The Hunt for Bloody Bill Anderson

By William E. McClintock

Saddles up where Widowmaker leaves off... a fast draw former U.S. Marshal, a beautiful but deadly Pinkerton detective, and intel that William T. Anderson is ALIVE...

• Language: English
• Publisher: William E. McClintock
• Release date: Jan 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310894237

William E. McClintock

Been just passin' through, mostly, but did a lot of cool things along the way... Was a disc jockey back when radio stations played 45 rpm records, did a stint as the news director of a state-wide radio network in Alaska, and logged more than a few years as a talk show host. Been both a deputy sheriff and a city cop... Seen murders and suicides, known good guys and bad guys, saints and sinners and stone cold killers... and been loved by some wonderful women. Back in my really younger days, too full of Kerouac and Hemingway, I was 'On the Road' for a time, a guitar on my shoulder, sleeping under bridges and in parks and on the subway, thumbing rides, and hopping a freight train or two along the way just to say I had. Never could play the guitar worth a damn, but carrying the thing around got me rides, and into beach parties, and laid more than once. Sometimes I wonder where I’m from. Grew up in Montana and Wyoming, but spent a lot of time in LA back when LA was cool, and the ironic, funny thing is, when I was in Wyoming I always felt like I was from LA, and when I was in LA, I felt like I was from Wyoming... I’ve always loved the west and all that history, though, (livin’ in Tombstone, Arizona now, go figure) and, through some combination of direction and DNA, I'm pretty sure it was my grandmother who gave me that. She was a ranch cook and I was a Casper kid who spent summers on whatever ranch she happened to be working -- the ZN, the Big Creek, the A Bar A... One of the cowhands at the Big Creek Ranch -- a tall, lanky guy named Ray -- taught me how to throw a rope, and I could still stop a steer in its tracks if I had to. A cowboy at the ZN imparted the basics of fist fighting when I was about eight years old, and the boys at the A Bar A let me in on the branding more than once. But maybe more to the point, there's this little flashback: bouncing along on the front seat of a battered old pickup, my grandmother's hand on the stick shift that comes up out of the crank case, and she's saying, "Hole-in-the-Wall is over that way, just over those hills. Remember me tellin’ you about Butch Cassidy?...” Or, “It was right around Bosler here where Tom Horn was pickin’ off rustlers for the Swan Land and Cattle Company...” For better or worse, those are character building moments, and memories like that don’t fade much. Not ever. (I can still close my eyes and see about a thousand eggs frying on the griddle in the cookhouse at the A Bar A...) Somebody asked me one time what book or movie I thought best represented my life. It was an interesting thing to ask but I had no interesting answer, so I more or less shrugged it off. That little pop psychology question rolled around inside my head for awhile, though... Once, I knew, I would've said, 'On the Road,' or 'Catcher in the Rye'... At another point in my life, it was very much the Clint Eastwood movie, 'Play Misty for Me'... At still another, later time, maybe 'The Blue Knight,' or 'The Choir Boys' or some other cop novel by Joseph Wambaugh... But it came to me in the form of a minor epiphany one day that it was all of the above, and a Dustin Hoffman movie came to my mind: Little Big Man. At the end, Little Big Man ruminates that he has lived his life in periods... "There was my missionary period," he says, "and then my Indian period and my Cavalry scout period, then my gunfighter period, and now my old man period..." And so -- I realize -- has it been with me. There was my Kerouac period, and my radio period, and my cop period, and now, I suppose, my writer period, which curves around and corkscrews into the Kerouac period... Could be it's that way with all of us. Maybe, as Toby Keith once said, I Should've Been a Cowboy... Well, who ever knows? That's one of the roads untraveled for me. But you know, having given it some thought, I do know where I’m from... I’m from Wyoming. So I’m in Tombstone now with Sam the cat. We walk the haunted streets together, and I try to keep him safe from the coyotes and the javelinas that come prowling at night. I write, and I’m with the Tombstone Marshal’s Office, and there’s a lot of weird but cool synchronicity in that, don’t you think?

Book preview

WIDOWMAKER 2:

THE HUNT FOR BLOODY BILL ANDERSON

by

William E. McClintock

Copyright 2014 by William E. McClintock

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author.

eBook formatting by Maureen Cutajar

www.gopublished.com

For Lana, who was with me throughout the writing of this book...

Table of Contents

Prologue

Part I

Code Name: Shiva

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Part II

The Devil’s Own Army

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part III

The Dark Brotherhood

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Epilogue

Make my enemy brave and strong, so that if defeated

I will not be ashamed.

