empty as his head. The alcohol spread inside him, burning as it went, cauterizing. He replenished the contents of the glass and drank it more slowly. The sharp barley fumes flushed his own stink from his olfactory system.

 
A harsh gust skidded around the corner of the frame building and clattered the panes in the window overlooking the narrow lot next door. The room was cold, as it always was in late October when the wind blew mornings, and mornings the wind was always blowing. He filled the basin from the flowered pitcher, stripped off his nightshirt, the cotton peeling away from his armpits with a sucking sound, and stood naked and shivering, blue-white flesh stretched over rib cage, genitals shriveled and plum-colored, while he bathed his chest and crotch and under his arms with icy water. He worked up a pathetic lather from the yellow soap Fly’s wife provided the boarders and rinsed himself off. He dressed, ignoring the cross-hatching of old dirt on his long johns, sat down on the edge of the mattress to pull on the trousers of his gray suit, and had to haul himself up with the aid of the brass bedstead to stamp his stockinged feet into black half-boots with lampblack on the toes. The whiskey was echoing in his head now, as hollow and weightless as one of those paste-paper animals the greaser kids in the Mexican quarter busted at Christmastime to get at the candy and trinkets inside. If they busted his head, he reflected, they’d get only bits of a dry-husk brain tobacco-cured and pickled in alcohol. A few memories, orange and wrinkled like tintype, and not one of them worth the breath it took to swing a stick.

  He shaved with his braces dangling, supporting himself with one hand on the washstand and working the razor over his scooped-out cheeks and round chin and flicking the lather into the sink. Then he wet his ivory comb, swept his hair into a wave and a curl, smoothed the flowing moustaches. Belatedly he remembered his swollen bladder and emptied it into the chamber pot beside the bed. His urine steamed in the cold room but the smell was not half as offensive to him as that of his sweat. It lacked corruption.

  Buttoning his fly, he hawked and spat and contemplated the fresh dark red worm floating in the yellow. Another piece gone.

  By the time Kate came in he had found his hickory cane to lean on and was shaking the wrinkles out of a pale green shirt he had taken from a drawer. She saw the high flame on his cheeks and, when he turned at her entrance drawing the pearl-handled knife from the lanyard around his neck, the luminosity in his gray eyes, and knew that his morning had been no better than the night before. At such times he was hellish handsome, with his ash-blond hair shining wet and his slightly darker moustaches lying flat and feline and his complexion all roses and milk like a girl’s. When he saw it was she, he resheathed the knife.

  “You all right?” she asked.

  He put on a grin with the shirt and said nothing. Long white fingers slipped the bone buttons through hand-stitched eyelets.

  “Doc, Ike Clanton was here looking for you. He had a rifle with him.”

  “If God will let me live long enough to get my clothes on, he will see me.” His Georgian drawl often made his words sound gentler than they were. He tucked in the shirt, smoothing it with his palms, and broke a fresh collar out of the box on the bureau.

  She watched him slide the braces up over his nearly nonexistent shoulders, a painfully thin man in his late twenties, several inches taller than she but barely half as wide, with his ears turning out. For all her superior bulk Kate was not fat by the standards of that place and time, merely generous, full in the hips and bosom and corseted narrow in the waist under the calicos and ginghams befitting a woman no longer on the line. She was not wearing a bonnet and her short black hair emphasized a large round head and the broad nose that had earned her a nickname to set her apart from all the other Kates on the circuit. A big, not-handsome woman with a pleasant smile stamped indelibly on her pink face.

  “What are you fixing to do?”

  “Eat breakfast.” He unslung his cartridge belt from the chair and buckled it around his waist so that the Colt’s Lightning in the scabbard swung short of the hem of his gray frock coat when he put it on. The cane barely creaked as he swayed toward the door to the hallway. He weighed scarcely more than a full horse rig.

  “Watch out for that Ike.”

  “I scraped better dogshit than him off my left boot heel.”

  Mrs. Fly was coming in from her husband’s photograph gallery behind the house when he closed the door behind him, his breath whistling. She was small and young with dark hair in braids and the braids pinned on top of her head. “Ike Clanton was looking for you.”

  “I heard. They’re singing it in the Bird Cage.”

  The dining room was warm, with a barrel stove going in the corner. He sat alone at the big table. It was past noon now and the other boarders were out, eating lunch downtown or inspecting their claims. While he was sipping coffee and grinning at the Daily Epitaph, Kate came out of their room wearing a bonnet as long as a shotgun and left without a word. Mrs. Fly brought his breakfast and he ate part of it, dealt a hand of patience on the oilcloth, went bust his third time through the deck, and returned to the room for his long gray overcoat and gray felt hat.

  Outside, the wind shoved at his coattails and lifted his collar. When he turned the corner onto Fourth Street it struck him full force, rocking him. He leaned into it, gripping the crook of the cane tightly, one hand on his hat. The wind carried dust from the street and a metallic smell of early snow off the Dragoons.

