3rd story, Rear Window by J. Brooks
Title: Rear Window
Fandom: Magnificent Seven
Author: J. Brooks
Artist: Black Rook aka grachonok
Characters: JD, Nathan, Ezra and the boys
Rating: Teen, for salty language and mayhem
Warning: The sheer quantity of gunfights, hostage takings, falls from great heights and shirtlessness contained in this fic are improbably even by Four Corners standards.
Summary: Laid up with a broken leg, one of the Seven sees something out the window that could spell disaster for the whole town.
Authors Notes: Yes, yes… Alfred Hitchcock did it first and best. I just took a good gimmick and ran with it. Oh, and the dime novel Buck is reading is real. “Deadwood Dick’s Doom” was penned by one Edward L. Wheeler back in the late 1800s. Some things are just too strange to make up. A thousand thanks to NotTasha for hand holding me through the delivery of this baby.
____________________________
William Wright, alias Wilson alias Will Perry alias Roaring Bill.
Horse Thief. Cattle Rustler. Stagecoach Robber. Receiver of Stolen Goods. Murderer.
Thirty-two years old.
Height 5 feet 4 inches.
Weight 165 pounds.
Black hair, dark eyes, light complexion. Usually wears a mustache.
Scar on right temple, over eye. Small scar on left cheek. Scar from pistol shot on left shoulder. Anchor tattooed in India ink on back of right hand. Escaped from Yuma Prison three weeks ago. _____________________________
JD flicked the wanted poster aside and rested his chin on the window sill, studying the suspect in the street below.
True, the man loitering in front of the hotel didn’t have a mustache, but mustaches could be shaved. JD double-checked the description on the flier. And maybe this man’s hair was more blond than black -- but a man on the run from the law might dye his hair, right?
He fidgeted, wedging another pillow behind his back so he could continue his surveillance in comfort. What he really needed was…aha! Josiah came strolling down the boardwalk on mid-day patrol, nodding pleasantly to the stranger in passing.
They were the same height. Drat.
JD crumpled the wanted poster and chucked it across the room before collapsing back on the mattress in a huff.
There was an unsympathetic snicker from the chair next to his bed.
“Shut up, Buck,” he groused as he shifted on the mattress, searching for a comfortable position and knowing he wouldn’t find one.
“Now, JD, I think folks in town’d be mighty touched to know you’re keeping an eye on things from up here,” Buck said, managing an expression of deep sincerity for all of ten seconds before he started snickering again. “I’m just wondering what in Sam Hill you think you’d do if you actually spotted one of them desperados wandering down the street.”
Buck shot a significant look at the complex system of ropes and pulleys and weights that kept JD’s left leg elevated and immobilized over the bed.
JD crossed his arms and scowled. “Ain’t nothing wrong with the rest of me. I can still shoot--”
“But you can’t ride,” Buck cut him off with a gentle cuff on the shoulder, his expression dark. “And you sure as hell showed us you can’t fly.” The smile slid off his face as he looked away, remembering.
“Hey, I flew.” JD jostled Buck’s elbow, trying to lighten the mood.
Buck snorted. “’Til the ground got in your way.”
“If you’d just untie me…” JD’s voice took on a whining edge as he eyed the rigging that kept him trapped in the infirmary.
“Ah-ah!” Nathan Jackson’s brusque warning cut JD off before he could explain -- again -- his plan to patrol the town on crutches.
“But--”
“Two more weeks.”
“Aw, Nate--”
“Two more weeks in traction and not a day less,” Nathan looked up from the workbench where he was grinding leaves and twigs into a fine powder. “You want to keep your foot? Keep still.”
JD subsided; studying the pink toes that poked out the other end of the immobilized lump of splints and bandages that was his leg. Three weeks ago, the same leg had been bent in two places it wasn’t supposed to bend, with shockingly white spars of bone jutting out of his splintered shin.
Most doctors would have just sawed the thing off, he knew. He was grateful to Nathan, more than words could say. But he was also…bored.
Bored.
Bored.
Bored... JD’s attention strayed to the items piled on his bedside table. Books from Josiah and Chris. Vin’s spyglass. Two decks of playing cards from Ezra -- one marked and one unmarked, and he was still trying to puzzle out which was which. A huge sheaf of wanted posters. A stack of dime novels. A plate of cookies from Casey that Nathan had sampled and declared unfit for human consumption.
JD sighed bitterly. Boring. He glared at his leg again, feeling the warning tingle of an itch, maddeningly out of reach. Perfect.
He eyed the stack of dime novels again. This was all their fault. Jumping from a second-story balcony into the saddle always worked like a dream on paper.
He picked up the spyglass and turned his attention back to the street.
*******
Five days later
*******
JD slunk lower in the bed and plotted Buck Wilmington’s imminent, messy death. The dead man walking ignored the daggers being glared his way and carried on with his dramatic reading of one JD’s dime novels.
“Buck…” he tried again.
“Hush up, kid. This is just gettin’ interesting,” Buck shushed him absently. “Where was I?”
“‘Oh, spare me, sir,’” Nathan prompted helpfully, not looking up from the bandages he was rolling on the other side of the room.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Buck cleared his throat and forced his voice into the squeaky registers of a dime novel damsel in distress: “‘Oh, spare me -- spare me, Sir! Oh, my God! is there no one here to help me?’ the poor girl sobbed...”
Buck’s voice dropped down to a villain’s menacing snarl: “‘Nary a durned galoot, my gal!’ Piute Dave declared, with a triumphant chuckle. ‘As I allowed, before, I'm boss o' this burg, an' thar's not a man hyar as durst lift a hand to help ye, when I'm around.’”
JD rolled his eyes as Buck sprang from his chair and struck a heroic pose, pointing dramatically with the hand that wasn’t holding the paperback: “‘You lie, you brute! and if you but lay a hand on that girl I'll bore a hole in your thick skull! If you offer that girl the least molestation, I'll make you up into a perforated porous plaster quicker than a Dutchman can say beer!'"
Buck dropped back in his chair, gasping for air, then launched back into the hero’s monologue. “Yes, I am Deadwood Dick, the celebrated cuss from Custer clime -- the diabolical devil-may-care devotee of road-agency, from Deadwood the hunted hurricane!”
JD crossed his arms and scowled as Buck and Nathan collapsed, howling with laughter. “Deadwood Dick’s Doom” fluttered to the floor, forgotten.
“Perforated porous plaster,” Nathan snickered, wiping his streaming eyes with a corner of the bandage roll.
“Deadwood Dick!” Buck countered.
JD huffed, then picked up Vin’s spyglass and pointedly turned his back on his chortling friends. He trained the telescope on the street, cheered by the sudden appearance of a red jacket on the boardwalk below. Relief was in sight.
*******
“...from Deadwood the hunted hurricane!” Ezra took up the narrative with gusto, sliding into the bedside chair and propping his feet up on one corner of the mattress.
JD fished out a pillow and winged it at the gambler, who caught it nimbly and wedged it behind his back as he carried on with his dramatic reading. JD gave serious thought to firing the rest of his bedding at the other men in the room, but abandoned the idea. He might be able to take down Buck and Nathan, but Chris Larabee was another story. He was pretty sure Larabee wouldn’t shoot a man in traction. But he didn’t want to risk anything that might extend his clinic stay.
“Now, you sure you’re gonna be okay while I’m gone, kid?” Buck asked, gathering up his saddlebags and gear from the corner of the room with what looked to JD like a certain degree of eagerness.
JD crossed his arms, eyeing the trail gear enviously. “Oh,” he said with a martyred sigh. “Go ahead. Don’t worry about me.” He plucked at his bedding. “I’ll be just fine.”
Buck froze in the doorway, staring back at him uncertainly. “You know if I could get out of this assignment, I would.”
Larabee rolled his eyes, planted a hand in the middle of Buck’s back and shoved him none-too-gently toward the exit. “He knows. We know. The judge knows. The whole damn town knows. Now get a move on. Josiah’s waiting for you in the livery.”
Buck caught the door frame and peered back fretfully at the kid. “You’re sure you’re gonna be okay? I mean, you’d tell me if you were feeling poorly, or your leg was flaring up--”
JD turned woeful eyes on him and let his head loll back against the pillow, as if he were too weak to hold it up a moment longer. He gave Buck a frail smile, forgiving him for abandoning him to this lonely bed of pain.
Larabee threw his shoulder into it and shoved the protesting lawman out the door. He tossed JD a wink and followed after.
A moment later Buck’s head reappeared in the doorway. “Don’t forget. I'll be back at the end of the week. And I’ll be just a telegram away. If you need anything, I mean anyth--awk!” A hand appeared, grabbed his collar and hauled him away.
Nathan and Ezra stared at the door a moment, and then turned to JD, impressed.
The kid held his pathetic pose for a beat longer, then straightened and started whistling.
“That was bad, JD,” Nathan said, shaking his head and trying to smother a grin.
“I tip my hat to you, sir,” Ezra said. “And I believe I shall make it a point to stay on your good side in future.” With a flick of his wrist, he sent Deadwood Dick’s Doom spiraling across the room.
Satisfied, JD leaned over and snagged a fresh stack of wanted posters off the bedside table.
