CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Years after these events, dime novels of the more sensational sort did the High Time affair a disservice, especially the New York Boys Adventure Library that in 1897 published a wildly inaccurate tale they entitled The Deputy’s Dilemma or Terror at Murder Mansion. The novel, which was widely praised, claimed that when Dan Caine kicked in the bedroom door he was met with a “fusillade of fire from the deadly pistols of Solomon (sic) Beck. But dashing Dan Caine triggered his own guns with amazing speed and dexterity and inflicted several hits, forcing Beck to cry out in extremis, ‘Oh, I am slain!’ An innocent housemaid had been dusting the room when the shooting started and Dan said to her, as he holstered his smoking Colts, ‘Thus perish all evildoers who believe they can break the law with impunity.’ The young maid swooned and Dan caught her ere she fell to the ground. ‘You are my hero!’ the girl exclaimed. But Dan did not encourage the lass because he’d made a promise to his gray-haired mother that neither a woman’s kiss nor demon drink would ever touch his lips. ‘I am, dear lady, already wed . . . to the law,’ quoth that stout-hearted stalwart.”
The reality was very different. Starkly different.
When the door slammed against the bedroom wall and shattered in a shower of splinters, two things happened. Violetta, the former line whore, shrieked and pulled the bedsheet under her chin, her china blue eyes as round as coins . . . and Shadow Beck smiled and said howdy. Then he said, grinning, “Hell, feller, no need to kick the door down. This gal ain’t that hard to get. All she does is scratch an itch.”
“Mister, I don’t want her, I want you,” Dan said. He showed the gun in his hand.
A sheet covered Shadow Beck’s lanky body but his big feet stuck out the bottom of the bed. He wore red socks with holes in them.
Beck made a show of using his forefinger to turn his gunbelt on the bedside table so that the butt of the holstered Colt faced him. “What do you want with me?” he said.
“You ride with Clay Kyle and them?” Dan said.
“Who wants to know?” Beck said. He lost his grin.
“Name’s Dan Caine.”
“Never heard of you.”
“Have you heard of the Calthrop family, north of here?”
That struck a nerve. Beck stiffened, revealing his surprise, and said, “No, I’ve never heard of them, and I ain’t never heard of you either. You some kind of law?”
“I was,” Dan said. “Now I’m just a concerned citizen.” He paused for effect. “What you might call a vigilante.”
A taut silence stretched between Dan and Beck, until Violetta cut through it with her sharp tongue. “Well, just you vigilante it the hell out of here, cowboy,” she said. “Shadow don’t know them people. Anyway, he’s been with me the last six months, an’ I’ll swear that on a stack of Bibles.”
“Lady, he just got here,” Dan said.
“Says you, Baine, Train, or whatever the hell you call yourself,” Violetta said. “Shadow is going straight and I’m proud to be his kept woman.”
“Listen to the little lady,” Beck said, smiling. “I’ve quit the outlaw profession for good, and me and Violetta is getting hitched. So run along, vigilante man, and search for the elephant someplace else.”
The woman lifted her hand, allowing the sheet to fall, and wiggled her fingers. “See, Shadow bought the wedding ring already.”
Dan was on edge, his belly knotted into a tight ball. Damn, Beck’s hand was close to his pistol. Mighty close. Too close. Even with a gun in his face he was relaxed, unafraid, confident in his abilities and of himself. An alarm bell clamored in Dan’s head. Hell, Beck was too relaxed, too arrogant. The man was a gun. Had to be. Dan’s jaw clenched. Well, there were no other lawmen or kinda lawmen around. There was only Dan Caine . . . and he had to do it.
The ring on the woman’s hand was rose gold and showed signs of wear. “Let me see that wedding band,” Dan said.
“No,” Violetta said, pouting. “You might steal it.”
“What does it say inside?” Dan said.
The woman didn’t need to look. “It says forever. Shadow put it there.”
