Wild Justice Read online

  I didn’t answer, but stepped away, pivoting silently on the ball of my foot, and reached my free hand to the lamp on the nightstand, turning it out. Reversing directions, I took up a position on the side of the door opposite the hinges with my back to the wall and palmed the knob at arm’s length. Intruders generally expect a cautious victim to choose the side closest to the hinges, for the leverage it offered them, to jerk the door open hoping to catch the threat by surprise; but I had nowhere to go and all the time there was. I turned the knob slowly, and when the latch let go gave it a gentle pull and withdrew my hand, letting the door drift into the room under its own weight.

  It moved at glacier pace. A gap lit by the lamp in the next room widened excruciatingly slow, like the minute hand on a clock.

  The light reflected off a white temple. I planted the muzzle of my revolver against it and drew back the hammer. In the stillness of the room the crackle was deafening.

  “Mr. Murdock!”

  This time it was a gasp. It was the first one I’d heard from that source, and with sound reason. I’d come within a hair’s width of sending Beatrice Blackthorne back into the arms of her dead husband.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The Mandan Hotel saw to all its guests’ comforts. On a corner of the writing desk in my room glittered four crystal goblets on snow-white linen lining a silver tray. Once I had Mrs. Blackthorne settled into my armchair, I uncorked the travel flask and charged two glasses with healthy draughts of the amber-tinted stuff the better butlers used to thin the mahogany stain on their masters’ dinner tables. When she stuck out a hand, palm forward in a signal to stop, I pressed one into it and curled her fingers around it. She followed the gesture with her other hand, as if her fingers were chilled and it was a steaming cup of chocolate; but she didn’t drink.

  “Doctors prescribe brandy in cases of shock,” I said. “I imagine they don’t lack for nervous patients. This is whiskey, but it delivers the goods without counting the candles on its birthday cake.”

  She smiled wanly. “I am aware of the medicinal properties of spirits, young man. We spent the first three years of our marriage in my parents’ old smokehouse, which my father used to make his own beer. Harlan did not propose to me for my fortune or social standing.”

  “The odds are he never stuck a pistol to your head either.” I tossed my dummy out from under the covers and sat on the edge of the mattress, cradling my own glass. “I’m sorry again. If it’s me they’re after, using you to get through the door seemed the obvious choice.”

  “Vanity.” She sipped, coloring her cheeks, and lowered the glass to her lap. She wore the same nightclothes I’d seen her wear that one time in the sleeper: flannel robe, gray nightgown, and suede slippers, once a deep maroon but now faded to a grayish pink. On this occasion I saw some remnants of black among the silver and white in her plaited hair, and thought of the raven-haired bride Harlan A. Blackthorne, Esquire, had carried across the threshold of that newlyweds’ cottage, rank as it was with cured ham and green beer. “You are fixed on the notion that you are the object of our enemies’ scheme. Is it that you wish to spare me from panic for myself, or do you hold your own life in so high regard that no others’ could match its worth?”

  I’d turned the lamp back up after rescuing her from her near faint (near being the key word; she’d staggered a step when I lowered my gun, catching herself even as I reached for her arm). Now I held up my glass, admiring the way the facets broke the light into splinters of red, blue, and yellow, like sunrise through a stained-glass window. “This stuff is better than I remembered. It must have been the rocking it got on the train.”

  “Stuff. We assign to inebriating agents qualities we possess already; rapid recovery from a startlement is one. Great age will do for you as it did for me—provided you attain it. The closer one comes to the Abyss, the less frightening is the prospect of being hastened over the edge. I have done all that someone in my position was expected to do. The only chore left is to wait. I abhor waiting.”

  “Not everyone shares your view. I’ve seen women older than you—men, too—hanging by their eyelashes to that last inch between them and the—” I paused. “Why Abyss, by the way? I took you for a committed Christian, serene in the promise of bliss eternal.”

