Wild Night (A Lucas Hallam Mystery Book 1)

  WILD NIGHT

  A LUCAS HALLAM MYSTERY BOOK ONE

  L.J. WASHBURN

  Wild Night

  Kindle Edition

  © Copyright 2022 (As Revised) L.J. Washburn

  Rough Edges Press

  An Imprint of Wolfpack Publishing

  5130 S. Fort Apache Rd. 215-380

  Las Vegas, NV 89148

  roughedgespress.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, other than brief quotes for reviews.

  eBook ISBN 978-1-68549-058-4

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-68549-059-1

  CONTENTS

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  A Look at: Dead Stick

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  About the Author

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  This book is dedicated

  to James M. Reasoner

  for introducing me to

  the Gower Gulch Gang,

  and to my daughters

  Shayna and Joanna.

  WILD NIGHT

  ONE

  Heat slapped Lucas Hallam in the face as he stepped from the flivver onto the dusty main street of Chuckwalla, California. He stood with his hands on his hips and watched steam rise from the radiator. Maybe with any luck the place wouldn't be totally deserted—many of the so-called ghost towns weren't—and he could get some water for the car.

  Otherwise it was going to be a long walk back to Hollywood.

  Hallam left the car there and turned toward the closest of the ramshackle buildings, eager to get into the shade. He had the rolling gait of a man who had spent much of his life on horseback. He could have used a good horse about now. He had ridden all over Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona back in the old days, and not one of the animals he rode had ever had a damn radiator go out!

  He stepped up onto a plank sidewalk and into the shade of the wooden awning that overhung it. Pulling a bright handkerchief from his pants pocket, Hallam mopped the sweat from his craggy face and looked around at the place called Chuckwalla.

  The name had originated with the miners who had once worked in the mountains overlooking the desert. The town had sprung up here when silver was discovered in the mountains, and every week, on payday, the miners made the trip in for a blowout, twenty-four hours of whiskey and women and whatever else they could lay their hands on before having to return to the holes in the ground. One habit that the miners had picked up from the Indians in the area was a liking for roasted chuckwalla, and attempting to catch the big lizards was a favorite pastime for the drunken mining men. The silver mines had played out a long time ago, and the miners were gone, but the name stayed while the town shrunk.

  Now Chuckwalla was maybe a dozen and a half buildings straggling along either side of a wide dirt street. Some of the roofs had fallen in, and quite a few of the walls sagged.

  Hallam was standing in front of the boarded-up door of a general mercantile store. It was at one end of a short block of buildings. The next door down the sidewalk had once led into a barber shop—BATHS 15₵, HOT WATER 25₵—and farther down had been a gunsmith and a tack shop. There were three livery stables on the edge of town, two churches, a hardware store, a dress shop, six saloons, and a building that he figured had housed a brothel.

  Hallam leaned against one of the posts that held up the awning. He was a big man, tall and wide-shouldered and carrying plenty of meat on him, and the post was old. He was careful not to put too much weight on it.

  He looked around Chuckwalla, and he saw it as it was now: old, abandoned, forgotten. A hot wind came off the desert and stirred up the dust, sent tumbleweeds rolling along the street.

  But Hallam could see it as it once must have been, too. He had been in a lot of places like Chuckwalla: raw and booming and filled with folks. In those days the street would have been busy with carriages and wagons, men on horseback, and fancy ladies out for a midday stroll with their bright silk gowns and twirling parasols. Miners in rough work clothes would move among the town's regular inhabitants. The town existed for the miners. And the fancy ladies, the gamblers, and the saloon-keepers were all very happy to take the miners' money. Sometimes they took it legally, sometimes not.

  Yep, Hallam had seen plenty of places like Chuckwalla in the old days.

  He had brought law and order to some of them.

  A town marshal had to be damn good in those days, good with his fists, good with a knife, good with a gun. Lucas Hallam had been good, all right. One of the best, people said.

  But those days were twenty years and more in the past. Hallam tried not to reminisce too much; a man could get lost in bygone days and not pay enough attention to what was going on around him now.

  The way he saw it, he had a lot of living left to do. Daydreaming was a good way not to get around to it. He shook his shaggy gray head and took a deep breath. Hell, a minute ago, he had even imagined that he heard somebody calling him. And as far as he could see, there wasn't a soul in Chuckwalla except him….

  "Hey, cowboy!"

  Hallam's head snapped around. He wasn't imagining this. Instinctively, his big right hand dropped to his hip as his eyes looked for whoever was yelling at him. There was no familiar gun butt there, though; he had brought the Colt Cavalry .45, but it was still in the flivver. He didn't carry it all the time any more, though it was never far from him.

  "Over here, cowboy!"

