Pistolero
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About this ebook
Mexico... the days just prior to the events depicted in the opening pages of ‘Widowmaker.’ A “prequel,” and the final installment of the Cole Matthews Trilogy, finds him besieged by bandits and troubled by dangerous ladies, taking on the Mexican Army, and being thrown into a hole and buried alive...
William E. McClintock
Been just passin' through, mostly, but did a lot of cool things along the way... Was a disc jockey back when radio stations played 45 rpm records, did a stint as the news director of a state-wide radio network in Alaska, and logged more than a few years as a talk show host. Been both a deputy sheriff and a city cop... Seen murders and suicides, known good guys and bad guys, saints and sinners and stone cold killers... and been loved by some wonderful women. Back in my really younger days, too full of Kerouac and Hemingway, I was 'On the Road' for a time, a guitar on my shoulder, sleeping under bridges and in parks and on the subway, thumbing rides, and hopping a freight train or two along the way just to say I had. Never could play the guitar worth a damn, but carrying the thing around got me rides, and into beach parties, and laid more than once. Sometimes I wonder where I’m from. Grew up in Montana and Wyoming, but spent a lot of time in LA back when LA was cool, and the ironic, funny thing is, when I was in Wyoming I always felt like I was from LA, and when I was in LA, I felt like I was from Wyoming... I’ve always loved the west and all that history, though, (livin’ in Tombstone, Arizona now, go figure) and, through some combination of direction and DNA, I'm pretty sure it was my grandmother who gave me that. She was a ranch cook and I was a Casper kid who spent summers on whatever ranch she happened to be working -- the ZN, the Big Creek, the A Bar A... One of the cowhands at the Big Creek Ranch -- a tall, lanky guy named Ray -- taught me how to throw a rope, and I could still stop a steer in its tracks if I had to. A cowboy at the ZN imparted the basics of fist fighting when I was about eight years old, and the boys at the A Bar A let me in on the branding more than once. But maybe more to the point, there's this little flashback: bouncing along on the front seat of a battered old pickup, my grandmother's hand on the stick shift that comes up out of the crank case, and she's saying, "Hole-in-the-Wall is over that way, just over those hills. Remember me tellin’ you about Butch Cassidy?...” Or, “It was right around Bosler here where Tom Horn was pickin’ off rustlers for the Swan Land and Cattle Company...” For better or worse, those are character building moments, and memories like that don’t fade much. Not ever. (I can still close my eyes and see about a thousand eggs frying on the griddle in the cookhouse at the A Bar A...) Somebody asked me one time what book or movie I thought best represented my life. It was an interesting thing to ask but I had no interesting answer, so I more or less shrugged it off. That little pop psychology question rolled around inside my head for awhile, though... Once, I knew, I would've said, 'On the Road,' or 'Catcher in the Rye'... At another point in my life, it was very much the Clint Eastwood movie, 'Play Misty for Me'... At still another, later time, maybe 'The Blue Knight,' or 'The Choir Boys' or some other cop novel by Joseph Wambaugh... But it came to me in the form of a minor epiphany one day that it was all of the above, and a Dustin Hoffman movie came to my mind: Little Big Man. At the end, Little Big Man ruminates that he has lived his life in periods... "There was my missionary period," he says, "and then my Indian period and my Cavalry scout period, then my gunfighter period, and now my old man period..." And so -- I realize -- has it been with me. There was my Kerouac period, and my radio period, and my cop period, and now, I suppose, my writer period, which curves around and corkscrews into the Kerouac period... Could be it's that way with all of us. Maybe, as Toby Keith once said, I Should've Been a Cowboy... Well, who ever knows? That's one of the roads untraveled for me. But you know, having given it some thought, I do know where I’m from... I’m from Wyoming. So I’m in Tombstone now with Sam the cat. We walk the haunted streets together, and I try to keep him safe from the coyotes and the javelinas that come prowling at night. I write, and I’m with the Tombstone Marshal’s Office, and there’s a lot of weird but cool synchronicity in that, don’t you think?
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Pistolero - William E. McClintock
PISTOLERO
A Prequel
William E. McClintock
Copyright 2016 by William E. McClintock
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author.
E-book formatting by www.gopublished.com
With profound gratitude to my friend and de facto editor, Joe Grove, whose newspaperman’s eye was critical on so many levels and caught a gaffe or two... And also to mi buen Tombstone amigo Jim Brown, whose knowledge and love of the West helped get this book over some rough spots. Then there was Bill Nelson...
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Certain it is that many of his stern deeds were for the right as he understood that right to be.
– from the obituary of Texas gunfighter Clay Allison;
The Kansas City Star, July 1887
Chapter One
- 1 -
The boy was dead. Just a poor, black-haired little Mexican boy, five, maybe six years old. He lay on his back in the dirt, barefoot, in threadbare trousers and no-button shirt, the shirt flung open wide at the front. There was a blood-red hole the size of a quarter dollar in the center of his little chest.
The body of a man lay forty or fifty feet away, on the other side of a small, roofed, rock well. There were rough sandals on the man’s bare feet, and he wore homemade cloth trousers with a length of rope for a belt. A large caliber bullet had taken part of his head off, and he lay face down, a cloud of flies buzzing about the black, gaping cavity.