*******
"Still don't see anything," Nathan said, squinting through the spyglass. He glanced back at the bed to double-check that he and JD's finger were pointing at the same spot. "You want to tell me what's so interesting about an empty patch of boardwalk?"
JD grinned without looking up from the pocket watch he'd borrowed from Ezra. "Wait for it... Five seconds...four..."
Nathan spun back to the window. On cue, the front door of the Gem Hotel swung open and old man Heidegger stepped out, broom in hand. The innkeeper looked around, then ducked his head and started sweeping. Nathan sighed. He'd been hoping for something more interesting than the sight of Heidegger waving a broom. A thought struck him and he squinted more carefully through the glass. Heidegger was sweeping the same spot, over and over again, ignoring the pointed looks he was getting from the townsfolk who were forced to detour around him.
"'Three...two...one...'Good afternoon Miss Daphne!'" JD crowed in an atrocious German accent.
Nathan's eyes widened as the town's new seamstress swished around the corner and was intercepted by Heidegger, right on cue. The businessman bobbed his head nervously and gestured her toward the front door.
Daphne Ledbetter fluttered her long lashes, tossed her blonde curls and, after a quick glance around the street, allowed the shopkeeper to usher her inside. The door snapped shut behind them, almost snagging the pink ruffled hem of her dress. Heidegger's broom leaned against the wall outside, forgotten.
Nathan lowered the spyglass, sputtering.
JD cackled. "Told you! You would not believe the stuff that goes on in this town."
"There's plenty of reasons she might be going into the hotel. One of the guests might need some tailoring."
"Every day? At the same time of day? For a week?"
Nathan harrumphed. "Heidegger better pray his wife don't get wind of this, ‘cause I don't know enough doctoring to remove her frying pan from his fool skull."
Unable to stop himself, he raised the spyglass again and took another peek at the hotel’s empty front stoop.
JD craned up for another look at the hotel himself. "And Heidegger really better hope Miss Daphne's husband don't come town anytime soon."
Nathan blinked. "She's married?" The pretty young seamstress had arrived in town a few weeks earlier, accompanied by a mountain of fabric bolts and dressmaker's dummies, but no husband that he’d noticed.
"Buck told me," JD said. And Buck would know. "Said the husband was out of the picture. Wait'll I tell him that Heidegger made a move on her before he could."
Nathan grinned, then caught himself. "Don't know what you're smiling about," he said, shutting the spyglass with a snap. "Spying on folk? That ain't the sort of thing decent folk do."
JD shrugged, unrepentant. "What else am I supposed to do all day? It ain't like everybody else on the street can't see what they're doing -- they just don't notice 'cause they've got better things to do." He gestured grandly toward his leg. "And I don't."
JD spent the rest of the afternoon rolling bandages for Nathan and reminding himself to keep his mouth shut the next time he saw something interesting out the window.
*******
A few night later, gunshots startled JD awake. For a confused moment, he thought he was caught up in a familiar nightmare. But this time instead of the shooting leading to falling and screaming, the gunshots kept coming, cracking through the pitch black on the other side of his window.
He levered himself up on one elbow, hissing as the movement jarred his leg. He could make out shouting in the street below, and bright muzzle flashes, sparking from one side of the street to the other.
JD leaned closer, trying to see, only to flinch back with a startled yell as a bullet punched through the glass, spraying shards everywhere. He threw himself backward without thinking, then let out an even louder yell as the traction ropes cut the movement brutally short. Hissing, he pawed through the pile of odds and end on the bedside table, fingertips brushing across paper, brass and...there. A tiny penknife he’d borrowed from Larabee during his brief, failed, experiment with whittling the other week.
Grasping the little knife, JD sat up, feeling broken glass shower out of his hair and down onto the blankets as he sawed at the ropes. His leg thumped down on the mattress with a jolt he could feel all the way to his teeth. Ignoring the pain, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and grimly eyed the distance between the bed and the chest of drawers across the room where Nathan kept his spare weaponry. A gun was the one thing he hadn’t thought to add to the pile on his bedside table.
Before he could work up the nerve to move, the sickroom door burst open. JD looked up, expecting to see one of his friends come to check on him. Instead, an unfamiliar silhouette filled the door frame. Frozen in shock, he watched the stranger bolt into the room, making straight for the rear window. Faint moonlight glinted off a shotgun barrel as the man leaned out the open window and took aim at something in the alley below. Still unaware that he had an audience, he started firing.
JD’s fingers tightened on the tiny knife as he heard a shout of pain through the gunshots. Without thinking, he leaned toward the window, trying to see what was happening. The bedsprings creaked beneath him.
“Who goes there?” the man at the window barked, whirling and firing wildly into the room.
JD threw himself to the floor and rolled under the bed frame as buckshot peppered the walls. The gunman emptied both barrels, then tossed the shotgun aside and went for his pistols.
Muzzle flashes illuminated the room like a strobe, giving JD an eerie stop-motion view of the figure moving closer, hunting for him.
The clinic door burst open again and JD shouted out an incoherent warning as the gunman took aim at this new intruder.
The shadow in the doorway ducked and returned fire, diving for cover behind Nathan’s work bench.
JD flinched back against the wall as bullets sent plaster dust, bits of paper and shards of glass flying around the room like an indoor blizzard. Again, he wished for a gun. He had a clear line of sight on the intruder at the window, which meant the only thing stopping the man from picking him off like a clay pigeon was the darkness and one of his friends. At least, he hoped the other gunman was friendly.
There was a final shot and the figure by the window flinched back, overbalanced, and tipped backward through the glass. A heartbeat later came the distinctive thud of a body landing two stories below.
The room fell silent. Then the shadowy form of the other gunman rose from behind Nathan’s workbench.
“JD?” Larabee’s voice rang out, sharp with concern.
“Here,” JD gasped in relief. “I’m okay.” Dust bunnies under the bed tickled his nose and he sneezed. Of all the rotten luck. The first interesting thing that had happened in town in weeks and he’s spent most of it hiding under a bed. Good thing Buck wasn’t around or he’d never live this down.
He could hear Larabee fumbling around the room, searching for a lamp that hadn’t been shot to pieces. There was a crash, a muffled curse and finally the glow of lamplight warmed the room. It was JD’s cue to move. It took some time to convince his stiff, shaking muscles to work.
“Owww,” he groaned, flopping onto his back on the rag rug. Larabee crouched over him, frowning in concern. JD blew his bangs out of his eyes and tried to look casual and competent, not like a man who’d brought a penknife to a gunfight. “What the heck happened?”
“Bar brawl,” Larabee said succinctly. He brushed a few stray splinters of glass out of JD’s hair. “Town’s still in one piece. How about you?”
JD grinned despite the growing ache in his leg. “I’m not in any more pieces than I was when this mess started.”
Larabee matched the grin and offered him a hand up. JD accepted, wobbling as he attempted to stand upright for the first time in weeks. Before Larabee could steer him back to bed, he gave an awkward hop and collapsed ungracefully into a rocking chair. This was the first time he’d been off that mattress in what felt like forever and he wasn’t in any hurry to get horizontal again.
Larabee left him to it and headed back to the rear window. Leaning out of the shattered frame, he peered down, trying to see what was left of their intruder through the pitch dark.
A moan drifted up through the night.
“I’ll be damned,” Larabee muttered. “He ain’t dead.”
JD, survivor of a two-story drop of his own, wasn’t impressed. “Any idea who that was?” he called out to him, wishing he’d gotten a better look at the man’s face. His only impression of a man was of a monstrous shadow with a giant gun.
Larabee grunted a negative.
Undeterred, JD leaned forward, eager for a report. “So what happened? Who started the fight? How many of them were there? Was anybody hurt? Do you--?”
Larabee pulled his head back in the room and squinted at him until the stream of questions dried up. “No idea,” he said, then turned his attention back to the window, listening for any more gunshots. “I was in the jail when all hell broke loose.”
A shout from outside broke the silence. “Nathan!”
Larabee was already moving, sprinting toward the door. They both recognized Vin’s voice, and they both recognized the tone he was using.
Larabee wrenched open the door, only to find the way blocked by Vin and Ezra, with the slumped form of Nathan slung between them.
JD barely had time to register the spreading red stain on the healer’s shirt when Nathan staggered forward, dragging his would-be rescuers with him as he collapsed.
*******
“You missed absolutely nothing of interest, my fine fractured friend.” Ezra was saying as he stepped back from JD’s bedside and squinted at his handiwork. None of them felt up to replicating the cats-cradle apparatus that Nathan had used to keep the leg in traction, so Ezra had settled for propping the broken leg up on a pile of pillows.
JD glared. “‘Nothing of interest?’ Somebody shot up the whole town! It’s the first interesting thing that’s happened in town in weeks!”
Nathan’s slurred voice piped up from the other side of the room. “In’ersting, yup. First i-interesting thing that’s happened since JD took that flying leap off the saloon balcony.”
The healer lifted his head off the pillow and blinked owlishly around the clinic. It had taken half a bottle of laudanum and two different medical textbooks for the other lawmen to figure out how to properly scrub and stitch the ragged bullet tear in his side. They would have asked Nathan himself for advice, but that hadn’t occurred to them until after they’d spooned all that laudanum down his neck.
