Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek (A Caleb York Western Book 6) Read online

  Also by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

  The Legend of Caleb York

  The Big Showdown

  The Bloody Spur

  Last Stage to Hell Junction

  Hot Lead, Cold Justice

  Masquerade for Murder

  Murder, My Love

  Killing Town

  The Will to Kill

  A Long Time Dead

  Murder Never Knocks

  Kill Me, Darling

  King of the Weeds

  Complex 90

  Lady, Go Die!

  The Consummata

  Kiss Her Goodbye

  The Big Bang

  The Goliath Bone

  Dead Street

  MICKEY SPILLANE AND MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Spillane and Wayne

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A TIP OF THE STETSON

  About the Authors

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

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2021 by Mickey Spillane Publishing LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  The K logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020952336

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-3012-1

  First Kensington Hardcover Edition: May 2021

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-3013-8 (ebook)

  ISBN-10: 1-4967-3013-5 (ebook)

  For Stuart Rosebrook,

  my True Western pal

  who also rides the Iowa range

  “They deal in life and sudden death

  and primitive struggle,

  and with the basic emotions—love, hate,

  and anger—thrown in.”

  —John Wayne, on Westerns

  Spillane and Wayne

  I remember vividly the lovely warm, sunny South Carolina afternoon when, as we sat sipping Miller beer in his outdoor tiki bar, Mickey Spillane told me that his famous private eye, Mike Hammer, was designed to be a modern-day equivalent of the mythic Western hero.

  “He wears the black hat,” he said, “but he does the right thing.”

  Like most of the great Western heroes of fiction and film, Hammer used the methods of the villains he’d pursued to get his man . . . and sometimes woman.

  This led Mickey to say on that afternoon, somewhat surprisingly, “I wrote a Western once, you know.”

  Well, I didn’t know.

  He went on to tell me about a screenplay, “The Saga of Calli York,” that he’d written for his old friend John Wayne. He and Wayne had been thick in Mickey’s early 1950s heyday, and the Mick had even starred in a circus mystery the Duke produced, Ring of Fear (1954). You can find it on DVD—color and CinemaScope, with Mickey playing himself but channeling Mike Hammer.

  If you’re a Spillane fan, you may know that Wayne gave Mickey a white Jaguar convertible by way of payment for Mike Hammer’s papa rewriting the script of that troubled film. Less than a decade later, Mickey would star in the Hammer movie The Girl Hunters, produced by longtime Wayne associate Robert Fellows. Of course, Mickey’s most famous acting role was as a pitchman for Miller Lite, sporting a porkpie hat and trenchcoat, a doll (well, The Doll) on his arm. That series of commercials only lasted eighteen years.

  “You wanna see it?” Mickey asked, getting back to the Western movie script he’d announced having written.

  Of course I did. He sent it home with me (he once called me his “human wastebasket”).

  Shortly before his death in 2006, Mickey asked me to complete the final Mike Hammer, then in progress (The Goliath Bone), if need be. I, of course, said yes. And then (without telling me) he instructed his wife, Jane, to turn over all of the rest of his unpublished materials to me. I would know what to do, he said.

  That has led to thirteen Mike Hammer books—all expanded from unfinished Spillane manuscripts or outlines—and two non-Hammer novels. More are on the way—Mickey’s files were extensive, to say the least. But only when I mentioned to my editor at Kensington—where, in addition to mysteries, Westerns are a specialty—that I had an unproduced screenplay written by Spillane for Wayne, well . . .

  Now we have arrived at the sixth Caleb York novel (“Calli” is a nickname I dropped), developed from various drafts of that script. I hope Mickey would be pleased. I think he would. I like to think both he and the Duke would get a kick out of them.

  But the readers—his “customers,” as Mickey put it—are what counts. I hope you will be a satisfied one, reading this new Caleb York yarn.

  Max Allan Collins

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the flickering yellow light of a brass oil lamp, Caleb York, seated at his big beat-up wooden desk, filed through wanted posters like a card player checking the deadwood discards for an ace that had eluded him.

  Closing in on forty, but not too fast, York was a big man yet lean, his jaw firm, his reddish brown hair gray at the temples. His pleasant features softened their rawboned, clean-shaven setting, his eyes the color of well-worn denim and fixed in an all but permanent squint.

  His gray shirt with pearl buttons and black string tie, and the black cotton pants tucked in hand-tooled black boots, said city—as did the black frock coat hung on a nearby wall peg, a calvary-pinched black hat on another peg next to it. But the gun belt with Colt Single Action Army .44—coiled on his desk like a rattler waiting to be roused—said something else.

