The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Stories Page 5

  “What kind of trouble?”

  But the black-suited man ignored him. “Girl—tie him up. Good and tight.”

  She set down her rifle and came toward Ben. “It’ll be a pleasure.”

  “I’ll take a look around,” the Beard said. “He might have friends.” The Indian followed him out, and the girl came around Ben to start her work. At that moment there wasn’t a gun on him, but he had a feeling the Preacher could be awfully fast on the draw, even with that coat on.

  The girl pulled his arms roughly behind his back and tied the wrists while the black-suited man watched. Then she tied his legs at the knees and ankles and toppled him over on his side. “I’m sure you’ll stay there,” she said. The Preacher nodded and went out to join the others at the horses.

  “You must have some name besides Girl,” Ben said, now that they were alone.

  “Laura. Does my name interest you?”

  “You interest me.” His eyes were on the tight jeans, worn at the buttocks from heavy riding. “How’d you get mixed up with those three?”

  “Harry’s my brother.”

  “The one in the black suit?”

  “Of course! It wouldn’t be the other two creeps, for God’s sake! That bearded one, Jason, gives me the creeps. And the Indian’s not much better. Where my brother dug them up, I’ll never know.”

  The bearded Jason returned at that moment, and walked over to Ben. “You damn killer! Your fast draw don’t help you now, does it?” He aimed a kick at Ben’s ribs, but Laura stopped him, blocking it with her foot.

  “Lay off, Jason. Get lost.”

  “Damn tramp! Gettin’ ready to sleep with him already?”

  She slapped him across his bearded cheek and he went away mumbling.

  “It’s like that all the time,” she told Ben, not seeming too upset.

  “What are the four of you up to?”

  She shrugged, too innocently. “Just riding. Tell me about you, Ben Snow. He said you were Billy the Kid.”

  He rolled over on the floor, trying to get comfortable. “A lot of people say that. Doesn’t make it true, though. Billy Bonney was born in ’59 and killed in ’81. I wasn’t born till ’61 and I’m still around, a mighty live 34 years.”

  “Then why do they say it?”

  “Too many rumors that Billy lived after ’81. I guess the people wanted him to be alive or something. Hero worship, you know. I was fast with a gun and the story got started. It was one jump ahead of me all across the southwest in ’90, and it’s still around now. I’ve had five years of living down a legend, and I’ve killed some men trying to do it. Trouble just seems to follow me.”

  “You talk like an educated man.”

  “I guess I’ve had a bit of schooling.”

  She sat there on the floor beside him for a moment, thinking her own thoughts. Then she hopped lightly to her feet. “I’ll be back. I want to look around some too.”

  He lay there alone for a moment, then started working on his bonds. She sure knew how to tie knots, but he thought maybe in time he might get one hand free. He’d been at it about five minutes when he heard the scream. It was a terrifying thing that echoed through the old building, but the most awful part of it was the way it was cut off in the middle, as if some giant hand had closed down forever. There were running footsteps somewhere above him, and after a moment the girl Laura entered from outside. “Who . . . ? God, what was that?”

  “Untie me and we’ll go see.”

  She ignored him and ran off toward the back room, which seemed to have been the source of the scream. “What’s this, water?” she mumbled from the darkened doorway, and reached for one of the lamps. At the same moment Ben managed to get a hand free. He was already ripping the thongs from his legs when she dropped the lamp and stumbled backward with a choking gasp.

  The Indian and the black-suited Harry had appeared from somewhere. In the sudden confusion they hadn’t even noticed he was free. They were clustered around the doorway, where the flickering light from the fallen lamp shone in on a scene from hell.

  The bearded Jason was in there, pinned to the wall like some giant butterfly with a shaft of wood and metal. His eyes were open and staring in death, and to Ben it looked as if almost in that last second of life before the shaft pierced his chest he’d seen some great unexpected truth. But the horror of Jason, awful as it was, could be only a part of it. At least a body was something solid, physical. But around the body, covering the floor in irregular puddles, was more water than Ben Snow had seen in days. It was almost as if here, in the middle of the desert, some creature of the sea had appeared to strike down this man.