Cole Matthews twisted in the saddle and looked all around. A Winchester ‘76 with a heavy, octagonal, sharpshooter’s barrel lay under his left knee, a sawed-off ten-gauge hung in a scabbard right of the saddle horn, and a Sharps long-range Creedmoor was under his right leg. He rested his right hand down on the ivory grip of the .45 caliber Smith and Wesson Schofield that was on his hip.
A tiny house with adobe walls and a flat, dirt roof sat forty or fifty yards from the well, and alongside that, a small, neat garden plot fenced in with sticks and string. Further back, a thrown-together little shed for a barn and a ramshackle corral with a few goats milling about, and some chickens. His eyes returned to the little stone well. A pair of fully saddled horses – a gray and a pinto – were tied to one of the well roof posts, and stood flicking at flies with their tails. He looked back to the house. The front door was open wide. He had stopped just to water his horse and found all this.
The day was hot, the sky was cloudless and blue, and but for the buzzing of the flies, it was quiet.
He pulled the Winchester and got down off his horse. The bay looked at him curiously, then dropped his big head and munched at a clump of grass.
He knew the horse wouldn’t wander, so he let the reins fall to the ground. Somewhere a blackbird cawed. He levered the Winchester, bringing a round of .45-75 under the hammer.
He stepped around the body of the dead boy, the rifle in his left hand, and made his way cautiously toward the little house, toward that open front door. One of the goats in the corral gave out with a tiny baa-aah-aaah, and he glanced briefly that way.
As he got closer, he could hear the rough sound of a man’s grunting, and the sound of another man’s soft laughter. He stepped into the doorway and pushed the plank door open a little further with the barrel of the Winchester.
Inside, down on the floor, pretty much what he had expected to find: a man with his pants down around his knees and a woman on her back, her legs spread wide. The man grunted hard as his bare, brown ass bumped and pounded, and another man crouched at the woman’s head, holding her by a knot of hair with one hand and clasping the other over her mouth.
The one at the woman’s head tightened his grip on her hair and laughed softly again and said, "Geev it to her, amigo," then looked up at the sound of the rusty, squeaking hinges on the plank door. His eyes widened just as Cole Matthews raised the Winchester one-handed, like a revolver, and shot him. The big slug split his sternum and punched him two feet back; he fell into the corner, where he slumped sucking hard for breath, and quickly died.
The other raised up a little and had just begun to turn when Matthews splintered his skull with the walnut stock of the Winchester. It was somehow unthinkable to shoot the man while he was still inside the woman, seemed like maybe it would be the ugliest violation of all, so he swung the rifle like a baseball bat, heard the skull crack, and the man went sprawling. Then he levered the Winchester and shot him.
The man lay on his side, his pants at the knees. Dead or just unconscious, Matthews didn’t know or care, but he knew a skull fracture would kill him if the nugget of .45-75 didn’t; cerebrospinal fluid was already trickling from the man’s nose. He glanced from one to the other. They were dressed in the rumpled brown khaki of the Mexican Army. A cap with a leather visor lay on the floor next to the one in the corner.
He turned to the woman. Her eyes were closed. She was struggling to breathe. The dress she wore had been ripped open at the front and she lay completely exposed, her legs cocked wide apart. Blood gurgled from a crimson, dime-sized hole just under her right breast.
He leaned the Winchester against an adobe wall, then knelt down and scooped her up off the floor. He held her in his arms for a moment as he looked around the tiny place.
One room held it all: a small, rough-hewn table with a kerosine lamp on top, a few chairs scattered about, a cook stove that no doubt heated the place come January, a few cooking and eating things, a neatly made bed in one corner.
He went to the bed and laid her down on the covers. She looked up at him through half-lidded, unfocused eyes and said something soft and unintelligible in Spanish, then she closed her eyes again and her breathing became a little more shallow.
He turned and crossed the room, went out the door and to his horse. There was a bottle of mescal and a small leather box in one of the saddlebags. Injuries and wounds of one sort or another had been a part of his life for as long as he could remember, and in the little box he carried a few concessions to that: some rolled muslin bandages and a curved suture needle and some thread. He took the bottle of mescal and the leather box and returned to the woman’s side.
She had been battered worse than he had seen at first. One of her eyes was puffy and beginning to swell shut, her nose mashed and a little misshapen. A trail of dried, crusty blood ran from one nostril down onto her lip. He could see he was going to have to set that nose.
He pulled the cork on the bottle with his teeth and poured mescal down onto the wound in her chest. She groaned softly and made little fists and shifted a little on the bed, more unconscious than not, and he knew that was a mercy at the moment.
He sat down on the bed beside her, set the bottle on the floor and the little leather box next to his leg on the bed, then reached across and lifted her by the shoulders. He brought her in close and her head fell onto his own shoulder. She groaned and murmured softly, like before.
He put a hand inside her dress and felt all up and down her back, searching for an exit wound. Nothing. Just smooth skin, moist with sweat. There was still a bullet somewhere deep inside.
He laid her gently back down, then pulled a short-bladed gambler’s push dagger from inside the front of his gunbelt. He bent over and took the bottle of mescal and poured it over both sides of the blade, then brought the little knife to his mouth and gripped it by the handle with his teeth. He poured mescal over one of his hands, then the other, set the bottle down, and rubbed his hands together all around. He took the dagger from between his teeth, reached for the mescal again, and swallowed a mouthful straight from the bottle.
He set the bottle back down on the floor. He slid further onto the bed, closer