Marshal and the Moonshiner Page 9

  We drove the last mile in silence. We passed dust-barren fields that had once hosted lush, vibrant crops: alfalfa and milo and corn. In one pasture stood two cows that looked like they might topple over from boredom at any time. Their ribs tickled their spines, and they stood with their back against the wind, oblivious to dust devils that swirled around them. They looked emaciated enough to be blown into the next field along with the empty hulls of the crops.

  Maris stopped before we reached the gate that announced the 252nd. And 253rd Quartermaster Remount Squadrons. She pointed to a building past the guard shack. “That’s the administration building and Colonel Boggs. You be on your best behavior if we run into him.”

  “The colonel a problem?”

  “Not for me.” She smiled. “But he might be for you. He’s a stickler for protocol. Army protocol. He lives and breathes his army, and the last thing we need is to tell him there’s a marine from the Wood on his base. And damn sure don’t tell him you have jurisdiction on his fort because you’re a federal marshal. The colonel likes law enforcement even less than he does marines.”

  “Don’t tell me—some of his soldiers raise hell in town now and again.”

  Maris nodded.

  “And they get arrested.”

  “They do. And sometimes they . . . resist. And every time one of his men gets tossed into the pokey, he personally comes down and raises his own kind of hell. He’s the only one who backs Stauffer down. So if we run into the good colonel—”

  “I’ll be good,” I raised my hand.

  Maris drove toward the guard shack and parked in the area designated for vehicles. Hitching rails still stood on one end of the parking lot, grooved and worn and obviously still in use by some visitors to the fort.

  I followed Maris toward the tiny kiosk big enough to house one man. That man—a buck private—emerged from the shack wiping sweat from his face and neck with a bandana. He frowned at me, but his attitude changed when Maris stepped from her truck and flashed him a smile. He cocked his hat on his head and strutted toward us.

  “We’re here to see the provost marshal.” She pulled her lapel back and revealed her badge. He stared at her chest, but I suspect he wasn’t looking at the badge.

  “I need to get your names, ma’am,” he stammered.

  She told the private our names. He jotted on a clipboard and looked after us as we walked toward the admin building. “Since when did I become old enough to be a ma’am?” she said when we were out of earshot of the soldier.

  “I bet if he played his cards right—”

  “We’re here on business,” Maris interrupted. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t line up some action for later.”

  We took the steps into the administration building and followed a sign down the hall to the provost’s marshal’s office. We entered the PMO to the tinkle of a bell over the door. A stern-looking sergeant sporting a Donnelly name tag looked at us over half-glasses from his typewriter. He stopped his pecking and stood. By the hash marks on his sleeve, he had neared thirty years of service. And still a sergeant. I wondered who he pissed off. Or what trouble he’d gotten into.

  Maris flashed her badge but not her smile. She must have thought it a waste of time on this old soldier. “We need to speak with Sergeant Seugard.”

  “Now what would you be needing with Dutch?” I placed his brogue as Scots. “He get in another tussle down at the pool room? ’Cause if he’s beaten another civilian—”

  “We just need to speak with him,” Maris answered.

  Donnelly turned his attention to me, perhaps because he thought it unmanly being obstinate with a woman. And because, I suspected, he’d rather enjoy another stripe-erasing brawl. “My business is to know what you want with Dutch.”

  “We need to speak with him, Gunnery Sergeant.” Maris stepped between us and turned on her charm. It was a wonderful thing to see how quickly Donnelly’s antagonism faded.

  “I’m just a sergeant now, Deputy.” He smiled, and his four remaining teeth were a testament that he should have ducked more often. “I’ll see where Dutch is. Have a seat. Please.”

  We sat in chairs pushed hard against a long wall, and I felt as if we were awaiting court martial.

  “Grouchy old bastard.” Maris lit a cigarette and tossed her match into the spittoon beside the chairs.

  “That he is,” I agreed. “Good thing you gave him a promise for later. Kind of greased the wheels.”

  “Promise!” A corporal and a woman dressed in civvies looked over their typewriters at us before they returned to their hunched-over posture. “What do you mean, promise?” Maris whispered. “With that old duffer?”

