Doc Read online

  He dealt again. “There’s the flush busted,” he observed. “You may not have noticed it, Wyatt, but the sheriff of Ford County is a shockin’ gossip. Why, you tell Bat Masterson any kind of story at all and no matter how foolish it is, you can just about depend on it bein’ all around town before dawn.” Doc looked up, as though reminded of something. “Is it true, I wonder, what they say about you and Michael O’Rourke? Word is, you faced down a lynch mob and saved his sorry neck for a proper execution.” Doc’s voice, always soft, became even quieter. “Or was it your brother Virgil did that?”

  There was just the slightest of tells, but Doc saw it.

  “Well, now,” Doc said reasonably. “Easy mistake to make, you Earp boys lookin’ so much alike. Still, a reputation can be a useful thing. Odds are better for all you boys if you don’t argue the details. What Virgil does gives you an edge. What you do gives Morgan one.”

  Another card.

  “You still considerin’ that dental work I recommended?” Doc asked. “No rush, of course, although at least four of your remaining teeth are doomed, and I’d appreciate the business. I am a damn fine dentist, if I say so myself, but I fear Miss Kate is right. There is no money in it out here. Poker, by contrast, can be a good and honest livin’. Takes nerve, not muscle.”

  He studied the hands.

  “My edge is that I can count,” he said quietly, “whereas the men I play against are rarely overburdened by education.” He laid a seven on the nines. “No help,” he said, “but sometimes a pair of nines is all you need … This will not fill,” he predicted, and added a jack to the eight-high straight. “See? Busted.”

  Another card, and he paused, eyes on Wyatt’s own. When John Henry Holliday spoke again, his voice was almost too soft to hear, and there was no bravado to be seen or heard.

  “I killed a man in Denison. It was awful. He wanted me dead, Wyatt. He went for his gun and—Everyone agreed it was self-defense. The charges were dropped. You can wire and ask. Those boys back in Georgia? Nobody got hurt. It was just pups, barkin’ at one another. I have paid fines for gamblin’. That is the extent of my trouble with the law. I have never set foot in California, let alone San Francisco! Which means,” he whispered fiercely, “Sheriff Masterson made that up out of whole cloth, and he is a contemptible slanderin’ sonofabitch! As for the rest of it: I have Mexican and black kin, Wyatt. They were fostered but so was I, and they count no less than blood with me!”

  Doc looked out the restaurant window, toward the tracks. He was trembling, as some men will when they have been very angry, or very frightened.

  Presently, the dentist took as deep a breath as he could and let it out slowly. Cool again, he said, “I myself do not believe that it is cheatin’ to calculate odds by takin’ note of cards layin’ in plain view on a table. Do you believe that is cheatin’, Wyatt?”

  Wyatt shook his head: No. Of course not.

  “And yet,” Doc said, “when some men lose to me, they reckon it theft, and when such men believe they have been cheated, they are not inclined to express their dismay with a well-turned phrase.”

  The cattlemen completed their business and rose to go, tipping their hats to Nora as they left. With the door open, you could hear the competing pianos, the drunken shouted threats, the raucous singing across the tracks.

  That was when Doc looked Wyatt in the eye and dropped his voice again. “So, while I may not be quite as fearsome as I sometimes make out, if you were to noise that around …?”

  Morgan’s age, Wyatt thought, but built like young Warren was at sixteen. All bone, no beef. Sickly. Scared.

  Wyatt nodded. Some of the tension went out of Doc’s face.

  “Thank you, Wyatt,” he said graciously. “I ’preciate your delicacy in the matter.” Back in control, the Georgian gathered up the deck. Tapped it into alignment. Tucked it into a breast pocket. “Naturally,” he added, ever so softly, “you and all your fine brothers may rely equally upon my own discretion.”

  It might have been a threat. Hard to tell.

  “You’ll excuse me?” Doc inquired courteously. “I am off to spend another evenin’ in the temples of unreason. Like everybody else in this godforsaken wilderness, I need to make a livin’.”

  Snake-slender and casual in fresh-pressed linen the color of cream, John Henry Holliday pushed himself to his feet—slowly this time—performed a slight bow, and left Delmonico’s.

  Wyatt watched him saunter off across the tracks.

  The sunset beyond shone vermilion through the dust.

  Next morning, Wyatt sent out the wires. All his queries were answered by the end of the week.

