Appaloosa / Resolution / Brimstone / Blue-Eyed Devil Read online

  The Virgil Cole-Everett Hitch Novels 1 – 4

  Appaloosa

  Resolution

  Brimstone

  Blue-Eyed Devil

  Robert B Parker

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Appaloosa

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2005 by Robert B. Parker

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0508-2

  A BERKLEY BOOK®

  Berkley Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: June, 2006

  THE SPENSER NOVELS

  Cold Service

  Bad Business

  Back Story

  Widow’s Walk

  Potshot

  Hugger Mugger

  Hush Money

  Sudden Mischief

  Small Vices

  Chance

  Thin Air

  Walking Shadow

  Paper Doll

  Double Deuce

  Pastime

  Stardust

  Playmates

  Crimson Joy

  Pale Kings and Princes

  Taming a Sea-Horse

  A Catskill Eagle

  Valediction

  The Widening Gyre

  Ceremony

  A Savage Place

  Early Autumn

  Looking for Rachel Wallace

  The Judas Goat

  Promised Land

  Mortal Stakes

  God Save the Child

  The Godwulf Manuscript

  THE JESSE STONE NOVELS

  Stone Cold

  Death in Paradise

  Trouble in Paradise

  Night Passage

  THE SUNNY RANDALL NOVELS

  Melancholy Baby

  Shrink Rap

  Perish Twice

  Family Honor

  ALSO BY ROBERT B. PARKER

  Appaloosa

  Double Play

  Gunman’s Rhapsody

  All Our Yesterdays

  A Year at the Races (with Joan Parker)

  Perchance to Dream

  Poodle Springs (with Raymond Chandler)

  Love and Glory

  Wilderness

  Three Weeks in Spring (with Joan Parker)

  Training with Weights (with John R. Marsh)

  Again, and always, for Joan

  PROLOGUE

  The Boston House Saloon was the best in Appaloosa. It had a long, teak bar with a big, gilt-framed mirror behind it. At night, the room was lit by coal oil lamps on a chandelier that could be lowered and raised on a chain and pulley. It was late afternoon, and the place was empty except for the bartender and three off-shift copper miners drinking beer. The bartender was Willis McDonough. McDonough was a fat man who always wore white shirts fresh from the Chinaman. He moved easily and with great dignity up and down the bar. He was polishing glasses with a clean towel when the two men came into the saloon and ordered two glasses of whiskey.

  One of the men, the shorter one, had a small face with a narrow mouth and prominent front teeth, which he tried to conceal with a big, sweeping moustache. He carried a gun cross draw in a cheap holster. He wasn’t a miner, and he wasn’t a cowboy. The other man was taller, with a thick body and long, black hair that looked oily. He too had a gun. It was stuck into his right-hand pants pocket, with its dark walnut butt showing.

  Between them, they drank a bottle of whiskey. They spoke only to each other. They paid no attention to McDonough or the three miners. When the whiskey was gone, they turned to leave.

  “That’ll be three dollars,” McDonough said.

  Both men turned and stared silently at McDonough for a moment. McDonough looked back at them and felt uncomfortable. They both had guns. Looking at them, he realized, as if they had told him, that they would shoot him if he persisted. He didn’t wish to die for three dollars. He shrugged.

  “On the house, gentlemen.”

  Neither one showed any reaction. They turned and left the bar. McDonough’s heart felt shaky in his chest.

  THEY HAD JUST come from seeing a stereopticon show about Venice, Italy. Now they walked up Second Street, lit mostly by the moon and a little by the light that spilled out of the barrooms. She put her arm through his. She could feel how strong he was. It would be so exciting if they could ever go to Venice—or anyplace, really, as long as they were together. Coming toward them on the board sidewalk were three men. From the way they walked, she could tell they were drunk. She wanted to cross the street, but he said no. He didn’t cross the street for anyone. They met by the livery stable. One of the men asked them where they were going. He was a tall man, she remembered, with narrow shoulders and a walleye. His beard was scraggly, as if he had trouble growing one.

  “We’re going home,” her husband said, “if you’ll kindly step out of the way.”

  “Good-looking lady you got,” the walleyed man said.

  “My wife,” her husband said, and she could hear the warning in his voice.

  “She fuck as good as she looks?” the walleyed man said.

  Her husband hit him very hard, and he staggered backward. One of his friends, a short, thick man with no hat, drew his gun and shot her husband in the chest. She screamed. Her husband collapsed in a heap. The tall man got his balance back and dragged her away from her husband and into the livery stable. The two other men followed. They forced her onto the floor and began to take off her clothes. She struggled as hard as she could. Then she was
naked and one of them was on her. She felt as if she was surrounded by a vast, empty space in which her own screams echoed like those of someone else. Then she closed her eyes and set her jaw and waited.