  I put on my sternest look. “The important thing is, Sergeant Donnelly thinks there’s a promise waiting by the way you flirted with him.”

  “We just needed to get past the red tape . . .”

  “And I appreciate it.” I patted her arm, and she jerked back. “How you sacrificed for sake of the investigation.”

  “You a-hole.” Maris flicked her butt into the spittoon just as Donnelly came through a side door. He walked past me and looked down at Maris. “Dutch is in sick bay.”

  “He ill?” I asked.

  “Not the soldier sick bay,” he answered, his eyes never leaving Maris. “The horse and mule sick bay.” He jerked his thumb to a set of double doors. “Through those and halfway down the row of stables.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant,” she said with a forced smile and double-timed it through the doors.

  I ran to catch up with her once we were outside the admin building. “I think you have a new admirer.”

  “Funny man.” She stopped long enough to stick a cigarette in her mouth. When she lit a match, I blew it out. “What you do that for?”

  “They teach you to read in Cholocco?”

  “Of course they did. Why?”

  Less than a yard away was a big sign: NO SMOKING AROUND HAY. She nodded and stuffed the cigarette back in the pack.

  We continued toward the stables marked EQUINE HOSPITAL and peeked around the corner. Two soldiers squatted beside a mare as she lay on her side. “Sergeant Seugard?”

  The shorter and thicker of the two men stood. “That’d be me.”

  Maris introduced us, and there was nothing to register that Dutch had a problem with the law. “She in labor?” Maris asked.

  “Colic,” I volunteered.

  Seugard stood with his sleeves rolled up over thick forearms and looked up at me. He cocked his head as he stroked his mutton chops. “You know something of horse ailments, do you now?”

  “My father claimed I was born with a cayuse under me back in Wyoming.”

  That registered with Dutch, and his eyes widened like he was surprised. “Wyoming’s a long ways off.” He motioned to the mare. “What do people in Wyoming do for a colicky horse?”

  “Same thing as you’re going to do.” I motioned to the water pitcher in the stall. “I’ll bet you got ginger in that bag of tricks of yours that you’ll add to some warm water.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’d also wager you just wormed her, and that gingered-water will clean her innards out.”

  “Not bad for some Wyoming hick.” He walked to the adjacent stall and looked over the railing. A soldier applied a poultice to a gelding’s rump, probably from some nasty insect bite. Dutch took off his hat and grabbed a canteen hanging by a nail on the gate. He dribbled some into his hat and put it back on. Water trickled down his cheeks and forehead and made tiny rivulets down his dusty face. “But you didn’t come here to see how we doctor horses, now did you?”

  “You’re right, we didn’t,” Maris said. Once again, the top two buttons of her shirt had miraculously come unbuttoned, but Dutch paid her no mind. As if his interests lay elsewhere. “We’re looking for Amos Iron Horse.”

  “Who?”

  “Vincent’s brother.”

  “And who is Vincent?”

  I’d grown accustomed to people lying. Mo
st criminal suspects I interviewed lied. But most did so better than Dutch did just then. His eyes darted around the stables, avoiding my eyes or Maris’s as he walked to the next stall over. “What would you say is wrong with this critter, Marshal?” He opened the gate and motioned me into the stall. A mule fifteen hands tall stood shuddering as if it were cold. I stepped close enough to run my hand over her sweating withers that felt hot to the touch. “High fever.” I bent and ran my hand over the mare’s legs. “Two are badly swollen.” I stood and pulled back the mule’s lips. Small vessels had hemorrhaged in her mouth. “Swamp fever’d be my uneducated guess. This animal been close to mosquitoes, maybe some of those large biting flies I’ve seen since I’ve been here?”

  “You want a job?”

  “Got a job. That’s why I’m here.”

  Dutch didn’t bite and instead called to the private two stalls over. “The marshal here hit this one right on the money. Take her to the rendering pit and put her down. Nothing we can do for her.”

  “You done stalling?” I asked.

  “How’s that?”

