Chapter Ten

Instead of going to directly back to the hotel room, Cole bought a bath and sank down into the tub of hot steamy water and paid the kid working the bathhouse $2 to bring him a meal. He wanted something that had beef on the plate and something to wash it down. He gave him two bits more to take his clothes down to a laundry and get them cleaned and wait for them. The steak was two inches thick and covered the entire plate and he ate it down to the bone, then washed it down with beer, and waited for the water to do its magic and the kid to return with his clothes. He thought of Billy Cook, reposing in the crimson water of his bloody bath, his expensive cigar floating on top. One minute you’re alive and the next you’re dead. He thought he could still hear the gunshot ringing in his ears.

He turned his thoughts elsewhere, to something more pleasant. Liddy Winslow’s image filled his brain. He could still smell her perfume. She had stirred something in him that had long lay cold and untouched, something that went beyond the usual desire a man can get for a woman. And yet there had been that air about her that suggested she was a closed door, a door behind which no man was allowed. What really troubled him was that he wanted to be the one to go through that door. He thought of the women who had come along in his life after Zee died: the widows and the whores and the ones in between. It seemed he’d drifted between one and the other, not knowing which he preferred. Part of him wanted what he once had had—a good stable woman and a home where he could hang his hat after a long day—while the other part wanted just the opposite: a woman as wild as the West Texas wind and just as hard to hold, warm nights and tempting smiles and plenty of mescal. He wondered if Juanita Delgado had found herself a new man yet.

Lydia Winslow was another matter altogether. She was neither saint nor sinner, as far as he could judge. She wasn’t needing or wanting. And now she was floating around in his mind in a way that good whiskey will, making him feel slightly off kilter and more pleasant than he had a right to feel.

The door opened with a slight click of the latch. He brought the Remington around from where it had been resting on a chair next to the tub; its action was smoothly mechanical, all its vital functions ready and set as he thumbed back the hammer. The man stood there, staring at him, the light soft in those nearly colorless eyes, eyes that were stern and without humor, the hollow cheeks puffing in and out below the prominent bones of his face. His mouth, partway open under the heavy sand-colored mustaches, showed a set of good teeth. His breathing was raspy and faint. The eyes shifted enough to see the self-cocker in Cole’s hand, then drifted back.

“What’ll it be, Doc?” Cole asked him. The front sight of the pistol was aimed at a spot just above his breastbone.

“It’s not what you think,” he said. “I didn’t come to shoot it out with you.”

“That’s good. Because, if you had, I’d have to pull the trigger and I don’t think you could stand the grief.”

He coughed into a crimson-stained handkerchief, wiped it back and forth across his lips twice, and then balled it in his fist. “What’s your business with Liddy Winslow?” he asked.

“That’s just it, Doc . . . my business.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It has to be.”

“You know of me? You know the type of man I am?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard the talk.”

“Dying doesn’t mean a damn’ thing to me. Does it to you?”

“Did you come to discuss philosophy, Doc, or was there another reason for this unexpected visit?”

His gaze grew to fixed points within his skull, his hands flexed and unflexed by his sides. His cheeks worked hard, like a bellows against a fire, trying to work the air in and out of his weakened lungs. “I will ask you again,” he said. His voice was raspy, full of phlegm, rough, the way a hard drinker’s will get after a time. Still, it was a voice stubborn with a Southern accent—the voice of a Confederate gentleman who had maybe lost some of his gentility. “What is your business with Miss Winslow?” he asked again.

“Like I said, it’s personal.”

“Then you and I, sir, have a problem.”

“Only if you believe so.”

He stood there, unmoving except for the labored breathing. He didn’t look like a killer; he looked like a man who had lost hope that he was going to live a long time.

“Someone took a shot at me tonight,” Cole said. “Maybe it was you.”

Something moved just under his left eye, a small twitch like a tiny worm working just below the skin. “Had I been the one,” he said, “you would have now been wrapped in the arms of death.”

