Work Text:
I been mayor of Bakerstown, Texas four years, mainly because nobody’s wanted the job enough to shoot me for it.
You wouldn’t want to remember Bakerstown, passing through; ugly little spot on the edge of the desert, nothing to boast of unless you count coyotes or scorpions. Once a year, like the spring flood, this place turns into a sea of roaring drunk-ass cowpunchers moving through on their way to Laramie, and that’s about the only time we need law around here. Cattle companies don’t like their profits getting cut by rustlers, thieves or renegades – and those are just the goddamn cowpunchers, ain’t talking about the professional badmen, robbers, or Comanche around here. We go from two hundred-and-some drunk mostly-male citizens to over four hundred men in their twenties – full of saloon rotgut, carrying guns and just looking for a fight – and ten thousand stinking head of longhorns. We’d beg the territory governor to send a sheriff, even just for during the cattle drive, and they just kept getting shot at, or joining the goddamn rustlers – last chap wheeled his horse and fled before he’d even entered Bakerstown proper. Trying to keep law around here’s a joke.
Or it was, till those two moved into a town of 219 hell-bound souls, looking for work, and bumped us up to 221.
Two of ‘em: A tall drink of water with black hair and a smooth chin, and a regular-sized fella with a mighty unfriendly squint over his handlebar, and a mighty steady hand on his shooting iron. “East,” was all Lock ever said about where he was from, and Doc just nodded agreement.
It all started not long after they showed up, when those two Mormon preachers was found dead in their boarding-house with some squarehead word scribbled on the wall in blood. Well, Lock stepped in and reckoned it was one fella making it look like a Mormon war – kept folks from stringing up the other Mormons on the edge of town and stopped the Mormons from shooting at the squarehead farmers, too. It was eerie, the way Lock just looked at everything and figured out who’d done it – the man’s quiet but scary-smart. He walked outside and pointed at the stage-driver down the road – and Hope hadn’t gotten his gun half out of his holster before Doc’s Colt knocked ‘im right off his seat, from 500 feet away.
I’d of taken them for two more broken men moving away from the remnants of the War, except that Lock had a letter from the governor of Mississippi thanking him for his assistance in recovering some important state documents. That’s as good as a commission out here in these cowtowns, and that Mormon business clinched it. Lock shrugged and nodded when I offered him the tin star; when I offered Doc one, he just grinned in a way made me wish I was elsewhere, and I didn’t try again. Both of them took up residence at the deserted sheriff’s office and they ain’t moved from there.
Why here? Why this goddamn cowpie of a town, when Sheriff Lock could be making real money in an up-and-coming place like Dodge City or Tombstone? “Boring,” Lock said; “Civilized,” Doc added through his teeth clamped around his cheroot. Well, Doc fit in here all right, even if Lock stuck out like a sore thumb.
When the place isn’t full of goddamn cowpunchers it’s just the local drunks shooting and causing trouble over cards or whores or the heat or the snakes. Snakes – shit, that was another one, Lock finding that girl Julie dead at the Red Circle, and announcing that her pimp had set a sidewinder loose in her room when her last customer left, with its rattler cut off so she wouldn’t hear it, to teach his girls a lesson about holding out on him. Big Grim roared that he’d goddamn break that goddamn sheriff in two – and that’s when Doc grabbed that scaly monster in his bare hand and threw it right into the pimp’s face. That son-of-a-bitch was dead before he hit the floor; only then did Doc shoot the snake’s head off. Got to say, Doc did get a handsome pair of boots out of that case. And that’s why the badasses here don’t even think of looking cross-eyed at Sheriff Lock, even though the crazy bastard never carries a gun!
I had to say, trying to figure how those two ever got together was a bigger mystery than anything that goes on in Bakerstown. Well, until that one night we all three got good and drunk after that Mexican jar business (six of them, all the same, smashed one by one, but turns out the fella had stashed the gold from his bank robbery in the last one). That was when they told me about the James brothers.
