The Crack in the Lens (18 page)

Or, I Lose My Stomach for Detecting, and an Acquaintance Spills Her Guts

There was a body under the bedsheets. A big one. That much was clear. What wasn’t so clear was what to do about it.

The first two steps came easy enough: (1) jump three feet in the air shrieking “Shit!” and (2) shut the damn door. After that, though, I was stumped.

As was, it seemed, my brother. The two of us just stood there staring at the bloody heap on our bed.

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “I know we parted on bad terms and all, but to go and do this…”

A different (though very familiar) kind of incredulity—the “Are you crazy or just plain stupid?” kind—shoved the shock off Gustav’s face.

“What are you talkin’ about?”

“Bob and Lottie dumpin’ Stonewall on us ’stead of buryin’ him,” I said.

“You think Bob ’n’ Lottie drove around back of the Star in broad daylight, dragged Stonewall up here with only Squirrel Tooth to help ’em, picked the lock on the door, and plopped the body here in our room? All just to spite us?”

“Well…I suppose it don’t sound so likely when you put it like that, but I don’t know of any other dead bodies floatin’ around town just now.”

“That’s the problem, ain’t it?” Old Red said, and he turned again toward the round-bellied mound under the sheets. “Someone can always go and make more.”

He took in a deep breath, steeling himself, and started toward the bed. He moved slowly, and not just because he wasn’t anxious to get where he was going—he was trying to keep his boots out of all the blood smearing the floorboards.

It wasn’t easy.

When he was close enough, he pinched one corner of the bedsheet and gently lifted it up.

“A www, hell,” he sighed, peering down at a face I couldn’t yet see. “A www, hell
what
?”

With a quick flick of the wrist, Gustav threw off the rest of the bedding.

“Uh!” he huffed out, sounding like he’d just taken a punch to the stomach, and even he—rawhide-tough witness to so much death he could just about compete with the Grim Reaper himself—was forced to look away.

Me, I didn’t just look away. I
stumbled
away, barely making it to a chair before my legs buckled.

It had been Big Bess, the gargantuan good-time gal from the Phoenix, under the sheets—and much of what belonged under her
skin
wasn’t any longer.

I couldn’t (and wouldn’t if I could) tell you exactly which pieces of her had been pulled out and strewn about. Suffice it to say she’d been gutted, and Big Bess was a woman with a lot of guts.

“Sweet Jesus,” I gasped. “He’s been here. The killer. Not only did we not stop him, he butchered a gal right in our own room.”

Gustav was hunched over, hands on his knees, face still turned away from the bed.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Good Lord, what else could it be? Big Bess dropped by to apologize and accidentally gored herself on the doorknob? No,
he
was here, Brother”—I pointed uselessly at the thing neither of us could yet bear to look at again—“and he left us
that
.”

“Maybe,” Old Red said again, and his next words he spat out like a curse. “‘There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.’”

It was a Holmes quote, of course, and I might have been glad to hear it—comforted that my brother had a grip on the Method even now—but for two things.

First off, it was my least favorite of Holmes’s little truisms. A falseism, it seemed to me. A bullshit-ism, even.

Then there was what Gustav said next.

“And the only ‘obvious fact’ here is
we
killed Big Bess.”

“Now, don’t be like that. You don’t have to feel guilty cuz some crazy bastard went and—”

“I ain’t talkin’ about what I
feel
, ya idjit!” my brother thundered. “I’m talkin’ about what this is supposed to look like!”

His meaning sank in quick—and just as quick, I hopped to my feet.

I’d been in such shock I actually forgot to panic. But that was over now.

“We gotta go,” I said. “We gotta
run
, and I ain’t just talkin’ about out of the Star.”

Old Red shook his head. “No.”

“Listen to me, Brother. You’re right about Bess there. Someone’s stickin’ our heads in the noose again, and there’s only one way to get ’em out. We can’t get rid of that body, and sure as hell no one’s gonna believe we didn’t kill her. So we ain’t got no choice. We gotta put San Marcos a long, long way behind us.”