  “No outstanding warrants in Texas, Colorado, or Georgia,” he told Morgan over pancakes and bacon. “He’s clean.”

  “Told you he was quality,” Morg said. “What about—?”

  “The police never heard of him in San Francisco.”

  “Well, hell, if he did what Bat said—”

  “There’d be something on the books.”

  “So Bat just—”

  “Looks like it.” Wyatt sat back and stared out the kitchen window of the little frame house he and Morgan had started renting. “Morg, did you see what happened when Ed Masterson was killed?”

  “Hell, yes. I was coming out of the Lady Gay. Ed was rousting drunks at the Lone Star, and one of them—Jack Wagner, his name was—he up and pulled a gun. Gut shot, point-blank. Ed didn’t have a chance.”

  “Who got Wagner?”

  “Ed. He didn’t die right away. He was on the ground, but he got his pistol out and put three bullets into Wagner. Ed died about half an hour later. Wagner died the next day.”

  Wyatt snorted. “Bat told me he killed the man who got his brother.”

  Morg’s eyes widened. “Well, Bat shot at Wagner, but he was way down by the billiard parlor when Ed got it.” Morgan shook his head as though to clear it. “I guess maybe Bat could have hit Wagner, but the odds’re against it—Bat was coming on at a dead run.”

  For a time they both sat there, taking it in.

  “What’s that?” Wyatt asked then, lifting his chin toward the book Morg had propped against the sugar bowl.

  Morg put a finger in his place and showed Wyatt the spine. “It’s not what I expected,” Morg admitted, “but it’s good.”

  “Crime and Punishment … ’Bout time you read a law book.”

  “No, it’s a story, but it’s not like anything I ever read before.”

  And it wasn’t easy, either. There were a shitload of words he had to look up or ask Doc about. Not just foreign ones like dvornik or batuchka, either. Hypochondria. Subterfuge. Torpor. And, damn, the names! Raskolnikoff. Lebeziatnikoff. Amalia Fedorovna Lippevechzel. Who in hell could get his mouth around words like that? Even Doc had trouble with a lot of them, and sometimes they asked Kate about how to say something.

  “Don’t worry about the names,” Doc advised. “Just read. People are people, in St. Petersburg or Dodge.”

  So Morg kept on, and Doc was right. The people in the book were all familiar. Drunks, prostitutes, politicians, policemen. Rich and poor, side by side. Men who beat horses and men who beat women. Good women gone bad. Bad women who weren’t so terrible when you got to know them.

  “It’s like you can listen inside everybody’s mind,” Morg told Wyatt. “You can hear them think in this story. The fella it’s about—Raskolnikoff? I can’t work out if he’s got a fever or if he’s plain crazy, but his thinking’s all mixed up. And you find out about people’s lives, and how they got that way. I was about ready to turn temperance by page thirty.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt you none.” Wyatt finished his coffee and stood. “Tell Fat Larry I’ll be a few minutes late.”

  Deacon Cox wasn’t behind the desk at Dodge House, so Wyatt went down to Doc’s office and then upstairs to check his room on the second floor. No one answered the knocks. He tried Delmonico’s next, and found the dentist having dinner there, with his woman practically in his lap. Whe
n the whore saw Wyatt through the window, she sat up straight and looked like she wanted to spit.

  Wyatt stepped inside. “Doc, I need a word.”

  “Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell?” the dentist inquired warily. “If you have come to accuse me of some new crime, sir, you may do so in front of my companion. If I am to be locked up, she will consult an attorney on my behalf.”

  “No, it’s nothing like that. Everything you said checked out.”

  “I am pleased to hear it,” Doc said tightly.

  “Could we go outside?”

  Doc got to his feet and turned to Kate. “If you will excuse us, darlin’?”

  They left the restaurant. Wyatt waited for the passersby to clear the boardwalk before he said, “Look, Doc, I’m sorry about the other day.”

  “You were doin’ your job. Let us put it behind us.”

  “Yeah. Good. Anyways … About my teeth. I have other debts,” Wyatt said. “Could you take two dollars a week for fifteen weeks? I want to do all of it.”

  The dentist seemed surprised, then pleased. “A wise decision,” he said warmly, “and one you won’t regret. Come by my office after your shift. Bring your brother Morgan, too, if you will. I’ll need to take a few measurements from his front teeth. Say eight o’clock tomorrow mornin’?”

