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Sheriff Lock’s Chinese was not as good as his Spanish, but his gestures told Wu the proprietor what he was seeking: a jar, a clay one, round, so high, with a face painted on the side. Wu swept his arm at the table and shelves and shrugged. So we looked, Lock and I.
“Some people just plumb hate everything about Mexicans, Sheriff,” I said. “Could be that simple.”
“Simpler than that.” Doc leaned in the doorway of the little shop, watching us rather than helping us look. “Some damn fool of a Mexican potter makes jars and paints the face of Santa Anna on the side, and tries to sell ‘em in Texas? That loco sumbitch is goddamn lucky it’s just his clay jars they’re breaking and not his skull.”
“Perhaps the jar-maker remembers Santa Anna as we remember George Washington,” Lock said, eyes up. “The general who fought for Mexican independence. Not the commander who wiped out a knot of squatters holed up in a mission.”
“Lock, you describe the Alamo that way out loud in this town and you’ll wish you had a gun,” Doc snapped. “The way I wish you’d grow a lick of damn’ sense about keeping yourself safe.”
“That’s not why this son of a bitch was breaking the jars, Doc. Mayor Strade.” Lock’s eyes never left off the bric-a-brac all through the little shop. Wu kept a suspicious eye on all of us; like most Chinese out here he’d obviously dealt with white men too long to trust any of them, no matter how courteous. “The easy answer is some fellow who remembers the Alamo. But he wouldn’t stick to breaking jars – like Doc says he’d have beaten up some of the Mexicans here too, or knifed them. But it’s just those damn jars.”
“Target practice?” I suggested. It didn’t seem right, but it was an idea. “Some bastards just like breaking stuff.”
“Simplest reason,” Lock said without looking away from the table. “Make a hell of a lot more sense if the blamed fellow didn’t spend so much time and effort looking for these particular jars to break. There’s a hundred other things here that would make faster targets or breakables.”
Doc grimaced. “Still say it’s–”
Lock lunged at something under the table, and he whooped. A second later he stood, grunting as he hoisted a round clay jar, so high, with a crude painting of a long-faced man in a uniform coat on the side. “Sixth one!”
Damn thing was heavier – solid, practically a ball of clay with a neck, useless. But painted with that Mexican general like all the others. It looked like the others.
Lock handed Wu a $20 gold piece – about 20 times more than that doorstop of a botched jar was worth – and carried it outside.
Doc whirled and fired in one explosion of movement. Amid the screams and yells of people doing their business, a man in the alley fell back against the painted wooden wall now redecorated in a splash of red and slid down in a mess of blood, his own cocked pistol tumbling out of his limp hand. By the time I realized that we’d been tailed and just missed being gunned down, Doc was hunkered down over the slumped body. “Bill Porter,” he said.
Lock nodded a little. He still held the damn’ jar. “The last of the bank robbers.”
I shook my head at the ghastly sight of the ringleader of the thieves that had been making their way through this territory. Saved us the cost of a judge and a rope, but why the hell had Porter started stealing clay jars?
Only when the undertaker had carried off the remains (again paid by Lock) and we’d returned to the sheriff’s office did Lock hold the jar over his head. “For Travis and Bowie,” he said with a grin, and let go.
The jar shattered instead of thudding, the way solid clay would have done. And it wasn’t clay that spilled out from the shards, but Mexican gold coins.
I couldn’t help myself – that had been such a neat trick of Lock’s that I whooped out loud, waving my hat like some fool cowhand at a show. Doc didn’t say nothing, but his mustache curled up at the ends from the long slow grin he sent to his partner.
“I would venture to say, Mayor Strade,” said Sheriff Lock, all calm but grinning ear to ear himself, “that this calls for the bottle of Kentucky whiskey.”