– Cheyenne Indian proverb

Prologue

New Orleans, September 1862

He was a huge man, and powerful. Darkening his face, habitually, was a fearful glower, and to simply behold him was to bestir a deep and dreadful awe. He stood six and a half feet tall, with a chest like a great oaken keg, and at his side hung massive, mighty arms. His big hands made fists that were like the iron heads of sledge hammers, but it was his feet that made him prodigiously and uniquely dangerous.

His name was Jacques Baptiste Boudreaux, and on the Marseilles waterfront, where he had broken arms and smashed heads for Le Syndicat, he was a fearsome, even legendary figure who was still known as L’Enforceur, or, impolitely, but now safely behind his back, Mad Jack. On his belt was a big, rectangular, nickle-plated buckle, a winged fist and sword emblazoned in the center, the symbol of La Légion étrangère de Français, the French Foreign Legion. Above the winged fist were engraved three words: Legio Patra Nostra – the Legion is our Fatherland – and below the sword and fist, three letters: J B B.

His face would have been handsome but for a flattened nose and a tooth missing on one side, and his thick hair was coal-black, black like the little girl’s who stood facing him. He looked down at her, remembering how, when she was tiny and he had carried her around in his arms looking down into her huge brown eyes, he had called her Peu Corbeau, or, Little Raven.

De nouveau, she said, Levez-vous les mains de nouveau, le Papa. Five years old, she stood little taller than the top of his massive belt buckle, barefoot in a pair of loose fitting cotton trousers and a short-sleeved shirt. She was breathtakingly beautiful and therefore self-assured well beyond her five years, and she already knew how to play men like they were violins.

"English, he said gruffly, putting a finger under her nose. His voice was thick and deep. When we train we speak in English."

She gave a little shrug and smiled. "Again, she said. Put your hands up again, Papa." In a perfect little fighting stance, both fists up in front of her, she stood in the middle of a clearing they had created in the living room; tables and chairs had been pushed aside to make room for kicks and lunges.

"Very well, Pischouette," he said, using the Cajun to express an idea that didn’t exist in either English or French: an affectionate combination of runt and little girl. He crouched down and held up his two beefy hands, palms forward, presenting them to her as kicking targets about level with her head.

She lashed out with a tiny right foot, bringing it up and around in a high, sweeping arc that knocked one of his hands away; she pivoted on that foot the moment it touched the floor, turning a fast circle on it, and then, sideways to him, threw a high, lightning-fast side kick with her left foot that smacked into the center of his other hand. It was sweet and classic boxe Francaise: take out your opponent with a high, sweeping kick to the head; if he manages to avoid it either by blocking or stepping back, pivot and throw a side kick to the solar plexus.

Bon, he said, then winced at his little gaffe.

The little girl laughed. "In English, she said merrily. When we train, we speak in English, Papa!" She was happy; happy to be doing her favorite thing in the world, which was practicing savate with her hulking father, and she was happy, always, to tease him about something.

He shook out his left hand, indicating that her kick had had a little sting to it, and then, smiling, he said, Good snap, Little One. He dropped his hands to his side.

She was back in her little fighting stance, bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet. Again, she said.

He shook his head no, and put up one hand. "Renversez le coup, he said. Reverse punch. Right hand."

Looking at him from under her eyebrows, a sly little smile said, English, Papa... and then she curled her right fist into a tiny hammer, putting the largest knuckles forward by tightly tucking the two little ones, and smacked his open hand with a quick, backwards arc of the forearm and a little whipcrack of the wrist.

"Pahhh, he said with mock, exaggerated disgust, a frown creasing his face and turning down the corners of his mouth. You punch like a tiny mouse... Show me some power, Little One!"

Still dancing lightly on the balls of her feet, she tucked her chin and stared at his hand with the intensity of a little cobra. She looked with hard, narrow eyes for a moment at the paw he presented, then she turned a swift and graceful pirouette, spinning around on one bare little foot and putting all the weight of her body into the strike, smacking his palm wickedly on the turnaround. She went smoothly back to combat position, both fists up in front of her, and she danced like a little feather, her raven-black hair bouncing gently off her shoulders and a smile lighting her beautiful face as she threw tiny, airy left hooks that teased the palm of his hand.

"Sacrebleu, he muttered with a smile, his eyebrows rising in pretended surprise, a reverse punch the way God intended."

She was beaming at him.

Remember, he said sternly, putting a finger under her nose again, "throw that one to the temple – throw it hard – and it will kill."

Again, Papa.

Enough, he said, drawing her to his side with a hand around one of her shoulders and glancing at the clock that sat ticking on the mantle. Enough for one day. They had been at it for three hours, and he knew she would happily train for hours to come.

"Ohhh, Papa," she murmured in a tone that was part grumble, part disappointment.