“Heeeere kitty, kitty, kitty...” Nathan crooned, leaning precariously over the edge of the bed as he tried to peer underneath.
Larabee, who sat on a chair beside him, reached out a hand and nudged him back onto the mattress without looking up from the medical reference book he was balancing on one knee.
“There’s no cat, Nathan,” he said, for the third time. He flipped to section H, for “hallucinations” and squinted at the tiny print. “You wouldn’t happen to be experiencing any blurred vision, nausea or, uh, constipation right now, would you?”
Nathan poked critically at his bandage-swaddled torso. “I better be experiencing blurred vision. Who the hell stitched me up? Were they drunk?” He gave a fretful tug at the cloth wrappings, which promptly unraveled, revealing an uneven ladder of lopsided stitches. “And seriously now, who let that cat in here?”
Leaving Larabee to the job of putting Nathan under wraps again, Ezra turned back to JD and resumed his narration.
“It all began - as most interesting stories do - in the saloon,” he said. “Your brief acquaintance...” He flapped a hand toward the rear window. “Got into an altercation of some sort with a gentleman in Digger Dan’s. Words were exchanged, then bullets, then their friends got involved and the action spilled out into the street. The rest you heard.”
On the other side of the room, Nathan had given up his search for the imaginary cat and had drifted off to sleep, snoring gently. He’d been deposited on JD’s old bed, once Vin and Ezra had shaken all the broken glass out of the covers.
JD had grudgingly agreed to lie down again. The others had set up a spare cot for him on the other side of the room. He fidgeted on the thin mattress, already missing the big bed with its view of Main Street. There was nothing to see out the rear window but the alley and the back of the boarding house one street over.
He craned his neck to peer out the shattered window. He could see Vin and Yosemite lowering a sheet over a sprawled body.
Had the fall killed their gunman after all? JD frowned, remembering the stranger firing at something - someone - outside before Larabee interrupted.
“Do we know who he was yet? The guy who fell out the window, I mean?”
A shadow passed across Ezra’s face. “That,” he said with a nod toward the body in the alley, “is not the ‘guy who fell out the window.’”
JD glanced back at the scene below. The sky was lightening toward dawn and it was easier to make out details -- including the ruffled pink hem of the skirt poking out from underneath the shroud.
*******
“Daphne Ledbetter,” Vin said thoughtfully, leaning on the broom he’d been using to sweep up the gun battle debris from Nathan’s clinic. “That’s a real shame.”
He looked around the shambles around him, without really seeing the pellet scars in the walls, the pockmarked books or the shattered glassware. He shook his head sadly, and JD wondered if he was thinking about the grisly fate of the town’s last seamstress, Miss Irene.
JD was jolted out of his own gloomy thoughts by an unwelcome tug on leg. He yelped and glared at Ezra, who was flexing his injured limb through a series of exercises. The gambler glanced at a sheet of paper covered with scrawled instructions and flexed JD’s foot in a direction it was never intended to bend. JD howled. Ezra dropped the foot, picked up the paper and scribbled a note.
JD scooted backward until his leg was back under the protection of the blankets. On the other side of the room, Nathan snored gently through his latest dose of laudanum. Ink-splattered papers covered the mattress around him. The one draped over his face fluttered with each exhale.
“You really need to stop giving Nathan that stuff,” JD said. Before the laudanum kicked in, Nathan had explained that the exercises were meant to work life and strength back into his leg. Right now, his muscles felt as brittle and weak as dried jerky. Nathan called it therapy. JD called it slow torture. To distract himself, he went back to interrogating Ezra and Vin.
“Why would anybody want to shoot Miss Daphne?”
“Don’t know that anybody did mean to shoot her,” Vin said. He went back to sweeping. “She probably got hit in the crossfire.”
“That guy... Wait, did we ever find out who that guy was who went out the window?” Ezra and Vin looked up, shrugged, and went back to their tasks. “Anyway, that guy was shooting at someone out the window last night. Maybe Daphne Ledbetter got in the way.”
“Or perhaps,” Ezra said, wadding up Nathan’s garbled instructions and tossing them aside, “she was his intended target all along.”
*******
By the time Nathan woke that afternoon, the wreckage of the gun battle had been cleared away, only to be replaced by chaos of another sort.
“That’s new,” he muttered, blinking at the sight of Vin staggering into the room with a body wrapped in a length of canvas.
“Ey, Nathan,” Vin greeted, shrugging his burden off his shoulder and onto the rug in the center of the room. It rolled a few times and fetched up against JD’s bed with a solid thunk.
“Thanks, Vin! That’s great!” JD said with a wide grin.
Someone snorted and Nathan turned to see Larabee leaning against the wall and staring sourly at the activity in the room. “This is stupid,” he corrected, giving Nathan a careful look. “How’re you feeling?”
Nathan thought for a moment, one hand resting on his throbbing ribcage. “Fine.”
Larabee ignored the lie. “You need anything for the pain?”
“No!” the shout came from around the room. Nathan made a face at his snickering friends. “No laudanum,” he agreed. “Although I wouldn’t say no to a cup of-” He smiled as Larabee passed him a mug, steaming with a foul-smelling brew. “Ahh, willow bark tea.”
He settled back against the pillows, took a sip, and studied the odd tableau in the middle of the room. “What do you think you’re doing with that body? That ain’t respectful. And it sure as hell ain’t sanitary. You’re gonna stink this whole place up.”
Vin threw him a wink, grabbed one corner of the canvas shroud and gave it a yank. It unraveled to reveal a dressmaker’s dummy, a shotgun and a brace of pistols. Nathan stared.
“We’re trying to figure out who shot Miss Daphne,” JD said, as if that explained anything.
Nathan sipped his tea. “And you figure the dummy did it?”
“Noo-oo-oo,” JD’s voice vibrated as Vin shoved the patient’s cot sideways across the floor, clearing a path to the rear window. “That guy who fell out the window still hasn’t woken up, so we’re trying to figure out what happened for ourselves.”
Vin leaned the dummy against the window sill leaned out. “Ready, Ez?” he called.
“Let the record show that I do this only because I have five dollars riding on the outcome.” Ezra’s voice floated up from the alley below.
“You just keep that money handy. I’ll be collecting it directly.” Vin rested the shotgun barrel on the dummy’s shoulder and took aim. “Get clear now, Ezra!”
The shotgun blast left everyone’s ears ringing. There was a pause and then Ezra’s voice came again, sounding smug. “I think we can rule out ‘shotgun blast from the infirmary’ as the cause of death.”
JD let out a low whistle. “Geez. That dummy is just never going to be good for anything again.” He nudged Vin. “Try it with the pistol, next!”
Intrigued, Nathan pushed himself up and wobbled across the room. Breathing hard, he took a look at the crime scene for himself. The dummy’s head and shoulders were a shredded mess, but it was still standing. The scattershot damage looked nothing like the bullet wound that had erased Daphne Ledbetter's face.
Nathan had been tending to Daphne when he caught a bullet of his own. The only way they’d been able to identify her was by her bright blonde hair and her distinctive pink dress.
Ezra lugged the damaged dummy out of view and returned with a second victim. A dried brown stain on the ground marked the spot where the dressmaker had died and Nathan nodded in approval as the gambler lowered the dummy until its wooden head rested in the blood pool, then carefully tilted it upright until it was standing approximately where Daphne would have been. Nathan frowned, wondering what possessed the young woman to run out into a dark alley in the middle of a gunfight.
He let Larabee guide him away from the window and down to rest on a corner of JD’s cot as Vin took aim again, this time with one of the pistols they’d taken off the unconscious bandit.
Again, he fired. Vin and Larabee leaned out the window to study the result.
“That look right to you?” Larabee asked, squinting down at the dummy, which had flopped face-down, away from the window, but also away from the pool of blood.
“Aw, hell,” Vin muttered. “Anybody got five bucks I could borrow?”
Ezra tossed the second dummy out of range and set up a third. “If you’ll permit me a small demonstration of my own?” he called up, a feral smile exposing the glint of a golden tooth.
Ezra cocked his head, studied the dummy for a moment, then backed up until he was standing in the shadowed rear exit of the boarding house. He drew one of his pistols and leveled it point-blank at the dummy's face. The hapless mannequin’s head exploded in splinters as the dummy jerked and fell, landing squarely in the pool of Daphne Ledbetter’s blood.
*******
“So she was caught in the crossfire. End of story,” Larabee said, turning back to the room to study his men. He had two men out of town, two laid up with injuries and two playing with oversized dolls. He was just about out of patience for JD’s little experiment in detective work.
“Peculiar sort of crossfire. Shot from the doorstep of her own home,” Vin drawled.
Larabee pulled a face. “Everybody who took part in that brawl last night is cooling their heels in our jail,” he said. “Judge can figure out who did what when he gets here at the end of the month.”
JD sputtered. “But we’re just getting started! We still have to figure out who shot her and who that guy was in the window and why the fight started and--”
Larabee gave the dummy in the window a straight-armed shove that sent it tumbling to the ground below. Ezra let out a startled yelp and dodged out of its way. Ignoring the complaints from below, Larabee herded Nathan back onto his feet.
Nathan let himself be led back to bed, still craning his neck for one last look out the window.
