Boon by Ed Kurtz (top 100 books to read .txt) 📕

to say, at least for the moment. He turned on his heel and limped away from the cells, through the office and out into the street. I hadn’t really noticed the limp when he’d come in, but I liked seeing it when he left.

The sheriff leaned back against the wall, underneath one of the lanterns that Missus McKenzie would come light in a few hours’ time. He hooked his thumbs under his belt and looked me over like I had six eyes.

Finally, he said, “You really saw a man’s head off?”

“That’d be the woman.”

“The half-breed he’s looking for?”

“She don’t like nobody calling her that,” I said.

“Hmm,” he said. “Could be you give her up they’ll spare your neck. You’ll still sit in Yuma a spell, maybe the rest of your days. But you’d be above ground.”

“No, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“Then swing,” he said. “Makes no difference to me. They’ll find her with or without you.”

I snorted.

“Seems to me,” I said, “that she’ll probably find them first.”

“That what you think?”

“That’s what I think.”

“Maybe I’ll tell Marshal Willocks that you think that.”

I snorted again.

“Do,” I said. “Tell him anything you like. If there’s one thing I know for certain about that woman after all this time, it’s that there’s no thinking ahead of her, and there’s no preparing for what she’s got a mind to do. It just happens and you either live through it or you don’t.”

“God Almighty,” said the sheriff. “I sure hope I’m invited to the hanging.”

“Wave when you get there,” I said. “So I can be sure I see you.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Tom Willocks already sat in his saddle by the time his deputies brought me out of the jailhouse. The sun was high and bright, the first I’d seen of it since two days before, and I had to squint to keep from going blind as a mole. Willocks must have found that funny, because he chortled the whole time I stumbled up to the horses, knocking into the deputies and feeling my way forward.

“Get your sorry ass on that nag,” he said.

I blinked at a skeletal brown horse, its back sagging beneath the weight of a riderless saddle. If I hadn’t known any better, I could have sworn it was the same damned nag I took up in Red Foot.

“Y’all didn’t come by train?” I asked.

“Rode in, riding back,” said the marshal. “Hurry up. Daylight’s burning.”

Piece by piece, my eyes adjusted to the sunlight enough to see that there were five men altogether, Willocks included. I’d never laid eyes on any other lawmen in Darling, though I hadn’t really been looking, either. Could have been they were around all the time. Seemed likely Willocks would have left at least a couple back in town to keep the peace and brew bad coffee. Didn’t seem too likely that he had six or seven deputies already on the payroll. My guess was these fellows were new to his employ and that he hadn’t gone hiring the most upstanding young gentlemen from the Sunday meeting. These were gun hands, hastily deputized if at all.

In a word, killers.

I stepped up in the saddle and took a hold of the bridle. Willocks held onto his with the one good hand he had left.

I said, “Which ones she get, anyway?”

“Fuck you,” he said.

Once everyone was mounted, the sheriff stepped out onto the boardwalk to bid the marshal farewell. Earl looked more than a little sour about it, having been forced to defer to a higher authority. I almost felt bad for the man.

“Don’t worry, mein Freund,” I said. “I’ll make sure Tom here notifies you about the execution.”

“Viel Glück,” Earl said.

Tom said, “Cut that God damned German talk and let’s ride, for Christ’s sake.”

Two deputies rode on either side of me, and two in a line behind me, with Willocks up front like he figured he was Phillip Sheridan or somebody. Dangling from the saddle strings behind his cantle was a burlap sack with what looked like a cannon ball weighing down on the horse’s right flank. We went right up the big street in the middle of Revelation and drew a crowd of curious townsfolk who by then had probably heard what I was charged with and wanted to see what a cold-blooded killer looked like. Further on to the edge of town we loped by a heap of construction, where men worked with hammers and saws and heaved lumber into frames that would be new buildings. I closed my eyes to the onlookers and listened to the cadence of the hammers and nails. It was strangely soothing.

We rode on past the outskirts of Revelation and past the garbage pit, which I smelled but did not see on account of my eyes were still closed. We crossed the railroad tracks and one of the deputies got to whistling until Willocks snapped at him to stop it. After a while I couldn’t hear the hammers any longer and I listened to the hooves of the six horses and the creak and jangle of rigs and spurs instead. Nobody spoke for a long time.

Then, when I opened my eyes again, I found that Willocks had fallen back and taken up the position to my right. The deputy who had been there now rode in front. The marshal of Darling, Texas regarded me like he was looking at a bug, or maybe a pile of horse dung. The sack strung to his saddle was starting to interest all sorts of buzzing and crawling things.

I said, “Well, mornin’, Tom.”

He sat his piebald mount and narrowed his eyes at me. The one that had swollen was looking better all the time.

“They had a big fire up in Chicago this summer,” he said. “You maybe heard about it.”

“I don’t hear much,” I said.

“Had ’em a much bigger one few years back,” he went on. “This one wasn’t so big. Still burned damned near a thousand buildings, though.”

“That’s a lot,” I said.

“It’s a hell of a lot,”