“No, he didn’t,” Dan said. “The husband of a woman called Nancy Calthrop put it there. Clay Kyle and his boys cut off Nancy’s finger to get the ring. And that’s not all they did to her.”
The woman looked like she’d been slapped. “Shadow, is that true? Tell him it’s a lie. Tell him you’d nothing to do with it.”
“You shut your trap,” Beck said. He was a cornered rat figuring his chances, his gun unhandy on the side table.
“Shadow . . .” Violetta whined.
“Get out of here you damned cheap whore,” Beck said. “I’ve got a man’s work to do.”
He studied the vigilante and summed him up as just another small-time lawman who carried around a rusty Colt as a badge of office. The outlaw saw Dan’s gun shake, just a little, but enough, and Beck figured he could dive out of bed, grab his own pistol, and get his work in while the rube panicked and sprayed lead.
It was a plan, and Shadow Beck tensed.
Whatever else historians say of him, that night Dan Caine was as scared as hell, but he was game. He’d shot bean cans off rocks at ten feet with his Colt and missed more often than he’d hit. But Beck was a bigger target than a bean can and much closer.
Suddenly, in quick succession, two unlikely events happened that swung the standoff in Dan’s favor.
The first was that Violetta got violently angry. Sure, she was a whore, but Shadow had called her a cheap whore, words that scalded her brain like hot sauce, words she could not forgive. Those days of working the line still hurt.
The second was more direct. She tore off the wedding ring and threw it at Beck, helped on its way by a stream of vile and vivid curses that must remain unwritten for fear they upset the timid reader.
Violetta didn’t know it then, but she’d just signed Shadow Beck’s death warrant.
The outlaw instinctively moved to his left to avoid the flying ring, a slight and harmless movement for sure.
But Dan Caine, edgy and alarmed, didn’t see it as harmless.
He fired, a hurried, poor shot that burned across the right side of Beck’s neck, drawing blood. Beck had skinned his Colt and he raised it to eye level, aiming for Dan’s head. It was a practiced motion, very smooth, very quick, a masterly shootist’s play.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Three guns hammered at almost the same instant.
Violetta got her work in a split second ahead of the two men. The Remington .41 caliber derringer she’d retrieved from the pocket of her discarded dress was devastating at close range. A split second before the gunman triggered his weapon, a bullet crashed into the side of his head above the ear. Beck jolted in pain and pulled his shot, and the bullet thudded into the wall a foot from Dan’s head. Dan fired only a heartbeat behind Violetta and almost at the same instant as an already dead Beck. His bullet hit the outlaw in the chest . . . but it was Violetta who’d killed him.
Shattering the echoing silence that followed the gunfire, the woman shrieked like a demented Valkyrie, threw herself on Beck’s bloody body, and begged him to take her with him to Valhalla. Well, not quite in those words. In 1926, newspaperman Richmond Soames’s fictionalized account of the life of Violetta Bullen claimed that she cried out, “Shadow, take me to hell with you!” And added that she hugged the man’s bleeding head to her breast and sobbed, “I’m sorry. I rid the ground of your shadow, Shadow.” What actually happened was that after hugging Beck she jumped up in alarm, stared down at her naked body, and wailed, “Eew . . . I’ve got his blood all over me. I think I’m gonna puke.”
While Violetta mourned Beck, Dan got on the floor and searched for the wedding ring. Displaying the perversity of inanimate objects, the ring had rolled under the bed and jammed itself against the wall. He got down on all fours, crawled under the bed among the dust, dirt, and dead spiders, and retrieved the ring. Determined not to lose the gold band again, Dan shoved it into his shirt pocket and crawled from under the bed. As Violetta stood at the washstand and frantically used an oversized sponge to wipe scarlet blood from her breasts and belly, Dan Caine began to get to his feet.
He never made it.
Something hard and solid hit the back of his head, and he fell into a well of scarlet-streaked darkness that went on forever . . . and ever . . .