Kerrigans: A Texas Dynasty Read online

  “How close?” Kate said.

  “Within spitting distance,” Hollister said.

  He stared at the girl.

  “Changed your mind?”

  Kate shook her head.

  Hollister smiled. “You’ve got bark on you, Miss Cotter.”

  “Someone in my family needs it,” Kate said.

  “Your father has sand, but in a different, quieter way. He’s not what the Mexicans call a pistolero.”

  “Am I, do you think?”

  “You have the makings, Miss Cotter. I sense a courage and a ruthlessness in you that I’ve sensed in few men.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The evening after Kate Cotter’s meeting with Ben Hollister her father retired to bed early with a bad cold.

  Kate quickly changed into a modest green cotton dress with a high collar and threw her late mother’s cloak over her shoulders.

  The dress had two deep pockets in front and into one of those she slipped the Colt that she’d hidden in her underwear drawer. The white straw hat completed her outfit, and she decided she looked like an innocent country girl just arrived in Five Points.

  Shannon, still recovering from her ordeal, was asleep, whimpering every now and then as her bad dreams returned and tormented her.

  Kate kissed her sister on the cheek and then slipped out of the house.

  According to the clock on the mantel it was ten o’clock.

  The moon rode high in a star-strewn sky and made the slate roofs of the tenements glow like tarnished silver.

  Her button boots loud on the cobbles, Kate walked in the direction of Kelley Street, through throngs of people, men, women, and children and lovers walking arm in arm.

  The residents of Five Points were in no hurry to return to their hot, smelly, rat-infested apartments and preferred to remain outside at night for as long as they could.

  A few men hurled suggestive, grinning comments at Kate as she passed, but she walked on, looking straight ahead.

  Kelley Street was no better and no worse than any other thoroughfare in the area, but there were fewer tenements and more grim, sooty warehouses, some of them abandoned and boarded, echoing with street noises.

  Kate looked around her. It was in one of those buildings . . .

  She put the thought out of her head.

  It was time to act the foolish virgin.

  The Cross Keys saloon was a smoky, noisy gin mill that smelled of sweaty, unwashed bodies, cheap perfume, spilled beer, and the usual background fragrance of urine and vomit.

  Kate had her bottom pinched five times before she reached the long, mahogany bar, backed by six bartenders with slicked down hair and diamond stickpins in their cravats.

  When one of the bartenders, among the aristocracy of Five Points, deigned to look in Kate’s direction, she dropped a little curtsey and ordered a small sherry, “Sir, if you please.”

  “I’ll pay that for the little lady,” said a rough-edged voice said behind her.

  A huge, hairy forearm reached out and grabbed the sherry glass. It looked like a tiny, amber wildflower in his hand.

  Kate turned and looked into the middle button of a man’s plaid shirt.

  She raised her eyes and saw a broad, red-veined face and fleshy wide nose broken to a pulp. The man had heavy-lidded eyes, pendulous, unshaven jowls and the chest and shoulders of a village blacksmith.

  He seemed as huge and indestructible as a German ironclad.

  Kate thought of the revolver in her pocket and feared that its tiny ball would bounce off such a man and do him no more harm than a stinging gnat.

  “So what brings you to Five Points, dearie?” the man said, his hand already tracing the curve of Kate’s hip.

  She played her role to the hilt.

  “Oh kind sir, I’ve just arrived from old Ireland and I’m looking for a place to lay my poor head,” she said.

  “Well, am I not from the old country my ownself?” the man said. “And is my name not Bill Wooten? We are well met, indeed.”

  It was only now Kate noticed that he had a fresh cut across his low, brutish forehead. He was one of them. One of the rapists.

  She had thought it might take days to find him, but here he was, big and bold as brass.

  “I have the very place for you,” the man said. “It’s a boardinghouse run by as respectable a lady as you’ll ever find.” He winked. “No gentleman callers, if such are to your liking.”

  “Oh no, sir,” Kate said. “It has been in my mind of late to enter holy orders.”