  “What’s that thing through his chest?” Harry gasped out.

  Ben took a step closer to examine it, carefully avoiding the puddles of water. “It’s a harpoon,” he answered at last. “Like they use on whales.”

  And they stood there, looking, not really understanding, because death can never really be understood by those who have yet to experience it. Ben took advantage of the moment to slip the pistol out of Jason’s untouched holster.

  When he turned from the pinned corpse he was covering them with the gun.

  “Caah!” the Indian shouted, his hand going for his knife. Ben fired from the hip and nicked his finger. That stopped him, and it stopped the others too.

  “Now let’s talk,” Ben said quietly. “In the other room.”

  He followed them in and motioned toward chairs. The gun in his hand gave him the old feeling of power. He lit another lamp and sat down opposite them.

  “Did you kill Jason?” the black-suited man asked.

  “Hardly. I was still tied up at the time.”

  “But there’s no one else in this damned town.”

  Ben shrugged casually. “Then it must have been one of you three.” He wasn’t yet ready to spring the other possibility on them.

  The Indian’s finger was still bleeding. “No,” he said simply. “No kill!”

  “See?” Harry said, as if this proved something. “The girl wouldn’t have the strength, and I was outside when it happened. Besides, why would we kill him? He was a friend.”

  Ben scratched his bristled chin. “Maybe I’d be able to answer that one better if I knew what the four of you were doing here.”

  Harry and the Indian exchanged glances, but neither spoke. Finally, after the silence had become obvious, the girl said, “Well, why not tell him? We’ve got a murder on our hands now.”

  “Shut up!” Harry told her.

  But she ignored him. “We robbed a train,” she told Ben. “Just like that.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” Harry insisted. “She’s just kidding you.”

  “Is this kidding?” she asked, suddenly on her feet by the bulging saddlebags the Indian had brought in. She overturned one and emptied its contents on the dull, sandy floor. Money, packages of new paper money, tumbled into view. Ben knelt to pick up one, keeping his gun ready. “Big bills,” he said. “They’ll have the serial numbers listed.”

  Harry shook his head. “We’ll have it spent before they do anything like that. It’ll take them a week to get the news across the country. How about it, Snow? We’ll cut you in for Jason’s share. He sure won’t need it.”

  But Ben wasn’t buying. “Sure, it’ll take a week! Didn’t you damn fools ever hear of the telegraph?”

  The Indian said, “We get out now. Split up money.”

  “In the morning, Redman. That’ll be soon enough.”

  Ben smiled a little. “We may none of us be alive by morning. Unless one of you want to confess killing him.”

  “Why would we kill him?” the girl asked.

  “Money. More money for each of you now. Or perhaps, Miss Laura, he caught you out there and tried to attack you, and you had to kill him.”

  “But she only shook her head, silently. The Indian spoke up again. “Evil spirit kill him. Water spirit.”

  Ben frowned at the thought. It had to be discussed, at least. “He may not be so wrong. Some say the town is haunted.”

  “Haunted! By what?” Harry was a true unbeliever. Ben imagined that he questioned anything that wasn’t black or white, and that made all the stranger his dress of a Preacher. Or was he a Preacher only when he robbed trains?

  Ben shrugged in answer to his question. “We’re in a deep valley here. It might even have been a river at one time, emptying into the Gulf of California. Perhaps some time a hundred years ago, a whaling ship made its way this far . . .”

  “Don’t give me that crazy talk!”

  But Ben could see that it wasn’t crazy talk to the Indian. He backed away, then headed for the door, unmindful of the gun Ben still held. He didn’t go far. At the doorway he uttered another gasping, “Caah!”

  “What is it?” Ben called out.

  “Evil spirit has stolen horses!”