“Damnedest thing, Mayor Strade.” Lock was the only chap in town didn’t call me Les or Lester. “Two brothers, both alike in dignity, both bearing the same Christian name and surname.”
Doc grinned. “Their ma musta hated them from the day they hit air, Les. James Moriarty and James Moriarty. Irish twins.”
“Mm. Maybe she liked the name James and wanted to make sure, sure one of them lived to wear it,” I slurred, leaning over to refill their glasses (from my bottle of good Kentucky whiskey, not that panther piss the saloon-keepers cook up).
“This was Kansas City. I was making my living in my usual manner.” Doc mimed spreading a hand of cards. I knew he was an actual people doctor, but damned if I could picture him treating anyone as a patient. “Lock here was apparently getting in trouble with the law in his own unique way.”
Sheriff Lock pursed his lips around the long curved stem of his wooden pipe. “Doc, if they’re gonna deputize damned fools with shit for brains, I can’t be faulted for trying to help them do their damn job.”
“Seems the James brothers wanted one of their kills kept a mystery.” Doc’s moustache curled up at one end. “Ain’t nothing kept a mystery when Lock claps eyes to it, and I learned that one right off. This sumbitch walks past my table, takes one look at me, and just as I’m about to plug him for trying to give away my hand he says, ‘Second Georgia Sharpshooters Battalion, bullet’s still in your shoulder, you were a doctor but decided killing men was less deadly than stacking up arms and legs outside the hospital tent’ and walks on. Well I was so poleaxed I dropped my cards anyway.”
I nodded; I’d thought there was a Georgia stretch to Doc’s voice, soft as syrup. Lock’s was harder to pin down; East, was all he’d said. There was something East about his talk.
“So my game was lost, and I just had to see what this fellow was up to.” Doc stretched. “I got up and followed him, once he’d left the saloon. Tracked him to the smithy. I was just in time for the show.”
“Earlier in the week, I’d found Harry Stacker’s body by his forge.” Lock puffed out a cloud of smoke. “Impaled on an axle he’d been mending. Marshall said it was an accident – he’d had a fit, fell forward onto his work. But I saw the tattoo, the missing wedding ring, the cheap new tools; he’d owed money and couldn’t pay it back in time. So I did some hunting, and found the hiding place with his ring and tools that pointed right at the James boys, and that’s when the three of them found me – the Moriartys, and their hired gun Wildcat Moran.”
“Sounds like Lock all right,” Doc drawled, tipping back his glass. “So damn’ smart he gets himself trapped in a building with one doorway.”
“Anyway,” Lock said, with a glare at the grinning Doc, “I looked ‘em in the eyes and told ‘em I knew what had happened and everyone would know.”
“’You kin shoot me.’” Doc did a passable turn at Lock’s voice, stretching his face to mock his friend’s features. “‘But you cain’t keep this hid forever. There’s three things can’t no one hide – the sun, the moon, and the truth.’”
I blinked. Very philosophical for an unarmed man facing three killers.
Lock smiled at Doc’s mock of him. “Said they reckoned they only needed the truth hid till they got out of town.”
Doc spun his Colt’s empty cylinder. “They didn’t get out of town.”
Lock nodded, grinning at his friend. “Shots, one two. Moran and one of the Moriartys drop dead. Other ‘un drops his gun and puts up his hands crying and begging like a baby. Doc shoots his hand anyway. Fingers flying.” Lock made a face.
Doc exhaled a puff of cigar smoke. “I was simply ensuring that the man has difficulty pulling a trigger in the future, Sheriff Lock. I had no wish to see you shot, as you’re far more entertaining alive. And you clearly needed someone to watch your back.”
Lock shook his head. “That was a little too much excitement for Kansas City. Marshall thanked me for my work, said the widow and kids appreciated getting the stuff back so they could bury Harry decent, and told me to get the hell out of his town and take my pet rattlesnake with me.”
“Which we did.” Doc stubbed out the cigar and held out his glass. “More, Les?”
I managed a nod, and topped off both their glasses with the last of my Kentucky. Mystery solved.