Last Stage to Hell Junction

Chapter Fourteen

Several minutes before Caleb York and Jonathan Tulley began their short stagecoach ride from the livery stable to the Hell Junction Inn, Willa Cullen was inside the hotel, sitting with Rita Filley on the two-seater sofa by the boarded-up windows onto the street. To the right of the women, in the chair where he’d first been deposited in the parlor the day before, was Raymond Parker.

To Willa’s left, in a chair pulled over from a wall, sat a rumpled, frazzled-looking Doc Miller, who earlier had escorted Ben Bemis, the wounded gang member, into the dining salon for a parlay among the outlaws. Across from them, the glass-and-wood doors stood open to the dining room, where Hargrave was at the table closest to those open doors — possibly to better keep an eye on the hostages. Seated with him were Reese Randabaugh, Bemis, and the Mexican woman, Juanita.

A forlorn-looking Randy Randabaugh was at the next table, alone, sitting there slumped, in the same gray shirt with arm garters he’d worn flagging down the stage just yesterday, seeming a much nicer boy than he’d proved to be. The Wileys were either not invited to the party or were choosing to be somewhere else. Tension, after all, was running high.

Bemis — the burly, bushy-bearded individual in a plaid jacket who at the holdup had struck Willa as resembling a miner — looked pale and seemed sluggish, either from pain or the doctor’s pills. He was saying little. Of course, their leader held center stage, doing most of the talking.

“I anticipate,” the actor was saying, “that Mr. McCory will be back with our due rewards no later than late tomorrow afternoon. He will have with him a business associate of Mr. Parker’s, who will make the exchange. It’s highly likely that this business associate will be accompanied by a Pink or some other bodyguard. But that’s of no matter.”

Reese had been squinting skeptically at his boss through all of that. “It isn’t?”

Hargrave shook his head. “I have no intention of allowing this exchange to be anything but a peaceful one.”

The older Randabaugh leaned forward, hands pressed against the linen-covered table top, halfway out of his seat. “You’re going to let him go?”

The outlaw leader flipped a hand. “I’m going to set all of them free. It’s simply good business.”

Juanita was on her feet and swearing at him in Spanish, teeth bared, eyes flaring, spittle flying.

Reese glanced in the direction of the hostages in the parlor and got up, closing the doors on them.

Willa did not hear the ensuing conversation, though the animated expressions of all concerned — but for the composed, self-contained Hargrave — spoke volumes.

What she’d have heard would have chilled her.

Juanita said, “These are witnesses! There were killings! Their testimonio will hang us!”

Hargrave gestured graciously for his paramour to sit back down. She didn’t. She just folded her arms on the shelf of her bosom and glared at her man.

Who said, “We will be long gone, querida, in a place where we can’t be touched. Do not worry your pretty self.”

Her teeth were bared, her head back. “You are sweet on that perra rubia! You lust for her!”

He didn’t allow himself to be drawn into her storm. “I am not, and I do not. I am kind to her only to keep her calm and manageable.”

“Never mind that blonde bitch,” Reese said, accidentally translating Juanita’s epithet. “What I want to know is, why do you trust a damn stranger like this McCory? What’s to keep him from takin’ the ransom money and hightailin’?”

“That won’t happen,” Hargrave said, waving that off. “Parker’s people won’t hand across that kind of money anywhere but the exchange. And we will be in the rocks watching as that takes place.”

Looking as if he were on the verge of passing out, Bemis said, “I don’t like it. I get damn near shot to death, and some outsider is part of the gang now? Trusted with gettin’ our damn money for us? All due respect, Mr. Hargrave, this don’t seem right a tall.”

Hargrave patted the air with a palm. “No need for these qualms, gentlemen. I have dispatched our friend Broken Knife to shadow Mr. McCory, to make certain he does our bidding.”

The conversation ended there, because Hargrave and the others heard what Willa now heard, though a few seconds after she did: the jangle of stagecoach ribbons and the hoofbeats of its horses.

But then she’d been waiting for that. So had Parker, Rita, and Doc.

The gang had done them a favor, congregating in the dining room like that. Had the outlaws been in the parlor, the hostages would have had to wait until the fuss started and hope to slip out the back way, with the outlaws’ attention drawn elsewhere.

