A World of Hurt

Book 1: Wilkie John Western

by Tim Bryant

Genres: Westerns; Horror

Synopsis

In Texas, every man has his price.

For a young man of 17, Wilkie John Liquorish has lived one sorry life. From his ill-fated stint in the US Army to a back-breaking job as a gravedigger, Wilkie just can't seem to catch a break.

His latest gig—working a cattle drive from Mobeetie, Texas, to Fort Worth—is no exception. The food-poisoning death of a chuckwagon cook has everyone spooked, and the fear spreads like a disease. Wilkie barely makes it out alive. But when he shows up in Fort Worth, he has another kind of death waiting for him-in the unlikely form of Gentleman Jack Delaney....

A fancily-dressed bounty hunter from New Orleans, Gentleman Jack is ready to nail and hang young Wilkie as soon he arrives in town. He claims the boy is the most wanted outlaw in Texas. If Wilkie can manage to outsmart, outrun, or outgun this not-so-gentle man, he just might go down in history. Or swing from a tree. Or both....

Release date: November 28, 2017

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

My name is Wilkie John Liquorish, and I’m here for to rob you,” I said.

The trip from Mobeetie to Fort Worth was a fool’s errand. It’s an angry hot ocean of sand, full of snakes and scorpions, Tonkawas and Comanches and maybe even ghosts, and when you’re herding eight hundred head of cattle, it’s akin to swimming the Colorado with a bale of cotton under one arm and a pig under the other. By the time we got to Comanche Texas, speaking of Comanches, our cattle were skin and bones, completely unsellable, and half our boys were jealous of them, because the boys were bones only.

I buried my brother Ira Lee in Meridian, and that was it for me. I had lost all my taste for cattle driving. Far as I could see, we were driving them straight into hell itself. I was ready to repent of that life. When I walked away from it, I walked from there clear to Fort Worth. It was slow and hot and lonesome. I walked mostly by night and slept by day, and, when I wasn’t walking, I was riding a mule named Bird. Not my favorite way to go, but more about that later. In between all of these things, I became my own man. When I arrived on the edge of town, I had no past and no great future either. The sun meant nothing and the moon meant less. Hell’s Half Acre opened its arms.

Three days after arriving, I pulled a robbery. I was dead hungry and didn’t have any coin on me. Tubbs’s General Store at Sixth and Main seemed to have plenty. I’d been watching long enough to know their banking schedule. Another man I couldn’t identify would come in at four o’clock to spell Mr. Tubbs, and he would take the day’s earnings down to the Fort Worth National Bank on Eighth and Main. Way I figured, 3:30 would be just about right. Any earlier, the pot would be smaller. Much later, you might run into that second fella and have more trouble on your hands.

“Well, my name is Bill Tubbs, young man, and I hate to tell you, but you’re doing nothing of the kind,” the man said.

He was standing behind the counter and seemed to be set on staying put. I was in a quandary. If I backed down now, my outlaw days would be over in a hail of laughter instead of bullets. They would most likely throw me in the hoosegow just for trying. They might feed me there, but in general the thought wasn’t appealing.

“Don’t reach for nothing but sky,” I said.

I pulled Ira’s .44 Colt out of my holster and waved it once. I knew I didn’t have the luxury of time.

“You say your name is Liquorish?” Tubbs said.

I could tell by the way he said it, he was thinking of the candy. It isn’t spelled that way, but I didn’t have time for a spelling lesson.

“You’re wasting my time,” I said.

“No need to do anything hasty, Mr. Liquorish,” he said. “That’s an awful big gun you got.”

There was something implied there, and it was something that didn’t need saying. Being barely five foot tall and a hundred pounds when packed down with holsters, guns and ammo, I can tell when I’m being poked at.

“You saying I’m little,” I said. “I get that. I get that a lot. But you know what? So’s a bullet, and I got six of them right here.”

I leveled the Colt good and steady at his face, taking in the waxed mustache, the sweat that glistened on his nose, and those eyes, blue as the Gulf of Mexico and every bit as full of crap, and I fired twice. Tubbs fell in a huff and a puff against a shelf full of flour and meal, a cloud of white rising around him like a quickly fading halo.