  They all went to look, but of course the Indian spoke the truth. The horses were indeed gone. “There must be someone else here,” Harry insisted.

  “We’ll search again. Any of you might have moved the horses,” Ben pointed out. “But we’ll search. No funny business, though. Remember, I’ve got my gun back.”

  “I’ll remember that, Snow. You remember my offer of the money. There’s still enough for all of us.”

  “What makes you think I want your money?”

  Harry smiled a little, a twisted sort of grimace. “Billy the Kid would have wanted it,” he said and walked away.

  They took lamps and spread out to search through the ruined buildings for the horses, and Ben found himself somehow teamed up with Laura. “Your brother’s a pretty crazy guy,” he said as they explored the big barn that might have been a stable once.

  “He’s all right.”

  “Sure. Al
l train robbers are.”

  “He had a hard childhood.”

  “Didn’t you have, too?”

  She hesitated. “Yes. I guess girls can take it a little better than boys.”

  “Why’s he wear the black suit?”

  “He studied for the ministry once. Really. They threw him out because he drank. He was wearing the suit on the train so he could get into the money car without arousing too much suspicion.”

  “Did he kill anyone on the train?”

  “No. The Indian stabbed a guard, but I don’t think he killed him.”

  “How much money is there?”

  “We’re not sure. A lot of it. Over a hundred thousand dollars, on its way to west coast banks.”

  He thought about that. It was a lot. With a quarter of it he could stop running from those who would make him a gunfighter. He could move to San Francisco, or back east to St. Louis. He realized suddenly that Laura was saying something. “What?”

  “You and I. We could take the whole thing.”

  She’d really said it—his ears weren’t deceiving him. “You’d double-cross your own brother?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t owe him anything.”

  “We wouldn’t get far without horses.” He paused, then added casually, “Unless you hid them somewhere.”

  “How could I? You’re right, of course. It’s crazy.” She’d been standing close to him. Now, in the shadow, she leaned her body against his and kissed him. Before he could do more than respond briefly, there was the sound of voices from outside.

  “They’re looking for us,” he said, breaking away.

  They went out into the darkness, where Harry and the Indian were waiting with swinging lanterns. “The harpoon’s gone,” Harry told them. “Someone took it out of Jason’s body.” He was scared.

  Ben broke into a trot as he headed back to the building, feeling the reassuring slap of holster against thigh. Whether human or ghost, the murderer had retrieved his weapon. That could only mean he intended to use it again. The bearded corpse was on the floor now, tumbled there by someone or something. Where the harpoon had been, there was now only a ragged, running wound, and the blood that had held back so long was now covering the floor to mix with the dampness and the puddled water. “Neither of you saw anything?”

  Ben asked them. “Where were you—together?”

  “No. I was upstairs and the Indian was across the street. He came over and found it, then called me.”

  Ben turned to the red man. “Well? You didn’t see anything, I suppose.”

  The Indian shook his head. “Found water,” he said, with a bit of pride.

  “Water?” Ben followed him out the back door. Sure enough, a large rain barrel sat there, with an inch or two of water still in the bottom. Rain came rarely to the region, but there’d been a few heavy downpours in recent weeks, enough to explain the water. Now all he had to explain was why the ghost—or Jason—had splashed it over the floor inside. It seemed like a wasted effort if its only reason was to heighten the effect of the harpoon as a weapon. Besides, if the ghost wanted them to leave, why steal their horses and make escape impossible? No, the more he thought about it, the more certain he became that one of them was the ghostly killer, looking for a larger share of the loot.

  “Is someone watching the money?” he asked.

  “I hid it under the stairs,” Harry said. “It’s safe.”

  They went back outside, where the night wind was beginning to pick up. Eddying sand cast strange patterns over the almost-street, and now the stars were beginning to appear from behind the dispersing clouds. Ben thought he heard the distant whinnying of horses, but he could not be sure. It might only have been a trick of the wind.

