Ralph Compton: West of the Law Read online

  On cat feet, McBride stepped closer to the shack. Laughter and loud talk drifted from the saloon and the night spread so quiet around him he could hear the click of the roulette wheel and the rattle of dice.

  Above the door of the lathe and tar-paper cabin a crude, hand-painted sign proclaimed:

  MADAME HUAN ~ Palmistry

  McBride tried the door. It was locked. He walked around to the rear of the shack, found that there was no other entrance and returned to the door. There was no one around and he was invisible in the darkness. McBride leaned his shoulder against the door and pushed. It held firm. He pushed harder. Wood splintered and the door swung open on its rawhide hinges.

  It was dark inside and the place stank. McBride took a chance on not being seen from the saloon and thumbed a match into flame. He discovered an oil lamp and lit the wick, alarmed at the amount of light that flooded into the room. If Trask or one of his men happened to be passing by . . .

  He forced that thought from his mind. There might be something in the shack that would explain how Trask kept the Chinese girls quiet.

  He was standing in the middle of a small room, a narrow door opposite him. The only furnishings were a rusty iron stove, a table, a chair and a cot, enough to convince anyone who glanced inside that someone lived here.

  McBride guessed that there was no Madame Huan and that the shack was always locked. He doubted that the miners cared about having their palms read and never came near the place.

  Swiftly crossing the room, he opened the narrow door and was immediately hit by a feral stench, the smell of the young women who had been confined there for days at a time.

  He raised the lamp. Half a dozen thick posts had been driven into the dirt floor of the tiny room and from each hung a pair of iron shackles. There was a shelf to his right, with several syringes, cotton, spoons, candles, narrow leather straps and bottles laid carefully on it. Only one of the bottles still had a handwritten label, which said, Citric Acid.

  Desperately McBride tried to recall the lectures he’d attended on heroin addiction. The citric acid was used to break down black tar heroin so it could be injected—he remembered that. The heroin was placed in the spoon and then the acid and a little water were added. A spoon was held over a candle flame until the heroin dissolved and afterward a tiny piece of cotton was used to soak up the liquid. The addict drew the heroin from the cotton with a syringe, hoping to filter out particles of tar and other impurities. The heroin was then injected into the arm or leg, or sometimes directly into the neck.

  Injection was the cheapest method of administering opium, but it created a greater dependency on the drug and as the user’s tolerance grew, more and more was needed to get the same effect.

  The Chinese girls had come from San Francisco, probably from the notorious and vicious Barbary Coast waterfront. After getting off the boat, they would have been raped repeatedly, beaten and forced to endure heroin injections. Once dependent on the drug, they would become compliant and be willing to do anything to get more.

  Trask obviously controlled the young women with heroin. The drug made them obedient and docile and they could be shipped east on trains without trouble. On each trip one or two of his men must travel with the girls, a plentiful supply of heroin at the ready.

  It was a neat setup and a profitable one. The girls McBride had seen herded into the alley had spent some time chained to the posts and were already gone. It was of no concern to Gamble Trask that all four would be dead within a couple of years.

  Cold anger rising in him, McBride knew it was too late to help the girls who’d been here, but he would make sure Trask would never use this prison again. He lifted the oil lamp high, ready to throw it against a wall. But he never completed the motion.

  A shot from the direction of the outside door hit the lamp and it shattered apart in his hand, hurling sheets of flame. Burning oil hit McBride on the shoulder and his coat flared. He threw off the smoldering coat as the dry tar-paper walls around him caught fire, surrounding him with raging cascades of flame. Smoke hung thick and black in the air as McBride lurched out of the room.

  Another shot slammed, but curling clouds of smoke obscured McBride and the bullet whined past his head, buzzing like an angry hornet. He drew his gun as he stumbled toward the door. It banged shut just before he reached it, scorching tongues of fire licking at him.

  McBride barged through the door, ripping it from the hinges, and ran outside. Behind him the shack was an inferno. A tangle of men was piling out the door of the Golden Garter and he thought he heard someone call his name. He did not wait to find out. Footsteps pounded off to his left and he went after them.

  Away from the street it was very dark. Ahead of him the footsteps slowed and then fell silent. Crouching low, his skin crawling as he expected a bullet at any moment, McBride was alone in the night with only the stars watching him. He heard a commotion and the clank of buckets back at the saloon as men fought to put out the fire, but he kept on moving.

  Counting Jim Nolan, three men had now tried to kill him and his patience had worn thin. He planned to catch up with the man ahead of him, and shoot him or beat him to a pulp with his fists. Then, as he’d done with the young cowboy, he’d deliver him back to Gamble Trask.

  Lamps were lit in the stores along the street and their back windows cast rectangles of yellow light on the ground as McBride passed. A few scattered cabins and shacks also showed gleaming windows, but around them lay canyons of darkness. Off to his left, a dog barked in sudden alarm. McBride turned and stepped toward the sound, his gun ready.