  “Why, because I continue to observe Sunday services even when a thing like a cross-country journey to bury the remains of my husband would seem to excuse me? A habit established over many years can be mindless, and its point lost. I have hopes, of course, of an afterlife in a place better than this.”

  “Hope and faith are different things.”

  “I was not speaking carelessly. My faith is in storage. I placed it there when I watched my father slip from this world, first by inches, then by yards, until he no longer recognized me or remembered the forty years he worked in a tannery, retiring as a foreman. Where is the soul when a body is committed to the earth bereft of its past?”

  “I can’t picture that happening to you.”

  “That is hope. Most of mine were fulfilled when the man I spent my life with passed to his reward with all his properties still in place. I had feared the worst ever since the first attack on his heart; wondering if the next would take aim at his mind. I am not the soldier you think, to stand courageously by and watch a brilliant man turn first into a child, then into a dumb brute.”

  I drank. She was right, as usual. It was just Old Gideon after all; nothing more miraculous than the pleasant heat it wired to the extremities. Her strength came from inside. “You just wiped away any fear I might have had that a bullet would take me before my time.”

  “I doubt you ever dwelt upon that.” She took another sip, placed her glass on the nightstand, and gripped the swan-shaped arms of the chair. “I thank you for the restorative. There is no reason to forgive you for taking proper precautions. He was correct in his choice of companions for this journey.”

  The Judge was he again; as if nothing of an intimate nature had passed between us. I shifted my weight onto the balls of my feet, stopping her in mid-motion. “Why did you knock on the door?”

  She shook her head. “Foolishness. I had a nightmare. The details are unimportant, but I wished not to fall back asleep immediately and take up where I left off. I selfishly decided to disturb your sleep, in return for a few moments of aimless conversation. Perhaps I brought the shock upon myself, as punishment for ungenerous behavior.” She made a dry sound in her throat. “That, you see, is faith.”

  “That is bearing false witness.”

  She stopped in mid-rise, brows raised. “Even in such pious terms, to call someone a liar is an insult and an abomination.”

  “The insult is in the lie,” I said. “You forgot I’m a fellow believer. It’s the Judge’s fault. He schooled me in the Bible, just as he forced me to study the classics so I wouldn’t embarrass his court, and sent me to Texas in a clerical collar. As a Christian himself, he should have known I’d come back changed. And so I borrowed from Exodus and accuse you of bearing false witness.” I plucked the tattered volume from the nightstand where I’d placed it facedown and handed it to her, open to the page I’d been reading.

  “This is Hosea,” she said, “not Exodus. Surely you selected the book before retiring, asking divine reason why it was Hosea Johnston who brought you the news of the conductor.”

  I accepted the return of the Bible and closed it, letting it rest in my lap. “I won’t waste time convincing you it was random. It may mean nothing, probably doesn’t; I can’t afford to be besotted. Any old book with a loose binding will fall open to odd passages; it’s rare in this book not to have some kind of significance for the reader. I only wanted to show you I don’t use it just to dress up the place.”

  “I never for one moment—”

  “That nightmare story is a lie, Mrs. Blackthorne. You might have been awakened by one, but you could have avoided taking it up again just by picking up your own Bible and reading until you were drowsy. Do I need to go into your r
oom to prove you keep it by the bed also?”

  Hers was a difficult face to read, but I’d had daily opportunity to study it, as I had Holy Writ and Charles Lamb’s essays. I saw her color change, and spotted the moment when she decided anger was pointless. She sat back—not quite touching the rear cushion; she hadn’t drifted so far from Eastern civilization—and retrieved her glass.

  “I am past worrying about the improprieties,” she said. “Do not think that is the reason for my dissembling. The mind that would see only filth in an old woman wishing to enter a young man’s bedroom—”

  “I’m not a young man.”

  “—is not worth concern. I do detest displaying weakness, and even more admitting to it. The simple fact of the matter is I cannot accustom myself to sleeping alone.”

  I stared. I hadn’t been prepared for that.