  Wyatt and Morgan were standing on the corner of Fourth and Allen in front of Hafford’s Saloon. They had on black hats and mackinaws over their black suits and boiled white shirts. Their pistol butts altered the hang of their clothes.

  “Ike Clanton was looking for me,” Doc said.

  Morgan’s moustaches lifted. “I can’t feature it. You never got around to calling him horseshit last night.”

  “I think I must have. The yellow son of a bitch wouldn’t fight.”

  Wyatt said, “Well, he wanted to fight today, and has got a busted head to lick because of it.”

  “You?”

  “Virgil. Ike was on the rut this morning with a Colt’s and a Winchester, squawking how he was fixing to have all our balls for breakfast, and him and Morg just kind of slid up behind him on Fourth and Virge buffaloed him.”

  “Dropped him like a turd,” Morgan said, his eyes crinkling. “We took him up to Judge Wallace’s and got him fined.”

  Doc glanced from one Earp to the other. They looked enough alike to be twins in spite of the difference in their ages, both of them lean and long and blue-eyed, fair of hair and drooping moustaches. Their linen was always white and their trousers carefully brushed, thanks to Morgan’s woman Lou and Wyatt’s Mattie—or Sadie, whichever one he was being domestic with at the time. Doc depended for his own haberdashery on a Chinawoman who waited tables at the Can Can Chop House; Kate wouldn’t know a washboard from a singletree.

  Of the two brothers, Morgan looked less on top of the weather, red-eyed and sallow. He and Doc had drunk most of the sting out of a chill night. Wyatt drank beer only and little enough of that. His eyes were clear, watering some in the wind that rouged his cheeks.

  “Where is Virge?” Doc asked.

  Wyatt gestured up Allen just as the eldest of the three Earps emerged from the Wells Fargo office, head down and carrying a shotgun with the muzzles pointed at the boardwalk. Built along more stately lines than either of his brothers, he looked as big as a front porch in his mackinaw, his black hatbrim turning up on the left side in the wind, heavy handlebars underscoring his jowls. From time to time a gust exposed the plain deputy U.S. marshal’s star on his vest under the coat. His heels struck pistol shots off the boards.

  Wyatt saw Doe eyeing the shotgun and said, “I had a set-to with Tom McLaury this morning. Frank’s in town too, and that Billy the Kid.”

  “Bonney’s dead, I heard.”

  “Billy Claiborne, then. I buffaloed Tom and called him a damn dirty cow thief and some other things. We had some more words there in front of Spangenberg’s. Him and Frank and Ike and Ike’s brother Billy was looking over the six-shooters inside.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Dunbar’s, as of about ten minutes ago.”

  “All of
them heeled?”

  “Enough to disincline me to ask the others.”

  “I never knew the place to be so livesome of a morning,” Doc said. “I will have to start getting up earlier.”

  Morgan grinned. The expression plainly hurt him and he stopped.

  “Billy Clanton and Frank are wearing their irons too high and wide for town,” said Virgil in his phlegmy baritone. “They are looking to make a fight or claim we showed the white feather.”

  He stopped talking. Doc and the others followed his gaze across Fourth to the west end of Allen, where five men were coming out of the Dexter Livery & Feed stables owned by John Dunbar and Sheriff John Behan. Doc spotted Ike’s brother Billy first, a full head taller than any of his companions and as wide as Virgil Earp but more oxlike in the chest and shoulders, leading a dun horse with a white blaze. He alone among the party was clean-shaven. Frank McLaury, moving with the cocky swinging stride of a small man, had a hand on a bit chain belonging to a strawberry roan. Long-jawed Billy Claiborne was there, picking his teeth with a pine splinter. He and Frank and Frank’s brother Tom, trailing the pack, wore moustaches and Ike Clanton up front had red chin-whiskers streaked brown with tobacco juice. Doc saw a splash of white bandage showing under Ike’s hat and laughed out loud. Billy Clanton turned his head to glare at the men assembled in front of Hafford’s, then accompanied the others across Allen into Ed Benson and John Montgomery’s O.K. Corral. A pistol scabbard flapped on his right hip. All the men were coated except Tom McLaury, who wore a vest over a dark blue shirt with the tail out. Winchester butts stuck up above both horses’ saddles.

  “Maybe they’re leaving,” said Virgil. Morgan snorted.

  Wyatt said, “Here comes the law in Cochise County.”

  Johnny Behan paused in front of the Alhambra to touch his hat and say something to one of the women from the Bird Cage Theater coming out through the batwings, then continued on to the Earps’s corner. He was trim and looked taller than he was in a flat-brimmed sombrero and light topcoat and dark trousers, a fresh shine on his boots with designs on the toes. His slim moustaches were newly clipped and as he drew near, Doc caught a scent of lavender water and pomade.