  “Is that so?” Wooten said. “And you’ll make a fine nun, I’ll be bound.”

  He grabbed Kate’s arm in his huge meaty fist.

  “Come and meet my friends, two Catholic, churchgoing gentlemen as ever was, lay to that.”

  As Wooten half-dragged Kate to a table, he shouldered a slatternly woman aside. She smiled at the girl, revealing black teeth and said, “Watch your step, dearie.”

  “Away with you,” Wooten growled, drawing back his hand.

  The woman scampered away and the man said, “Me and my friends have been trying to save that fallen woman’s soul, but she’ll have none of it.”

  The two men who sat at the table, their sullen faces much cut about by knives, stared at Kate as Wooten shoved her in a chair.

  “My associates,” the big man said. “The one with the white eye is Tom Van Meter and t’other with the warts all over his ugly mug is Chauncey Upsell.”

  Van Meter smiled at Kate.

  “We may look rough and ready, but we’re honest men to the bone,” he said. “Ain’t that right, Chauncey?”

  “To the bone all right,” Upsell said, grinning.

  His eyes had already stripped Kate naked.

  “And what’s your name, dearie?” Van Meter said.

  “Why sir, it’s Mary. Mary Brennan,” Kate said.

  “Little Mary has just arrived from the Emerald Isle and she’s looking for a place to stay,” Wooten said. “I thought we might take her along to Mrs. O’Hara’s boardin’house.”

  He smiled at Kate.

  “You’re not safe in the streets by yourself.”

  Upsell, his eyes fixed on Kate’s breasts, touched his tongue to his top lip.

  “I say we leave now,” he said. “Mrs. O’Hara locks her door early.”

  “Good idea,” Van Meter said.

  He grinned at Kate.

  “You’ll be safe with us, Mary me darlin’.”

  Kate Cotter knew she was headed into the lion’s den.

  The Colt, heavy in her pocket, gave her little reassurance.

  She’d never shot a gun before, never killed a man.

  It came to her then that it might be the last night of her life.

  But as the three vile thugs pushed Kate along the street she knew that, given the choice, she’d do it all over again.

  The animals had harmed her own and there was no stepping away from that.

  Not now.

  Not ever.

  The events that followed after Kate left the pub played out exactly as she feared and knew they would.

  Oddly silent, but constantly exchanging grins, as the three men walked her closer to what seemed an abandoned warehouse they began to glance over their shoulders.

  Satisfied that there were no prying eyes on the street, they stopped, and with considerable violence dragged Kate into a doorway.

  Van Meter kicked the door open and threw her into a dark, echoing stairwell.

  “Oh sirs, what are you doing?” Kate cried out. “This is not Mrs. O’Hara’s.”

  “You can go there later,” Bill Wooten said.

  “If ye can walk, that is,” Upsell said.

  “Please,” Kate said, “I am a virgin, destined for the nunnery.”

  “Not for much longer,” Van Meter said.

  “Me first,” Upsell said. “Girlie, I’m gonna bust you wide open.”

  Convinced they had a terrified, cowering victim in their power, the grinning Wooten
thumbed a match into flame and lit a stub of candle he’d picked up from the bottom step.

  For a moment, no one had a hand on Kate.

  “Damn you all to hell!” she yelled.

  The gun was in her hands and she fired.

  The bullet hit Wooten high in the chest and he fell back, gawping at the blood pumping out of him.

  Deafened, her ears ringing, Kate thumbed back the hammer again, wondering at how steady was her hand.

  Van Meter charged toward her, cursing, his clawed hands reaching for Kate’s throat.

  Ben Hollister had warned Kate never to try for a head shot.

  The light was poor, but the candle Wooten had dropped was still alight and had tinted the blackness with a pale yellow haze.

  Kate’s ball, fired at a distance of a couple of feet, crashed in the thug’s forehead and dropped him like a felled steer.

  Chauncey Upsell yelled that he was out of it.