But this arrangement allowed Willa and the others — Doc Miller in the lead, closest to the double doors onto the street — to make their escape as the horses and the vehicle they bore came to a sudden whinnying halt. Jonathan Tulley, up in the box, shotgun in his lap, had yanked the brake lever with one hand and with the other pulled the reins to a stop. Within seconds, the captives were outside, on the porch, then clambering down the steps and up into the waiting stagecoach, Parker holding the door for them as first Willa, then Rita, piled in, followed quickly by Doc Miller and Parker himself.

Willa glimpsed Caleb York at the rear of the coach, behind his dappled-gray, black-maned gelding tied onto the boot. He flashed her a tight smile, but his eyes were on the hotel, whose broken-out but boarded-up windows allowed slots for weapons from within to be wielded.

Then, with the former hostages barely in their seats, the coach took off, Tulley yelling, “Yee-haw! Yee-haw!”

And the jangle of reins and hoofbeats of horses picked up again, almost as if they had never stopped, and the stagecoach, the gelding tied behind it, charged down Main Street, leaving behind a dust cloud...

... and Caleb York.

Blaine Hargrave was the first one out of the dining room and into the parlor, fast on his feet but not enough so to get there before the front doors, with their fancy stained-glass windows, swung themselves shut behind the fleeing hostages.

And by the time Hargrave got to a front window in the parlor, his knees on a sofa still warm from Willa Cullen’s backside, he saw only the stagecoach rumbling off and the cloud of dust that subsumed a male figure that, of all people, appeared to be Bret McCory.

Reese rushed to the two-seater sofa, and his knees found the warmth Rita Finney had left behind. He was at the window, too, muttering, “McCory? What the hell...?”

Then, as the dust dissipated, no one was there.

Hargrave called out: “What have you done, man? Et tu, Bret?”

Young Randy was behind them, a .45 in hand. “Who et what?”

Hargrave spat, “Take a window, man!”

Reese did, shoving aside the chair that had been Parker’s to get at it.

“The name’s Caleb York!” came the familiar voice from somewhere in or across the street. “Never saw this Bret McCory in my life — and neither have you!”

Juanita was leaning in beside Hargrave, putting a hand on his shoulder. “How can I help, querida?”

“Seems someone in our little play was a better actor than I,” he told her with a rueful smile. “I’ve been upstaged.”

“What can I do?”

Then he looked hard at her and said, “You can start by going upstairs and getting your thirty-eight.”

She nodded and ran off through the lobby and up the stairs.

Bemis, looking barely able to stay conscious, stood in the parlor waiting for directions.

From outside thundered that voice again: “I’m sheriff of Trinidad County, and you’re all under arrest! Throw out your weapons and come out with your hands empty and high!”

Hargrave said, “There’s only one of him and five of us. So we wait him out. In the meantime, Broken Knife will sneak up on him like a good little redskin and get rid of the white eyes.”

As if he’d heard that, York yelled: “Get out here now, or I will cut you down like I did your Indian scout! Your choice.”

Hargrave could see no target, and no shots had been leveled their way; nothing provided help in figuring the sheriff’s position...

Still on his knees on the sofa, the outlaw leader said, “All right, everyone. We can’t get to the horses, either out front or in the stable. We have no choice but to go out the back way and come around and flank the bastard.”

Bemis said, “I ain’t much on runnin’ and gunnin’ at present. How about I take a high winder?”

“Do that,” Hargrave said, nodding as he got off the couch and onto his feet. “Reese, you and your brother go out by the kitchen. You go left, Reese, and Randy, go right. Head down behind a building or two and squeeze our friend between you.”

“Whatever you say, Blaine,” Reese said. Smiling, eyes glittering, the older Randabaugh obviously relished the idea that his competition for Hargrave’s approval would soon be removed from the gang — and that he might be the one doing the removing, was all the sweeter...

Randy, so hangdog this morning from last night’s trashing and humiliation, had come alive, the blond boy smiling and holding his .45 with its barrel in the air, as if about to fire the starting shot on a race.

And it was a race of sorts — which of them could get to York first without getting themselves killed...

But Hargrave had something else in mind for himself and Juanita. Muttering, he said, “Son of a bitch always did have a lean and hungry look...”

Reese frowned. “What, Blaine?”

“Nothing. Get to it. Enjoy yourselves. Surviving this is the prize now, because our hostages are lost to us.”

Caleb York was positioned behind Doc Miller’s buckboard, which remained tied to the hotel’s façade. The outlaws within hadn’t seemed to get a fix on him yet, and not a single shot had been fired his way, though he’d seen the barrels of revolvers poking from between the slats of the boarded-up windows.