He left a trail of blood and flour across the back of the store as I dragged him into a mop closet, where I traded him for the mop and went to cleaning up. I pulled thirty dollars from the money box to cover expenses up until that point. Leaving more than that behind would show it wasn’t personal and I wasn’t greedy. I was just about to be on my way when the front door opened. In walked the High Sheriff of Hell’s Half Acre.

“Bill not here?” he said.

I scanned the back of the counter and found an old rag, which I quickly dried my hands on.

“Not at the moment, Sheriff.”

The sheriff scooted across the floor at me, squinting like he was looking into the sun. The man easily made three of me, and none of the three looked particularly friendly either.

“Who in tarnation are you?” he said.

“Wilkie John Liquorish, sir,” I said.

He had a big Colt Navy Revolver. I knew what it was because I had seen one like it on a sailor back in my San Antonio days. I had offered the sailor three head of cattle for it.

“What the hell am I going to do with three cows on a ship?” the sailor said.

I regretted letting that damn gun get away.

The High Sheriff was a little slow on the draw. Maybe he didn’t see me being all that formidable. If that’s the case, it was a mistake. I shot him right in the teeth. That brought out such a holler, I was afraid the whole neighborhood was going to come running. The next two shots shut him up real good.

The sheriff joined Bill in the mop closet. Seeing as I only had one shot left, I decided it was closing time. I locked up the store and grabbed three boxes of bullets from the top shelf behind the counter. Nobody laughed when I climbed the ladder to get them. Nobody laughed when I crawled out a back window and slipped into a side street, two blocks away from the whorehouse where I was keeping a room. I was seventeen years of age, but the Madam there didn’t believe it. In that instance, it was all for good, as she took pity on me and took me in. An hour after I turned Tubbs’s General Store into one more crime scene in the middle of the most crime-infested town west of the Mississippi, I was sleeping like a baby in the Madam Pearlie’s big feather bed, her best girl, a caramel-skinned redhead named Sunny, keeping watch over me.

Waking the next day and heading downstairs, I was surprised to hear the news being whispered from ear to ear to ear. Mr. Tubbs, the city commissioner who had muscled his way into the Acre with the plan to clean up its dirty image, had been gunned down in his own store. The High Sheriff, who had been using the store as police headquarters in enemy territory, was shot dead too. The Madam called for a day of celebration. Call girls were going for half price and so were the drinks.

I thought about taking credit for the killings, but it wouldn’t have done me any good. It would’ve been taken as a plea for attention, which I had no need of, or, more likely, for a joke. Then I might have had to shoot somebody else. I could see it was a vicious cycle, and, anyway, I sure didn’t want to shoot up the madam’s establishment, a right genteel place called the Black Elephant Saloon. And yes, I had been instructed right from the get-go that there was a White Elephant Saloon on Main Street where I might better belong. But Madam Pearlie had welcomed me like a son and told me to pay no mind to any such talk, I belonged right where I was. I liked being the only white man in the Black Elephant. It made me feel important. And I liked Madam Pearlie.

It was during that half-priced celebration, while the Black Elephant’s six girls lined up the men in the back and the bartender lined up the drinks at the bar, that I first met Gentleman Jack Delaney, whom Madam Pearlie said was known, to close friends and family, as Jack Rabbit. That was the only time I ever heard her refer to him in that manner. Others said Gentleman Jack had once been a slave on a plantation somewhere north of New Orleans. They said he managed to save up money from blacksmithing and bought up his own freedom a few years before the war. Then, somewhere along the line, he went into business as a bounty hunter.

“I’m here strictly on business,” he said.

I thought maybe he was referring to the Tubbs store murders as they were being referred to in the Fort Worth Chief. It’s what everyone was talking about, inside and outside the saloon, me included. We would sit around the Black Elephant half the day talking about who might have done it, how they could have pulled it off and got away. It was such great fun that, every once in a while, I’d have to remind myself that my latest thought on the matter wasn’t at all how it had happened.

The barkeep, a one-eyed man from Missouri named Black Price Hardwick, was taking bets on who did it and whether they would ever be found out. Even Madam Pearlie got in on the action, which she said was unusual for her, putting a fifty-dollar banknote on the authorities never fingering anybody.

“If they was somebody here in the Acre, we’d already be knowing,” she said. “Whoever it was that done it, they’re already east of the Mississippi or else west of the Rockies.”