“Meanwhile,” Larabee said, easing Nathan back down onto the mattress and shaking out a blanket to cover him. “I need Vin’s help to watch the prisoners and patrol the town. I’ll send Ezra up here to keep an eye on the two of you.”
JD shot him a pleading look. “What about the guy who fell out the window? Are we ever going to figure out who he is?”
Larabee snagged the pile of wanted posters off the bedside table and tossed them at him.
“Knock yourself out.”
*******
“No. No. Wrong height. Wrong hair color. No. Wrong gender,” Ezra tossed each discarded wanted poster onto the growing pile next to JD’s cot. “Honestly, JD, this is an exercise in futility. We don’t even know whether your assailant had a criminal rec--” He paused, staring hard at the image on the flier he was holding. “Hello.”
“What?” Nathan called out, his question lost in a coughing fit. Ezra pushed the wanted poster at JD and hurried over to pour a glass of water. The healer accepted the cup, but ducked Ezra’s attempts to feel his forehead for signs of fever. Ezra huffed and moved over to the kettle to check on the foul-smelling brew he was steeping from one of Nathan’s recipes.
JD squinted at the poster in his hands. “Ludlow Wilkerson?” his voice climbed into an excited squeak. “You think we took down Ludlow Wilkerson? He’s one of the most wanted men in the territory. They say one time he ran out of bullets and robbed a stagecoach with a brick!”
Ezra took an experimental sniff at the medicinal tea and reeled back, eyes watering. “I can’t swear it’s the same man,” he said, throwing open a few more windows. “But they're both tall blond men with identical eye color and similar tattoos. And both of them are missing their left ear.”
Nathan took an experimental sniff at the vapors wafting around the sickroom and clamped his lips shut. If Ezra thought he was drinking that, he had another thing coming.
“It’s your recipe, not mine,” Ezra said, pressing a steaming mug into his hands and glowering over him until he took a drink.
Ignoring the faces Nathan was making, Ezra turned back to JD and continued. “What a high-profile miscreant like Mr. Wilkerson was doing in Four Corners is anyone’s guess.”
JD smoothed the wanted poster. “Maybe he’s here to hold up the stagecoach?”
“In that case, why would he have involved himself in a common saloon scuffle?” Ezra wondered, relieving Nathan of the empty mug and offering him another drink of water to wash away the taste.
Shuddering, Nathan set the glass aside. “Somebody needs to figure out how long he’s been in town and what he’s been up to since he got here.”
Silence filled the sickroom, until Ezra realized that both patients were looking at him. “What?”
*******
“What do you see?” JD asked impatiently.
Nathan twisted the spyglass until the view of Main Street sharpened into focus. “Ezra’s still talking with Heidegger,” he said, watching as the German innkeeper mopped at his forehead and gestured wildly. “Looks like our outlaw was staying at the Gem.”
“Kinda pricey place,” JD said. “I guess he had plenty of stagecoach money to spend.”
Nathan grunted and leaned back. “Ezra’s heading back this way.”
“’Bout time!” JD squirmed, wishing he’d asked Ezra to leave a bedpan handy before he went out.
To his vast relief, the clinic door opened to reveal Ezra - and a guest.
“I believe you’ve already made this young lady’s acquaintance?” he said, hoisting another one of Daphne’s dressmaking dummies into the room. He propped the mannequin against the wall and eyed his charges. Without a word, he dug a bedpan out for JD and moved to check on Nathan’s bandages.
Nathan nodded approvingly. The same skills that made the gambler so good at reading faces around a poker table made him an able assistant in a sickroom. He glanced down at his torn-up side, noting that the infection seemed to be fading. The stitches still looked like some demented child’s sewing sampler, though.
“What’s the dummy doing back here again?” he said, hissing softly as Ezra dabbed at the stitches with an alcohol-soaked cloth.
“Oh, I asked Ezra to bring her up here,” JD called out from his side of the room. “We’re gonna put her in Buck’s bed right before he gets back.”
“Only one?”
“Good thinking, Nathan. How many of those things do you think we could fit into Buck’s room, Ez?”
Ezra rolled his eyes. Caretaking duties complete, he threw himself into a chair and pulled a small notebook out of his jacket pocket. “Is anyone at all interested in the fruits of our fact-finding mission?”
JD and Nathan made encouraging noises as Ezra flipped a few pages and referred to his notes. “Our mysterious stagecoach robber checked into the Gem more than a week ago, under the name,” his lip curled in disdain, “‘John Smith.’”
JD sat up straighter. A week ago, at the Gem... But Ezra was already moving on with his report.
“Our Mr. Smith kept to his rooms during the day and ventured out at night, usually frequenting Digger Dan’s, where he failed to make much of an impression on the staff or the usual patrons, at least until last night, when he managed to singlehandedly set off last night’s altercation. How and why the fight started remains a mystery. Wilkerson remains unconscious. The rest of our prisoners claim to be unemployed ranch hands who deny ever having met the man they were trying to kill.”
“At the Gem,” Ezra continued, flipping another page. “Mr. Smith received only one visitor, who he paid our friend Heidegger to usher discreetly to his quarters every afternoon at--”
“Three o’clock!” JD broke, almost squirming off his cot in excitement. “That’s who Daphne Ledbetter was meeting at the hotel every day! Omigosh!”
Nathan shook his head in amazement. “So maybe Ludlow Wilkerson really was trying to kill her last night? Some sorta lover’s quarrel?”
Ezra paced over to the window to study their crime scene again. “Or perhaps,” he said slowly, “he was trying to protect her.”
Moving quickly, he grabbed the dressmaker’s dummy and pulled it to the center of the room.
“The late Mrs. Ledbetter rented a room in the boarding house next door. Her landlady said she was home and in her quarters when the gunfight broke out. Why would she leave the safety of her rooms? Unless--” he scooped the discarded shotgun up from the wall next to the window and leveled it at the dummy, “unless someone forced her to leave?”
He prodded the dummy in the back with the weapon. “It’s possible our outlaw was riding to the aid of a lady in distress.”
JD’s eyes widened. An outlaw with a heart of gold. Just like in the dime novels. Then again, Wilkerson did try to blow his head off, so he couldn’t muster too much sympathy.
Nathan yawned, feeling the tug of exhaustion from his still-healing wound. He settled back on the bed and closed his eyes. “Sure would like to know what happened at Digger Dan’s that night,” he said softly. “If we knew how the fight started, it might help us figure out how it ended.”
He felt the soft weight of a blanket settle over him.
“Don’t you worry, Nathan,” JD’s voice came to him, sounding very far away. “We’ll figure it out.”
*******
It was Ezra’s turn to patrol while Vin took over sickroom duty. He came bearing news from the jail and an old pair of crutches that he snuck in while Nathan was still asleep.
Delighted, JD wrestled himself into street clothes, including a pair of pants they had to slit up the leg to make enough room for the bulky splints and bandages around his leg. The crutches and splint made a godawful clatter on the wooden floor as he maneuvered himself around the room.
The noise woke Nathan, who gave Vin a poisonous glare and pointed out that JD wasn’t supposed to be putting weight on that leg for another week.
JD ignored the complaints and the jangling pain in his healing bones. Ludlow Wilkerson had bought him an early release from bed rest. He could have kissed the man, outlaw or no outlaw. He made another circuit of Nathan’s work table, whipping around the corners with increasing speed and confidence. The crutches were killing his armpits, but he wasn’t about to complain.
Vin held out his peace offering to Nathan - a pecan pie from the hotel’s kitchen. JD teetered over for his share and the three of them settled down to enjoy.
“Talked with them fellas in the jail again,” Vin said, using one of Nathan’s good throwing knives to cut one half of the pie into three massive slices. Nathan ignored the abuse of his weaponry once Vin passed him the biggest wedge.
“And?” JD mumbled around a syrupy mouthful of pie.
“They ain’t cowboys,” Vin said, polishing off his slice and eyeing the remaining half of the pie.
Nathan wiped his sticky fingers on his bandages. They’d need changing soon anyway. “What makes you say that?” he asked, wishing he could get out of the infirmary and take a look at the prisoners himself.
“Soft hands. Big guns,” Vin said with a crooked grin. “We took enough weapons off ‘em to arm a cavalry regiment.”
JD snapped to attention. “Bandits!”
He knocked one of the crutches over and hopped in an unsteady circle with the other, trying to maintain his balance. Eyes glowing, he jammed the remaining crutch under his arm and started hitching his way toward the door.
Vin and Nathan watched him go, bemused.
“C’mon, guys! We need to talk to them! They must be Ludlow Wilkerson’s gang. We need to find out what they had planned.”
He banged into the door and lost his grip on the other crutch. For a moment, he teetered there, clutching the doorknob and breathing hard just from the exertion of crossing the room.
Vin moseyed up, handed him his crutches without comment and stepped back, clearing a path for JD to head back to his cot. JD eyed the bed and the nice soft pillow and the second slice of consolation pie waiting for him. He thought about the two steep, rickety flights of stairs between him and the street.
Then he squared his shoulders, swung the door open and hobbled out into the sunlight.
Vin and Nathan exchanged a look.
“Well, what’re you waiting for?” Nathan flapped a hand at Vin, shooing him out. “Go make sure he doesn’t fall and break his other leg.”
Vin clamped his hat on his head and set out after the sickroom escapee.