That the gang would stay inside and use the hotel as their fortress remained a possibility, but York considered it a distant one. Managing to keep them pinned down might give Doc Miller time to raise a posse to send to support him. But that would be hours from now.

He’d considered having Tulley drive the stage a respectable distance and then let either Doc Miller or Raymond Parker take over at the reins, delivering the women back to Trinidad. That would have given him Tulley and his scattergun, making it possible to keep both the front and back of the hotel covered.

But getting those two females back to safety had been his major concern, and he didn’t feel confident that either Miller or Parker could handle the role of stagecoach driver.

So that left him here, a man alone, which was probably his preference anyway. He grinned as he peeked around the rear of the buckboard. Ned Clutter was getting ripe, but at least the ruckus had scared the flies off.

Now several minutes had gone by and nothing — not a voice, not a gunshot — had emanated from the hotel, the slots between boards on those windows no longer sprouting gun barrels, either.

So they were coming for him.

He felt his best bet, in that case, was to hug the buildings along the boardwalk of the ghost town, though the squeaks of the weathered wood underfoot, and the spurs on his boots, would almost certainly announce him. Keeping a gun in his right hand, he sat on the crushed-rock street behind the buckboard, and his left hand encouraged his boots off. In his stocking feet now, he could edge down that boardwalk and not be easily heard, as long as he took care.

Staying low, he started around the buckboard, at his left, but this exposed him in the street briefly, which was enough to draw a shot from above.

York ducked, rolled, and aimed up at a vague figure in a second-floor window. The .44 cracked the silence and the window glass. The vague figure seemed to totter, as if the man were using his last conscious moments on earth to decide whether to fall backward or forward.

The shooter chose the latter and burst through the window in a shower of shards and crunching glass and splintered wood, pitching onto the overhang of the hotel porch. He rolled like a log down and off that roof and hit the street with a whump, raising dust.

By this time York was under that overhang, his back against the building. Wondering who he’d killed, York looked past the still hitched-up horses of the outlaws at the facedown bearded man in the street, and figured this to be Ben Bemis, who he’d never seen before. That was as much thought as he gave that subject, as staying alive was more important.

So he crept along the boardwalk, past the next building, what had been a laundry, waiting for someone to try to come around on him from the back. With spaces between buildings, he needed to glance behind him every two seconds or so. His progress was slow.

Then, between a dead restaurant and the equally defunct post office, Reese Randabaugh emerged onto the boardwalk, gun in hand raised and ready to shoot, just a few feet from York. The older Randabaugh’s face contorted with rage, his hatred and perhaps his jealousy of the man who’d called himself Bret McCory overwhelming him for half a second.

York, not encumbered with any such emotion, used that half second to blow a hole through Reese’s forehead. The close-set eyes, shared by the brothers, had just time to widen before the works within him shut off; the hole, not quite in the center of his brow, looked black, then wept a single scarlet tear that trickled between blue eyes.

Then Reese tumbled to the boardwalk, his head hanging off the slightly elevated side, leaking blood and brain and bone matter onto the crushed-rock street.

York headed back the way he came, figuring they would try a pincer move, meaning the next gun should come from the other side of the hotel, between it and the assay office. As York moved by Doc’s hitched-up buckboard, the trotter restlessly dancing after the gunfire, he wondered if he’d misjudged their strategy; but then Randy Randabaugh stepped out from between buildings, revolver ready, and looked past York at his fallen brother.

Screaming, the boy started shooting wildly, staying put but issuing one gunshot after another. The idiocy of this non-tactic caught York by surprise. He dove into the street, seeking to return fire from a prone position.

Randy had availed himself of a second handgun and was firing just as wildly with it now, pausing only to skirt Doc’s buckboard, making it momentarily impossible for York to return fire. When the boy was in view, in the street, the incessant gunfire caused York to have to again roll back out of the way.

“Randy!” a female voice called.

The blond boy froze and his eyes went to the source, a female figure in the window, the same one where Ben Bemis died; framed in the broken-glass teeth, she stood holding a double-barreled shotgun, its twin black bottomless eyes aimed down.

Mahalia either had experience with such a weapon or was just plain lucky. The first barrel turned the boy’s groin into a bloody mess. His mouth opened but nothing came out, as if screaming just didn’t cover his loss. The second barrel took his head off. Blood shot up like an oil well coming in. But the gusher was brief.

York got to his feet and smiled up at the girl. She was smiling, too. He tipped his hat to her and moved on.

