Black Hats A Novel of Wyatt Earp and Al Capone Chapter One The night those bastards shot Virgil, it was storming like this. Sky darker than the inside of your fist, rain slanting in from the east, slashing at will, unseen till lightning gave it away. Wyatt Earp, not in particular reflective, found his memory bestirred by weather, most often. And back in Tombstone, what? Almost forty years ago? That craven crowd had ambushed Virgil, a marshal making his midnight rounds, maimed him, ruined his left arm forever with their buckshot and cowardice. Now Wyatt was doing the ambushing, and his nightly rounds were hardly marshal's work. He did have a badge in his wallet, a private detective's star courtesy of his friends at the Los Angeles Police Department, for whom he occasionally did jobs. Not this job, though. Lowman's Motor Court on North San Fernando Road consisted of a dozen pink adobe cabins, six facing six across a graveled courtyard, where tiny pools glimmered in the sky's occasional shouts of white. The other night--this was Wednesday, that had been Monday--when Wyatt had stopped here, the foothills of the green Verdugo Mountains had conspired with a blazing orange sunset to provide a majestic backdrop for this sordid little assignation village. Tonight the hills were just shapes, dark shoulders that couldn't be bothered to shrug in this downpour. Wyatt knew how they felt. A damned domestic case. Wasn't exactly dignified work for a man, was it? City of Angels coppers, at least, always gave him real jobs to do--hauling back wanted men from Mexico, sub rosa; putting the boot to claim-jumpers in the wilds of San Bernardino County. Hell, getting an investigative operator's license had been only to please Police Commissioner Lewis. Wyatt had never had no intention of hanging out a shingle and becoming a goddamned bedroom dick. But word had gotten round that Wyatt Earp himself, the Grand Old (for Lord's sake!) Lion of Tombstone, was doing detective work; and the occasional client would find him at his rented bungalow on Seventeenth Street. Not that this job came from the "occasional" client. This was the kind of thankless task that he would do only for a friend. He'd had very few real friends in his life, but when one came around asking a favor, Wyatt Earp was not the kind to say no. He stood beneath a palm tree, the tree swaying, Wyatt not. He'd positioned himself between that tropical excuse for vegetation and the teal Model T that William S. had loaned him--Wyatt had learned to drive ages ago but had never owned an auto--hands in the pockets of a black rain slicker and wearing a wide-brimmed black Stetson that funneled the sluice nicely. Slender, six one, with Apache cheekbones, unblinking sky-blue eyes and snow-white hair with a well-trimmed matching mustache, Wyatt Earp might have been fifty-five. But he was seventy. In this weather, a man like Earp--legendary lawman, gambler, buffalo hunter, prospector, Indian fighter, survivor of more bloody encounters than even the Wild West might be expected to throw at a body--should darn sure feel that moisture in his joints, be well and truly plagued by phantom pulsing pains from all those wounds. Had he ever been wounded. Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp--who had shot it out with drunken cowboys and notorious outlaws, gone toe-to-toe with the Clantons and McLaurys at the gunfight near the O.K. Corral, been through countless Indian raids and rode posses against cattle rustlers and tracked stagecoach bandits, whose brothers Virgil and Morgan had been shot down in the streets of Tombstone--had thus far in his lifetime suffered not a single bullet wound. That time with Curly Bill Brocious, Wyatt wading across that stream with his damned fool cartridge belt slipping down around his knees and turning him into a waddling duck of a man, answering Bill's shotgun with a sixgun, that time? That time he'd come close to a cropper, skirts of his coat shot all to pieces, pretty well riddled to shreds. And a horse had died. Also Curly Bill. Wyatt had never been one to wear a gun unless he was on marshaling duty, or maybe carting a big sum--the latter leading to that embarrassment when a police captain on security detail disarmed the former frontier marshal going into the ring to referee the Fitzsimmons/Sharkey bout in '96. This bounty huntering for the Los Angeles blue boys, however, had him hauling the long-barreled Colt .45 out of mothballs. The ungainly old girl cleaned up good; she'd been a gift in Dodge City days from a dime-novel writer, an eccentric who'd pumped Wyatt for info, then never wrote a damned word about him! Anyway, Wyatt had always prized the weapon, especially the way he could sight down that ten-inch barrel; but it was awkward as hell in a shoulder-rig. So, to-night, he carried her in a stiff-leather holster on his left hip, cross-draw, border-style--like Doc used to. Something near a smile worked at the line of his mouth, summoned by the thought of his deceased gambler friend. Most people, back then, had hated Doc Holliday, mean drunken consumptive that he was. But Holliday's dark sense of humor had always tickled Wyatt. You'd be hurting in this wetness, Doc , Wyatt said to his friend, in his mind. Coughing like a schoolgirl getting her first taste of whiskey . I like the rain, thank you very much, Wyatt , Holliday might well have drawled back in his Southern gentleman's way. And what would you know of schoolgirls, or whiskey for that matter? The lights were still out in cottage number four. Wyatt found the notion distasteful of interrupting the couple, in flagrante delicto . He would wait for them to finish. It was the Christian thing to do. Just over a week ago he'd gone to Bill Hart's home in rural West Hollywood. For a movie star's diggings, the place was modest, a ranch-style ramble with some horses in a corral and a barn no bigger than Wyatt's bungalow. The former deputy marshal and the current Western film star sat in Hart's study where the walls were lined with books about the old days and authentic artifacts from back then were displayed in glass cases as if something precious--six shooters and buffalo guns and assorted Sioux Indian junk. Black Hats A Novel of Wyatt Earp and Al Capone . Copyright © by Patrick Culhane. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Black Hats: A Novel of Wyatt Earp and Al Capone by Patrick Culhane All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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