  JACK BELL had worked all the tough towns. He’d been a city marshal in cattle-trail towns and worked the wild mining towns like Tombstone and Silver City. He’d scouted for the army and rode shotgun for Wells Fargo. He’d once arrested John Wesley Hardin. When Clayton Johansson’s wife described the men who shot her husband and raped her, Bell was pretty sure who did it. With two deputies, he rode out to the Circle RB ranch to talk with Randall Bragg, who owned the ranch and for whom the suspects worked. They met in the open area of hard, trampled dirt between the ranch house and the barn. Most of his hands stood near Bragg. All of them were armed.

  “Randall,” Bell said. “I’m afraid I need to bring three of your boys back into town with me.”

  Bragg was a spare man, wearing a black duster and a high-crowned black hat. He held a Winchester rifle. Bell could see that the hammer was back.

  “Can’t spare ’em, Jack,” he said.

  His voice was deep, but it had a hard sound to it, as if it were forced out through his nose.

  “It’s serious legal business, Randall. I got to take them in.”

  “No.”

  Bell looked at Bragg and the cowboys ranged behind him. He looked over his shoulder at one of the deputies, and nodded at the walleyed man standing with his two friends near one end of the group.

  “Cut those three out,” he said.

  The deputy looked uncertain. Bell’s hand rested gently on his gun’s butt.

  “Do what I tell you,” Bell said.

  The deputy moved his horse forward and pitched suddenly off the horse as a shot was fired from the barn. Bell knew it was a Winchester; he’d heard enough of them. He turned his horse toward the shot and pulled his gun free, and a bullet hit him in the face and knocked him backward out of the saddle. The second deputy sat, frozen, in his saddle. He looked at the deputy and Bell sprawled in the dirt. He glanced at the barn and then at Bragg. Bragg, still holding the Winchester, smiled.

  “Time to see what you’re made of,” he said to the deputy. “Ain’t it.”

  The deputy pulled his horse sharply around and headed out at a gallop. No one in town knew where he went.

  1

  It was a long time ago, now, and there were many gunfights to follow, but I remember as well, perhaps, as I remember anything, the first time I saw Virgil Cole shoot. Time slowed down for him. He fought with an odd stateliness. Always steady and never fast, but always faster than the man he was fighting.

  Like my father, I’d been to West Point, and I was good at soldiering. But soldiering didn’t allow too much for expansion of the soul. So after five years in the Indian Wars, I turned in my commission and rode away to see how far I could expand it. To keep from starving to death while I was expanding it, I shot buffalo for the railroad, and rode beside the driver on Wells Fargo coaches with an eight-gauge shotgun, and scouted now and then for the Army. I sat lookout for a while in a gambling parlor in Durango. I did a short turn as a bouncer in a whorehouse in Canon City. I got in a fight in Tres Piedras, and killed the man and had to move on pretty quick. I tried to find a little gold in the mountains in Colorado and didn’t, and came down out of the San Juan Mountains, looking for something else to do. Along the way, I read a lot of books and fucked a lot of women, all of whom I liked. Now, with thirty dollars’ worth of gold in my pocket, on a dark bay gelding named Sugar that I’d won playing poker in Esmeralda, I came on into Trinidad in the midafternoon on a summer day with the sun warm on my back.

  It wasn’t much of a town then. Two streets north and south. Three streets crossing east and west. Twelve blocks in all. It was one of those towns that existed mostly for people passing through. Cowboys who brought cattle to the railhead from the East Colorado grasslands. Soldiers on the way to Fort Carson. Hide hunters, teamsters, and miners occasionally, coming down to resupply. A few people trying to farm. People like me, moving from place to place because they didn’t know what else to do.

  As I passed the Rattlesnake Saloon on my left, the swinging doors burst open and a big man in a buckskin shirt came through them faster, surely, than he would have wished, stumbled across the boardwalk, trying to catch his balance, and fell forward into the street. There was blood on one side of his face. Sugar shied a little, and I pulled him up. The man in the street had gotten himself onto all fours when the saloon doors opened more gently and a tall man came out wearing a black suit. The suit’s coat was pushed back on the right side to expose a big, bone-handled Colt. I could see the badge pinned to his white shirt. Very dignified and deliberate, he stepped off the boardwalk into the street and stopped maybe six feet from the man in the buckskin shirt, and waited. Behind him, five or six other men pushed out of the saloon and stood on the boardwalk. He didn’t seem to see them, but I noticed that he had turned slightly, so that he could look at the man in the street and the men on the boardwalk.