[ Part one][ Part two]
Fandom: Magnificent Seven
Author: J. Brooks
Artist: Black Rook aka grachonok
Characters: JD, Nathan, Ezra and the boys
Rating: Teen, for salty language and mayhem
Warning: The sheer quantity of gunfights, hostage takings, falls from great heights and shirtlessness contained in this fic are improbably even by Four Corners standards.
Summary: Laid up with a broken leg, one of the Seven sees something out the window that could spell disaster for the whole town.
Authors Notes: Yes, yes… Alfred Hitchcock did it first and best. I just took a good gimmick and ran with it. Oh, and the dime novel Buck is reading is real. “Deadwood Dick’s Doom” was penned by one Edward L. Wheeler back in the late 1800s. Some things are just too strange to make up. A thousand thanks to NotTasha for hand holding me through the delivery of this baby.
____________________________
William Wright, alias Wilson alias Will Perry alias Roaring Bill.
Horse Thief. Cattle Rustler. Stagecoach Robber. Receiver of Stolen Goods. Murderer.
Thirty-two years old.
Height 5 feet 4 inches.
Weight 165 pounds.
Black hair, dark eyes, light complexion. Usually wears a mustache.
Scar on right temple, over eye. Small scar on left cheek. Scar from pistol shot on left shoulder. Anchor tattooed in India ink on back of right hand. Escaped from Yuma Prison three weeks ago. _____________________________
JD flicked the wanted poster aside and rested his chin on the window sill, studying the suspect in the street below.
True, the man loitering in front of the hotel didn’t have a mustache, but mustaches could be shaved. JD double-checked the description on the flier. And maybe this man’s hair was more blond than black -- but a man on the run from the law might dye his hair, right?
He fidgeted, wedging another pillow behind his back so he could continue his surveillance in comfort. What he really needed was…aha! Josiah came strolling down the boardwalk on mid-day patrol, nodding pleasantly to the stranger in passing.
They were the same height. Drat.
JD crumpled the wanted poster and chucked it across the room before collapsing back on the mattress in a huff.
There was an unsympathetic snicker from the chair next to his bed.
“Shut up, Buck,” he groused as he shifted on the mattress, searching for a comfortable position and knowing he wouldn’t find one.
“Now, JD, I think folks in town’d be mighty touched to know you’re keeping an eye on things from up here,” Buck said, managing an expression of deep sincerity for all of ten seconds before he started snickering again. “I’m just wondering what in Sam Hill you think you’d do if you actually spotted one of them desperados wandering down the street.”
Buck shot a significant look at the complex system of ropes and pulleys and weights that kept JD’s left leg elevated and immobilized over the bed.
JD crossed his arms and scowled. “Ain’t nothing wrong with the rest of me. I can still shoot--”
“But you can’t ride,” Buck cut him off with a gentle cuff on the shoulder, his expression dark. “And you sure as hell showed us you can’t fly.” The smile slid off his face as he looked away, remembering.
“Hey, I flew.” JD jostled Buck’s elbow, trying to lighten the mood.
Buck snorted. “’Til the ground got in your way.”
“If you’d just untie me…” JD’s voice took on a whining edge as he eyed the rigging that kept him trapped in the infirmary.
“Ah-ah!” Nathan Jackson’s brusque warning cut JD off before he could explain -- again -- his plan to patrol the town on crutches.
“But--”
“Two more weeks.”
“Aw, Nate--”
“Two more weeks in traction and not a day less,” Nathan looked up from the workbench where he was grinding leaves and twigs into a fine powder. “You want to keep your foot? Keep still.”
JD subsided; studying the pink toes that poked out the other end of the immobilized lump of splints and bandages that was his leg. Three weeks ago, the same leg had been bent in two places it wasn’t supposed to bend, with shockingly white spars of bone jutting out of his splintered shin.
Most doctors would have just sawed the thing off, he knew. He was grateful to Nathan, more than words could say. But he was also…bored.
Bored.
Bored.
Bored... JD’s attention strayed to the items piled on his bedside table. Books from Josiah and Chris. Vin’s spyglass. Two decks of playing cards from Ezra -- one marked and one unmarked, and he was still trying to puzzle out which was which. A huge sheaf of wanted posters. A stack of dime novels. A plate of cookies from Casey that Nathan had sampled and declared unfit for human consumption.
JD sighed bitterly. Boring. He glared at his leg again, feeling the warning tingle of an itch, maddeningly out of reach. Perfect.
He eyed the stack of dime novels again. This was all their fault. Jumping from a second-story balcony into the saddle always worked like a dream on paper.
He picked up the spyglass and turned his attention back to the street.
*******
Five days later
*******
JD slunk lower in the bed and plotted Buck Wilmington’s imminent, messy death. The dead man walking ignored the daggers being glared his way and carried on with his dramatic reading of one JD’s dime novels.
“Buck…” he tried again.
“Hush up, kid. This is just gettin’ interesting,” Buck shushed him absently. “Where was I?”
“‘Oh, spare me, sir,’” Nathan prompted helpfully, not looking up from the bandages he was rolling on the other side of the room.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Buck cleared his throat and forced his voice into the squeaky registers of a dime novel damsel in distress: “‘Oh, spare me -- spare me, Sir! Oh, my God! is there no one here to help me?’ the poor girl sobbed...”
Buck’s voice dropped down to a villain’s menacing snarl: “‘Nary a durned galoot, my gal!’ Piute Dave declared, with a triumphant chuckle. ‘As I allowed, before, I'm boss o' this burg, an' thar's not a man hyar as durst lift a hand to help ye, when I'm around.’”
JD rolled his eyes as Buck sprang from his chair and struck a heroic pose, pointing dramatically with the hand that wasn’t holding the paperback: “‘You lie, you brute! and if you but lay a hand on that girl I'll bore a hole in your thick skull! If you offer that girl the least molestation, I'll make you up into a perforated porous plaster quicker than a Dutchman can say beer!'"
Buck dropped back in his chair, gasping for air, then launched back into the hero’s monologue. “Yes, I am Deadwood Dick, the celebrated cuss from Custer clime -- the diabolical devil-may-care devotee of road-agency, from Deadwood the hunted hurricane!”
JD crossed his arms and scowled as Buck and Nathan collapsed, howling with laughter. “Deadwood Dick’s Doom” fluttered to the floor, forgotten.
“Perforated porous plaster,” Nathan snickered, wiping his streaming eyes with a corner of the bandage roll.
“Deadwood Dick!” Buck countered.
JD huffed, then picked up Vin’s spyglass and pointedly turned his back on his chortling friends. He trained the telescope on the street, cheered by the sudden appearance of a red jacket on the boardwalk below. Relief was in sight.
*******
“...from Deadwood the hunted hurricane!” Ezra took up the narrative with gusto, sliding into the bedside chair and propping his feet up on one corner of the mattress.
JD fished out a pillow and winged it at the gambler, who caught it nimbly and wedged it behind his back as he carried on with his dramatic reading. JD gave serious thought to firing the rest of his bedding at the other men in the room, but abandoned the idea. He might be able to take down Buck and Nathan, but Chris Larabee was another story. He was pretty sure Larabee wouldn’t shoot a man in traction. But he didn’t want to risk anything that might extend his clinic stay.
“Now, you sure you’re gonna be okay while I’m gone, kid?” Buck asked, gathering up his saddlebags and gear from the corner of the room with what looked to JD like a certain degree of eagerness.
JD crossed his arms, eyeing the trail gear enviously. “Oh,” he said with a martyred sigh. “Go ahead. Don’t worry about me.” He plucked at his bedding. “I’ll be just fine.”
Buck froze in the doorway, staring back at him uncertainly. “You know if I could get out of this assignment, I would.”
Larabee rolled his eyes, planted a hand in the middle of Buck’s back and shoved him none-too-gently toward the exit. “He knows. We know. The judge knows. The whole damn town knows. Now get a move on. Josiah’s waiting for you in the livery.”
Buck caught the door frame and peered back fretfully at the kid. “You’re sure you’re gonna be okay? I mean, you’d tell me if you were feeling poorly, or your leg was flaring up--”
JD turned woeful eyes on him and let his head loll back against the pillow, as if he were too weak to hold it up a moment longer. He gave Buck a frail smile, forgiving him for abandoning him to this lonely bed of pain.
Larabee threw his shoulder into it and shoved the protesting lawman out the door. He tossed JD a wink and followed after.
A moment later Buck’s head reappeared in the doorway. “Don’t forget. I'll be back at the end of the week. And I’ll be just a telegram away. If you need anything, I mean anyth--awk!” A hand appeared, grabbed his collar and hauled him away.
Nathan and Ezra stared at the door a moment, and then turned to JD, impressed.
The kid held his pathetic pose for a beat longer, then straightened and started whistling.
“That was bad, JD,” Nathan said, shaking his head and trying to smother a grin.
“I tip my hat to you, sir,” Ezra said. “And I believe I shall make it a point to stay on your good side in future.” With a flick of his wrist, he sent Deadwood Dick’s Doom spiraling across the room.
Satisfied, JD leaned over and snagged a fresh stack of wanted posters off the bedside table.