  Like the other two who sprawled on the floor, one dead, the second coughing up frothing blood, Upsell was a skull and knuckle fighter and good with the blade against any opponent.

  But fighting with a gun was alien to him.

  Her revolver had turned a hundred pound girl into more than his equal and even now, as he saw death in her eyes, he couldn’t grasp what was happening to him.

  “Her name was Shannon. I am her sister,” Kate said. “You raped her.”

  “No . . .” Upsell said. “I didn’t . . . I couldn’t . . .”

  “You watched these two animals rape her and did nothing.”

  “I’m sorry. Put the gun away and I’ll buy your drink.”

  “It’s way too late for sorrow, Upsell. Yours and mine.”

  She shot into the man’s belly, fired again and watched him fall.

  Gunsmoke fogged the stairwell as Kate stepped to Wooten.

  The man was still alive.

  “For God’s sake get me a doctor,” he said, his eyes wild. “I don’t want to die.”

  Kate spat on him.

  She had one ball left . . . .

  The one Bill Wooten rode into hell.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A few days later Constable Sam Sullivan met Kate Cotter in the street.

  “Did you hear?” he said.

  “Hear what?” Kate said, her eyelashes fluttering her innocence.

  “Bill Wooten, Tom Van Meter, and Chauncey Upsell are all dead,” the big cop said. “Shot down in an abandoned warehouse on Kelley Street.”

  “Then good riddance,” Kate said. “I hope they all rot in hell.”

  “Those three won’t be missed, that’s for sure.”

  Sullivan waited until a freight wagon rumbled past.

  “A detective looked into the case,” he said. “Three men shot dead at the same time is unusual, even for Five Points.”

  Kate felt a small stab of panic.

  “And what did the detective say?”

  “He said it was a professional job, done by a man who knew how to use a revolver.”

  “Is that so?” Kate said.

  “A man like Ben Hollister,” Sullivan said.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t him,” Kate said.

  “Well, they dug .31 caliber balls out of the dead men. Hollister killed his last man with a .44. I doubt that he would go up against three violent toughs with a belly gun.”

  Kate swallowed hard.

  “Then who do you suspect, Constable Sullivan?”

  “A professional assassin from out of town, I’d say. And the detective agrees.”

  “I hope you catch your man,” Kate said.

  “Little chance of that. He’s probably back in Chicago by this time.”

  Sullivan touched his cap.

  “Well, it’s good news for you, Miss Cotter.”

  “It is indeed,” Kate said.

  What Shannon was not able to hide for long was that the attack had left her pregnant and her father finally learned the truth about what had happened.

  Filled with impotent rage, Patrick Cotter demanded to know if the police had been informed.

  “It’s too late for that, Pa,” Kate said. “The three men who raped Shannon are dead.”

  “But who? How?”

  “Sam Sullivan says they were shot by a hired assassin. I say it was the wrath of God that brought them to justice.”

  “Then thanks to the Good Lord that we will soon leave this accursed place,” Cotter said.

  “And to where?” Shannon said. “Everywhere I go I take this vile belly with me.”

  “A while ago I wrote to my brother Shamus who resides in the city of Nashville in Tennessee,” Patrick said. “I explained our straightened circumstance and”—the man searched for a word, then accepted reality and hung his head—“begged for his help.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you’d done this?” Kate said.

  She stared at her father, half in anger, half in pity.

  “I feared that he might refuse,” Patrick said.

  Kate’s face softened and tears glistened in her eyes.

  She put her hand on Patrick’s shoulder and said, “Pa, what have you done? The Cotters ask charity of no one, not even their kin.”

  “Well, now it’s spilled milk,” Patrick said. He reached into the inside pocket of his threadbare coat and produced a folded letter.

  “Read this aloud, child, so that Shannon can hear.”

  Kate took the letter, brushed away a tear and read.

  May 9, 1852

  Nashville, Tennessee

  My Dearest Brother,

  It is sorry I am to hear of the travails that beset you and yours.

  Of course, you must come to Nashville at once, and to that aim I’m sending you a most singular man by the name of Isaac Kerrigan, a saw doctor by trade.