Coming from him, the expression did not seem florid. “Well, Doc, I guess I was lucky, then, that it wasn’t you.”

“Miss Winslow is a special friend of mine. We enjoy a business relationship as well. It is incumbent upon me to see that she and her employees are not to be troubled. Do you understand my position, sir?”

“I know, she told me.”

The spot below his eye twitched again. He swallowed, the paper collar around his neck moved, the string tie moved with it. His shadow hovered against one wall. Cole was fully prepared for him to produce a pistol. He was half expecting it.

“She told you,” he said. It was not quite a question, not quite an assertion. Then, impossibly, the eyes became colder, more void of any emotion, and he said: “Then you understand?”

“I understand that your business with Miss Winslow is your own, Doc. I expect the same consideration.”

“Then you understand?” he repeated.

“Let me ask you something, Doc.”

He did nothing to invite the question, but Cole asked it anyway. “If your job was to protect the girls working for Liddy, then why didn’t you?”

The slightest blush of color rose in his neck; the side of his jaw moved almost imperceptibly. These were the little things a man needed to be aware of when challenging a man of Doc’s reputation. The hands will kill, but the look in a man’s eye will tell you whether or not he’s thinking about it. On the frontier, there were two types of men who would kill you: there were those like Doc, who might just pull their piece and have at it, and there was the other type, the ones that would lay for you in an alley, or shoot you in your sleep—fill your brains full of lead or shoot you in the kidneys and walk away. With Doc, Cole sort of got the sense he could do it either way. “You are intruding where you are not welcome,” he said.

“You know about the reward she’s put out for those responsible for killing the girls?” Cole said.

“You are here for that?”

“It’s what I do, Doc.”

Then the hard stare eased a bit and one corner of his mouth lifted into what could only be described as mild amusement. “I hope that your journey to this place was not a long one,” he said. “For you have come here for nothing.”

“I’m not the only who has come, or will be coming,” Cole said. “One of them might already be in town. King Fisher. You ever heard of King Fisher, Doc?”

The small amusement fell from his mouth. “He is a low-heeled assassin,” Doc said. He said it like a Southern senator denouncing an opponent. A cough rattled high up in his chest and bent him forward at the waist. The hand with the balled-up hankie jerked upward to his mouth and the veins of his neck distended into small purple ropes as the paroxysms rattled through him. He gripped the jamb of the door with his free hand in order to steady himself. Finally, after several seconds, the cough abated and he wiped his mouth and swallowed several times. He looked weak and frail, a man ready to step through death’s door. “Do you mind not dropping the hammer on that piece?” he asked, his gaze falling to the revolver in Cole’s hand. “I need a drink of my whiskey. I have it here, inside my coat.”

Cole motioned for him to do so. His hand, a tremble of bones, reached inside the greatcoat and brought out a small silver flask that he held aloft and said: “I would offer to share it with you, but not many men will drink from the same container as a lunger, so I won’t bother to extend the invitation.” Then he tipped it to his mouth and Cole watched the sharp edge of his Adam’s apple jerk in his throat as he swallowed. His breathing was labored, but he replaced the flask inside his coat, then swiped a finger across his mustaches, sweeping away the dew clinging to them.

“Your involvement with Lydia,” he said, his voice a tinge weaker now, “will come to nothing. There are things that you do not understand.”

“My water’s getting cold, Doc.” Cole felt there was nothing he was going to learn from him that he did not already know, except that Doc saw him as a rival, a threat to whatever it was he thought he had going with Liddy Winslow.

Doc blinked. Just once. He drew in a deep breath through his nostrils and let it out again. “Perhaps the next time we meet, sir, the odds will be more even between us,” he said, again his gaze falling to the self-cocker in Cole’s hand.

“Maybe so, Doc. You just never know.”

He adjusted the greatcoat over his shoulders, pulling it tighter about him, then he turned and closed the door behind him, the scent of his bay rum still lingering in the air. Doc Holliday, King Fisher, Johnny Logan. The number of gun shooters Cole had to keep an eye out for was beginning to add up.