I had heard of both of those places, but they seemed far away from me as the ocean and maybe farther. I had no plans on ever seeing either of them. To me, Fort Worth was far superior to Mobeetie and the God-forsaken desert that made up most of the stretch between. I was staying put, at least until more reasonable weather arrived.

Gentleman Jack had a room at the colored hotel right across the street, so we saw plenty of him. Each of his days, as he told it, began with a breakfast of six eggs, salt pork bacon, biscuits, and brown gravy, all delivered up to his room and eaten off of a silver tray. Then he had his beard trimmed by one of the hotel staff while he watched in that same silver tray. After that, he was on his way. He would gamble at one of the poker tables or one of the blackjack tables in our front room until the clock over the bar showed noon, smoking and swearing up a storm and collecting his winnings. He always seemed to win. Then he moseyed on a little after noon.

“I’ve got to get about my work,” he would wink. “I’m strictly here for business.”

I wasn’t too naive to know what a bounty hunter was. I’d run into a few of them in San Antone. Still, it was an occupation of mystery, and I didn’t have the first clue how it all worked or how a person would become such a thing. It was partly out of natural inquisitiveness and partly out of suspicion that I decided to follow along after him. I’d heard enough talk from Madam Pearlie and others to pique my interest.

Hell’s Half Acre wasn’t so different from places in Mobeetie or San Antone. The biggest difference, San Antonio’s Sporting District was mostly filled with military boys, and its girls spoke mostly Spanish. As a result, it was something between alarming and downright embarrassing to hear pale-skinned girls calling out from their ratty little cribs, telling you specifically what they could do for you and how little it would cost you. If you had to walk down a block, you might hear two or three of them calling out and then arguing amongst themselves, trying to undersell each other. It was all a guy could do to get to the other end of the block with his dignity intact.

With Feather Hill in Mobeetie, on the other hand, it was all a matter of scale. Whatever Mobeetie had, Fort Worth had fifty of. Fort Worth was an overabundance of abundance.

It was easy enough to follow Jack through a crowd though. He stood a good head taller than most of the men in the street, which meant he had two heads on me. He also wore, as a habit, a dark red top hat with a feather stuck in it—surely one he had purchased down in New Orleans—that made him tower even taller. I couldn’t help but admire his ability to wind his way through the girls, who all called even louder to him, caught as in a spell by his appearance.

He was heading in the direction of Main Street, and I began to wonder if it was foolishness or fearlessness leading him there. A colored man might move among the white people on that street if he kept his head down and didn’t call attention to himself. Neither proposition seemed likely with Jack. With each storefront he passed, it became more obvious that he had no plan to turn back. I considered calling out to him, just as a friendly warning. I stopped against a hitching post right square in front of Tubbs’s General Store and watched him go.

He ducked into the back door of Mary Porter’s house, the biggest, fanciest brothel in all of the Acre. It wasn’t uncommon for well-bred colored men to enter through the big two-story house’s back door, but I watched as his silhouette made its way from window shade to window shade, and, suddenly, out he stepped through the big red double doors in the front, stepping down from the wraparound porch and continuing on his way as if the whole house had been no more than a puddle to step through and then shake off.

Down Main Street he paraded, barely slowing down to doff his hat at a couple of the townspeople along the way. Finally, he removed his hat and ducked into a small building I had never taken notice of. I had just come off a disastrously star-crossed cattle drive, so I was dressed as the other ninety-nine percent of the crowd, and my white face, sunburned as it was, blended in well enough that I could walk right up to the old clapboard building built against and leaning noticeably toward the constable’s office. I meant to make a pass-by, take a quick glance into the two big front glasses, and try to identify the proceedings within. What fell on my eyes, I must admit, staggered me in my steps.

The man was dead. That was the first and foremost thing that sprang to my mind. There wasn’t any question about that. He was dressed in a fine looking suit. The kind you have shipped in from St. Louis or somewhere via stagecoach. He had a derby on his head that seemed too small by a size and determined to sit just a little off center. The man’s face seemed contorted into an expression that said, “I’d rather not have my photograph taken in this condition,” but that’s exactly what they seemed intent on doing.