  A cabin lay just ahead of him and beyond it, only the inky blackness of the plains. As he got closer McBride saw the dog staring intently into the gloom. The dog started to bark again and the cabin door opened and a man in shirtsleeves came out and looked around him. Hidden by the dark, McBride stayed where he was. Finally the man called the dog inside. The animal walked to the door reluctantly, growling as its eyes continued to search the night.

  After the cabin door slammed, McBride holstered his gun. It would be suicide to walk out into the dark after a man who could even now be waiting in ambush. He’d learned that lesson when he went out in the dark after the cowboy who had killed Theo. It was not an experience he cared to repeat.

  A sense of defeat weighing on him, McBride made his way back behind the stores, but he stopped at a hand pump at the rear of the restaurant, his face puzzled. The pump stood in the light of a window and around it the ground was muddy. The thing that had caught McBride’s eye was a perfect footprint in the mud. He kneeled and looked closer. The only person who would pump water for the restaurant was the waitress, but she would surely have left more than one footprint. In any case this was too wide to be a woman’s print. The track was very recent and it was shallow. McBride guessed it had been left by a smallish man who could not have weighed more than 140 pounds. What intrigued McBride was that it was a shoe print, probably made by a shoe with a leather sole and heel. As far as he was aware, all of Gamble Trask’s men wore boots. Hack Burns certainly did. So did Stryker Allison and the miners who helped Trask bring in the Chinese girls.

  McBride was convinced the man who’d tried to kill him at the shack and then fled had left this print. He was equally sure it wasn’t one of Trask’s men. Then who?

  Unbidden, a dark memory wormed its way into his mind, of a man back in New York called Gypsy Jim O’Hara. He was nicknamed Gypsy not because he was a Romany but for his swarthy skin and black eyes and hair.

  O’Hara was a contract killer, an ice-cold assassin without conscience who was suspected of at least two dozen murders. Inspector Byrnes had many times tried to bring O’Hara to justice, but the man always had a cast-iron alibi and walked free. He also enjoyed the protection of gangsters like Sean Donovan who appreciated his deadly skills and provided him with the best lawyers money could buy.

  Jim O’Hara was a small, compact man with the flat, soulless eyes of a basilisk. Extremely vain, he always dressed
in the height of fashion and a shoe-shine was part of his morning ritual. He was good with a revolver but would use a shotgun or knife as the occasion demanded. O’Hara was a bad enemy, relentless in pursuit, merciless at the kill, a man to be reckoned with.

  McBride stood and looked around him. Away from the glare of the streetlamps the stars were visible, the sky a spangled roof over the world that gradually melted in the distance and became one with the violet darkness of the plain. The coyotes were talking to the night birds and the prairie wind was asleep. Nothing moved among the brooding shadows but hidden things that skittered and screeched and hunted their own kind.

  The air smelled of dust and heat as McBride stood, head bent in thought.

  Gypsy Jim here in High Hopes? That was impossible. The man was a sewer rat who would never leave the suffocating brick canyons and swarming, filthy alleys of the city. Yet Byrnes had warned him that Donovan’s reach was long. Was O’Hara here—hunting him?

  It was not so improbable as it sounded. Many crooked New York cops were on Sean Donovan’s payroll. Could it be that McBride’s message to Byrnes had been intercepted, the envelope steamed open and the letter read? Pay O’Hara enough money and he’d track a man all the way into hell.

  McBride shook his head. He was thinking like an old lady who hears a rustle in every bush. His dread of Gypsy Jim was based on a single shoe print that could have been left by anybody, a gambler maybe, or a member of the town’s broad-clothed citizenry.

  He breathed deep, fighting his own overwrought imagination. But the thought lingered, nagging at him like a bad toothache. He had a copper’s instinct for danger and now it was telling him to be wary, that the danger he sensed was very close and getting closer.

  He would go on the assumption that Gypsy Jim was in High Hopes, at least until he learned differently. McBride took no joy in that conclusion. It brought him only a great deal of worry.

  The shack was still a blazing inferno as McBride walked along the street to the hotel. He smiled when he saw that Trask had organized a bucket brigade. The man was running around in a panic, barking orders to miners who were throwing water on the back wall and roof of the saloon. Fire was always a hazard in a wooden town, and sparks from the burning shack could easily set the Golden Garter alight.

  Trask had good cause to be panicked and that pleased McBride mightily. To his relief he saw Shannon standing outside on the boardwalk, a shawl around her shoulders. She saw him, smiled and waved, then went back inside.

  McBride lit the lamp in his room and grieved mightily for his lost coat. It had cost him ten dollars at Aaron Goldberg’s Clothing Emporium for Gents back in New York and he doubted if he’d find another quite so fine.