  Maris dug into her pocket and showed Dutch the matchbook she’d found on Vincent’s desk. “We found this at Vincent Iron Horse’s shop in the city.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “Name of Dutch scribbled inside . . .”

  “Lot of people named Dutch.”

  I brushed Maris aside and stepped close to him. “We got no time for this. Where’s Amos?”

  Dutch tossed his hat aside and squared up to me. “You big bastard—you’re a little pushy . . .”

  “The last guy I sent to the morgue said that, too.”

  Maris stepped between us. Somehow she’d popped another button, showing more cleavage than she should have. This time Dutch’s eyes widened, and he definitely noticed Maris. She stepped closer, and her breasts brushed his arm. “We think—I think—Amos will contact you.” She laid her hand on his shoulder. “Please call me the moment you hear from him, and we can talk it over, you and me.”

  Dutch smiled for the first time. He shouldn’t have. Like Donnelly in admin building, Dutch had only four teeth remaining. As if that were the number the army issued soldiers nowadays.

  “Where can I call you?” he stammered.

  “Just call the Canadian County Sheriff. They’ll see I get the message.”

  We left Dutch leaning against a horse stall with his hand in his pocket doing God only knows what and hoofed it back to the main gate. As we stepped onto the boardwalk in front of the officers’ quarters, a trooper ran from the commissary building. He looked the wrong way and ran into me. He dropped his paper sack, and a jar broke on the wooden walkway. The sour odor of moonshine mash wafted over me. Oh, for a short pull, I thought to myself as I offered the kid a hand. He stood and brushed his uniform off.

  His eyes darted from the broken jar to the commissary building to the admin building. He shook as he bent to pick up the pieces of glass. He tossed the glass and the wet sack into a garbage can before he disappeared back into the commissary building. “Be good time to quit the hooch,” I called after him.

  “Is there ever a good time?” Maris said.

  I ignored her, and we continued to the gate. We passed the private who had been on duty earlier, his hair now pasted down with Brilliantine, and he’d bloused his shirt sharply. He smiled, and Maris smiled back. I thought she was going to break away and talk the private into something for later, but she continued to the truck.

  “So what do you think of him?”

  “The private? I think he’s a little young for you.”

  “I meant Dutch.”

  “Not bad for someone missing most of his teeth.” Maris coaxed the truck’s spark advance, and it started with a cough that sounded a lot like the mule we’d just heard dying.

  “How much do you believe him?”

  She paused to draw on her cigarette. “None of it. If he calls me tonight with Amos’s whereabouts, I’ll be surprised. But he damn sure knows Amos, and I bet he knows where we can find him.”

  “If nothing else, he’ll get the word to Amos, and this might just smoke him out. You up for some surveillance here tonight?”

  “Can I bring my own jar of shine?”

  I shook my head. “The last thing this fort needs is a drunk and horny Crazy Woman.”

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  I stuck my head out the window to let the breeze blow over my itching stitches and caught a mouthful of dust that gritted between my teeth and stung my eyeballs. I spat and ducked my head back inside the truck and wished I had something to wash the dust down. Something like that trooper had in that Mason jar earlier at the fort. “You notice the car?”

  Maris nodded. She turned her head slightly to verify the car still paced us. “It’s followed us from Ft. Reno.”

  “Know the driver?”

  “Dale Goar. Stupid bastard. Done some bounty hunting. Muscle for Stauffer now and then.” Maris laughed.

  “Explain muscle.”

  “Stauffer’s the high sheriff,” Maris explained. “And when he needs dirty things done, he finds Goar.”

  “Thought that’s why he had Johnny Notch.”

  “Notch can be traced right back to Stauffer. If that fool Goar is caught roughing up some taxpayer, Stauffer can claim he’s not one of his men.” She checked behind her and quickly turned her attention back to the road. “If Stauffer needs a confession, he sometimes calls up Dale.”

  “What the hell’s he want?”

  Maris jammed her knees on either side of the steering wheel while she shook out a Chesterfield. The truck hit a rut and shot toward a ten-foot embankment before she caught the wheel. “Maybe Stauffer’s having Dale follow ’cause I’m the new kid on the force. Maybe he just doesn’t trust me ’cause I’m Cheyenne, and he don’t trust Indians.”