  The voice came to him more clearly now, and the tightness of his muscles and nerves eased a little bit. The wind had distorted the voice before, but now he recognized the tones as those of a woman.

  What would a woman be doing way out here the hell and gone in the middle of nowhere, though?

  He spotted her standing on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, at the far end of town. She had pushed through the batwings that adorned the entrance of the Silver Horseshoe Saloon. Hallam could faintly make out the letters on the big sign that stretched across the second story of the false-fronted building. The paint was flaked off and long gone, but the outlines still remained.

  The woman had red hair and wore a bright blue dress with spangles on it. There was laughter in her voice as she called to him, and for a moment Hallam wanted to rub his eyes and see if she disappeared.

  He didn't believe in ghosts—even if he was in a ghost town.

  The woman lifted a bare arm and beckoned him with it.

  Hallam stayed where he was, feet planted solidly on the planks of the sidewalk. His
eyes narrowed as he looked down the street at the woman. She was no ghost. She was there, all right.

  Because to admit that she was a ghost would be to admit that he was seeing things.

  And there were a lot of people who would tell you that Lucas Hallam was just too damn hard-headed to go around seeing things.

  He stepped out into the street and began walking toward her. The wind had gotten up some more, and grit stung Hallam's eyes. The woman stayed where she was, watching him.

  She wasn't as young as he had first thought, he saw as he got closer. Her slim figure had fooled him—that and the bright red hair. He imagined she worked hard at both. Now, he figured she was a little younger than him, somewhere between forty-five and fifty.

  He lifted his booted right foot, let it rest on the sidewalk. "Howdy," he said, nodding to her.

  "Howdy yourself. Welcome to Chuckwalla." She came across the sidewalk and put out a hand. "I'm Elizabeth Fletcher, Liz to my friends. What do I call you besides cowboy?"

  "Hallam, Lucas Hallam." He took her hand. "Right pleased to meet you, ma'am."

  Her smile was bright and warm. She inclined her head toward the batwings and said, "Come on inside and have a drink, Lucas Hallam. One thing I hate it's drinking alone."

  Hallam followed her into the saloon. His eyes adjusted to the dimness after a few seconds. There was a long mahogany bar along the left side of the room, the shelves behind it filled with liquor bottles. A large, gold-framed mirror also took up part of the wall space. Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, overlooking a player piano, a small dance floor, and a cluster of tables. At the back of the room were a roulette wheel and several baize-covered tables for card games. It looked just like a lot of other saloons Hallam had seen… except that everything in it was covered with a fine coating of dust.

  Everything except the bottle of whiskey that Liz Fletcher took down from the shelves as she went behind the bar. And the glasses she took from underneath the bar were clean, too. She was a lady who obviously had priorities.

  She expertly uncorked the bottle and tipped amber liquid into each of the glasses. "To your health, Lucas Hallam," she said as she picked up one of them.

  Hallam picked up the other glass, clinked it against hers, and downed the whiskey. It was raw, and burned going down, but he had tasted worse.

  "Hallam," Liz Fletcher said slowly. She leaned her bare arms on the bar and studied him. "Seems I should know the name."

  "I've been a few places," Hallam allowed. "Could be we ran into each other before."

  "I've been a few places, too." Her smile was rueful. "Could be." Suddenly she looked up at him in recognition. "Lucas Hallam! Now I remember the name. You can't be the same one that shot up the Crowder boys in Santa Fe back in ninety-three, though."

  It was Hallam's turn to incline his head and smile ruefully. "Way I recollect it, they got in more shots than I did." He slapped his right thigh. "I still limp a little on account of Mart Crowder."

  "Maybe so, but none of them Crowders did any more walking, not unless they got up out of their graves."

  "I didn't go lookin' for that trouble," Hallam said solemnly. "Wasn't going to let 'em shoot me and get away with it, though."

  Liz Fletcher shook her head. "Those were wild times, weren't they, Lucas? When I think about how young and sure of myself I was..."

  "Reckon we were all a little full of ourselves," Hallam said softly. "Never figured that the world would keep spinnin' and a new crop of youngsters would come along."

  She spilled more whiskey into the glasses. "That's what happened, though. Nothing we can do about it, so we might as well drink to it."

  "Sounds like a right smart thing to do."

  But Hallam wasn't so sure of that. Even as he sipped the fiery whiskey, he wondered if he should be encouraging this woman to drink. He had a feeling these weren't her first of the day. As he glanced along the shelves behind the bar, he saw that most of the bottles were full. Prohibition had gone into effect a couple of years before, but it looked like Liz Fletcher had enough stock on hand to last her quite a while. She might need it.

  He set the glass on the bar and looked at the light coating of dust on the hardwood surface. "Live out here by yourself, do you?" he asked. "Not that I'm meaning to cause you any trouble..."