  “O.K.,” he told them. “We split up again and keep searching. Laura, go in with the money and sit tight. If anything suspicious happens, start blasting away with that rifle of yours.”

  “I want to go with you,” she said.

  “No.” He had a feeling he could force one of the others to show his hand if he was alone. With Laura along, the killer wouldn’t be likely to appear. He left them and went off by himself, this time along the back of the line of tottering structures. He held his lantern close to the ground, searching for hoof marks in the sandy soil. But there was nothing that could certainly be distinguished in this light.

  He’d been moving along the street about five minutes when he became conscious of someone following him. Laura, perhaps. He doubted if the Indian would make that vague shuffling sound on sand. But he couldn’t take the chance. He left the lantern propped on a fallen timber and moved out of its yellow circle of light.

  Someone, across the circle from him. Someone, stalking him as Jason might have been stalked. He drew his gun carefully and waited, certain that he was as invisible as the other. But then, hadn’t Jason been invisible too? Suddenly, off to the right, there appeared a tiny spot of glowing fire. It might have been a star fallen to earth, or the frozen burst of a pale rocket. It might even have been the ghost of Raindeer, if Ben Snow believed in such things. He turned his gun to aim at the strangely glowing spot, but the movement now seemed to blur in the darkness to his left. There was the crunching thud of blade against flesh and bone, and the glow vanished before Ben’s eyes.

  He circled the lighted area, and now with it behind him the stars cast a pale glow over the scene. A thing, something bulky, curled into itself in the dust, and ahead were the running footsteps of a murderer. Ben knelt for an instant in the spreading blood, trying to pull the harpoon free, but it was too late. The man before him was the Indian, and he was dead.

  Now Ben was running too, in the direction of the retreating footsteps, down between the darkly dead buildings that sometimes leaned too far out at him. Silently, without a shouted warning or a shot. But Ben kept his gun ready, running with it held high.

  The other, desperately, leaped onto a creaking wooden porch, then into one of the buildings where even the stars could not reveal him. Ben followed.

  And there, just inside the black door, was the glow of light—the ghost?—again. This time Ben did not hesitate. He fired twice from the hip, and the glow dissolved in a splintering crash.

  A mirror! He looked down at his chest, his stomach, and realized suddenly that the glow was upon him! He was standing there in the void, a perfect target for the ghostly killer.

  He threw himself to the floor as a gun blazed out, tearing through the loose cloth of his shirt. Ben answered the weapon’s flash with his remaining four bullets.

  For a long time silence settled like the dust about him. He waited for more shots, his glowing stomach pressed against the protecting floor. But none came. Presently there was the noise of cautious arrival in the doorway behind him. Harry and Laura were there, with lamps. “What in hell happened? You all right?”

  “I think so,” Ben said, getting to one knee. “Shine the light over there.”

  “God! You got him, whoever it was.”

  Ben walked over and kicked at the body with his toe. The face, in death distorted, was still familiar. It was the face of the sheepman who’d warned him about the town only a few hours earlier.

  “There’s your murderer,” Ben said. “He killed Jason and the Indian. He’s a sheepman from over the next hill.”

  “You’re a good shot,” Laura said. “Even in the dark.”

  “Especially in the dark. If I’d thought about it, I’d have known it was the sheepman, of course. He’s the one who tried to tell me the town was haunted, to keep me away. And the water in the room where Jason was killed—there had to be a reason for it. I thought about it, but that crazy harpoon misled me.

  The water was simply an attempt to wash the floor, to clean up some possible clue to his identity. Jason found him there, waiting to claim his first victim, and the sheepman killed him with the harpoon, just as he killed the Indian a while ago.”

  Harry shrugged. “The Indian is no great loss. It’s just one less cut on the money. But what clue could the sheepman have left on the floor?”

  “Something he feared any of us would recognize. Probably dirt and manure, the odor, the stink of sheep. I don’t say I would have recognized the smell, but he must have feared we might. Those sheepmen have queer ideas sometimes about us, like we belong to a different world.”