“No!” Gustav snapped up straight, his expression a muddle of revulsion and rage and regret that came close to agony. “If we run now, this follows us forever. We won’t have just come here and failed. We’ll be wanted for murder, and everything I hoped for and you hoped for…it’ll all be impossible. Our lives’ll be over whether we’re caught or not.”

He paused to suck in a deep breath. When he went on, he was calmer—though not anywhere near calm.

“It ain’t just about avengin’ Adeline anymore. It’s the only way to save
us
.”

I knew he was right…dammit. Turn tail, and we were ruined. Yet a part of me—like nine-tenths of me—wanted to light out of there and never look back.

Only there’d be looking back. Back over our shoulders. Back at our mistakes. Back at how close we’d come to being something other than drifters.

Besides, that other one-tenth that wanted to stick with my brother, no matter what? It always won out anyway.

I slipped off the chair and crouched down by our carpetbags.

“I’ll get us packed while you do what detectin’ you can. But don’t dilly-dally, you understand?”

“I never dilly-dally,” Old Red grumbled, and he finally turned himself toward the bed again.

How exactly he went about inspecting Big Bess’s mangled remains I couldn’t say, for I made certain I couldn’t
see
, keeping my back to him as much as was possible. I
heard
plenty, though—a moist, sticky sound, like someone peeling a half-chewed licorice whip off a strip of soggy flypaper.

“Throat’s cut,” Gustav said. “It’s a clean cut, too. Not hacked or gashed.”

There were more soft, squishy sounds that made me thankful I had nothing but nice, bland doughnuts in my stomach—and even those I was having a hard time keeping down now.

“Same with her stomach. Straight lines. And her hands are covered with blood.”

“What were you expectin’? Cookie crumbs?”

Old Red grunted sourly, and I heard footsteps and the creaking of floorboards.

I risked a quick glance back.

My brother was backing away from the bed, eyeballing the blood on the floor, tracking the splatter and flow of it around his half of the room.

I got back to stuffing my carpetbag full of clothes. When it was filled, I snatched up my brother’s and kept at it till it was full, too.

“Done,” I said, hopping to my feet, both bags in hand.

Gustav was kneeling, still staring at the floor, and he pushed himself up with obvious reluctance.

“Alright…I reckon that’ll have to do.”

He turned and took in Big Bess one last time, holding his gaze steady on the mess that had been made of her. He was fixing the sight in his mind, like a photographer hovering over his camera while the light burns into the plate.

“Let’s get the hell outta here,” he said.

I didn’t ask where the hell we’d be getting
to
. First things first. We had to get clear of the Star.

My brother moved to the door and cracked it open. After a quick peep around, he hurried out, waving for me to follow.

The hallway was empty.

We locked the door behind us before making for the stairs. It felt more than a little futile, doing that, for surely what was in that room we couldn’t lock away forever.

But a day? Maybe two? That at least we could hope for. It might even be enough.

We slipped into the back stairwell we’d come to know so well and started spiraling down fast.

“Smart thing would be sneakin’ outta town and comin’ back after nightfall,” Old Red said. “We wouldn’t last long ’round here while there’s light.”

He was right about that, too—more right than he knew.

All of two steps into the sunshine behind the hotel, and a gun butt came crashing down atop my brother’s head. Before he even hit the ground, the business end came swinging around to practically poke me in the nose.

“Marshal!” Bales’s friend Tommy called out. The gawky young man had traded his choir robes for street clothes—and a deputy’s six-pointed star. “Marshal, come quick! I got ’em!”

Or, The Killer Still Doesn’t Have a Face, but He Finally Gets a Name

My brother wasn’t knocked out. He just wished he was.

“Damn,” he moaned. “Give a man a chance to surrender, why don’t you?”

He was on his knees behind the Star, a steadying hand on the ground the only thing keeping him from flopping face-first into the dirt.

His other hand was pressed to the top of his head. Or the top of his hat, more like. The blow from the deputy’s gun butt had come down on Gustav’s white Stetson, smashing the crown into a dimple like a hammer hitting a mound of mashed potatoes.