*******
"Still don't see anything," Nathan said, squinting through the spyglass. He glanced back at the bed to double-check that he and JD's finger were pointing at the same spot. "You want to tell me what's so interesting about an empty patch of boardwalk?"
JD grinned without looking up from the pocket watch he'd borrowed from Ezra. "Wait for it... Five seconds...four..."
Nathan spun back to the window. On cue, the front door of the Gem Hotel swung open and old man Heidegger stepped out, broom in hand. The innkeeper looked around, then ducked his head and started sweeping. Nathan sighed. He'd been hoping for something more interesting than the sight of Heidegger waving a broom. A thought struck him and he squinted more carefully through the glass. Heidegger was sweeping the same spot, over and over again, ignoring the pointed looks he was getting from the townsfolk who were forced to detour around him.
"'Three...two...one...'Good afternoon Miss Daphne!'" JD crowed in an atrocious German accent.
Nathan's eyes widened as the town's new seamstress swished around the corner and was intercepted by Heidegger, right on cue. The businessman bobbed his head nervously and gestured her toward the front door.
Daphne Ledbetter fluttered her long lashes, tossed her blonde curls and, after a quick glance around the street, allowed the shopkeeper to usher her inside. The door snapped shut behind them, almost snagging the pink ruffled hem of her dress. Heidegger's broom leaned against the wall outside, forgotten.
Nathan lowered the spyglass, sputtering.
JD cackled. "Told you! You would not believe the stuff that goes on in this town."
"There's plenty of reasons she might be going into the hotel. One of the guests might need some tailoring."
"Every day? At the same time of day? For a week?"
Nathan harrumphed. "Heidegger better pray his wife don't get wind of this, ‘cause I don't know enough doctoring to remove her frying pan from his fool skull."
Unable to stop himself, he raised the spyglass again and took another peek at the hotel’s empty front stoop.
JD craned up for another look at the hotel himself. "And Heidegger really better hope Miss Daphne's husband don't come town anytime soon."
Nathan blinked. "She's married?" The pretty young seamstress had arrived in town a few weeks earlier, accompanied by a mountain of fabric bolts and dressmaker's dummies, but no husband that he’d noticed.
"Buck told me," JD said. And Buck would know. "Said the husband was out of the picture. Wait'll I tell him that Heidegger made a move on her before he could."
Nathan grinned, then caught himself. "Don't know what you're smiling about," he said, shutting the spyglass with a snap. "Spying on folk? That ain't the sort of thing decent folk do."
JD shrugged, unrepentant. "What else am I supposed to do all day? It ain't like everybody else on the street can't see what they're doing -- they just don't notice 'cause they've got better things to do." He gestured grandly toward his leg. "And I don't."
JD spent the rest of the afternoon rolling bandages for Nathan and reminding himself to keep his mouth shut the next time he saw something interesting out the window.
*******
A few night later, gunshots startled JD awake. For a confused moment, he thought he was caught up in a familiar nightmare. But this time instead of the shooting leading to falling and screaming, the gunshots kept coming, cracking through the pitch black on the other side of his window.
He levered himself up on one elbow, hissing as the movement jarred his leg. He could make out shouting in the street below, and bright muzzle flashes, sparking from one side of the street to the other.
JD leaned closer, trying to see, only to flinch back with a startled yell as a bullet punched through the glass, spraying shards everywhere. He threw himself backward without thinking, then let out an even louder yell as the traction ropes cut the movement brutally short. Hissing, he pawed through the pile of odds and end on the bedside table, fingertips brushing across paper, brass and...there. A tiny penknife he’d borrowed from Larabee during his brief, failed, experiment with whittling the other week.
Grasping the little knife, JD sat up, feeling broken glass shower out of his hair and down onto the blankets as he sawed at the ropes. His leg thumped down on the mattress with a jolt he could feel all the way to his teeth. Ignoring the pain, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and grimly eyed the distance between the bed and the chest of drawers across the room where Nathan kept his spare weaponry. A gun was the one thing he hadn’t thought to add to the pile on his bedside table.
Before he could work up the nerve to move, the sickroom door burst open. JD looked up, expecting to see one of his friends come to check on him. Instead, an unfamiliar silhouette filled the door frame. Frozen in shock, he watched the stranger bolt into the room, making straight for the rear window. Faint moonlight glinted off a shotgun barrel as the man leaned out the open window and took aim at something in the alley below. Still unaware that he had an audience, he started firing.
JD’s fingers tightened on the tiny knife as he heard a shout of pain through the gunshots. Without thinking, he leaned toward the window, trying to see what was happening. The bedsprings creaked beneath him.
“Who goes there?” the man at the window barked, whirling and firing wildly into the room.
JD threw himself to the floor and rolled under the bed frame as buckshot peppered the walls. The gunman emptied both barrels, then tossed the shotgun aside and went for his pistols.
Muzzle flashes illuminated the room like a strobe, giving JD an eerie stop-motion view of the figure moving closer, hunting for him.
The clinic door burst open again and JD shouted out an incoherent warning as the gunman took aim at this new intruder.
The shadow in the doorway ducked and returned fire, diving for cover behind Nathan’s work bench.
JD flinched back against the wall as bullets sent plaster dust, bits of paper and shards of glass flying around the room like an indoor blizzard. Again, he wished for a gun. He had a clear line of sight on the intruder at the window, which meant the only thing stopping the man from picking him off like a clay pigeon was the darkness and one of his friends. At least, he hoped the other gunman was friendly.
There was a final shot and the figure by the window flinched back, overbalanced, and tipped backward through the glass. A heartbeat later came the distinctive thud of a body landing two stories below.
The room fell silent. Then the shadowy form of the other gunman rose from behind Nathan’s workbench.
“JD?” Larabee’s voice rang out, sharp with concern.
“Here,” JD gasped in relief. “I’m okay.” Dust bunnies under the bed tickled his nose and he sneezed. Of all the rotten luck. The first interesting thing that had happened in town in weeks and he’s spent most of it hiding under a bed. Good thing Buck wasn’t around or he’d never live this down.
He could hear Larabee fumbling around the room, searching for a lamp that hadn’t been shot to pieces. There was a crash, a muffled curse and finally the glow of lamplight warmed the room. It was JD’s cue to move. It took some time to convince his stiff, shaking muscles to work.
“Owww,” he groaned, flopping onto his back on the rag rug. Larabee crouched over him, frowning in concern. JD blew his bangs out of his eyes and tried to look casual and competent, not like a man who’d brought a penknife to a gunfight. “What the heck happened?”
“Bar brawl,” Larabee said succinctly. He brushed a few stray splinters of glass out of JD’s hair. “Town’s still in one piece. How about you?”
JD grinned despite the growing ache in his leg. “I’m not in any more pieces than I was when this mess started.”
Larabee matched the grin and offered him a hand up. JD accepted, wobbling as he attempted to stand upright for the first time in weeks. Before Larabee could steer him back to bed, he gave an awkward hop and collapsed ungracefully into a rocking chair. This was the first time he’d been off that mattress in what felt like forever and he wasn’t in any hurry to get horizontal again.
Larabee left him to it and headed back to the rear window. Leaning out of the shattered frame, he peered down, trying to see what was left of their intruder through the pitch dark.
A moan drifted up through the night.
“I’ll be damned,” Larabee muttered. “He ain’t dead.”
JD, survivor of a two-story drop of his own, wasn’t impressed. “Any idea who that was?” he called out to him, wishing he’d gotten a better look at the man’s face. His only impression of a man was of a monstrous shadow with a giant gun.
Larabee grunted a negative.
Undeterred, JD leaned forward, eager for a report. “So what happened? Who started the fight? How many of them were there? Was anybody hurt? Do you--?”
Larabee pulled his head back in the room and squinted at him until the stream of questions dried up. “No idea,” he said, then turned his attention back to the window, listening for any more gunshots. “I was in the jail when all hell broke loose.”
A shout from outside broke the silence. “Nathan!”
Larabee was already moving, sprinting toward the door. They both recognized Vin’s voice, and they both recognized the tone he was using.
Larabee wrenched open the door, only to find the way blocked by Vin and Ezra, with the slumped form of Nathan slung between them.
JD barely had time to register the spreading red stain on the healer’s shirt when Nathan staggered forward, dragging his would-be rescuers with him as he collapsed.
*******
“You missed absolutely nothing of interest, my fine fractured friend.” Ezra was saying as he stepped back from JD’s bedside and squinted at his handiwork. None of them felt up to replicating the cats-cradle apparatus that Nathan had used to keep the leg in traction, so Ezra had settled for propping the broken leg up on a pile of pillows.
JD glared. “‘Nothing of interest?’ Somebody shot up the whole town! It’s the first interesting thing that’s happened in town in weeks!”
Nathan’s slurred voice piped up from the other side of the room. “In’ersting, yup. First i-interesting thing that’s happened since JD took that flying leap off the saloon balcony.”
The healer lifted his head off the pillow and blinked owlishly around the clinic. It had taken half a bottle of laudanum and two different medical textbooks for the other lawmen to figure out how to properly scrub and stitch the ragged bullet tear in his side. They would have asked Nathan himself for advice, but that hadn’t occurred to them until after they’d spooned all that laudanum down his neck.
“Heeeere kitty, kitty, kitty...” Nathan crooned, leaning precariously over the edge of the bed as he tried to peer underneath.