One man stood behind the camera, his left hand on his hip and the other on the contraption that made the bulb flash. Another man had what looked like a woman’s powder puffin his hand, dabbing at the dead man’s cheeks and repeatedly trying to level out that devilish derby.

“What you staring at?”

There was a gentleman standing outside on the small porch, and it took a moment to realize he was talking to me.

I gathered myself and moved on without answering his question, although I could have told him plenty. I knew more about what I was staring at than he did. Sitting inside the little shop, waiting to have his picture made, gussied up like he’d never been in all his live-long days, was my old cattle-drive coach driver. A man named Leon Thaw, he had been born and raised in Mobeetie, Texas. The best shootist far and wide, his reputation had been sealed by getting tossed out of a Wild West Show in Amarillo and warned against ever coming back for getting up and outshooting J. B. Hickok. Twenty-six years old and getting no older, he was the husband of a seventeen-year-old Emeline Thaw and father of baby Millie. The last I had seen him, he was skinny as a broomstick, but swearing that he would make Fort Worth before I would.

“You take off on your own, Wilkie John, you’ll be lucky to ever see me again,” he said. “But if you do, I’m sure to be sitting up in some fine hotel sipping whiskey and waiting for you.”

I walked by the building again on my way back to the Black Elephant, and I could see Gentleman Jack, the Jack Rabbit, standing next to my unlucky friend Leon, jotting down notes in a little brown book. Talking to the photographer, he leaned over and rubbed on Leon’s face. That’s when it hit me that he was truly good and dead, for Leon would have never allowed such a thing. Not that I had any tears to give him. He hadn’t been like a brother to me. Truth is, he had tried to kill me on one occasion, and I couldn’t help seeing his current predicament at least partially as being well deserved.

As I walked along Main Street and made my turn on Fourth, I couldn’t help shaking the feeling that the tables had turned and it was now me that was being followed. I watched in the glass windows of the passing businesses. I saw nothing but my own reflection, looking thinner and older and maybe a bit more worried than expected.

“Wilkie John,” Gentleman Jack said. “Must it be both? Why can it not be Wilkie? Or John? You can even pick.”

We were sitting at the third blackjack table on a slow Tuesday night, which meant the dealer was at the bar chatting up one of the girls and we were sitting alone. My appearance at the table had been requested by the Jack Rabbit himself, earlier in the afternoon. I had been beside myself since then, standing in front of the mirror in Madam Pearlie’s room, practicing answers to every question I could think up. Now, I was sitting three feet away from the man, he was looking me dead in the eye, and all my cool had suddenly evaporated.

“I’ve always just been called Wilkie John,” I said.

That actually wasn’t true at all. I had been called all kinds of things. Wilkie. Will. Wilkes. John. Johnny. Liquorish. Whiskey. I was in the Texas Panhandle News under the name John Liquorman and Whiskey John, so Wilkie John would do just fine, thank you. I didn’t see what the big problem was.

“Okay, Willie Boy,” Jack said, “you expect me to believe you did not come into town with the coach from Mobeetie, the same coach your good friend Leon Thaw showed up dead in.”

I had never been called Willie Boy, and I didn’t like it at all. On the other hand, part of me was fascinated by this man, and his calm manner worked to keep my hot head in check.

“That man is no friend of mine,” I said.

If I hoped to trick the system, he was having none of it.

“Willie, I’m willing to give you that one. You know why?” He leaned across the table and lowered his voice from steady, quiet lilt to full whisper. “I don’t guess good friends put bullets in each other’s noggins, do they?”

So it turned out that the derby hat was tilting because some part of the top of Leon Thaw’s head had been taken off with a bullet. I only knew two things: One, Leon was more the cattleman’s hat type. Two, it hadn’t been me that pulled that particular trigger. Last time I saw Leon, he was fully intact and talking back.

“The two drovers on the drive were located. One was dead and buried just outside Meridian. Fella named Ira Lee Liquorish, I believe it was. Now ain’t that a peculiar thing?”

I was a balloon and he was a pin.

“The cook, from what I can tell, seems to have died before you even hit Wichita Falls. Why, it’s a wonder even two of you survived.”

I wasn’t sure if he was amused by the story he was unfolding or by my reaction to it. Either way, I didn’t like the way he was smiling at me. I figured by the. . .