Boon Ed Kurtz (the little red hen read aloud txt) 📖

to where the shots had originated. “I am coming, all right, I am coming.”

Willocks’ shoulders sank and his body withered from the heat and the sweat and the disappointment. He groaned and wiped his brow with the back of his hand.

“God damned crazy fool,” he said low.

“I am coming,” Blackmouth shouted. He and the gray got smaller and smaller on the shimmering vista until, finally, another shot cracked the sky and the kid dropped like a hailstone from the saddle to the red earth. The gray reared back, tramped a circle, and fell into a hard gallop east until I could no longer see it.

I could still make out the kid, though. Still and small, flat on the ground where he had died.

Tom Willocks hung his head.

“God damned fool,” he said.

“All right,” I said, grinning.

Willocks swung the Springfield up and around to aim at my center, his face beet-red and eyes burning with hate.

“Say another word,” he said. “One more fucking word, Dutchman. Just one.”

I declined. The marshal of Darling kept that rifle at me for a minute longer, his jaw set tight and finger tickling the trigger. I figured he was going to do what he felt like doing, no matter what I did or said, so I leaned back against a cottonwood and closed my eyes. I listened to a soft breeze pick up and I smelled the foliage and the horses and their shit. I thought about Boon and realized that I still wasn’t altogether sure and certain that it was her out there sniping at us. And when I opened my eyes again, Willocks was back to watch, leaning on the Springfield like a crutch with its butt to the ground, having decided not to further incur the wrath of the executioner in the flatland.

Which, of course, made for an eerie and dispossessing experience that raised the same question, I am sure, in the mind of every man in that cottonwood grove: where could she possibly hide? Were there anything approaching a rise or some rocks or even a log to provide cover, more sense could have been made of the situation. As things were, however, there was little to nothing stretching out before us but dust and yellow short grass. It was as though our shooter was perfectly invisible, a wraith with a rifle that could not be seen nor stopped. None of us voiced this apprehension, but I knew each one of us was thinking it. Whether or not it was Boon out there picking men off, the increased restlessness of the two remaining men in the trees was all the evidence I needed to judge them scared out of their minds.

And if it was not Boon, then there was a good portion of my own self that was a fair bit frightened, too.

The two deputies—or, more properly, gunmen—left to Willocks were the big Brute and the lanky, dark-faced Irishman with a nose like an eagle’s beak. It was this second one who broke the long silence in the late afternoon, throwing down his knife so that it buried itself in the dirt at his feet and shouting, “One woman! One damn woman! What kind of yellow sons of bitches are we, anyhow?”

“Go on ahead and get kilt, then,” said the Brute.

“I won’t be cowed by a God damned woman,” Paddy spat. “And not any Oriental breed, neither, or whatever she be.”

“She’s more,” Willocks said softly.

He didn’t take his eyes from the vista to say it, and it sounded as though he might have been talking to himself.

“Eh?” Paddy said. “What’s that, Willocks?”

“Mayhap you won’t be cowed by a woman,” said the marshal, “but this isn’t just any woman. You’d do well to hear me on that.”

“What is she, then? God’s snot, Willocks! I killed thirteen men in fair fights, mostly, some of them terrible, mean fuckers you never thought could be, and here we are stove in and hiding out from one woman with a rifle? I can’t stand for that, Willocks. God damn you, I can’t stand for that!”

Tom Willocks smiled and laughed soundlessly. Gradually, his head turned to face me, still leaned up against the tree for so long my legs were tingly and half-asleep.

“Whyn’t you tell him,” he said. “Tell him what she is.”

“Boonsri Angchuan?” I said, laughing. “Christ, I don’t reckon God himself knows for sure what she is. And I don’t know for sure whether He made her, or if it was the other fellow down below, ’cause she’s got plenty of devil in her when her blood is up, and it just about always is.”

Paddy scoffed.

“Ain’t no devil out there,” he groused. “Just one fucking woman.”

“Go find out,” Willocks said.

“A woman,” Paddy said.

Willocks twisted around, rising at the same time, and roared, “Go find out, you jabbering son of a bitch!”

The Irishman said nothing in reply to that.

And so, we waited a good deal longer, until the afternoon melted darkly into night. The night, it turned out, was to be considerably more interesting still.

Chapter Twenty-Three

On a flat, red rock, which had been baking in the sun all day at the edge of the cottonwood grove where it met the dust, a scaly prairie lizard squatted with its black, half-lidded eyes trained on me. I had seen probably a thousand of its like in my time, and a hundred other kinds of lizards besides, but I had never seen one change the expression on its cold, cruel face. Way I always guessed it was, the little critters just didn’t have the mind for it, which is to say they weren’t made for anything else than killing their prey, eating up the flesh and bones, and resting in the warmth of the sun until they got hungry again. No thought put to it. No faces to pull, the way human beings do, on account of there wasn’t any emotion there to inspire such a thing. Just dumb killers, that was all.

Yet being cold and being a killer did not