My poor hands can’t take anymore of this cruel punishment, he said with a mournful look, shaking the huge hand at his side, as if painfully.

She looked up at him skeptically from under her eyebrows, and he smiled down at her. Go outside and play, he said, giving her a little shove between the shoulder blades. Do something else for awhile. He wanted to sit in his big chair and read the newspaper.

Ohhh, Papa, she said again in that same tone of grumbling letdown, but began to move reluctantly toward the door that led to the fenced backyard. When she reached the door she put a hand on the knob and looked back over her shoulder at him. Nous exercerons-nous encore demain, Père? she asked.

Mad Jack smiled. Oui, naturellement, he said, his voice like gravel, we will train again tomorrow. As she slipped through the door, all the hubbub of the French Quarter spilled in – voices and laughter and the smell of chicken frying, a Cajun fiddle screeching somewhere down the street and the nearby clatter of horses’ hooves on cobblestone – and he called after her, "Rory..."

She turned and looked back at him.

Vous avez jailli aujourd’hui, Le Petit, he told her. You did well today, Little One.

She gave him a smile, and in that moment, looking into her tiny face, his heart felt like it would crack with love for her; he told himself he would snap the back of anyone who so much as slighted her, and God himself couldn’t help the man who ever did her an injury. He watched as she turned and went out into the backyard, closing the door softly behind her.

He reassembled the room, dragging a chair and a table back to their places, smoothing out the rug that lay on the floor between them, and then looked again at the clock on the mantle. Almost three. He calculated that it would be another hour before he needed to concern himself with preparing a meal for them, and so he eased his massive frame down into his favorite chair and took the New Orleans Daily Picayune from the side table.

He glanced past the curtains and out the front window at the noisy bustle on Rampart Street, at the many horse drawn wagons and carts and passers-by. He watched a boy roll a hoop down the street with a stick, then unfolded the newspaper and shook it open. His eyes circled the page for a moment, searching for anything of interest; he passed over the news of the parish council meeting and took in a black-bordered advertisement at the lower right-hand side of the page, (Smoke Gen. Moultrie Cigars; mild and fragrant!) and then his attention was drawn to bold headlines, two columns wide, back at the top of the page.

THE LATEST FROM THE SEAT OF WAR!

THE BATTLES IN MARYLAND

BLOODY FIGHT AT ANTIETAM CREEK!

He pursed his lips thoughtfully, brought the paper in a little closer, and began to read.

The dispatches are meager as regards detail, but state in general terms that the most terrific battle that ever was fought on this continent has been going on all day near Sharpsburg, the contest being primarily between opposing forces of artillery, and that the enemy has been driven back two miles. The slaughter has been prodigious, particularly in the vicinity of Antietam Creek, and early estimates of the total number fallen, both dead and wounded, is staggering to the imagination. One report

He was not really much interested in the war among the Américains, and so his eyes drifted off the page and out the window again. As he gazed at a horse and rider clip-clopping by, he decided that he had no real interest in the newspaper, after all. He dropped it to the floor and pushed himself up and out of the chair. He wandered over to the window and gazed out, putting his big hands in his pockets. He stood there, his mind disengaged, just watching people and animals and things meander past his window. A young woman carrying an armful of produce caught his eye, and she was just pretty enough and just Irish enough to make him think of his own lost colleen. He watched as she proceeded on down the street and was absorbed by many pedestrians and bicycles and hand carts, and then he turned away from the window, his eyes suddenly burning and a fist-sized lump in his throat. His gaze was drawn across the room to a small wooden picture frame that sat on the mantle over the fireplace. He walked over and picked it up and cradled it in his two big hands, a brown and white daguerreotype that had been taken at a picnic on the last Fat Tuesday of her life. The sparkling Irish eyes that looked out from the picture showed no sign of the sickness that was no doubt, even on that day, gnawing away inside her. He couldn’t swallow for the lump in his throat; he looked about the room for something that would divert his thoughts.

Faintly, he could hear a little girl’s singing – the Cajun ditty Allons Danser Colinda carried aloft by a sweet, tiny little voice – and he cocked his head as he listened for a moment, and then the trace of a crooked smile returned to his face. He gently laid the picture back on the mantle and turned, thinking he would join his daughter in the back yard.

He shuffled toward the back door. The little pischouette had been badgering him for months to begin teaching her how to fight with a knife; it was sunny and warm with much singing from the birds this day, and so Mad Jack decided that perhaps he would indulge the girl, and they would train outside for awhile.

