Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek (A Caleb York Western Book 6) - Mickey Spillane (classic novels .TXT) 📗

“For what, Conchita?”

“For . . . killing the bad people.”

“That’s right. Now I want you to tell me who did this.”

She did.

York took her left hand in both of his and gently squeezed. He smiled at her. She smiled back, or he thought she did. With those puffy, battered lips, who could say for sure?

Leaving the doctor to his patient and his ministrations, York joined Rita and Tulley in the waiting room. They had taken chairs but bolted to their feet upon seeing him.

“Rita, why don’t you stay here for a time,” York said, taking her hands in his. “Doc’s got a broken wing to set and maybe he can use you at her bedside. Tulley, you and the scattergun join me. We’re gonna track that boy down and talk to him some.”

“I’d give ’im a good hidin’, were I you, Caleb York.”

“We’ll try to arrest him.”

Rita’s eyes narrowed and she nodded to him, interpreting that in her own way.

Back out on the boardwalk, in the ivory moonlight, the two men walked along, the tall one and the bandy-legged creature. Over to the left, the barrio mostly slept, but the glow of the Red Bull was like a fire licking at the edge of the moonlight. Outside the adobe jailhouse on this side of the street, someone was pacing, much as Tulley had been earlier, a squat figure whose footsteps made the boardwalk groan.

As the sheriff and deputy advanced, who this was became plain: Cesar, proprietor of De Toro Rojo, a hooded-eyed, bandito-mustached hombre gordo with wet strands of black hair plastered across his round head, whose untucked cream-color shirt and matching trousers were somehow baggy despite their wearer’s size.

Cesar stopped in place, facing them as he recognized the approaching pair.

“Sheriff!” the bar owner blurted. “You are just who I wish to see!”

Rarely did the man whose business was half bar and half bordello react this favorably to Caleb York stopping in front of him.

“This hijo de Satanás,” Cesar burst out with, “first he drag that poor muchacha outside por violación, then he come back in and he wave his gun around and bother my girls and my cliente.”

“Did you go to that girl’s aid, Cesar?”

“No. He have a gun.”

York was already crossing the street, Tulley tagging along on one side, Cesar on the other.

York said to the cantina owner, “And you didn’t come looking for me till he came back in and started disturbing your customers?”

“No. No.”

“Did you help her in any way?”

“No. She stagger off into the night. I think to myself, he will be satisfied now. But, no—he bother my other girls!”

“And your cliente, too, right?”

“Sí.”

That was no surprise to York. He figured it would take Cesar more than one raped prostituta to come looking for help.

York said, “You go on ahead with Tulley and go in the back, through the kitchen. I’ll take care of this, but, Tulley? You do any shooting you feel necessary.”

“Happy to, Sheriff.”

The deputy and the cantina owner scurried down the shabby rock-and-dirt lane separating the facing adobe hovels, raising a little dust.

By day, the humble barrio was by turns sleepy and bustling, no one in a hurry, yet somehow always in the midst of activity, chickens navigating and pecking at the space between facing adobes, mutts foraging for scraps and yapping for the hell of it. By night, no human activity at all, except trips to the privy, and the fowls penned up, the dogs curled up in doorways.

Some dogs, anyway.

At the end of this unprepossessing lane of sand-colored hovels was a two-story structure, also adobe, a shabby castle overlooking its pitiful peons. Windows blazed yellow on the first floor, and on the second windows were either dark or flickered with halfhearted candlelight. Towering faded red lettering—CANTINA DE TORO ROJO—hovered over a doorless archway.

For a moment York stopped, as gunshots from the cantina popped in the night, muffled but distinct.

York picked up his pace.

He went in, quick but studied, .44 in hand, figuring Tulley would be in position by now. The Red Bull was nothing special, as “castles” went: straw on its dirt floor, yellow walls with faded murals. Cesar’s fat cigarillo-puffing wife was behind the bar, breasts bulging like cannonballs in her peasant top, a beauty mark on a plump cheek really just a mole got out of hand. Normally a confident mujer, she stood back away from the counter, frozen in fear. The little hombre in the big sombrero who played guitar here seemed to be trying to disappear into his corner. At the scattered mismatched tables and chairs, patrons—cowboys and town folk alike—sat motionless, not touching beers before them or the cards they’d been playing. Three señoritas in off-the-shoulder dresses were planted around the room like statues with red-rouged mouths; normally their black-and-red-and-yellow-and-green-striped skirts, petticoat plump, would be swishing around as they trolled for customers among the all-male clientele to entice upstairs.

Not tonight.

A young man who just had to be the Hammond boy sat at a table for four with a young girl on his lap, her blouse pulled down to her waist, small pert breasts exposed. Her expression was one of terror in a young life—she was perhaps fifteen—that had already taken plenty of nasty turns, and in which she had suffered more than her share of indignities. For example, right now she was having her neck nuzzled by a gun-wielding young man.

The boy was seated with his chair’s back to his otherwise empty table—the other three chairs were not in use—although a bottle of tequila was within easy reach. The barrel of the Colt Single Action Army .45 in his right hand curled smoke. Across from him, on the wall, was a faded mural of a bullfighter, which now wore a number of bullet holes.

York counted them: four. So the boy had bullets left, or at least one if the gun’s owner left an empty chamber under his hammer when he carried it. But York doubted that, since this did not appear to be a cautious