  "Hell, I know that. You and me, we're from the old school, Lucas. You may look like a grizzly bear"—she grinned to show that she meant no offense—" but you're a gentleman underneath. I knew that as soon as I saw you. Not like some of the varmints that come around here."

  She reached under the bar again, and Hallam wasn't surprised when she came up with a sawed-off double-barrel. She laid it on the bar with a thump. The smile that creased her face had a touch of savagery in it.

  "Yep, I'm by myself except for this little beauty. But let me tell you, Lucas, anybody gives me any grief's going to get himself a hot buckshot kiss."

  After a moment, Hallam said. "Why do you stay?"

  "Why the hell shouldn't I? It's my town."

  "Reckon I understand why you feel that way—"

  "Reckon you don't. I meant what I said. This is my town. I own the damn place." She waved a hand at their surroundings. "Just owned the Silver Horseshoe to start. Then, as the other folks gave up and left, I paid the county taxes on their places and took 'em up, too. You're looking at the grand mistress of Chuckwalla, Lucas."

  "Guess you're the person I came to see, then," Hallam said.

  Liz Fletcher frowned. "You came out here on purpose? I figured you just strayed off the main road and got stuck when your car boiled over. Why would anybody come off out here on purpose?"

  "Came to see if you'd want to rent out your town."

  A look of apprehension passed over her face. "Rent it? Rent it to who? And what in the world for?"

  Hallam grinned. "Fella I work for sometimes, he wants to make movies in it."

  "Movies? Lord, I haven't seen a movie in—you mean they still make 'em?"

  Hallam nodded. "They sure do. Been in a few myself."

  "You're an actor now?" She sounded like she couldn't believe that the same Lucas Hallam who had faced down the Crowder boys in Santa Fe was an actor.

  "Just every now and then, when I need a little extra money. My regular line of work sometimes hits dry spells."

  "And what might that be?"

  "Detective business. Got my own agency." Hallam chuckled. "Course, I sweep out the place, too."

  "So you're a detective and an actor." Liz Fletcher shook her head, disapproval evident on her face. "Seems like strange work for a man who used to be hell on wheels, no offense, Lucas."

  "None taken. Times change, Liz. Nothin' stands still."

  But that was just what she was trying to do out here in this ghost town: make time stand still. She had her whiskey and her memories, and Hallam, for one, wasn't going to take it on himself to tell anybody how to live their life.

  "Like I said," Hallam went on, "the feller I do some work for sometimes, Mr. Frank Sheldon, he wants to rent this town and shoot some movies here. Seems somebody told him about it and he thought it'd make a good place for that. So he asked me to come out here and look it over, let him know what I thought."

  "And what do you think?"

  Hallam shrugged. "A little fixin' up here and there, and the place could look about like it used to. It's pretty far out from town, but that's Mr. Sheldon's lookout, not mine. I reckon if you want to rent it to him, I'll tell him to go ahead if he wants to."

  "A little fixing up here and there… God, we could all use that."

  Hallam thought about the limp in his right leg, the stiffness he sometimes felt in his left shoulder, the bumps and bruises and bullet holes of a hard lifetime that ached when the weather was right. "Yes, ma'am, we surely could," he agreed.

  Liz Fletcher was silent for a long moment. Then she said, "I'm sorry, Lucas, but I don't think I can go along with that." She smiled slightly. "Don't think I want a lot of people poking around
my town, even if it does get a little bit lonesome hereabouts. I get enough company, what with the drifters and desert rats who sneak around and try to steal my whiskey." She patted the shotgun. "They don't worry us too much, though."

  Hallam tossed down the remainder of his drink and shrugged. "All right, Liz, if that's what you want. I'll tell Frank he'll just have to stay in Hollywood."

  "You do that, Lucas. Otherwise he might get the seat of his pants dusted with buckshot."

  Hallam grinned and nodded a farewell to the woman, then turned to the door of the saloon. He pushed through the batwings and started to step out onto the sidewalk….

  The flash of sun on metal, across the street and off to the right—

  Hallam threw himself sideways out of the door as a bullet smacked through the right-hand batwing. Splinters stung his face.

  TWO

  Hallam landed hard on the sidewalk. There was no cover outside, so he did the only thing he could. He rolled back toward the saloon's entrance and went through it in a low dive as another bullet hit the planks of the sidewalk and threw up more splinters.

  "What the hell!" Liz Fletcher yelled from behind the bar.

  Hallam waved a big hand at her. "Stay back! Get down behind that bar and stay there!"

  He got out of the line of fire and crouched below the big window to the left of the door. When he glanced at the bar, he saw that Liz hadn't ducked as he had told her. She was standing behind the bar, the shotgun gripped tightly in her hands, ready to fight.