  I turned my head to look out the back. Goar followed in Stauffer’s Lincoln close enough I could see a large bandage plastered across his nose. Like he’d just lost a fight somewhere recently. Perhaps in back of the Kerfoot a couple of nights ago. “My guess is it’s got nothing to do with you. Stauffer knows the only reason we’re together is to look for Amos. And he wants to be there when we find him, or have one of his men there so his boss can take the credit.”

  “Want me to lose him?”

  “In this?”

  “James Cagney did in Public Enemy.”

  I laughed. “And Joan Blondell loved him forever for losing the cops, right?” Stauffer’s Lincoln had twelve cylinders of American iron. Maris’s Chevy had six cylinders hitting on four. It couldn’t outrun Stauffer’s car if Goar were driving in reverse. “Let him think we haven’t seen him and drop me off at the hotel.”

  When we entered El Reno, Goar made little effort to conceal his intentions. He turned whenever Maris did, stopped too close at stop signs when she did. If Stauffer secretly sent a man to follow us, he couldn’t have picked a worse person than this clown.

  Maris pulled to the curb at the Kerfoot, and Goar killed his engine. “Are you sure you want me to give you that promise?”

  “Different kind of promise,” I said as I folded myself into a standing position. I stretched and arched my back while I watched Goar out of the corner of my eye. “Promise you’ll pick me up on time tonight?”

  She batted her eyelashes. “Promise.”

  I walked to the front doors of the hotel with a deliberate pace, making sure Goar saw me enter. When I cleared the front doors, I ran through the lobby towards the back alley with Ragwood looking after me as if I were crazy. I paused just long enough by the back doors to make sure no one was in the back lot and stepped out. A Watkins salesman had backed up to the door and sweated profusely as he unloaded his wares: shoe polish and spices and tit salve, though I doubted he would find many sore tits tonight in this hotel.

  I walked to the corner of the Kerfoot and peered around. Goar sat scrunched down in the seat of the Lincoln. He eyed th
e front doors of the hotel as if he expected me to come out any moment. A red glow from his cigarette illuminated his face, and the sun reflected from white tape across his broken nose.

  I picked my way past dead bushes at the side of the hotel and eased toward the Lincoln. The toe of my boot smashed a can, and I froze. Goar turned his head to see where the sound came from, and I was glad the man had little for a neck—his head went right to his shoulders and prevented him from looking back far enough to see me. He turned back to watching the front of the hotel as he lit another smoke.

  I waited until two kids rolled a tire by. They laughed, a molting dog following after them. When they had disappeared around the corner, I left the safety of the bushes. I advanced on the car slowly as I picked my way carefully along the pavement. Eight feet. Five feet. Now three feet from the open window. I lunged at the door handle and jerked the door open. Goar screamed and nearly fell out of the car as he dropped his cigarette into his lap. His eyes, wide with fright, darted to the open door as I grabbed him by the coat front and jerked him out of the car.

  Cologne . . . familiar now that the wind brought it past my nose; the same cologne I’d smelled the night the two thugs jumped me in back of the Kerfoot. It was Goar’s nose I’d connected with just before I passed out. “Why the hell you follow us?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about . . .”

  I backhanded him. The blow, though hard, barely moved his big, gomby head, and he looked frantically about for an escape route. As long as I kept him scared, I might get some answers. “Try again: why did you follow us, and why did you jump me the other night?”

  Goar’s eyes widened as he looked up at mine. He was shorter than me by half a foot, but muscular, built like he was made for jumping other men in back alleys and dark parking lots. I decided I wasn’t other men and drew my hand back to slap him again. He writhed free, and his hand went under his coat to a gun in a shoulder holster. I grabbed his hand and squeezed hard like I was milking a cow. Goar yelled in pain and let go. I skinned his gun and tossed it aside. It clanged loudly when it hit the pavement and skidded, the sound bouncing off the hotel and buildings surrounding it.