  Wyatt nodded and looked away. Needing something always bothered him, even if it was dentistry. He noticed Kate, still sitting at the table, glaring at him through the plate glass. What’d I ever do to her? he wondered.

  “Didn’t expect to see you two back together,” he said.

  “Miss Kate is possessed of a passionate Hungarian nature,” Doc murmured. “Our reunions are compensation for her occasional lapses in good taste.”

  Just then, a burst of laughter from across the tracks took their attention. Bat Masterson was telling some story to his cronies, using his gold-topped walking stick to mime a rifle. The men around him were loudly appreciative.

  Eyes narrowed against another brilliant sunset, Wyatt said nothing for a time, watching pink light flash off Bat’s fancy chromed Colts. Even at this distance, you could see the stone in his cravat sparkle.

  “Doc, if you don’t mind me asking, how much did that diamond of yours cost?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea.” Doc’s fingers went to the stickpin he always wore. “It was a gift from someone dear to me. I will die before I part with it,” he said. “But I take your meanin’. Sheriff Masterson appears to be prosperin’ in public service. You hear he just bought a half interest in the Lone Star Dance Hall? Now, what do you suppose that must have cost?”

  For a time, Wyatt stood silently, watching Bat. “Thanks, Doc,” he said before walking on. “I’ll stop by after work, like you said.”

  Kate came outside, her scowl aimed at Wyatt’s broad back. “I don’t trust him,” she said. She was making a cigarette: licking the edge of the tissue paper, sealing the tobacco in. “He don’t drink. He goes to church! Never trust a lawman who goes to church.”

  “Why, Miss Kate, you are philosophical this evenin’.”

  Doc scratched a match against the rough wood of a hitching rail and lit her cigarette. Kate inhaled deeply and blew out a plume of smoke.

  “You shouldn’t trust him neither, Doc. He’s no good.”

  “I believe you have misjudged the gentleman, but I shall certainly take your opinion under consideration.”

  “Buy me a drink, Doc. I need a drink.”

  “My pleasure, darlin’.”

  She took the cigarette out of her mouth and reached up, placing it between Doc’s lips, her eyes on his, with the flat, challenging stare he was coming to appreciate. He drew in carefully, but still choked slightly on the smoke.

  “Where’s the money tonight?” he asked.

  “The Saratoga,” she said as they strolled down Front, arm in arm, the boardwalk hollow-sounding beneath their feet. “You feeling lucky, Doc?”

  “Always, darlin’, when you are at my side.”

  He rarely heard from Martha Anne these days, and Georgia was very far away.

  Reform, he thought, just might be overrated.

  “So Raskolnikoff was planning to kill that old lady all along?” Morgan asked. “He planned it up ahead of time, like it was a bank robbery?”

  “That is my readin’ of the affair, yes,” Doc said.

  Morgan shook his head. In his experience, killings were the result of momentary fury, or drunken foolishness, or plain clumsiness even. Thinking a murder through was so cold-blooded … “Must be like hanging a man,” he mused. “That’s awful.”

  Doc was measuring the gap where Wyatt’s front teeth would have been, if Morgan had done as he was told and picked those berries instead of sneaking up to the barn with a book.

  “That’s all I need from you, Wyatt,” Doc said after he wrote the numbers down and made some notes to himself. “I’ll get the rest from Morgan.”

  “And you think somebody planned up killing Johnnie like that?” Morgan asked, swapping places with his brother in Doc’s barber chair.

  “Well, now, it might not have been so thought out. More a matter of a sore loser decidin’ to get his money back, I imagine.”

  “Get him into the barn for some reason, then bash him,” Wyatt said.

  “Set fire to the barn,” Morg said. “Make it look like an accident.”

  “That is my guess,” Doc confirmed. “Open.”

  For a while, Doc poked around, measuring things. When he had what he needed, he sat at the desk and began to sketch Morg’s front teeth. The drawing was remarkable, down to tiny little bumps along the bottom edge of the teeth that Morgan had never noticed.

  “Mamelons,” Doc told him. “From the Greek: small rounded mounds. Same root as ‘mammary,’ ” he said, cupping his hands in front of his chest.

  Morgan laughed. Then it struck him. “Is that where ‘mamma’ comes from?”

  “Or vice versa … The dental structures wear to a straight edge as you age. Yours are still visible. I expect Wyatt’s would be as well. I am requestin’ replacements that match.”