  He stepped to the window and looked outside. The fire had died down and the bucket brigade had disbanded. There was no sign of Trask.

  He heard a soft knock at his door and smiled. Shannon had come to pay him a visit. He stepped to the door and opened it wide, his smile quickly fading as he saw the small, compact man in the doorway—a man who held a gun aimed right at his belly.

  Chapter 13

  ‘‘You call yourself John Smith?’’ the man asked.

  McBride nodded. ‘‘I go by that name.’’

  The man motioned with the gun. ‘‘Inside.’’ McBride hesitated. ‘‘Now!’’

  McBride backed into the room and his visitor followed, shutting the door behind him with his foot. He was wearing boots.

  ‘‘Shuck the iron with your left hand and lay it on the bed,’’ the man said.

  McBride did as he was told. ‘‘I didn’t catch your name,’’ he said.

  ‘‘I didn’t give it.’’ A moment’s pause, then: ‘‘Name’s Luke Prescott, out of Pueblo and other places.’’

  ‘‘Your brother—’’

  ‘‘Was Rusty Prescott. You killed him.’’

  ‘‘He tried to kill me.’’

  ‘‘I know.’’ To McBride’s surprise Prescott holstered his gun. ‘‘Move away from the bed,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m not what you’d call a trusting man.’’

  McBride stepped close to the window. ‘‘Now you want revenge, is that it?’’

  Prescott nodded. ‘‘That’s why I’m here.’’

  The man saw McBride’s eyes angle to the gun on the bed and he smiled. ‘‘Don’t even think about it. I’d put three bullets into your belly before you even got halfway there.’’

  ‘‘I’d still get a couple into you,’’ McBride said.

  ‘‘Maybe you would at that.’’ Prescott shrugged. ‘‘Then again, maybe you wouldn’t.’’

  The man was dressed in dusty range clothes, but his boots, hat and coat were all top quality. He hadn’t bought those duds on a puncher’s wages, McBride decided, experiencing a momentary pang of regret for his own coat.

  ‘‘I heard that somebody paid my brother to kill you and another man. Is that the way of it?’’ Prescott asked, his eyes searching McBride’s face.

  ‘‘That’s the way of it. He killed an old newspaperman named Theo Leggett. He missed me. Later I found five double eagles in your brother’s pocket. That works out at fifty dollars a man, cheap enough for a human life.’’

  ‘‘Rusty always figured on making money the easy way. He wasn’t much on hard work, leastways not punching cows on a half-broke pony eighteen hours a day for thirty dollars a month.’’

  ‘‘Too bad,’’ McBride said. ‘‘But he should have stayed on the ranch.’’

  ‘‘I said them very words when I buried him. He should have stayed on the ranch.’’ Prescott’s gaze again explored McBride’s face. ‘‘You heard my name before?’’

  ‘‘Yes. I was told you’re pretty good with that gun on your hip. Of course, that’s only what people say. I don’t know the truth of it.’’

  Prescott moved. Suddenly, in a motion too fast to see, the Colt was in his hand. He did a border shift, twirled the gun, then sent it spinning back to his right hand. The Colt was still revolving when he slammed it into the holster.

  ‘‘The people were right, Smith. I am pretty good.’’

  ‘‘Fancy work, but it could get you killed if a man was shooting at you.’’

  To McBride’s surprise, Prescott laughed. ‘‘You never said a truer word. When I aim to kill a man, I leave the fancy work back at the barn.’’

  ‘‘And do you aim to kill me? If you do, draw that revolver again and we’ll see what happens.’’

  McBride was poised, ready to make a dive for the Smith & Wesson. The rifle he’d taken from Rusty Prescott was standing in a corner, but he’d never make it.

  Reading the other man’s eyes, Prescott smiled. ‘‘Relax, Smith, I’m not going to kill you. You did what you had to do and I have no quarrel with that. I’m here because I want the name of the man who paid my brother the blood money. The way I figure it, that man killed Rusty, not you.’’

  McBride stepped to the bed, picked up his gun and slid it into the holster. Prescott watched, but made no attempt to stop him.

  ‘‘The man’s name is Gamble Trask.’’

  ‘‘The owner of the Golden Garter?’’

  ‘‘Yes, the very same.’’

  Confusion showed in Prescott’s eyes. ‘‘Why would Trask want to kill you?’’

  ‘‘Because Theo Leggett talked to me. Gamble Trask is a small man, but he wants to grow a lot bigger. He has political ambitions, the honorable senator from the great state of Colorado being one of them. Theo wanted to expose Trask’s dealings in drugs and Chinese slave girls, and that’s why Trask couldn’t let him live. Carrying baggage like that, his political career would go nowhere. Now I know what Theo knew, and he sure can’t leave me around either.’’