  “It’s been days. You must have had some sleep.”

  “I would not dignify it with that name. The details of funeral arrangements, preparation for this journey, the meddling of the press, and the difficulty of resting on a train in motion gave me little opportunity to reflect upon the emptiness at my side. This is the first night I felt truly alone, and realized this is how it will be for the rest of my life.”

  “But you kept separate rooms.”

  “That was our little conceit, for the sake of the servants. The more conscientious they are, the stodgier. Sharing a bed is unseemly for a man and wife of our years. Harlan was always careful to go into his room upon rising and muss the covers in his bed. It amused him, I think, to humor the sanctimony of the staff.”

  Her smile grew distant. The picture of the Judge in his nightshirt, scrunching up his sheets like a little boy who’d sneaked into his parents’ bed, was less disturbing to her than to me. She shook loose of it.

  “Perhaps it’s that we’re in a hotel. As I was turning down the bed tonight, I remembered that Harlan and I spent six nights in such rooms traveling to and from Fort Lincoln, to help send off an old crony of Harlan’s, who was retiring from the military. That was our last trip together. Suddenly the thought of climbing under those covers chilled me to the bone. I know these are the imbecilic fears of a woman in her dotage, and yet—”

  I remembered the glass I was holding in my own lap, next to the Bible. I drained it, set it and the book down on the table, and slid over on the counterpane, spreading it open on her side. “I should warn you, I snore when I’ve been drinking.”

  When she smiled this time she showed an enviable set of teeth, patently her own. “As do I. I have that on the good authority of my late husband.” She got up from the chair, leaving her robe draped across it.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I lay awake a long time, not because of the situation, but from instinct. For lack of heat or space I’d been forced to share beds with cowpunchers, buffalo runners, Indian braves, and strangers whose very gender was open to question; a couple of horses and a mule, if you counted stables. When circumstances crowded close, most of the touchstones of civilization were cast overboard; sleeping with the boss’s widow was no more scandal than cuddling up to a goat for warmth.

  The goat in this case being me.

  Evidently it was no challenge to Mrs. Blackthorne. She’d been under the covers, her back turned toward me, less than five minutes when her even breathing told me she slept.

  With her husband she’d left the seat of a victorious Union for one of the least-settled territories in a West still bleeding from civil war, crossing two thousand miles of wild prairie, mountains, and arid waste, under conditions that only a few years later were the stuff of fable. The Transcontinental Railroad was still in pieces, the great Indian nations poised to challenge an army torn and weary of battle, the landscape itself armored, fanged, and thorned. It had attacked them from above and below, often at once. They’d bunked in the holds of flatboats, slept under wagons, and fled from sandstorms and blizzards and Cheyenne dog soldiers in dugouts alive with ants, rats, and worse. If the Judge hadn’t exaggerated—and that was one flaw he didn’t exhibit—they’d escaped starvation snowed in in an empty farmhouse by boiling wallpaper for the flour paste. Lying next to a half-broke lawman with a bad conscience in a plush hotel was nothing to stay awake for.

  I remained dressed except for coat and boots; again, not from any sense of decency as to be prepared, with the Deane-Adams loose in my hand down by my side where I lay on top of the spread. At my request, my bedmate had turned the lamp back down low, but not out. My eyes were best left adjusted to some light in case quick action was necessary.

  Everything about the situation said it wouldn’t be. A frontal assault on a gilded establishment in a city as settled as Minneapolis defied all logic.

  If you think that way, Page, I can’t use you. It places all the ammunition in the hands of the enemy. Anarchy thrives on illogical behavior. Here in Helena we fight it with laws and structure. Out in the field they’ll kill you faster than a bullet.

  He had all the answers, the Judge had.

  The son of a bitch.