Larabee, who sat on a chair beside him, reached out a hand and nudged him back onto the mattress without looking up from the medical reference book he was balancing on one knee.
“There’s no cat, Nathan,” he said, for the third time. He flipped to section H, for “hallucinations” and squinted at the tiny print. “You wouldn’t happen to be experiencing any blurred vision, nausea or, uh, constipation right now, would you?”
Nathan poked critically at his bandage-swaddled torso. “I better be experiencing blurred vision. Who the hell stitched me up? Were they drunk?” He gave a fretful tug at the cloth wrappings, which promptly unraveled, revealing an uneven ladder of lopsided stitches. “And seriously now, who let that cat in here?”
Leaving Larabee to the job of putting Nathan under wraps again, Ezra turned back to JD and resumed his narration.
“It all began - as most interesting stories do - in the saloon,” he said. “Your brief acquaintance...” He flapped a hand toward the rear window. “Got into an altercation of some sort with a gentleman in Digger Dan’s. Words were exchanged, then bullets, then their friends got involved and the action spilled out into the street. The rest you heard.”
On the other side of the room, Nathan had given up his search for the imaginary cat and had drifted off to sleep, snoring gently. He’d been deposited on JD’s old bed, once Vin and Ezra had shaken all the broken glass out of the covers.
JD had grudgingly agreed to lie down again. The others had set up a spare cot for him on the other side of the room. He fidgeted on the thin mattress, already missing the big bed with its view of Main Street. There was nothing to see out the rear window but the alley and the back of the boarding house one street over.
He craned his neck to peer out the shattered window. He could see Vin and Yosemite lowering a sheet over a sprawled body.
Had the fall killed their gunman after all? JD frowned, remembering the stranger firing at something - someone - outside before Larabee interrupted.
“Do we know who he was yet? The guy who fell out the window, I mean?”
A shadow passed across Ezra’s face. “That,” he said with a nod toward the body in the alley, “is not the ‘guy who fell out the window.’”
JD glanced back at the scene below. The sky was lightening toward dawn and it was easier to make out details -- including the ruffled pink hem of the skirt poking out from underneath the shroud.
*******
“Daphne Ledbetter,” Vin said thoughtfully, leaning on the broom he’d been using to sweep up the gun battle debris from Nathan’s clinic. “That’s a real shame.”
He looked around the shambles around him, without really seeing the pellet scars in the walls, the pockmarked books or the shattered glassware. He shook his head sadly, and JD wondered if he was thinking about the grisly fate of the town’s last seamstress, Miss Irene.
JD was jolted out of his own gloomy thoughts by an unwelcome tug on leg. He yelped and glared at Ezra, who was flexing his injured limb through a series of exercises. The gambler glanced at a sheet of paper covered with scrawled instructions and flexed JD’s foot in a direction it was never intended to bend. JD howled. Ezra dropped the foot, picked up the paper and scribbled a note.
JD scooted backward until his leg was back under the protection of the blankets. On the other side of the room, Nathan snored gently through his latest dose of laudanum. Ink-splattered papers covered the mattress around him. The one draped over his face fluttered with each exhale.
“You really need to stop giving Nathan that stuff,” JD said. Before the laudanum kicked in, Nathan had explained that the exercises were meant to work life and strength back into his leg. Right now, his muscles felt as brittle and weak as dried jerky. Nathan called it therapy. JD called it slow torture. To distract himself, he went back to interrogating Ezra and Vin.
“Why would anybody want to shoot Miss Daphne?”
“Don’t know that anybody did mean to shoot her,” Vin said. He went back to sweeping. “She probably got hit in the crossfire.”
“That guy... Wait, did we ever find out who that guy was who went out the window?” Ezra and Vin looked up, shrugged, and went back to their tasks. “Anyway, that guy was shooting at someone out the window last night. Maybe Daphne Ledbetter got in the way.”
“Or perhaps,” Ezra said, wadding up Nathan’s garbled instructions and tossing them aside, “she was his intended target all along.”
*******
By the time Nathan woke that afternoon, the wreckage of the gun battle had been cleared away, only to be replaced by chaos of another sort.
“That’s new,” he muttered, blinking at the sight of Vin staggering into the room with a body wrapped in a length of canvas.
“Ey, Nathan,” Vin greeted, shrugging his burden off his shoulder and onto the rug in the center of the room. It rolled a few times and fetched up against JD’s bed with a solid thunk.
“Thanks, Vin! That’s great!” JD said with a wide grin.
Someone snorted and Nathan turned to see Larabee leaning against the wall and staring sourly at the activity in the room. “This is stupid,” he corrected, giving Nathan a careful look. “How’re you feeling?”
Nathan thought for a moment, one hand resting on his throbbing ribcage. “Fine.”
Larabee ignored the lie. “You need anything for the pain?”
“No!” the shout came from around the room. Nathan made a face at his snickering friends. “No laudanum,” he agreed. “Although I wouldn’t say no to a cup of-” He smiled as Larabee passed him a mug, steaming with a foul-smelling brew. “Ahh, willow bark tea.”
He settled back against the pillows, took a sip, and studied the odd tableau in the middle of the room. “What do you think you’re doing with that body? That ain’t respectful. And it sure as hell ain’t sanitary. You’re gonna stink this whole place up.”
Vin threw him a wink, grabbed one corner of the canvas shroud and gave it a yank. It unraveled to reveal a dressmaker’s dummy, a shotgun and a brace of pistols. Nathan stared.
“We’re trying to figure out who shot Miss Daphne,” JD said, as if that explained anything.
Nathan sipped his tea. “And you figure the dummy did it?”
“Noo-oo-oo,” JD’s voice vibrated as Vin shoved the patient’s cot sideways across the floor, clearing a path to the rear window. “That guy who fell out the window still hasn’t woken up, so we’re trying to figure out what happened for ourselves.”
Vin leaned the dummy against the window sill leaned out. “Ready, Ez?” he called.
“Let the record show that I do this only because I have five dollars riding on the outcome.” Ezra’s voice floated up from the alley below.
“You just keep that money handy. I’ll be collecting it directly.” Vin rested the shotgun barrel on the dummy’s shoulder and took aim. “Get clear now, Ezra!”
The shotgun blast left everyone’s ears ringing. There was a pause and then Ezra’s voice came again, sounding smug. “I think we can rule out ‘shotgun blast from the infirmary’ as the cause of death.”
JD let out a low whistle. “Geez. That dummy is just never going to be good for anything again.” He nudged Vin. “Try it with the pistol, next!”
Intrigued, Nathan pushed himself up and wobbled across the room. Breathing hard, he took a look at the crime scene for himself. The dummy’s head and shoulders were a shredded mess, but it was still standing. The scattershot damage looked nothing like the bullet wound that had erased Daphne Ledbetter's face.
Nathan had been tending to Daphne when he caught a bullet of his own. The only way they’d been able to identify her was by her bright blonde hair and her distinctive pink dress.
Ezra lugged the damaged dummy out of view and returned with a second victim. A dried brown stain on the ground marked the spot where the dressmaker had died and Nathan nodded in approval as the gambler lowered the dummy until its wooden head rested in the blood pool, then carefully tilted it upright until it was standing approximately where Daphne would have been. Nathan frowned, wondering what possessed the young woman to run out into a dark alley in the middle of a gunfight.
He let Larabee guide him away from the window and down to rest on a corner of JD’s cot as Vin took aim again, this time with one of the pistols they’d taken off the unconscious bandit.
Again, he fired. Vin and Larabee leaned out the window to study the result.
“That look right to you?” Larabee asked, squinting down at the dummy, which had flopped face-down, away from the window, but also away from the pool of blood.
“Aw, hell,” Vin muttered. “Anybody got five bucks I could borrow?”
Ezra tossed the second dummy out of range and set up a third. “If you’ll permit me a small demonstration of my own?” he called up, a feral smile exposing the glint of a golden tooth.
Ezra cocked his head, studied the dummy for a moment, then backed up until he was standing in the shadowed rear exit of the boarding house. He drew one of his pistols and leveled it point-blank at the dummy's face. The hapless mannequin’s head exploded in splinters as the dummy jerked and fell, landing squarely in the pool of Daphne Ledbetter’s blood.
*******
“So she was caught in the crossfire. End of story,” Larabee said, turning back to the room to study his men. He had two men out of town, two laid up with injuries and two playing with oversized dolls. He was just about out of patience for JD’s little experiment in detective work.
“Peculiar sort of crossfire. Shot from the doorstep of her own home,” Vin drawled.
Larabee pulled a face. “Everybody who took part in that brawl last night is cooling their heels in our jail,” he said. “Judge can figure out who did what when he gets here at the end of the month.”
JD sputtered. “But we’re just getting started! We still have to figure out who shot her and who that guy was in the window and why the fight started and--”
Larabee gave the dummy in the window a straight-armed shove that sent it tumbling to the ground below. Ezra let out a startled yelp and dodged out of its way. Ignoring the complaints from below, Larabee herded Nathan back onto his feet.
Nathan let himself be led back to bed, still craning his neck for one last look out the window.
“Meanwhile,” Larabee said, easing Nathan back down onto the mattress and shaking out a blanket to cover him. “I need Vin’s help to watch the prisoners and patrol the town. I’ll send Ezra up here to keep an eye on the two of you.”