Sharpsburg, Maryland

September 1862

He sat on the rear of a medical wagon, stripped to the waist, his legs dangling off the chained gate, gazing down at the many bodies that littered the landscape at the bottom of the hill. He brought a canteen to his lips and glanced off to the right where a cluster of hospital tents huddled a short distance back of the wagon. At the center of a vortex of madness and chaos the night before, they stood quiet now, sagging a little, sad and dirty, waiting to be struck; a single surgeon and a pair of orderlies shuffled the canvas corridors policing up equipment and tending to a few groaning men on stretchers still awaiting evacuation. Looking over his shoulder at the half dozen or so tents, he knew that inside each one was a barrel or a crate that contained a bloody snarl of amputated arms, legs, hands, and feet, and to his mind, the shrieks that had emanated from this hilltop for a day and a night were worse by far than had been the sounds from the center of battle down below. The screams were silent now, but another, almost equally horrible sound was beginning to fill the air: flies were gathering.

He looked down at the meadow. It had been a slaughter beyond imagination two days before, separate engagements between huge forces had spread out over several miles, and the ocean of dead that lay in the meadow were but a small part of what bayonet and musket fire and grapeshot had wrought. Rebs lay together with Yankees, equal at last in great, bloody tangles, and all lay in the skewed, awkward, ultimately embarrassing positions of violent death. The field of corpses stretched from as far as he could see on the right all the way to the bridge that crossed Antietam Creek on his left, the little stone crossing they were disdainfully calling Burnside’s Bridge, after the immense and awful butchery the man had caused there. And he didn’t know what the hell they were waiting for with these bodies; they would have to get them under the ground soon, he thought, before they began to bloat.

He wore dark blue trousers with a thin red stripe down the side of each leg tucked into knee-high cavalry boots, and there was a .44 caliber Remington Army Model in the flap holster on the left side of his belt. His shirt had been tossed over one of the rear wheels of the medical wagon; the chevrons of a Union sergeant were on its blood soaked sleeves. Dried blood spatter was on his trousers and on his hands, and some had splashed onto his face.

He brought the canteen to his lips again as he looked over at the encrusted wound in his left shoulder, a gunshot that had gone untended for the better part of two days while the more seriously injured were looked after. A Reb minie ball had punched in just to the side of the collar bone where it made a dark, ragged hole about the size of a copper penny; it was pinched closed now, and purple and swollen all around. All in all, not a bad place to take a minie ball, he figured, if a minie ball had to be taken. It lodged there still, deep inside, and the nurse that stood on his left leaned in and squinted with concentration as she brought up a pair of forceps, an instrument that looked to him like a nasty little pair of scissors with pliers on the end.

Brace yourself, laddie, she said, glancing into his eyes. Fun part’s over.

He rested the canteen in his lap and watched her eyes as she peered intently down at his wound. She was an essentially plain woman with a little crook in her nose and she looked to him to be somewhere in her forties, which made her, he supposed, old enough to be his mother, but there was kindness and something more in her eyes, and he found her completely compelling and attractive in some way.

With two fingers of one hand she split the wound open, and with the other began to insert the curved steel tip of the forceps. It hurt hellaciously more going in than the minie ball had, but he was unflinching and kept his impassive gray eyes locked on hers, which were focused down on his shoulder. She was clearly exhausted, her soft brown eyes ringed with fatigue, and her voice sounded weak as she said, quietly and somewhat to herself, I’ve mislaid the probe I was using. This will have to do. She looked briefly up into his eyes, then back down again.

He felt the head of the forceps down inside the meat of his shoulder, twisting and turning an excruciating path, going deeper, pushing through muscle and around sinew, slowly, agonizingly seeking the piece of lead that lay somewhere down inside. He bit into his lip when he felt the instrument scrape bone, and he dropped his eyes to the front of the gray dress she wore. It was grimy and soiled with sweat and blood, but she filled it rather nicely, and he concentrated on that.

"Ahhh, she said, finding what she was looking for, the pincers inside his shoulder twisting around and biting on something, and the pain rebounding and hitting him so hard that he drew in his breath. He clenched his eyes tight and ground his teeth as the forceps reversed course, took a slow, meandering journey back to the surface and then popped out with a little sucking sound as it tore the wound apart. The ragged little hole in his shoulder began to run with pus and blood, and the nurse slapped a square of white linen on it and held it down with one hand; in her other hand she still gripped the forceps, and between the curved steel jaws was a chunk of metal an inch long, shiny and bloody and bulging to a cone at the tip. She brought it up in front of her own face, studying it for a moment, then extended it down to him, her other hand still clasping the patch on his shoulder. Not your first, I take it, young sergeant, she said, glancing at a scarred little crater above the elbow in the muscle of his right arm. But I do pray God it be your last." She was thinking how strange and awful it was that this tanned and handsome boy should be part of a vast army of killers instead of peacefully raising a young