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

powerfully. Sam howled like a coyote caught in a steel trap.

“He still at the customs house?”

“She’s like to kill me, Lem,” Sam hollered. “Might as well start shooting.”

I thought I heard Lem sob then, and the next moment he was up from behind the rock again, squeezing off a shot with his left hand. The ball struck the cabin. The child inside yelped, but I didn’t think she was hit. Just scared. I hoped.

Boon said, “Edward.”

I heaved a sigh and sighted Lem down. His left arm was shaking, trying like hell to get a bead on Boon. I shot him in the chest. He looked startled when the bullet slammed into his ribs, then a little bit like he might start laughing.

Lem didn’t laugh. He just fell down and died.

Boon watched the whole thing, then quietly returned her attention to Sam.

“Just you now,” she said.

“You have murdered my brother and my friend,” Sam seethed through clenched teeth. “You will burn in hell, God damn you.”

“Whatever makes you feel better about it,” she said. “Now, back to business. Where is Arthur Stanley?”

“Up your ass.”

“Edward,” Boon said, keeping her eyes on Sam. “Let’s have that toothpick.”

I might have given it a moment’s thought, but I did as she asked. Pulled the knife, handed it over, hilt first. Boon took it, squatted down over Sam with her boot still pressing half her weight against the wound. He groaned wetly.

“Go on and check on our ward,” she said then.

I scrunched up my brows, uncertain at the time what she meant.

“The kid, Edward.”

“Right,” I said.

Sam turned his shimmering, frightened eyes to me, like I was like to do anything to stop her. I smiled at him. He closed his eyes.

Inside the cabin, the girl still cowered behind the stony fireplace, her dirty knees to her chin and arms wrapped around her shins. She wasn’t in anything anybody would call good shape, but she wasn’t shot, either. She raised her face up so that the light from the hole in the roof caught the water welling up in her wide, brown eyes. The kid didn’t seem much assured by my presence. Then again, I couldn’t see why she should. We might have taken her away from whatever hellish depravity went on in that cathouse back in the city, but she had no good reason to feel safe quite yet. Not with a couple of desperadoes like me and Boon.

I said, “Hey there, little calf. Don’t know if you understand any American or if you don’t, but some bad men came ’round, and now they’re gone, and you’re safe here with us.”

The tears spilled over and she didn’t blink at all. Just stared. Quiet like.

Outside, Sam got to wailing again. He sounded like a woman, the way he was screaming. Not that there was a thing wrong with the way women sounded, just that it struck me funny how men’s voices can get so high-pitched when they’re scared bad enough. I reckoned Sam was plenty scared, and plenty hurting, too.

I just hoped she cleaned my knife when she was done.

My meager hopes were dashed when Boon returned to the shanty, short of breath and specked with blood on her face and neck, shirt, and hands. She gave me back my knife, hilt first, and the blade was a gruesome mess.

“Could of wiped it on your pants,” I said.

“Could have,” she said.

“Might could wipe it on your pants my own self.”

“Wouldn’t.”

Good advice, there. I nodded at the open door behind her.

“Dead?”

“No. Just missing a few teeth.”

“Christ,” I said, making a face and looking at the knife. “With this?”

Boon nodded.

“Christ,” I said again. “Tell you anything?”

Boon nodded again.

“Stanley’s left the city. Figures on us coming back there for him, wasn’t willing to put all his trust in them dumb shits he sent after us to finish the job.”

“Good thinking,” I said. “Where’d he go?”

“Funny thing, that. All I could get out of Sam before he blacked out was ‘handsome Frank.’”

“Handsome Frank,” I said.

“Said it three times. Handsome Frank, Handsome Frank, Handsome Frank. Like that, but more blubbering and sort of wet like, on account of the blood.”

“Mighty strange.”

“Mighty,” she agreed.

“Handsome Frank,” I said again, just to hear it. “Reckon that’s what they used to call old Franklin Pierce.”

She chewed on that a minute.

“The president?”

“Yeah, but before that. Back in the Mexican-American War days, way I recollect. Maybe even earlier, one of them Indian Wars back east. Sort of a nickname. Generals always get all kinds of nicknames.”

“Well,” Boon said, “Stanley sure as shit ain’t going to spend his time with President Pierce. Man’s been dead some years now.”

“I recollect that, too.”

“Handsome Frank,” she said.

I shrugged. Looked to the kid, like she might know. If she did, she kept it to herself.

We packed up, left the cabin in the same condition it was when we found it, apart from a couple few new holes in the walls. At Boon’s insistence, we dragged Lem and Watts a ways from the back of the place, into the woods. Sam we left where he lay, his face swollen and some five or six bloody teeth in the dirt beside his head. He hadn’t woken up, but he was still breathing, if a little shallowly. The girl gaped at him.

All those teeth on the ground made me feel a little less troubled about the one I lost back in Revelation.

“Mayhap it was just nonsense,” I said, eyeing Sam’s saddle and provisions. “Crazy with the pain. Tooth pain is just about the worst pain. Mayhap you ought to have worked on him someplace else.”

“Why don’t you ask him,” she said, stepping up into her saddle.

I gave Sam a light kick in the ribs. He did not stir.

We rode out before noontime. I took Sam’s saddle, gun, and making for biscuits and cigarettes. So, it wasn’t a complete loss, even if we had no idea what was next.

That is, until the kid shocked us both to hell and back but muttering something under her breath, too