  He was the county sheriff—and de facto marshal—of Trinidad, New Mexico (population three hundred or so but growing), alone in a plank-floored jailhouse office whose two barred street windows were letting in only darkness. The wood-burning stove was unlit—this was April, the worst winter in anybody’s memory mercifully over, but the smell of spring flowers on the prairies had been supplanted by the stench of death.

  Here in town, at least, the bouquet of horse manure and the whiff of beans cooking across the way in the modest barrio represented the normal scent of spring in the Southwest. Not that anything much was normal about the aftermath of what folks were calling the Big Die-Up.

  The snow had begun last November, a seeming relief after the Hades-like heat of a dry summer, w
orse the farther north you went, Montana, Wyoming, the Black Hills. By early January, plateaus were painted a crystalline pearl, dry river bottoms buried beneath drifting white. Cattle starved to death by the thousands, owners caught flat-footed without enough hay stored for such a disaster. New Mexico hadn’t been hit quite as hard, but hard enough. The spring roundup—hence, “die-up”—would not happen at all, which meant hardship for ranchers in the area, in particular Willa Cullen and her Bar-O.

  Willa was of a special concern to York, whose relationship with the willful young woman—who had inherited the biggest ranch in these parts from an otherwise childless father—had, over the near year York had been here, gone from cool to warm to cold to (more recently) hot, pleasantly so.

  When he’d ridden into Trinidad, he’d been a nameless nobody, just passing through, on a westbound journey on which he had benefited from a rumor that Caleb York—celebrated Wells Fargo detective notorious for not bringing them back alive—had been shot down like a dog. He’d decided to leave it that way, at least until he got to San Diego, where the Pinkerton people might choose to resurrect his infamous name to make use of his reputation for their commercial purposes (and his).

  Till then, he’d intended to stay dead. It had gotten old, facing down gunhands and saddle tramps who sought to steal his hard-earned, blood-soaked reputation by killing him for it. York was, after all, a dime novel hero—but he’d made not a nickel from those pen pushers’ work . . . was such a thing right? Buffalo Bill had at least got a show out of it. Only a handful in the Southwest bore York’s kind of gunfighter fame—Wyatt and Virgil Earp, John Wesley Hardin, Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson maybe.

  Circumstances had led York to an extended stay in Trinidad, with his name exposed and a badge pinned on his shirt with a couple of women who interested him encouraging an extended stay. One was Willa, a blonde Viking of a girl who could make a plaid blouse and Levis look like a wedding night.

  The other was Rita Filley, and that was who burst into his office as he leaned forward in flickering lamplight, looking at dangerous ugly faces on wanted posters.

  Rita’s face, though tightly distraught, her usually smooth brow furrowed deep, was anything but ugly—rather, a heart-shaped home to big brown eyes, a turned-up nose, and full, red-painted lips, parted at the moment in heavy breathing. That mouth in such a condition York had witnessed before, close-up, but this was different.

  The young woman, in a blue-and-gray satin gown worn in her role as hostess of the Victory Saloon, had been running, her full bosom heaving (York had witnessed that before, as well). She was otherwise slender, a striking woman whose pale complexion spoke of her Irish father but whose features recalled a Mexican mother. She stopped in the now-open doorway, her hands propping her there, framed against the night.

  “Caleb,” the sultry voice panted, “you’re needed at Doc Miller’s!”

  Rita, who had inherited the Victory from the sister whose murder York had avenged, was not to be taken lightly. Without asking of the circumstances, the sheriff rose from the hard chair, snatching the gun belt from its slumber and strapping it on as he joined the woman, who’d already stepped back outside.

  Rita was on the move again. He kept up as he buckled the gun belt. Their footsteps echoed off the narrow boardwalk as they hastened.

  “You remember Conchita,” she huffed.

  “One of your girls.”

  When Rita first inherited the Victory, the upstairs had been a bordello. A few months ago, at York’s urging, she had converted the second floor into her own quarters and limited her girls to dance hall duties—cavorting with the cowboys and clerks, encouraging drinking, but anything beyond that was their own business . . . and not on the Victory premises.

  “Working of late,” he went on, “at the Red Bull. Correct?”

  De Toro Rojo was a prosperous cantina in the barrio, offering spirits on the first floor and spirited putanas on the second. Despite a city ordinance forbidding such activity, York looked the other way. Men white and brown and black would find a place to slake their various thirsts, and not having the carnal side of things serviced at the Victory was victory enough for him.

  Rita sighed and nodded, not breaking stride. “I discouraged it, but she has a child with a hungry mouth.”

  The night was cool, the moon full and high, Main Street almost glowing ivory, a benign memory of a white-choked thoroughfare not so long ago. They quickly walked through this somber setting toward the three-story brick bank building.