  Wyatt asked, “When can we get started?”

  “Gettin’ eager? I can begin the repair work tomorrow.” Doc added the diagram to an envelope addressed to Robert Holliday, D.D.S., and handed it to Morgan. “Mail this for me, son.”

  Morg got a kick out of how Doc called him son even though Morg was actually a few months older.

  “Heat taking the starch out of you, old man?” Morg asked him.

  “Morgan, I am flourishin’,” Doc said, but the dentist looked pasty this morning. It was pretty close in the office, and Doc went to stand by the window, leaning his bony hips against the sill and resting one hand high on the frame. “How does that horse of yours run in this weather, Wyatt?”

  The Fourth of July race was coming up. Everybody was handicapping the entries.

  “He’ll do,” Wyatt said. “Nothing seems to bother Dick.”

  Morgan snickered.

  “Always rises to the occasion,” Doc suggested, slate-blue eyes angelic.

  Wyatt frowned, suspicious. “What’s funny?”

  Morgan glanced at Doc and started to laugh. “Dick Nail ’Er,” he said, sniggering. “Jesus, Wyatt, don’t you—?”

  “Hush up, Morgan,” Doc said severely. He lifted his chin and added piously, “Your brother is a pure soul.”

  Morgan crinkled up laughing like he used to when he was a kid, and all the brothers were crammed into an attic bedroom, and Virgil farted loud enough to wake Warren up.

  “Pay that pup no mind, Wyatt.” Doc remained straight-faced, but he was struggling now. “It’s a fine name,” he said. “For a stallion.”

  “You plan to stud Dick out?” Morgan asked, sobering momentarily.

  Doc started to choke. Morgan broke up again. Pretty soon, the pair of them were giggling like eight-year-olds. Wyatt felt like the only grownup in the room.

  Then he got it.

&
nbsp; “Wait …” he said, his face going slack. “No!” he protested, mortified. “That’s not what—Oh, hell. He was named when I got him!”

  Morgan wailed, and Doc was headed into a serious coughing fit.

  “Anyways, I thought it was N-A-Y-L—” Wyatt started, but somehow bringing spelling into the matter just made things funnier. “Go on,” he told them, annoyed. “Enjoy yourselves, youngsters. Just don’t bet against him on the Fourth.”

  By then Doc was laughing and coughing so hard, he couldn’t stand on his own anymore, and Morg was trying to hold him up but not very well. When Wyatt finally gave in and started to laugh, he didn’t even bother putting a hand over his mouth, and once he joined them, the other two were helpless. Doc’s knees gave out, and Morg dropped him. Before long, all three of them were breathless and exhausted, and Doc wasn’t the only one wiping tears from his eyes, which is why it took Morg so long to ask, “Jeez, Doc! Are you—?”

  Doc nodded, grinning through the pain. “I’m all right,” he insisted, and his eyes were shining, but he was wet-faced and white, sitting on the floor of his office, pushing against his chest with both hands. “I cannot remember the last time I laughed like that,” he moaned. “Now I remember why. Oh, Christ, that hurts!”

  Hand on the doorknob, Wyatt asked, “Should I get Doc McCarty?”

  The dentist shook his head but gestured toward the bottle of bourbon he kept on his desk. Morgan poured him a drink. Doc tossed it back, closed his eyes against the burn, and held up the glass again. It felt like a long time before he wiped his face on a sleeve and let Morgan help him to his feet. Wyatt pulled the desk chair out. Doc sat for a time, elbows on the table, head in his hands.

  “You sure about McCarty?” Wyatt asked. “What’s wrong, Doc?”

  “Nothin’. Adhesions tearin’.”

  Wyatt looked at Morg, who shrugged. Doc didn’t seem alarmed, so they just waited until he sat back in the chair.

  “Morgan,” he said, “I haven’t seen a look like that since Cousin George came to visit me in Texas! You are very kind to be so concerned.” His voice was hoarse but cheerful enough, and his color was better. “Healthy lungs move smoothly, like this,” he told them, sliding one palm over the other. “Mine are stuck to the chest cavity. Fibrous bands form, like ropes.” He interlaced his fingers. “When I cough or laugh or—God help me, when I sneeze—the fibers rip.” He jerked his fingers apart. “It’s like breathin’ razor blades.”