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

“What is going on here,” said the first policeman. “We have heard there is shooting in this place.”

Boon leveled her .44 at his chest and said, “You have heard correctly.”

One of the other officers let out a squeak and jabbed his gun in the air at the half-immolated corpse of the Pinkerton on the floor. All three of them twitched their noses at the smell of it, which I did not notice.

“This woman is almost naked,” said the one who first noticed the body.

“It is a whorehouse,” said the first man, annoyed.

I said, “She ain’t no whore, you shit-headed pig.”

Boon said, “Shut up, Edward,” and kept her Colt on the “coppers,” as I understood them to be sometimes called.

Neither the melodeon man nor the Chinaman moved, and I was damned if any of the policemen saw them at all. The barman, however, peeked his head up from behind the bar, and the first officer barked at him.

“Out here with your hands up,” he said.

The barman complied, looking for all the world like he was fixing to start crying, when the rest of the squadron poured in from the front stairs. We were fairly surrounded then, and with only Boon’s Colt and a few bullets to face them down. My knife felt like little more than a knitting needle against so much iron. I slid it back into my boot and waited for Boon to make the call.

The barrel dropped by inches, and her face fell, too. She was licked, which I reckoned was the first time she ever was. I stood there facing her, worrying not so much about whether these men were going to shoot anyway, nor if I was like to get locked up, but that I might not ever see my friend again. An iron collar ’round my neck in Yuma for a hundred years did not sound worse to me than that.

The man leading the charge from the front stairs stepped close, but carefully, his weapon matching every other amongst the policemen. He wore a trimmed brown mustache and his eyes were small and watery.

“You speakee English?” he said.

Boon smiled.

That was when I knew we weren’t licked, after all, but that the situation was about to get messy.

She said, “I speak with this,” and she jammed the barrel of her .44 into the policeman’s belly before squeezing the trigger and blowing bits of his spine clear out his back.

The copper did not cry out, nor did he fire his gun. He merely took several short steps backward, dropped to his knees, and then fell forward on his face. Looking back, I suspect only seconds passed before the shock wore off and the rest of the policemen got to shooting, but in the moment, it surely felt like many long minutes. Whatever the case, there were now seven or eight living officers crowding both ways out, and every single one of them lunged forward, barrels first, and filled the fetid air with lead and smoke.

Boon and I both dropped to the boards at the same time. She held tight to her gun with one hand and used her other to knock the dead officer’s weapon across the floor to me. I caught it and rolled over onto my back to begin sighting down policemen. I shot one, two, three, just like that, and headshots all. Single-actions were nice that way. No need to bother with the hammer. I did not attempt a fourth shot, because I knew three was pushing my luck and half the coppers still standing aimed down and emptied chambers at the floor. I rolled and rolled some more, scuttled under a table and leaped up, knocking it over on its side and using it for cover while I spent the final two rounds available to me. One entered a fellow’s ear, the other only flew into another man’s thigh. This latter policeman mewled like a heifer birthing a foal, and the wound jetted blood like a geyser.

I hurled the empty gun at him and it struck him right in the mouth. He spit blood and broken teeth and staggered for the stairs. I pulled my knife and searched through the acrid gunsmoke and flailing limbs for Boon.

She had made it to the bar, which served as a considerably better barrier than my table. Bottles and glasses exploded behind her from the volley of bullets sent her way, and not a few punched right through the wood, only missing Boon due to blind firing. It aggrieved me to see such fine spirits go to waste and I wished for another pistol to revenge it all.

Boon had it well in hand. She emptied every chamber into the throng of blue tunics and plug hats, ducked to reload with sure and steady fingers, and popped back up again to resume fire. This method took more time than the first portion of the gunfight, but one by one she took our aggressors down until only two remained on their feet, and these two retreated to the stairwell to shoot around the corner without so much as looking where they shot.

For the time being, the back stairwell was clear. I signaled at Boon, waving my arms at our escape. In so doing, I realized that the Chinese fellow had vanished and the melodeon player was dead. Boon hurried out from the bar, stooping to scoop up a dead policeman’s revolver along the way, which she pressed into my hand when she reached me.

“Obliged,” I said, and together we rushed for the back stairs.

We tromped up, sagging, creaking step by step, from the smelly subterranean Palace to what I suspected to be the cribs for the whores above. And I was right about that, too—the whole back half of the ground story was partitioned into small quarters by dirty sheets strewn from the ceiling, a single cot in each. Most of the girls had lit out, probably at the first shots, though two or three still milled