  Rita, her words rushing much as she was, said, “She was not even working tonight . . . not above. She was waiting tables, and when she refused to go upstairs with him, the bastard dragged her outside. Threw her on the ground and . . .”

  Rita choked back tears.

  “I get the picture,” he said.

  But she went on.

  “He thrashed her,” she said, voice trembling. “Then he . . . he ravaged her.”

  “You saw this?”

  “No! I’d have stopped it. I’d have shot him dead. Which is what you should do, Caleb. You really should.”

  “Who did this?”

  But Rita was already scurrying up the stairs alongside the bank building. Dr. Albert Miller’s office was on the second floor. York followed Rita up to the little exterior landing and inside.

  In the modest waiting room, Jonathan P. Tulley—York’s deputy—was pacing like an expectant father, albeit one with a double-barreled baby in his arms already.

  The bony, bandy-legged Tulley—reformed drunkard; desert rat turned deputy—was damn near resplendent in store-bought duds—flannel shirt, woolen pants, and jaunty red suspenders, the wispy head of white hair and matching beard trimmed now, with only the shapeless canvas thing that passed for a hat an echo of his prior position as town character.

  “Caleb York!” the deputy blurted, coming to a sudden stop. “There be mischief afoot!”

  “Mischief,” a lower-pitched, calmer voice intoned from the doorway of the surgery, “is, I’m afraid, a gross understatement.”

  Portly little Doc Miller came in, wiping his hands with a red-splotched rag, like a bartender cleaning up after a sloppy customer. The physician was in his rolled-up shirtsleeves, his string tie loose and limp, brown suit typically rumpled, his eyes weary behind the wire-framed glasses.

  York said, his voice soft but with an edge, “What’s happened to this girl?”

  The sheriff stood just inside the door off the landing, with Rita at his right and Tulley having fallen in at his left, as all three faced the physician with expressions that expected the worst. They were not disappointed.

  “She has been beaten to within an inch of her life,” the doctor said. “Not a medical term, perhaps, but an accurate one. And that’s not the worst of it.”

  Rita said, eyes glimmering with tears, voice filled with rage, “He attacked her! Violated her!”

  Tulley was frowning. “Punishing her like that was sinful. But she lay with men for money, did she not? Ye can’t say she was ruined, can ye?”

  “Rape,” York said, “is rape. Doc, has she said who did this?”

  The physician’s eyebrows rose above his glasses. “She has. The Hammond boy.”

  “William Hammond,” York said.

  It was not a question.

  Hammond was the son of Victoria Hammond, widow of Andrew Hammond, a Colorado cattle baron who had died a year or so ago. His wife had, through intermediaries, been buying up the small spreads that had suffered so terribly in the Big Die-Up, and was now ensconced in the ranch house of the biggest of the smaller ranches, the Circle G.

  The Hammond woman had only moved in last week and York had not yet met her. In fact, he’d had it in mind to ride out there this week, in part because of a nasty episode several nights ago involving her son, who had threatened a Bar-O cowboy with a pistol at the Victory, in an argument over one of Rita’s girls.

  The saloon owner had pulled in Deputy Tulley, on his night rounds, to help a b
ouncer of hers eject the young man—who was perhaps twenty—and give the troublemaker a choice between a night in a cell or riding home without further incident. The boy had been arrogant and sneering (Tulley had reported to the sheriff), but accepted the latter option.

  “He’s a handsome boy,” Rita was saying, “but a mean drunk.”

  Tulley said, “I was doin’ my nightly rounds and Miss Rita came out of the Victory with an arm around that poor bloodied chile, walkin’ her along as best she could.”

  Rita interjected, “She came looking for me. Needing help. Looking like stumbling death.”

  Tulley went on: “I helped get that poor soul to the doc’s, up the stairs and within, and stood guard here while I sent Miss Rita for ye. Done the best I could, Caleb York.”

  “You did fine, Tulley,” York said. He turned to Doc Miller. “Can I see her?”

  The doc thought for a moment, then nodded. “I’ve given her laudanum, so she may drift off soon . . . at least I hope she will. Come with me, Caleb. . . . Rita, Tulley, stay out here, would you?”

  York followed the physician through the private quarters beyond—sitting room, small kitchen, past the open doorway of the physician’s bedroom and on to a spare room with a metal bed and a dresser with a basin and pitcher.

  In a white hospital-style gown, Conchita was under a sheet, head sunk into a plump feather pillow. York knew her to be a pretty girl of perhaps eighteen, but that prettiness was lost under the welter of bruises and contusions, her eyes so puffy and swollen, only slits remained through which she might see. Her arms were outside the covers, exposed by short sleeves and just as heavily bruised, the impressions of strong, brutal hands left behind. Her right forearm lay at an impossible angle, as if an invisible hinge had been broken within her.