JD shot him a pleading look. “What about the guy who fell out the window? Are we ever going to figure out who he is?”
Larabee snagged the pile of wanted posters off the bedside table and tossed them at him.
“Knock yourself out.”
*******
“No. No. Wrong height. Wrong hair color. No. Wrong gender,” Ezra tossed each discarded wanted poster onto the growing pile next to JD’s cot. “Honestly, JD, this is an exercise in futility. We don’t even know whether your assailant had a criminal rec--” He paused, staring hard at the image on the flier he was holding. “Hello.”
“What?” Nathan called out, his question lost in a coughing fit. Ezra pushed the wanted poster at JD and hurried over to pour a glass of water. The healer accepted the cup, but ducked Ezra’s attempts to feel his forehead for signs of fever. Ezra huffed and moved over to the kettle to check on the foul-smelling brew he was steeping from one of Nathan’s recipes.
JD squinted at the poster in his hands. “Ludlow Wilkerson?” his voice climbed into an excited squeak. “You think we took down Ludlow Wilkerson? He’s one of the most wanted men in the territory. They say one time he ran out of bullets and robbed a stagecoach with a brick!”
Ezra took an experimental sniff at the medicinal tea and reeled back, eyes watering. “I can’t swear it’s the same man,” he said, throwing open a few more windows. “But they're both tall blond men with identical eye color and similar tattoos. And both of them are missing their left ear.”
Nathan took an experimental sniff at the vapors wafting around the sickroom and clamped his lips shut. If Ezra thought he was drinking that, he had another thing coming.
“It’s your recipe, not mine,” Ezra said, pressing a steaming mug into his hands and glowering over him until he took a drink.
Ignoring the faces Nathan was making, Ezra turned back to JD and continued. “What a high-profile miscreant like Mr. Wilkerson was doing in Four Corners is anyone’s guess.”
JD smoothed the wanted poster. “Maybe he’s here to hold up the stagecoach?”
“In that case, why would he have involved himself in a common saloon scuffle?” Ezra wondered, relieving Nathan of the empty mug and offering him another drink of water to wash away the taste.
Shuddering, Nathan set the glass aside. “Somebody needs to figure out how long he’s been in town and what he’s been up to since he got here.”
Silence filled the sickroom, until Ezra realized that both patients were looking at him. “What?”
*******
“What do you see?” JD asked impatiently.
Nathan twisted the spyglass until the view of Main Street sharpened into focus. “Ezra’s still talking with Heidegger,” he said, watching as the German innkeeper mopped at his forehead and gestured wildly. “Looks like our outlaw was staying at the Gem.”
“Kinda pricey place,” JD said. “I guess he had plenty of stagecoach money to spend.”
Nathan grunted and leaned back. “Ezra’s heading back this way.”
“’Bout time!” JD squirmed, wishing he’d asked Ezra to leave a bedpan handy before he went out.
To his vast relief, the clinic door opened to reveal Ezra - and a guest.
“I believe you’ve already made this young lady’s acquaintance?” he said, hoisting another one of Daphne’s dressmaking dummies into the room. He propped the mannequin against the wall and eyed his charges. Without a word, he dug a bedpan out for JD and moved to check on Nathan’s bandages.
Nathan nodded approvingly. The same skills that made the gambler so good at reading faces around a poker table made him an able assistant in a sickroom. He glanced down at his torn-up side, noting that the infection seemed to be fading. The stitches still looked like some demented child’s sewing sampler, though.
“What’s the dummy doing back here again?” he said, hissing softly as Ezra dabbed at the stitches with an alcohol-soaked cloth.
“Oh, I asked Ezra to bring her up here,” JD called out from his side of the room. “We’re gonna put her in Buck’s bed right before he gets back.”
“Only one?”
“Good thinking, Nathan. How many of those things do you think we could fit into Buck’s room, Ez?”
Ezra rolled his eyes. Caretaking duties complete, he threw himself into a chair and pulled a small notebook out of his jacket pocket. “Is anyone at all interested in the fruits of our fact-finding mission?”
JD and Nathan made encouraging noises as Ezra flipped a few pages and referred to his notes. “Our mysterious stagecoach robber checked into the Gem more than a week ago, under the name,” his lip curled in disdain, “‘John Smith.’”
JD sat up straighter. A week ago, at the Gem... But Ezra was already moving on with his report.
“Our Mr. Smith kept to his rooms during the day and ventured out at night, usually frequenting Digger Dan’s, where he failed to make much of an impression on the staff or the usual patrons, at least until last night, when he managed to singlehandedly set off last night’s altercation. How and why the fight started remains a mystery. Wilkerson remains unconscious. The rest of our prisoners claim to be unemployed ranch hands who deny ever having met the man they were trying to kill.”
“At the Gem,” Ezra continued, flipping another page. “Mr. Smith received only one visitor, who he paid our friend Heidegger to usher discreetly to his quarters every afternoon at--”
“Three o’clock!” JD broke, almost squirming off his cot in excitement. “That’s who Daphne Ledbetter was meeting at the hotel every day! Omigosh!”
Nathan shook his head in amazement. “So maybe Ludlow Wilkerson really was trying to kill her last night? Some sorta lover’s quarrel?”
Ezra paced over to the window to study their crime scene again. “Or perhaps,” he said slowly, “he was trying to protect her.”
Moving quickly, he grabbed the dressmaker’s dummy and pulled it to the center of the room.
“The late Mrs. Ledbetter rented a room in the boarding house next door. Her landlady said she was home and in her quarters when the gunfight broke out. Why would she leave the safety of her rooms? Unless--” he scooped the discarded shotgun up from the wall next to the window and leveled it at the dummy, “unless someone forced her to leave?”
He prodded the dummy in the back with the weapon. “It’s possible our outlaw was riding to the aid of a lady in distress.”
JD’s eyes widened. An outlaw with a heart of gold. Just like in the dime novels. Then again, Wilkerson did try to blow his head off, so he couldn’t muster too much sympathy.
Nathan yawned, feeling the tug of exhaustion from his still-healing wound. He settled back on the bed and closed his eyes. “Sure would like to know what happened at Digger Dan’s that night,” he said softly. “If we knew how the fight started, it might help us figure out how it ended.”
He felt the soft weight of a blanket settle over him.
“Don’t you worry, Nathan,” JD’s voice came to him, sounding very far away. “We’ll figure it out.”
*******
It was Ezra’s turn to patrol while Vin took over sickroom duty. He came bearing news from the jail and an old pair of crutches that he snuck in while Nathan was still asleep.
Delighted, JD wrestled himself into street clothes, including a pair of pants they had to slit up the leg to make enough room for the bulky splints and bandages around his leg. The crutches and splint made a godawful clatter on the wooden floor as he maneuvered himself around the room.
The noise woke Nathan, who gave Vin a poisonous glare and pointed out that JD wasn’t supposed to be putting weight on that leg for another week.
JD ignored the complaints and the jangling pain in his healing bones. Ludlow Wilkerson had bought him an early release from bed rest. He could have kissed the man, outlaw or no outlaw. He made another circuit of Nathan’s work table, whipping around the corners with increasing speed and confidence. The crutches were killing his armpits, but he wasn’t about to complain.
Vin held out his peace offering to Nathan - a pecan pie from the hotel’s kitchen. JD teetered over for his share and the three of them settled down to enjoy.
“Talked with them fellas in the jail again,” Vin said, using one of Nathan’s good throwing knives to cut one half of the pie into three massive slices. Nathan ignored the abuse of his weaponry once Vin passed him the biggest wedge.
“And?” JD mumbled around a syrupy mouthful of pie.
“They ain’t cowboys,” Vin said, polishing off his slice and eyeing the remaining half of the pie.
Nathan wiped his sticky fingers on his bandages. They’d need changing soon anyway. “What makes you say that?” he asked, wishing he could get out of the infirmary and take a look at the prisoners himself.
“Soft hands. Big guns,” Vin said with a crooked grin. “We took enough weapons off ‘em to arm a cavalry regiment.”
JD snapped to attention. “Bandits!”
He knocked one of the crutches over and hopped in an unsteady circle with the other, trying to maintain his balance. Eyes glowing, he jammed the remaining crutch under his arm and started hitching his way toward the door.
Vin and Nathan watched him go, bemused.
“C’mon, guys! We need to talk to them! They must be Ludlow Wilkerson’s gang. We need to find out what they had planned.”
He banged into the door and lost his grip on the other crutch. For a moment, he teetered there, clutching the doorknob and breathing hard just from the exertion of crossing the room.
Vin moseyed up, handed him his crutches without comment and stepped back, clearing a path for JD to head back to his cot. JD eyed the bed and the nice soft pillow and the second slice of consolation pie waiting for him. He thought about the two steep, rickety flights of stairs between him and the street.
Then he squared his shoulders, swung the door open and hobbled out into the sunlight.
Vin and Nathan exchanged a look.
“Well, what’re you waiting for?” Nathan flapped a hand at Vin, shooing him out. “Go make sure he doesn’t fall and break his other leg.”
Vin clamped his hat on his head and set out after the sickroom escapee.
[ Part one][ Part two]