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

you know he runs him a passel of whorehouses down in Frisco, but I wonder whether you know how many of the girls in them cribs ain’t nothing but kids?”

“Chinks, Monty,” said Stanley “We’re not talking about white girls here, for Christ’s sake.”

“You really that lady’s daddy?”

“I’m your daddy, Monty. That beast is hardly even human. You don’t know what she is, what she has done. How desperate she is to hurt me. To destroy our family.”

“But, Pop…”

“That is enough, Montgomery.”

His voice low and loud, it was sufficient to silence Monty, who no doubt had learned the hard meaning behind the change in his father’s tone long ago.

“You know where she is, Monty?” I asked.

Monty didn’t answer.

“How about you, Art? You want to tell me what you done with her?”

“See, now, that’s quite the issue at stake here, fat man. My men watched quite carefully as she and the Chinagirl went into the hotel, but despite keeping watch, they never saw them go back out again. And yet, neither of them are there. How you suppose this can be?”

“Boon is one to surprise you, and that’s a fact.”

“Indeed.”

Of course, I couldn’t tell him anything about it. As far as I knew, she and Meihui stayed in the hotel while I went for a drink or three. But I believed him. She was in the wind—they both were. So all I had to do was wait for her to figure out her approach and come make a little noise.

I chuckled a little under my breath.

And then Arthur Stanley shot me.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Somehow, probably due to my infinite arrogance and almost limitless stupidity, it never really occurred to me that I might take a bullet while riding the vengeance line with Boon. I’d reckoned those teeth I got knocked out back in the New Mexico Territory would be as bad as it ever got, and even after Boon took that metal in the back down in San Francisco, I never thought I’d catch any bullets, too. Yet here I was, in some one-horse Northern California booze hole, keening like a brand-new widow and bleeding like a stuck hog.

Stanley’s Colt Dragoon barked and belched flame from the barrel, and the next thing I knew there was a fire in my side that turned the whole world white as a blizzard for a long couple of minutes while I gave voice to the hot agony of it. I tasted blood like copper pennies in my mouth and I was sure he’d struck something necessary—I was no master of my own anatomy, but I knew enough that coughing up blood from a body shot wasn’t any kind of good news. What was the point of being so God damned fat if the padding didn’t protect me any?

All the rest of the room, the rest of the world, was nothing more than a blur to me as I raised my shaky hand to touch the blood on my lips. The short barrel of my belly gun grazed my cheek, hotter than the devil’s ass. It singed my beard and I could smell the hair sizzle. My forefinger was curled tight against the trigger, pushing it all the way to the guard. It was as though my hand had frozen that way, clutched permanently in the position it formed when I unknowingly squeezed that trigger the moment Stanley shot me.

Unconsciously, I licked my lips. Even then, I knew the blood wasn’t mine.

I heard Bill say, “Oh, my Christ.” He rolled the R musically. He sounded very far away.

Slowly, painfully, I lowered my hand until it was down by my waist and the Derringer dropped to the floor clattering against the boards. My other hand went to my side, which was warm and wet and sticky with blood. My blood.

“Well, hell,” I muttered and, turning clumsily against the bar, I found Monty on the floor behind me. His throat was a ragged, red mess. I’d blown it right through the back of his neck.

“Oh,” Stanley said. “Oh, Monty.”

My thoughts were a jumble. For the most part, my brain was occupied with the searing pain from the new hole in my trunk, though I tried like hell to draw some measure of focus onto the situation at hand. I considered Boon, and Meihui, and I tried to recall whether or not I knew where they were. Weren’t we all just talking about them? And why was the damned saloon getting so cold all of a sudden?

Somewhere distant there came a grumble and a crack and for an instant I was certain I’d been shot again—a killing shot, this time. I tensed up and squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the pain or just cold, black death to take me. I guessed I’d reckoned my time was mostly borrowed ever since I got strung up by those boys in Texas, that while me and Boon were tracking Stanley, Death its own evil self was tracking me. Now that each of us had found his quarry, it seemed we’d reached the railhead.

But neither death nor pain came. Instead, the night sky opened up and dumped raindrops as big as dimes right outside the batwings, turning the street almost instantly to mud. It was only thunder I’d heard. I did not feel relieved by this.

To my side, Irish Bill rose from his chair and drew a pearl-gripped pistol. He was a slow draw, but I was in no shape to critique his technique. My hands were empty, my brain a sludgy fog. He had me dead to rights.

“Don’t,” Stanley said. “Not yet.”

Bracing myself against the bar, I turned again to face Arthur Stanley. My body made it first, then my head. My eyes lagged behind and when they finally caught up, it took a moment to pull him into focus. His Colt was back in the holster at his hip, both hands at his sides, trembling.

“You have killed my son,” he said through clenched golden plates.

“You shot me,” I countered. I sounded drunk