Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 43, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1998
- Автор: Alexander Gary, Crawford Dan
- Год: 1998
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines/Crosstown Publications
- ISBN: ISSN: 0002-5224
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 43, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1998». Краткое содержание книги:
“South of the Chisos, into the Big Bend,” Hardesty said. “The money from that robbery was never recovered.”
“I hadn’t forgotten,” Placido Geist said.
“It’s been my experience that most outlaws are creatures of habit, and none too eager to change,” the marshal said.
“No more than the rest of us,” Placido Geist said.
For years, he’d been known in the border country as el Espectro, for his stealth and his skill as a manhunter. He was still respected, but in some quarters they’d begun calling him Tio Taco, although not to his face. A tame Mexican in other words, a paid regulator in the hire of Anglos, railroad robber barons and oilmen. He was a buscadero out of a forgotten school, the tail end of the Comanche wars, a scout for the army and the Texas Rangers, a hired gun. He’d been born a halfbreed, his father a farrier, an immigrant from the Rhineland Palatinate who’d settled in West Texas and married a woman of mixed blood, part Spanish, part Indian. His place of birth, his parentage, his entire circumstance, had made its mark on him, and he’d learned early the lessons of a pitiless environment. But the earth turned, the past slipped away into historical anecdote. The railroads came, and the telegraph. Electricity and the automobile. A world war was now beginning in Europe, a war being fought with machine guns and mustard gas, even aircraft. The killing would be mechanized and impersonal, and solitary adventurers like Placido Geist were becoming an anachronism. On occasion, however, it served him. He was a rough old cob, and necessarily so, but he had the equipment, physically and temperamentally, to make the best of a dirty job, with few rewards and less thanks.
The man he was after was named James Taft Pringle. Jimmy the Juke, alias Concho Jimmy. Originally from the Lower East Side in New York, Jimmy Pringle had been sent west as a boy, one of thousands of urban orphans placed with families along the frontier, some of the children welcomed and made to feel wanted but many of them no better than indentured servants. Jimmy Pringle had been one of the unlucky ones, bound over to a Bible-beating dirt farmer who preached Temperance and regularly exercised the strap. Jimmy lay in wait for his foster father in the barn one hot Nebraska afternoon, clouted him with a singletree, and put his eyes out with a pitchfork before he strung him up by the heels from the hayloft, doused him with coal oil, and set him on fire. On the run, he made his way south to Ogallala and across the Platte, down to Dodge City, where he picked up the route of the old Chisholm Trail and followed it into Texas. He was barely sixteen. He was dealing faro in Fort Worth when he fell in with worse company, a hardened owlhoot by the name of Bob Ketchum, known as Wind River Bob, a murderer and horse thief from Wyoming. Wind River Bob came to an appropriately villainous end at the hands of an angry mob in Las Cruces, New Mexico, but by then he and Jimmy had long since come to a parting of the ways. In the meantime, Concho Jimmy had earned his spurs and drunk his fill from the cup of wickedness.
“I don’t recall the specifics,” the judge said. “Then again, it’s been close to thirty years, and back then I was riding circuit up near Amarillo. Deaf Smith, Castro, as far as Ochiltree, little Panhandle courthouses with outdoor privies. I’ve heard bits and pieces, of course.”
Lockjaw Lamar was retired from the bench, but he was still a serving justice of the peace, a lifetime appointment. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Placido Geist’s affidavit was on the partner desk in front of him. Placido Geist sat on the other side of the desk.
The judge sighed and replaced his spectacles, tucking the thinning hair back over his ears. “You’re putting me in a compromising position,” he said. “If you had grounds for a criminal complaint, any court could issue a warrant.”
“I’m aware what I’m asking,” Placido Geist told him.
Lamar nodded. “You want legal authority to effect a reprisal,” he said. “Letters of marque, I might say.”
“I’m not trying to hide behind the law,” Placido Geist said. “If my intention were simply to hunt the man down and kill him outright, I’d do it and suffer the consequences. I want the authority to apprehend.”
Lamar’s eyes narrowed behind the lenses of his glasses. “You’re, presuming on our previous acquaintance,” he said. “I don’t know as I cotton to it.”
“You know what they say,” Placido Geist remarked, smiling for the first time. “It’s good to know the law, but it’s better to know the judge.”
Lamar snorted. “You’re a bold rascal, but I see no reason to doubt your word,” he said.
“I hope to secure a conviction,” Placido Geist said.
“I’ll draft a writ,” Lamar said. He sucked on his teeth unhappily. “It’s no better than a legal fiction and almost certainly abuse of process,” he added. “A piece of paper won’t afford much protection to either one of us if you bring your man in head down over a saddle.”
“I’d rather see him swing for it,” Placido Geist said.
“I expect he needs it,” the judge said.
Placido Geist rose to his feet. “I’ll be by first thing in the morning,” he said. “I appreciate your help.”
“This affidavit makes no mention of an injury done you,” Lamar said.
“The injury done me was incidental,” Placido Geist said. “I wasn’t there when it happened.”
Ketchum’s gang had held up a freight office in Alpine and escaped south toward Boquillas, on the Rio Grande. They were pursued by a posse of citizens, determined but ill-equipped for tracking fugitives in such desolate country, and the bandits eluded them. Back in those days the Big Bend was wild and broken, with little cultivation or settlement even by the Apache. It still belonged to mule deer and javelina, and horses left little sign on the stony ground a white man could follow. The posse turned back, defeated, and Wind River Bob and Concho Jimmy Pringle got away into Mexico without sweating their mounts. By the time Placido Geist had learned of the outrage, the trail was cold.
This much was on the record. The judge was asking for a fuller account.
“They shot their way out of Alpine with no regard for casualties, civilian or otherwise,” Placido Geist said. “One of the victims was a pregnant woman. She lingered for three days, while the doctor tried to save the baby, but in the end she died and the infant along with her.”
“You knew the girl?” Lamar asked him.
“Her name was Amarita Espenor,” Placido Geist said. His voice sounded rusty. “I was the father of her child.”
“You blame yourself for her death,” the judge said.
“I blame myself for her disgrace,” Placido Geist said. He shrugged. “The ancient Greeks tell us a man can’t step in the same river twice.”
“Heraclitus,” Lamar said.
“I have to make an accounting.”
“As do we all, sooner or later,” Lamar commented.
“Some of us sooner than others,” Placido Geist said.
He’d run them to ground one by one, over time. The task was complicated by the fact that the gang had split up, and it was difficult to establish which of them had actually taken part. The evidence was circumstantial, since the money from the holdup wasn’t found and the notes never went back into circulation, but he pieced it together from outlaw gossip and saloon talk, jailhouse interviews, trial transcripts, deathbed confessions, and foolish luck. He used bribes and, on one occasion, torture. By process of elimination, he made up a list of the six men who’d been in Alpine that afternoon and confirmed it by speaking with witnesses. It took him ten years to find them, and in the course of things two of them died before he caught up with them, killed in an attempted robbery, or trying to evade pursuit, and two more went to the noose for crimes committed later. He was able to talk with Gimp Fogerty the day before his hanging, and it was Gimp who gave him the name of the kid, Concho Jimmy Pringle.