“Marshal!” Tommy hollered again, a note of growing panic in his reedy voice. I couldn’t help but notice that his gun hand was shaking—this being a point of general interest to me, as said hand was pointing a Colt at my picture-perfect features, and stray bullets are hell on a fellow’s profile.

I dropped the carpetbags I’d been toting and put up my hands.

“Steady there, Tommy…”

I was still inside the stairwell, and if I’d whirled around and bounded up the steps, I’d have had a good chance of getting away. Yet the thought that I could make a break for it didn’t occur to me till this very moment. At the time, it just seemed to me if Gustav was caught, I was, too.

“We won’t be no trouble,” I said. “No need to be nervous.”

Tommy
meant
to wave the gun at me now, though he’d gone so slick with sweat I was almost more scared he’d throw the thing at me than shoot me with it.

“Who’s nervous? You’re the one who oughta be nervous!”

“Oh, I am, Tommy. I promise you. I am.”

“Stop calling me Tommy!” the deputy squeaked.

His boss might have seemed about as rough and tough as cotton candy, but compared to young Tommy, Milford Bales was Wyatt Earp.

“Look…uhhh…
friend
,” I began.

The sound of approaching footsteps silenced me.

Bales rounded the corner from the alley. He was still in a black suit of the sort you might wear to church, but now there was a badge pinned to his sack coat and a holster around his well-padded waist.

“What happened?” he asked Tommy.

“They came sneaking out the back here not a minute after you left. I apprehended them.”

“Oh, is that what you did?” I said. “Gosh, I don’t think I’ve ever been ‘apprehended’ before.”

“Shut up,” Bales snapped.

“Not just yet, thank you. I’d like to point out that none of this strong-arm stuff is necessary.” I stuck out my right foot and gave one of our carpetbags a nudge. “See that? We was leavin’ town, just like you told us to. You wanna escort us over to the train station, fine, but there ain’t no need for gunplay.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Bales bent down and pulled Old Red’s Peacemaker from its holster, then stepped up close and groped under my coat to relieve me of my Bulldog.

“Think you can hold ’em here another couple minutes, Deputy?” he said once he had us unheeled.

Tommy straightened up to his full height and nodded firmly. I almost expected him to salute.

“Of course, Marshal.”

“Alright. I’ll be back.”

Bales marched back into the alley. If he was headed to the hotel’s front desk to get a passkey, it was all over.

Or maybe, I realized with a queasy churn in my gut, it was all over already—because Bales had done in Big Bess, and we were caught in a web he’d woven for us himself.

I nodded down at my brother.

“Mind if I help him up?”

I could practically hear the gears turning in Tommy’s head as he thought it through.
What would a
real
lawman do?

“You got the gun,” I reminded him.

“Okay. But no tricks.”

I got my brother to his feet. He was wobbly but surprisingly steady for a fellow who’s just had his hat nailed to his head.

I wondered if he was steady enough to run.

“Say,” I said to Tommy, “how long you been a deputy, Deputy?”

“Shut up,” he barked. Or yipped, more like. He wasn’t so much a rottweiler as a shivery little Chihuahua.

“Fine. You don’t gotta tell me. I thought you seemed a tad green, is all. Like you could use a few pointers. I’ve done some detective work, you know, so I could tell you a thing or two.”

Tommy tried to shoot me a steely glare, but it merely made him look cross-eyed. “What are you talking about?”

“How you got the drop on us, for one thing. That wasn’t too bad, the way you had yourself hid outta sight back here…except you almost undid it all comin’ at my brother like that. Believe me—I’ve had some experience thumpin’ fellers with gun butts.” I shook my head and tut-tutted. “And boppin’ a man over the brainpan when he’s wearin’ a big ol’ Boss of the Plains? Please. He may as well have had a pillow strapped to his head.”

“So what would you do? Tap him on the shoulder and ask him to take off his hat?”

I had to smile. The kid had some spunk after all. More importantly, he was starting to listen to me.

“Actually, if you’re quick about it, you
can
take a man’s hat off before you hit him,” I said. “Just grab the brim and flip. Or if that don’t suit you, don’t hit the man at all. Most of the time, just tellin’ a feller you got a gun on him is enough. Though you’d wanna fix your stance first.”

