A Waterfall of Creative Alternatives
a story in The Gambler’s
Heart Series by Setcheti
Disclaimer: I don't own M7 or Blazing Saddles and we all know it.
:-P And that's how I feel about
that. This story was originally
conceived of as an answer to a challenge.
The well dressed, immaculately groomed middle-aged man sat sipping a whiskey in the saloon and apparently idly watching the patrons come and go through the swinging doors. He was watching, although not idly, and those who did notice him might have been surprised that the refined gentleman who looked slightly out of place in the rough-edged atmosphere of Four Corners was in reality a cold, calculating criminal engaged in 'research' needed to finalize his latest grab for control of a future railroad town. A more knowledgeable witness might have thought it odd that the leader of some of the most vicious outlaws in the West would be out acquiring the information he required firsthand, but the gentleman if asked would have politely informed them that the key to success was being through in your attention to details. And Hedley Lamarr was nothing if not thorough.
He'd already spotted a few of the pitiful town's seven 'lawmen' and had not been impressed; he'd chuckled into his drink when the first one had come in, a finely dressed little peacock of a gambler who stood no taller than the Waco Kid. But Hedley didn't want to think about the Kid; instead he briefly envied the man his tailor and resolved to find and appropriate the seamstress to his own needs once he'd taken over the town.
The leader of the ragged band had entered next and brought the hated Kid to mind again; the man was dressed entirely in black and drank like the proverbial fish. This one was as tall as Hedley himself, however, and had the same cold, assessing blue eyes. What reports the self-proclaimed criminal mastermind had been able to come by had suggested that the man was as explosive as gunpowder under a match, though, prone even to attacking his own men in fits of unreasoning rage. Hedley toyed with the idea of using that to his own advantage and put the thought aside for later consideration; how devilishly amusing it would be to make the leader of the 'Magnificent Seven' aid him in bringing about their downfall!
A little time went by, perhaps a quarter of an hour, and then Larabee was joined by a part of the plan that Hedley had already begun to work on; he'd been warning bounty hunters away from Four Corners for months to lull the long-haired tracker into complacency, to make him feel he was safe in his little town and to cause him to relax his guard enough to make him vulnerable. To Hedley Lamarr's mind, Vin Tanner was easily the most dangerous of the seven men and had therefore gained more of his attention than the others had as of yet. He couldn't conceal a triumphant smirk when the scruffy man in buckskin who should have been as watchful and suspicious as a wild animal sat down with his back to the saloon's swinging doors in complete disregard of the tenets a wanted man must live by if he wants to remain among the living. Vin Tanner was at once triumphantly relocated to Lamarr's mental list of completed preparations.
None of the other men entered the saloon while he sat there finishing his drink, but Hedley went over them in his mind as he casually sauntered back to his room at the hotel, rearranging their order of priority in light of his success with the tracker. Distracting the ladies' man with a sufficiently evil member of the fairer sex would have been obvious and most likely would have worked, but he was still smarting from the spectacular failure of that strategy on Sheriff Bart in Rock Ridge and hesitated to try it again for a while. The young sheriff here, however, was a different story entirely; although not a threat in and of himself, the deep fraternal bond he appeared to share with the mustached womanizing cowboy spoke well of him as distraction material. Ditto for the gambler with regards to the unkempt giant over at the town's sad excuse for a church, only in that case the attachment seemed to have a more paternal slant to it.
Under normal circumstances staging a kidnapping was a ploy Hedley would avoid as too fraught with possible complications, but these weren't normal circumstances. Taking and keeping JD Dunne would be reasonably simple and he already knew which of his men could be entrusted with the job when the time was right; he'd need to take Standish out first, though, in order to achieve the desired effect of splitting the seven lawmen up into more manageable numbers, and that was a job he would have to handle personally. Drugs, he decided, relaxing comfortably on the bed in his hotel room, it would have to be drugs. The inconvenience involved in transporting an unconscious man would be negligible when compared to the difficulty entailed in transporting an alert and highly intelligent con artist--even with Hedley himself watching him. And if he managed the substances introduced to the gambler carefully and perhaps did some judicious damage to him in the interest of leaving an easy to follow blood trail, he could reasonably expect to keep both the former preacher and the Negro healer occupied for an indefinite amount of time trying to keep the small man alive once they found him. Yes, that was an excellent plan; he was glad he'd thought of it.
Deciding he'd done enough plotting for one night,
Hedley went to sleep with a smile on his face. The 'Magnificent Seven' indeed;
seven mere mortal hired guns were no match for the pure evil genius that was
Hedley Lamarr. Two weeks from now, he would own Four Corners.
The...cessation of literary expression for the present. ;)