  In the pursuit of his profession, Isaac had traveled extensively and he is well suited to bring the wagon and horses I am providing for you.

  His son, Joseph, a stalwart lad who will be of great help to you, will accompany his father.

  I am happy to report that the Indian tribes you may encounter, among them the fierce Shawnee, are smoking the peace pipe of late, thanks to the efforts of our brave dragoons.

  You and your family face a long, arduous journey. My atlas tell me it is all of seven ’undred miles, but keep the Appalachian Mountains in sight and haste ye to my side.

  Your Fond Brother,

  Shamus

  After Kate finished reading, she said, “Then it’s settled.”

  “I expect the wagon to be here in two weeks or less,” Patrick said. “We had best be ready to leave on the instant.”

  Kate saw her sister’s troubled face, the terrible deadness in her eyes that had been there since she was attacked.

  “Seven hundred miles of wild Indians, mountains, and river crossings, Shannon,” she said. “We must think of it as a great adventure.”

  “Don’t talk to me of adventures,” Shannon said. “All I want to do now is die and the sooner the better.”

  Shannon spat out spiteful words as though eager to get rid of the bad taste they left in her mouth.

  Patrick looked like a man who’d just been punched in the gut.

  He sprang to his feet and slapped Shannon hard across her cheek.

  “How dare you talk of death as we move to a new life?” he said.

  Then, his voice breaking, “I will not stand for it. I will not . . .”

  Shocked by the scarlet mark of his hand on Shannon’s fair cheek, and appalled at the enormity of what he’d just done, Patrick groaned like a soul in torment and fled to his room.

  Kate sat in silence and listened to her sister’s bitter sobs.

  She had but a small family and now it was slowly breaking apart.

  From now on she’d have to be strong and lead the way, keep them together.

  It is a dark tunnel you’re looking through, Kate Cotter, she told herself. But you must make sure that there’s light at the end of it.

  CHAPTER E
LEVEN

  Isaac Kerrigan was a good-looking man in his late fifties, but Kate Cotter had eyes only for his handsome son.

  Joseph was eighteen years old that spring, a strapping lad with a fine, bold mustache and a thick mane of hair to match. Born in Ireland, he had eyes that were as clear and gray as a Donegal mist and a smile as bright as morning.

  For Kate, it was love at first sight.

  She knew from the first that was the man she’d marry.

  Some say it can’t happen like that, but it does and more times than people imagine. When Kate first looked into Joseph Kerrigan’s eyes she knew in her heart that she could not go on without him at her side.

  He was a man to live her life with, and for Kate, there would be no going back from it, not in a year, or ten, or a hundred.

  Apart from difficult river crossings, swollen from the spring melt, and the collapse of a wagon wheel that took two full days to repair, the long trek to Tennessee proved to be uneventful.

  Isaac Kerrigan knew the trails and was an excellent hand with horses and he was a good camp cook, a skill he patiently taught Kate.

  As Shannon sulked in the back of the wagon along with the supplies and the Cotters’ few sticks of furniture, and Patrick grew more silent and withdrawn with each passing day, Kate and Joseph were thrown together and took great delight in each other’s company.

  Night after night they sat together and watched the smoke rise from the campfire and reach toward the stars.

  “One day Kate, I’ll grab a handful of those and scatter them in your hair,” Joseph once said.

  Kate said he was being silly, but secretly she was pleased beyond measure. She’d never met, or had ever hoped to meet, a man who talked such pretties.

  It was inevitable that by the time they reached Nashville, they were head over heels in love and desirous of getting married as soon as was possible.

  Unlike his thin, aesthetic brother, Shamus Cotter was a fat, jolly man full of boisterous good humor, and his eyes were as black and bright as a bird’s. He habitually wore a brocade vest, a brown, swallow-tailed coat, and a high hat as shiny as a stovepipe. A trader in Irish horses by profession, he was a notorious rogue and cheerfully acknowledged that fact.