  The man in the street was on his feet now. He was a big man, fat but strong-looking, with a black beard and long hair. His buckskin shirt looked as if he’d worn it since the buck was killed. On his belt, he wore a bowie knife and a big Army Colt in a flap holster. He smelled like a man who skinned buffalo. Some of the street dust had caked onto the blood on the left side of his face. He faced the man in the black suit.

  “Goddamn you, Cole,” he said. “You got no business hitting me with that gun.”

  “Time for you to come on with me, Bear,” Cole said. “Until you cool down.”

  His voice was surprisingly light and soft.

  “I ain’t going with anybody,” Bear said. “I paid that whore three dollars for an hour, and she fucked me once and said she was through.”

  “Bear,” Cole said, “I would guess that you are only good for one an hour.”

  “Don’t you rag me, Cole. Next time I see that sow, I’m going to gut her.”

  “No.”

  Cole’s voice didn’t get less soft, but something came into it that made the “no” crackle like summer lightning. Bear almost swayed for a moment. Then he steadied himself, and his eyes shifted to the other men on the boardwalk.

  Somebody said, “We’re with you, Bear.”

  Somebody else said, “Don’t let him run you.”

  Bear turned his gaze back to Cole.

  “I ain’t coming with you,” Bear said.

  Cole didn’t move. Nobody spoke. The light wind that had followed me out of the mountains drifted along the street, kicking up tiny swirls of dust and hay and dried manure. The force of his motionless silence was hard to explain. But I could see it pushing at Bear. The men on the boardwalk began to spread out a little. They were all hide skinners, probably come into town with Bear. Been sleeping on the ground with him, cutting buffalo with him. Eating bad food and drinking lousy whiskey with him. They couldn’t back away from him now. One of the men slid the hammer loop off his Colt. I took the eight-gauge from under my right leg. Cole saw me, I knew. Already, I could tell that he saw everything. If he thought I was with the skinners, the increase in odds didn’t appear to bother him. I had no money on this one. But I didn’t think Bear should gut a woman, whore or otherwise, and I didn’t think one man should go against seven.

  “Marshal,” I said, “I’m backing you in this.”

  I said it softly, but it was so still that it almost echoed. Cole didn’t stop looking at Bear, but he made a barely visible nod. Bear still watched Cole. The men on the boardwalk glanced at me when I spoke, and spread a little farther. I cocked both barrels on the eight-gauge and rested the butt against my right hip. Then I moved Sugar a little closer so that I was nearly beside Cole. Again, the silence arched over us, made more intense somehow by the sound of the easy wind.

  Bear said, “Fuck you, Marshal,” and went for his gun.

  I brought the shotgun to my shoulder. Cole seemed in no hurry. Carefully,
he drew the Colt, thumbed back the hammer, aimed at the middle of Bear’s big body, and shot him in the center of the chest. He recocked the Colt as he turned a half-turn so that the big, bone-handled Colt was steady on Bear’s supporters. Bear sagged and fell over, his gun half out of the holster.

  Sugar didn’t mind gunfire. Sudden movement scared him, but noise had no effect. He held rock-still where I had set him, so that both barrels of the shotgun were steady toward the men on the boardwalk.

  “You men go about your business now,” Cole said.

  Nobody did anything.

  “I won’t tell you again,” Cole said.

  At the far right edge of the group, the right shoulder of the man who’d loosened his Colt made a kind of involuntary twitch and then froze. Everything teetered. Then the man turned and walked away, and the rest of the group followed him. Cole carefully let the hammer down on his Colt. He opened the cylinder, extracted the spent shell, put in a fresh one from his belt, closed the cylinder, and put the Colt carefully back in its holster. Then he looked up at me and nodded.

  “Come see me in my office when you can,” he said.

  Then he turned and walked away without a glance at the corpse. I stayed there for a time, watching as some people came out into the street and looked at Bear and stood around, and finally a man in a white coat came along with a wagon, and four of us helped him put Bear in the back, and he drove off. I tied Sugar to the rail, took the shotgun with me, and went on in and had a couple of whiskeys in the Rattlesnake, and a plate of beans and bacon. Some people stared at me, but no one said anything and, feeling warmer inside, I went on down to the jail and sat in the front room where Cole kept his office, and we talked. He asked me my name and I told him.

  “Everett Hitch,” he said.

  Like he was tasting it.

  He asked me had I done much gun work, and I said I had done some, but no law officering. And he asked me what I had done, and I told him.

  “West Point,” Cole said—not impressed, just recording it, like he did, and filing it.

  “You didn’t like soldier boyin’?” he said.

  I told Cole that I liked some of it. I liked the men, and sometimes, on mounted patrol, I liked the space, and how far you could see, and the way it seemed like possibility was rolling out ahead of us. But most of the time, I said, it was sort of crampsome.