  I was playing three-card monte in my head: The ace of spades was on the left last time; this time would it be on the right, in the center, or left again? If on the right twice in succession, what were the odds the dealer would gamble on turning it up in the same spot a third time? I’d patted myself on the back for my cleverness in switching rooms with the widow, but if she wasn’t the target, had I stacked the odds even higher against her by putting her in the room I’d been assigned? And now, whether I’d been right or wrong, what did both of us in one room do to the danger?

  The puzzle was unsolvable, and should have been enough in itself to keep me awake.

  It wasn’t. I slid into a black pool of molasses.

  The window burst. Shards shredded the curtains and the lamp’s glass chimney popped and tipped over with a tinkle. The crash of the report itself came as an afterthought.

  * * *

  Gallantry is the first casualty of armed conflict. Clasping my revolver tight to my waist, I rolled left and shoved with all my weight. Mrs. Blackthorne, who was just stirring awake, resisted out of impulse, but I had the element of surprise and my momentum was greater. She slid over the edge of the mattress and landed on the floor, hard enough to jar the still-burning lamp off its base. I was prepared for that. I caught it with my free hand and set it right, blowing out the flame in the same motion. The room went black.

  I was still rolling. I landed on top of her; the air left her lungs with a woof. More glass pattered down onto my back, simultaneous with the sound of the second shot and then a third.

  After that came a lull. I used it to think.

  The room was in the front of the building, too well lit by the gas lamp on the corner to scale without attracting attention. The bullet had to have entered more or less parallel with the floor to break the chimney, and there was no reason to think the others came from any other gun; at least I hoped so. Then the shooter had to be firing from directly across the street, probably from a window facing ours. Random fire is no guarantee of success; the attack would have to be followed up by a visit in person. In order to enter the room on foot, he’d have to run down several flights of stairs, cross the street, and climb three more flights past a crowd alarmed by the shots.

  He wouldn’t do that, any more than he’d scramble up an exposed wall in a busy city and swing in through the window.

  All this raced through my mind in the second and a half after I shoved a widow out of bed, compounding the crime by crushing her with my weight. I knew who the shooter was and that he had a partner, probably already in the building. The last was my advantage, because it ruled out the window as a source of further attack.

  Unless.

  Unless the partner had decided to wait for the shooter to catch up and pinch us between two fronts. That added a card to the game, hiking the odds against us even higher.

  Mrs. Blackthorne was fully awake now. I could feel the rapid-fire beating of her heart through my own
chest. I twisted away, releasing a shower of broken glass to the floor and giving her room to lever herself onto a hip and into a sitting position with her back against the nightstand. My eyes were adjusting to the conditions; just enough gaslight trickled through the torn curtains to fall dead white on her face. Her plait had come undone and her mouth hung open, but not to scream. She was breathing heavily through it, drawing in great gusts of air to refill her chest. When she’d gathered enough to speak, I stuck out my free hand and pressed it against her mouth.

  Then I winked.

  I still don’t know why, but it seemed to calm her. She nodded jerkily, and when I took away the hand flung the loose hair out of her eyes and drew her knees into her chest, wrapping the hem of her gown around her bare feet. That cleared the way for me to kneel beside the bed and prop my elbows on the mattress, holding the Deane-Adams in both hands with the muzzle in line with the door to the hallway.

  The room had a fireplace with an iron surround that served as an echo chamber to the ugly bronze clock parsing out the seconds on the mantel. Every few strokes the ticking matched the thump of the pulse in my temples. It was dangerously mesmeric. When a door panel split with the noise of a mortar blast, the shock sent my first shot wide. That might have been the end of us both, but the door was built of stout oak and took a second blow from the battering ram—it turned out to be one of the heavy majolica smoking stands set yards apart along the hallway—to open a gap wide enough to thrust the little belly gun through and snap a slug past my right ear, too close for relief.

  I recognized the pistol, an over-and-under Marston derringer; I couldn’t see the pearl grips, but I knew they were there.

  Not that identifying it affected my own aim.

  I put two more through the shattered panel. They’d both have been on the money, except the first hit the target, knocking it out of the line of fire and throwing off the second; but one was all it took.