“My stance?”

“Yes, your stance! The way you’re holdin’ your body—chest square to us, elbow bent, gun out. You fire a .45 like that, the kick’ll pop it right outta your hand. I mean, just look at how you got your feet set.”

God bless the lad, he looked.

I clenched my fist and started forward.

A hand shot out and clutched at me, bunching up my shirtfront and holding me tight.

It was my brother.

He looked into my eyes and shook his head.

Not yet
.

By the time Tommy looked up again, it was all over.

“What’s wrong with my feet?”

“On second thought,” I sighed, “your way’s as good as any.”

The clatter of quick footfalls echoed down the stairs behind me, and a moment later the marshal came charging from the stairwell. We were about to find out if he’d gotten into our room.

“You sick son of a bitch!” he spat, and he sent Old Red back to the ground with a roundhouse to the jaw.

I took that as a yes.

I balled up a fist again and started for Bales.

“Don’t,” Tommy said, his Colt level with my head, and even with the shrill screech to his tinny voice, that was warning enough.

“Why would you do it?” Bales roared at my brother. “Why?
Why?
”

Gustav was sprawled out in the dirt, and when he rolled over and looked up, there was blood and grime on his face—and a crooked, sneering smile.

“Feh. And you accuse
me
of playactin’.”

Bales looked like he wanted to squash my brother like a scurrying bug.

“Get these animals in a cell,” he said, and he whirled around and stalked back toward the stairs again.

“What did you find up there?” Tommy asked him.

Bales paused half in, half out of the darkened stairwell, rubbing the bruised knuckles of his left hand.

“Another one. Just like before.”

Then he stepped into the shadows and was gone.

“Alright, you two—move,” Tommy snapped. I must admit, he almost sounded like a real lawman, for once. Which is to say, he sounded like he couldn’t stand the sight of us.

“You alright?” I asked Old Red as I hauled him to his feet yet again.

My brother put a hand to his chin and gave it a waggle. When he was sure his jawbone wouldn’t pop out, he shrugged.

“Don’t hurt any worse than the top of my head.”

“Well, that’s a relief. Who wants to get hung with a busted jaw?”

“
Go
.” Tommy waved his gun at the alley. “That way.”

We picked up our carpetbags and started off.

“What’d the marshal mean when he said ‘just like before’?” Gustav asked. “Which ‘other one’ was he talkin’ about?”

“Just shut up and walk,” Tommy said. “No distractions.”

I looked back and gave him an approving nod.

“Now you’re gettin’ the hang of it!”

“The next one of you that talks,” the deputy said, “I’m shooting.”

I kept my compliments to myself after that.

Old Red and I spent the next few minutes on parade through the streets of San Marcos. No one could have known what we were accused of yet, but that didn’t matter. Marching at gunpoint was enough, and we passed under one cold, scornful stare after another.

Once we’d withstood the disdain of what seemed like every upright citizen in the county, it was almost a relief to finally tromp into the marshal’s tidy little office…until we saw who was waiting for us inside.

Leaning back in a swivel chair, his long legs propped up on what had to be Bales’s own desk (none other being in sight), was Pete Ragsdale. Like always, Gil Bock was beside him, as unshakable as a pudgy shadow. Both were dressed with their usual overformal flair—top hats, frock coats, ties, checked trousers—with a little something extra to show they were in a festive mood: Each wore a big yellow daisy in his lapel.

“Well well well,” Ragsdale drawled through his perpetual lip-curled sneer. “Would ya look what the fudgin’ pussy dragged in.”

Gustav started toward him fast, flying by me before I could get a hand on him.

“You bastards—”

“Hold it right there!” Tommy hollered, and I was relieved to learn my protégé could muster the menace to get my brother to stop. Packing a stingy gun’s an old mack tradition, and I was certain Ragsdale wouldn’t pass up a chance to claim self-defense.

“I didn’t think even you had the gall for this,” Old Red snarled at him.