This left only Hargrave and Juanita. York figured the woman was at least as dangerous as the man, unless they both had covered their tails by siccing the Randabaughs and Bemis on him while they quietly left out a backstage door.

No, he thought. He had ruined enough things for Hargrave and his honey to keep them here seeking revenge. Hamlet was the actor’s most famous role, after all...

York walked past the Buckhorn Saloon, its broken window saying only BUC and OON now. Next door was the Palace Theater, where Hargrave had likely once performed; its façade had no windows at all, just the bold lettering announcing itself and a marquee to add who was playing. No one, right now. Unless...

Surely the actor would not take refuge there, of all places!

But actors, particularly Shakespearean ones, had a love of poetry, and of the inherently dramatic gesture, and what more dramatic, poetic place could there be for the last confrontation between archenemies than the ghost town’s playhouse?

And, indeed, the front doors of the Palace Theater stood open. Someone — well, there were only two possibilities — had engaged the wedges that had once upon a time been used to keep those doors open to the public.

York, 44 in hand, slowly entered the small foyer. A box-office booth, its gilded cage festooned with spiderwebs, was to the right. Staying close to the wall, York crept over there, to see if Hargrave or the woman might be within, waiting to jack-in-the-box up and hand him, on the house, a ticket to hell.

But no.

The space within was empty, home only to more spiders and their webs.

The two inner doors were also wedged open. Hargrave was staging the production with some care, considering the lack of time available. York stepped inside, under a balcony’s overhang. The chamber seemed vast, though the structure itself was not elaborate, just a wooden husk whose red and gold decorative paint was blistered where it wasn’t gone. Several box seats on either side overlooked the stage, whose frayed curtains, open to expose an empty, dusty proscenium, seemed to be hanging on for dear life.

No seats in this theater. Likely the space had been used for dances as well as plays and musical events, so folding chairs that could be cleared when necessary had provided seating. What had become of them was lost to the ages, as if anyone cared.

York stepped out from under the balcony, listening for any sign of either of them. Glanced up there and saw nothing. Perhaps they had led him here in order to come up on him from behind. But he heard nothing.

Then came applause — the sound of one person clapping.

It rang through the high-ceilinged room, echoing, as if it were announcing the star of this performance.

Which it was.

Blaine Hargrave, in his customary black, stepped from the wings and kept clapping till he reached center stage. His jacket was back to reveal the revolver on his hip, low and tied-down. Was that the show the outlaw planned? To shoot it out with his Brutus?

“It’s what I get,” Hargrave said, his voice carrying without trying too hard, “for wearing my heart on my sleeve.”

“More like hoist on your own petard.”

Hargrave gestured with his left hand, perhaps realizing a movement of his right, near his weapon, could get him killed. He said, “ ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars...’”

“That’s enough of this bull,” York said. “Unbuckle that gun belt and let it drop. I’m taking you to Trinidad. Your next performance is in front of the circuit judge. Anything clever or Shakespearean to say about that?”

The actor, alone on his stage, shook his head. “No. I prefer to save my farewell speech for the gallows.”

Some particles of dirt drifted down and landed on York’s shoulder. He hurled himself out onto the dusty floor, looking up to see just who he expected: Juanita — at the rail of the balcony, with a revolver in her hand and hatred on her pretty face. She was trying to draw a bead on York when he shot her, the angle of the bullet starting under a cheek and traveling out the top of the back of her head, a spray of red blossoming like a beautiful, terrible flower that wilted at once.

The shot took her backward and she slipped out of sight just as she slipped out of life. The scream from the stage told York that he best roll to one side and face that direction. There he saw Hargrave leaping, revolver in hand, handsome face contorted into agonized ugliness, jumping from the stage much as he’d done when that heckler taunted him and sent him down a torturous path that was ending here.

Hargrave was still in the air when York’s bullet lanced through him, in the chest, and when he hit the floor, it was with no grace at all.

The gun had fled the actor’s fingers, but even if it hadn’t, the man was so close to death that when York approached him, no danger awaited. The lawman knelt over the outlaw.

Hargrave, sprawled on his back, was smiling. At first York thought the man was looking at him, but no — the actor was looking through York.

Then the dying man said, weakly but with perfect enunciation despite a bubbling mouthful of blood, “ ‘Juliet, I will lie with thee tonight.’ ”

York stood, wondering if that was from the balcony scene.

Sure seemed like it should have been.