The world has changed around Wyatt Earp since his glory days as a lawman in the wide-open towns of the Western frontier. Now in his golden years, he's a private detective in Los Angeles—and the mistress of his late partner Doc Holliday wants him to help turn Doc's errant son away from the shady path he's chosen to walk in New York City. And there's another good reason for Earp to mount an iron horse headed for the wild, wild East: a reunion with his old friend Bat Masterson, who's traded in his shooting iron for a sportswriter's pen.

But a new breed of big city badmen roars in the '20s—organized cold-killers toting machine guns in lieu of six-shooters. And in the midst of the Jazz Age glitter, two aging, legendary enforcers could be headed for their final showdown with a brutal, hot-headed young gangster . . . named Al Capone.

Black Hats

A Novel of Suspense

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By Patrick Culhane

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2008 Patrick Culhane
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780060892548

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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.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Black Hats by Patrick Culhane Copyright © 2008 by Patrick Culhane. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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"Wyatt Earp! Wyatt Earp! Brave, courageous, and old!" Yes, old! Culhane, better known as New York Times best-selling writer Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition ), presents an improbable but highly entertaining scenario that has the young and reckless son of the late "Doc" Holliday being protected and guided by a 70-year-old Wyatt Earp in a New York City gangland war over a large supply of hard liquor. Did Johnny Holliday Jr. give gangster Al Capone the three knife scars on his cheek responsible for the "Scarface" nickname? That's just part of the story. Collins has outdone himself in this tale of bad guys, bullets, and booze set at the start of the Prohibition era. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.â€"Ken St. Andre, Phoenix P.L.

[Page 88]. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

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The pseudonymous Culhane (aka Max Allen Collins) once again shows himself a master at the historical thriller. In 1920, 70-year-old Wyatt Earp, who's working as a PI in Los Angeles, is hired by "Big Nosed Kate" Elder, the widow of his best friend, Doc Holliday. Kate wants Wyatt to go to New York and help her speakeasy-owning son, John (fathered by Doc as he was dying), who has fallen afoul of a local tough guy, the young Alphonse Capone. In New York, Wyatt teams with another old pal, Morning Telegraph sportswriter Bat Masterson. It's a fabulous setup, and Culhane has all the skills and experience to bring these great characters leaping off the page. The bad guys may have organized gangs and tommy guns, but in the end these whippersnappers are no match for Wyatt's cunning and 10-inch-long-barreled .45. The exigencies of historical fact force Culhane into a tamer ending than some readers might like, but the sheer fun of riding along with the two old lawmen and their memories will run roughshod over any quibbles or complaints. (Apr.)

[Page 31]. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.