Ragsdale threw up his hands and beetled his brow, putting on a show of mystified perplexity. “The gall for fudgin’ what? We’re just here to talk to the fudgin’ marshal. Three of our fudgin’ employees have gone missin’ in the past twelve fudgin’ hours.” He swept his feet off the desktop and sat up straight. “Hey…
you
wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Gus?”

“Exactly which employees are you talkin’ about, Mr. Ragsdale?” I piped up. “From what we’ve heard, you two have been losin’ ’em pretty regular-like goin’ on five years now.”

Ragsdale’s smirk puckered and petrified, while Bock’s dead eyes finally came to life, widening ever so slightly as they darted toward his partner.

We were closer to the truth than they’d thought—and they didn’t like it.

Ragsdale recovered first, leaning back and throwing his heels up on Bales’s desk again.

“So, Deputy,” he said, “whadaya got these two fudgewits in for, anyway?”

“You can ask Marshal Bales about that,” Tommy said. “And you can get your ass out of his chair, too.”

Ragsdale chuckled and raised his hands in mock surrender, as if he’d just been told “Stick ’em up!” by a four-year-old waving a pinewood gun. He did as Tommy told him, though, pushing himself to his feet and stepping away from the desk.

I resisted the urge to give Tommy a round of applause.

“Alright, let’s go.” The deputy jerked his head at a narrow staircase in a back corner of the room. “Up there.”

Gustav and I dutifully trudged off toward the steps, passing so close to Ragsdale and Bock we were practically treading on their toes—and for a second there I was tempted to try it.

“Don’t worry, Gus,” Bock said with his usual deadpan flatness. “You won’t be here long.”

Ragsdale burst out laughing, though I had no idea what the joke was. I got the feeling I wouldn’t find it funny even if I did.

A minute later, Tommy was locking us in upstairs. It was a small jail, with just two cells, each barely bigger than a horse stall. The one Old Red and I ended up sharing had but one bunk and one iron-barred window. I felt like a turkey crammed into a birdcage with a canary.

After heading back downstairs with our bags, Tommy exchanged a few more words with Ragsdale and Bock, though all Gustav and I could make out were muffled
mph-mph
s. A door opened, there was another couple minutes of
mph-mph
ing, and the door slammed shut.

Then Milford Bales came upstairs alone.

“Well, there you are, at last,” he said, glaring at my brother through the bars. “Where you belong.”

“Don’t bother,” Gustav jeered back. He’d appropriated the bunk for himself, sitting atop it with his legs stretched out and his arms folded. “There ain’t nobody but us around to hear.”

Bales shook his head sadly. The rage that had overtaken him back at the Star was gone. Now he just looked drained and disgusted.

“I’m still willing to make this as easy on you as I can, Gus. For old times’ sake. Just come clean. Admit what you did. Then we can get this over with.”

“Oh, come on, Milford,” Old Red said. “You got us where you want us, so you may as well cut the crap.”

Bales blinked at my brother a moment. If he knew which crap to cut, he sure wasn’t letting on.

“So you’re not going to own up to anything? Even now?”

“Tell you what,” Gustav said. “You want me to start ownin’ up to stuff? Fine…only you go first.”

The marshal gaped at him again. “You are one crazy SOB, you know that? Well, I guess it doesn’t matter if you can admit it or not.” Bales pulled a slip of folded paper from his coat pocket and gave it a little wave. “This is as good as a confession.”

“Oh? And what is that supposed to be?”

Despite Old Red’s sneering tone, he let himself be lured off the bunk. I joined him as he stepped up to the bars.

Bales unfolded the paper. It was covered with scratchy-scrawled writing.

“I guess you thought you’d be out of town by the time Horace Cuff found this slipped under his door at the newspaper,” the marshal said, “but then, you don’t know Horace very well, do you? If he’s not at church, he’s at his office. He went straight there after the service this morning. Then he came straight to me with this.”

“Are you gonna tell us what the damn thing says or not?” Old Red growled.

Bales shook his head and sighed. “Gus…this is getting ridiculous.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more, Marshal,” I said. “Tell you what, though—just for a minute, why don’t you pretend we
don’t
know what that is and read it out for us, hmmm?”